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Church of the Crossroads
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
January 29, 2006
Neal MacPherson

JESUS, UPSETTER OF RELIGION

Following this service, the members of this church will gather in Weaver Hall across the courtyard for the annual meeting of the congregation. At the meeting, we will receive reports, elect officers, and approve a budget. It all sounds very institutional, and in a way it is. Much of our time is spent doing institutional/administrative work. There is property to be managed and cared for, staff to be compensated, utility bills to be paid, trees to be trimmed, and tax forms to file.

No wonder more people shy away from joining the church! How often have I heard something like this: “I really like what Jesus stood for, but I do not care to be a part of institutional religion.” As one who is involved in more administration that I would like, I sympathize.

Douglas John Hall will remind us tomorrow evening that Jesus did not come to establish a new religion but to bring new life. He was the initiator of a kingdom movement, a movement of the Spirit. He did not come to establish the institutional church. Constantine and Theodosius in the 4th century saw to that. We still live with the consequences of their efforts.

In the 1960’s Del Rayson, the pastor of this church, often said that the church as institution should really cease to be. He said that Church of the Crossroads ought to work for its own institutional demise. He said that Crossroads should become the church it claims to be, a church in the world. That would mean no more buildings, no more staff, and so on. He had a point, to be sure. Yet, there is a need to have a place to come so that we can gather together for study and worship. Members of the larger community value the beauty and serenity of our courtyard. A friend of Crossroads comes here each noon hour to eat her lunch and spend twenty minutes in centering prayer. There is a need to have a place where Cindy Sheehan, Anne Wright, and Medea Benjamin can speak to the issue of war and peace, an issue dear to our own hearts.

For good or for ill, we are an institution. That is acceptable, as long as our church enables us to be part of the movement Jesus began. If we cease to be a people of the way, a people belonging to the movement of the Spirit, then Del Rayson was right. We ought to work for our church’s demise.

Now, one way to keep in touch with the Christian movement is to keep in touch with the Jesus of the Gospels. We do need to understand that 16 centuries of Christendom have resulted in the domestication of the Gospel and of Jesus himself. Christendom has been far more interested in religion than it has been committed to the spirit of the movement begun by Jesus. Again, as Douglas will share with us this coming week, the church has been caught up in Christianity as a culture religion for a very long time now. In the United States, Christianity has become synonymous with the American way of life. To be un-American is to be un-Christian.

Yet, Jesus came to bring new life rather than a new religion. In his life and ministry, he represented the kingdom of God – the realm of God – and at the beginning of his ministry, as reported in Mark’s Gospel, he said that it had come very near. He envisioned it breaking in upon the world – good news for the poor, release for the captive, freedom for the oppressed. Jesus embodied the spirit we associate with the great prophets. His call was not unlike the call God gave to Jeremiah. Jeremiah recalls,

Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me,
“Now I have put my words in your mouth.
See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and pull down
to destroy and overthrow,
to build and to plant.
         - Jeremiah 1:9b,10d

As it turned out, Jeremiah was led to confront the political, religious, and cultural forces of his day. It was the same with Jesus, six centuries later. In the Gospel of Mark, the moment Jesus strides into the synagogue in Capernaum on a Sabbath, it becomes clear that his kingdom movement will be in conflict with the religious authorities and incompatible with the social order they represent. Once Jesus begins to teach, it is said that all were amazed at his teaching, for “he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” Immediately, an unclean spirit residing in one of the synagogue attendees demands that Jesus explain his attack upon the authority of the scribal establishment. Says the unclean spirit, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” Jesus destroys the unclean spirit (and by implication the authority of the scribes) and then begins his ministry of healing, and this, on a Sabbath, contrary to the prescriptions of the law.

In his ministry, as the initiator of the kingdom movement, Jesus brings new life and wholeness and liberation to the poor. He receives hospitality from the outcast, with who he is in solidarity. That is the way of the kingdom.

It might be helpful to know a little more about those scribes whom Jesus sought to displace. In 1st Palestine, the scribes were the professional interpreters of the law in Jewish synagogues. The requirements of the law were numerous, and since it was required that every Jew follow the law in its minute details, the scribes were needed in order to provide guidance for daily behavior. By the time of Jesus, the teaching of the scribes had become rooted in a slavish literalism, and the religion they espoused had become an intricate system of morality. It was this system of morality that Jesus confronted with his own ethic of expansive and inclusive love.

It came to me, as I was preparing for today’s sermon, that Christianity has its own scribes in our day. Surely the author and preacher Rick Warren is one of these. His book, The Purpose Driven Life, which offers prescriptions for godly living, has been on the New York Times best seller list for 155 weeks. Millions of copies have been sold. If we were to ask the American public what it means to be a Christian, probably a majority of them would refer to this book. Rick Warren, though, like the scribes of old, promotes religion (in this case Christianity) as a system of morality related to individual Christians. His book effectively brings together lessons from the Bible and the values of American culture, so much so that they become indistinguishable.

One wonders what Jesus would say about The Purpose Driven Life. But then, we also wonder what Jesus might say about our own religious life, and the values we hold, for in the liberal framework we have inherited from our own mainline Protestantism, we have our own prescriptions of what makes for the good life and good behavior and good action, and just like the fundamentalist Christians we oppose, we tend to reduce Christian faith and practice to a system of morality and a set of prescriptions.

In our imaginations, we might want to ponder what Jesus would say to us, were he to walk into our midst this morning, or into our annual meeting following church. The point is that we must always resist the temptation to codify the Christian faith, and make it into something established and rigid.

We must always remember that Jesus came not to bring a new religion but new life. He envisioned his kingdom project as a movement, a movement of the Spirit, and his followers as yeast and salt and a little light set upon a hill, illuminating the darkness. This day, let us renew our commitment to be part of the kingdom movement Jesus began. He is, after all, the One whom we follow. And may our beloved Church of the Crossroads, with all its institutional trappings and concerns, be open always to the peace, the justice, and the love of God’s realm, which even now breaks in upon our world and our lives, offering to us and to all new life and wholeness.

Amen.

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