Wednesday, December 19, 2007

The Voice in the wilderness

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal Church on December 9, 2007

Oh good! It’s “brood of vipers” Sunday. John the Baptizer railing at the people who supported the religious and social status quo in Israel. Ordinary people were flocking to him to be dipped in the river in hopes of cleaning off some of the dust of oppression. John was fine with them – they knew that they weren’t hearing the truth from the voices that represented their faith. John also knew that all he could give them was a bath and a warning. John didn’t mince words and as a result, he is the reason we have the phrase a “head on a platter.” But John said things that needed to be said.

The corruption of a faith is an ugly thing to witness. Violent jihad is a corruption of Islam. Zionism is a corruption of Judaism. And where to start with Christianity? I have a confession to make – I am automatically suspicious when someone identifies himself as a Christian. Talk of Christian values usually sends me screaming from the room. My understanding of Christianity has been corrupted by voices that offend me. And if they offend me – imagine what they do to people who are not schooled as I have been in how to seek the truth in our texts without stopping at the surface. To my way of thinking, the voices that have co-opted Christianity are a brood of vipers.

Fortunately, a kind of John the Baptizer has come around again. His name is Brian McLaren and he has courageously stood up to warn of the wrath to come. I’d like to read some of his statement that appeared on the Talking Points Memo – a liberal blog that is under the direction of a Jew, Josh Marshall. The fact that Brian the Baptizer was invited to be a guest blogger on this very liberal site is no less than amazing. Here is the link: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/060138.php And here’s some of what he had to say.

“There’s a lot of talk nearly everywhere these days about the dangers of radical Islam. In some settings, people express similar concerns about Christianity, especially the dangers of a right-wing theocracy here in America. Whether the warnings come from “the new atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens or from secular-political voices on the left, the prospective villains are usually described as the Religious Right, Evangelicals, Christian Fundamentalists, and so on.

“But largely under the radar, there’s something else going on in the Christian community in the US and world-wide, and it’s a change worth knowing about. Many of us who are involved with this emergence of a new thing would describe it as a deep shift, even a kind of repentance. Growing numbers of us Christians are ashamed of the ways that we Christians have behaved in recent decades – from Evangelicals backing unjust and unwise wars to Catholics covering up priestly abuse, from Prosperity Gospel televangelists getting rich by ripping off the poor to institutional religious bureaucracies fiddling around in carpet-color-committee meetings while the world is burning, or at least warming dangerously.

“We have been arguing about the origin of species while an unprecedented extinction of species occurs on our watch; we’ve been fighting endlessly (and unproductively) about unborn children while achieving precious little for the already-born children in Darfur or Congo or Malawi or downtown Cincinnati. These stale expressions of bad faith have left many of us gasping for the fresh air of good faith.

“So along with facing up to our current and historic failures and atrocities, we’re engaging in a hopeful re-imagining of what Christian faith can be, become, and do in the future. My book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope is a kind of cry, a plea, a prayer reaching toward this kind of faithful re-imagination.

Brian McLaren, an Evangelical pastor himself, is telling us that there are voices within the conservative Christian community have done just what John the Baptizer said they should do. They have repented and are trying to bring their understanding of the faith back to the vision of the Kingdom of God that Jesus talked about. He has identified what he calls “four deep issues.”

"First, we have created an economic system that exceeds environmental limits, resulting in our growing, multifaceted environmental crisis. Second, this economic system is succeeding at making a minority increasingly wealthy, while simultaneously creating a global underclass whose standard of living falls farther and farther behind those who swim in luxury and excess. This growing gap between rich and poor exacerbates the third crisis: as the poor grow more desperate and the rich more frightened of their desperation, both sides arm themselves with more and more terrifying weapons.

"Fourth, I suggest that these first three crises, which I call the prosperity, equity, and security dysfunctions, turn like three gears, teeth in teeth with the others, and they are together driven by a central drive shaft which I call the religious dysfunction. Our world’s religions are failing to provide a story strong enough to inspire enough of us to deal effectively with the first three crises. In fact, all too often our religions provide destructive narratives…our religions can fan the flames of holy-war narratives –whether expressed in terms of terrorism or counter-terrorism, jihad or crusade. But our religions can inspire us with stories of reconciliation and peace. Our religions can foment stories of scapegoating and vilification, or they can inspire us toward compassion and understanding through stories of reconciliation and grace.

"Instead of baptizing greed and self-interest, our faith communities can teach us stories which promote the common good, inspiring us to creatively pursue sustainability both environmentally and socially. Instead of sanctifying the consumerism that reduces everything to a financial “resource,” our faith communities can teach us stories that inspire true reverence for the planet and all it contains – opening our eyes to the signature of God in the hawk soaring among the mountains, the school of minnows flashing in the shallows, the cricket singing in the back yard.

"Instead of distracting us from this-worldly injustice, our religions can embed in us a sense of stewardship and responsibility, so that we who have been given much gladly accept much responsibility for our neighbors. Instead of preoccupying us with raising our own moral score so we can consider ourselves spiritual winners at the finish line, we can live in a story of hope that turns our hearts towards our neighbor, toward the stranger, and even towards our enemies.

"Christians with this emerging sensibility seek a third option, a path beyond the bad religion of which we have a surplus, and beyond the no religion called for by the new atheists: we seek a new kind of faith that engages us with the world as it is and challenges us to become more than we have been.”

I cannot tell how long I have waited for someone from the evangelical Christian world to say this. Thank you, Brian McLaren. It makes me wonder whether John the Baptizer might say instead of “Repent” “Rejoice, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

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