March 30, 2009 by djackson.

This is the sermon I preached yesterday at my church, Windsor Park Baptist here in Corpus Christi. Regular readers of this blog (both of you) will recognize the conclusion as a lightly re-worked version of an earlier piece. So sue me.

Knuckleball Economics
Matthew 20.1-16

Introduction

Let’s talk baseball for a minute. Might as well; after all, most of you are already thinking about basketball. Specifically, I want to talk about pitching. As far as I can tell, there are really only three distinct species of pitches in baseball: the fastball and the curve being the most prominent.

Yes, I know all about two-finger and four-finger, splitters and cutters, but those are just variations of the fastball. And the change-up is just a fastball that’s not in a hurry, while the slider is a curve ball that is.

The only remaining pitch that is truly distinct is the knuckleball. You throw a knuckler by gripping the horsehide with the first knuckle of your index and middle fingers or, more commonly these days, with all four fingertips, and just sort of launching it at the plate. Done properly, this puts the ball in motion with virtually no spin, so its motion is determined by wind, sunspots, signs of the Zodiac, a butterfly beating its wings in a Brazilian rain forest . . . well, you get the idea. The pitch’s unpredictability makes it hard to hit, but it also makes it hard to catch, and you don’t hit the strike-zone with any consistency. Listen to what some ballplayers have said about the knuckleball.

“It’s like trying to catch a fly with a chopstick.” ― All-star and Gold Glove catcher Jason Varitek, Boston Red Sox

“Throwing a knuckleball for a strike is like throwing a butterfly with hiccups across the street into your neighbor’s mailbox.” ― Hall of Famer Willie Stargell

“I always thought the knuckleball was the easiest pitch to catch. Wait’ll it stops rolling, then go to the backstop and pick it up.” ― broadcaster and former catcher Bob Uecker

But my favorite quote comes from Dodgers manager Joe Torre, a former catcher himself, who said, “You don’t catch a knuckleball, you defend against it.”

Now I want to make a baseball analogy to the Gospel of Matthew. I think Jesus throws about three basic pitches in this account of his ministry, just like in baseball. First of all, there is straight-forward teaching. I think this is the fastball – Jesus throwing the high, hard heat, ninety-five miles per hour and belt high but nobody can hit it. There’s a lot of this in Matthew. In fact, Matthew constructs his gospel on a framework of five big blocks of teaching, leading some scholars to speculate that he intends it as a sort of new Law, completing Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers and Deuteronomy with Our Lord as the new Moses.

And we need this teaching: “Turn the other cheek,” “Go the second mile,” “Forgive unto seventy times seven.” The problem with teaching is not that we don’t understand; the problem is that we do!

Then there are narrative sections, stories about Jesus’ interaction with people, mostly his opponents, the religious establishment. Between each chunk of teaching we get these narratives. Here, Jesus tends to throw the curve: unexpected responses to impertinent questions, things that nobody saw coming. “Jesus, should we pay our taxes?” The Pharisees are crowding the plate, giving Jesus no room to maneuver. Say yes and you’re a law-abiding citizen but a traitor to your people. Say no and you’re a patriotic Israelite but a dangerous rebel against the empire. Jesus throws ‘em a curve: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22.21). Matthew reports that after this “they went away,” slunk from the batter’s box back to the dugout with another “K” on the scorecard.

Again, the problem isn’t that we don’t understand. It’s just that we only understand after this trick pitch makes us look like the fools we probably really are after all. We don’t like it, but we get it. In fact, we don’t like because we get it.

The remaining material in Matthew is the parable – the knuckleball. Parables start off alright – they leave Jesus’ mouth on a predictable pattern. The rabbis also told parables – morality tales to back up popular interpretations of Scripture. “A man had two sons,” to use an example from Luke’s gospel (Luke 15.11ff). And everyone thinks, “Oh, we get this: the loyal, hard-working boy stays home and makes good and the wastrel winds up hip-deep in hog slop and the moral is, ‘You teenagers cut your hair and pull up your pants and make good grades and go to church without complaining and don’t smoke or drink or have sex before marriage.’” But wait! A stray puff of air catches this knuckle-parable just before we get our bat on it. The next thing we know the white hats and black hats are on all the wrong heads and the father violates everything James Dobson says in Dare to Discipline.

