The Park Road Pulpit

It was a long night. A very long night. Amy and I were young, and foolish enough still to do youth “lock-ins.” Our church member, Peggy McIntyre, and some of her high school friends gathered at First Baptist Church about 8:00 p.m. After some silly introductions we put in the first movie. It was that great contemporary David vs. Goliath epic thriller whose crowning scene follows the “challenger,” the “Italian Stallion,” Rocky Balboa, through the streets in a pre-dawn training run, culminating in a dreamy-eyed celebration of a million-to-one victory atop that length of granite steps rising to the Philadelphia Art Museum. From that high moment we travel through days of gut-wrenching training into fifteen rounds of bloody punches and, finally, through his defeat, but to Rocky’s now-famous cry, “Adrianne! Adrianne!”

As soon as the credits rolled we cued up, “Rocky II,” the sequel. That fine piece of film footage ended about 1:00 a.m. Just in time for “Rocky III,” which ended in time for the just-as-predictable “Rocky IV,” which as ended just in time for a bleary-eyed preview of “Rocky V.” Which ended just after a Saturday morning sunrise, and just before I had to be committed for having conceived of such a dreadfully maddening idea.

I still love the movie, “Rocky,” with its soaring theme song, and its impossible dream. About every decade, it’s still worth watching! But Sylvester Stallone should have stopped with the original.

Last week, I left you with some rather strange words for Easter. The sermon ended, perhaps a little dangerously with the following statement:

For the last few weeks, I have been asking about the meaning of resurrection. This questioning has led me to a startling conclusion: I do not believe in resurrection. Well, not fully. At least, not yet.[1]

Many of you stayed with me for the explanation which followed, and you understood my purpose in making such a statement. But others of you had questions. And your questions have prompted even more thinking on my part this week. My most consistent and insightful critic has suggested that I need to learn to preach my footnotes. So, today, in a sequel of my own I’d like to do just that.

My “heart&soul” column[2] prior to Easter gave a hint into my thinking as we approached Resurrection Sunday. I confessed that as a now-middle-aged pastor I come to this season of celebration with a bit of fear and trembling. Not only have I learned that because of life’s inevitable mix of joy and sorrow, that all times of celebrations are tainted by grief, but I also admitted that one of the struggles of this season is the very focal point of Christian faith, itself: Resurrection.

What is resurrection? What does resurrection mean, to you? How do I preach resurrection in a way that is honest and practical?

Since I’m preaching footnotes today, let me tell you as plainly as I can that though you know I love teasing you with five-dollar, multisyllabic words, with theological jargon, and with the world of ideas that crowds my brain, I suffer from no delusions when it comes to my own understanding of our rich faith, nor of my ability to communicate even the basic Truths of this faith to you. This is why I find preaching such an emotional discipline. Who am I to speak to you? Why should you trust me to convey a Word from God?

(Amy laughs at me, because even when my voice does not quiver, she can read the frequent chill-bumps that come to my face, and she knows what’s going on. She’ll say to me when we get home, “You spoke to yourself today, didn’t you!” If I could learn to convey even a glimpse of the Truth that I gain nearly every time I am privileged to preach, my emotion would need no explanation.)

The point of this confessional footnote is to say to you that the goal of my preaching is never purely theological. At the heart of every biblical passage is some movement, some action, some crisis or some celebration of a people in relationship with God.[3] And every sermon should be an attempt to convey the Truth-story of that particular text so that it might inform our own Truth-stories. And, to convey that Truth-story for the same, practical purpose that it was originally told, which is -- to seek to make the presence of God real in our lives.

In the introduction to his book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Charlotte’s own controversial son, Bishop John Shelby Spong says:

I live in a constant and almost mystical awareness of the divine presence. . . I have the sense of God’s inescapableness.[4]

“What shall separate us from God’s inescapable presence?” Nothing![5] This affirmation is the purpose of faith, and preaching must encourage a “God-intoxication”[6] in our lives. Faith is this “simple.” Faith-teaching should always be this personal and practical – to make the presence of God real in our lives.

Yet, when I seek to put my understanding of this God into human words (words like “resurrection”), my certainty all but disappears. Human words always contract and diminish my God awareness. They never expand it.[7]

I have been asking what resurrection means. I have only asked people of faith. Christian people who are active in the life of the church. Dedicated believers who take faithful thinking and acting very seriously. And, in my asking, I have gotten very few easily-spoken answers. The response usually involves a good bit of stuttering and stammering. (What does resurrection mean, to you?) The pure eloquence of this stuttering proves the very point underscoring the next footnote of last week’s sermon: believing is not just a matter of what goes on in our heads.

After I told you last week that I had come to realize I did not yet believe in resurrection, I went on to qualify this statement with my estimation that believing requires personal experience.[8] Someone asked, “Can you really not believe in something you have not experienced?”

I will ask you as I asked her, “Can a child believe in love if she has never known a father’s touch? A mother’s kiss?” Can we know trust if all we have experienced is betrayal? (Sometimes one experience of betrayal counters years of trustworthiness.)

However powerful this argument from experience might be, though, I know that I am wrong here. You can “believe” without experiencing. But such believing does injustice to the word itself. It is this kind of hollowed-out believing (belief as only an assent of the mind) that has eviscerated, gutted the Christian Church of the authentic, powerful, living voice of Jesus Christ.

