I do not make it a habit to review or recommend books, but reading this book by Rachel Held Evans has made me think that it might well be time to think of changing that policy.
Searching for Sunday is the story of one woman's journey from her beginnings in the American Evangelical Church tradition through doubt, crises of faith, rejection, despair and hope. It is a very contemporary story of Christian life that has many parallels in the lives of various people I have known. The subtitle of the book is, "Loving, leaving and finding the church," and I just find that there are so many of us who are living in the very difficult and challenging space between those three verbs.
While Evan's book ventures into a number of areas of doctrine, theology and especially sacramental practice, it is at it's heart the story of a personal journey of disruption of what was once taken for granted, the loss and despair that come with that, and an unrelenting faith that prompts her to hold onto what the church can be and not fall into despair. Evan's very personal journey will definitely find many parallels in the lives of Christians everywhere.
So here is my recommendation: You need to read this book if...
You are someone who is completely committed to the church as it is.
Perhaps you are completely happy with the church as it is. If that is who you are, you need to understand what many people in the church and on the margins of the church are struggling with these days. I'm not sure that there is anyone out there who can show it to you in as compelling and as interesting way as Rachel Held Evans does.
You are someone who is wavering
Maybe you are struggling with the church. Reading Searching for Sunday will reassure you that you are not alone. Evans may even help you to find words for some of the dissatisfaction that you are feeling. It is very helpful to follow in the path of someone who is struggling with the things that you are struggling with.
You are giving up
Maybe you've had it with the church. Maybe you just find that it is easier to stay away than it is to deal with the things that cause you frustration, pain or annoyance. I think that you will find this book especially meaningful. Evans can be brutally honest about the flaws of the church, but here is the amazing thing about her writing: the grace of God just continues to shine through. Even when the church had let her down completely, she just can't stop finding evidence of God's grace and love. She continues the conversation with the church despite disappointment. I find this very inspiring.
She may be brutally honest, but I've got to say that this is one book that gives me more hope for the future of the church than any that I have read in a while. That alone makes it worth the read.
o you remember the first time you read this morning’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew? I sure do. I don’t know how old I was, but I must have been fairly young when I came across it because I remember finding it pretty darn exciting.
When I read that Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt… if you say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done,” I was all ready to go. Jesus’ instructions couldn’t have been more clear. All I had to do was believe – I mean be really certain without even doubting a little tiny bit that I could do it – and I would have fig trees and mountains and pieces of chalk and blackboard erasers flying through the air in no time. Ha, ha! People couldn’t help but notice me then! (I was a bit of a shy and retiring child.)
Did I try? You bet I did! Come on, admit it, you tried it too, didn’t you? I remember sitting there and
staring at some random object and trying to convince myself that if I only really believed that I could do it and especially banished all doubt that I couldn’t, it would happen.
It never did. And, at the time, I just figured that it was because somewhere deep inside I had some little tiny grain of doubt and that is why I never succeeded. It was only in later years that I began to consider that maybe my problem was that I never really understood what Jesus was trying to say at all.
I have done a lot more reflection on what Jesus had to say on the topic of faith since those days and I have learned a few things. What we often don’t realize is that the meanings of the words, “believe” and “faith” have actually changed a great deal over the years.
Our modern English word, believe, comes to us from an Old English word “geleafa” which means to hold something or someone dear. The second syllable, “leafa” actually comes from the same Germanic root as the word love. So, in its origins, belief was much more about giving your heart to something than it was about being certain about it. It didn’t have anything to do with evidence or intellectual choice. It was about your heart’s commitment.
That is a far cry from how people use the word today. In fact, people often use “I believe” to explain the opinions that they hold or the facts that they hold to be true. It is primarily an intellectual activity, not really an action of the heart.
The other word that we use to talk about belief (and especially religious belief) in English is faith. That word didn’t come into English from German but rather from Latin via French. The original Latin word was fides thesame Latin root that we find in words like fidelity and fiduciary. So faith, at least the original word for it, doesn’t mean the act of accepting certain opinions or ideas, it refers to the choice to trust in someone or in something like a bank or an institution.
So both the word believe and the word faith came to English with the sense of giving your heart to or placing your trust in someone. And in the language that Jesus spoke and the language of the New Testament, the same concept was in mind. But somehow today both words mean something quite different. Today we mostly use them to talk about intellectual opinions or convictions.
Even when we talk about religious faith, we generally talk about it in terms of the things that we believe about God, about Jesus, the Bible or other spiritual matters. But this kind of intellectual assent or conviction was not really what Jesus was talking about. For him, believing was about giving your heart and not merely your assent or opinion to God.
I have often spoken to people who are concerned that they can’t be Christians or that they aren’t good Christians because they can’t bring themselves to be completely certain about at least some of the things that people in churches believe. I mean, there are lots of reasons to doubt some of these teachings of the church. It is not as if anyone can offer you conclusive proof that Jesus was born to a virgin or rose bodily from the dead or stilled a mighty storm with a few words. So, yes, it is not uncommon for people to struggle with specific beliefs.
But someone who struggles with or even rejects some specific thing that the church has traditionally believed is not necessarily someone who does not or cannot have faith. Faith as Jesus understood it and proclaimed it was not a matter of believing or accepting certain things on an intellectual level. It was about giving your heart to someone – the old sense of believing in Old English. It was about being willing to trust someone as the origin of the word faith means.
So, while it may matter to a certain extent what you believe about God or about Jesus or about various points of doctrine, none of that matters anywhere near so much as the question of where you put your heart and in whom you place your trust. And, you know what? It is possible to love God even though you are not entirely sure of some of the things you believe about God. It is possible to trust Jesus without having everything that you believe about Jesus sorted out in your mind. Thank God it is. Otherwise, I’m convinced, a lot of us wouldn’t be here.
But don’t just take my word for it. Take the word of the Letter of James. James writes this to the church, “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder.” Do you realize what James is saying here? He is taking what is for us, one of the key tests of faith, the question, “Do you believe that God exists,” or “Do you believe that there is one God,” and he is saying: “Big deal! Who cares if you believe that God exists? I can show you demons who believe that.”
So Jesus isn’t looking for you to hold certain opinions or to accept certain propositions. What is he looking for? He wants you to trust him. But that also implies one more thing. James writes this in his letter, “But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.” You see, trusting someone, really trusting someone implies that you will do something about your trust.
Let me give a simple example. Say that I have this chair here. It is a good chair, a solid chair. I can tell you all kinds of wonderful things about this chair. But here’s the thing: if I stand here saying wonderful things about this chair, even talking about how sure I am that it is sturdy and able to hold me up, does that mean that I have faith in the chair. Not really. The one thing that would demonstrate that I have faith in the chair would be that I actually do something about what I profess to believe about the chair. I need to actually sit in it.
Well, that is basically what James is saying about having faith in God. It doesn’t really matter what you say you believe about God. Professing to be certain of all kinds of things about God doesn’t prove you have faith. The only thing that would prove that would be if you took what you profess to believe about God and did something with it – if you chose to put the things that you profess to believe about God into practice by putting your trust in God and doing some good in the world. That is what James means when he says that faith without works is dead and amounts to nothing.
