What is the single most forbidden activity of the postmodern/liberal Christian? Typically, our mind dredges up a list of potential moral sins. But we have a way of dealing with moral failure—forgiveness. The forbidden practice of liberal Christianity is proselytizing—that is, recruiting others to the Christian faith. As a young Christian I had a flare for “winning souls for Christ”. I look back on it with a mixture of shame and regret. Today, we cannot engage in any kind of activity that gives off the mildest sniff that we’re recruiting for the cause. Fair enough. Proselytizing empires, bible thumping preachers, and well-meaning Jehovah Witnesses knocking on our doors handing out religious tracts that offer the program for the salvation of humanity, all reflect a pre-modern religious sensibility.
Still today, the agenda for 70% of the world’s “heaven and hell” Christians is to save souls from eternal damnation and for heaven. Our brothers and sisters in the faith believe that they are in sole possession of the Truth. Because liberal Christians are still in the minority on this planet, we are vigilant in our agenda to not be seen as
“that kind” of Christian. Which means, again no proselytizing. But it’s gone beyond this. We’re so sensitive to being identified with a certain kind of Christian that we rarely even invite a friend to church.
What do we do, then, with this story from Mark’s gospel in which Jesus unashamedly recruits disciples and then tells these fishermen that he’s going to teach them to fish for “men”? He offers them a license to metaphorically fish for human beings. If it makes you squirm a little it’s because you’ve moved beyond heaven and hell, mythic Christianity. The problem many of us face, however, is that we haven’t yet figured out what we do have that we’d be proud to share, and which the world just might very well need. What if our reticence is actually only serving our own contracted egos confusing spiritual vocation with making a good impression?
All that Jesus is doing is offering is to teach them how to share the “good news”, the gospel. This good news is what is going to “net” people and haul them in for God. Clearly, we’re going to need to get some clarity about what is meant by “good news” in the 21st century, and then decide whether there is any place in a 21st century church to make the claim that the church should be going out, sharing that good news with the world, and inviting people into community. The first bit of good news is that seventy percent of the world’s Christians, who are still functioning from within the heaven and hell paradigm, misinterpreted the good news in the first place. Salvation for Jews (and Jesus was a Jew) never meant believing stuff so you could get into heaven. Redemption was never about saving souls. The Kingdom of God/Heaven was never about another world. A proper translation of “eternal life” from the Greek concerns the age to come—the future, present where love and justice reign—and not endless time. It seems imperative that minimally we need to be offering the world a new interpretation—a corrective mission if you like.
Before I get to what we could be proclaiming from the rooftops, let me first share with you what a modern-day rock-star atheist philosopher has to say about what the church has to offer the world.
I recently listened to Alain de Botton giving a Ted Talk. These are 15-minute talks by luminaries in every imaginable field. Mr. de Botton, as mentioned, is an avowed atheist. He has no time for God, angels, or the vast array of associated beliefs that he counts as silly superstition. But unlike Richard Dawkins, he thinks that the church has tried and tested practices that secular culture needs to adopt. Modernism, he is convinced, tossed the baby out with the bathwater. The church gave human being practices that the secular culture never compensated for when it threw out religion. There are holes in secular culture, in other words, that he wants to fill with time-tested practices of the church.
(http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html)
The list of things that secular culture needs to re-incorporate from the church going forward include:
· Secular education assumes that we are all rational adults. Just give us a little more information and we’ll be just fine.
· Religion always assumed that human beings were often like children who need clear instruction about how to live. The goal of education is not information but transformation. Sermons have a goal of changing people’s lives. Secular culture should learn from the church, he says, about helping adults to transform.
· Secular culture has no way of helping people encounter really great ideas over and over again. They leave the great ideas that shape the way we live to chance.
· Religion structures time in such a way that throughout the year, (what we call the liturgical seasons), you are going to run into our most inspiring ideas and teachers repeatedly.
· Secular culture speaks only to the mind.
· Religion helps people to in-corporate ideas, that is, we help people to embody ideas. For example, forgiveness in the Jewish tradition is associated with the ritual of cleansing one’s body in a bath. Religion was an early adopter of what science has now calls cellular or body memory.
· Secular culture doesn’t know what to do with its art, imagining that art is an end in itself. He says poppycock.
· Religion has always known that art teaches you two things—what there is to love about the world, and what there is to hate. In other words, Rembrandt’s art is instrumental, serving a higher purpose than itself.
· Secular culture isolates its poets, philosophers and meaning-makers. They become lonely individuals, powerless to make any real difference.
· Religion has situated their great thinkers within community, and given them support. Through community they have become a moral force.
· Religion is an organized global force. The modern equivalent is the corporation, but corporations meet only our most basic needs, not our highest ones like religion.