See, to paraphrase Joe Torre, you don’t interpret the parables of Jesus, you defend against them. And that defense is a losing proposition because their unpredictable movement gets inside your guard from so many directions that before you know it you’re nose is bleeding and you’re racing for the backstop as the runners advance.

And not just a knuckleball; the parables are left-handed knuckle balls! The Anglican theologian Robert Farar Capon rightly refers to the parables of Jesus as a form of “left-handed power,” southpaw preaching that dips and wafts and corkscrews under and through and around all of our analysis. I can almost see Jesus, tired of throwing heated teaching that no one can refute but no one seems to get, arm-weary from slicing curve-balls that silence but do not convert his opponents, stepping from the dugout and signaling to the bullpen: Send in the leftie! Gimme the Torah, kid; it’s just not your day.

So what about this parable, the Knuckleball of the Laborers in the Vineyard? Let’s see how we do defending ourselves against it.

This parable goes off the rails when we come to payday, when the boss tells his tool-pusher to blow the whistle, summon the crew, and pay off the men. Everything up to that point has made perfect sense: the early bird catches the worm, you snooze you lose, early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise – and we’ll settle for one out of three as long as it’s the one in the middle.

Then one split second before the satisfying crack of connection – just before our personal preferences smack the sweet-spot of Jesus’ instructions – a stray puff of words blows the whole thing right out of our wheelhouse. To our dismay we discover that the God we claim to believe in and the god we actually serve are not the same at all! The logical linear relationship, of input to output, of pain to gain, breaks down in the face of a crazy Kingdom grace. We suddenly feel like all those conscientious home owners who didn’t buy houses they couldn’t afford, scrimped to make their payments, lived within their means only to discover that the feds are now in the business of bailing out deadbeats. Why did I go with the three-bedroom ranch in Flour Bluff when I could’ve sprung for the Ocean Drive McMansion and let someone else take the weight? What’s going on here?

Matthew gives us a few linguistic clues that key us into some other passages in his Gospel. Taken together, I think they can help us here. As we examine the final conversation between the owner and the early birds, I think we discover the twin truths that the kingdom of heaven is all about relationships, and that a focus on rewards ruins kingdom relationships.

The Kingdom of Heaven is all about Relationships

Notice how the boss addresses the shop steward for his disgruntled employees. “Friend,” he calls him in v.13. That isn’t a happy word. It is the cultural equivalent of saying to someone, “Hey, buddy,” or “Say, pal.” Nothing good ever happens after a conversation opens that way.

As far as I can tell, this particular word occurs only three times in the New Testament, all of them in Matthew, all of them in the mouth of Jesus, and all of them in situations of strained relationship. The king uses it in Matthew 22 when he’s getting ready to have his bouncers eighty-six a guy out of the reception for refusing to put on a tie (in Matthew 22.12), and Jesus uses it to Judas at the moment that disciple betrays him (Matthew 26.50). In all three of these situations, what we find is a previous relationship that now has been broken. And in all three cases, it is a relationship with God.
Then look at the landowner’s defense: “I am doing you no wrong.” But literally he says “I am doing you no injustice.” Or, to turn it around: I am being just.

That’s worth noting. Because there’s no doubt that what the boss is doing isn’t fair. “Fair” treatment means everyone gets what she deserves; “fair” means equal. If one hours’ work is good for one days’ wages, then one days’ work should cash out at twelve days’ wages. But the biblical concept of justice – the Old Testament concept from which Jesus draws – is not about fairness; it is about wholeness. It doesn’t ask about what people deserve but about what they need. It is less about earning than about yearning.

The ultimate embodiment of this mindset is the year of jubilee (Leviticus 25). God basically says to let the free-market economy operate for a half-century and then to shake the Etch-a-Sketch, wipe out all the debts and let everybody start out all over again. This is important in a couple of ways. First of all, this concept of justice-as-wholeness occupies a large place in the Bible as a whole. There are four words in the Bible, two in the Old Testament and two in the New, that should be translated “justice.” Together they occur 1,060 times. By contrast, all words for sexual sin combined appear 90 times. Now, I’m no good at math but I checked this one with a calculator and that’s more than ten times as many references to justice as to sexual sin.

