How God is Good for Nothing….and the Church’s Job is to Tell This Like it Is.

 

God is good for nothing, not only in the sense that God provides precisely the salvation we don’t want or think we need (e.g. when we are drowning we don’t want a lifeguard who will simply swim out to join us in the going down) but also in the sense that whatever good is brought or given is done so on the basis of God’s decision and not our merit or demerit.

 The truth of the matter is that we spend inordinate time and energy looking for and claiming signs of divine presence that would and will empower us to great progress and purpose. “Where is God that I might believe in Him?” we might say. “Wise Men Still Seek Him,” so goes the seasonal slogan. Church is seen as the revelation of the Hidden God – a signpost to help us figure out and find God. We want God to be good for something – to help us get the safety and security we want and name and to do that on the basis of what inputs we provide – be that belief or behavior. But God, it turns out, is good for nothing. God not only disregards our definition of safety, security and success but also disenfranchises our ability to merit attention or eternity.

 God: how utterly worthless! But how too so utterly wonderful!

 We know precisely what we are doing when we crucify God. We are getting rid of the one who doesn’t help us gain our game and we are getting rid of the one who says our game is worthless.

“I’m worthless? No, dear God, you are worthless!” And the nail is pierced into God’s hands and feet!

 So how does this worthlessness become wonderful? God’s grit. Call it resurrection from the dead. God would and does not take no for an answer.

 Is it possible for us to know this? Is it possible for us to live in the “wonderful” instead of the “worthlessness? Only if God does all and we do nothing. And we know it.  Only if there is a death and resurrection that is our death and resurrection daily because of God. And because it is in Christ Jesus where God is revealed as most supremely and utterly worthless (Good for Nothing), only in Christ Jesus.

And how would we come to know this? How does God do all and we do nothing and that is most wonderful? The Church.

 The Church’s job is to deliver who God is and what God does and not to direct us or set us on some path to figure out or realize or find our salvation. The Church does not reveal the hidden God, have special powers to show us where God hides and gives us special mechanisms, spiritual practices, to get to that hidden God. Rather, the Church hides the revealed God – not “hides” in the sense that it tries to sequester or remove from access, but in the sense of “sub contrario,” (under the form of the opposite), in the sense that you just can’t expect it there because its just so plain and simple and, frankly, literally, elemental. In the elements of larynx/voice and water and bread/wine God is revealed, accessible to all, not hiding for us to find, available without us earning a thing.  God hides sub contrario (again, under the form of the opposite) not in order to not be found but in order to be displayed and delivered in the only place where humanity actually is, so to be then also the only place where humanity can actually access, connect, know the divine (human beings like to think they can get out of their own skin, be something else. We cannot. God knows, literally, and so brings us gospel in the only place possible – in our own skin, in the flesh and blood (call it incarnation) and in the elements (call it, then, word and sacrament).

 To say church “hides the revealed God” means then that the church “holds” or “delivers” or “is the vehicle for the transmission of” God who is on display for all to know and see and live with now.

 You just can’t get this kind of good news anywhere else! Where else can you find somebody telling you that your lousy attempts at making good, call it pride, and your empty space of feeling bad, call it despair, are actually not changed by circumstances or effort (from the inside out) but rather transformed by love from the outside in (in other words – God is good for  nothing in the sense that what you thought was salvation – you surviving by God – is not salvation at all. Salvation is God surviving by you). And where else can you find that all of this happens without your merit or effort but simply because you exist (in other words God is good for nothing in the sense that you need not bring a thing to the table, nothing, to be a part of it all).

 You just can’t find this kind of good news anyplace else but Church.

 You can find people talking about this, and speculating about God and the meaning of life, anywhere. From pool hall to poolside, hill and dale.

 But its only Church who does the actual deed of delivering God in direct form and in person.

Church is not here to help you figure out God. Church is here to turn God out on you who figures you out. And gives you life, no questions asked. Church is here to bring God who is good for nothing. And that is everything.

