Time For A Minimalist Faith
Sermon
Sermons on the Gospel Readings
Series II, Cycle B
Some years ago, a San Francisco author who often worked as a stevedore on the city's docks, wrote, The True Believer. Eric Hoffer pointed out the destructive legacy of those who hold to positions with unbending tenacity, particularly in mass movements. Hoffer said that these rigid believers became unattractive representatives for their cause, alienating themselves from any civil discourse with those who differed with them. Their fanaticism became meaningful only to themselves; further, they created antipathy toward the cause they espouse.
Something like this is going on today in our text from the Gospel of Mark. The "true believers" are pestering Jesus because he and his followers do not scrupulously follow one of the defining marks of true belief -- the ceremonial washing of hands before eating. Because of this, they consigned Jesus and his mission to a dangerous heresy. Years later, the Apostle Paul faced the same restrictive fanaticism as he took the Jesus faith out into the Gentile world. His true-believing opponents insisted the only way Gentiles could become Christians would mean affirming the Torah with all its written and oral forms of the law. This clash was so fierce that Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, exploded in some unusually impolite language about these true believers.
One of our great hymns is Martin Rinkart's, "Now Thank We All Our God." Rinkart was a Lutheran priest during the Thirty Years' War (1618-48). His walled city received hundreds of refugees into its safe precincts. Ironically, safe from the war, the city became vulnerable to the plague because of overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions. Rinkart sometimes buried forty to fifty plague victims in a single day. But under such terrible conditions, Rinkart held to a vibrant faith. The outrageous part of the story is that the war was fought between Roman Catholic and Protestant true believers. How abhorrent that fanatical, true-faith believers would cause such unspeakable violence!
The Role Of Definitions Of Religion
Many pastors know of people coming to them and inquiring about the beliefs and practices of their tradition. "Pastor," they say, "I've been thinking of joining your church. But first I want to know what I must believe." The assumption behind this request is that religion centers on beliefs and practices, distinguishing them from other traditions.
Pastors usually invite these folks into a class or seminar to learn about the church's beliefs. Certainly, each religious tradition has its particular theological convictions lying at the heart of its life and history. We humans are creatures of language and concepts. Our ability to put ideals, beliefs, hopes, and fears into language separates us from the rest of living creatures -- by degree, if not absolutely. So it is understandable that we shape our central religious concerns with ideas and mental concepts.
In the Hebrew Bible, there are three main attempts to join right language to religious conviction. One is the Law or Torah, combining doctrine and behavior. Some of the Torah was written down and embedded in our Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Other traditions developing out of the Law were passed on by memory. Religious teachers memorized these and handed down their summaries from generation to generation. In short, the Jewish Law, or Torah, is a magnificent work covering almost all the serious religious and personal behavior of God's people. It is said that the Torah was so comprehensive that if the Jews played baseball, the "infield fly rule" would be there.
Later, Christians also became concerned about theological doctrine. Early Christians struggled to put language around their doctrines of creation, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity. In the creeds, Christians borrowed language and concepts from Greek philosophy. Implicit in both the Torah and Christian doctrine is the conviction that these efforts defined true religious behavior. Anyone differing from these positions was an untrue believer.
In the Middle Ages, Christians made similar attempts to put the faith into language. Thomas Aquinas merged Christian doctrine with the philosophy of Aristotle. John Calvin offered a massive statement of Christian faith inspiring the theological thinking of many of the Reformation churches. John Wesley provided a modified version of Calvin's theology informing the Methodist tradition, and William Ellery Channing gave those unhappy with nineteenth-century Calvinistic Puritanism, a modern-day Unitarianism.
Others have continued to give us rich and provocative versions of the faith. Walter Rauschenbush and his "social gospel," Karl Barth and his sturdy European neo-orthodoxy, H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr in America, Alfred North Whitehead, Hans Kung, and Walter Kaufman each rethought the faith in new ways. These have enriched our faith and made our Christian journey much clearer even though each of them takes their own distinctive path.
Unfortunately, we are tempted to turn the Torah, the early Christian creeds, and the theological offerings of succeeding centuries, into hard and unbending descriptions of the faith. With these we consign anyone differing with us as dangerous and destructive. We easily may become true believers, needing to reflect on Isaiah's insight so long ago,
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are my ways higher than your ways,
And my thoughts than your thoughts.