In the church we have actually reduced and impoverished the meaning of the word faith. We have made it to mean only that you must accept certain propositions or ideas about God, Jesus and other things. What’s more, you are not really expected to do anything about those propositions – just believe them. That was never what Jesus was looking for when he was looking for faith in the people that he met.
So let’s return to that saying of Jesus that I started with this morning. What did Jesus mean when he said, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt… if you say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done”? He was saying that you need to have faith. But faith, as we have been saying, is not a matter of being certain about things as I thought in my youth. It is a matter of trust.
And it is not even a matter of how much you trust. This same saying of Jesus comes to us in the Gospel of Luke in a slightly different form. In Luke, Jesus says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” That is kind of the lite version of the saying because it doesn’t just go from moving a mountain to a mulberry tree but also talks about the faith that does the moving as a very small thing – as a little, tiny mustard seed. So clearly the amount of faith that you have doesn’t matter.
So what does matter in faith? Only one thing really: where you choose to place your trust in action. I mean, you can see that in my example with the chair. If I find another chair that is all old and rickety and falling apart, that only has three legs left and I tell you that I have all kinds of faith in that chair – tons of faith – and so I plunk myself down on it, will that chair hold me up? Probably not. I end up sprawled on the floor.
But then I find another good and sturdy chair. I look at it and see that it is well-made but because, you know, last time I trusted a chair it let me down, I don’t have near as much faith in this chair. In fact, I am so lacking in faith that I am unwilling to sit on it. Will it hold me up? No, because I am not sitting on it. But if I have a little tiny bit of faith – faith, say, as small as a mustard seed – but enough trust to persuade me to actually do something and sit on the chair, will the chair hold me up? Of course it will, because it is a good chair! So we see what matters is not how much faith you have but that you actually choose to place your trust in a trustworthy thing.
That is the kind of faith that Jesus talked about all the time. And it is a kind of faith that can move mountains, but not by me being certain and sure and having lots of it. The only way that faith can move mountains is when it persuades you to place your trust in the one who made the mountains in the first place.
So that is faith as we must begin to understand it and as we must practice it. Your assignment this week is to actually use faith. I want you to move a mountain in your life. I’ll bet you’ve got one. I’ll bet you’ve got some great big problem or barrier in your life or in the life of someone that you love that you have been trying to move. Can you picture that mountain? You know what it is.
I’ll bet you have been trying to move it with your own strength or determination. But it hasn’t worked and it won’t move that way. Here’s what I want you to do this week: give up on moving that mountain in your life by your own determination, and chose instead to see it moved by faith.
How do you do that? By telling God that you don’t have it in you to move it but that you will trust God to move it instead. Now that can be a scary thing to say because you are leaving the biggest problem in your life in someone else’s hand. What if he doesn’t move it in the way that you think he should? What if he moves it to a place you don’t want it to go?
Well, that it how you know we’re talking about real faith because it means that you have to trust God for all of that – give up control of it and trust God. It means giving your heart to God not just your understanding. And I’m not saying that God will move your mountain in the way that you think it needs to be moved. You may be surprised at what he does with your mountain.
But I promise you this, if you choose to trust God for one of the biggest mountains in your life, you won’t regret it because you will be choosing to place your confidence in the one who will never let you down.
Last night we held our first session at St. Andrew's Hespeler to start to work through the document, "Body, Mind and Soul: Thinking together about human sexuality and sexual orientation in The Presbyterian Church in Canada." I must say that I found the session a little bit hard to prepare for and that I didn't know what to expect going in.
The discussions that we held together were held in an intentional atmosphere of openness and confidentiality so that people could be able to speak freely and not fear that their words or views would be shared. So I am not at liberty to share any particular words or views expressed. But I know that a lot of people who are leading these discussions are having a hard time figuring out how to do them well. So I would like to at least share a few observations and insights that might be helpful to others who are planning or preparing.
1) Questions of why we are doing this
I thought that I had a pretty good understanding going in of why we were going through this exercise. The General Assembly is going through a process of discerning where the Holy Spirit might be leading us to change (or not change) our approach to issues around human sexuality and needs congregations like our own to participate in that discernment. In order to help we need to go through a process like this. But a discussion of that sense of purpose was important. Perceptions of what we were doing were not necessarily shared.
There was suspicion expressed by some. There were feelings that the study had been written with a bias towards certain conclusions. There were feelings expressed that the decision had already been made and that this process was simply designed to get us to that foregone conclusion. These views did come out of one particular perspective on the issues, but I can well imagine that, in some other context, people coming from the opposite point of view might well feel the same thing.
A discussion of bias and expectations was therefore necessary. I appreciate all of the work that went into this document and how well it is done given the time constraints on it. I also don't think that it is possible to create such a document without some bias seeping through from time to time. Given that there are multiple authors, I expect that different biases will come through at different points. I think we can acknowledge that without getting hung up on it.
As to being able to come up with something coherent to feed back to the national church committees, I must say that I cannot see at this time how we may come up with a consensus response. Pray for us!
2) People prepared and engaged!
I planned to start by dealing with the section on Scripture. I made pages 14 to 37 available to people on the previous Sunday to read in preparation and also directed them to the downloadable document. I also had pages 89 - 97 printed up for our first session as a handout.
I had my doubts and questions about whether people would read that pages in preparation. None of it was necessarily very easy reading, but they all did it. Some acknowledged that they had to read it in small bites but they were all committed enough to do it. Always a good sign.
I started by going through the listening circles group guidelines (pp. 87,88). A very good place to start. In retrospect, I likely should have printed that up too, or put it up in a poster format.
It took some time to get people engaged, but once we got going, engagement was good, respectful, truthful and positive. Some did not speak up. I may need to check in with a few to see if they are looking for someone to help them to find those openings to speak or if they just need us to respect their silence.
3) My role as a leader
I struggled and expect I will continue to struggle in my role as a leader. My issue is that I do have opinions and, even more important, convictions around these issue. I also feel that I have a right and a duty to share those convictions that have come out of thoughtful reflection and scriptural study. But I am also aware that, whenever I speak, there is this danger that it will be received as the authoritative and definitive answer or opinion which may cause others to feel that their opinions or approaches are being squelched. Because of that, I felt that I maintained a light touch on moderation and leadership. I do not regret that and feel that it was the most helpful approach at least this time.
4) Our progress
We specifically discussed Leviticus 18:22 and Genesis 19:4-8. We discussed related issues like the Holiness Code, cultural assumptions around homosexual activity in the ancient Mediterranean world, the dimensions of hospitality and the larger Biblical context of the Sodom story.
We branched off (necessarily, I think) into discussions about the assumptions that people were bringing to the table. There was certainly diversity in the approaches.
I used only one of the supplied discussion questions. Other prompts to continuing discussion were not a big problem.
We ended after about and hour and a half (but before running out of steam) by deciding that next week we would try to deal with the passages from the New Testament Letters and the whole Normal vs. Normative discussion. (p. 92). I feel that I have a bit of a better handle on how to prepare for that.
