Scripture text: Romans 3:19-28, John 8:31-36
Four years from now, we will mark the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenburg church. Five hundred years since the last great tumult of the Church. You can guess what that means. We are due for another.
Oh my, are we ever. The Church is sick. The signs of that are all around us. Membership is dropping across the board. The fastest growing religious group in our nation is the “nones,” that is they answer what religion they follow with the word “none.” The simple and ugly truth is that the Church has no place in many people’s lives. It has no place because religion does not do anything for them. Faith is meaningless to them. Why then should they participate in its institution?
And that is not a defect in them. We could stand here and deride those people for their foolishness, but that would only feed the problem not solve it. You see they find nothing here of value because so often there is nothing in our churches of value to people. That’s not their problem. That’s ours.
We’ve lost our way. That’s the simple truth of it.
It’s not hard to see when you open your eyes to the world around us. Look at what passes for Christianity in this day and age. In this corner, you have the Prosperity Gospel, those who teach that faith is a means to worldly success and riches. Just believe hard enough and just pray hard enough and God will shower you with all your hearts’ desires. Ok, God, I liked that picture on Facebook. Where’s my blessing? I prayed six times today. I want my Ferrari.
In the opposite corner you have the legalists. The Bible says...don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t dance, don’t have sex (or if you do, don’t enjoy it). Hate the gays, hate the liberals, love war, save the babies, but screw the freeloaders. Do all this or God’s going to come get you like a cosmic boogeyman. A great torrent of hatred and fear.
That’s what the church has become in this day and age. But here’s the funny thing. There ain’t done of that in the Bible. There ain’t none of that in the teachings of Jesus. And if it isn’t in the Scriptures, then where is it coming from?
The answer to that is simple. It’s coming from us. It’s coming from human beings. You want to know what the sickness of today’s church is? I’ll tell you. It’s quite simple. It’s all about us. Our desires. Our wants. Our opinions. Our hopes. Our prejudices. Our bigotry. Our anger. Our fears. Our behaviors. Our actions. Me. Me. Me. Me.
There ain’t no room for Jesus here anymore. Oh, except for one rather insidious way. We’ve turned him into a rubber stamp of sorts. The Prosperity Gospel is just greed. But we’ve stamped Jesus all over it and that makes it ok. Fundamentalism is just bigotry and hate, but we’ve stamped Jesus all over it and that makes it okay. This is fun. This is easy. Take anything wrong with the world today and do that. The sex abuse scandal of the Roman church. Well, we just stamped Jesus all over it and that makes it okay.
The funny thing is, none of this is new. It’s the same crap we’ve been doing for thousands of years. The Crusades were just murder, but we stamped Jesus all over them and that made them okay. The Inquisition was torture, but hey, we stamped Jesus all over it and that made it okay. Slavery was the brutal exploitation of human beings, but again, we stamped Jesus all over it and everything was okay.
We keep turning Jesus into an excuse, a rationale, a justification for things that he would have no part of. We think sin stops being sin just so long as we stamp Jesus all over it. It doesn’t. Sin remains sin no matter what pious justifications we invent to excuse it all away. You can’t lie to God, but boy do we love lying to ourselves.
And if that’s what we’re doing, lying to ourselves it’s not faith, my friends, because faith is based on truth. What it is instead is idolatry and the idol we worship is us.
In the 5th Century, during the first of those great turmoils, the church had become infected with the idolatry of me. It took the form of a heresy known as Pelagianism, which taught that salvation is all about what we can do for ourselves. My efforts, my works, my charity, that’s what saves me. St. Augustine turned to the Scriptures and found what it really says. Turns out, it’s all about what Jesus did.
When Martin Luther pounded those theses to the door of the church, the church had become infected again with the idolatry of me. The Pope cared only for temporal power. It was all about him and he got the whole world to go along with him by the wonderful power of that Jesus-rubber-stamp. Give me money for my mistresses, because Jesus said so. Feed my ambitions, because Jesus wants you to. Well, Martin Luther read what Jesus said in the Scriptures and he didn’t find any of that in there.
A lot of people are going to be real disappointed to find out what’s really in that book they claim to follow, but never read. Greed? Greed is condemned in the Bible. It’s teachings are clear that what we are given we are given to use for others. Hate? There is no hated in what Jesus teaches. Yes, sin is condemned, but not the sinner. Sinners are forgiven and even welcomed by Christ. There are countless examples of that. Salvation? It comes through the grace of God and by nothing else. It’s his call who is to be saved. It’s not up to you or me. Not our own. All the devotion, piety, and following the rules mean nothing when it comes to that.
And it’s not up to us concerning the salvation of others. For all we know, God could say “Hey, you know those people over there. They’re okay. Let’s let them into heaven too.” If “those people” are made up of people we think don’t deserve it, too bad. It’s not your call. It’s not my call. It’s God’s call. His choice and his alone.
If faith is about you, you’re doing it wrong. If it’s about Jesus, the real Jesus that you find in God’s holy word and not the rubber-stamp-Jesus that just tells you everything about you is okay, then you’re on the right track. That’s where the Church needs to be. We need to find the real Jesus again. The Jesus of the Bible. The Jesus who comes to us in Word, bread, wine, and water. The Jesus who loved the whole world (and everyone in it) enough to die on a cross for its sake and then rose again on the third day. The Jesus who calls his disciples, us, to proclaim his truth in word and deed to all the world. The Jesus who calls us to service and not to judgment. The Jesus who challenges all of us to be more than we are now.
We are the Church, my friends. This moment is ours and the new Reformation must begin with us and with all our fellow Christians. That title has to mean something again. It has to mean that people see who Jesus truly is through us. They see his love through us. They see his sacrifice through us. It’s got to stop being about us, because when it is that’s all the world sees. We can’t get in the way anymore. The world can’t afford that and neither can we. Amen.
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