"To Somebody Else"

This summer I will be guiding yet another trip to the Holy Land. Don't know how many this makes me; lost count. The timing is coincident with the re-printing of my book, Where Jesus Walked (Judson Press). I wrote the book some years ago to serve as a guide book and devotional resource for pilgrims and students traveling to the Holy Land. It will serve as our “textbook” of sorts for the trip (I know at least one college using it as well for the text for their travel-study experience this summer to Israel). We’ll spend most of our time learning about the history, culture, customs, language, and context of the New Testament. While I believe that the Bible speaks to us irrespective of whether or not we understand or appreciate the historical context and setting of the inspired author and his first readers, an appreciation of biblical history (including culture, language, politics, economics, religion, etc.) can open up the Scriptures in ways unavailable to those who ignore it.

For example, we all learned in Sunday School that Paul was a tent-maker. Luke (Acts 18) says that Paul supported himself while in Corinth by practicing his craft of tent-making along with Aquila and Priscilla, also tent-makers. But what kind of tents did he make? Were they pup tents? Boy Scout tents? Why did the Corinthians need tents? Some scholars point out that it was Luke, not Paul, who says that Paul was a tentmaker. Paul never mentions it. In this regard, is it significant that Paul uses the word “tent” (skenoo in Greek) only three times – in his second letter to the Corinthians? Now, of course you can understand something of Paul’s letters without ever asking any of these questions, but you will understand far more of who Paul was, what he was about, and what he was saying to believers (of both 1st and 21st centuries) with an understanding of and appreciation for his original context and situation. And that means that someone has to study Bible history; otherwise, the Bible’s just an inkblot in which you tend to find exactly what you’re looking for. Without knowledge of the original history of the biblical story we’re not really reading the Bible at all, we’re just reading ourselves into the Bible.

The late Clyde Francisco (who taught Old Testament at Southern Seminary for over 30 years) used to say: "We can never forget that the Bible was the Word of God to somebody else before it was the Word of God to us." That’s why, if you really love the Word of God you will take the time to ask the hard questions and do the hard work of trying to live yourself into the time, culture, and experience of biblical people. Only then will you hear the Voice of God speaking through the voice of the inspired biblical writer. And when you do, you’ll say: “You know, in what he said way back there to them, I think I heard a Word from God in there for me!”

You don’t have to travel to the Holy Land to do that (though it helps!). A good Bible dictionary or commentary or even a good Internet search engine will do just fine. While we can’t all be Bible scholars, as Christians we are all called to be Bible students.

But let’s give Paul the last word, shall we? “Study to show yourself approved to God, a workman unashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” (2 Tim. 2:15)

Easter Hope

In a recent book, The Eyes of the Heart, Frederick Buechner recounts the last conversation he ever had with his younger brother, Jamie, before the latter succumbed to cancer. They said goodbye on the telephone, each knowing it would be their last conversation, and as they were about to hang up, Buechner said to his brother: “I have a feeling we’ve not seen the last of each other.”

Our contemporary culture (both secular and religious) tends to deal with death through denial (flowers, embalming, “They’re not really dead if we keep them alive in our hearts”). Christians, however, don’t deny death; they defy it! In the face of the final foe, Christians dare to hope that “we’ve not seen the last of each other,” and that even when it comes to death, God gets the last word.

In the church year the time between Easter and Pentecost is known as Eastertide, a time when Christians reflect on the resurrection, Christ's and ours. "We've not seen the last of each other." When Christians say "Easter" that's what we mean. We Christians do not believe that some divine “spark” in Jesus was insulated from the destructive powers of death and thereby spared the ravages of mortality (the common pagan notion). Rather, we believe that Jesus died (If you ever doubted that before, Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ should have convinced you), and God brought him back again! That’s the Christian hope; not that “some things never really die,” but that God brings dead things back to life again.

And what is the image of hope in the Bible? A desert. And in the desert a stump, just a dead old stump of a tree. And from out of the side of the stump comes one little green shoot. And the word goes out: “The shoot from the stump of Jesse will save the world.”

“I have a feeling that we’ve not seen the last of each other,” he said. Some might call that wishful thinking. I call it hope, Christian hope, Easter hope, the kind of hope that believes in a God Who brings dead things to life again. The kind of hope that can see you through whatever dust and debris and death has settled over your soul right now. The kind of hope that comes only from “God knows where.”

The Purpose-Driven Church

I’m going to say something that is at once the most obvious and most neglected truth about the purpose of the church out there today; namely, that you cannot decide what the church ought to be doing until there is fundamental clarity about what the church is. But in my observation, there is anything but “clarity” about the purpose of the church. Everywhere you turn, in every book you read, someone is offering a new “bag of tricks” to save the church from extinction in a postmodern, post-Christian world. [I wish I had a nickel for every time over the past 2,000 years someone proclaimed the church “extinct!”] When you actually analyze them, however, they fall into two categories.

The first is what I would call “Church as the Vanguard of the Consumer Culture.” The mottos of the consumer culture are well known: “The customer’s always right” and “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Perhaps the best I’ve heard is the Chase Bank Card commercial in which a man lusts for a new flat-panel television and goes to a big box store to shop for one. It is not accidental that as he shops for his television in the big box store, the venue has a “sanctuary” feel about it, and a choir swells in the background with anthem-like strains: “I want it all; I want it all; I want it all; I want it now!” In such a consumer culture, some in the church have “gotten it” and have adapted their mission and strategy to the culture and its values and have re-invented “church” as sort of a “pious Wal-Mart” competing with the big box “superstore” down the street and giving the customer whatever the customer wants to keep him happy and attending. It actually can get kind of silly - if the customer wants a “low-impact aerobic worship service,” then of course we have to start one.

