A WAY TO BE CHRISTIAN

Sermon for January 3, 2010

Scripture: Isaiah 35:1-6; 1John 4:16-21

I'll be honest with you. This sermon started out several weeks ago as a Christmas sermon. I had already started my sermon preparation and had in fact written the beginning of the sermon that I thought I was going to give on December 20. I knew snow was in the forecast, but I didn't want to call off church for the 20 th , it being Christmas Sunday and all, so I was going on the assumption that the 6 to 8 inches I had heard predicted would turn into 2 or 3, and that we would be able to go ahead with church. Then the snow came, and it became quickly apparent that it would be silly of me to keep working on that sermon. So much for that sermon, I thought. I won't be giving any more Christmas sermons at Sojourners, so I couldn't save it for next year. I put it aside, figuring I would never really have the occasion to finish it. Oh well…

Then, while I was on vacation, I started thinking about what I wanted to preach about in January, my last several sermons at Sojourners, and I decided to try to do some looking back and some looking forward. Looking back, what do I see as having been some of the themes of my preaching over the past ten years that have been important to me and that represent ideas or values that I believed were part of what Sojourners as a community stood for, and therefore that I might dare to hope would continue to be important as Sojourners looks to its future. Of course it's not my place to say what themes ought to be dear to the heart of future ministers here or to suggest that my version of the important themes of life at Sojourners ought to continue indefinitely into the future. Still, as a way of wrapping up my own preaching at Sojourners, it seems like it would be appropriate to say some of the things that I think Sojourners has stood for from my vantage point, some of the themes that have been important to me, and that I have done my best to articulate and encourage and reinforce in my preaching, and maybe along the way express some hopes I have for the future, for whatever that may be worth.

When I settled on that approach to these upcoming sermons, I realized that what I had started out to say in that unfinished sermon I had put aside actually was in keeping with what I was thinking about and could help to define what this first of those sermons will be about. So let me go back for a few moments to where my mind was a few weeks ago.

There's a magazine, as many of you know, called Sojourners. I sometimes have to explain to people that there is no connection between us and the folks who publish the magazine except that we both chose that name. And although we did so independently from each other, it's also not a complete accident that we both chose the name, because we do share some values with each other, and because we do, I subscribe to the magazine.

When the December issue of Sojourners first arrived in the mail, now about a month ago, I have to admit that it surprised me a little. On the cover was a picture of a polar bear standing on a small patch of snow. It took me a minute to get oriented, since I was expecting something Christmas-y. But I eventually noticed the caption, which read “Climate change and our future.” Oh, OK. I get it. The polar bear standing on the patch of snow represented the melting of the polar ice cap. It was a time when the Copenhagen Conference was dominating the news. Sojourners was devoting this issue to environmental concerns.

Which under normal circumstances would have been fine and not at all surprising. But this was December, and I was looking for some help with Christmas, doggone it. But no. Instead of angels and magi, polar bears. Instead of Bethlehem, Copenhagen. Instead of Christmas, climate change. Had Sojourners magazine forgotten that Christmas comes in December and that not only me but no doubt many of its clergy readers would be looking for something that might spark some preaching ideas for Advent and Christmas? I was a little not just surprised but put out. In our desire to be socially responsible Christians have we decided to do away with mangers, shepherds, stars, angels, and magi, to say nothing of the baby Jesus? Isn't it our job as Christians to tell the stories of our faith and at Christmastime to tell the Christmas part of that story which has lasted through all the countless re-tellings of it and which has inspired so much art and music and poetry—some of it even good art and music and poetry? If we do nothing else, isn't it our job to bring out that story every December no matter how familiar, well worn, misused or abused it may be, and let its symbols and meanings inspire us in some way, or at least give them a chance to do so? What's with polar bears and melting ice caps and climate change when Christmas is right around the corner? Something like all that I think was going on in my head as I assessed the December issue of Sojourners magazine…momentarily I thought something like that.

Then I came to my senses. I realized, upon just a small amount of reflection and reading just a small portion of the magazine that Sojourners was not ignoring Christmas. This was their Christmas issue. There was a scripture on the cover: “All creation is waiting…” referring to the passage from Romans that says “creation is waiting with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God…” This was meant to be in the spirit of Advent. The theology wasn't spelled out, but it would go something like this: what we wait for during Advent is not the birth of a child that took place all these centuries ago, no matter how good or holy we hold him to have been. What that birth represented, what Jesus represents for Christians is the hope of the dawning of a new age for humanity, and the message of the Sojourners cover was that the new age we await is not just for humanity but for all creation and it is not just humanity who waits but all creation. The rest of the Romans passage can be read in that same way. “The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now,” it says. An appropriate and hopeful image for a season that celebrates birth. The planet is not merely disintegrating or being destroyed in front of our eyes but, like a mother in labor, longs for and struggles toward the birth of something new.

