Five More Mistakes

 Another of Constantine’s big mistakes, theologically, was to make the Church a building.  We do it because that’s what we’ve done for centuries.  Yes, some churches are humble and plain.  But many are ornate and beautiful.  And yes, if you go to the Old Testament, you find the building of the Temple, twice, which was magnificent, by all accounts, one of the most beautiful of its age.  

But does God want us to worship him in a building?  Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 3:16 "Don't you yourselves know that you are God’s temple and that the Spirit of God lives in you?” That is the only book in the Bible where it explicitly says we are God’s Temple. However there are many suggestions that we are not meant to worship in an ornate cathedral:

• Three of Paul’s letters talk about being members of the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians, Ephesians and Colossians).  

• John 15 has the passage about abiding, specifically 15:4 “Abide in me, and I in you.” 

• Acts 2:46, “...breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts”.  

• Even in the OT, starting with the Exodus, the Israelites worshipped God in an elaborate tent, which continued for four hundred years after they conquered the Promised Land.

Obviously, God instructed the Jews to build the Temple, so I can’t say it wasn’t according to His Will.  I do see, however, that it was not the original plan.  The big building requires a staff to keep it up and a staff needs a leader.  The leader, by definition, tells everyone else what to do.  It did not take too much stretching to turn some of Paul’s writings into a system that elevated men and relegated women.  This also created a hierarchy, which became a tool for politics and oppression.  “You’re going to Hell unless you do X (give your money to us, go kill the Muslims, etc).”  From the Middle Ages to the present day, pastors of all denominations angle for higher positions, often at the expense of their flock.

Reason 1B, is wealth.  How can the Church have so much wealth when there is one person in the world who will die from starvation today, much less the 24,000+ who actually will?  (Yes that is a real number How Many People and Children Starve to Death Every Day.)  Over 3 million a year under 5 years old die of hunger.  James 2:16, “If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?”  

Second: despite 1B above, many churches, like mine, now are funded by endowments.  This is the opposite of living on faith.  It is not trusting God to provide.  

Third, the Church as a building negates the message that our very hearts are the place where He resides.  For far too much of my life, I have relegated God to Sunday Morning, content to leave Him in that building and go out into the “real world”, where Faith, Hope and Love often seem far less relevant, but actually matter far more.  

Furthermore, if God resides in my heart, He must also reside in the hearts of all believers.  And every person who does not know Him is still made in His Image and has the potential to have Him abide in them.  Shouldn’t that change how I treat them?  

You may be saying, “why go to church then?”  If so, maybe I overdid it with all this.  For me, church is a largely agreed-upon understanding of who God is and what it means to follow Jesus.  I am sure that without going to Church regularly, I would be lost in my sin.  Probably divorced.  Likely one or more of my kids would be in some kind of trouble, whether with the Law, substance abuse or some other bad track.  And I would not know Jesus as my Savior.  So yes, I think going to Church is important.  But maybe we are doing it wrong.  

Certainly worship is best done in communion with one another and with God.  Some talk about this using the Cross as a metaphor.  Too much emphasis on the “vertical” part makes one “so heavenly minded he’s of no earthly good”.  And too much emphasis on the “horizontal” without vertical and we tend to forget what it’s all about. 

Yay Persecution!

 I wrote last week that one of the great gifts Constantine gave Christians was for believers to no longer fear for their lives because of their faith.  While that allowed Christianity to flourish around the world faster and farther than it had before, and I think it is fair to say that while most Christians truly believed and followed Jesus, the political machine that was built quickly became something else.  But this freedom to worship did come with a cost for everyday believers.

In Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, Kenneth Bailey relates that, when Communism fell in the Soviet republics and Christianity became legal again, the Church had a gating question to new priests: “When were you baptized?”  If it was before the fall of the USSR, they were immediately acceptable.  If it was after, there was a much longer process.  The theory was, if they were willing to risk their lives for their faith, no other questions needed to be asked.  

I’m sure we all know the origin of the “Jesus Fish”, the secret code that helped believers recognize one another.  One person would draw one arc ( and the other would draw the second, ) and between the two, you had a fish.  Anyone not knowing the “secret handshake” was dangerous.  Revealing one’s faith could result in imprisonment and death, as Peter, Paul, James and countless others found.  

In America today, many Christians lament the “oppression” of the Church, as if the corruption, bigotry, sexual assault and myriads of other scandals that pervade it do not warrant some kind of pushback.  But Jesus said “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account (Matthew 5:11-12).”  Emphasis on “falsely”.  

