Hidden In Plain Sight
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
Series II, Cycle A
Object:
I had a much-loved professor in seminary who confessed to some of us over coffee one day that he frequently came home from church and was so frustrated he had to go out and dig in the garden, even in the middle of winter. Robert Louis Stevenson once recorded in his diary, as if it were a surprise, "I went to church today and am not depressed." Someone has said, "I feel like unscrewing my head and putting it underneath the pew every time I go to church." Thoughts like these are often expressed by people who have dropped out of church, especially youth and young adults. Many people assume that Christianity is dull, boring, and for the mindless. Unfortunately, like portions of 1 Corinthians we have already examined, today's chapter has been used to support an uneducated, unthinking approach to Christianity that Paul clearly did not intend.
One of my colleagues has that poster distributed by the Episcopal church that shows the head of Christ with the caption, "He came to save your soul, not your mind." Perhaps Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, got it a little more correct when he said, "Christ doesn't destroy reason; he dethrones it." Today's reading really teaches that a maturing Christian, rather than dumbing down, actually becomes wiser: wiser not in the way of the world, but in the ways of the Spirit.
As we saw last week, the "wisdom" of which Paul speaks is not identical with what we today might call philosophical, theological, or academic thinking. Many of the Greek philosophers were part deep thinker and part popular entertainer whose polished oratory, eloquence, and wisdom dazzled their audiences. How did this contrast with Paul's teaching at Corinth? We need to see three things. First, Paul came directly from his less than august experience in Athens where he tried casting the gospel message in philosophical terms with modest results at best. Second, compared to some of the orators who had dazzled Corinth, Paul's speaking evidently didn't measure up very well -- "… his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible" (2 Corinthians 10:10). And yet, there was a church in Corinth, and at least many of its members looked to Paul as the leader. In his writing, including this epistle to the Corinthians, Paul frequently employed literary devices that would be very much at home in Greek letters of his day ("His letters are weighty and strong") (2 Corinthians 10:10). No one would deny the beauty of the love chapter or the power of Paul comparing the church to a human body. Third, when he says, "I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified," he is saying, "I am not going to wrap the gospel message so totally in the language of popular wisdom that its central message is obscured." Paul did not limit his message literally to a theology of the cross: He taught about ethics, love, and prayer, but all flowed from the centrality of the work of Christ.
Some people from the Wesleyan family of denominations defend a kind of narrow biblicism with John Wesley's famous self-description as a "man of one book." They are sometimes distressed or puzzled to learn that Wesley suggested his preachers read a passage from the Bible and Thomas à Kempis' Imitation of Christ daily, let alone that Wesley himself wrote on a wide range of topics including what we would call "folk medicine." Obviously, the "man of one book" meant that his total worldview, his understanding of everything, flowed from the truths of scripture. Wesley, like Paul before him, was using hyperbole to focus on what is truly central. Robert Webber has suggested that every Christian leader, pastoral or otherwise, should reread Irenaeus' On the Apostolic Preaching annually. This slim volume recounts the basics of the faith and provides a good checklist of essential Christian doctrines. We should never be seduced by glitzy communication skills into abandoning the central teachings of the gospel.
What does that mean? I hope we would agree that keeping Christ and the cross at the heart of one's message is not at odds with effective communication. I have sat through extemporaneous sermons in which the preacher proclaimed she or he was "completely depending on the Holy Spirit," when it has occurred to me that they could have also depended a little more on the Holy Spirit in the classroom in previous years or in their office the day before stepping into the pulpit. Everyone knows that it is not a coincidence that the Protestant reformation and the development of movable type in Western Europe came at roughly the same time. Christians have greatly benefited from advances in printing, radio, television, computer networks, pod-casts, and other modern forms of communication. Would any deny that God has used each of these to spread the gospel and build the church? But would any deny that each medium carries the danger of overshadowing the message?
In the early days of cable television, the college I served had a weekly thirty-minute public access slot on which we broadcast trimmed down versions of our chapel services. It began innocently enough. A couple of video cameras and a simple director's control panel were placed in the back of the room and recorded what went on. But a strange thing happened. People actually were watching. I would be in the dentist's office or at the Acme Market and someone would say, "Aren't you the preacher from television?" Well, I was indeed! So we began to be little more mindful of the taping as we planned the services; sometimes the music was altered; there were certain preachers you might want on campus but not on the tube. And on it went. I came to understand firsthand how controlling what starts out as a tool can become. When does using such tools of the world become worldly and a subversion of the gospel? In his 1986 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, the late Neil Postman warned of a time when the methods and look of television would overtake the church and synagogue. Two decades later anybody who doesn't understand what he was talking about isn't paying attention.
