January 31, 2010
“Who Would Jesus Annoy?” January 31, 2010
Doug Norris
Jeremiah 1:4-10 , Luke 4:21-30) Rosedale United Church
On his way to his hometown,( Luke said this, in chapter 4) Jesus was full of the Spirit and where there is Spirit there is fire and where there is fire there is light…
Let me tell a fable. If, as the old Charlie Daniels Band song says,
The devil went down to Georgia, looking for a soul to steal, and He was in a bind ‘cos he was way behind: and he was willin’ to make a deal…
- then on that trip to Georgia, about three hours drive south of Atlanta, and just 20 minutes north of where Jimmy Carter still teaches Sunday School in a little Baptist church (the only Sunday school in the world that is essentially a tourist attraction) – just north of that, on a red-soil farm with a few buildings scattered around, the Devil would have found an intolerably bright place of light, and would have had to go tearing off in some other direction – the children of the Devil in the back seat calling out ‘But Daddy we need to stop – we have to pee’ – the Devil, I always imagine, driving a 1978 Ford Pinto, and in hell there must always be children in the back seat who have to pee – and he’s saying ‘We can’t stop there, not in that place, too much light….’
Clarence Jordan was a New Testament scholar, white, born in the 1930’s into privileged Georgia culture, and he knew something was wrong in the fabric of that place, and so to learn to help the black sharecroppers there he went to Farming School and he farmed for a while and then he understood that the problem in that place was not simply technical but also a matter of spirit and so he went back to school and got a PhD in New Testament studies in Louisville Kentucky – just down the road from Wendell Berry, and in 1942 he and his wife and another couple bought 400 acres of farm just outside Americus Georgia and they set up what they believed to be the only authentic kind of household for a believer – an integrated inter-racial community, and they bound themselves to the principles of equality of all persons, rejection of violence, common ownership of property and ecological stewardship. They called it ‘Koinonia Community’.
Now, we like this stuff. This is the coin of the realm now – they would get a guest spot on Oprah and she would get them a car and a big screen TV and a book deal…
But this was the deep south in the 1940’s and 1950’s. It went very well which means it did not go well at all, because the darkness hates the light.
They lived together, black and white and they worked together, black and white and they ate together black and white and this was a rejection of the fundamental premise of life below the Mason-Dixon line – that there were two races two kinds of people two nations and they may all have been Christian but surely they weren’t the same kind of Christian – so this farm was vandalized and they were shot at and the local stores refused to serve them – the host culture with a strong auto-immune system released all the defenses it knew of. But there was still too much light in that place and they hung on.
Jordan was still a Baptist preacher and in the early years would occasionally be invited to preach in pulpits in the area and he recalled one such day :
After the sermon an elderly woman, as crisp with pride as a dead honeysuckle vine, made her way down the aisle, her blazing eyes telegraphing the tone of her response. Clarence braced, and she delivered – straight from the gut level of her culture : “I want you to know that my grandfather fought in the Civil War and I’ll never believe a word you say!”
Clarence, who was tall and gracious and as southern as sow belly himself, smiled and replied : ‘Ma’am, your choice seems quite clear. You can follow your Grand-daddy or you can follow Jesus.’ (from ‘The Substance of Faith’ – intro – ed D Lee)
In 1965 Millard and Linda Fuller came to visit Koinonia Community and by the time they left, the community had developed what is now known as Habitat For Humanity. So much light on that little red-soil farm that there are now more than a million people in 250,000 homes that would never have been built otherwise…
From a sermon he called ‘The God Movement’ :
“Those who have endured much for what is right are God’s people. Scripture does not say : You all are God’s people when you increase your budget 20% each year; or, you all are God’s people when you have the best choir in the city, or; you all are God’s people when you get your sanctuary air-conditioned.
You all are God’s people when others call you names and harass you and tell all kinds of false tales on you just because you follow me.
If somebody hasn’t called you up at two o’clock in the morning and threatened to kill you the next time they see you, what’s the matter with you? Where have you been? They’re going to call you, Jesus says, all kind of names. I know what they’re going to call you. They’re going to call you a Communist. Any Christian who hasn’t been called a Communist today, I don’t think he’s worth his salt…” (C Jordan, ‘The God Movement’ in ‘The Substance of Faith’ p.66)
In 1969 Clarence Jordan died, and the local funeral home would neither handle his body nor sell his friends a casket. They picked his body up with a farm wagon and he was taken home in a shipping crate that a casket had come in, and his friends mournfully carried him over to a corner of the field and they buried him there where there is no marker, no glory. There’s a little hut about a hundred yards from where he’s buried, where he used to go to do his reading and praying and you can go there and sit at his desk and wonder about all these things…
In the 1970’s Harry Chapin wrote a stage play from Jordan’s writings, a musical called ‘The Cotton Patch Gospel’ and we’ll be watching a recording of this as one of the films in the ‘Reel Jesus’ series, in a month or so.
