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Finding Him Who Has Found Us
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 25, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 55:6-11 John 1:35-51
On a very early airplane bound for Pittsburgh this last week, having made short work of the morning paper and a first cup of coffee, I reached into my briefcase and pulled out a little collection of writings by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Along with the Book of Common Worship and C.S. Lewis’ profoundly moving essay on A Grief Observed, I carried Bonhoeffer’s words to be read at a memorial service later that morning. Perhaps it was the vulnerability of the early hour or of the pastoral task ahead, or maybe it was the always-precarious situation of being suspended, with no visible means of support, 30,000 feet above the earth—I do not know the reason. I only know that, in the midst of the height and depth and length and breadth of that hour, Bonhoeffer’s words bowed me down anew before the radical truth of the gospel and the unsettling reality of Jesus Christ. “You would be surprised, and perhaps even worried by my theological thoughts,” Bonhoeffer wrote Eberhard Bethge from Tegel prison, a little less than a year before he was executed, “and the conclusions that they lead to.” His thoughts concerned religion and its obsolescence, his conclusion: “that Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world.” I read on. What if religion in general and Christianity in particular were “a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression?” he asked, assuming religion to be the human search for God and faith to be “the gift of a meeting” in which God comes to us [Barth]. What if the Christian religion consisted only of “a few ‘last survivors of the age of chivalry,’ or a few intellectually dishonest people, on whom we can descend as ‘religious.’ Are they the chosen few?” he asks. “Is it on this dubious group of people that we are to pounce in fervor, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them our goods? Or are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion on them?” The questions, I must confess, are questions I ask often when my days seem more taken with the responsibility of cranking out an institution and worrying about its survival than taken with helping people live a life of faith in the world. They haunt me, these questions, when my energies are diverted by a denomination voting graciously to separate lest gay people be let in or voting this week in Philadelphia Presbytery to apologize because those opposed to women’s ordination have been kept out, when I am spent by religion’s schisms rather than given to helping people die in a great trust that they belong--body and soul, in life and in death—not to themselves but to the God who has come to them in Jesus Christ. I know God’s address calls us into community and I trust that faith is given us in the messiness of life together, even the church’s life, but how often does the promotion of this exclusive way of seeking God take the place of lives lived in the world to the glory of God who, in Christ, first sought us? Assuming, then, that Christianity has been “only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion,” and so pushing his questions to their logical conclusion, Bonhoeffer asks what kind of situation emerges for the church? By the way, he does not bemoan this turn of events as most theologians and preachers do today, blaming the secular world for the church’s woes. Rather he takes this turn as a hopeful evolution, freeing us from religion to ask “In what way are we ‘religionless-secular’ Christians, in what way are we the ecclesia, those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case,” he insists, “Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean?” Bonhoeffer’s question is clearly addressed to those of us who still spend our time within the walls of a sanctuary. Even we must admit that less and less do our days correspond with the received forms of the church’s life--with potlucks and endless evening meetings, with internecine church politics or the traditional practices of piety—Bible study, prayer groups, circles of fellowship. And more significant for the substance of the Christian faith than the irrelevance of these things, it would seem our minds are neither engaged in any sustained way by the church’s presentation of scripture nor even provoked by the ancient words of the church’s confessions. This being the case, what necessarily preoccupies the dwindling occupants of mainline churches, though pitiful, is not surprising. In an almost desperate effort to shore up these visible vestiges of religious life, the church attempts to exercise a sort of religious compulsion, equating serious faith with faithfulness to the institution. So we beg and we market, we whine and we worry, we try our best to convince friends that going to church is normal and not what they think, suspecting all the while that it isn’t [normal] and is [what they think]. Wrestling, now, with the future existence of the church on that early morning flight (of fancy?), and knowing that this morning was ahead, I began to read Bonhoeffer’s questions in light of