Do We Need an Institutional Church?
“What other church is there besides institutional? There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian except the church. There’s sin in the local bank. There’s sin in the grocery stores. I really don’t understand this naïve criticism of the institution. I really don’t get it. Frederick von Hugel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There’s no life in the bark. It’s dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it’s prone to disease, dehydration, death. So, yes, the church is dead but it protects something alive. And when you try to have a church without bark, it doesn’t last long. It disappears, gets sick, and it’s prone to all kinds of disease, heresy, and narcissism.”
-Eugene Peterson
The Judged Judge
It was not what you would call the highlight of my musical career.
My mouth was dry. My leg shook uncontrollably. My cold hands trembled even as they clutched the trumpet. The three judges–professors in music departments at local colleges, I assume–sat in their folding chairs behind a table across the room. One slumped back in her chair and chewed a pencil. Another rested his elbows on the table and peered over the top of his reading glasses. The third glanced at his watch and sipped his coffee. They were waiting for me to begin.
“Start with an E flat scale”, they’d said. So, I took as deep of a breath as I could manage, and lifted the instrument to my lips. I began to play. Or–to put it more accurately–I attempted to play. But try as I might, my lips refused to vibrate. My fingers could not find the right valves. The notes would not come out right. Some sort of sound came out the bell of my trumpet. But it wasn’t an E flat scale. I mumbled a quick apology to the judges, shook my head, and tried again. Still nothing like an E flat scale. I began a third time, this time charging through the missed notes. When I finished the scale, I knew my audition was over.
I had prepared for that audition for months (years, actually). I could do an E flat (and a B flat, and an A flat) in in my sleep. But for some reason, when the judges were watching, everything fell apart.
Judgment. I don’t know any (self aware individual) who is excited by the prospect. Most people feel a pang of anxiety when they hear the word because most of us can remember I time when we were judged–and came up short.
Not smart enough.
Not fast enough.
Not rich enough.
Not good enough.
Rarely is judgment a good experience for us. All too often, judgment means rejection. And so I was not surprised at the old saints reaction when I mentioned to her that I would be preaching on the phrase, I believe…he will come to judge the living in the dead. She winced–as though she’d just grabbed hold of a live wire. The unspoken question was written across her face. How do I know that I can withstand judgment? When I have to “give an account for every careless word spoken” (Matt.12:36), when every concealed thought and act is brought out into the open (Luke 8:17) and everything is laid bare (2 Peter 3:10), how can I possibly believe that I will endure God’s scrutiny? How can I have any hope? For her, the proclamation that Jesus will come to judge does not sound like good news. It sounds like terrifying news. It probably does to many of us.
And yet, when the writers of the Heidelberg Catechism pondered this phrase (Q&A 52), they insisted that we should anticipate Christ’s coming to judge (as the old translation put it) “with uplifted heads.” We should be standing on tiptoe, straining our eyes toward the horizon, confidently awaiting his arrival. Why? Because the judge we await is “the very one who has already stood trial in my place before God.” Or as Karl Barth once put it, “Our Judge has been judged.”
Theologian Daniel Migliore observes that one of the crucial questions we must answer when pondering the meaning of the prhase he will come to judge the living and the dead is who our judge will be (the other is what the purpose of his judgment will be–but more on that Sunday morning). Too often, write Migliore, we act as if there are two different Christs: the first Christ who came to Bethlehem to show us his love and grace and then a later Christ who will come to judge and show us his wrath and vengeance. But this is simply not the case. As the angel reminds the disciples in Acts 1:10, Jesus who ascended to heaven is the same Jesus who will return. In other words, when Christ returns to judge, he will not have changed identity or purpose. He will be the same Jesus we came to know two thousand years ago–the Jesus who came in the flesh to die in our place and save us from our sins, the Jesus who endured the just judgment of God for our sin. He will be our judge.
In a famous passage at the end of Romans 8, Paul throws out what appears to be a rhetorical question to his readers. Who is he that condemns? He asks. Christ Jesus who died? More than that, who was raised to life and is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us? Paul seems to be saying it all with a bit of a smirk and a pa-shaw. Would the Jesus who died for you really condemn you? Would he suddenly change his mind and decide that he wants nothing to do for you? I don’t think so! We may hear the voice of condemnation from our parents, our teachers, our coaches, our spouses, our friends, or from ourselves. But Paul insists that we will never hear it from Jesus. Our judge was condemned for us, he says. So for us, there is now no condemnation!