Paul goes on, and it becomes clear beginning in verse 6 that his "know(ing) nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified," is a multifaceted thing after all. We already know that some in Corinth saw no point in Paul's preaching and teaching. They just didn't get his meaning. Others did, and of these, some were greatly changed by it while others were changed only a little. Paul has words for each kind of person. There are no three words in English to match exactly these three Greek words but we can try. At the lowest level is the "unspiritual" person, sometimes translated "natural" person, who is deaf to the gospel story and blind to Christ -- and quite content to be so. There are plenty of people in the world like that today. These are simply people who are not Christians; who have not heard and responded to the communication of the Holy Spirit in their lives. While followers of Jesus Christ may have first been called Christians at Antioch in Syria, it is not a term that Paul ever used. He simply refers to them as "unspiritual," without God's Spirit.
The other two levels are those whose hearts have been touched by the Holy Spirit, Christians in our terminology. Some Greek philosophers, like Pythagorus, had divided their disciples into two categories: the babes and the mature. Interestingly, Paul uses the same scheme to categorize Christians. In future readings, we will get to him addressing the less-developed Christians, the "babes in Christ," but first he has some things to say to the "mature" (the word could be, as sometimes has been, translated "perfect," but that is misleading). Here we need to stop and notice something, particularly since most of us sitting in church probably think of ourselves as "mature" Christians rather than "babes." This description of Christians is not meant to demean the less mature, anymore than the word "ignorant" should be mistaken to mean "stupid." An extremely bright, accomplished person will be ignorant in many fields they have not studied.
While no expert on interculturalism, I have had the opportunity to travel a good bit in Central and South America and Africa and can avoid some of the more flagrant "ugly American" behaviors there. But the first time I traveled to Asia (Thailand), I was reminded of my extreme ignorance of cultural patterns in that part of the world. So there were gradations of believers, even though they might be quite well informed in some areas of the faith.
It is no surprise there would be these levels of Christian followers since we learn how in the very earliest Christian communities of the book of Acts there were distinct kinds of Christian proclamation. There was the announcement of who Jesus was and what he did (the kerygma) that we noted previously. Then in Acts 2:42, we read that when the very earliest Christians met together they devoted themselves to the apostolic teaching (the didache), expounding on how the facts of who Jesus was and what he did impacted on them and changed their world: in other words, what it meant. This was a deeper, more mature teaching. Paul, then, is drawing a double distinction we sometimes fail to acknowledge: there are the unspiritual and spiritual persons (non-Christians and Christians) and there are the mature and the babes in Christ. In our churches, we are sometimes so concerned with the former distinction we fail to get around to the latter.
Much of Paul Tillich's life and ministry were spent encouraging modern Westerners to live life at a deeper level. In his famous sermon "The Depth of Existence," he wrote something with which we can all identify:
All visible things have a surface. Surface is that side of things which first appears to us. If we look at it, we know what things seem to be. Yet if we act according to what things and persons seem to be, we are disappointed. Our expectations are frustrated. And so we try to penetrate below the surfaces in order to learn what things really are. Why have men always asked for truth? Is it because they have been disappointed with the surfaces, and have known that the truth which does not disappoint dwells below the surfaces in the depth? And therefore, men have dug through one level after another. What seemed true one day was experienced as superficial the next. When we encounter a person, we receive an impression. But often if we act accordingly we are disappointed by his actual behavior. We pierce a deeper level of his character, and for some time experience less disappointment. But soon he may do something which is contrary to all our expectations; and we realize that what we know about him is still superficial. Again we dig more deeply into his true being.1
Two notable (not to say encouraging) things have happened in the years since those words were published in 1955: The level of superficiality at which many of us live our lives, constantly distracted by the media and perpetually driven by the clock, has only increased. And the general level of biblical, theological, and religious knowledge has dramatically decreased. It is no wonder that Richard Foster describes superficiality as the curse of our age. The enormous danger is that in an age of superficiality something that barely gets beneath the surface may be mistaken for the profound.