That Tampa Pastor is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

On how the secular is sacred and the sacred is secular

We like to say the mission of God is to bless and heal the world. We like to say that the church doesn’t have a mission but God does, and church is doing God’s mission. All well and good, but still there is the danger of boundaries being established or maintained between the sacred and the secular.

The church has nothing to bring to the world that isn’t already here. We don’t “bring Christ” and we don’t even “live as Christ” in the world. What I mean is that the real world, to be worldly, is to be pure gospel, pure unconditional love, pure powerlessness, pure, as Steven Paulson would say, outlaw. Gospel, and thus church, is simply living the truth of the world: unconditional grace, not conditional law. Thus the need all the more today for Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “non-religious interpretation” of dogma: sin, redemption, Holy Spirit, eschaton, Christ, creation, God and how all of that is an expression of the real world, not a superimposed religiosity that attempts to get the world to not be itself.

There is a sense I get in a lot of Christian preaching that the church, through the voice or mouthpiece of the preacher, is in the business of teaching the world a lesson. There is a certain privileged position that is assumed, a telling of a story that the listener is supposed to come to see, appreciate and appropriate.  There is a world that the world doesn’t see and doesn’t’ get and needs to step into in order to be real and live truth.

Shame on us if this is how we the church see ourselves, this being distinct from the world, and how we see preaching as explaining a new construction project people must engage.

In the same way Jesus did not come to establish a new religion, the church does not come to establish a new way of living in the world. Jesus destroyed religion so that the real world could thrive. We do the same. We are and do Jesus – the outlaw.

So, to be precise about to whom the church’s proclamation goes: it is to the religious, not the non-religious. Well, that’s saying it with a bit of a blunt instrument, because the proclamation actually is for all, but for the sake of this discussion, I will go with the proclamation going to the religious. Take a look at Luke 15’s Waiting Father (popularly knows as the Prodigal Son) parable as a story told to the Elder Brothers that we are. If the church is in the business of teaching anybody a lesson it would be to teach the church a lesson in how to be secular, “worldly,” human. The church really does, if it’s doing its job, preach to the choir!

But church leaders cannot blame the church members for seeing church as a refuge from the world, a construct of a world sacred to go to when the secular is just too hard to handle. Leaders, preachers, have only ourselves to blame. We have failed to tell the story of Jesus as the deconstruction of religion and instead of giving the dynamics of sin, creation, Spirit, redemption and all a non-religious interpretation we have used them to try to gain agency with God, something that removes us from our humanity and world.

In today’s church, the church is not God’s gift to the world.

The world is God’s gift to the church.

The whole separation of sacred and secular is baldly displayed in the Tampa, Florida Pastor who blindly tells his people that to have faith in God means to defy public safety and health anti-viral standards and to come together for worship services in order to defy the world that is trying to destroy the church. What planet does that pastor live on? Shame on him for in the name of God leading his people to danger and death in the name of religion that has agency with God to live outside of the world, to invoke the supernatural over the natural.

Viruses are of the world. The world is of God. Viruses are of God. God is not going to stop being God and stop viruses from being viruses simply because we think we are privileged spiritual beings.

Jesus renews the world, gives it it’s life back again, by saving it from religion. The church is to live and tell that story, not become the story itself. Jesus does not renew the church. The sooner the church can get over itself as some sacred space that the secular must see and do, the sooner the death and resurrection of Jesus will have its way with us and the secular will be sacred.

Let’s Just Get Rid of Jesus. Good Luck. Welcome to Lent.

Do not, please, have remorse for killing Jesus unless you have remorse for refusing God’s absolute and complete forgiveness for every person for all time, forever, where all receive the same eternal benefits of life with God simply because God decides this is to be so.

Do not feel remorse because you think its proper etiquette to feel bad for innocent blood shed and thus yourself are able to keep your distance, untouched.

Be honest instead. You don’t feel bad. You feel vindicated. Jesus got what he deserved! Of course we need to kill the one who simply let’s everybody off the hook! It’s not only unfair to do that, its dangerous! It’s not only unlawful, it’s reckless. Jesus is an outlaw!