I read the other day about a nine year-old girl who aborted the twins she was carrying. She was nine years old. She weighed 80 pounds. The doctor said neither she nor the babies could have survived delivery. The Catholic church ex-communicated the girl and the doctor, but not the stepfather who impregnated the child by raping her. “Rape is bad,” the local bishop explained, “but abortion is worse.” A lawyer for the diocese explained, “It is the law of God.” See, we’re addressing the result, the symptom – sexual sin – and it isn’t working and we can’t figure out why because we don’t realize that we haven’t addressed the underlying cause of injustice.

Secondly, this concept of justice-as-wholeness was very important to Jesus. For instance, in what Luke records as the inaugural sermon of Jesus’ ministry, Our Lord takes his text from Isaiah 61 and proclaims “the favorable year of the Lord,” in essence, full-time jubilee from this point forward! No more fairness, no more getting what you deserve, no more quid-pro-quo. Instead, giving what you can and helping everyone get what she needs.

And the real problem is that a failure to embrace God’s justice over our fairness means that we choose to be out of relationship with God. I said that the word “friend” here implies a strained relationship. I should add one other thing: it can also imply a complete lack of relationship. It was a word you used when you didn’t know someone’s name. That’s why the boss uses it here, and the king in Matthew 22 uses it in talking to one of the hoard of homeless swept off the streets and into the Waldorf-Astoria for the social event of the season. And remember that Jesus uses this term to Judas, as if to say, “I don’t even know you anymore.” Remember what Jesus promises to say to those who choose fairness over righteousness in the face of the poor? “I never knew you” (Matthew 7.23).

How does this happen? Well, look at the strong “us-and-them” language this guy uses. “These last men have worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us.” And in fact they don’t even say “these men” but literally, “these latecomers.” They deny them the dignity of being people and define them only in terms of their relative merits. Instead of thinking about what was righteous, how everyone could have enough, how everyone could be in relationship, they thought about how to distinguish between “us” and “them.” When they set themselves apart from the other workers, they set themselves apart from the one who hired the workers.

In Jesus’ day, the principle religious category was not justice but holiness, understood as separation, keeping the good away from the bad, purity, cleanliness, us-vs.-them. That’s also where we put a lot of our religious energy.

I read just today about a hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This is a part of the country settled by Northern Europeans, people with absolutely no melanin in their skin, people so white as to be almost diaphanous – you can read through them. Not long ago, the city had two hospitals: one for Swedes and one for Norwegians, two ethnic stocks who did not get along because of a bad history of wars fought back in the old country. Now they are dealing with an influx of immigrants: not just Hispanics but Somalis, Laotians, Hmong from Viet Nam, Bosnians and others. The article spoke of how these hospitals are hiring interpreters and struggling to adapt to the cultural norms of these various people-groups. They don’t ask, “Are you here legally? Do you have a green card? Can you pay?” They ask, “Where does it hurt?”

Religion in Texas used to be like that. We were all either Baptist or Methodist and we had our own churches and our own hospitals and our own softball leagues. Now, it occurs to me that in the postmodern meltdown of our kaleidoscope culture we must learn a lot of cultural languages so we can speak the gospel to everyone. And we must stop asking, “Are you my kind of person? Do you pass my religious litmus test?” and instead start asking, “Where does it hurt?” then telling them about the Good Physician.

So the kingdom of heaven is all about relationships. Now let’s look at the second idea I mentioned, that a focus on rewards ruins kingdom relationships.

A Focus on Rewards Ruins Kingdom Relationships

The boss makes it clear that his disgruntled workers have no remedy in law. We had a contract and I paid off. Furthermore, you’re on my land. I own the means of production and I can dispose of it as I see fit. That’s clear enough, but look what he says next: “Is your eye envious because I am generous?” Literally he asks, “is your eye evil.”