5) This will not change anyone's mind.
I went into this saying that I don't expect that, ultimately, we will all agree about what to do and that it is okay that we don't agree. This was certainly confirmed. Even more important, I think that this idea was embraced by everyone. There were attempts, of course, to get other people to appreciate someone's point of view. There were critical discussions about where certain approaches would lead us and what the consequences might be. But everyone could respect where people were coming from.
One thing that is clear coming out of this discussion is how very segmented everyone is around these issues. Everyone -- conservatives, traditionalists, progressives or whatever you want to call people -- tends to read and follow only those sources of thought and learning that confirm the point of view that they already have. This can lead to one person stating something that is, in their mind, an established fact while someone also cites a totally contradictory datum as an established fact. This is a big issue in all kinds of ways for the church -- perhaps an inescapable effect of our segmented information age.
Nevertheless, none of that means that this exercise is fruitless. The dialog is important, engaging and worthwhile. It was also uplifting and I am very thankful for that.
ello, my name is Scott and I am a sinner." Of all the lessons that the Christian church could learn from the world around us, I suspect that the greatest one would be to borrow that phrase from organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous and adapt them to the challenges that we face living as Christians in the world.
Think for a moment about how that phrase functions within an AA meeting. The most important part of any meeting is when the various members stand up and share from their own experience – stories about their personal struggles with addiction and the problems that have come out of that struggle for themselves and the people that they love.
But before they get into any of that, every single one of them introduces himself or herself as an alcoholic or an addict. They all say it and that includes both the person who has not had a single drink in fifteen years and the person who was out binge drinking a few nights ago. It is a question, not p
rimarily at least, of what they have done so much as a question of who they are. I suspect that the church would be much farther ahead if we would learn to think of what we call our basic problem, sin, along the same lines as how Alcoholics Anonymous thinks about addiction.
But that isn’t going to be so easy. One of the big problems we have is our whole language about sin. In fact, I would suggest that our understanding of this word that is an essential part of our Christian faith is sorely lacking.
What is sin? Sinis a part of the vocabulary of the world around us. Think about the last time you heard someone use the word outside of the context of the church. They probably said something like, “This cake is sinful,” or “Chocolate is my favourite sin.” And, when it is used like that, what does the word mean? It is usually a way of speaking about something that is extremely desirable, that you probably should not have or do, but that you fully intend to indulge in anyway. If you want to sell a product, sinful is actually a very good way to describe that product.
So that is how the world around us uses the word. I’m sure that you all understand that such a meaning is pretty far from what the Bible means when it uses the world. But, I would argue, when we use the word inthe church, we don’t do all that much better.
In the church, we mostly talk about sin in the plural, and refer to all of the little things that we do wrong. (Though, of course, we are usually much happier to talk about the little things that other people do wrong.) For many Christians, that is all that a concern for sin is about: counting up all the little things (or sometimes big things) that mostly other people do wrong.
The problem with that is not that such things don’t matter; they do. We all regularly get things wrong and we all have to deal with the fallout from that: the people we hurt, the damage we do to ourselves and to the world around us. But that, as far as the Bible is concerned, is only the smallest part of our problem with sin.
The Apostle Paul explains what the real problem with sin is in his letter to the Romans: “I do not do the good I want,” Paul starts, “but the evil I do not want is what I do.” He is simply saying that he has problems with the bad things that he does and his failure to do good things. So, at this point, he is taking about what we usually talk about when we discuss sin.
But note where he goes from there: “Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” He just took this whole concept in a very different direction. Though he has acknowledged that there are problems with his actions, he is actually saying that his actions are not really where the problem lies. There is something else – something within him – that is the real source of his misery and failure. And Paul wants us to focus, not on those individual actions, but on the internal thing that is causing them.
That is what the Bible is actually talking about when it talks about sin: an attitude, something that we carry around within us that gets in the way of us being who we want to be and that stops us from doing what we really want to do. The basic attitude that causes us so much trouble is sometimes called pride, but that is not necessarily the best word to use. Pride, after all, can be a good thing. There is nothing wrong with having pride in your worthwhile achievements or in being proud of your friends and the people you love.
No, the attitude that gets us in trouble is more than just your everyday pride. It is what the Greeks called hubris, an attitude that puts yourself and your own needs and desires ahead of everything else – both what is human and what is divine. It is an attitude, above all, where you try and build yourself up by taking others down.
In our relationship with God, hubris means that we try to put ourselves in the place of God because we think we know best. That is the sin that is described in the garden at the beginning of the Bible. Adam and Eve’s sin was not that they disobeyed an order and ate the fruit anyways, it was that they sought to take the place of God by becoming masters of good and evil.
But it is in our relationships with other people that we see the destructive power of hubris most often. This comes out of a basic human assumption (a false assumption by the way) that honour and self-worth are a zero sum game.
That might take a bit of explaining. A zero sum game is a system that is closed with no additional value coming into it. A good example of a zero sum game is the actual game of Poker. There is only so much money in a poker game – all of the money that all of the players combined bring to the table. That means that the only way that you can win at poker is by taking other people’s money. In other words, you can only win if other people lose. That’s all a zero sum game is.
We all understand zero sum games because they are simple and straightforward. I win, you lose is a pretty simple concept. That’s why we often assume that everything in life works like a zero sum game, even though it is clearly not true. For example, we assume that things like budgets (government budgets, family budgets and church budgets) work like that. We assume that there is only a fixed amount of money coming in and so we make cuts and assume that that is what will balance the budget.
It usually doesn’t work because there are some things that you cut and it means that you have less money coming in. (For example, a church might say that it would be cheaper to have services every other week without realizing that such a move would probably also reduce givings in half or even more.) And then, of course, there are also things that, if you spend more on them, it may actually increase revenues and you actually end up ahead of the game. Budgeting is so hard precisely because it is not a zero sum game.
Neither is self-worth. There is no limit to the value of a human being because we are all loved by God and God’s love has no limit. So it is quite possible to enhance your self worth without taking any from anyone else. Indeed, the very idea of the church is that when we come together we can build each other up and all gain in value together.
But still we seem to behave all the time as if it is a zero sum game. In social interactions what that means is that we behave all the time as if the only way for me to gain self worth is by devaluing someone else. So that is how hubris works in our relationships – it leads us to unnecessarily tear other people down in a vain attempt at building ourselves up.
That is why the attitude behind our sinfulness is so much more of a problem than the collection of particular things that we do wrong or fail to do right. In fact, it is because of hubris that we actually prefer to think of sin in terms of all the various things that we do wrong. That makes the business of morality seem more like a zero sum game. It makes it seem like all I have to do is count up all of the faults and errors of other people and compare them to my own. If I have fewer faults than other people (and, of course, we are always far more likely to see other people’s faults than we are to see our own) then it seems like I win and other people lose.
But morality is not a zero sum game. As far as I can see, the God that we worship – the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ – is not interested in our games of who wins and who loses and will never be impressed if you manage to make yourself look better by putting somebody else down. That is why our focus on sins – on mistakes and errors and missteps will never get us to the place where God wants us to be.