There is a thing in the Christian tradition called the “adoration of the cross.” It is possible to do that, but beware you are not using it to your glory. You can’t adore it without first, or simultaneously, hating it. In fact, it might be better to drop our whole adoration of the cross and realize the cross adores us: kills us and raises us up.

Jesus! You forgive too much!

For Christians: you forgive the rotten and the unbelieving too much!

For Non-Christians: you forgive us when we don’t even need your forgiveness!

For Both: get rid of Jesus!

For Christians: give me law, not gospel!

For Non-Christians: give me gospel, not law!

For Both: let me be me!

To put a 16^th century reformation theology light on it:

For Christians trying to control our wild nature: nomianism and Melancthon

For Christians trying to control God’s wild nature: anti-nomianism and Agricola

To put a 1^st century biblical theology light on it:

For Religious (Pharisees and Sadducees) : Jesus, you forgive the rotten too much!

For Non-Religious (Pilate): Jesus, you forgive me too much! (“Don’t you see that I have power over you?!!”)

Both want to dismiss Jesus. Both want to kill Jesus.

Jesus is a loose cannon! He must be contained! He isn’t just a pest, he is dangerous.

Religious: the rabble will rise!

Non-Religious:  we are usurped!

Jesus is offensive to both.

Religious: Others don’t deserve forgiveness from you Jesus!

Non-Religious: I don’t need forgiveness from you Jesus!

 Well, and then there is this: Jesus raised from the dead! We simply could not get rid of him! He lives, and he remains offensive!

This is why I am suspicious of any who say they love God without first saying they hate God. And why I believe you cannot adore the cross without first despising it. All at the same time.

We are about to head into the 40 day period that Christians call Lent: a time to focus on the life and death of Jesus with particular attention to the cross and the killing of Jesus. Hmmmmm. Perhaps we can see it is our story of being rid of him. And how he simply will not let us go.

Changing up Christmas: The Jesus Birth Story – In July

A thought occurs to me that we should, as Christians attempting to be true to the 1^st century Jesus and the Cross in the 21^st century world, move the celebration of Jesus’ birth to some other time of year and leave December 25^th to the celebration of family, friends, and giving.  It can even stay “Christmas” and all its involvement of Santa and presents can be all of what it is: giving, being kind, generous, thoughtful, celebrative, together. Rather than feeling something is hollow about a Christmas without Jesus or giving a modicum of Jesus, a certain sugar that makes the cake taste better, we should allow it to be wholly whole on its own and appreciate it for what it is and not denigrate it for what it is not. 

But at the same time we should insist it be authentic and true to what it has become, a celebration of family, friends, love that is not connected to God and the Jesus Story.

I know, of course, the Jesus story however sentimentalized and maudlin or given over to religion as some accounting of how misery (humanity) loves company (sympathy, even empathy, assistance, divinity!) and “isn’t it wonderful that at least we are embraced in our misery,” is so intertwined, enmeshed in the December 25^th celebrations that a December 25^th without Jesus may have a hard time standing on its own. But I think perhaps it actually could. Kind of like Memorial Day for most people if it is any observance at all it is for some kind of idea of military service to country (if not idealized recognition) but divorced from the actual dead on the battlefield. December 25^th would be aware of its roots but that heritage would not be the driving force of the celebration nor would it impede. It would be cultural history to appreciate (or not to color it positive, to simply acknowledge).

So, why divorce the Christian celebration of the birth from the cultural celebration of love and giving? And what would that divorce look like?

First, why.

For one thing (and perhaps the only thing) it would help us tell the story of Jesus to Christians who do not know it. The focus would not be on non-Christians or “Nones” or the unchurched, although they may pick up on the vibe. Even as we attempt, in our current kerygma and didache, to tell of a Jesus who is God who is with and for the least, last, lost, little and dead and is nothing more (!) than humanity in its fullest and truest expression, now in this cultural mix of Santa and salvation, it is hard to tell the story through all the noise. And so much preaching and teaching over the past years has been trying to use giving and love and presents and family and caring for the less fortunate as illustrations if not expressions of Jesus – a certain trying to get to Jesus through our best selves (or as Martin Luther would have it: “through what is in us”). Maybe that’s it – that we preachers simply try to use the noise and we end up providing more noise, more food to feed the beast of how wonderful we all are so as to fend off the darkness with light rather than transform the darkness with a light that has nothing to do with our agency bur everything to do with divine intervention and embrace.