Now that’s a phrase I’ve heard before in Matthew’s gospel. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus warns us that, since the eye is the body’s lamp, a clear eye means a bright life, but “if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.” It’s the same phrase: “if your eye is evil” (Matthew 6.22-23). And don’t miss the context of that remark: it comes right after the paragraph about storing up treasures on earth, and right before the line about trying to serve both God and mammon. So what gives us an evil eye? A fixation on this world’s rewards. Take it a step farther: Remember I said that the third time Jesus calls someone “Friend” is at the moment Judas betrays him? And what was Judas’ motivation? Money! He sold out his Lord for what he could get.

Then the lesson here isn’t that we shouldn’t work because the rewards are all by grace. The lesson is that we shouldn’t think about the rewards at all! You may recall that in John 10.12-13 Jesus has some harsh things to say about hireling shepherds who are in it for the shekels. We don’t work so we can become rich; we work so that everyone can be in relationship.

See, as long as we’re asking what’s in it for us, we’ve missed the point. Last week, President Obama went on Leno to explain why we have to bail out all these giant corporations. He likened AIG to a terrorist with a bomb strapped to his torso. We don’t care about him; in fact, we’d like to take him out. Problem is, if the sniper takes the headshot, this guy’s thumb slips off the button and we all go up together. It is in our best interest, the president said, to get AIG out of hock.

That may be good economic sense; I don’t know – I don’t understand economics. But it isn’t kingdom sense. This landowner doesn’t pay big bucks to the best workers because he can’t get his crop in without them. He pays bonuses to the bozos at the back of the line (and even moves them to the front!) because he’d rather meet needs than make money, rather put his wealth into people than into his pockets.

Never fail to remember that God does not save us because he needs us. He doesn’t need anything – that’s one of the perks of being God. As trinity, he can live in perfect love without us. As omnipotent, he can accomplish all tasks without us. That’s one reason we can’t earn our salvation: we don’t have anything God needs in the first place, or even anything that doesn’t already belong to him. So if our other relationships truly operate out of our relationship to God, then we’ll work the same way.

Conclusion

“Take what is yours and go.” That’s where the owner leaves it because that’s all that’s left. All these men had invested in this relationship was the payment of a contract so, since the contract had been paid, the relationship was over. And don’t miss the tragedy of that last imperative. “Go” is literally “go away.” It’s a common enough word, shows up all over the New Testament, but I want to look at some specific places where we find it.

Jesus uses it only a few verses later to describe a father instructing his sons to “go work today in the vineyard” (Matthew 21.28). The issue there is not pay, since they are his sons, but relationship. The question Jesus asks is not which one earned the most but “which of the two did the will of his father?” (v.31) He uses the same command in this story, once for the early shift (v.4) and once for the late-comers (v.7). So it works in this story as a relationship-word: because we are in relationship, obey me.

But Jesus also uses it to dismiss the devil (Matthew 4.10) and to dismiss Peter when he’s acting like the devil (Matthew 16.23). And what, by the way, had the devil been offering Jesus? Rewards, quid-pro-quo, worship me and get this. And what was Peter really urging Jesus to do? Be a hireling, leave the sheep and flee when the wolf comes and you must lay down your life.

So the choice before us as Christians hearing this parable is which command we will heed. The command to “go into the vineyard” because we are in relationship with the Lord of the Harvest, or the command simply to “go” because we’ve gotten everything out of God that we want, or at least everything we know how to get, and there was no relationship in the first place. And, terrifyingly enough, the answer to that question depends on whether we care deeply about helping all of those around us to have the fullest life possible.

Now, to make an immediate application of the parable, consider this. We tend to read this as a story about Heaven: “Everyone who trusts Jesus will be saved and go to Heaven whether they trust him early and spend their lives working for him or trust him on their deathbed after a life spent in sin.” True, but not the only lesson this parable slips through the strike zone.

Jesus doesn’t mention Heaven; he talks about “the kingdom of heaven,” which is something different: the rule of God both here and now and in the life to come. So the point is that right now, with stuff as mundane as money or our daily work or our home life, we need stop thinking about whether we are being treated fairly and instead think about how we can contribute to everyone’s wholeness.

I’m going to wind this up with a basketball analogy. What the heck? I’ve already done baseball and J. D.’s not here anyway. Shane Battier of the Houston Rockets is my new favorite basketball player. He shouldn’t be flattered: I didn’t have a former favorite basketball player. I don’t follow basketball. But I may now that I know about Battier.

