January 12, 2003
“Suppose We Got It Wrong?”
Riley E. Jensen

Here’s an old one that tries to pass for humor every once in a while.  The Pope died and went to heaven.  Because of his long years of faithful service in the church, God and St. Peter agreed that he should be treated with the utmost respect and given free latitude to do whatever he wanted.  So the Pope decided that he wanted to give his heavenly life to the pursuit of scholarship.

Week-after-week and month-after-month he secluded himself in the heavenly library and poured over ancient manuscripts.  One day a loud cry of distress was heard from his small office in the library.  The shout of agony seemed to shake the walls themselves as the words reverberated unmistakably down the ancient halls and out onto the golden streets, “They left out the letter ‘r’!  It’s supposed to read ‘celebrate’ not ‘celebate’.”

I feel safe in telling that story because even my friend Father Bolster down the street at St. Andrews gets a chuckle out of it.  But, of course, it raises a larger and much more serious truth for all of us in the religion business, “Suppose we got it wrong!”  And I’m not talking about just misplacing one letter but rather misunderstanding the larger purpose of our message.

It was religion writer, James Carroll, of the Boston Globe who in an op-ed column challenged us at precisely this point.  The occasion for this particular column was the publication of the Vatican document, “Dominus Jesus”.  This document (by its own admission) offers nothing new but is a reiteration of the Catholic Church’s teaching down through the ages about where salvation is to be found.

Instead of rehashing that old debate, Carroll simply moves the paradigm (as they say) and asks the tantalizing question, “Suppose we Christians have got it wrong?”  That is, suppose the purpose of Jesus is not that of salvation – of saving us from the wrath of God, but rather of revelation – of showing us that God loves us and that we belong to God?

Wow! Double Wow!! That’s enough to shake up an old guy like me.  Is it possible that the purpose of Jesus and the purpose of religion is not what was taught with such great authority.  Is it possible that we have gotten it wrong over time and have been spinning our wheels if not going backward in this race through time and eternity.  It takes a fair amount of courage to even ask such a question, but I want to invite you to suck-it-up for a few minutes and let’s take a look to see if there might be any enlightenment in shifting the paradigm from salvation to revelation as Carroll suggests.

I.                  Revelation and Not Salvation

What’s it all about if it’s not about getting saved.  Clearly, the first consequence of such a paradigm shift would be that a whole bunch of T.V. evangelists and not a few of us ministers would be out of business.  The Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards offered the image that few of us have been able to preach as forcefully, but often is in the back of our minds somewhere as we offer our more polite attempts at persuasion.  “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” he called it, and it started a revival in North Hampton, Massachusetts, and spread throughout New England like a prairie fire bringing thousands to their knees in fear and confession.

I fear that is the basis of the salvation many of us have been taught, and which has been part of our religious programming for most of our lives.  Now I’m sure that it has been watered down by sensitive pastors and caring leaders over the years.  I think that it is safe to say that most of us in this room have long since rejected a fire-and-brimstone approach to our faith.  Nevertheless, at rock bottom, that is the paradigm with which we have been working all these years.

I don’t want to burden you with too much theology but I think you will recognize the Doctrine of Substitutionary Atonement when I describe it:  God is the Judge and we are the sinners who have offended God by our sins, and therefore deserve eternal punishment.  But then Jesus enters the picture to tell God that even though the verdict has been rendered as guilty and the penalty has been issued, he will take our place, he will be our substitute; thereby, saving us from the justice of a righteous God.

Does that sound familiar?  It may not for all of us, but I know that it has been grounded into many of us so deeply that we can’t imagine any other way of relating to God.  And so the image that we carry around with us is of this forbidding God who demands his due.

It may be hard to conceive there may be another way of understanding our relationship with God.  For me there is a helpful illustration that comes out of the world of higher education.  Some of us walked into our first college class with fear and trembling (particularly if you were the first as I was in your family to attend college).  We sat down to receive a stern warning from a professor who thought he was motivating us.  “Look at the person on your right and on your left”, he ordered us.  And then came the bombshell, “One of you won’t be here next semester.”

I much prefer the motivational tactic which I understand is Stanford University’s approach to higher education as it orients its new students.  “You have made it through a rigorous admissions process and are to be congratulated” is their message to new students.  “You obviously are the kind of people who deserve to be at Stanford.  Therefore, it is our job to do everything we can to make sure you graduate.”  I don’t know about you, but I am more motivated by the second approach than the first.

I also believe that is the primary biblical approach that we find stated in our text: “God saw everything that God had made, and behold, it was very good.”  You see, it’s a different starting part.  It’s one that assumes that God don’t make no bad stuff.

II. What is Revealed?

If revelation is going to win the day over salvation, what then is revealed to us that is so transforming that it will cause us to give up our sinful ways.  Much as it may offend our polite sensibilities, the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” approach certainly gets our attention, creates sweaty palms, and motivates us to toe the line.  In the language of the day this is the “edgy” approach to a changed life which can get the job done even if it doesn’t create much joyful living.

I have been one who has long been opposed to capital punishment, and I am pleased to be finally living in a state that shares my views though I am under no illusion that everyone in this congregation would share that perspective.  But we can agree that the studies overwhelmingly indicate that there is little if any correlation between deterrence and capital punishment.  The fact of the matter is that people just don’t think much about the consequences of their actions before committing a crime.