That brings me back to where I started – with the phrase, “Hello, my name is Scott and I am a sinner.” I really do think that that is where we ought to start in our worship as the community of the church together. But you need to understand what I don’t mean by that. I don’t mean that I have messed up in my life, that I have made mistakes and have regrets. I mean, yes, have done all of that, but that is not what I mean when I call myself a sinner.
What I mean is that I struggle with my own sense of self-worth. I am afraid that I am not good enough – not good enough for God and not good enough for other people. I am afraid of being rejected. And so I try to cover up all of that and create worth for myself and sometimes try and do that by putting down other people or exploiting things or people. And that struggle is my problem. It is a problem I should not have because I am valuable and so are you. We are valuable and important (if for no other reason) because God made us and God loves us. But we seem to have a hard time believing that and so we think we have to build our self-worth in other ways.
That is our problem and that is what leads us to do things like put down other people in an effort to feel better about ourselves. That is what leads to things like greed when we think that we will have more value when we have more stuff. It really is the root of all our other problems.
Paul tells of his own struggle with this insidious force in his life. It leads him, he says, to do the very things that he doesn’t want to do because the pull is that strong. Even laws and rules don’t help. In fact, they make it all worse because when we inevitably break them or see other people break them they just give us another excuse to think worse of ourselves or look down on somebody else.
And so the cycle continues and we feel like we will never be able to break out of it and so Paul cries out in despair, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” But there is hope because Paul goes on from there to say, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
And so, yes, we need to talk about sin in the life of the church. We need desperately to come to terms with this force in our lives that leads us so far away from the path that we need to follow. But we really need to come to terms with what we actually mean when we talk about sin.
Jesus does set you free from the power of sin. Not simply by offering you forgiveness for all of your regrets and failures and mistakes (though he does offer you that when that is what you need). More important though, Jesus sets you free from the power of sin by letting you know just how much you really matter.
I’m going to close with a very explicit application of all of this. Here is what I want you to do with it. Stop putting down other people to feel better about yourself. Stop holding someone else back because you think it gets you farther ahead. Don’t tell me that you don’t do that because we all do. See the part in the Bible where it says we are all sinners. It’s just that some of us are more subtle about it than others. Examine yourself this week and, when you catch yourself doing it, tell yourself that you don’t need to. You are beloved by God.
Matthew 14:22-33, Acts 16:25-34; Psalm 106:6-13, 19-21
O
ne of my favourite Steve Martin comedy routines goes like this: “Let me give you a warning, okay.” he says on his album, A Wild and Crazy Guy. “I was in Paris about two months ago and – it was just a little vacation, I was on the east coast, I had seven days off and said ‘Well, I’ll just go over there and go to Paris.’ But let me give you a warning if you’re going over there. Here’s an example: chapeau means hat. Œufmeans egg. It’s like those French have a different word for everything! See, you never appreciate your language till you go to a foreign country that doesn’t have the courtesy to speak English.”
I like that routine because it is an important reminder that language matters and sets us apart from one another. But, even more important, it reminds us that when you live in a unilingual environment – when, in your day-to-day life, you go without meeting people who can’t speak your language as most people in North America do – it is so easy to forget the huge barrier that language can be. It becomes a bit of a shock to realize that there are other people in the world who cannot speak like you do.
I thought that was rather interesting because it seems to me that, in many ways, the church today is dealing with the same issue. The Christian church in North America has a language that we speak amongst ourselves that is largely unintelligible to the world around us. But, because we live in the unilingual world of the church, it can be easy for us to forget that and to be shocked when other people don’t understand or misunderstand what we are saying.
It is not that the church has “a different word for everything” though. In most cases, we actually seem to make sense to the world, but the world is understanding something completely different from our words.
use the same words as everybody else. It is just that, when we use them in the church, they mean something different. Sometimes that means that we can be talking away to the world in a way that is perfectly clear to us and may even
Another symptom of this issue is that it also creates problems of misunderstanding inside the church too. Our own people become unsure of exactly what we mean by some of the things we say. Let’s take one simple word that we use all of the time in the church: the word salvation. Salvation is a very common word in the world around us. Salvation is, after all, just a word that means the act of saving. And people talk about saving all the time.
People probably talk most often about saving with the meaning of setting things aside or storing things up: “I saved up my money for my retirement.” or “I saved $100 at the Boxing Day sale,” someone might say. People also talk about saving in terms of rescuing people from dangerous situations: “The fire department saved twenty people when the building caught on fire.” or “Batman saved the citizens of Gotham City from the Joker.”
But when we talk about salvation in the church, when we talk about being saved and needing a saviour, do we mean that same thing? Not really. Most of the time we have some very particular saving in mind. In the church, it seems, people only need saving from one thing: sin – or maybe two things: sin and hell.
It is a major limitation on the meaning of a very rich and full word when you narrow it down to only apply to being saved from one very specific thing. But that is what salvation seems to mean in the church. It is what it means to call Jesus saviour. And our restrictions on the meaning of the word sometimes cause us problems. I remember, for example, back in my university days, I went away to an Evangelical Christian conference for about week. Most of the plenary sessions took place in a large conference hall and, part way through the week, the organizers noted that people trying to get all of their friends to sit together were causing problems by reserving large blocks of seats and not letting anyone else sit in them. So, about half way through the conference, a sign went up at the entrances to the hall: “Saving seats is not permitted in the assembly hall.”
Well, people complained immediately. “Are we not evangelicals,” they asked. “Do we not believe that Jesus came as the saviour of the whole world? Who are these organizers to say that seats cannot be saved? We will preach the gospel to the seats too!” Okay, I know, they were just joking. But it does immediately show up the key differences between how the world uses the word and how we use it.
But it is not just a problem that comes up with seats. I remember, back in those days I saw myself as bit of an evangelist. I thought it was my task to convince everybody I met that they needed Jesus Christ as their personal saviour. (I have mellowed a bit on that account in the years since university but I was very much into it at the time.) But you know what I discovered? Sometimes the kind of salvation I was offering wasn’t the kind of salvation that people were looking for.
I remember one long conversation with a woman who was very deeply involved in the women’s movement. For years she had been on the front lines of standing up for women’s rights in Canada and around the world – doing things to help save women from oppression. And here I was trying to convince her that, all these years, she had been chasing after saving herself and others from the wrong thing and that she needed to be concerned instead with saving herself (with Jesus’ help) from her personal sin. I didn’t get very far with her and, I think, rightfully so.
As I think back on it now, that is just an extreme example of something that happens more than we might think. How often does it happen that we are offering to save people from one thing when they are actually looking to be saved from something else? Now, I’m not saying that salvation from sin is not necessary, it is. And, in fact, when that woman that I was talking to was fighting against the oppression of women around the world, what was she truly fighting against if not sin? She was fighting against an insidious sinful attitude that has infected society for a very long time – the attitude that women are of somewhat less value than men. It is a sinful attitude that has led to much evil in the world. And the fact of the matter is that if we are going to identify Jesus as the one who saves us from sin, it is time that we think about how Jesus saves us from the sin that make women less equal than men. We need to talk about how Jesus saves us from the sin of racial inequality and economic inequality and all other attitudes that make one group more valuable than another.