-- Isaiah 55:8-9
True Believers Create Unbelief
A classic case of true believers causing religious doubt is that of Abraham Lincoln. Growing up on the impoverished midwestern frontier, young Lincoln witnessed true-believer Christianity as mean-spirited denominations struggled for converts. Each claimed their take on Christian faith was the one and only correct one. This became distasteful to Lincoln so that in his adult years he never joined any church. However, he maintained a deep respect for Christian faith and often could be found in the pews on Sunday mornings, especially during his presidency. When asked about his reluctance to unite with any denomination, he said he would join any church, which had as its sole requirement to love God and neighbor as oneself. The petty niceties of doctrinal true belief almost separated him from a robust faith.
Later, Lincoln's faith departed from the true believers as the Civil War dragged on. Lincoln objected all attempts by politicians and evangelical theologians to find the obvious hand of God in all the violence of that awful struggle. He was not certain America was a chosen nation, uniquely favored by God. He was uneasy about identifying the ways of God with the battlefield slaughter. None of the confident theology served up by the nation's leading theologians was acceptable to Lincoln's spirituality. Even though Lincoln held his religious convictions to the end of his life, he found the prevailing orthodoxy of the day a temptation to unbelief. We could hope that Lincoln's doubts about the godly favoring of America, and his reluctance to think he saw clearly the workings of God in human affairs, could rain down on our contemporary politicians and religious leaders.
Today, true belief folks are creating unbelief for our time. These folks say they know any sexual orientation other than a heterosexual one is evil. They drag out biblical passages having nothing to do with homosexuality and assault those who differ. They overlook that the biblical ethos has no sense that homosexuality is a biological given for a minority of humans. So when the Bible rails against same sex behavior, it assumes that these are heterosexuals indulging in a violation of their God-given sexuality. The Bible does not understand that some people engage in same-sex because it is the result of their given sexual nature.
Nor do these true believers understand the massive evidence that homosexuality is a given, not a choice, making conversion to heterosexuality impossible; nor is our sexual orientation contagious. Sexually, we are who we are. It would be refreshing for true believers to think back to that moment when they discovered their sexual orientation. They will need to confess that they did not choose their sexual orientation -- it was simply given and there was a moment as we aged, when we discovered it. Thus, the rigid belief of true believers creates unbelief among the sexually different, including those whose sons and daughters, siblings, or friends discover themselves gay or lesbian. One effect of true believers is a denial of faith found in churches denying the validity of a different sexual orientation, causing an inability for gay and lesbian persons to hear with glad affirmation, the rest of the gospel. Perhaps true-believer churches will change, modifying their rigid stance, as they face dwindling membership due to their intolerance. In the meantime, they may rue that their self-righteousness has cut them off from people who might have found the saving grace of God, as they became involved in their congregations.
Let's Have A Minimalist Diversity
So what could a person believe in today's world? Let's opt for a minimalist position, free of all pretensions claiming that our doctrines and ethical judgments are the perfect ways of God. Several of these minimalist approaches have been around for a long time.
One is from the prophet Micah. In his minimalist statement he said what the Lord requires of us is to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God. We may spend the rest of our lives discovering what this curt statement means -- justice, kindness, and humility. We can pray, study, think, and ponder these things to our spiritual benefit, but we cannot mistake any of our ponderings for the absolute truth and will of God. Rather, we will need to re-think, revise, and refocus our conclusions as more understanding comes our way. These can never be frozen into true belief.
Another minimalist position allowing much diversity among believers, is the statement of Jesus so favored by Lincoln: We are to love God and neighbor as ourselves. This clean, stark verse reminds us of the prose of novelist, Ernest Hemingway, known for his crisp, brief prose. We'll never know the full meaning of this love commandment. It will always exceed any attempt to freeze it into true belief statements. Christians once thought that killing Arabs who occupied Jerusalem and the Holy Land, was God's will. In the long run, the true-believer crusades created much unbelief in Christian Europe. Yet, the beast that is the legacy of true believers dies with difficulty, for our current American foreign policy comes near to reviving this discredited response.