I think that we have lived with the metaphor of the courtroom for too long which has made us feel guilty before an angry God.  Why did Christ die we ask?  And we rush to these images of punishment for our sins thinking that somehow that will motivate us to a changed life.  But there is another way of thinking about the core of our faith that James Carroll chooses to call “Revelation”.

Rather he’s asking us to focus our eyes on a faith that begins with an epiphany which of course means revelation.  And that, my friends, is what we have been about for the last month and a half.  Our faith begins with this fantastic, amazing revelation of a God who sends his Son in love.  Luci Shaw’s poem, “Descent” gives us a vision of the wondrous distance traveled from heaven to earth with the resulting picture of grace come down:

                                                  Down he came

                                                  from up --- and in

                                                  from out--- and here

                                                  from there ---

                                                  a long leap,

                                                  an incandescent

                                                  fall

                                                  from magnificent

                                                  to naked, frail, small,

                                                  through space,

                                                  between stars,

                                                  into our chill

                                                  night air,

                                                  shrunk, in infant grace,

                                                  to our damp,

                                                  cramped, earthy place

                                                  among the

                                                  shivering sheep.

                                                  And now, after all,

                                                  there he lies,

                                                  fast asleep.

You see, what has been revealed to us is clearly a story of grace.  That’s the controlling image.  That’s the kind of God we come back to.  The one of the loving Father who receives the Prodigal home.  The God of Creation who looked upon all that was made and called it good.  Sure, we sin.  Sure, we stray.  Sure, we need to be corrected.  But we are always brought back to the One who keeps the door open and who won’t let us go.

One of the most misinterpreted pieces of advice ever offered by a religious leader is Martin Luther’s daring proclamation “pecce fortiter -- sin boldly”.  As Luther put it in a letter to Philip Melancthon, “If you are a preacher of grace, then preach true grace and not fictitious grace.  If grace is true, you must bear a true and not fictitious sin.  God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners.  Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world.”

Luther’s advice was to act boldly, even though you know you are a sinner.  Be totally dependent on grace for it is grace that frees you to act.

III.           It’s About How We See God and Respond

One of the most humbling and liberating statements a person can utter is:  “I may be wrong.”  David Myers of Hope College (speaking to the Kirk Academy) reminded us of that this fall.  He made a compelling presentation of his lifetime of research on homosexuality, and then in good professorial fashion listed his conclusions which have led him to believe that homosexuality is a sexual orientation just as heterosexuality is a sexual orientation.  Leading the way was the simple statement, “I may be wrong”.  He was also quick to add but I don’t think so.  You see honesty requires us to always leave the door open to more light admitting humbly that we may be wrong.

No matter what kind of religious training we have received in or out of the church, there has always been a heavy dose of morality -- “If we do the right things, we will please God and if we don’t, we will be judged.”  There is a reason that previously absent young people begin to return to church when that first child arrives.  Every young parent feels that overwhelming sense of responsibility, and openly confesses the need to get all the help they can get.

Even the state has recognized the important role of church, synagogue, and mosque in the moral training of its people by granting us a generous tax deduction for contributing to the moral fiber of the nation.

You see, we’ve got a lot at stake here!  Suppose we got it wrong!  Suppose it is about grace and not morality.  Suppose it is about the kind of God who has been revealed to us in Christ, and not about what we can do to please and appease that God to make sure that we can be counted among the saved.

William Blake once cynically asked the question, “If our primary purpose is to save all the other people in the world, what is the purpose of all the other people in the world?”  But that kind of thinking is turned on its ear when we open ourselves to the kind of God revealed in Jesus Christ.  It’s the God of the Prodigal Son, the God who always welcomes us home no matter where we’ve been, no matter how far we have strayed, and no matter what sins we have committed.

I have a deeply committed member of this church who has been after me for several years to lay out my vision for Westminster Church.  My efforts to respond have sometimes come off as defensive and usually unsatisfactory.  The ‘Vision Thing’ is big these days, and those who don’t have a three-point program in their pocket are challenged for their effectiveness as leaders.

It may be that my reluctance is based upon the fact that like my eyeglasses that have to have their prescription changed periodically, my vision changes.  It may be the terminology, but it certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t see something in the future for this great church that draws us into making the kingdom of God more of a reality in this world.

For as clearly as Isaiah had a vision of a future -- “where the hills will be made low, the paths straight, where the wolf will lie down with the lamb, and where they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain” -- so my life has always been consumed by a vision for the church that we will become so grace-filled:

• That we will give each other the benefit of the doubt.
• That we will break down the dividing walls of hostility.
• That we will dedicate ourselves to making peace and not war.
• That we will err on the side of inclusion and not exclusion.
• That we will assume that we are all on a common journey of faith and will not try to press another into a single mold.

My touchstone for that vision has always been the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  There is no question that Jesus is also shifting the paradigm in this parable.  Jesus was challenging a group of religious leaders who knew where they were in that story.  They were represented by the elder brother whose life was governed by obedience to the rules.  He could be characterized as a good moral person, but he would never be found challenging the status quo or coloring outside the lines.

Because there is a good dose of the elder brother in each of us we want to defend him and make sure that he is not dismissed as without value.  After all, what would the world be like without us responsible, anal types who make sure that every i is dotted and every t is crossed.  But suppose we got it wrong!  We want to look at a story like this and immediately determine who is good and who is bad.

But suppose we got it wrong!  Suppose Jesus is telling us that it is really the loving Father who sets the grounds rules for living.  Suppose, just suppose that it’s not about whether you are good or bad; it’s only about whether you are forgiven!

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