the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. No matter which gospel I opened, I encountered a Savior whom religion could abide only if he could be made into religion’s object. Yet there was no hint he had come either to found a new institution or to shore up an ancient one. He showed no interest in the definitions of religious piety and orthodoxy except as he countered (and in countering, fulfilled) them, no concern for the divisions carefully drawn by religion between those who belonged and those who did not, no regard for religious leaders and their non-negotiable interpretation of the law and the prophets. Rather it is written that, in his presence, either men and women responded as though their entire lives had been reoriented toward the reality of the living God they encountered in him…as though their days were given a radically new purpose in following him…as though their dark nights were lent a larger meaning in light of his nearness…in other words, either people responded to him, by God’s grace, with the surrender of who-they-were-without-him to the new person they already had become with him…or they reasonably determined that the danger he posed to their ordered lives, to their society with its traditions and values, and so to their religion, ultimately warranted his death. “We all know,” proclaimed Bonhoeffer to a congregation at the beginning of his ministry, “that Christ has, in effect, been eliminated from our lives. Of course, we build him a temple, but we live in our own houses. Christ has become a matter of the church or, rather of the churchiness of a group, not a matter of life.” Suddenly I understood why religion has been equated with unbelief, Christianity being no exception to that rule! From the beginning, the fourth gospel presumes Christ’s rejection by the reigning religious community. “He came to his own people,” John had reported already, “and his own people received him not.” Make no mistake. The report is not specific to the Jews but generally about religion—all religious presumption to know the way to God that is forever contrary to the way God chooses to come to us! “God comes to people,” writes Bonhoeffer in words that may begin to help us imagine where he might have gone with his unsettling thoughts about a religionless Christianity, “to people who have nothing but room for God—and this hollow space, this emptiness in people is called in Christian speech, faith.” God goes after the sinner, which is to say the one without God in the world, the one who has nothing to offer according to the world, the one found by God in the places where a human person is deemed no longer to be anything. In Christ, says John’s gospel over and over again, the light of the world shines in the darkness of the “neglected, insignificant, weak, ignoble, unknown, inferior, opposed, despised…radiates over the houses of prostitutes and tax collectors…[is] cast on the toiling, struggling and sinning masses. The word of grace,” he says with prophetic fury, “spreads across the stale sultriness of the big cities, but it halts before the houses of the satisfied, the knowledgeable, and the ‘haves’ of this world in a spiritual sense…Christianity preaches the unending worth of the apparently worthless and the unending worthlessness of what is apparently so valuable.” The plane landed and soon I was climbing into a strange pulpit to stand before people I did not know, except to know death had left in them a hollow place, grief had found in them nothing, perhaps, but room for God. Most were not members of the church where the service was held; most were friends who had lost a young friend to death. In that gathering of them that mourn, the scriptures were opened, the hymns of faith were sung, prayers were said, silence was kept, hope was dared even in the face of weeping and sorrow and pain, a potluck table was spread, people lingered. Here was a microcosm of the world he came to save from life lived without God’s nearness, gathered not so much by a common confession but by a common grief. Suddenly it seemed to me, for all the world, I had been give a glimpse of religionless Christianity, the ecclesia, those called forth, not regarding themselves from a religious point of view as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world of sin and grief and death; those sought out by him who comes moment by moment to seek and save the lost; those who know him as in the manger places of our lives where he is born even for us. These, then, are the same places, these hollow places of human existence, that the church is called out to occupy in his name: where grief is borne alone and pain left with no comfort and the exception cast out and the ignoble ignored and the poor left to fend for themselves and the insignificant forgotten. Here the Word made flesh still pitches his tent, seeks the ones who have quit the search, finds those who have wandered to the edge of a cliff and on his shoulder carries them home rejoicing. “I often ask myself,” writes Bonhoeffer with some amusement, “why a ‘Christian instinct’ often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious.” It is, I now begin to understand, because in these the religions of the world would cast out, there is nothing but room for God. Thanks be to God. Amen. |