When we go out with our ‘Habitat’ team and raise some money and build some walls and then the next time we raise some more money and we rebuild some of the same walls because we didn’t do it right the first time but that’s just how it goes, then we participate in the founding blunder of Clarence Jordon – who said, essentially, that because we take the name of Jesus we’re going to live as though some things are true that the people around us generally do not hold to be true – that people who would by all the conventional rules not get to own a house because they do not deserve to own a house – now get to own a house and so possess the stability and the access to resources. It’s unfair in the way that the gospel is unfair to many conventional standards. It’s unfair in the way that annoys people who can’t stand the sight of mercy.
Like the older brother in the parable later in Luke – he does all the right things, stays home gets his degree earns a living and burns the midnight oil and it makes no sense when the father offers not just mercy but delight to the idiotic and wasted younger brother when he finally crawls home. We’ve kind of sanitized that story to be a nice kind of ‘homecoming’ story, but it’s a rotten story for the people who first heard it – mercy for the undeserving.
So here is one of the tensions always present in the church if we will live in the image of Jesus – not a given, I understand this, for all churches, but let me assume it here – if the church will live in the image of Jesus it must live somewhere in between the respect of the culture (that is to say it must remain attractive and compelling enough to be populated) and the approbation of the culture. We must both speak the natural language of the people, and live at a sufficient distance to morally rebuke the culture. That’s awfully hard to do.
Ask any clergy about the requirement to provide a satisfying entertaining and uplifting experience to the members who pay our salaries and the juxtaposed obligation to name and lift up for review the practices and pre-dispositions in which we all participate, and to note where they will lead us into temptation and deliver us right to evil.
Is it prudent, or even possible, here, to name the equity holdings which if we hold them will have us complicit as owners in firms which plunder third world countries, or manufacture 89cent landmines which will still be maiming children a generation from now, or is it prudent or even possible here to speak of electing the people who will guarantee the solidity of our status and the security of our holdings but endlessly neglect the poorest? OK – these things are possible to say – but not prudent. This is no long term strategy for a career in ministry.
Luke says ‘When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage!’
Sept 17 2001 – essentially my first sermon here. We’d had a few Sundays in July, some holidays, Labour Day weekend, then, September 11, and then, the Sunday – and the church was packed full as people looked hard for wisdom and for community that week. And aware that I did not yet know the people here well I spoke what I thought was a responsible message – responsible to the comfort of the grieving in this neighbourhood, and neighbourhoods in Manhattan and to people we knew here and there – and also responsible to the teachings of the gospel which ask about how you respond to evil – with forgiveness and even with love of the enemy. And on the way out of the church right after the Amen, not even down the aisle yet I can see a man sitting near the back, a few rows up, a few seats in, and he is reaching across to intercept me as I get to him – reaching, not as it might have looked, to shake my hand, but to grab my sleeve – and how annoying it must have been, to have had to listen for 15 minutes to what he did not want to hear – he grabbed my sleeve and he said, fiercely, ‘that was the most irresponsible Goddam thing I’ve ever heard in church…”
So this is, of course, a quandary. If to follow Jesus is to take a path that will not always and only bring peace but also trouble, and still keep the doors open here by not sending the customers away furious. What’s the business model for a church?
And there are three routes out of it. I’ll call these :
Church without Jesus. It is quite conceivable to construct a church culture that only minimally involves the person and the character and the ongoing Presence of Jesus himself. In fact, it is more and more tempting, as the spiritual conversations move away from the specifics of the gospel and towards self-fulfillment and cosmic one-ness, like the current conversations about Avatar. All very fine, and no need to get caught up in Jesus.
The second route, which I’ll call Jesus, Almost involves a commitment to the church being built on Jesus but only selectively. Usually this means a choice for a private religion over a public religion. Whuch is to say that Jesus is allowed only to be a mystical saviour who will bring about personal healing in us, and depending on your theology, also guarantee us a place in Paradise, but it is usually about us.
So, in some churches you can get a lot of Jesus but not actually get all of him.
Public religion, on the other hand, is about the journey of restored people out into the world to work prophetically. So I call this third route, Why Not Take All of Me?
GK Chesterton said ‘it is not that Christianity has been tried and has failed. It is that Christianity has been found to be difficult, and so rarely ever tried at all…”
And, truth be told – we’re going to be all of these, aren’t we? It’s what being a ‘big tent’ church like ours means – you’ll each find a place that works. And if we are staying awake here then some days you will be pleased and lifted and some days you will leave very annoyed, and thinking about why…
As long as – and here is a bottom line – without which we may as well pack up and go home, sell the building here to Mooredale to run a branch plant : as long as when the Devil and his whiny children leave Georgia and come cruising by here, they see that here is another of those places where there is too much light for them to abide, too much courage for what is right, too much mercy, and they have to go…
How will it go for us here? Jesus Christ is waiting…..