Rockets GM Daryl Morey, who recruited and signed the power forward, has this to say about his acquisition: “He’s, at best, a marginal N.B.A. athlete.” “Shane can’t create an offensive situation.” “He can’t dribble, he’s slow and hasn’t got much body control.”

High praise indeed. And the numbers (remember how they don’t lie?) back Morey up. The stats insist that Battier doesn’t score many points, blocks few shots, seldom steals the ball and makes few assists. And his salary reflects these numbers – relatively low for an NBA starter.

Oh, but there is this: with Battier on the floor, the Rockets win. Houston went on a rampage last season and reeled off a string of twenty-two straight victories, the most ever in the league with the exception of the ‘71-’72 Lakers. For exactly half of those games either Yao Ming or Tracy McGrady rode pine due to injuries. The Rockets player with the most floor-time during the streak was Battier. The season before he joined the franchise, Houston went 34-48. The next year, 52-30 and the year after that, 55-27. Nor is this an isolated fluke. The Memphis Grizzlies drafted Battier out of Duke, then went from 23-59 his rookie season to 50-32 in his third year. Battier is a journeyman, a competent workman at best, yet as one sportswriter puts it, “every team he has every played on has acquired some magical ability to win.”

So what’s the deal? Battier is, says Morey, “the most abnormally unselfish basketball player he has ever seen.”

Battier does things that help the team win. He makes few rebounds, but the team snags far more of them when he is in the game, because he knows how to position himself to free a teammate to get to the boards. He doesn’t score a lot of points, but knows the trick of feeding his pals when they are in position for an easy shot. He swats the ball away as an opponent takes it from waist to shoulders; doesn’t count as a blocked shot in the N.B.A., but prevents the hoop all the same. He routinely guards the best shooters in the league, and their scoring averages dip against him. In fact, the data reveal that with Battier on him, Kobe Bryant actually becomes a liability; the Lakers would score more if they took him out of the game!

“I call him Lego,” Morey explains. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together.” Or, as his high school coach Kurt Keener notes, “he had this incredible ability to make everyone around him better.”

So why isn’t he famous?

Shane Battier might be able to make mor money if he paid more attention to his own statistics, to his own box score, but he would rather see his team win. Jesus’ parable reminds us to stop thinking in terms of box scores and individual stats and instead ask how we can help those around us.

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March 23, 2009 by djackson.

This is an expanded manuscript of the sermon I preached last Sunday at Wesley United Methodist Church, where my wife serves as minister of music. I’d never preached in a Methodist church before. It’s not that different, except the sermon is shorter and the pulpit sits off to one side. This gave me a slight sense of sermonic seasickness at first until I had the rather pleasant realization that it wasn’t all about me, since I’d been bumped by the Lord’s Supper table. Anyway, here’s the sermon.

Believing is Seeing
John 9.1-12

Introduction
In a dramatic scene in C. S. Lewis’ science fiction novel Perelandra, Elwin Ransom, Oxford professor of philology and inter-planetary explorer extraordinaire, finds himself trapped in subterranean caverns miles below the surface of the planet Venus, forced to grope his way in darkness up towards the surface. Describing the trek, Lewis writes,

He found himself thinking about light as a hungry man thinks about food – picturing April hillsides with milky clouds racing over them in blue skies or quiet circles of lamp-light on tables pleasantly littered with books and pipes. By a curious confusion of mind he found it impossible not to imagine that the slope he walked on was not merely dark, but black in its own right, as if with soot. He felt that his feet and hands must be blackened by touching it. Whenever he pictured himself arriving at any light, he also pictured that light revealing a world of soot all around him.

Two things: the hunger for light and the fear of what that light might reveal. I think most of us can relate to both. We know we grope our way upward in a dark world deprived of the light of God’s love and long for that blazing beam to brighten our blindness. We also know that all of our world is bleared and seared with sin, that it bears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell. We seek the light and flee the light at the same time. This story from the gospel of John is about both things: a blind man who sees and sighted people who don’t like what the light shows them.