Lastly, for all his meticulous theology, the Apostle Paul did get it all down to a minimalist focus. He said that the one and only thing for Christians is love. Paul preferred to let us work against the changing needs of our times with love assisted by the Holy Spirit, and the changing needs of the times. One gets the feeling that Paul was willing to sit quite close to everything but love. This would qualify him as a minimalist making room for diversity and qualifying him with Jesus and Micah as appropriate for our age, free of doubt and countering true believers. We could take our cue from "minimal" Paul.
Something like this is going on today in our text from the Gospel of Mark. The "true believers" are pestering Jesus because he and his followers do not scrupulously follow one of the defining marks of true belief -- the ceremonial washing of hands before eating. Because of this, they consigned Jesus and his mission to a dangerous heresy. Years later, the Apostle Paul faced the same restrictive fanaticism as he took the Jesus faith out into the Gentile world. His true-believing opponents insisted the only way Gentiles could become Christians would mean affirming the Torah with all its written and oral forms of the law. This clash was so fierce that Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, exploded in some unusually impolite language about these true believers.
One of our great hymns is Martin Rinkart's, "Now Thank We All Our God." Rinkart was a Lutheran priest during the Thirty Years' War (1618-48). His walled city received hundreds of refugees into its safe precincts. Ironically, safe from the war, the city became vulnerable to the plague because of overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions. Rinkart sometimes buried forty to fifty plague victims in a single day. But under such terrible conditions, Rinkart held to a vibrant faith. The outrageous part of the story is that the war was fought between Roman Catholic and Protestant true believers. How abhorrent that fanatical, true-faith believers would cause such unspeakable violence!
The Role Of Definitions Of Religion
Many pastors know of people coming to them and inquiring about the beliefs and practices of their tradition. "Pastor," they say, "I've been thinking of joining your church. But first I want to know what I must believe." The assumption behind this request is that religion centers on beliefs and practices, distinguishing them from other traditions.
Pastors usually invite these folks into a class or seminar to learn about the church's beliefs. Certainly, each religious tradition has its particular theological convictions lying at the heart of its life and history. We humans are creatures of language and concepts. Our ability to put ideals, beliefs, hopes, and fears into language separates us from the rest of living creatures -- by degree, if not absolutely. So it is understandable that we shape our central religious concerns with ideas and mental concepts.
In the Hebrew Bible, there are three main attempts to join right language to religious conviction. One is the Law or Torah, combining doctrine and behavior. Some of the Torah was written down and embedded in our Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Other traditions developing out of the Law were passed on by memory. Religious teachers memorized these and handed down their summaries from generation to generation. In short, the Jewish Law, or Torah, is a magnificent work covering almost all the serious religious and personal behavior of God's people. It is said that the Torah was so comprehensive that if the Jews played baseball, the "infield fly rule" would be there.
Later, Christians also became concerned about theological doctrine. Early Christians struggled to put language around their doctrines of creation, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and the Trinity. In the creeds, Christians borrowed language and concepts from Greek philosophy. Implicit in both the Torah and Christian doctrine is the conviction that these efforts defined true religious behavior. Anyone differing from these positions was an untrue believer.
In the Middle Ages, Christians made similar attempts to put the faith into language. Thomas Aquinas merged Christian doctrine with the philosophy of Aristotle. John Calvin offered a massive statement of Christian faith inspiring the theological thinking of many of the Reformation churches. John Wesley provided a modified version of Calvin's theology informing the Methodist tradition, and William Ellery Channing gave those unhappy with nineteenth-century Calvinistic Puritanism, a modern-day Unitarianism.
Others have continued to give us rich and provocative versions of the faith. Walter Rauschenbush and his "social gospel," Karl Barth and his sturdy European neo-orthodoxy, H. Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr in America, Alfred North Whitehead, Hans Kung, and Walter Kaufman each rethought the faith in new ways. These have enriched our faith and made our Christian journey much clearer even though each of them takes their own distinctive path.
Unfortunately, we are tempted to turn the Torah, the early Christian creeds, and the theological offerings of succeeding centuries, into hard and unbending descriptions of the faith. With these we consign anyone differing with us as dangerous and destructive. We easily may become true believers, needing to reflect on Isaiah's insight so long ago,
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are my ways higher than your ways,
And my thoughts than your thoughts.
