This morning our focus will be on our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, specifically the conversion of Saul, the persecutor of Jesus’ followers, to St. Paul, arguably the greatest of all the messengers of the Gospel. In the chapter just before this one today, Saul oversaw the stoning death of St. Stephen. And as our text today begins, we read that he was “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.” On his way to Damascus, he encountered the Resurrected Jesus and things were never the same for him, or the world, again. After seeing Jesus, scales covered his eyes until he was baptized a few days later.
And I would suggest Saul was blind before those scales covered his eyes. He was blind to the Truth of the Gospel. He was blind to the grace of God moving around Palestine. He was blind to the new thing that God was doing. He was a devout Jew and zealous defender of the faith. The disciples were seen as enemies of both Rome and the Temple, as they were followers of Jesus, whom had been put to death in order to silence his message. But it seemed that killing him did not work. There were reports that he was risen, and there was new vigor among his followers. Saul was so convinced of what he believed about the world, that he was blind that what was happening before his very eyes. And so this morning, I want to raise the question of our own blindness.
I recently attended a lecture called “Preaching
Without Apology.” One thing that was discussed was the need for preachers to
get out of the way of the Gospel in sermons and instead let the truth of the
text speak for itself. There is no need to explain the Gospel and assume that
it is too obtuse to understand. And there is no need to give the Gospel a more
pastoral and comfortable tone, as that is a betrayal of the text. As
Christians, we really need to have a dialogue about the future of the Church
and our own discipleship. And it’s not an easy conversation, nor should it be.
To be honest, I have some trepidation about preaching this sermon because I
don’t know how it will be heard, but I know that it needs to be heard. I take
seriously that opening prayer, asking God to lead us to truth, come whence it
may, cost what it will, and lead where it might. The 17th century
preacher, Lancelot Andrewes, once said “I don’t preach what people want to
hear, I preach what, on the day of judgment, they will wish they would have
heard.”
Look around and you’ll see we have a problem. There are stories in every journal and news outlet about the rising tide of atheism and indifference towards religion. And statistics back up what we all, in our gut, know is happening. Older generations are hanging onto their faith, though often for unknown reasons. And younger generations are staying away. I’m 29 years old, and there are only a few people in this congregation that are within a decade of my age in either direction. Our budget is tight ever year, and more parishioners are buried from this church than are baptized. And we’re in the Bible-belt. In the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast regions of this country, churches are becoming museums.
And it’s a problem for which we have no one to blame but ourselves. Christianity simply isn’t worth living or dying for in most of the instances where we find it. We have so perverted and betrayed the Gospel that we have soured the experience of discipleship. Much of the shallow and apathetic faith we find today is akin to desecrating the graves of the martyrs, who died for the greater Church. I’ll let you decided to what extent this does, or does not, apply to you personally.
Stanley Hauerwas has remarked that atheism is not the greatest enemy of Christianity, rather sentimentality is. Our greatest enemy is within; it is complacent, passive membership as the norm instead of radical discipleship. CS Lewis, writing as a demon in The Screwtape Letters, says “it will be an ill day for us demons if what most humans mean by ‘religion’ ever vanishes from the Earth. The fine flower of unholiness can grow only in the close neighbourhood of the Holy. Nowhere do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of the altar.” And it happens on both sides.
Evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity is a problem. The belief that the world was created 4,000 years ago in a literal seven days is simply idiotic. And I’m not going to apologize for it any longer. It makes absolutely no theological or rational sense. The Body of Christ is not called to be a homophobic, war-crazed, weapon-toting, people who claim that they are somehow saved while others are destined to hell. It’s simply wrong at best, and the work of the anti-Christ at worst.
But Evangelical Christianity is simply the other side of the same coin of Liberal Christianity, which is just as worthless. Liberal or progressive Christianity has legs comparable to a wet noodle. We have fallen captive to the idols of hospitality, and finding “the” historical Jesus, so that we can tame Jesus to suit our own needs and desires. Liberal Christianity spends too much time apologizing for the Gospel instead of proclaiming it. The Gospel has been diluted and betrayed in the name of not offending people. Jesus did not die on a cross so that we could say “Jesus is Lord, but that’s just my opinion.”