The Light Shines on Us

We should start by realizing the radical claim that Jesus makes in the seemingly simple statement, “I am the light of the world” (v.5). We have grown so familiar with this language that it becomes like a once-jagged stone, so smoothed by the stream of time that it slides off the surface of our minds without the shocking, wounding impact that it had on the people of Jesus’ day. We should look both at the context of the statement and language he uses.
Look first at the context. Scholars believe that Jesus utters these words during the Festival of Dedication, also known as the Festival of Lights or, to us, Hanukkah. It commemorates a time, about a century and a half before the birth of Jesus, when the Jewish people regained control of their temple from pagan invaders. They had to perform an eight-day ceremony to cleanse the house of God. According to the Talmud, olive oil was needed for the menorah in the Temple, which was required to burn throughout the night every night. But there was only enough oil to burn for one day, yet miraculously, it burned for eight days. The Jewish sages an eight day festival to commemorate this miracle.
So in that setting, Jesus’ words become very bold: he claims to be the true light of God symbolized by the burning lampstand in the holy temple. He claims, in fact, to be God in the flesh.
Now look at Jesus’ language. This is the second time in this section of John that the Lord makes this claim. The first time (8.12), he uses some very specific Greek grammar that goes back to Moses’ experience at the burning bush. Moses asks God’s name, and God responds, “I am who I am” (Exodus 3.14). This becomes the YHWH name of God, the “I AM” that denotes his eternal, timeless existence. For Jesus to use that language about himself (and he does it seven times in John’s gospel, each of the “I AM” sayings), means that he claims equality with the Father. After this, the presence of God becomes associated throughout the Old Testament with the blazing light of his glory. This is the same thing John tells us when he rights, “In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (John 1.4-5).
That is the answer to the first thing we’ve mentioned: humanity’s yearning for God’s light in this darkened world. The light of the world is Jesus. This is good news! God is with us, and he is with us in and through the person of Christ. Jesus proves this claim by his resurrection from the dead. This is also shocking news! If Jesus is the light of the world, then there is no other. He makes a claim that refuses to share the spotlight with the gurus and gods of other religions because he is, himself, the source of all light.

What Does the Light Show Us?

When a spotlight stabs the gloom of a darkened stage, it always shines on the star. When God’s light illumines the darkened world, it shows us a beggar! The disciples, noticing the man born blind, start up a theological debate about whose fault it is. The common thinking of the day was that bad things only happened to bad people, so this man’s condition meant that someone’s muddy feet had polluted the religious gene pool. They saw a beggar whom they could use as an obhject lesson. Jesus saw a man in need of healing.When the disciples want to debate the cause of this man’s problem, Jesus says he would rather talk about the solution. “Why is he blind?” is, for Jesus, a less important quesiton than, “What can we do about it?”
Christians sometimes seek to avoid responsibility to help the needy by debating the extent to which it is their own fault. Jesus instead encourages us to avoid our own fault by taking responsibility. “How did they get themselves into this mess?” is not the Christian question. “how can we get them out of it?” is the question Christ calls us to ask.
I must admit, as a lifelong Baptist, that you Methodists are on the whole better at this than we are. This church operates a thrift store and a food closet designed for just this purpose: lighting up the needs of our community and doing something about them in the name of Jesus. This is important because our ability to see the needy ultimately bears witness to whether we have truly seen Christ. Whether or not we’ve seen the light depends on whether or not we’re seeing what that light claims to show us.

Conclusion

One final word: this shining of light in the darkness is not just work that Jesus does for us; it is also work that he does in us. Notice carefully how Jesus replies when the disciples ask him about the man born blind: “We must work the works of Him who sent me” (John 9.4). He includes us, you and me, the church in this business of being and bringing light. It is the same thing that Our Lord says in that famous figure of speech from the Sermon on the Mount:

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven. – Matthew 5.14-16.

