The Park Road Pulpit

In recent years there has been an increased interest in writings from the New Testament period, which did not make it into the biblical canon. Several “gospels” have been discovered that have become quite useful in better understanding the four biblical gospels by comparing their language and stories with these non-canonical gospels. In addition to our first two lessons, then, I invite you now to hear a first-ever public reading, from the not-yet-discovered and very non-canonical book, which I shall call, “The Protogospel of Russ”[1]:

And, murmering because of the controversies which he had provoked among them, one of the Legalists asked him, “Who authorized you to do ‘these things’?”

“Like healing the sick?” he asked. “Sometimes on our Sabbath? Like teaching our scriptures so that the people have understanding? Like speaking the words, ‘you are forgiven’ to our people who wallow in self-hatred? Like touching lepers and talking publicly with tax collectors and prostitutes?”

Jesus said unto them, “The authority is mine, from within.” (And they looked nervously at one another.) “It is mine from birth.” (And they groaned.) “For I was born of the ‘fifth generation’ of my father.”

And they snarled at him and twisted up their faces and then they huddled together and said to one another, “How can this be? Can a man be born his father’s great-great-grandson?” For they did not understand the scriptures and their hearts were hardened by their considerable religious knowledge and their pious affections.

And Jesus, knowing their hearts, said to them, “Do you not know the scriptures? The ‘Ten Words’ given to our father, Moses?”

And one Legalist stepped forward and began to recite, “I am the LORD your God… you shall have no other gods before me… You shall not make for yourself an idol… you shall not bow down and worship any image of a god… You shall not make wrongful use of the name…”

“Wait,” Jesus interrupted. “Go back. For you have answered rightly, but you have missed something. Is there not a warning with the second command?”

Another stepped forward and repeated in his perfect Hebrew, “for I, Adonai Elohenu, am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation…”

“There it is,” Jesus answered. “To the third and the fourth generation.” But all who will come after me will be children of the fifth generation. To those there is no condemnation. For they will live without fear before a God whose grace is broad enough for all. And such a birth shall be their authority.”

And the Legalists frowned and turned and went away from him, their minds scheming to destroy him, this son of the son of the son of a liberating God, for they each had been born, first sons of their fathers…

The prophet Ezekiel was tired of grumbling. He was tired of the Israelites’ pitiful helplessness. Their superstitious and shallow theology -- “Who sinned, that we should suffer this exile from God? Whose fault is it that we should know such pain?” Make no mistake, the Babylonian Exile was a tragedy of epic proportions. The homes and land of the Israelites had been destroyed. Their cities pulled down. Their Temple destroyed. Many of their people had been murdered in the warring aggression of invading terrorists. King Nebuchadnezzar was ruthless, and now hundreds of Israel’s best citizens sat on the banks of a foreign river blaming someone, anyone for all that had befallen them, and asking, “Where is God in all this?”

Ezekiel was especially tired of hearing that familiar, ancient proverb which expressed a belief in what we might call hereditary retribution. If the parents ate sour grapes, even their children’s lips puckered up! The warning was associated with the second commandment. Infidelity to the One, true God of Israel, would result in divine retribution to the third and the fourth generation.[3] And the Israelites, far from living, cowered in fear of such an unjust God.

But Ezekiel counseled comfort and courage[4] – each will live and die, for himself -- not for your parents’ sins, but by your own sins shall you be judged.[5] So stand tall, and take heart, for God who gave you life desires life -- for all.

It was a message of hope and grace. A word of self-empowerment – God, the divine image-maker,[6] is not to be feared, for each is free to live her own life, filled with God’s spirit of self-confidence and individual courage

Five hundred years after exile, the pleas of the prophets had gone unheeded, and the religious contemporaries of Jesus were filled with the same shallow questions, the same insecurities that had plagued their ancestors some twelve generations before. The issue prompting today’s lesson, though framed differently, was still the issue of confidence before God. The Jews said, in effect, “We are God’s chosen. We alone have been granted God’s authority.” So when Jesus came, preaching without consent of the establishment, empowering the masses, blessing fisherman and tax collectors, instilling a sense of worth in prostitutes, offering acceptance to lepers who had been ostracized from the touch of community… they questioned his authority.

