THE SCANDAL OF PARTICULARITY December 12, 2010, The Third Sunday in Advent Matthew 11:2-11 Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Theme: Christian faith is called to balance the saving uniqueness of Jesus Christ with our trust in the sovereignty of a God who might save in any way He pleases. God of all times and places, as we ponder the ancient words of Scripture we ve heard today, speak through them, speak the word we need to hear, this more than the word we might prefer to hear. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen. The Bible passage that Helen read a moment ago is hardly a Christmas story. It takes place nearly three decades after Jesus birth. Herod Antipas, that perfidious quisling king of Judea, has arrested John the Baptist and shut him up in his great fortress complex called Machaerus overlooking the Dead Sea. This particular Herod is the son of the ironically named Herod the Great. It was that earlier Herod who had been visited by the Wise Men and had ordered the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem. Infamy ran in the family. This second Herod, titular King of Judea, was a Roman lackey involved in a scandalous marriage to his former mistress a mistress who also happened to be his niece and his brother's wife. (You can t make this stuff up!) Well, John the Baptist had negatively critiqued this romantic liaison with typical John the Baptist bluntness. That blunt sermon landed him in the same prison as Herod's number-one wife. From his prison cell John somehow had managed to get word out to some of his followers. He tells them to go find Jesus and ask him a question point blank: Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another? The One Who Is to Come is a euphemism for the Messiah, the Son of God, the single and unique One, the One (with a capital O ) on whom history will hinge. - 1 -
Jesus first responds to the question by paraphrasing the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. Isaiah had described what things would be like when the Messiah came: Go and tell John what you hear and see, Jesus says to John s messengers, the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. Tradition associated just these things with The One Who Is to Come. With that answer, Jesus declares, in definitive language, that he is not just another teacher of ethics, that he is not simply an especially keen rabbi, that he is no mere man, but that he is in fact The One, The Anointed One, which is precisely what the word Messiah means in Hebrew and what the word Christ means in Greek. Jesus knew that this answer would be offensive to some. After he makes it, he offers this frank closing footnote, Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me. Of course, some did indeed take offense. Some still take offense. The scandal of particularity is inherent in our Christian faith. We profess that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah. We do not believe that he is merely one among many; he is the One. But, in a cultural mood much taken with religious relativism and infused with a deep anxiety about affirming anything absolute, such basic Christian affirmation can become veritably scandalous, even offensive politically incorrect in the popular catchphrase. Thus it is so counter-cultural to do what we will do in 15 minutes, when we say the Apostles Creed. This ancient creed specifically names Jesus as God s only Son and our Lord, not one son among many, not one lord among many, but specifically and uniquely God s only Son and our Lord. In his magisterial study of contemporary American faith and values, sociologist Robert Bellah told the stories of hundreds of people he interviewed concerning their beliefs about themselves and God. One of the people Bellah interviewed was an extreme illustration of this proclivity to take offense at any notion of definitive revelation about absolute divinity. Bellah writes about a young nurse named - 2 -
Sheila who said this to him: I believe in God. I m not a religious fanatic. I can t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. Then she said, It s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice. May God bless Sheila, but her own little voice, my own little voice, your own little voice is simply not what the Christian faith has trusted in for 2,000 years. In a nutshell, here is the quandary for Christians: How do we balance our clear affirmation of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior he and no other with regard, deep respect, yea, love, for those who do not, cannot, name Jesus Christ as such? I think of wonderful Jewish neighbors, dear Muslim friends, kindly atheist neighbors, not to mention the legion of sweet Sheila s out there? The nuanced answer that our Presbyterian-Reformed tradition offers to this question makes two towering affirmations, two truths that just stand there and tug away at each other. Let me give them to you in brief: The first truth is this bottom-line Christian declaration of faith centered in Jesus Christ that I have been talking about that he is who he said he was. So, I trust in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior no one else. Jesus Christ none other is the one through whom I encounter God. His words, his life, his death, his life again have come to be at the center of my being. As Fred Buechner said it, A Christian is one who points to Christ and says, I can t prove a thing, but there is something about his eyes and his voice. There s something about the way he carries his head and his hand, the way he carries his cross the way he carries me. Our tradition is clear that the core of the faith is this uncompromised trust that Jesus Christ is God s defining word not one witness among many, not just another manifestation of the Absolute. Let me offer a metaphorical story to this point. Lloyd C. Douglas was author of a 50s novel made into a Biblical bathrobe movie called The Robe. Douglas was also a congregational minister back in Ann Arbor where we used to live. In a sermon, he once told a story from his days as a university student. This story pictures the very point he was, and I am, making about who Jesus Christ is. - 3 -