It is of course possible to tell the true story of Jesus at Christmas time without using the Christmas of love and giving, but we preachers haven’t been very good at it. So, taking the birth story away from our cultural Christmas (to give it a name but not trying to put down culture in the process – maybe better would be “our current and contemporary Christmas”) could possibly be of value simply to force the preachers and teachers to tell the  starkness of the cross (shorthand for life, death, resurrection of Jesus) where God doesn’t save us from the nihil and death but rather in it all.

Secondly, what.

Well, perhaps most dramatically and solely, take way all church worship on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. No telling and celebration of the birth. Christmas Day, December 25^th, would simply be observed by Christians much like non-Christians who participate in traditionally Christmas celebration activities: trees, lights, family gatherings, cultural recognitions and observances, parties, gift-giving, cards, shopping, the whole thing. We would just stop the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day worship. One could even keep the liturgical season of Advent and let it be that of which it actually is but miss because we currently have the December 25^th at its conclusion: the celebration and the anticipation and hope of the “second coming” or return of Christ and the completion of all creation.

When to celebrate the birth? I have intimated the month of July because that’s just to pay on our current observance, by some, of a “Christmas in July” giving time (of which I have no idea of origin!), The actual time to celebrate might actually be September – the summer months are too traditionally vacation time and thus, perhaps, hard to people to gather (a technical but not incidental consideration would be the Revised Common Lectionary cycle of Scripture and the tradition of the Christmas Cycle and Easter Cycle which tells of birth, life, death and resurrection before turning to life teaching and life activity of Jesus. But I’ll leave that to the liturgical scholars. They are smart people and can figure something out. Most of us can walk and chew gum as the same time so taking the birth story and putting it as part of a different sequence is something most could handle).  Also, doing this change of calendar actually has an added benefit: it would take the telling of the birth and place it in it’s original place: a telling that is told because the subject Jesus was deemed after his death and resurrection to be of divine significance and so an origin story was created and written, a fiction, to mythologize, in the best sense of that word, and thus elevate Jesus’ status and position.

Church leaders today give particular attention – time, money, energy – on what is called “church renewal.” It’s an attempt to engage the deflation of significance of the faith traditions, if not the faith itself, in so many practicing Christians and an attempt to make others interested in the faith. But, famously, culture eats strategy for breakfast (and lunch and dinner) and so often the strategy for renewal is actually just a shining up of the old silver. In other words, church renewal that is actually adaptive change has to fight hard against the traditions that comfort the heart and expenses (both fiscal and otherwise) that dampen the interest and ability to change. And, church renewal so often is not adaptive change at all but rather technical fix and so will not have a chance in the long run of allowing the organization (church!) to sustain and thrive. So,  all that being said, would changing the calendar of Christian observance of the birth story be something that would actually be of any benefit or aid toward an invigorated church? Would it be adaptive change or technical fix or neither or both? I’m not sure, but the more I think about it, it may be more adaptive than technical: we would be using what is not common knowledge (Jesus was not born in the winter and his birth narrative is a legend, not actual event, told to further and celebrate his status and not to deliver a record of a factual account) to change perceptions and understanding of Jesus and the whole Christian enterprise that follows him.

How could we do such a thing – this changing of the calendar of celebrating Jesus birth? It might begin with a conversation in any given congregation about just what is lost in the current calendar tradition and what is gained therein. And the same with a new calendar tradition. It’s a lot to consider and I’ve likely not covered it all here. But it would be good for dedicated followers of Jesus to consider.

Christmas in July indeed. Or September. Or any time other than December.

Glory to the newborn King!