I recently read of an incident in which a reporter asked the wife of Albert Einstein if she understood her husband’s famous formula, E =MC2. Mrs. Einstein replied that she did not. Then, after a pause, she added these words: But I know my husband. And that is enough. That answer, I believe, is a good start for us as we think about Jesus’ coming to judge. There are, of course, many questions that remain. We may not know where the lines will fall. We may not know the fate of every person we know and love. But we know our (judged) Judge. And that should be enough.
Cross Talk
“When we try to say that the cross means this, or that, or the other thing, we usually end up doing something analogous to playing a Beethoven symphony on a mouth-organ. We bring it down to the level of our own thinking and feeling, instead of allowing it to lift our thinking and feeling–yes, and our praying and living and loving–up to its own level.” (NT Wright, For All God’s Worth, p. 53)
As I Was Saying…
Last week, I tried to suggest that the Christian doctrine of sin is rooted in an extremely lofty–rather than extremly low–view of human nature. Today, I came across this bit in Debra Rienstra’s book that made the point much more clearly:
Maintaining a robust view of sin, paradoxically, is the best thing the world for self-esteem. If we truly value ourselves, we will not be satisfied with some mild, namby-pamby version of good enough. The highest standard of goodness is the one that most highly rizes our humanity, most fiercely insists that we were designed to be something so much greater than what we are. Christianity is picky about sin because of the magnificence of its goal: full reconciliation with God–perfect peace, perfect shalom. Nothing less can satisfy the longing in our hearts and God’s.
….As long as you think you are good enough right now or could be soon, you limit yoruself at best to a dim shadow of goodness in this life. Christians believe that even the brightest of these dim shadows is still a shadow, still an address in the neighborhood of sin. But you could have something infinetely better: an entirely new kind of life, made possible by God’s power. Sin is the lock on the door to this life; you can’t open the oor unless you recgonize there’s a lock and that you need a key. This is not a reason to be discouraged but a reason to be glad. Now you know what kind of problem you’re facing. (Debra Rienstra, So Much More, pg 58-59.)
I hope it’s not a sin to say I wish I had written that.
Gulp
I stumbled across this old bit from Soren Kierkegaard this week. I’d read it before (in Provocations), but preferred to forget it–especially when dealing with a text like Luke 18.
The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obligated to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful is it to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.
Overheard
Overheard:
“You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.”
True?
Feeling Fine
“Well,” said the woman , “I don’t know what happened. I felt fine.”
The eighty-something year old woman was laying in a hospital bed. Machines beeped, nurses scurried, tubes dripped all around her. She was there because she’d taken a fall on the sidewalk outside of her home. Her legs had simply given out under her. And she was baffled. After all, she felt fine.
Later that day, the shroud of mystery surrounding the fall was removed. The doctor came in and rattled off a long list of ailments afflicting the old widow. I can no longer remember them all, but somewhere on the list was a virus in her bloodstream, pnuemonia, dibitating diabetes, and a pair of kidneys that could hardly function without the help of machines. She was hardly fine. No matter how she felt.
Human beings, it would appear, have an incredible ability to adapt. We can get used to almost anything. Our bodies can be filled with cripplying diseas and yet we can insist that we are fine. The standards we set for ourselves can be remarkably low.
At the center of the Christian message is the good news that Jesus saves. But sometimes, it’s hard to believe that we are people who are in need of saving. Me? Really? But I feel fine. I don’t cheat on my wife or look at dirty pictures on the internet. I never tell lies (or at least, not big ones). I give money to the church. I’m a nice guy (most of the time). Humble too. Why would somebody like me need a savior?
And then I remember my old friend in the hospital. And I think: Maybe my standards are a little low, too. Maybe there is a terrible sickness in my soul–a sicknesess that I’ve grown so accustomed to living with that I no longer notice it is there. Maybe I’m grading myself on a curve–and the curve is being set by a bunch of people who are also anything but fine.