That's what I realized about the magazine I was reading, but I also realized something about myself. In reacting the way I did I revealed myself to be part of a problem I believe Christians have with Christmas specifically but also with our faith in general. Let me put it this way, somewhat bluntly, I admit. As far as Christmas goes, Jesus is not “the reason for the season.” Today in a little different context I'll simply say: Christianity is not all about Jesus. Being Christian is not all about praising Jesus, proclaiming Jesus, exalting Jesus, or believing in Jesus. I realize that making such a statement might very well horrify, offend, or bewilder many Christians. But I don't say it merely to be provocative. And it's not that what I was saying earlier about our need and our duty to tell the Biblical story—it's not that I think that is all wrong. It's not. We do need to tell the stories of our faith, including of course this one, over and over. They are our stories. We should know them by heart, or if we don't quite, we should be willing to tell them and listen to them again and again.

But the trouble with thinking that “Jesus is the reason for the season” and that Christmas is all about shepherds, angels, magi, Mary and Joseph, no room at the inn, and the baby Jesus, which is the assumption I seemed to have reverted to momentarily, is that it leads us to thinking that Christianity is all about Jesus and only secondarily, if at all, about, for example, climate change. I was a bit sheepish about catching myself with the attitude I had, since it has been, I think, one of the consistent themes of my preaching, directly and indirectly, that Christianity is not all about Jesus. It is certainly one of my basic approaches to Christianity that what we are about is to be about what Jesus was about, not to make Jesus himself the center of it, but to make what he was about the center of it. And whether Jesus himself gets a star billing is really not so important.

When Christians put the person of Jesus at the center, it has always struck me as being similar to the kind of celebrity fixation we are afflicted with in our culture. We offer our attention, our admiration, our adulation, our devotion, our allegiance, our worship to a person, and even if his name is Jesus, it is not healthy. By contrast there is a way of being Christian that draws on the spirit of Jesus we find in the gospels, that is a way of compassion toward humans and trust in God, but not only that but that involves a vision of the reign of God that was a vision that was at the heart of everything that Jesus said and did and that leads us to work toward and pray toward and live toward a society that is inclusive and loving and just and that causes us to put social justice concerns at the center of our way of being Christian. Social justice is part of our way of being Christian here not because we happen to have gathered together a bunch of socially liberal people who believe in things like racial and economic justice and peace, but because such things are basic to what Jesus was about, basic to the story of our faith.

We have a way of being Christian here at Sojourners that does not call on Christians to believe Jesus was sent to earth to suffer and die as a sacrifice for our sins and that it is that sacrifice that reconciles us to God. If we believed that Christianity is all about the heroic sacrifice that Jesus accomplished on our behalf, then it would be appropriate to center our faith on him. What he did would be what Christianity is all about, and we would be asked to believe in him, to follow him, to give ourselves to him out of gratitude for what he has done. But if Jesus came to lose himself in our humanity, then what becomes central to being Christian is who we are and how we live. It was what was central to Jesus. It is what the Christian story is about, and we need to tell that story.

We have a way of being Christian here at Sojourners that does not insist that “believing in Jesus” is the only path to salvation, the only way to gain forgiveness, the only or even necessarily the best way for people to draw near to God or God to draw near to us. That, in my way of understanding what we are about here at Sojourners, is not to say that we are Christians who don't take our Christianity all that seriously. It is not that we have a kind of easy going, “whatever” approach to Christianity that doesn't require us to take being Christian very seriously. It is that we have a way of being sincerely and seriously Christian that does not require “believing in Jesus” to be at the core of one's religious faith.

Not only does this mean that we have a way of being Christian that respects people of other faiths, that does not assume Christianity to be superior to other faiths; it means that we respect those among us who do not have Jesus at the center of their spiritual lives as fully a part of this Christian community—because our way of being Christian does not require it. I realize from a certain perspective this may sound paradoxical, even illogical. But faith is never without paradox and is not about logic. There is room in this Christian community for those who love Jesus, for those who feel called to follow Jesus, for those who find themselves drawn to him but aren't sure what they believe about him, and for those whose relationship to God does not depend on Jesus. Again, this is not our way of being sort of Christian or vaguely Christian, though I expect that some people will see us that way. But it is important that we not see ourselves that way. This is our way of being Christian. It's not a matter of saying, “well, we want to call ourselves Christians but we don't believe this and this and that and that. It's matter of our saying what being Christian means to us in a positive way. We have a way of being Christian which is inclusive of people who have all sorts of spiritual issues and which values doubts and struggles as well as beliefs as contributing to the faith journey that we are on together.

We have a way of being Christian that derives from Jesus, that comes from the Biblical story, that is in Christ, in the spirit of Christ, but that does not require us to concentrate our spiritual attention on the person of Jesus. Hundreds of years before Jesus, the prophet Micah rhetorically asked “What does the Lord require of us but that we do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God?” I can't think of a way to be that is more Christian than that. Amen.

Rev. Jim Bundy

January 3 , 2010

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