This is a situation (if not the situation) in which we find ourselves today, not terribly different from Paul's. We are in a world that is in desperate need of the truths of the gospel: the simple truths that love is of more value than hate, that peace is better than war, that we have a responsibility to one another as children of God. The truth that the God made fully known in Jesus Christ is a God of love and compassion, not a God of violence and vengeance. But these truths are, as Paul says in verse 1, the "mystery" of God. A mystery, in the way Paul uses the word, is not like a puzzle that we can master with enough perseverance like the rules of cricket. It is something that is hidden to those who have not been initiated and crystal clear to those who have, like a ceremony carried out in a club. This mystery, the good news of the gospel, is available to all. Any person who believes that God was at work in Jesus Christ receives the gift of the Holy Spirit, according to Paul, that enables them to clearly see this public mystery of God. It is hidden in plain sight, plainly visible to the eyes of faith but hidden from those who do not have the Spirit.
The church today, like the church of Paul's time, has a double mission, a mission of outreach and inreach and all too many of us content ourselves with one or the other when both are needed. There are many congregations that provide very effective growth opportunities for their members without reaching much beyond the church walls. A frequently heard critique is that many pastors function as chaplains, providing pastoral care for members but little outreach to the community. (I might say that as someone who has carried the title "chaplain" for over a quarter of a century, I rather resent this observation, but it is true.) While these congregations may in fact try to reach out, their efforts are often cloaked in theological, liturgical, or traditional garb that render them unintelligible to the outsider.
On the other hand, there has been an explosion of seeker-sensitive services, which avoid some of these trappings to more effectively reach the increasing percentage of the population that simply has had little contact with Christianity. The fear is that in stripping away too much, these churches may meet people where they are and virtually leave them there with either a very rudimentary knowledge of the gospel or one that has been alarmingly colored by cultural presuppositions.
The good news is that there are increasing numbers of congregations that are doing both, reaching in and reaching out, and, to use Marva Dawn's phrase, "reaching out without dumbing down." The Alpha Course, the Renovaré movement, and the variegated forms of the Cursillo movement all provide avenues to bring people to Christ while encouraging them to continue to grow in their faith. Writing in the Christian Century (December 2, 1998), Luke Timothy Johnson observed, "If Jesus is alive among us, what we learn about Jesus must include what we can continue to learn from him. It is better to speak of 'learning Jesus,' rather than of 'knowing Jesus,' because we are concerned with a process rather than a product."
It is never either/or, always both/and. We proclaim the gospel simply, Christ crucified, so that all may see the mystery of the gospel just waiting to be discovered. But we do not stop with being babes in Christ. We must be attentive to the promptings of the Spirit, learning from Jesus, growing in our understanding so that we may affirm with Paul that "we have the mind of Christ." Amen.
____________
1. Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Peter Smith Publisher, Inc., 1988).
One of my colleagues has that poster distributed by the Episcopal church that shows the head of Christ with the caption, "He came to save your soul, not your mind." Perhaps Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, got it a little more correct when he said, "Christ doesn't destroy reason; he dethrones it." Today's reading really teaches that a maturing Christian, rather than dumbing down, actually becomes wiser: wiser not in the way of the world, but in the ways of the Spirit.
As we saw last week, the "wisdom" of which Paul speaks is not identical with what we today might call philosophical, theological, or academic thinking. Many of the Greek philosophers were part deep thinker and part popular entertainer whose polished oratory, eloquence, and wisdom dazzled their audiences. How did this contrast with Paul's teaching at Corinth? We need to see three things. First, Paul came directly from his less than august experience in Athens where he tried casting the gospel message in philosophical terms with modest results at best. Second, compared to some of the orators who had dazzled Corinth, Paul's speaking evidently didn't measure up very well -- "… his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible" (2 Corinthians 10:10). And yet, there was a church in Corinth, and at least many of its members looked to Paul as the leader. In his writing, including this epistle to the Corinthians, Paul frequently employed literary devices that would be very much at home in Greek letters of his day ("His letters are weighty and strong") (2 Corinthians 10:10). No one would deny the beauty of the love chapter or the power of Paul comparing the church to a human body. Third, when he says, "I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified," he is saying, "I am not going to wrap the gospel message so totally in the language of popular wisdom that its central message is obscured." Paul did not limit his message literally to a theology of the cross: He taught about ethics, love, and prayer, but all flowed from the centrality of the work of Christ.