In an oft quoted line from Isaiah 64:6, the prophet laments the human condition. All of our righteous acts are like filthy rags, he says. Its a rather grim assessment. But it seems to me that within this statement their is a hope that human beings have the potential to be more than we ever imagined. If even our best works are like a pile of old shop rags, what might we be like if we were being the people that God made us to be? In his famous sermon, The Weight of Glory, CS Lewis said that if we were to see each other as God made us to be–living up to the glory of God rather than falling short of it–we would be strongly tempted to worship one another. We would be so much more than “just fine”!
But of course, right now, we are not. We are people in need of a savior. And in Jesus Christ, that is exactly what we get.
Sin and Salvation
The essence of sin is we human beings substituting ourselves for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for us. We…put ourselves where only God deserves to be; God…puts himself where we deserve to be. (John Stott, The Cross of Christ)
Little Faith, Big God
The girl was too young. Everybody who heard about it agreed. They shook their heads, tsk tsked, and in the murmered conversations that take place in funeral parlors said, nearly without fail: I can’t believe it. It’s so sad. She was so young.
She was closer to twenty than to thirty. She’d only been at her job as a jr. high English teacher for a year or two. She sang on the praise team in her church. She’d met a boy who she thought would be “the one.” Life looked so good. She was just getting started.
But cancer changed all that. The diagnosis came mid-September. By December she was gone. Just in time for Christmas. She’d been so young.
Most everybody who came through the line in the funeral home kept a stunned silence. I’m sorry, they said to her sniffling parents, I just don’t know what to say. Then they offered a quick embrace, dropped their tear-blurred eyes to the floor, and shuffled on past the flowers, past the pictures, past the casket that held the body of the girl that was too young. Who could explain such a tragedy?
The young man–the one who sat next to her in church, the one who occasionally slipped his hand over hers during the long prayer, the one who had wanted to bring her home for Christmas dinner, the one whom she had thought was the one–he thought, if only for an instant, that perhaps he could explain it. Maybe it was grief. Or maybe he really believed it. But as he stood by the casket he said, I’m sorry…I’m so sorry. I should’ve had more faith. He looked up at her parents. If only we had believed more. God could have–would have–healed her. ‘The prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well.’ Faith the size of a mustard seed…His voice trailed off and his sobs took over.
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There is a wonderful scene at the end of C.S. Lewis’ Prince Caspian in which Lucy, finds the great Lion (and Christ-figure) Aslan after a long search. The scene unfolds this way:
Aslan, Aslan. Dear Aslan,” sobbed Lucy. “At last.”
The great beast rolled over on his side so that Lucy fell, half sitting and half lying between his front paws. He bent forward and just touched her nose with his tongue. His warm breath came all around her. She gazed up into his large wise face.”
“Welcome, child.” He said.
“Aslan,” said Lucy, “You’re bigger.”
“This is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”
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Sometimes, we treat God like a balloon animal who must be inflated by the mighty wind of our faith. Little faith, little God. Big faith, big God. God’s strength and power are somehow restricted (or enhanced) by the sincerity, urgency, and depth of our faith. If God does not act as we had hoped, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
There is something that sounds almost right about that. After all, there is a strand of teaching in Scripture that suggests that our faith has an important role in mobilizing God. I’m not entirely sure of what that means. But I am fairly certain it does not mean that our faith changes how big and powerful God is. The God of Scripture will still be God–a big, sovereign, Almighty God–no matter how feeble or fumbling my faith is. He does not need me–or my faith–to do his work. It is not for his benefit that my faith needs to grow. It is for my own.
As little Lucy grow up (in her faith), the gift she receives is that she continues to discover that there is (and has always been) more to Aslan than she had previously thought. More strength, more power, more wisdom. As she grows bigger, she discovers that he has always been bigger. Her perceiving that reality with new clarity does not make the reality more or less true. But it does open up a new way for her to live. To love him more. To trust him more. And finally, to collapse with confidence into the mighty arms of the one who is bigger than she had ever dared to imagine.
As we continue to profess that we believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, may our faith continue to grow. And in the process, may we discover that he has always been bigger.
Augustine on Creation
Preparing for Sunday’s sermon on Genesis 1, I stumbled upon this little gem from Augustine of Hippo (written @ 1500 years ago).
Often a non-Christian knows something of the earth, the heavens, the motions and the orbits of the stars, and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is say is based on Scripture. We should do all we can to avoid such embarrassment, which people see as ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn. (From The Literal Meaning of Genesis)