That verse is followed by “rejoice and be glad”.  This is not to say we seek out pain.  Jesus did not revel in being nailed to the Cross.  Hebrews 12:2 says, “For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”  

Now, many Christians will say that we need to be bold for Christ and welcome persecution that comes.  However, almost without fail, Jesus and his followers shown spreading the Gospel, do so only to people there to hear a sermon.  The two exceptions to this are when Paul gets stoned and nearly dies (twice) because he did not respect the boundaries and expectations of his audience.

Jesus himself warned not to cast pearls before swine, that is, not to insist on spreading the Gospel where it was not welcome.  Paul has that vision in Acts where just after the Holy Spirit prevents him from going to Asia (Turkey), he is called to Macedonia.  The Holy Spirit prevented him from going to preach where he would not be effective.  He greatly desired to get to Spain.  He never did.  “Preach the Gospel always.  When necessary use words” is attributed to Francis of Assisi.  I like 1 Peter 3:15, always be ready to give a reason for the hope you have, but do so with gentleness and respect.  Being ready to give a reason, I believe, means acting in such a loving way that people stop and ask you, “Why are you doing this?”

Persecution, for many American Christians, is that dirty look or harsh word we get when we say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays”; that reprimand we get at work for saying a prayer, including Jesus’ name, in the company meeting, or the public school coach gets fired from his job when he huddles his team up for a prayer.  

So first of all, I think American Christians have no idea what being persecuted for our faith really looks like.  If you want to be persecuted for being bold for Christ, go preach in China.  Second of all, when a coach does get fired, this is not a time to whine and complain that we ought to be a Christian Nation. It is a time to rejoice (see Matt 5:11-12 above).  And third, I suspect that forcing our beliefs on someone without being in a loving relationship with that person is antithetical to what Jesus’ teaching.  1 Corinthians 13:1-3 would seem to agree:  

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to the flames that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

The word "ichthys", fish in Greek, was an acronym for Jesus Christ, God's Son, Savior. One thing that may be lost in today's world of buying magnetic Jesus Fish is that the symbol itself, the original secret handshake, required two people coming together in community to complete Jesus' name. I know I can do better finding ways to share my faith with my friends who need it. In love. With gentleness and respect.

The Beginning of the Trouble

 This is the first of my Ninety-Five Theses For the Twenty-First Century.  We'll see how many I actually have.  Call it my “airing of grievances”.  As Frank Costanza said, “I got a lot of problems with you people!” Is this the equivalent of nailing it to the door of the church?

Where to begin?  There are so many subtle things we do that I believe are against God’s Law, things everyone around us is doing and has done for generations.  I want to start at the beginning of the Trouble.  To my mind, that means Constantine.  

Emperor Constantine did some wonderful and amazing things on behalf of Christians about 1700 years ago.  I am sure that no longer having to fear for your life just by confessing Jesus as Lord was a great blessing.  Codifying the books of the Bible is another.  Sorting out who Jesus is and quashing some of the more dangerous heresies was vital to the survival of the Faith.  

However, he also set the Church on some wrong tracks: making the Church an institution, with a hierarchy that quickly became more political than faithful; as a result, women in the Church were relegated to secondary roles only, where the “Desert Mothers” were some of the key leaders of the early Church; making the Church a building first, with a staff that needed money was antithetical to helping those in need; today that has led to churches with endowments, because we worry that God might not provide enough for us to keep it open; the selling of indulgences; infant baptism; the many “holy relics” that were fabricated to bilk the masses; the fear of other religions such as Islam and Judaism that led to the Crusades and the Inquisition.  

I want to cover all those areas.  Today I want to look at the Nicene Creed and Constantine’s baptism.  Constantine asked to not be baptized until he was on his death bed. His goal was to have a “tabula rasa”, a clean slate, when he died, as if saving his baptism until then would accomplish what Christ’s death on the Cross could not.  However, practically speaking, he did not want to stop being Emperor the way he knew how - intrigue, war, back-stabbing, oath-breaking and assassination.  These he continued long after his “conversion”, counting on being baptized to wipe clean his many sins. I love that picture of him, sitting casually, even arrogantly, outside a church, contemplating his sword.