So, there is a problem in that even when we talk about Jesus saving us from sin, we are thinking too small about sin. (We will look closer at our concept of sin next week.) But there is also another problem. If we’re going to call Jesus a saviour, should we not acknowledge that there are things other than sin that people need saving from. Take the story that we read from the gospel this morning. Peter is out on top of the water – walking around in the midst of the stormy waves when all of a sudden (and maybe quite understandably) he realizes that this is not supposed to be possible and he panics and he starts to sink. And what does he do? He prays. He talks to Jesus (that is the definition of prayer, after all) and he says, “Lord, save me.”
It is, perhaps, the shortest prayer in the Bible. It is also very clearly a prayer to Jesus for salvation. But let me ask you, if Jesus had answered Peter and said, “Oh, Peter, I’m glad you have called on me as your saviour. Just confess your sins to me and I’d be glad to save you from them,” would that have been an answer to Peter’s prayer? Of course not! As much as Peter had sins that he needed to be saved from, Jesus knew very well that there was something much more urgent that he needed to be saved from in the moment. Jesus responded most appropriately to Peter’s prayer by simply sticking out his hand and grabbing onto him to keep him from sinking.
In the same way, when the jailer in the story from the Book of Acts asks Paul and Silas, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” he is referring to a major crisis in his life that might well lead to his death or poverty. His job security, among other things, has just been reduced to rubble with the prison. Salvation means many things to him in that moment and yet Paul and Silas assure him that Jesus can give him whatever salvation he really needs.
And that is how Jesus operates. His salvation is not a one-size-fits-all salvation. He offers to people the salvation that they need most urgently. We see this throughout his life and ministry. When he meets the sick, he offers them healing and not just forgiveness of their sins. When he meets the blind, he offers them sight. When he meets that spiritually blind, he offers them enlightenment and wisdom.
And when we step back from the ministry of Jesus and take a look at the overall story of the scriptures, we see a God who has been working in many ways throughout history to save his people and all people. Sometimes that includes saving them from sin and from the effects of sin, but God’s salvation is never so limited in its scope. Our psalm reading this morning is a great example. The psalm does acknowledge the problem of sin. Indeed, our reading begins with a confession: “Both we and our ancestors have sinned; we have committed iniquity, have done wickedly.” The sin they are confessing is, in fact, their failure to recongnize the love and greatness of God.
But when they talk about God saving them, what kind of salvation do they have in mind? God has saved them, the people declare, by getting them out of slavery and mistreatment in Egypt. Salvation, in this psalm, is salvation from oppression. And so, when you are talking to people suffering under oppression, what do you think that the Bible is teaching you about the kind of saviour that they need?
It is true that part of our job as Christians is to offer people salvation. It is true that Jesus has come to us as our saviour and the saviour of the whole world. What has happened down through the centuries, however, is that we have limited that notion of salvation far too much. We have presented to the world a saviour who really only saves people from one thing that people sometimes haven’t felt a great need to be saved from and who may be in rather urgent need to be saved from something else. Is it any wonder that the church finds itself struggling these days with a sense that the world finds us somewhat irrelevant?
I believe that we ought not to be afraid to proclaim to the world that we have a saviour – a saviour who is for everyone and anyone. But how do you proclaim that? Not by going out with the message, “This is what we think you ought to be saved from and so you had better start being concerned about this!” No, to introduce somebody to a saviour, you have to first really listen to that person and find out what they are struggling with and what they need to be saved from. And then you have to seriously ask yourself how Jesus (or his followers today) might intercede to save that person in the way that responds to what they are struggling with.
Here, then, my challenge to you. This week, really listen to someone – anyone. Listen to what they are struggling with in their life. Or maybe listen to what they are struggling for in this world. And try and figure out how Jesus can be a saviour to them. I’m not saying that you have to tell them what you come up with, just try and understand their struggle for salvation. If you can’t figure out how Jesus can be a saviour to that person in their situation, maybe, just maybe, your understanding of the salvation that Jesus offers is too small. Sermon Video:
Today I had the privilege of conducting the baptism of a six year old child. In the Presbyterian Church, there is no defined age for a baptism and I have baptized people at various ages through the years, but this was my first six year old. I found it a deeply meaningful celebration for a number of reasons but mostly because the child got to have a say to and express his faith at the level of understanding. I adapted the baptismal questions as followed:
Minister: Candidate, I know that you have heard the name of Jesus, that you are learning about him, his words and his stories. Candidate, I want to ask you a very important question. Based on what you know right now about Jesus, are you willing to trust him and to serve him as best as you can?
Candidate: Yes, I am.
Minister: Candidate, as a sign of your trust in Jesus, are you willing to be baptized?
Candidate: Yes.
Minister: Mother and Father, in his own way, Candidate could probably teach us all a great deal about what it really means to have faith in Jesus. But he is still growing in his knowledge about Jesus and his gospel. He needs someone to help and protect his faith as he grows. Will you do that for him?
Parents: We will.
Minister: But that is more than we can ask of two people alone. Big brother, will you, as big brother, also do your part to help Candidategrow in faith?
Big Brother: I will.
Minister: And will you, Witnessand Witness do what you can to assist this family in this very important task before them?
Witnesses: I will.
(Congregation stand)
Minister: But even a loving family and committed friends are not enough. They say it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a church to create a faithful Christian. Will you, the people of St. Andrew’s Hespeler, provide for Candidate and his family a community where they can all grow in faith and explore their relationship with God in Christ? Will you welcome and value them for who they are?
Congregation: We will.
Scott: Father and Mother, will you make sure that this congregation (or whatever congregations you may belong to in the future) has the opportunity to fulfill the promises that they have made here today?
Parents: We will.
Minister: Then, by all means, let us celebrate this sacrament of faith and commitment!
The most fun part of the baptism? I must say that I have never had a candidate so eager to say yes to my questions!
he people of Alexandria were all stirred up and you could understand why. After all, didn’t the city have enough of its own problems? The economy had been dismal for years. Ever since the death of Anthony and Cleopatra, Roman taxes had only gone up and up. (It seemed as if nine out of every ten bushels of wheat produced in the Nile valley was shipped overseas to feed the ever-hungry people of Rome) and the lack of a descent flood of the Nile in, like, three years, meant that there just didn’t seem to be enough to feed Egypt’s population.
And then there was the labour market. It had been, what, like a thousand years since anybody was hiring in the pyramid building industry. And really, what other work was there for good hardworking Egyptians? Mummy wrapping? Hieroglyphic drawing? Slavery? The guys who whip the slaves? Listen, the point is that there were only so many good jobs to go around and the last thing they needed was outsiders – non-Egyptians – coming along and taking away good jobs from hardworking Egyptians.