And do you remember what I said about Jesus’ grammar in that “I am” statement? Well, he uses it in this passage when he says, “You are”. In other words, if our world is ever going to see the light of God they will see it in Jesus, and if they are ever going to see the light of Jesus they will see it in us . . . or not at all! They will care what we say when they see who we are. They will believe what we declare when they see what we do.
I like teaching seminary students because they don’t worry about asking tough questions. In fact, they live to play “stump the professor”! One of my students recently asked me if I had ever considered how conceited Paul was. After all, he orders the Corinthians to “be imitators of me” (1 Corinthians 4.16). The Greek word is the root of our word mimic, like the guys who do those great George Bush impersonations. But, as I told my student, Paul was writing to a church that did not have a New Testament; none of the gospels had even been written yet. The best – the only – hope they had of seeing what Jesus was like was by looking at one of his followers.
And that is true today in our postmodern melt-down of competing narratives. Our only hope to spread the gospel is to live it! What should shock us is not that Paul was willing to offer that challenge, but that we are not!
One of my favorite short stories is Ernest Hemingway’s story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” It tells the story of an old man, lonely and suicidal after the death of his beloved wife, who sits at the neighborhood café late into the night until the weary waiters finally force him to leave. He does this because, as one of the waiters explains to the other, it is the last clean, well-lighted place in the city’s darkness. “Each night,” the man explains to his colleague, “I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the café.”
I like to think of the church in those terms. In a sin-blackened world where lonely men and women wander friendless and aimless through the dark night of the soul, we are the last outpost of light, the clean, well-lighted place, the lamp burning on the lampstand, the city whose lights blaze against the skyline. Why does it matter that you give sacrificially so that Wesley United Methodist can meet its financial obligations? Why does it matter that you volunteer to teach Sunday school, or work with the children, or help with the food pantry, or serve on a committee? Because we must be reluctant to close up. There may be someone who needs the church, the last clean, well-lighted place in a lightless world.

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March 17, 2009 by djackson.

In “The Cop Killer,” one of the three stories in Rex Stout’s anthology Triple Jeopardy, a pair of illegal immigrants, refugees of Stalin’s Gulag, find themselves among those suspected of puncturing a policeman’s pulmonary artery with a pair of sheers. They flee for protection to the most powerful American they can think of, New York detective Nero Wolfe. Wolfe’s assistant Archie Goodwin explains with some asperity that, if innocent, they would have done better to stay put and answer the questions put to them. The husband, Carl, explains the world-view of a political refugee:

A policeman asking questions has a different effect on different people. If you have a country like this one and you are innocent of a crime, all the people of your country are saying it with you when you answer the questions. That is true even when you are away from home – especially when you are away from home. Two people alone cannot answer a policeman’s questions anywhere in the world. It takes a whole country to speak to a policeman.

“It takes a whole country to speak to a policeman.” While it may or may not take a whole village to raise a child, I’m pretty sure Stout got it right about law enforcement. Not to cast aspersions on the cops. In fact, that’s the whole point. The policeman and I meet on the terms of a social contract or the whole thing becomes a straight-forward power struggle in which he has all the strength on his side.

Think about it: a cop has a pistol, pepper spray, and handcuffs. He has training that I lack in physical combat. Most of all, he has a shield, a badge that puts the entire power of the state behind him. He wears a uniform which makes him more than an individual; it makes him the contact point between me and the hundreds of others who don the same livery.

Innocence, if it is only my individual, isolated innocence, cannot answer that kind of force. The peace officer will not – indeed, integrity dictates that he cannot – simply take my word for it that I have not committed a crime. When I speak to him, I must do so as a member of the same community, the same commonwealth that stands behind his badge. When that happens, though we still do not meet with equal force, we meet with equal assumptions, a common understanding as the matrix of our encounter. It requires the voice of the entire community citing its laws and insisting on its procedures to speak with sufficient volume to outshout the policeman’s lawful authority. It takes a whole country to speak to a policeman.

In a similar sense, I think it takes a whole church to speak to God.

I know the analogy is flawed, containing contrasts as well as comparisons, but I think it has merit. We Baptists are big on what we term “the believer priesthood,” a category by which we often really mean the believer-cowboy, a loner riding the range all on his own, fighting his own battles with the six-shooters of personal prayer and private worship. We don’t spell Church with a capital-C and we don’t slink into confessional booths where “some human being stands between me and God.” We like to quote 1 Timothy 2.5, not stopping to note that while the Mediator the verse mentions is, in fact, singular, the “mediated” are plural.

