The Park Road Pulpit

Our most recent nomination for beatification (sainthood) in Park Road Baptist Church is Mac Cameron. Mac was witty and wonderful. In her mid-nineties, she died full of life. Sometime last year, Mac invited Amy and me to bring some music, especially a little of Amy’s “Loretta Lynn” to Sunrise Assisted Living. (Mac had specifically requested, “Don’t come home a drnkin’ with lovin’ on your mind…” which Amy, of course, dutifully, twangfully, obliged.)

We had arrived there just after noon, and Mac had proudly introduced her pastors around that room of lively faces. (I mean no disrespect here, but there were no “lively” faces there!) We have no desire to promote a “singing preachers” routine, but there are some invitations you simply cannot refuse. As the closest thing to a queen we knew, we took Mac’s gig as a veritable “Command Performance.”

We sang much of our old repertoire: love songs from years gone by, an appearance from Loretta, and then the expected (or so we thought expected) transition into the sacred. Most of the sacred pieces we sing for senior adult crowds go back for more than twenty years, many having their genesis in Friday night dates at the piano in my parents’ home.

From the outset Amy and I had noted the certain lack of response from our audience. With the exception of Mac, who delighted in clapping and patting her foot, the rest of the crowd shared all the emotional enthusiasm of a tent full of Jews in a Friday night revival meeting in August. We would quickly learn that they did so, for good reason!

Following our medley of “Jesus is the Answer,” a gospel tune by Andre Crouch and the Disciples, and “Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus,” one grey-haired woman (who had so rudely whispered throughout our performance) raised her hand and offered, “Most of us here are Jews. Do you know any Jewish songs!?”

I have told you this story before. Forgive the repetition, but it’s the best way I knew to begin this sermon. In that moment we were both embarrassed: We should have known these were Jewish people… Singing about Jesus to the Jews… How insensitive!? But I got home and thought again. “What did they really expect us to sing about? No, we don’t know any Jewish songs (not even any Jewish hymns) – we’re Baptist ministers, for crying out loud!”

We live in a dangerous world. “Global” used to be an adjective of massive proportion. “Global” now describes a village. When Mac Cameron was a girl, China was an exotic place, far, far away. Traveling to the orient was the trip of a lifetime, an adventure requiring weeks. Today we worry that the Chinese executive who contracted SARS yesterday will bring the epidemic to New York City (or to Charlotte) tomorrow.

Steve Shoemaker of Myers Park Baptist offers a weekly benediction which claims, “The world is now too dangerous for anything but truth, and too small for anything but love.”[1] And so it is. In this kind of world, Baptists need to sing more about Jesus, not less.

As a southerner and a Baptist, “the Jews” were distant strangers to me, and I encountered Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, only in the bizarre tales of “foreign missionaries.” Today, we work in the same offices. We carpool our children to the same schools. We serve in the same military. The International House of Charlotte identifies 85 different non-English-speaking, non-Christian religious organizations within our own community.

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth. The world is too small for anything but love. And the followers of the “Prince of Peace”[2] do need to sing more and not less. But this is not Mac Cameron’s world, anymore. Staking exclusive claims, whether in politics, economics, or religion, will only make it more dangerous. The tragedy of 9/11 and all its fallout have made this clear, because exclusive language seeks to convince us only that this global village is too small, and too-much filled with strangers, infidels and enemies.[3]

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a leader in Islamic studies and comparative religion, observed:

The traditional form of Western scholarship in the study of other [religious traditions] was that of an impersonal presentation of an “it.” The first great innovation in recent times has been the personalization of [other] faiths observed, so that one finds a discussion of a “they”. . . The culmination of the process [will be] when “we all” are talking with each other about “us.”[4]

Charles Kimball was at Harvard University in 1975 studying and living in the Center for the Study of World Religions. In his recent book, When Religion Becomes Evil, Dr. Kimball recalls that time of growth and interaction: “It was a stimulating and congenial context in which to explore issues of particularity and pluralism.”

“Particularity” simply refers to individuality, the uniqueness of people and people groups. Theologically speaking, we can talk about the “particularity” of God’s work in the world. As Christians, we affirm our knowledge of God, we believe in the love of God, we affirm the work and will and way of God in and through a particular person, namely, the first-century Jewish carpenter known by the name, Jesus Christ. In such audacious particularity, we dare to affirm, with the Apostle Paul that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world.”[5] (Could God actually work in a non-particular way?) The discipleship of Jesus Christ is our particular vision. Our particular claim. Our particular faith.

