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.