In short, religion knows how to do ritual, art, and education. It knows how to help people feel like they belong, and knows how to do transcendence, that is to connect people with the higher mysteries.
What’s my point? Whether or not you agree with Botton’s analysis, it’s interesting that here we have an atheist philosopher reminding the church of what it has to offer secular culture, and yet we liberal Christians have never been more cautious about making that offering to the world.
But what I think our brilliant philosopher is missing is that the practices that the churches, Temples, synagogues, sanghas and tribal shaman developed weren’t just arbitrary rituals that popped up out of nowhere. They were a congruent response to the experience of Spirit. Ritual, community, self-transcendent practices that connect us to Source, are manifestations of Spirit. Secular, atheist culture is welcome to try to adopt and adapt the genius of religion, but I’m dubious that this attempt to appropriate religion’s legacy without the underlying inspiration of and grounding in Spirit will be successful.
So what is the Good News that we have to share? Well, it hasn’t changed in essence since Jesus announced it a couple thousand years ago. The world needs to get ready for the emergence of a new age that is coming. Jesus called it the Kingdom of God or the divine realm on Earth. This is an age characterized by justice—what the ancient Hebrews called righteousness—in our social, political and economic systems. It’s an age characterized by compassion for the most vulnerable—starting with our own vulnerability and extending out to the world of human and other-than-human creatures. The age that is coming is characterized by love—by a falling in love with Love itself, and allowing ourselves to be absolutely transformed by love.
We are to be That in the world and for the world, and we are to let the world know that this is possible and that, in fact, this is what we are about. And while we are leaky vessels for Spirit to move this work forward, we’re all Spirit has, and if Spirit will have us, then here is a community that offers as whole-hearted yes to this mission as we can.
The age that is to come has already arrived in Jesus, and is always coming in those who have so oriented themselves to this love of justice, to the love of Love, and to compassion for all beings. Where can you get a foretaste of this age that is to come? Well, anywhere that love is on offer, through any religion, or in secular culture itself. But included in that “anywhere” is the church, communities of love committed to being stewards of Jesus’ good news.
And so, when somebody walks through that door, they ought to be able to leave saying, “you know, these folks really believe this stuff. I don’t mean they believe a lot of irrational ideas that are hard to believe and then call that “faith.” No, their hearts are in it. They seem to be living it out in how they show up for each other and with each other. I felt joy when I was with them. They are practicing it. They’re working it. They’re just normal people, but they seem to be lit up by a real hope for the emergence of a new age. They seem to believe that it’s coming through them.
These folks might be thinking to themselves that they do this, not through the pursuit of moral perfection, or pretending to be better than anybody else, but by deep transparency and vulnerability with each other. It seems to be their wounds and fragility that connect them and open them up to Spirit, and not their perfection.
They aren’t afraid to be themselves with each other.
If we are going to get over our reticence about sharing what we have—and we need to get over it—then let’s be clear about our motivation for doing so.
It’s not about making more Christians. It never was. Jesus wasn’t recruiting for Christianity. The thought of a new religion never entered his mind. He was recruiting for the Kingdom of God. Rather, he put the question to all he met: Who wants to join me in staking their life on the promise of a glorious future, and then on becoming the presence of that glory right here, right now? He dared to say to the world, I am the presence of that promise, standing before you, and I want to show you how your life can be so transformed that people will see you as well as the presence of that promise. And you don’t have to do a blessed thing. You simply have to say an unambiguous “yes” to the universe, or to Spirit, or whatever you want to call That which is the Source of Love, Justice, Compassion, and Deep Joy.
Can we also make it perfectly clear that our motivation is not about putting more bums in the pews? This is not about calculating about many new people we’re going to need in order to solve our financial problems. It’s not about “growing the church”. This is a grave temptation for our beloved United Church in an age of declining membership. We default to survivalist thinking and lose the focus. No, the reason we want to tell the world about what’s going on is that that we have tasted into such a deep joy that we can’t keep it in. We can’t keep it in. We can’t keep it in, we gotta let it out. Gotta tell the world. World’s gotta see. See all the love, love that’s in me. (Name that tune! And the singer, Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens). Spirit is moving, in us, through us, as us.
The reading this morning ends with a strange and ancient image of angels ascending and descending upon the “son of man”. This is a metaphor of a divine blessing conferred upon humanity. A ladder connects the transcendent beings of heaven with the blessed Earth. Occupying the middle ground as a conduit between heaven and Earth is the human. Perhaps there were only a couple of titles that Jesus gave to himself. One was child of wisdom, and the other was “the son of man”. Scholars think that what Jesus meant by this was simply the “human one”—the human being fully realized, one with this beloved planet and her creatures, human and other than human, and one with the divine, drawing upon the transcendent energies of the universe. Let’s not be afraid to tell the world that we are a community where people are committed to becoming the human ones.
