Clayton Presbyterian Church
August 13, 2006
A great preacher named E. Stanley Jones told a story of a missionary serving in the jungle. He got lost with nothing around him but bush and a few cleared places. He finally found a small village and asked one of the natives if he could lead him out of the jungle. The native said that he could.
“All right,” the missionary said, “Show me the way.” They walked for hours through dense brush hacking their way through unmarked jungle. The missionary began to worry and said, “Are you quite sure this is the way? Where is the path?”
The native said, “Bwana, in this place there is no path. I am the path.”
The church is in the same position. We don’t have a path, other than Jesus. He is the one we must follow. He does not give us a map to follow. He does not lay out for us the way that our lives are going to turn out, and tell us to follow the plan. He doesn’t give us a list of the top ten principles for spiritual success to follow to eternal bliss. Instead, he says, “Come, follow me.” Jesus is the one we must follow in life and in death.
This is the truth that a group of Christians living in Nazi Germany more than 60 years ago took great pains to express, in the document called the Barmen Declaration. It is this Declaration that we are looking at for six weeks in our sermon series, entitled, “Light from Barmen.”
At that time, most Germans took it for granted that Christianity, German nationalism, and militarism were all saying the same thing. They equated patriotic sentiments with Christian truth. In a document they wrote, “We want an evangelical Church that is rooted in our nationhood.”
Because they took Christianity and German nationalism to be the same thing, they believed that the church should serve the goals of the state. In fact, the church was seen to get its authority and its mandate from the state. And Hitler himself was the head of this new church rooted in German soil, German blood, and the German nation.
However, there was a significant group, called the Confessing Church, who came together to declare their objection to these false truths. In the third article of the Declaration they wrote:
3. "Let us, however, speak the truth in love, and in every respect grow into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body is joined together." Eph. 4:15-16
The Christian Church is the community of brethren in which, in Word and Sacrament, through the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ acts in the present as Lord. With both its faith and its obedience, with both its message and its order, it has to testify in the midst of the sinful world, as the Church of pardoned sinners, that it belongs to him alone and lives and may live by his comfort and under his direction alone, in expectation of his appearing.
We reject the false doctrine that the Church could have permission to hand over the form of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day.
The Declaration states as clearly as possible the true identity of the church. It is the church of Jesus Christ, who is its Lord and its comforter. The church is not a servant of the state, and it can’t listen to the fashions of the day to get its agenda. It can do nothing else but follow Jesus, its Lord, the author and protector of its faith.
But it also goes further and articulates what the church must do, because it belongs to Jesus, and him alone. The church cannot just know in its heart that it belongs to Jesus. It must testify to this truth through its faith and obedience, with its message and the way that it members live and work together.
This is true of the church in every time and in every place. It always lives in danger of handing itself over to the society around it. In 1934, the danger that they faced was having the church serve the German state. But it must always testify to the reality that it belongs to Christ alone.
According to the Declaration,
“With both its faith and its obedience, with both its message and its order, it has to testify in the midst of the sinful world, as the Church of pardoned sinners, that it belongs to him alone.”
This is so Biblical. Over and over again the Bible tells us that our task is to bear witness, to testify to what we have seen, and to point people to Jesus Christ.
Think of this as being a witness in a court case, where you are called to testify to what you know. As the church we are each called to give an account of the truth. Part of our task is to speak the truth to the world.
Now I know, the mere mention of Christians standing up to proclaim the Truth, with a capital ‘t’, is disconcerting for many people. It conjures up images of self-righteous preachers calling down condemnation on all who don’t see the world their way. This is most often the way that committed Christians are depicted in the media.
There is much truth to the depiction of Christians who look out on the world from their tower of righteousness, with the attitude that they have found all of the answers and the rest of the world needs to come and get it.
There are various reactions to these kind of people. Some Christians are so repulsed by such smugness that they respond by putting as much distance from this camp as they can. Anything that smacks of self-righteousness they denounce. They turn their noses up at these “fundamentalist wackos,” often in their own smugness and self-righteousness. They say that they are about being inclusive and non-judgmental about all belief and actions. It becomes a badge of honor to never condemn any kind of behavior. After all, they don’t want to break the cultural taboo of “imposing your views on someone else.”
But there is something worse than this kind of self-righteousness, it is the fact that they have given up on their task. They have ceased to bear witness to the truth of God in Jesus Christ. When there is no activity that can be condemned, then there can be no sin. Thus, no need for a savior.
As a culture, we have a hard time uttering words that seem too harsh. Take education, for example. The Professional Association of Teachers (PAT) in Great Britain recently put forth an alternative to telling kids that they fail. They proposed banning the word "fail" from classrooms and replacing it with the phrase, "deferred success." Eliminating negative language, a spokesman for the group said, would help avoid the lasting educational problems associated with the labeling of pupils.
Applying this type of thinking to theology would lead us to eliminate the word "sin." Instead, we might speak of "deferred obedience," or even "delayed righteousness."