Where Ezekiel promoted a private courage, a call to independent confidence, the Jewish leaders needed a lesson in humility, and a reminder of the wideness of God’s mercy.

Jesus lived in a religious world. There was a synagogue on every corner. His was surely “one nation under God.” The priests and a whole assembly of the religious elite had canonized and codified God into a black and white Jewish deity. If you wanted to know who God was, what God thought, how God worked -- they could tell you. It was right there. Written in the law. The Jewish world of Jesus’ birth did not lack for confidence, for the Jews reveled in their exclusive claim to the grace of God. (Does any of this sound familiar?)

“There was a man who had two sons. One son said he would do what the father wanted (but did not do it), the other said that he would not do his father’s will (but did it anyway). Jesus asked, “So which one did the will of the father? (Who really is the father’s son?)” Those first generation children of Jewish ancestry? Those made secure by a religious claim of salvation?

To their great horror, as blasphemy to their orthodox teaching, Jesus declared a resounding, “No!” I believe that they knew the answer, instinctively, but it was an answer which minimized their importance as God’s chosen few, so they would not[7] accept it, and it angered them greatly. God’s children are not first-born children, but those “fifth-generation” sons and daughters who are born of integrity and fidelity to the will and the way of a loving and gracious God.

As first-generation children of Christian parents, Jesus asks us the same disturbing, subversive, heresy-provoking question.[8] What is your authority? Is it some religious claim that you can hold over the head of infidels and pagans alike? Some exclusive right of entry to heaven? Is your claim just a trip you made down some church aisle, some dip in the water? Or is there substance to your speech?[9] Christians have no more an exclusive claim on God’s grace than did the Jews of Jesus’ day, and we have no more a lock on God’s salvation than does anyone else today, if our only security is the insecurity of religious dogma. “There must be more.”[10]

Several weeks ago in my pastor’s column, I wrote about my experience as a father, taking a kindergartener to school and setting him out.[11] Confident. Courageous. Calm, cool, and collected, Jackson left the truck that second day and he has not looked back yet. Though in the article I played up my emotions, this is what we want as parents, isn’t it? For our children to grow up, to make it on their own – even without us? I alluded to an insight of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who claimed that what God wants most from us is for us to grow up, and to realize that we can do very well without God. My mother, who is a faithful reader of my articles, let me know, with that certain concern in her voice that she didn’t quite understand. “… without God?” What can that mean?

On several Friday nights in the summer of 1990, at a men’s Bible study in the basement of the Gardiner Baptist Church in Gardiner, Montana, I sat in pain as I listened to a young man named Rick describe the greatest spiritual crisis of his life. Rick was leaving his job and moving to Texas to work with the organization called “Youth for Christ.” But this decision wasn’t the spiritual crisis. Rick couldn’t decide what to do with his truck! This was his crisis. Maybe God wanted him to keep his truck and drive it to Texas so he could use it for God’s glory in ministry. Maybe God wanted him to sell the truck, which represented his old life, before his commitment, and give the money to the ministry. But, then, how would he get to Texas? What should he do? He had prayed? But there seemed no answer. So we prayed some more. And we prayed some more. And we prayed some more.

Do you hear the pitiful insecurity? The childish fear of making the wrong decision before a God who might just hold the sin of selling (or not selling) a pickup truck against him and against his children and his children’s children? Grow up, Rick! In security. In maturity. Parents want their children to become confident in independence. So does God.[12]

One Sunday in 1970 in Birmingham, Alabama, the pastor of the First Baptist Church came home and met his wife in the kitchen. He said to her, “I’ve got a card here in my pocket. It’s a visitor’s card from a black lady and her daughter. They are interested in joining our church. If I follow through on this card – it will change our lives forever.” Joyce Gilmore asked her husband what he was going to do, and he said, “I am going to follow through on the card.”

