January 17, 2010

causing the harbor and coastal waters to recede, revealing the litter of wrecked ships and their cargoes. After forty minutes, as if the ocean was taking a deep breath, the water rushed back in a massive tsunami, engulfing the harbor and the downtown area, and then receded again, sweeping  everything and everyone in its path back out to sea. Historians variously estimate the death toll between fifty and ninety thousand, as shocks from the quake were felt as far north as Finland and as far south as North Africa. There was even a ten foot tsunami on the southern coast of Cornwall in England.

The impact on Portugal and its colonial ambitions was devastating, but no less significant was the impact on the optimism of Europan thought. How could a beneficent God allow this to happen? Where was the ordered universe that had seemed so secure? The French philosopher Voltaire attacked the notion of a benevolent God in his novel Candide, in which misfortune and disaster befall people indiscriminately, good and evil alike. Theologians likewise reacted to the disaster, viewing the nature of God from very different perspectives, and the church took note that the quake had not only happened on All Saints Day, but had ruined almost all of their buildings in Lisbon.

As the world reacts today to yet another cataclysmic earthquake, how should Christians respond to the tragedy in Haiti? Yes, we must send emergency help as generously as we can. As you heard at the beginning of the service, our Outreach Committee here at West End has been prompt to call on us, and especially to give our financial support. Our United Methodist Tennessee Office of Mercy, Mission and Justice Ministries is coordinating efforts throughout the Conference, and our national United Methodist Committee on Relief, one of the most respected such organizations in the world, is right there at the forefront. Indeed, several of its officers were in at the Montana Hotel Haiti in Port au Prince at the time of the quake, and word was received only this morning that  two of them have died of their injuries: the chief executive Dr. Sam Dixon, before he could be rescued from the wreckage, and  Rev. Clinton Rabb, after being airlifted to a Florida hospital. We mourn their deaths.

But when we have done and continue to do all we can, those of us charged with announcing to the world the good news of God’s redemption in Jesus Christ cannot avoid the same weighty questions that were raised in Europe in 1755. We have seen the footage coming out of Haiti: the little girl, rescued after two days buried in rubble, only to die the following day because of the lack of hospital facilities; the anguished cry of the father desperately looking for his family, and asking, “Why us?” The deep underlying question is inescapable: “Where was God last week, and what does this disaster say about God’s parental credentials?” We not only need to ask these questions. We also need to be ready with some answers, because others will ask them. Indeed, they already are. Will you join me in prayer?

Most gracious God, out of all the words that will now be spoken and heard, may it be your living word that stays in our hearts. Give us the grace to receive it, and give us the charity to let all the other words slip away. We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen

In an essay that should be required reading for all Methodist clergy, and high on the list for all Methodist laity, the late Robert E. Cushman concluded that the theological and philosophical ineptitude of the Reformation was to disjoin nature and grace. (“Wesley and the Calvinists” in Faith Seeking Understanding, Duke University Press, 1979) While the watchwords of the Reformation, sola fide, by faith alone, had been a shout of freedom for the individual believer against an authoritarian church, these words in Protestant tradition have made human self-understanding the starting point of Christian belief rather than the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Never mind the awesome sovereignty of God, never mind the majesty of God’s creation, never mind our God-given natural faculties, nothing counts except how you and I experience God through the gift of faith. This makes Jesus Christ himself less important than how we respond to the gospel about him. Indeed, there are those who argue that it doesn’t really matter whether there was such a person as Jesus of Nazareth, as long as we have faith in Christian tradition! The myopia of such a stance is matched only by its arrogance, yet it is the end result of the Reformation ineptitude identified by Cushman, and can be found today in countless places carrying the name Christian.

This tendency to center Christian belief on human self-understanding is at the root of so much today that discounts and even discredits concern for the world in which we live. Caring for Planet Earth becomes a pointless exercise, since God’s redemption will ultimately consist of taking us out of a world that God has written off as a lost cause. The meaning of God’s salvation becomes the saving of individual souls, or to use the vernacular, “getting saved.” I encountered this in my first church, where there was a couple who, let it quickly be said, were two of the most faithful and stalwart members of the congregation, but who regarded their salvation as a series of personal spiritual encounters. “We’ve been saved seven times,” they told me shortly after I arrived, “and each time has been better than the last.” In more sophisticated language this becomes self-realization, or the fulfilment of our personhood through our faith, and while this is important, it is not what the scriptures as a whole say about our redemption in Jesus Christ. Nothing near.

Perhaps you have had the same experience we had when our children were growing up and we were getting ready for church on a hot summer Sunday morning. There was the usual scuffle for the bathroom, and then the hassle of what to wear, and finally the rush to the car to put the air conditioning on full blast so that we could evaporate before we arrived at the church. And in the midst of all this haste and pandemonium, we would look across the street at our neighborly pagan, whose lawn was better kept, whose kids were better behaved, whose dog was more courteous to our yard than ours was to his, and who was still in his bath robe picking up the Sunday paper for a leisurely read and a second cup of coffee before deciding which restaurant to go to for lunch. I often paused to ask myself who really had the better grasp of how to live in God’s world – and I was the preacher, for pity’s sake.