But it wasn’t just about the economy. You had to think about the question of security. The rumour was that these people who were coming in had been part of an incident that had frightened the whole city of Jerusalem. That’s right, they had employed fear (also known as terror) and we all know what you call people who use terror to achieve their goals – or at least what we call people who don’t look like us and use terror to achieve their goals. That’s right, we call them terrorists.
And what was the “incident” that they were involved in? Well it seems to be nothing less than a plot to replace the existing, duly appointed government with some new and previously unknown figure. That’s right, it was nothing less than an insurrection.
Did the existing regime overreact by sending in the troops and exterminating all of the children in an
entire region? Well, yes, there is absolutely no doubt that they did and Egypt certainly should send a sternly worded letter to Rome to protest such absolute atrocities. But, even so, Judea needs to solve Judea’s own problems. By all means, construct refugee camps on the borders of Judea – maybe in Galilee. I mean, yes, Herod is in charge of Galilee too, but what I’m saying is that surely there has to be some kind of local solution without having these people show up in Egypt.
And, dare I risk saying it, these people from Judea were followers of a strange and foreign religion. They didn’t worship real gods – not the ones that you could actually see in a statue or an inscription – and they wouldn’t even acknowledge the greatness of gods like Horus, Isis and Osiris. They just had this idea of some invisible God who ruled over the whole world – a radical and dangerous idea if ever there was one.
That is exactly what the people of Alexandria were saying as they peeked through their blinds and spoke behind their hands about the newcomers – the few families from some town called Bethlehem – who were settling down in their city. What good could come from these refugees anyways? They were only a drain on Egypt – a drain on the world. Nothing good could come from allowing them to come into the country.
It is what people have always said about refugees. Did you think that it only came up in the most recent talk about bringing in huge numbers of people from Syria and some of the surrounding counties? No. Canada may well be a country built by immigrants and refugees but that hardly means that each wave of people coming in was welcomed with open arms.
The Gospel of Matthew doesn’t offer any account of what sort of welcome Jesus, Mary and Joseph received in Egypt. All he writes is that “Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt.” People have often taken that to mean that they left alone and without telling anyone, leaving other children of Bethlehem to their fates. The flight into Egypt has long been a standard piece in traditional Christian art and always it had been portrayed with only three characters making that flight. But I have a hard time believing it would have happened like that. What is being described is a major persecution for political beliefs – for the belief that there was someone else out there who had a better claim to rule over Judea than Herod.
Unfortunately, there is a long history of how people react in such times and there is little reason to think that Joseph’s little family would have reacted any differently. Matthew portrays them as having a home and family and friends in Bethlehem. How could they possibly have even considered leaving if they did not at least attempt to take some of those people with them? So I imagine at least a small group of Judeans from the area around Bethlehem escaped, making their way through the desert towards Egypt.
And how would this small tribe have been welcomed in Egypt? Undoubtedly in the same way that such people have always been welcomed: with suspicion, judgement and fear. Did you know that, in the first century, Egypt (and especially Alexandria) had a very large expatriate Jewish community? But even that likely would not have made much difference on how they were welcomed. What we often see is that people who have already arrived as immigrants or refugees in a country can be very grateful for the opportunities that they have received and yet still oppose those opportunities being given to others still on the outside.
So, yes, there is every reason to think that the family fleeing from Bethlehem would have met with all kinds of rejection and scorn. And how wrong that was! Jesus, we believe, came into this world to reveal God to us, to bring us back into relationship with God and to say and do things that would change all history. He came to bring salvation upon all nations including the Egyptians who, within a couple of centuries, would embrace Christianity with unparalleled enthusiasm. But, when he arrived, the people of Egypt only saw him as a dirty, dangerous and a best gotten rid of as soon as possible refugee child.
Which is a way of saying that the things that people assume about refugees is generally not true. Many of you have probably seen an email that has circulated whenever, in recent years, Canada has talked about taking in more refugee families. This email that you’ve probably had sent to you by some aunt or cousin declares that refugees receive a monthly allowance of $1,890.00 and each can get an additional $580.00 in social assistance for a total of $2,470.00. Which it compares to what is received by Canadian pensioners, an amount of only $1,012.00 a month.
The email was obviously written by someone who wanted people to be very appalled at all that refugees take away from our Canadian resources. And the email, which has been shared literally millions of times in countries all over the world, has obviously connected with all kinds of people for that very reason.
Does it matter that the so-called facts in the email are not actually true? I mean the amount that it says that refugees receive is actually a maximum amount that a family might possibly receive as a one-time payment – not a monthly payment at all so it doesn’t even make sense to compare it to a monthly pension payment. No it probably doesn’t matter because a lot of people don’t care about the facts. They are far more interested in what they see as the reality that refugees are a drain.
But it’s not just about the facts anyways; it is about truth. The truth of the matter is that it has been consistently shown throughout history that refugees bring far more to a country than they take out of it. Yes, at first when they arrive with almost nothing and are unable to work they do receive to a certain extent (though probably less than you might think). But in the long run they certainly give back far more than they ever receive. Indeed, some of it is literally paid back. Any travel expenses that are paid to get them here are literally a loan that they have to repay within a certain amount of time.
But, more than that, it has been found through wave after wave of refugees from various parts of the world, that there has been a continuous story of contribution to Canada in all kinds of ways. Far from taking jobs away from Canadians, in the long run they actually create jobs by helping the economy to grow and through their own enterprise. They pay more into systems like the pension plan or the health care system through taxes than they ever receive. Are there a few exceptions – people who ultimately don’t contribute much? Of course there are, just as there are in other sectors of the population. But overall the contribution of refugees to their host countries is extraordinary.
And the Bible is certainly in tune with these truths. You may not be aware of this, but Jesus is hardly the only refugee that the Bible celebrates. In fact, the list of Biblical refugees is almost a who’s who of scripture. We have Moses, who fled political persecution in Egypt when the king of Egypt wanted to kill him for fomenting a slave revolt. Jacob fled domestic persecution (a brother who was going to kill him) and sought refuge in Haran. The prophet Jeremiah fled an invading army and went to hide, like Jesus, in Egypt. Two other prophets, Ezra and Nehemiah were refugees in Babylon who returned to rebuild their war torn city of Jerusalem. John, the one who wrote the Book of Revelations, was a refugee from imperial power on the island of Patmos.
All of these people would definitely fit the modern United Nation High Commission on Refugees’ definition of a refugee and we regularly celebrate all of the great and wonderful things that God did through them. They were and are no drains on any nation. They are miracle workers, leaders, great thinkers and more whose contributions echo down through the ages.
And that isn’t even counting all of the people in the Bible who don’t fit the strict definition of refugee but who migrated out of a deep need – because of famine, financial disaster and devastation. On this list we could include people like Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, all the children of Jacob, Ruth and Elijah. Can you imagine what the world would be like without the contribution of people like that?
It is true that the world is presently in the throes of the largest refugee crisis in history with 60 million people displaced, the biggest cause of this displacement being the ongoing war in Syria. Of course such a large crisis is going to create waves of trouble all over the world. Of course it will not be solved or even made much better easily. This is a huge global problem the size of which we have never seen before and we will have to put some policies in place and perhaps set some limits that we do not feel all that comfortable with.