According to E Stanley Jones, in his book Christ of the Mount, he made sure that the Nicene Creed would have nothing in it about how Jesus lived his life.  We go right from “born of the Virgin Mary” to “crucified under Pontius Pilate”.  Not a thing about his teachings, his miracles, and especially the way Jesus lived, exhibiting love and forgiveness even to his enemies.  

In this way, the institutionalization of the Church quickly became, in many positions of its leadership, about something other than “Following the Way”.  Yet the people who made up the Nicene Council were genuine believers.  These people were the foundation of the Church, and in many ways, that has been what has kept the Church together ever since, despite the bad and sometimes evil leadership.  I believe that is why people today are identifying as “nones” - the vast majority of these, about 80% of the “nones”, still believe in something, but are not finding it in Church.  There is too much “Religion”, too much greed, corruption, scandal, hypocrisy.  But most of us know deep down, this life is about the Greatest Commandment.  And once again, the ONE Greatest Commandment is to love our neighbor as ourself (Matt 7:12, Galatians 5:14, Romans 13:10, James 2:8).  We love God BY loving our neighbor.  This is why Jesus’ death tore the veil in the Temple.  This is why the early church met in the homes of believers and gave as anyone had need.  

At our first Faith and Reason Conference, I had the opportunity to pray with some people from my church in NJ.  I have known these people for years.  But I tell you, I never felt more connected to them than I was, sitting there on the shores of Lake George, watching the sun rise over the mountains.  We each were able to talk about our lives, our families and our faith in a way we had never done before.  My point is: what kind of religion do we follow where it is possible to know someone for ten or more years and never actually get to know them?  In the pre-Constantine church, this would have been impossible.  Now, it is the standard practice.

I encourage you to get to know someone at church today.  Make an effort to invite them to lunch.  Find out how they came to faith, how their faith has helped them in life.  I suspect that breaking bread together, sharing your needs together, praying and praising God, whether in your home or a restaurant or a truck stop, is more like Following the Way than most of what goes on in that building we call “Church”.  "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2)."

95 Theses More (or Less)

 Building on last week, if you agree that our country is a mess, I suggest this did not happen overnight, or even in our lifetimes.  If you trace back the corruption, the racism, the persecution of the Church, the exodus from the Church, the destruction of morals, if you trace it back, the problems started 250 years ago, 500 years ago, 1700 years ago.  Those are not random numbers.  250 years ago, our beloved Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.  500 years ago was the Protestant Reformation, the founding of the Church of England in particular.  And 1700 years ago, Constantine declared Christianity to be the official religion of Rome.  

I’m a few dozen short of 95 Theses, but after 500 years, the time seems ripe for another Reformation, quick before He comes again. Here is a list of practices common to the Church now that contradict God’s Word:  

Infant baptism (removes the power of “dying to self”, paints God as a monster who sends infants to Hell); Forgiveness and reconciliation (general repentance and instant forgiveness instead of reconciling with our brother); Belief / unbelief (belief is so much more than thinking it is true, unbelief is hypocrisy); Noah and racism (did you know that Noah is the father of Slavery in the US?); Heaven and Hell (when we go, who gets in where); Discipleship (be prepared to answer for your faith, not preach to the unreceptive, not casting pearls before swine); Church as a building - giving to Christ (setting up endowments is the opposite of living on faith); Women preaching; Cheap Grace; Gospel of Wealth.  It should go without saying that the church should not have its leaders engaged in sexual assault especially of minors, having affairs with parishioners (or anyone else), creating cults, stealing money (or anything else), or any kind of abuse; and the Unforgivable Sin (if it is “lack of repentance”, encourages judgmentalism, if “abusing God’s authority”, a warning to Church leaders who should know better).   

I plan to write separately on each of those: what the Church teaches and why I believe it is unbiblical.  Most of these are common to the vast majority of Churches in this country.  This realization that the Christian Religion has lost its way has been hard for me.  Tied to it is the realization that my country not only has lost its way but seems to have always been on the wrong track.  I became a history major because of how much I love America, so this too has been disconcerting.

What I hope to show is not “All is Lost”, but “This is what God’s Plan (really) is.”  It turns out to be quite comforting to realize that this is not what He had in mind: we are not a Christian Nation.  That is not to say there are no good Christians, or that some of our Founders may have wanted to create a City on the Hill.  It is to say that when you build on a foundation that is faulty, the house will not stand.  But the right path, the Path of Righteousness, is actually very familiar.  And it leads Home.  To where our Father eagerly waits for us.