Why this is a big deal should be evident just by remembering the situation of the church in Nazi Germany. Most of the church compromised the gospel so that it would fit with the reigning ideology of the day. They began by softening their message in small ways, and then they couldn’t stand up against the regime when the issues became larger and larger. To this, the Barmen Declaration clearly stated:
“We reject the false doctrine that the Church could have permission to hand over the form of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day.”
It clearly identifies that there is a danger for each congregation in the midst of whatever culture it finds itself to give it; to try so hard to fit in with the prevailing winds of the culture and the political convictions of the day. I want to read again the verse quoted in the declaration with surrounding verses:
14 We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. 15 But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love.
Our task as those who belong to Christ is to “speak the truth in love,” to say the hard word.
On the Bill Moyer’s PBS special Genesis, panelists from diverse religious backgrounds spoke to the issues raised in the first book of the Bible. After the rest of the panel tiptoed around the problem of sin, which has beset humankind since the fall, bestselling novelist Mary Gordon got sick of all the political correctness. She said: "People just aren't right. There is something fundamentally wrong with us that we cannot fix ourselves."
This ‘something’ that is fundamentally wrong is what the Bible calls sin. And when we refuse to name it, to call it what it is, we do people a greater disservice than we do good. To tell a student that they failed the reading test is a hard word, but it is a much more loving word than letting them believe that their inability to read is no big deal. I can’t imagine trying to get along in this information-age not being able to read. Saying such a thing would condemn them to always being on the bottom of society.
This is the same issue with sin. Calling a sin a sin is a loving word. It is to say that there is a standard, which if it is not held to, will result in pain and more brokenness for oneself and for others.
How do we speak the truth in love? One answer is creatively.
Author James Michener gives us a fascinating example of creatively speaking the truth in love in his book, Hawaii.
Abner Hale, a nineteenth-century missionary, is trying to help Hawaii's nobility institute some much-needed rules. One rule he insists on is no adultery. But which adultery, they ask. "In Hawaii we have 23 different kinds of adultery."
"You what?" Abner gasps.
"And this would be our problem," they explain. "If we said simply, 'There shall be no adultery,' without indicating which kind, everyone who heard would reason, 'They don't mean our kind of adultery. They mean the other 22 kinds.' But on the other hand, if we list all the 23 kinds, one after another, somebody will surely say, 'We never heard of that kind before. Let's try it!' and things would be worse than before."
Abner Hale came up with a great solution with this felicitous wording, which the Hawaiians understood perfectly: "Thou shalt not sleep mischievously."
This was a positive word. Adultery is not morally neutral. It is condemned by God. It destroys marriages. It injures children. Saying, “Thou shall not…” is speaking the truth about morality in love. The 10 commandments are good news.
We need to take a stand against what our culture says about many things, from family to sexuality to church and state, which we will talk about next week. If we don’t, no one will.
Yet, even when we take a stand, we don’t want to appear self-righteous or bigoted. How can we not just speak the truth, but do it in love?
The answer for this is also suggested by the Declaration. It says that we are to witness to the fact that we belong to Christ, but we are to do so as pardoned sinners. We must never forget that we are sinners. I am a sinner. You are a sinner. We have all rebelled against God and done our own thing. We have not trusted him with our whole life. This sin has seeped into every crevasse of our lives and so all that we do is tainted. We must think of ourselves as sinners.
The great news is that Christ came for people just like us. Romans 5:8 says, “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” God did not send Jesus to die because we had done such a great job with our lives or the world, but because we were sinners. And the Bible goes on to say that everyone who turns away from their sinful life and turns to Christ, their sins will be forgiven! Gone. Taken care of. Psalms 103 says that they are removed from us as far as the east is from the west. They are forgiven. We must think of ourselves as those whose sins have been forgiven.
However, we are still sinners. The great temptation for Christians is that because God has given us his word announcing that we are forgiven, we can now think of ourselves as being holy and pure. And when we give in to this way of thinking, we develop a smug self-righteousness.
The task of a Christian has been likened to one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread. It is an image that captures the humility that we should have as pardoned sinners. And yet, it also depicts the fact that we do have a message. We do have good news to share with others. And it is “life and death” news.
We must always be asking, How do we do this? How do we take a stand in our culture that has jettisoned standards of right and wrong? How do we give a clear and compelling account of the gospel, without sounding like self-righteous zealots? There is no one-size-fits all answer or a roadmap. Because, remember, there is no roadmap. There is no path, because Jesus is the path. The answer is that we need to pray and ask that Jesus might lead us and guide our steps. We need to beseech him to guide our steps and to give us the right words to speak to our friends and neighbors. And then we need to do what he says and go where he follows. Perhaps, as much as anything, we need to get to know him better. We need to spend time reading the gospels so that we might gain a better understanding of just how Jesus “spoke the truth in love.” For at times he spoke some very harsh words, even words of condemnation, and yet, he was the very incarnation of true love. So, take up your Bible and read. Get to know Jesus better. Get to know the truth of the gospel better. So that you can follow him out of the jungle of confusion, and so that others might see his light and behold his truth.