Dr. Gilmore did receive Winifred Bryant and her daughter into the membership of his church. But it was a new church, a church born of conviction and security, of mature and individual courage. For thirty members of the First Baptist Church walked out with the pastor when the deacons refused Mrs. Bryant’s request for membership. There were no late night prayer sessions of fear and trembling. They knew what was right, and in Christian maturity, they simply stood up and walked out.[13]

What is your authority? Are you paralyzed from really living, out of a fear of a God of third and fourth generation retribution? Or have you been empowered by the God who, in Christ, goes above and before, behind and beside us? Have you accepted the authority that is truly yours by the God who goes within you, every step of the way?

Jesus told Nicodemus, who came to him by night, that he needed to be “born again.”[14] So it is with a timid and insecure Church today. Let us all be born, again, as children of the children of the children of the liberating God.

The authority is yours in Jesus Christ. I say to you, children of the fifth generation, grow up!

[1] I do not know how a “protogospel” differs from a “gospel,” but there is a non-canonical text entitled “The Protogospel of James.”

[2] Could not or would not? I wrestled with the words here and chose “could not” to reflect the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of changing theological beliefs after years of commitment to a certain perspective. The Jewish leaders were not just stubborn (“unwilling”) to change – Jesus’ message was simply one they “could not” accept, because it was outside the bounds of their orthodoxy.

[3] The warning need not be read as necessarily implying that all Israel believed God was so bent on such “unjust retribution.” Perhaps the intent of the waning was to indicate the obvious reality that sin does have long-term consequence, consequences which sometimes carry over for several generations.

[4] See also Jeremiah 31.29-30.

[5] In her book, Traveling Mercies, Anne LaMott comments that we are condemned “by” our sins, and not “for” them. This view reflects, again, the reality of sin and its consequences without positing an angry God who punishes humans for every misstep along the way.

[6] Genesis 1.27 -- are created “in God’s image.”. I come back to this concept over and over – it is the starting point of my theology, and a necessary emphasis throughout.

[7] See note #2, above.

[8] “Supercessionism” is a theological claim that Christians have “superceded” Jews as God’s “chosen people.” This view makes null the “everlasting covenant” which God promised to Abraham (Genesis 17.7), since the Jews subsequently rejected Jesus. I believe that such a claim is unwarranted, given Jesus’ teaching – especially in some of the very subversive parables, such as today’s lesson. If Jesus were here, today, I firmly believe that the condemnation which he directed toward the Jews, for their elitist and exclusive claims, would be pointed directly at the institution of the Christian Church as well. A more conservative reading may seem more comforting to Christians (since “we” have superceded the Jews, we alone are now recipients of God’s grace (salvation)) – but such a reading will miss the cutting edge of Jesus’ message – what separates the “sheep and the goats,” ultimately, is not a claim to salvation by any assertion of orthodox “belief,” but by “what they did and did not do” (see his parable in Matthew 25.)

[9] See Matthew 25, the “Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.”

[10] This is a direct allusion to last week’s sermon on grace. See “Southern Hospitality and the Grace of an Unjust God.” I suggested that simple “justice” is never enough. In God’s economy there must be more, and the more is grace. In our religious life, too, there must be more than a simple, legalistic claim to “salvation” – the more is the integrity of lives lived in maturity and freedom, in compassion and conviction, seeking after God’s will and way.

[11] See “Watching From the Truck.”

[12] I do not mean to belittle anyone. I do appreciate his commitment and his desire to please God in his choices, but I think much popular piety reduces Christians from maturity to a timid, fearful approach to God.

[13] The story was told by Dr. Roger Lovette, the now retired pastor of Covenant Baptist in Birmingham.

[14] See John 3.

[15] Dr. Stephen Shoemaker of Myers Park Baptist in Charlotte, used this address in prayers during parent/child dedication services at Crescent Hill Baptist in Louisville, KY.

[16] This is also an allusion to last week’s sermon, and to Psalm 23.

[17] Matthew 5.48.

[18] 2 Corinthians 12.9.

[19] Ephesians 4.13.

[20] Ephesians 4.15