Reform the World
Scriptures: Jeremiah 31:31-34, John 8:31-36
For many years in most Protestant churches the last Sunday in October was known as Reformation Sunday. The reason for the date is that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, and so spawned the movement that became known as Protestantism.
(Such a momentous historical event inevitably lends itself to humorous treatments. Maybe some of you saw the episode of “The Simpsons” a few years back where Marge and Homer’s daughter Lisa – the straight-A, brainy older sister – tried an experiment. She wanted to see if soda pop would dissolve a tooth. However, her Petri dish was zapped by an electrical charge that produced tiny life forms. While peering at her new creations through a microscope she saw a villager march to the door of the cathedral and nail a document to it. She gasped in shock and exclaimed, “I’ve created Lutherans!”)
Well, Martin Luther didn’t create Lutherans anymore than Lisa Simpson did. His deep desire was to reform the Roman Catholic Church of the 16th century, not to create a whole new life form known as Lutherans or Presbyterians, or Methodists or…..the United Church of Christ-ians. Luther was simply seeking to protest against the perceived excesses of the Roman Catholic Church, especially the selling of indulgences. This doctrine taught that by giving money to the church – which counted as a good deed – God would then allow you, or someone you love, to enter heaven without suffering in purgatory. Luther saw such transactions as the purchase and sale of salvation. It was a practice deeply in need of reform.
The problem was that Protestant churches’ recognition of Reformation Sunday, especially in the first half of the 20th century, became an opportunity for Catholic bashing. After the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s and the ecumenical spirit they engendered, such Catholic bashing started going the way of all like-minded attitudes and behaviors based on hatred.
Churches like ours began to raise the question: “If we started out by protesting something – that is being against – and so became identified as Protestants, what are we now for?” Too much in church life has been focused on the negative. (Just this past week in the Review-Journal’s Sports Section there was an article about a Baptist Church in Canton, NC, saying that Tom Brady was going to hell – not for throwing six touchdown passes against the Tennessee Titans, but because of having an out-of-wedlock baby with his former girlfriend. That’s a pretty typical example at how the media can sneer at the negativity of churches.) Society in general seems to have a pretty good idea of what the church is opposed to, but how much does it really know about what the church supports and is positive about? About a year ago there was a poll by the Barna Group (although the questions were focused on Evangelicals, I hunch that it could apply to most all Protestant denominations) which had one finding that 59 percent of respondents “felt that evangelicals spend too much time complaining and not enough time solving problems.” Interestingly, half of the evangelicals polled felt the same way.
We need to look for a new way to reform the world. In his book A Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren gets at one way to do that. He suggests that we refer to ourselves as “pro-testifiers” instead of “protest-ants”. Instead of constantly speaking out about what we are against, we must begin to testify about what we are for. We must begin to tell the story of our God – not about our churches or denominations – but about that bulwark that never fails, which is what Luther wrote about in that hymn we will sing at the end of this service. It is God who is our bulwark never failing…..not the church.
Part of the journey toward becoming “pro-testifiers” rather than “protest-ants” is to get more of a handle on that illusive concept: the truth. John 8:32 has always been an absolutely central Bible verse for me: “and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” Jesus says to his disciples. What two great promises! Yet, what is behind this verse is also quite problematical. Feeling that we absolutely know what the truth is – that’s what has gotten Christians in trouble with the world more often than not.
“What is truth?”, Pilate asks when Jesus comes before him and says, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” “What is truth?” We can almost hear the sneer in Pilate’s voice as he uses the typical judge’s trick of asking an unanswerable question. You and I both know that Pilate did not really want an answer to his rhetorical question. It is asked more in scorn than with any desire to learn, as if to say, “This is a court of law, not a philosophical discussion.” Indeed, what was really controlling events around Jesus’ condemnation were political and practical considerations – Pilate needed some act to pacify these rebellious Jews – rather than having anything to do with knowing the truth. Seems like some things haven’t changed in 2100 years. How many political prisoners occupy our jails around the world? (That’s the kind of question we’ll be considering in our video presentation about Sami al-Arian on November 8.)
Pilate’s question has haunted us down through the centuries. We, like Pilate, give lip service to wanting to know the truth – the whole truth – and nothing but the truth – while at the same time we prefer not to know the “whole” truth: about ourselves, about our relationships, about this universe which is ours and God’s. How many of us really want to know if we have a terminal illness – or the conditions that might cause our death? The recent death of Michael Jackson made me wonder how much he knew – or wanted to know – about the effect that all those medications were having on him.
Or take another kind of truth: scientific discoveries which may challenge religious faith. Most of you know by now that one of my favorite plays is “Inherit the Wind”, about the Scopes trial in which a fundamentalist faith is pitted against the scientific theories of evolution. We might smile today at the simplicity of such a faith challenge to acceptable scientific knowledge, but can we be so sure that we would not make a similar challenge to such latter-day developments as the creation of artificial life in a laboratory or cloning or surrogate motherhood? There is that tendency within the faith community to find some was of circumventing such realities rather than faced their possible or even probable truth.