But in the midst of all that, let us not forget that a refugee crisis is not just about numbers and statistics. It is about families – real families just like one that included a woman named Mary, her husband named Joseph and their young child. It is also about families that may cause some disruption or even trouble when they arrive but who also have so much to offer to the world. This calls for a certain attitude towards strangers and refugees that is also an essential part of the Christmas message.
But the leper, who lived outside Capernaum, did not!
Because of psoriasis his skin was all white
And the people who saw him reacted in fright.
But as much as they scorned him for being impure
The leper detested himself even more.
He was certain that all this had happened to him
Because he’d deserved it – because of some sin.
So he spent all his days in a terrible mood
And in dark depression he constantly stewed.
For nobody loved him – no body at all
And that’s why his heart was two sizes too small.
It is fair, I think, to compare Dr. Seuss’ story of the Grinch who stole Christmas with the story of the leper from Mark’s Gospel. They actually have a great deal in common. Both the Grinch and the leper live outside of town – away from the society of other people. This is not stated in the gospel story, of course. But it is understood. There were numerous laws and rules in the Galilee of Jesus’ time that required all
lepers to stay out of populated places. A leper risked getting stoned to death just for coming into town. The Grinch’s reasons for living away from others seem to be a bit different – seem to be based on a basic mutual dislike – but the effect is the same.
There is something else that the two of them have in common: there is no real medical reason for their banishment. More than anything, the cause of their troubles seems to have to do with the accident of skin colour. Certainly there is nothing physically wrong with the Grinch that means that he cannot live in Whoville. The thing that sets him apart (at least according to the movie version of his story) is that he just happens to be green and people haven’t been able to accept that.
The odd thing is that that is likely true of the leper too. This is confusing because, for us today, leprosy refers to a very specific medical condition – a highly contagious disease called Hanson’s disease that destroys the nerve endings in a person’s body leading to terrible disfigurement or worse. But ancient people were never so accurate in their medical diagnoses. The people in Jesus’ world just called any skin condition that persisted for any length of time leprosy – any skin condition. That includes persistent rashes, eczema, psoriasis. So things that, for us, are easily treated or managed with creams, salves or other medications meant for them that you were banished from the ordinary society of other people. So the leper may well have been an outcast because his skin just happened to be a strange colour – perhaps white or bright red.
So people labeled as lepers could be unfairly and unnecessarily cast out. It was all based on attitudes of blame. Everyone – including the lepers themselves – blamed the victims for their disease. They must have done something to deserve it. They must have been exceedingly wicked for such a thing to happen to them. The real problem, in most cases, was not the skin condition but the attitude towards it.
And the worst thing about it was that the attitude actually made the condition worse. Being banished from society meant that they could not take care of their skin and so wounds festered, lesions became caked with dirt and new infections were picked up. And it was practically impossible to break out of that cycle.
That leper was sitting outside of the town
When all of a sudden there came walking down
The street a great crowd. And among all these folk
Was Jesus the prophet and healer who spoke
And he told them of life and a God up above
Who poured out on people a most perfect love.
But at this the leper just scoffed and he vowed
That he’d prove that this preacher was merely a fraud.
So he jumped out and fell to his knees with a jeer.
The crowd all stepped back in considerable fear
While the leper cried out in a tone that was mean.
“If you’re willing,” he sneered “you can make me clean.”
Now I don’t know if that request was spoken in exactly that tone or not. But I do know that it was certainly an odd way to put it. The man seems to have had no doubt that Jesus could heal him. What he does question, however, is whether Jesus would choose to do it. And, you see, he had good reason to think that Jesus wouldn’t. After all, why would Jesus treat him any different than all the other people who had long ago decided that he wasn’t worth the trouble?
Remember, this guy’s biggest problem wasn’t any skin condition. It was attitude – both his and everyone else’s. And he simply couldn’t see any way that those attitudes could change – not his own and certainly not anyone else’s. Why it would have taken something truly extraordinary to break through years and years of assumptions and suspicions, of hatred, fear and blame. Why someone would have to do something crazy like...
Jesus felt compassion and reached out his hand.
He touched that poor leper that knelt on the sand.
The people cried out and drew back in dismay
“Jesus, why’d you do that?” they started to say.
The healer ignored their concern for hygiene
And said, “I do will it. I say you are clean.”
And what happened then? In Capernaum they say
That the leper’s small heart grew three sizes that day.
But a far greater wonder is yet to be told.
For those who saw Jesus behaving so bold
Were stunned to discover their hearts too could grow
To encompass that man they had once feared to know.
So sisters and brothers, don’t wait to show love.
In your hands is a power that comes from above.
To touch is to care and to care is to heal
And that’s how from heaven God’s love you reveal.
And he heard him exclaim ere he strode out of sight,
Psalm 107:1-16, 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, John 17:13-19
A
lmost exactly fifty years ago today (think about that for a moment!) On Thursday, December 9, 1965, viewers who were just settling in to watch their favourite television show on CBS, the Munsters, were in for a surprise. The show had been pre-empted, replaced with a brand new television special: A Charlie Brown Christmas. For the very first time the popular comic strip was brought to life through the magic of animation.
And the executives down at CBS were huddled in fear. They were bracing for what they were sure would be an embarrassing failure. And they had some very good reasons for that fear. The special had been made on a shoestring budget and had definitely suffered for it. The animation was very poor quality. It was jerky and repetitive. The sound was hardly better. The film was poorly edited as well and the action cut from one thing to another in strange and unexplained ways.
Part of the problem was the pure bullheadedness of the writer: Charles Shultz. He had insisted on a number of ridiculous things. He’d insisted on using child actors for the voices – children who had no experience at all. Some of them couldn’t even read! The producers had to read the lines to the kids and have them repeat them back and then they had to splice the dialogue together. (Which is actually how we tape our St. Andrews Stars episodes.) The result, in the pre-digital age, was dialogue that was choppy and didn’t sound good.
Shultz also wanted the soundtrack to be played by a jazz trio which everyone considered to be quite inappropriate for a children’s show. Even worse, he absolutely refused to add a la
ugh track. The executives tried and tried to make him see how foolish this was. They even made up an alternate version with the laugh track, hoping that he would change his mind at the last minute but Shultz would not budge.
But the worst thing of all – the thing that they were sure would lead to a total disaster – Shultz had included in his script a reading from the Gospel of Luke. And the executives were certain that when Linus stepped forward and began to quote from the King James Version of the Bible, people everywhere would turn off their televisions in disgust. Perhaps they would never tune into CBS ever again. Oh, it was awful!