If we take the words redemption and salvation seriously, there is something that makes us uncomfortable with the notion that, simply by believing in Jesus Christ we are redeemed and saved, while neighborly pagans such as these are not. There is something that does not stand to reason about such a contradistinction, and we find it incongruous if not impossible to say that our personal faith in Jesus Christ ensures us a place in eternity while their lack of faith guarantees that they do not. As messengers of the gospel we should have good news for such neighbors, but because our understanding of salvation leaves us unsure about what to say, we usually don’t say anything at all, and settle for just being a good neighbor. Or we invite them to come to our church, not to encounter the Risen Christ, but rather to have good community, caring relationships, and fulfilled personhoods.

More than we might imagine, this truncated gospel is one of the most pervasive and persistent impacts of the Lisbon earthquake on our Christian understanding of salvation. Because that was such a cataclysmic event, shattering certainty in the goodness of God’s creation, the weight of thinking about God’s redemption turned toward personal salvation with an emphasis on the hereafter rather than the here and now. While some progress has been made since the eighteenth century in addressing the questions of natural disaster, to say nothing of holocausts and genocides and disease and the environmental rape of our planet, we are still handicapped by a concept of God’s redemption that is overwhelmingly personalized. This leaves us, especially those of us in Protestant traditions, insensitive to the full scope of the gospel message, which is that God is not only parental toward us, but loves all the world, all of it, and who, in the words of the psalmist, saves humans and animals alike.(36:6)

That said, what about earthquakes that leave tens of thousands dead? What of diseases that maim innocent children? What of suffering and pain and death? For the time being we have no answer other than the mystery of a planet that has gone wrong: wrong in the cruelty as well as the beauty of nature; wrong in the tragedy of a rescued little girl who then dies from lack of care. Attempts to explain these mysteries by twisting the parental nature of God into divine favor or retribution are as warped as they are blasphemous. They remain a mystery, and that’s that. But the hope we have is that  all of planet Earth is to be redeemed in a New Creation, when the home of God will fully be among us, when every tear will be wiped away, and death and mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things will have passed away.” (Revelation 21:3-4). What we have right now is the vision and the promise. But it will come to pass; it will, according to laws of the universe that are presently hidden from us, and will one day be revealed.

Listen to the words of Jacques Ellul as he closes his prophetic book, The Meaning of the City:

The order is all is beyond our minds and expressible only by figures of speech. But now the detestable, gangrenous suburb I have to walk through, the workers’ shacks with their peeling paint and permanent layers of dirt, the tool sheds sinking into the sewers and streams that reek of washings and toilets, and the corrugated iron that constitutes man’s choicest building materials – all are gone, transformed into a wall of pure gold, a new enclosure for the city, pierced by the river of living water, as by an eternal crystal.” (p. 209).

The reason for our hope is the Person of Jesus Christ, who is the embodiment of God’s presence with us in the midst of the present mystery, and whose resurrection is the promise of the New Creation. How much more can we trust in God because of Jesus Christ than because of theories of an ordered universe that ultimately prove unreliable, as the people of Lisbon, Haiti, Indonesia, and countless other victims can testify. “Here’s my Son,” says God. “The fallenness and unpredictability of planet Earth may be mysteries, but they are most certainly not a game. And until the mysteries can be revealed, I am with you, I am one of you, I am among you. You can trust me.”

Which brings us to discipleship, the other word in scripture that is as much misunderstood as salvation. To clear up the misunderstanding, we can begin by noting that there are two tracks to the ministry of Jesus as we have them in scripture. The first was his love for the people, unconditional and all-embracing. We read in the gospels how he taught them, healed them, and fed them, thousands at a time, and the only condition he required was that they accept his love. But when it came to being his disciple, his tone changed. It became hard, even harsh and demanding. He told people to think hard before they followed him, and to count the cost, which could be considerable. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26-27). “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” (Matthew 10:34-36).

How loosely we use the word discipleship today, and how little thought we give to the difference between our salvation in Jesus Christ and being his disciple. Our salvation is promised to us in Christ as part of the redemption of our planet, a salvation that we will not understand until the mysteries of our fallenness are revealed, and the veil between time and eternity is lifted. Moreover, this salvation is most certainly not a matter of choice. Our only part in it is to finally quit resisting God’s grace, and no one and no thing is exempt. Our redemption will be complete, a totally New Creation.

But meanwhile, Jesus Christ calls some of us to be his disciples, to help him prepare for this New Creation, to announce it, live it, and in places like West End and Haiti, work for it. That most certainly is a choice on our part: we can accept or decline. Whether we say Yes or No does not affect Christ’s love for us, nor our salvation, but it does affect our relationship with him.

And the test of that relationship? You will recall the account of the wedding in Cana in our gospel reading this morning, and the miracle of turning the water into wine. His mother, who knew him as well as anyone, said to the servants: “Do whatever he tells you.”

Precisely.