In a world of suicide bombers and weapons of mass destruction, of SARS and AIDS, a world where the excesses of CEO’s and professional athletes continue to rise, along with the excesses even of middle class America, while our own infant mortality rate stands above that of any major industrialized nation in the world, a world where teenage girls bruise each other with baseball bats and humiliation, and call it initiation – in this kind of crazy, mixed-up, dangerous village, we need to proclaim the name of Jesus, and his message of peace, forgiveness, love: “I have come that you might have life!”[6]

The very particular vision of Christian faith, faith in God, in the name of Jesus, does bring health, healing, salvation.[7] But it need not be a limiting vision. It should not be an exclusive claim. It must not be an alienating faith.

Advocates of a pluralist position see Christianity neither as the only means to salvation nor as the fulfillment of other religious traditions. The pluralist position affirms the viability of various paths. John Hick, perhaps the most prominent advocate of this approach, called for a “Copernican revolution” in theological thinking thirty years ago.[8] Extending the analogy from astronomy, Hick argued for a theocentric (God-centered) approach, a “shift from the dogma that Christianity is at the centre to the realization that it is God who is at the centre, and that all religions . . . serve and revolved around [God].[9]

Wow! No one ever said anything like that to me as a young person, struggling to understand why the God I was coming to know in the name of Jesus Christ could send all the Buddhists and all the Jews to Hell. Instead, in those years I memorized John 14.6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” I also memorized and understood today’s text exclusively, “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.”[10]

What will we proclaim to our dangerous world, an exclusive particularity or the pluralism of what the Letter of First Peter calls God’s “multi-colored grace”?[11]

To answer that question I want to tell you briefly two things. First, I want to tell you why I am Christian. And then, I’d like to tell you why I am the greatest father on earth.

First, and foremost, I am a Christian by birth. My father is a Baptist minister. My mother studied at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and is a virtual picture-girl for the Women’s Missionary Union! Everyone I knew in my childhood was “a Christian.” The nation I loved, the laws, the land, the liberty – the very air I breathed was baptized in Christian religion. I was quite simply, born Christian.[12]

But I also made that choice. Conscious, in my developing mind, I chose to become a follower. The way I understood it, I experienced the “transforming power of Jesus,”[13] and baptism marked my desire for this faith – to live this faith, to share this faith.

Today, I still make that conscious decision. I have been challenged beyond my childish faith by competing philosophies, conflicting ambiguities, continuing embarrassments of poor theology, and I’m still trying to sort-out the emotionalism of my youthful faith from that which is real and true, but more than ever I am committed to believing, belonging, becoming – a follower of Jesus.

I am a Christian because, just like Peter, I have come to believe there is transforming power, the power of healing, the power of salvation in his name. In him we can “become in character who we already are in relationship.”[14] In that name, there is power to love the un-loveable, to challenge the status quo, to persevere against all odds.

I am Christian today because I claim without reservation the startling credo of my systematic theology professor, “If I did not believe in Jesus, I would not believe in God.”[15] Jesus is the particularity that gives my faith any understandable and practical value.

I am Christian because I was born Christian, and because I continue to choose this particular name in relating to God. The reason I am the best father in the world? I am the best father in the world because I have two boys who absolutely believe.[16] In their world, there is no other. Their claim is heart-felt. Their claim is honest. Their claim is all-embracing. Their claim is true. But their claim is not a competing claim of an absolute truth – for in your house there is also one who is “the greatest.” I am the greatest father in the world because the language of faith and love, and the devotion of two developing young minds makes it so.[17]

Wesley Ariajah, a Methodist minister from Sri Lanka, suggests that the only way to understand today’s text and to move forward in creating a world of mutual respect instead of mutually assured destruction is to “untangle the notion of absolute truth from confessional statements uttered in the language of faith and love.” Today’s text “derives [its] meaning in the context of faith and [has] no meaning outside the community of faith.”[18]

Katie Oates’ parents were visiting from Montana this week, and following Wednesday night’s discussion, we talked of Faith and Truth, and water color painting. Dr. Jack Oates, a Presbyterian minister, is an eager student of beauty, and in his painting, he is learning ever more – even about faith. He has come to understand that it serves no purpose in painting to mix the colors before putting them on the canvas. All you get is a smeared, runny, ill-defined, one-color mess. Likewise, watering down our own beliefs, moderating our own claims of faith in an attempt to be respectful of competing religious claims, neither does justice to the particular beauty of our faith nor to any other. On the contrary, this dangerous canvass of God’s world and ours is made beautiful when each color stands alone, claiming, boldly, its own Truth, yet, in harmony with all other colors, adding value, depth, richness, meaning to the vision that God is continually unfolding in a multi-color world.

