"Christianity:
Rhetorical or Relational?"
First Presbyterian
Easter 4
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The
fourth Sunday of Easter is known in the Christian Church as the Sunday of the
Good Shepherd. Tradition as well as
lectionary appoints the recitation of Psalm 23.
The Psalms comprise both the song book – the psalms originally were
sung – and the prayer book of the Bible. We
just have heard the choir sing a lovely rendition of the psalm and we shall sing
a version of it ourselves at the end of our worship today.
But, for now, I invite you to pray it with me without music, allowing the
words to soak into you as we do:
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters;
He restoreth my soul.
He leadeth me in paths of righteousness for his name’s
sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
death,
I will fear no evil;
for Thou art with me;
Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine
enemies;
Thou anointest my head with oil;
my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days
of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
(King James Version)
What did you notice as we were
praying that psalm? Here is what
occurred to me. It is saturated in
the language of relationship. In the
twilight years of his life, David, who, with Moses, arguably are the
towering figures of the Old Testament, when it came time to offer his
valedictory, chose to tell about God not in the language of theology, but
relationship. No grandiose
theological claims about God did David make at the end of his days, but a poetic
testimony to his, David’s, experience of God’s abiding presence his whole
life long.
This, too, struck me: As significant and influential a life as David lived, there is no concern on David’s part to polish up a legacy. No self-aggrandizing. No attempt to explain himself or to revise embarrassing personal history. Rather, he offered a paean of praise to the steadfast goodness of God. Taking an opportunity to speak last words, David said simply, gently, gratefully, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” He trusted God with his life and with his coming death. Period. David trusted the relationship that God had initiated and kept with him throughout his life – through the thick and the thin, the waxing and the waning, the good and the not so good.
I have had the privilege for the
last seven or eight years of befriending a young woman who, until a year or two
ago when I presided at her wedding, lived in our community.
Andrea is in her early thirties and has been living for some time now
with the HIV virus; she has a teenage son with cerebral palsy; she was burned
out of her house in that spate of arson fires on the south side of Jamestown a
few years ago and bounced around from apartment to apartment after that.
While Andrea herself was growing up, her father was in and out of jail,
mostly in, and when he was out, Andrea said he wanted to be a friend to her
rather than a father. Meanwhile, her
mother was addicted to drugs and alcohol, a lifestyle that Andrea had adopted
for a while but from which she has been in recovery for many years.
She had started in a degree program at JCC but the demands of caring for
her son did not allow her to make much progress.
When I asked her how she copes with everything, Andrea said that God
never gives her more than she can handle.
I wanted to throw Andrea in
theological jail when she said that. I
wanted to tell her that the God I know does not parcel out adversities and
atrocities. I wanted to tell her
that when St. Paul said that we will not be tempted beyond our strength to
endure that he was speaking to the collective church family at Corinth and not
to any single individual, that individuals indeed may feel a crushing weight but
that others in the church can help to lighten the burden by sharing it.
But before I could express my theological ire, I realized that Andrea was
not making a theological claim when she said that God never gives her more than
she can handle. She was using the
language of relationship to say what she had found to be true, that “even
though I walk through the valley of darkness, God is with me.”
Andrea had been in and out of
churches much of her life, but mostly out, because as she once told me, “AA
and NA are more like church to me than any church of which I have been a
part.” As I listened to her
talk about her AA community, it sounded very much to me like the fledgling
Christian community being described in our Acts
passage today. Tending to
their twelve steps is reminiscent to me of the Acts community tending to their
rituals, prayers, and common life. Andrea
told me it is her responsibility to set up the coffee for their meetings and
that the group members themselves take turns bringing little snacks to share and
it sounded to me like the eucharistic meal that the members of the Acts
community shared among themselves. When
I was at Andrea’s apartment one time, there was a knock on the door and it was
a member of her AA group checking in to see how she was doing and if she needed
anything and it reminded me of the koinonia, of the fellowship, of that little
church in Acts whose members lived as if they belonged not only to God but also
to each other.
It occurs to me that a lot of
church life today is rhetorical instead of relational, that we are marked out
and defined by what we say and believe rather than by what we do.
I wonder if decades of “rhetorical Christianity” have not been a
major contributor to the decline of mainline churches.
I wonder if the renewal of the church might hinge more on “right
relatedness” than on “right religion.”
Richard Halverson, a
Presbyterian minister who was for years the chaplain to the United States
Senate, often was heard to say about the church that in the beginning it was a
fellowship of men and women centered in the risen and living Christ.
Then it moved to
I understand Halverson’s
assessment. Think of how we commonly
judge the success of churches. Size.
Budget. Bottom line.
Program menu. Market share.
It sounds as if we are measuring the performance of a Fortune 500
company. How often do
financial discussions usurp a disproportionate amount of time and attention at
session and council meetings in churches? Strategies
are developed and deployed to attract people to “our” church brand and
franchise so as to share the budget load and to increase the church’s
viability and visibility in the community. More
and more people seem to think that abandoning their present congregations for
other ones if they seem more attractive for some reason or other is all right.
And, oh, how we stake out and defend our theological and moral positions
with great rhetorical flair and fire.
By contrast, what does our
passage from Acts describe as the primary marker of a church living in the
Spirit of the risen Christ? Love.
Love that invites us to spend time together with one another, to exegete
the scriptures of church, world, and daily life together, to break bread
together, to cover one another’s needs together, to make the circle of welcome
and mercy always broader and wider. People
were attracted to the early church community not because of evangelism programs
but by the winsomeness of the church community itself…not so much by what it
said, but by how it lived its life.
Theology matters a great deal in
the church because bad theology can be damaging and harmful.
But theology does not matter more than love.
Christianity based on theological rhetoric can never supplant
Christianity rooted in love. I love
theology as much as anyone I know. But
I also know that all the theology the church can muster and bluster pales in
comparison to the presence of love.
There is a local pastor who, to
this day, considers me a theological apostate.
Probably there are more than one, but I am thinking right now about one
in particular. He regularly, in
sermons and conversations, I am told, takes me to his theological woodshed.
But several years ago, when I was standing in the receiving line at my
daughter’s funeral, this man came alongside of me in love to convey his
consolations and understanding. So I
can withstand his theological woodshed. The
famous Baltimore writer, H. L. Mencken, whenever he received a critical piece of
correspondence, would send back a letter on which he had written, “Dear Sir
or Dear Madame, You may be right. Sincerely,
H. L. Mencken.” That is pretty
much my response to those who call me on the theological carpet.
But I treasure every act of love for love is what moves us toward fuller
humanity and toward each other.
Rhetorical Christianity is no
match for relational Christianity. I
have the former down pat. I need to
get better at the latter. Likely we
all of us do.
Kathleen Norris, whose books
many of us enjoy, tells the story of a Benedictine sister who was keeping vigil
at the bedside of her dying mother. She
sought to comfort her mother by saying, “In heaven, everyone we love is
there.” But her mother, wiser,
told her daughter differently. “No,”
she said, “in heaven I will love everyone who is there.”
My
question and challenge to us today is: Why
wait?
Amen.
© Copyright 2008 First Presbyterian Church