Both liberal and conservative Christianity have forgotten that God created us and not the other way around. On both sides, we claim to know the mind of God, we make judgments in the name of God, and we ostracize those who do not agree with us. The Gospel has been co-opted for the agendas of the right and the left. The Gospel needs no defense, it doesn’t need to be made more palatable, nor does it need to be sharpened. The Gospel needs no explanation, and it doesn’t need to worry about aligning with our political views. The Gospel is its own interpretation and its own politic. And it loses its edge when we domesticate it to our purposes or interpretations.
The Gospel is a matter of life and death, but do we treat it as such? Bishop Curry recently remarked that it would be better to have an incompetent airline pilot than an incompetent preacher, because the pilot can only take down a plane of a few hundred people; but a preacher can, often unknowingly, chip away at the Kingdom of God for years. The Gospel is about peace, justice, mercy, and Resurrection, and if our world doesn’t have more of that, we will know more death. The Gospel is about the life of the world, and so when we lessen its impact, we indeed are talking about matters of life and death.
Once Saul encounters the risen Jesus, he goes to Damascus and is baptized by Ananias. His baptism completed his transformation from Saul to St. Paul. He went from being a persecutor to one of the persecuted. St. Paul endured much on account of his baptism- in his own words, he writes that “Five times I have received lashes, three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; and many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked.”
But St. Paul would go on to write that “Therefore we have been buried with Jesus by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” His baptism allowed him to endure all that he did, and he did it gladly for the sake of the Gospel.
Consider what the Sacrament of Baptism looks like in most churches. We fill the church with people who have no idea what the discipleship is about because they aren’t living it. And we baptize babies for people whom we know that we’ll never see again. We placate ourselves by saying “well, we’re sowing the seeds of faith.” That’s lazy and irresponsible. Jesus doesn’t tell us to “sow seeds of faith,” he says “make disciples.” And so people stand up front and make empty promises, all while wearing the cutest little outfits that they can find. And then after the service we stand up front and smile for the pictures and then enjoy a nice brunch afterwards.
Baptism is serious business; it is, quite literally, about life and death. Baptism is preparing us to be martyrs, which we are all called to be. Let us remember that Jesus makes it quite clear that “all who wish to follow me should deny themselves and take up their cross.” As Dietrich Bohoeffer put it, “when Christ calls us, he bids us come and die.”
When we baptize a child, the mother and father smile and are filled with joy, which isn’t a bad response to start with, but it should go deeper. Their stomachs should also be churning; they should be scared to death for their child who is taking on the death of Christ in Baptism. They are being prepared to become a martyr for the Kingdom of God. The way a parent sees off their child when they are shipped off to war should evoke a similar feeling to when our children are baptized. Baptism should, quite literally, put the fear of God in us and scare us to death. Our baptismal gowns are meant to be our burial shrouds. St. Paul understood this, as evidenced by his many sufferings. But, just as we’ve made the Gospel a comfortable message that allows us to keep living the life we choose, we have done the same to Baptism.
And for these reasons, Christianity is in decline, because it simply isn’t worth it. On the religious right, a rather weak straw man has been created for the secularists to poke fun at. Look at those idiots, they don’t believe in dinosaurs, or global warming. Or they support war and follow the Prince of Peace. That Gospel doesn’t hold any water. That Gospel isn’t worth dying for. And on the religious left, faith has become trivial. Faith has become what feels right, what feels good. We embrace inclusivity at the cost of losing our identity. And we become hypocrites who say the Creed while crossing our fingers. That sort of faith is lighter than a feather. That Gospel isn’t worth dying for either.
Bonhoeffer writes about cheap grace and costly grace in his work, The Cost of Discipleship. He writes “cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.” And he contrasts this to costly grace saying that “it is costly grace because it costs us our lives, but grace because it gives us the only true life.” It makes no sense to pay for the worthlessness of cheap grace which is too often found filling our churches, and it is not surprising that so few are willing to pay the radical and high price of costly grace. But perhaps that is because so few people know the true value of costly grace. Not everyone has had such a tangible experience the power of the risen Lord as St. Paul did.