Park Road Baptist Church: The world is too dangerous for anything but Truth and too small for anything but Love – so take the name of Jesus with you![19]

[1] “May the Lord Bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. May God give you grace never to sell yourself short; grace to risk something big for something good. Grace to remember that the world is now too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love. So may God take your minds and think through them, may God take your lips and speak through them; may God take your hearts and set them on fire. Through Jesus the Savior. Amen.” Used by H. Stephen Shoemaker, Myers Park Baptist Church, and adapted from a benediction by William Sloane Coffin.

[2] See, Isaiah 9.6. Christians view this prophecy as fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

[3] The obvious and ironic point is that Jesus changed all of this, claiming even that we should “love our enemies” (Matthew 5.43-44), and challenging the traditional understanding of our “neighbor” (Luke 10.29 ff).

[4] Quoted in When Religion Becomes Evil, by Charles Kimball, p.13.

[5] “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.” 2 Corinthians 5.17-19

[6] John 10.10.

[7] The Greek word used in the text (“There is salvation in no one else…”), is sozo, the word traditionally rendered “salvation,” but it is also used explicitly to mean “healing.”

[8] Copernicus first observed that the earth was not the center of the universe. This was a world-changing discovery, not only in science, but also for the Church, which had long held that the earth, and humans on the earth, were the very center of God’s concern for the entire cosmos.

[9] Kimball, pp.205-206.

[10] Both of these references are quoted here in the text of the KJV, which was what I memorized as a child.

[11] “Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received” 1 Peter 4.10. Here Peter is not talking about the inclusive or exclusive nature of salvation in Christ, but of our treatment of one another. The nature of God, however, is revealed, a nature which has most clearly been revealed to me in Jesus Christ. I also believe, however, that God’s grace is revealed by other means, or in keeping with today’s theme, “by other names.”

[12] Horace Bushnell, a proponent of the early twentieth-century “Social Gospel” movement, has said that children should be raised knowing nothing other than being Christian. This has been my experience.

[13] I am alluding here to my last sermon, “Life, Death, Resurrection – The Sequel.” The quote is from David Burrell of the University of Notre Dame: “Part of the reason [that Western religious faith so often alienates others], I believe, is that the transforming power of our original revelation – be it Torah or Jesus – is no longer available to many of us. Muslim piety and practice can help open our eyes to God’s real presence among us.” (Quoted in Martin Marty’s “Context,” April 1, 2003, p.5.)

[14] Charlie Milford, the Pastor Emeritus of Park Road Baptist Church defines salvation by these words.

[15] Frank Tupper, now of Wake Forest Divinity School.

[16] I couldn’t help but think here of the statement from my Easter sermon, “I do not believe in resurrection. Well, not fully. At least, not yet.” (“Nothing Can Separate Us: The Transformation of Brokenness”) The statement was meant to connote a sense of “existentialism” in our believing – that believing is not just something that happens in our heads, but something that must be lived. Since that sermon, I have discovered the word “be-live” to convey more of the meaning that I intend.

[17] This insight is not original; it comes from Wesley Ariajah, also quoted, below

[18] Kimball, p.69.

[19] The words of the hymn are by Lydia Baxter: “Take the name of Jesus with you, Child of sorrow and of woe; It will joy and comfort give you, Take it then where’re you go. Precious name, O how sweet! Hope of earth and joy of heav’n; Precious name, O how sweet! Hope of earth and joy of heav’n.”

[20] Diana Eck, quoted by Charles Kimball, p.207: “Through the years I have found my own faith not threatened, but broadened and deepened by the study of Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Sikh traditions of faith. And I have found that only as a Christian pluralist could I be faithful to the mystery and the presence of the one I call God. Being a Christian pluralist means daring to encounter people of different faith traditions and defining my faith not by its borders but by its roots.”