Why is that tendency there? Well, for one thing, the truth can be destructive. Do you remember the book that was made into a movie back in the 60’s called Black Like Me? In it newspaperman John Howard Griffin decided that he could not know the truth about being a black man in the South by remaining white. So, he disguised himself, chemically, as a black man. What he discovered about himself and his society through this process was such a horrendous truth that it came close to destroying his own sanity and sense of self-realization. Truth may be absolute, as some Christians have claimed; but it’s also the case that we do not know truth absolutely. Like the character Robert Morse played in “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” we are all of us – Christian and non-Christian alike – “seekers of wisdom and truth”. But it is difficult, isn’t it, to accept the possibility that “truth” may be something other than that which we already believe – that which we come to call “acceptable truth”.
“What is truth?” We know better what it is not. Truth is not kind, or just, or partial. It is, or should be for us, neutral and impartial. What is true can be as destructive for our lives as it can be beneficial. Yet, publicly at least, we say we want to know “the whole truth”. Why? Would it not be better for us, as if was for Pilate, not to know the whole truth? Are we not better off with rationalizations, circumventions, half-truths? Doesn’t truth really inhibit us rather than set us free?
If you’re quick to say “no” to these questions, then we’ve got a real problem when it comes to the gospel of John. In this most spiritual of the four gospels the “truth” is a symbol for Christ himself. Jesus as the Truth was a very important symbol for John; in fact, it is one of three symbols John uses for the Christ – the others being Jesus as Light and as Word. So, when Christ says, “you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free,” what he is really saying is, “you will know me, and I will make you free.”
But if, as we have said, truth is neutral and impartial, how can it be used as a symbol for Jesus the Christ? One answer to this question lies in a paradox: that to know truth about ourselves or others we must first reveal some truth about ourselves to others. Think about two newly-discovered lovers. When one can trust another enough to reveal that he or she is lonely and that there are fears beneath an extroverted exterior, then the other can likewise reveal something of the truth about herself or himself.
I chose an example of lovers deliberately, for being able to love is intimately bound up with being able to be set free by truth. The ultimate source of Christ’s claim to be the Truth is that he loved and trusted the world. This world which spit on him, executed him, and refused to accept his love – this amazingly untrustworthy world, Christ trusted. And because he trusted and loved it, he revealed himself – opened himself up – to it. We know more about the inner life of this man, who was God, than we do about anyone else, for Jesus revealed himself to us as no other has. Thus, we can say about Jesus the Christ, as we can say fully about no other, that his life embraced the whole Truth. Jesus as the Truth describes what we might become.
Think about a hypothetical illustration. Suppose we were to live in a world where everyone could see into everyone else’s mind. Here we would all know the truth about everyone else – we would know everyone’s secret hates, prejudices, lusts – as well as their loving and happy thoughts. If this science-fiction situation were to happen to the human race suddenly, one of two things would have to result: either the human race would destroy itself within a generation because the truth about its degree of hatred would be too much to bear, or it would have to develop ways of loving in truth. The very thoughts that we think would have to be fundamentally loving ones.
Christian faith says, “Let’s live as if we could all read one another’s minds – as if the truth about each person is that he or she should be loved and trusted.” To love in this way is to reveal ourselves in such a way that truth can be spoken in love. To trust and love one another and then to speak the truth in love are what set us free. And they are what we can uniquely bring to heal and reform a broken world.
Here is a new way to reform the world – not by focusing on its deficiencies but by offering the kind of love and trust that typified Jesus’ approach to discovering what is the truth.
In so doing we will be entering a new covenant between God’s people and God’s world, similarly to the new covenant Jeremiah speaks of that will appear between the Lord and the houses of Israel and Judah – a covenant that will be written on the hearts of the people. That 34th verse is one of the loveliest and most powerful in all of scripture: “No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”
“I will forgive their iniquity…..” There’s no quibble or question about it. The truth that we have to offer is that God is a forgiving God who seeks always for a covenantal relationship with the people. That’s so much stronger and “pro-testifying” a message instead of coming across as “protest-ants”. Pro-testifiers understand that God is still speaking, even in this modern day. Instead of noisy protest, we can testify to the God who is our “bulwark never failing.” The truth, which is Jesus the Christ, does indeed set us free – free to love ourselves and in that way to become one who can love another – free from the fear of rejection, for as we know from the night in which Christ was betrayed, rejection does not destroy love and does not destroy the one who loves – free to proclaim the God who is and who is still speaking to a world so in need of that declaration. Now that’s a reform worthy of the name Reformation Sunday.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church/United Church of ChristLas Vegas, NV
October 25, 2009
Reform the World (Jeremiah 31:31-34, John 8:31-36)
Jeremiah 31:31-34
31 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (ESV)
John 8:31-36
31 So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” 33 They answered him, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?”
34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. (ESV)