Some people from the Wesleyan family of denominations defend a kind of narrow biblicism with John Wesley's famous self-description as a "man of one book." They are sometimes distressed or puzzled to learn that Wesley suggested his preachers read a passage from the Bible and Thomas à Kempis' Imitation of Christ daily, let alone that Wesley himself wrote on a wide range of topics including what we would call "folk medicine." Obviously, the "man of one book" meant that his total worldview, his understanding of everything, flowed from the truths of scripture. Wesley, like Paul before him, was using hyperbole to focus on what is truly central. Robert Webber has suggested that every Christian leader, pastoral or otherwise, should reread Irenaeus' On the Apostolic Preaching annually. This slim volume recounts the basics of the faith and provides a good checklist of essential Christian doctrines. We should never be seduced by glitzy communication skills into abandoning the central teachings of the gospel.
What does that mean? I hope we would agree that keeping Christ and the cross at the heart of one's message is not at odds with effective communication. I have sat through extemporaneous sermons in which the preacher proclaimed she or he was "completely depending on the Holy Spirit," when it has occurred to me that they could have also depended a little more on the Holy Spirit in the classroom in previous years or in their office the day before stepping into the pulpit. Everyone knows that it is not a coincidence that the Protestant reformation and the development of movable type in Western Europe came at roughly the same time. Christians have greatly benefited from advances in printing, radio, television, computer networks, pod-casts, and other modern forms of communication. Would any deny that God has used each of these to spread the gospel and build the church? But would any deny that each medium carries the danger of overshadowing the message?
In the early days of cable television, the college I served had a weekly thirty-minute public access slot on which we broadcast trimmed down versions of our chapel services. It began innocently enough. A couple of video cameras and a simple director's control panel were placed in the back of the room and recorded what went on. But a strange thing happened. People actually were watching. I would be in the dentist's office or at the Acme Market and someone would say, "Aren't you the preacher from television?" Well, I was indeed! So we began to be little more mindful of the taping as we planned the services; sometimes the music was altered; there were certain preachers you might want on campus but not on the tube. And on it went. I came to understand firsthand how controlling what starts out as a tool can become. When does using such tools of the world become worldly and a subversion of the gospel? In his 1986 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, the late Neil Postman warned of a time when the methods and look of television would overtake the church and synagogue. Two decades later anybody who doesn't understand what he was talking about isn't paying attention.
Paul goes on, and it becomes clear beginning in verse 6 that his "know(ing) nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified," is a multifaceted thing after all. We already know that some in Corinth saw no point in Paul's preaching and teaching. They just didn't get his meaning. Others did, and of these, some were greatly changed by it while others were changed only a little. Paul has words for each kind of person. There are no three words in English to match exactly these three Greek words but we can try. At the lowest level is the "unspiritual" person, sometimes translated "natural" person, who is deaf to the gospel story and blind to Christ -- and quite content to be so. There are plenty of people in the world like that today. These are simply people who are not Christians; who have not heard and responded to the communication of the Holy Spirit in their lives. While followers of Jesus Christ may have first been called Christians at Antioch in Syria, it is not a term that Paul ever used. He simply refers to them as "unspiritual," without God's Spirit.
The other two levels are those whose hearts have been touched by the Holy Spirit, Christians in our terminology. Some Greek philosophers, like Pythagorus, had divided their disciples into two categories: the babes and the mature. Interestingly, Paul uses the same scheme to categorize Christians. In future readings, we will get to him addressing the less-developed Christians, the "babes in Christ," but first he has some things to say to the "mature" (the word could be, as sometimes has been, translated "perfect," but that is misleading). Here we need to stop and notice something, particularly since most of us sitting in church probably think of ourselves as "mature" Christians rather than "babes." This description of Christians is not meant to demean the less mature, anymore than the word "ignorant" should be mistaken to mean "stupid." An extremely bright, accomplished person will be ignorant in many fields they have not studied.
While no expert on interculturalism, I have had the opportunity to travel a good bit in Central and South America and Africa and can avoid some of the more flagrant "ugly American" behaviors there. But the first time I traveled to Asia (Thailand), I was reminded of my extreme ignorance of cultural patterns in that part of the world. So there were gradations of believers, even though they might be quite well informed in some areas of the faith.
It is no surprise there would be these levels of Christian followers since we learn how in the very earliest Christian communities of the book of Acts there were distinct kinds of Christian proclamation. There was the announcement of who Jesus was and what he did (the kerygma) that we noted previously. Then in Acts 2:42, we read that when the very earliest Christians met together they devoted themselves to the apostolic teaching (the didache), expounding on how the facts of who Jesus was and what he did impacted on them and changed their world: in other words, what it meant. This was a deeper, more mature teaching. Paul, then, is drawing a double distinction we sometimes fail to acknowledge: there are the unspiritual and spiritual persons (non-Christians and Christians) and there are the mature and the babes in Christ. In our churches, we are sometimes so concerned with the former distinction we fail to get around to the latter.