-- Isaiah 55:8-9
True Believers Create Unbelief
A classic case of true believers causing religious doubt is that of Abraham Lincoln. Growing up on the impoverished midwestern frontier, young Lincoln witnessed true-believer Christianity as mean-spirited denominations struggled for converts. Each claimed their take on Christian faith was the one and only correct one. This became distasteful to Lincoln so that in his adult years he never joined any church. However, he maintained a deep respect for Christian faith and often could be found in the pews on Sunday mornings, especially during his presidency. When asked about his reluctance to unite with any denomination, he said he would join any church, which had as its sole requirement to love God and neighbor as oneself. The petty niceties of doctrinal true belief almost separated him from a robust faith.
Later, Lincoln's faith departed from the true believers as the Civil War dragged on. Lincoln objected all attempts by politicians and evangelical theologians to find the obvious hand of God in all the violence of that awful struggle. He was not certain America was a chosen nation, uniquely favored by God. He was uneasy about identifying the ways of God with the battlefield slaughter. None of the confident theology served up by the nation's leading theologians was acceptable to Lincoln's spirituality. Even though Lincoln held his religious convictions to the end of his life, he found the prevailing orthodoxy of the day a temptation to unbelief. We could hope that Lincoln's doubts about the godly favoring of America, and his reluctance to think he saw clearly the workings of God in human affairs, could rain down on our contemporary politicians and religious leaders.
Today, true belief folks are creating unbelief for our time. These folks say they know any sexual orientation other than a heterosexual one is evil. They drag out biblical passages having nothing to do with homosexuality and assault those who differ. They overlook that the biblical ethos has no sense that homosexuality is a biological given for a minority of humans. So when the Bible rails against same sex behavior, it assumes that these are heterosexuals indulging in a violation of their God-given sexuality. The Bible does not understand that some people engage in same-sex because it is the result of their given sexual nature.
Nor do these true believers understand the massive evidence that homosexuality is a given, not a choice, making conversion to heterosexuality impossible; nor is our sexual orientation contagious. Sexually, we are who we are. It would be refreshing for true believers to think back to that moment when they discovered their sexual orientation. They will need to confess that they did not choose their sexual orientation -- it was simply given and there was a moment as we aged, when we discovered it. Thus, the rigid belief of true believers creates unbelief among the sexually different, including those whose sons and daughters, siblings, or friends discover themselves gay or lesbian. One effect of true believers is a denial of faith found in churches denying the validity of a different sexual orientation, causing an inability for gay and lesbian persons to hear with glad affirmation, the rest of the gospel. Perhaps true-believer churches will change, modifying their rigid stance, as they face dwindling membership due to their intolerance. In the meantime, they may rue that their self-righteousness has cut them off from people who might have found the saving grace of God, as they became involved in their congregations.
Let's Have A Minimalist Diversity
So what could a person believe in today's world? Let's opt for a minimalist position, free of all pretensions claiming that our doctrines and ethical judgments are the perfect ways of God. Several of these minimalist approaches have been around for a long time.
One is from the prophet Micah. In his minimalist statement he said what the Lord requires of us is to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God. We may spend the rest of our lives discovering what this curt statement means -- justice, kindness, and humility. We can pray, study, think, and ponder these things to our spiritual benefit, but we cannot mistake any of our ponderings for the absolute truth and will of God. Rather, we will need to re-think, revise, and refocus our conclusions as more understanding comes our way. These can never be frozen into true belief.
Another minimalist position allowing much diversity among believers, is the statement of Jesus so favored by Lincoln: We are to love God and neighbor as ourselves. This clean, stark verse reminds us of the prose of novelist, Ernest Hemingway, known for his crisp, brief prose. We'll never know the full meaning of this love commandment. It will always exceed any attempt to freeze it into true belief statements. Christians once thought that killing Arabs who occupied Jerusalem and the Holy Land, was God's will. In the long run, the true-believer crusades created much unbelief in Christian Europe. Yet, the beast that is the legacy of true believers dies with difficulty, for our current American foreign policy comes near to reviving this discredited response.
Lastly, for all his meticulous theology, the Apostle Paul did get it all down to a minimalist focus. He said that the one and only thing for Christians is love. Paul preferred to let us work against the changing needs of our times with love assisted by the Holy Spirit, and the changing needs of the times. One gets the feeling that Paul was willing to sit quite close to everything but love. This would qualify him as a minimalist making room for diversity and qualifying him with Jesus and Micah as appropriate for our age, free of doubt and countering true believers. We could take our cue from "minimal" Paul.