In college, the young Douglas lived upstairs in a boarding house, the first floor of which was rented to a retired music teacher who was infirm and unable to leave his apartment. Douglas said that every morning for years the two of them engaged in a ritual of sorts. Douglas would come down the steps, open the door to the old man s apartment, and ask the same question: Well, what s the good news? The old man would pick up his tuning fork, tap it on the side of his wheelchair and say, That s middle C! It was middle C yesterday; it will be middle C tomorrow; it will be middle C a thousand years from now. The tenor upstairs sings flat, the piano across the hall is out of tune, but, my friend, that is middle C! The first truth we affirm as Christians, perhaps offensively, maybe even scandalously in this culture of relativism is that, Jesus Christ was, is, and always shall be middle C. But as I said, our tradition has insisted on a second affirmation. This second is in dynamic tension with this first. Presbyterian-Reformed Christians have also insisted on what s traditionally called the sovereignty of God. The sovereignty of God is a five-dollar theological term for the idea that God can do whatever God wants to do. The sovereignty of God reminds us that the Divine Mystery cannot be contained in any of our systems of understanding. God is bigger than any theology, bigger than any set of doctrines. The church doesn t contain God; God contains the church. This all sounds avant, but it s actually very old stuff. One of the great theologians of the early church was a guy named Justin Martyr. In the Second Century, believe it or not, Justin said that some pre-christian philosophers like Socrates were in effect Christians, even though they never heard of Jesus. They may never have heard of Jesus, Justin said, but they did know sweet reason, and reason is a gift of God. Justin talks about a lot about the logos, the word or reason from the first chapter of John s Gospel. They knew this, he said, even before Jesus. They lived their lives around it, and that made them something like Christians even if they didn t know it. In his little book, The Trivialization of God, minister-author Donald McCullough uses a fine image to picture the sovereignty of God. He writes: A child at the beach digs a hole in the sand and, with her little bucket, busily sets about transferring the ocean into it. We smile at the grandeur of her ambition, but only - 4 -
because we know she will soon mature beyond such pathetic futility. An ocean cannot be contained in any hole of any size on any continent. And neither can God be fully contained with any theological system. McCullough goes on, Once the last plank of our theological house has been firmly nailed down, we may discover that the only god we have contained is too trivial to be worth the effort. John Calvin, the first theologian of our Reformed tradition of Christianity, wrestled with this issue 500 years ago. Calvin suggests that there are really two churches if you will. One is what he named the visible church. This visible church is obvious: official members on the roll, folks who show up on Sunday, pray, read scripture, and receive the sacraments. That s an easy circle to draw. It s an important circle to draw, but in the end, Calvin said, it s not God s circle. He called the other circle the invisible church. The invisible church is God s drawing of the circle, and you and I can t even see the line. Who knows who s in and who s out? God and God alone. As I noted last week, I ve been re-reading C. S. Lewis classic defense of the Christian faith, Mere Christianity. I find myself stumbling across gem after gem that I forgot was there. Lewis, I discovered, balances this very question deftly. On the one hand he writes, You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But on the other hand, Lewis is troubled about those who do not know Jesus Christ or are unable to believe in him. He writes, But the truth is God has not told us what his arrangements about other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him [italics mine] can be saved So we hold these two things fast, but in a dynamic tension. In one hand, a trust that Jesus is Messiah, the Christ, in John the Baptist s interrogatory words, The One Who Was (and Is) to Come. In the other hand, we hold the sovereignty and mystery of a God whose great providence and purposes can never be compassed by what mortal mind can know. - 5 -
I have a name for this tension. I like to call it generous orthodoxy. By the orthodox part I mean an unshakable centeredness in Jesus Christ as the One Lord and Savior. By the generous part, I mean a deep appreciation for the sovereignty of God a God who can save whoever God chooses, perhaps in ways unimaginable to us. When you join these two, you come to a faith that offers generous welcome to all human beings. Put them together, and you arrive at a faith imbued with deep love for all in the world that God so loved as to send His only Son. Join orthodox and generous, and you cannot but offer a grounded graciousness to all however they may answer John s venerable question to Jesus about who he is. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. - 6 -