Much of Paul Tillich's life and ministry were spent encouraging modern Westerners to live life at a deeper level. In his famous sermon "The Depth of Existence," he wrote something with which we can all identify:
All visible things have a surface. Surface is that side of things which first appears to us. If we look at it, we know what things seem to be. Yet if we act according to what things and persons seem to be, we are disappointed. Our expectations are frustrated. And so we try to penetrate below the surfaces in order to learn what things really are. Why have men always asked for truth? Is it because they have been disappointed with the surfaces, and have known that the truth which does not disappoint dwells below the surfaces in the depth? And therefore, men have dug through one level after another. What seemed true one day was experienced as superficial the next. When we encounter a person, we receive an impression. But often if we act accordingly we are disappointed by his actual behavior. We pierce a deeper level of his character, and for some time experience less disappointment. But soon he may do something which is contrary to all our expectations; and we realize that what we know about him is still superficial. Again we dig more deeply into his true being.1
Two notable (not to say encouraging) things have happened in the years since those words were published in 1955: The level of superficiality at which many of us live our lives, constantly distracted by the media and perpetually driven by the clock, has only increased. And the general level of biblical, theological, and religious knowledge has dramatically decreased. It is no wonder that Richard Foster describes superficiality as the curse of our age. The enormous danger is that in an age of superficiality something that barely gets beneath the surface may be mistaken for the profound.
This is a situation (if not the situation) in which we find ourselves today, not terribly different from Paul's. We are in a world that is in desperate need of the truths of the gospel: the simple truths that love is of more value than hate, that peace is better than war, that we have a responsibility to one another as children of God. The truth that the God made fully known in Jesus Christ is a God of love and compassion, not a God of violence and vengeance. But these truths are, as Paul says in verse 1, the "mystery" of God. A mystery, in the way Paul uses the word, is not like a puzzle that we can master with enough perseverance like the rules of cricket. It is something that is hidden to those who have not been initiated and crystal clear to those who have, like a ceremony carried out in a club. This mystery, the good news of the gospel, is available to all. Any person who believes that God was at work in Jesus Christ receives the gift of the Holy Spirit, according to Paul, that enables them to clearly see this public mystery of God. It is hidden in plain sight, plainly visible to the eyes of faith but hidden from those who do not have the Spirit.
The church today, like the church of Paul's time, has a double mission, a mission of outreach and inreach and all too many of us content ourselves with one or the other when both are needed. There are many congregations that provide very effective growth opportunities for their members without reaching much beyond the church walls. A frequently heard critique is that many pastors function as chaplains, providing pastoral care for members but little outreach to the community. (I might say that as someone who has carried the title "chaplain" for over a quarter of a century, I rather resent this observation, but it is true.) While these congregations may in fact try to reach out, their efforts are often cloaked in theological, liturgical, or traditional garb that render them unintelligible to the outsider.
On the other hand, there has been an explosion of seeker-sensitive services, which avoid some of these trappings to more effectively reach the increasing percentage of the population that simply has had little contact with Christianity. The fear is that in stripping away too much, these churches may meet people where they are and virtually leave them there with either a very rudimentary knowledge of the gospel or one that has been alarmingly colored by cultural presuppositions.
The good news is that there are increasing numbers of congregations that are doing both, reaching in and reaching out, and, to use Marva Dawn's phrase, "reaching out without dumbing down." The Alpha Course, the Renovaré movement, and the variegated forms of the Cursillo movement all provide avenues to bring people to Christ while encouraging them to continue to grow in their faith. Writing in the Christian Century (December 2, 1998), Luke Timothy Johnson observed, "If Jesus is alive among us, what we learn about Jesus must include what we can continue to learn from him. It is better to speak of 'learning Jesus,' rather than of 'knowing Jesus,' because we are concerned with a process rather than a product."
It is never either/or, always both/and. We proclaim the gospel simply, Christ crucified, so that all may see the mystery of the gospel just waiting to be discovered. But we do not stop with being babes in Christ. We must be attentive to the promptings of the Spirit, learning from Jesus, growing in our understanding so that we may affirm with Paul that "we have the mind of Christ." Amen.
____________
1. Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Peter Smith Publisher, Inc., 1988).
