The Harvard Divinity community gathers on Wednesdays at noon for worship. This week the UCC students hosted, and I was blessed with an invitation to preach. The reading was an amazingly scripted parallel of the Gerasene demoniac(s) story from the Synoptic gospels. (Thanks to Matt, Alex and Gusti!) The audience included HDS students and staff, as well as vistors considering enrollment. Here ismy sermon:
The Task of the Christian Minister
Jesus crosses the sea and casts out some X number of demons from some Y number of demoniacs. The gospels don’t agree, but when it comes to scriptural disagreement, this is minor league, nothing like the differing accounts in the Birth and Passion narratives. Okay, fair enough, Matthew’s version has an unflattering image of Jesus as tormenter of demons, kind of like the little boy burning ants on the sidewalk with his magnifying glass, not at all congruent with the happy clappy Jesus of the liberal tradition. And Matthew has that whole “before the time†line that is way too eschatological to be comfortable. Well, actually all three have this thing about Jesus not sending the demons back to the abyss, or at least letting them off easy with a piggy-back trip over a cliff, maybe an indication that demons running loose are part of God’s purpose. Try fitting that one into your theodicy. So maybe even these straightforward passages with their minor variations do have some theological implications. At least our congregants won’t hear them in the same lectionary year!
And we don’t have to preach on them. We can dodge them, try the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures on for size, and if that doesn’t work, throw the whole thing out and pick a reading that feels more comfortable. Besides, the budget isn’t looking good, Shinji and Heidi need marriage counseling, and Rebecca just lost her father, and don’t even get me started on the war that is raging over the flower arrangements. I don’t have time to deal with abstract theology… this is a church you know!
Of course, we sit at this end of the Christian trajectory because of women and men who did get caught up in abstract theology. Little scriptural details and subtle differences in belief were make or break, you were orthodox or out, cut off from salvation. And here we sit at our end of the trajectory, of our particular branch of the trajectory, because others became obsessed with these details, with scripture and theology and the meaning of God with us, of salvation and of sin. And here’s the bad news… our branches, and especially the branches of mainline and progressive Protestantism, are withering, becoming irrelevant in our world. We wrap ourselves in liberal self-righteousness, preach sermons designed to challenge, but not too much, and then re-wrap ourselves in our cloaks woven from the slave labor of brutal regimes. Jesus may have said drop it all, walk away, leave your family, but we have responsibilities!
What is the task of the Christian minister in such a time? What are we to do when the only forms of Christianity that thrive are those that perceive themselves as at war with the world, those who see the world as broken, those who embrace apocalyptic? What is our task, I mean other than serving as caretakers for a dying church?
We might begin by being honest with ourselves and our congregations. We like to pretend that God’s revelation closed at the end of the apostolic age, with the formation of the biblical canon. We flatten the developing theology of the Hebrew Scriptures, whitewash the contradictions. But here is the truth, a truth that the United Church of Christ has been bold enough to proclaim. God is still speaking. God has always spoken. And while God speaks, we change, our world changes. And so, necessarily, our understanding of God changes. Now before you accuse me of violating the doctrine of divine impassability, a fair accusation, understand that I am not suggesting that God changes. I am suggesting that if we change and our understanding of God changes, then we should attend to that process. We should stop viewing our faith as some modern incarnation of a religion that was finalized centuries ago, whether we choose Chalcedon or Wittenburg as the end point. Because here is the truth… the understanding of God and the human evolves throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, continues to evolve in the particularity of Jesus, and evolves further as the Jesus movement collides with the Roman Empire. It continues to evolve and diverge to this day. Our story is now and always has been one of constructive theology. Lying to ourselves is not helpful, God may be God, but I’m not my grandfather, and his understanding of God in his world is not my understanding of God in my world. The prophets knew this, they also were constructive theologians… practical theologians, with an urgent message for humans to change how they were in the world, but also very much in the business of reshaping theologies that no longer fit the world in which they lived.
Heck, we’re willing to embrace Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, we are willing to get on the post-modern wagon, at least here in the safe halls of the academy, but are we willing to ride that wagon up to the pulpit. Are we willing to preach a constructive theology? Are we willing to ask the hard questions, questions like how can we make sense of the “Our Father†when we’ve abandoned the image of a male ego-needy god upon whom we depend as helpless children, passive before divine gift? Are we willing to ask hard questions? What if they cost us our pulpits?
If we don’t ask these questions, we might keep our pulpits, but there won’t be any pulpits left in the future. Our faith survives because it evolves… if it stops, it withers and dies, because the world doesn’t stop… When we change our understanding of human dominion over creation because the consequences are right before us, when we go green and develop a green theology, we are doing constructive theology. And when we say that God is not for war, despite the warrior God depicted in the scriptures, we are making truth claims. We are not only constructing a theology that goes beyond the plain text of the scripture, we are stating that others are wrong.
Let me repeat this last bit, because it is important. When we make claims about justice and scripture and theology, we are always contradicting someone else’s claims. Progressives shy away from telling others that they are wrong… but we must. Theologies of oppression must be denounced… we must follow Martin Luther… “Here we stand, we can not do otherwise.†We’re actually pretty good at this part… but we won’t call it theology, and we won’t admit that these new understandings are the result of a changing world, of a changing humanity, of a changing constructing theology.
If you are going to keep Christianity alive, and especially the particular branches of mainline and progressive Christianity, then you must be honest with yourself and with others. You cannot be a caretaker, satisfied to keep the budget balanced and the parishioners happy. You must be a prophet, and like the prophets, you must be a constructive theologian.
As a candidate for ordination in the United Church of Christ, I will be charged with faithful study of the scriptures, and with a life of prayer. Scholar and practitioner, believer and theologian. I will be asked to strive for unity in essentials, diversity in non-essentials, and charity in everything. Charity is the most important of these, for if I am to do my part in this great tradition, I will have to often admit that I’m unsure, and I will often disagree with colleagues. We will struggle and build and tear down and rebuild. We will be a community of charity, a community of theologians and biblical scholars and pastors. A community that stands in amazement at this miracle world, this miracle life, that weeps in joy and in sorrow. We will throw off the comforts of detachment… but we will remain scholars! We are constructive theologians because we believe, because Jesus changes everything, because life in Christ is raw and joyful and yes!
It is so easy to get caught up in the day to day. It is so easy to let the pastoral and administrative aspects of our jobs overwhelm us. So listen carefully. The world is filled with counselors and administrators. You are called to be a pointer, a bridge, a sign… you are called to be a prophet, and yes, a biblical scholar and a constructive theologian. You are called to be the rabbi to whom the villagers come when they cannot reconcile their experiences with their beliefs. And you are to take the raw stuff of life and the powerful stuff of faith and you are to reshape it, a potter for Christ. Earthen vessels, yes! But my aren’t they lovely!
Go forth in unity, in diversity, in charity. Go forth as theologian, ready to serve our God. Amen.