The second is what I call “Church as Harbinger of Human Hubris.” This is the idea that man, individually or collectively, has within his own resources the power to “fix” the world and turn it into the kingdom of heaven here and now. This is church as “Social Service Organization.” If we can just get people to cooperate and work together and vote the right way, we can bring about the kingdom of heaven right here, right now.

The problem with both of these approaches is that they deny the fundamentally eschatological (read “other worldly”) character of the church as described by Jesus in the gospels; namely, that the church is not here to pander to the world on the one hand, or to “fix” it on the other. The church is rather the Vanguard of the Kingdom of God, in the world, but not of it. That is to say, the church of Jesus Christ is a community of people who’ve caught sight of and been captured by a vision of another world he called “the kingdom of God,” a world that is not only different from this world in vision and values, but is in almost every way that matters competitive with it (see John 17:14-16).

Now, of course, those who argue for the purpose of the church as capitulating to the culture will criticize this perspective as being too “escapist” and “other worldly,” but that criticism is bogus. Until either death or Christ’s return takes us out of this world, we’re in the world; there is no “escaping” it. The question is not whether the church will be “in the world” or “out of the world;” the question is whether the church will be the church “in the world,” or will it instead be some “knock off” masquerading as the church of Jesus Christ.

And so, if Jesus is to be our guide as to the nature and character of his church, then its purpose is clear: “Go into the world and make disciples by baptizing them and teaching them,” is how he put it (Matt. 28:19-20). That the church has an essentially eschatological character is seen in the promise that follows the purpose: “And I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.”

But how do we get that kind of church in this kind of culture? It starts I think with pastors who are more motivated by a biblical vision of church than the latest church growth gimmick or mandate from whatever ecclesiocracy they happen to serve. It takes courage these days to stand before a congregation and say: “We’re in the disciple-making business, and that’s measured more by lives changed and disciplines owned and values embraced than by buildings built or bucks banked or heads counted.” A retired pastor friend who speaks with both perspective and passion about the church says that the biggest challenge facing the church today is what he calls “undiscipled disciples,” people who think they're disciples because they go to church or small group, but whose lives evince none of the disciplines (intellectual, emotional, ethical, spiritual, financial, volitional) characteristic of a disciple of Jesus Christ. They are folk who have been “inoculated” with just enough Christianity to keep them from “taking” the real thing. But if you’re only interested in the short run, that’ll do! It takes tremendous courage for a pastor to plant his life in the middle of a congregation and say: “I won’t let you off; I won’t let you go until all of us attain the ‘measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.’” If you don’t have a pastor like that, get one!

Architecture as Evangelism

In a few weeks I will be returning to Israel with about thirty or so people in tow where I will once again guide, lecture, and sermonize at biblical sites and places Where Jesus Walked.

Every time I lead this excursion (I've lost count) I take people to churches, ancient churches usually constructed over places important to faith. Usually those churches take the architectural form of a basilica. Deriving from the Greek basilikos, meaning “royal,” the early Christian basilica reflects the time when Christianity defeated the Roman persecution by (Are you ready for this?) converting the Emperor himself (Constantine). Then, adding inspiration to injury, the church took over the Emperor’s palace architecture and adapted it to the service of Christ and His Kingdom.

That strikes me as odd, living as I do in postmodern America. You see, today it’s more often the other way ‘round; namely, Constantine converts Christianity. In today’s consumer-driven, user-defined church, the culture does all the talking and the church does all the listening. “The customer’s always right” is the real mission statement of many churches these days, and the consumer church it seems is eager and willing to adapt and accommodate to whatever culture wishes (or demands) in order to win its approval and curry its favor.

But it was not always so. The architecture of our spiritual ancestors reflected their conviction that though they were “in the world,” they were never to be “of it,” and even the architecture of the church said so. The church’s shape was always cruciform, both literally and figuratively Christ’s Body. The “head” of the cross (apse) was where the altar stood. It always does. The arms (transept) reached out to the world, ready to receive the nails they knew would come. The body (nave) was where the church gathered, always remembering that the church, if it is the Church, is the Body of Christ.

Out in front of the nave was a rectangular porch called the narthex (Greek for “casket”). It was here that the curious and the cautious gathered and listened in on the goings on in this “other world” called “The Kingdom of God.” They could not enter the nave (Christ’s Body) until they were ready to submit to the discipline and demands of the Body, to live (literally, to escape the “casket” and come alive) according to the “rules of the House,” an entry that demanded a cold, wet bath Christians called “baptism.”

An interesting ritual, this baptism. They stripped them naked as the day they were born, threw them into a pool of water, half drowning them, and coming up out of the bath, they gave them a new, white resurrection robe. Then the priest led them through the narthex to the door of the nave, knocked on the door, and when it opened, led them into Christ’s Body where they gathered with brothers and sisters and received the body and blood of Christ, their first communion.

It was how the earliest Christians did evangelism. They invited the cautious and the curious to stand out in the narthex until they were willing to come inside - literally and figuratively - and become part of the Body of Christ.

Kind of makes the invitation "Come to church!" take on a whole new meaning, doesn't it!