March 12, 2025
PACA Lenten Service
First Presbyterian Church, Phoenixville
The algorithm on YouTube has picked up a few things about
me and pushes things onto my feed that it calculates will keep me listening
while I bump around the kitchen in the morning feeding the dogs, making my
oatmeal, and emptying the dishwasher.
One of them a couple of days ago was from a particularly grumpy
commentator with some very clear denominational preferences who decided to
spend his time picking apart a bunch of hymns whose words he considers heretical.
It caught me off-guard because I realized that I had done
something similar to another hymn in my sermon on Sunday. Of course, I was just doing that as a
disclaimer before getting to the part that I approve of. The other guy was doing it because he enjoys
his superiority, regardless of the fact that his theology is not simply
mistaken but wrong.
So how wrong does somebody have to be to be wrong
wrong? Christians have a pretty
extensive track record of trying to figure that out and never quite getting to
a satisfactory answer.
Read
through the book of Acts and you get an account of how Paul and Peter and James
had a series of fallings-out over the question of whether a gentile (or as Paul
would say, “a Greek”) could participate fully in the Christian community
without first accepting Jewish law and practice as a rule of life. In Acts 15, they seem to reach a compromise,
then hug it out.
Then
turn over to Paul’s letter to the Galatians, where you get a different picture. Even after the meeting discussed in Acts, the
sniping and undermining of each other’s ministries went on. Paul wrote to the Galatians about people who
were telling them that gentile converts needed to observe specified ritual practices,
including circumcision, and he did not hold back on what he thought about that:
“I wish those who unsettle you would
castrate themselves!” [Galatians 5:12]
Then in the next words he
writes, it’s as if he realizes he might need to explain why he would make a
comment like that, what was at stake for him in the entire argument, and he
goes on,
“For you were called to freedom, brothers
and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for
self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For
the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your
neighbor as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take
care that you are not consumed by one another.” [Galatians
5:13-15]
To put in another way,
what lies at the heart of Christianity has to be something other than us – our behaviors, our practices, our
explanations, our anything. It has to be
our response to God’s love in Christ, a love that doesn’t begin with us nor end
with us.
In his book What’s the Least I Can Believe and Still
Be a Christian? Martin Thielen (full disclosure – the author is a United
Methodist pastor with a Lutheran-sounding name, and the book is published by the
very Presbyterian Westminster John Knox Press) retells a story that he heard. He writes,
“Several decades ago, a group of
theologians gathered in England for a conference on comparative religions. They grappled with the question ‘Is there one
belief completely unique to the Christian faith?’
As
they debated that question, world-famous theologian and author C.S. Lewis
walked into the room. ‘What’s going on?’
he asked.
Someone
told him that his colleagues were discussing the question ‘Is there one belief
unique to Christianity?’
C.S.
Lewis responded, ‘Oh, that’s easy: it’s grace.’
By
the end of the conference, the theologians agreed with Lewis. … In one way or
another, every religion of the world requires people to earn God’s approval –
every religion except Christianity. The
one belief that is completely unique to the Christian faith is grace: God’s
unconditional love and acceptance of us just as we are. …That grace, more than
anything else, draws people to Christianity.”[1]
So back to what Paul says
in Romans. He holds out hope.
The hope begins with the news that salvation does not
begin with us, we who are implicated in the world that we would change if we
could. The hope begins, in fact, with
our powerlessness. We are not – and this
is truly good news – the saviors of the world.
We have made so much of it in our own image, and look what a mess we
have made.
We
see a handful of billionaires across the globe holding onto the vast majority
of wealth while people starve in Sudan and Yemen and struggle for the very
basics in Venezuela. We can see rich and
powerful nations cut off assistance that they had promised the hungry and the
sick in foreign lands or even in their own.
We can ask why women or various ethnic groups are denied full
participation in their societies. We can
shake our heads at the disrespect we see among people in our own neighborhoods
or within households. We can feel angry
at the injustices and we should. And our
souls are every bit as messed up as the outer world; it all goes together.
But
there is grace from beyond us, and salvation that is broader than our judgments,
a grace that draws us together in more than intellectual agreement or uniformity
of practice. It makes us one even if often
we cannot stand each other. It’s the
same grace that we experience first and before all from God, and a grace which
goes out to others and offers both forgiveness and the challenge to love as God
has first loved us.
“For one believes with the heart and so is
justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. The scripture
says, ‘No one who believes in him will be put to shame.’ For there is no
distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous
to all who call on him. For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord
shall be saved.’” [Romans 10:10-13]
We can count on that,
thanks be to God.
[1] Martin
Thielen, “What’s the Least I Can Believe and Still Be a Christian?” A Guide
to What Matters Most (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011),
82-83.