Our addiction to 1 Peter 2.5 and 9 needs careful re-examination. Certainly the apostle declares the priesthood of all believers. Baptists over the centuries have gone to prison, some to the scaffold, for our insistence that the kingdom knows nothing of a top-down distribution of saving grace, a sacred spout where the glory comes out with only authorized barkeeps tapping the keg. But somewhere along the way we got our adjectives mixed up. “Universal” priesthood became “individual” priesthood. The priesthood of “all” believers mutated into the priesthood of “each” believer. A shared priesthood shattered into shards of priesthood as we mistook mutual obligation for personal privilege. The very Hebrew word for priest has the root idea of mediation, a go-between. A private priest, then, is as silly an idea as a one-ended bridge.

This is on my mind because I continue to encounter those who cut themselves loose from the supporting community of saints in the name of some kind of individualized holiness that they feel gives them a superior spirituality. They grudgingly acknowledge that a verse or two here and there (Hebrews 10.25 forces its way through their reluctant - often clenched - jaws) may make church seem like a good idea, even obligatory, but this fact doesn’t appear to make much of an impact. They usually counter that the church in our day is such an un-Christlike mess as to provide a historical escape clause from a book they would otherwise acknowledge as eternal and unchanging.

I can spot a couple of problems with this approach. First of all, finding a proof-text for the church in the New Testament is like pointing to one car in five o’clock traffic to “prove” the rush-hour exists. It reminds me of what G. K. Chesterton says about proofs in general:

It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness. The belief is so big that it takes a long timem to get it into action.

The church is so big in the Bible that it overwhelms articulation. You see, the assumption of mutual commitment to a visible group of gathered believers is not argued in the Bible; it is assumed. Paul addresses one letter to a private individual, three to pastors to tell them how to minister to churches, and all the rest to churches. Most of the pronouns in the Pauline and general epistles are plural - “y’all” instead of “you.” There is a sense in which you can’t read the Bible by yourself without hogging a conversation meant for a multitude.

The other problem I find with the anti-church argument is the idea that because the church today is such a mess, those who have transcended her low-level holiness can opt out. Now, understand the nature of my disagreement: I don’t for a moment maintain that the church (or, if you prefer, “the churches”) of our day, at least in America, are a mess, a mare’s nest of carnality and spiritual shallowness and theological ignorance. What I do argue is that this is nothing new. To take but one example: the church at Corinth in the first century had turned the Lord’s Supper into a kegger complete with a cool-table for the upper class, was attending barbeques at the local brothel, and harbored political in-fighting that made Chicago politics look irenic. Yet, when Paul wanted to mete out the greatest punishment possible to a wayward member, what did he prescribe? Refuse to let the guy come to church! In other words, the worst punishment possible for a Christian is to be prohibited from attending a bad church.

Certainly I don’t mean to say that we should never speak prophetically to the church’s failings. One way of loving any community is to insist that it move toward its own ideals. I do, however, mean to say that such a conversation can only happen from the inside. But to return to my original theme, I mean something more than just that we should all go to church. I mean that we all need the church.

In the face of the righteousness of God and the complete power he has to enforce it, I must find a way to answer. Of course, the only “innocence” I or anyone else can claim is in the blood of Christ, the satisfaction of the law made not by my own merit but by Jesus’ sacrifice on my behalf. But I don’t think it stops there. My individual encounter with Jesus is critical, but my assertion of it leaves me insecure. I need an entire believing community to say of me, and with me, that I have come to the cross and found my sin forgiven.

When I kneel to pray, I need to know that I have backup from those who have agreed to underwrite my confession of faith and to share the liability of my spiritual misadventures. Come judgment day, I don’t hope to have priest or pope at my back to shore up my assertion of redemption. That isn’t a concept I find in Scripture. I do, however, hope to have the members of the Windsor Park Baptist Church there. I don’t want them to read a list of the good stuff I’ve done in order to win God over. I want them to say, “Father, we know this guy, and we affirm that he trusts Christ and nothing else for his salvation.”

It takes a whole church to speak to God, and my church, though not big and not perfect, is whole.

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