And if Christianity and discipleship, as it is most often understood and lived out, isn’t worth dying for, then it certainly isn’t worth living for. Martyrdom makes us uncomfortable, doesn’t it? I know it does me. But do we really practice a faith that is worth dying for? For too many Christians, the answer is “no.” And so it is no surprise that Christians don’t actually live their faith either, because why should we bother dedicating our entire life to something for which we are unwilling to die?
And this is where the Resurrection comes in. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the central tenet of Christianity, and the most often misunderstood. Jesus did not die and raise from the dead to give us eternal life, but that is how we often understand the Resurrection. And if we stop and think about it, it’s a rather narcissistic and masochistic view. It puts us at the center of the Gospel instead of God. And it assumes that God needed some sort of bloody sacrifice to satisfy the divine cause of justice. If God wanted us to be immortal, God could simply have it be that way. But Resurrection is not about the immortality of our souls. Instead, the Resurrection gives us the power and courage to stare at the face of death, and not blink. The Resurrection allows us to be martyrs without fear. A poet once said, “I will die, but that is all I will do for death.” The Resurrection enables this.
Now remember, the Gospel can stand on its own. We don’t need to explain the Resurrection. What matters is that Christ is risen, period, full stop. And so when we die, either literally or metaphorically, as we seek to build the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven, we can have faith and confidence that death will not be the end of us. Through our Baptism into the life, death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus, we are given boldness and grace to stare into the face of death and laugh, asking “is that all you’ve got?”
And this Gospel, the Gospel of defying death, of seeking to further the reign of God through peace, reconciliation, love, justice, and mercy is worth something. And that, my brothers and sisters, is worth dying for, and it is worth living for. The Gospel of the Resurrection of Jesus is worth our life and our death.
Please don’t misunderstand me to be saying that Christendom would be fixed if we could just be more orthodox in thought, because that is not at all what I’m saying. In her book, Christianity Without Religion, Diana Butler Bass writes of the importance and transformation afforded us through orthopraxy; that is, actually practicing our discipleship. The early disciples indeed knew the Gospel, that was not the issue, but living it was. And many of them understood this Gospel because tradition tells us that all of the twelve were killed for their actions of faith.
Bass suggests that we ask ourselves not “what do we believe,” but “how do we believe?” She reminds us the origins of the English word “believe” are found in the word “belove.” What you love, you believe. Thought and intellectual assent doesn’t matter as much. Again, CS Lewis writing as a demon says “let them do anything but act. No amount of piety in their imaginations or affections will harm us if we can keep it out of their wills.” Faith is a matter of the heart and the will, of the hands and the feet, and less about the brain. What you believe doesn’t matter nearly as much as how you believe. Don’t worry about what you believe about the Resurrection, but focus on how you believe it.
What I am suggesting is more than simply reclaiming the middle ground of the Anglican via media somewhere between the religious left and right. I am not suggesting that if fool ourselves into believing the literal words of the Creed that all will be made right. But we must give up the idol of fully understanding the Gospel. Instead, the Gospel is about beloving that Christ is risen, and our response to that miraculous happening. We must decide if the Gospel and the Resurrection of Jesus is a nice little story, or is it something to live, and die, for.
For Saul, it took a radical conversion. Even Ananias struggled with it, as he couldn’t believe that the evil Saul was the vehicle of God’s grace. To live the Gospel, we must be willing to be surprised by God, just as Paul and Ananias were. As Hauerwas notes, “the Resurrection is the reconfiguration of all we know, have known, and will know.” Paul, who at first was blind to the Truth of the Gospel, became instead blind to the niceties, practicalities, and comforts of the world in favor of focusing on the Gospel. Paul and Ananias were given the grace to see the new thing that God was doing, and we pray that we might have grace to do the same. I know that this is a tough task, but certainly it is one worthy of dying for, and therefore, worth giving our life to.
This is the message of Easter. Easter is not about proving the literal Resurrection of Jesus, or explaining it in such a way that our modern minds can accept it metaphorically. Easter is the event that needs no explanation and no apology. Easter shouts in the face of death that the Lord is risen indeed! This Gospel gives us something to live, and die for, in the pursuit of God’s continually coming Kingdom. Our Baptisms have empowered us for our martyrdom in the following Jesus as disciples, that we might not be blind to the grace of God all around us. Let our battle cry be loud and strong this day, and every day. Alleluia, Christ is risen!