In the early second century, the Roman Emperor Trajan, determined to rid his world of political threats, dispatched his strong-man, Pliny, to the troublesome middle East. In Bithynia, Pliny found a disturbing new cult called “Christians.” With his threat of execution, many so-called Christians easily renounced their belief. Consider his words in a letter to Trajan:

Those who denied being Christians now or in the past, I thought necessary to release, since they invoked our gods according to the formula I gave them and since they offered sacrifices of wine and incense before your image which I had brought in for this purpose along with the statues of our gods. I also had them curse Christ. It is said that real Christians cannot be forced to do any of these things.[9]

Most of the Christians did, but those believers who would not renounce their faith we now call martyrs, a word from the Greek, meaning “testimony” or “witness.” You can “believe,” but you cannot give witness to that which you have not experienced.

We will not all have to die for the faith. But no one who seeks to follow Jesus is excused from true believing.[10]

David Burrell is undoubtedly right when he suggests that many Christians, we should name them as personally as he does, “many of us” have lost the “transforming power of our original revelation… which is Jesus.”[11] How have you experienced the “transforming power” of Jesus in your life? You cannot experience this by claiming to simply “believe” in his resurrection. In last week’s sermon I affirmed both the resurrection of Jesus as an event which changed the world, and I affirmed my hope in the resurrection of the body and the life, everlasting.

But who really cares what I say I “believe” if that believing makes no difference in my life?

Let me leave you with three quotes today. They are footnotes to Life, Death, Resurrection.

Oscar Romero was the Archbishop of El Salvador, whose rather boring, institutional approach to the church was transformed by the murder of a close friend. Romero was converted again, for the first time, and he became an “advocate for the people” until he was assassinated at the altar, while serving mass to his people. Hear his witness:

…as a Christian I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people. More important than the moment of death is giving [God] all of life and living for [God].[12]

Jesus’ life is not a life to think about. If we desire to find the presence of God in this world, if we want meaning, if we want to know abundance, it is a life that we, too, must believe.

Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University comments on Jesus’ life this way:

The followers of Jesus came very early to the conclusion that he had lived in order to die, that his death was not the interruption of his life at all but its ultimate purpose. . . What was said of the thane of Cawdor in Macbeth was true preeminently of Jesus: “Nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it.”[13]

For Christian theology, Jesus’ death has become necessary in explaining his life. But if we only make of his death some great doctrine of redemption, we will miss the actual redemption that it brings. He called us to die with him. “For whoever will save his life, will lose it, but whoever will lose her life for the sake of the gospel will find it.” If his death will have any final meaning for this world, it is a death that we, too must believe.

Clarence Jordan was a Georgia farm boy with a sharp mind. He got a doctorate in New Testament Greek and began applying the radical words of Jesus’ to his own, rural people. When he opened a farm near Americus Georgia in 1942 with the intent that blacks and whites would live and work, together, neither Jesus nor Jordan were welcomed home! Listen to Jordan on resurrection:

The good news of the resurrection is not that we shall die and go home with him, but that he has risen and comes home with us, bringing all his hungry, naked, thirsty, sick, prisoner brothers with him.

Resurrection is not, finally, an artifact of faith to simply affirm. If we are to live with the sure presence of God in our midst, it is a resurrection that we, too, must believe.

As Paul makes clear, these are not three points in a systematic theology, not aspects of doctrine to be “believed” in our minds.[14] In some ways of thinking, Christian faith is made to be ultimately self-centered – “believing” is about me. I believe, and therefore, I am saved.

But the “Jesus-story” seeks to be a “Jesus-reality”[15] in our lives, to be believed by the living of it. In doing so, God creates in each of us a new, living person, raising us from a valley of dry bones,[16] creating living sequels to Christ. You are a Living Sequel. In this new creation, faith is not ultimately about saving ourselves, “believing” is about giving our lives away for one another.

[1] Nothing Can Separate Us – The Transformation of Brokenness

[2] This is the Pastors’ column in our weekly newsletter, “Good Tidings.”

[3] It is for this reason that my friend, Dr. William E. Hull disdains “lectionary preaching,” for what he calls “strategic preaching.” Preaching from the prescribed lectionary in his opinion removes the “movements” of scripture from the movements within the life of a congregation. His point is well-taken.

[4] Spong, p.3.

[5] This was the rhetorical question I repeatedly asked in last week’s sermon, taken from Romans 8. 31-39.

[6] Spong, p.3.

[7] Spong, p.4.

[8] Here in the sermon, I quoted Craig Barnes of the National Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC: “No one is ever ready to encounter Easter until he or she has spent time in the dark place where hope cannot be seen. Easter is the last thing we are expecting. And that is why it terrifies us. This day is not about springtime and girls in cute new dresses. It’s about more hope than we can handle.” (The Christian Century, March 13-20, 2002, p.16.)

[9] Taken from Servants, Misfits, and Martyrs: Saints and Their Stories, by James C. Howell, p.156.

[10] I have tried diligently to be explicit with the use of language in this sermon, but I cannot avoid the obvious play on the meanings of “believe” that I use here. I use “believe” to refer both, and contrarily to 1) a purely cognitive act, and 2) an active, existential act representative of a true, living faith.

[11] Quoted in Martin Marty’s “Context,” April 1, 2003, p.5.

[12] Howell, pp.161-162.

[13] Quoted in John Killinger’s recent book, God, the Devil, and Harry Potter.

[14] During the scripture reading, I encouraged the congregation to be aware of the number of times that Paul interwove the words life, death, and resurrection in reference to Christ and in reference to the follower of Jesus. Subtly, Paul is making my point (I think!), that life, death, and resurrection are living items of faith, to be experienced, and not just “believed.”

[15] This language is borrowed from N.T. Wright, The Interpreter’s Bible, “Romans,” p.540.

[16] The Old Testament text for today was Ezekiel 37.1-6.

[17] What I claim here is not to be interpreted as an exclusively-rendered Christianity, but as an existential reality – the world needs faith, truly lived, actively “believed.”