Well, as we all know now, those television experts in their high towers were all wrong and the lowly cartoonist was completely right. The special was a smash hit both with the general audience and with the critics. It won an Emmy and a Peabody award the next year. It became an instant classic and still remains one to this very day. For many people, Christmas would not be Christmas if they didn’t get to see it. And, what’s more, the very things that the executives were worried about – the things that Shultz had insisted on – were the best things about it. The amateur child actors lent a sense of sincerity to the whole thing. People just loved Vince Guaraldi’s music. When the cdcame out several years ago, it was the top seller of the season. And Linus’ recitation from the Gospel of Luke was hailed as “quite simply, the dramatic highlight of the season.”[1]
“But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” That is what the Apostle Paul wrote to his friends in the church at Corinth centuries ago. Perhaps if Paul had written it in 1965 he would have said, “But God chose the cartoonists of the world to shame the high-powered executives.” It is a wonderful gospel principle. And it is so true. God has this uncanny way of using the very people that everyone else looks down on and despises to accomplish his greatest works. Who but God would think of creating a nation out of two people who had no children and were already so old that they had one foot in the grave? Who but God would chose a ragged band of shepherds to spread the news that the Messiah had been born? Who but Jesus would think of starting a new religious movement by choosing some fishermen and a few tax-collectors and troublemakers?
And this eternal principle was put on display yet again when Charles Shultz created his beloved television special. What’s more, the very same principle was on display in the plot of the special. I’m sure that we all know the story. Charlie Brown is upset as Christmas approaches. He is afraid that he has lost the true meaning of Christmas in the midst of all the glitz and glamour and especially the commercialism of the season. The special tells the story of his struggles.
It is amazing when you think of it but somehow the story has remained very current for over fifty years. Charlie Brown’s struggles with the Christmas season are still the very same struggles that people have to this day. Take this exchange between Charlie Brown and his little sister, Sally. Sally has asked her brother to write a letter to Santa for her. And this is what she dictates: “Dear Santa Claus, How have you been? Did you have a nice summer? How is your wife? I have been extra good this year, so I have a long list of presents that I want.” “Oh brother,” says Charlie Brown. “Please note the size and color of each item,” says Sally, “and send as many as possible. If it seems too complicated, make it easy on yourself: just send money. How about tens and twenties?”
“Tens and twenties?” cries Charlie Brown, “Oh, even my baby sister!” “All I want is what I have coming to me,” replies Sally. “All I want is my fair share.”
That exchange could just as easily be written today as it was fifty years ago. But if anything it has all gotten worse since the 1960’s. For so many people today, Christmas is all about making sure that they get what’s coming to them. And it’s not just the kids; it has spread to every area of our society. The culture of Christmas seems to have become ever more a culture of everyone getting what’s coming to them.
In the Christmas special, the symbol of the commercialism and greed of the season is the artificial aluminum Christmas tree. The fake trees are beautiful and awe inspiring and the little natural tree that Charlie Brown chooses instead of them is, by contrast, so plain and disappointing. But the message of the special is that the simple, plain and seemingly unimpressive things have a power and a meaning that goes a lot further than the glitz and glamour of the commercial products.
That’s why, at the end, the Peanuts gang learns to respect and even love Charlie Brown’s little tree. In the same way, Linus’ simple recitation of the plain old simple Gospel story of a plain old simple birth has the power to touch everyone’s heart. The message of the special, when you get right down to it is that “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.”
Friends, that is the message, not only of a fifty year-old television special, it is and has always been the message of Christianity and especially of Christmas. Now, I know that the big money-making juggernaut that is Christmas can be pretty overwhelming at times. Those who are out to get whatever is coming to them seem to be in charge no matter what we may have to say about it.
If we fail to go along with that prevailing wisdom, people might laugh at us and call us foolish. Politicians demand positive economic indicators and economists look for growth in the Gross Domestic Product, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to politicians and foolishness to economists.
But somehow I believe that once all of that economic wisdom has passed away and been sent to the recycler like so many gaudy aluminum Christmas trees, our simple and lowly little natural tree of faith will still be standing and still be inspiring hope and life. For “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”
Genesis 2:4-7, Luke 1:46-55, 1 Corinthians 15:12-28
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n 1969 the decision was made to take a silly little winter children’s song about a snowman who came to life and turn it into an animated Christmas special. It was not really a very radical idea. Five years previously producers had taken another popular Christmas song, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and turned it into what is probably the most popular Christmas special of all time. If they could do it for Rudolph, they could surely do it for Frosty and in fact they even hired the same man, Romeo Muller, who had written the Rudolph special to expand the song’s story to fill an entire half hour.
But didn’t Romeo Muller have quite a challenge before him? How do you take a little lightweight song about what is, I guess, just about everyone’s childhood fantasy (What do you suppose it would be like if this snowman I’m making came to life?) – how do you take that and turn it into a full length drama that will engage people and speak to their hearts? But Muller did a terrific job. And to do it he drew on some deep and ancient truths. He created what I consider to be nothing less than a grand parable that communicates the gospel message.
The story already touched on the oldest mystery of all – the mystery of creation. Ever since they first started wondering about anything, people have wondered about why they are here and where they come from. And ancient people, including the ancient people of Israel, often imagined a creation process where the creator first formed people out of mud or clay and then breathed life into them. And although I think that we all assume today that the whole creation process must have been a bit more complicated than that, there is something about that simple image of God moulding us out of common clay and then breathing his own spirit into us to give us life that just offers a wonderful symbol of the
meaning behind creation – how God brought together the material body with that spark of the divine to create us as spiritual creatures.
Well, of course, that whole creation scene is re-enacted in the Frosty story except, of course, instead of mud or clay the creators use snow. Now, the original story in the original song did not have much of an actual connection with Christmas. It could have been the story of any snowman made on any winter’s day. But the producers of the Christmas special wanted to tie the story in with Christmas, so they made a point of telling us that Frosty wasn’t made out of just any snow but of Christmas snow. This becomes a very important point later on. So the Christmas snow stands in for the clay of creation. And instead of the gift of the spirit or of breath to give the snowman life we have a hat – not just any hat, but a magic hat.
And so when Frosty is brought to life it is like a parable of the creation of human life. To make this very clear in the special, Muller has Frosty himself tell us what all of this means with his very first words. “Happy Birthday,” he says. It is a moment of birth, an act of creation. But a simple story of creation, as nice as it may be, wasn’t going to fill a half hour of prime time. Muller needed to complicate the story – to introduce a little bit of tension.
He created a new character, an incompetent magician named Professor Hinkle who is the one who has lost the magic hat – who threw it away, in fact, because he thought that there was no magic in it. And when he finds out how wrong he is, he’s ready to do anything to get it back. And since, in the story, the magic hat seems to represent life or the gift of the spirit, I guess that makes Professor Hinkle into the very personification of the evil that is in this world, of those who would steal life from others to accomplish their own goals. It makes him, if you like, the devil.
But, if Hinkle is the devil, who is Frosty? That is the key question! He kind of looks like a new being – one who has been created out of magic and of snow. You might even call him a new Adam. And in the Letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul says that Adam “was a pattern of the one to come.”(Romans 5:14) That is to say that when Christians look at the story of the creation of the first man, they should find something that teaches them about Jesus Christ and what he has accomplished for us.
And I would suggest that, in the television special, Frosty is very clearly a figure of Christ. When Frosty’s life is put in danger by rising temperatures, he and his friends decide that he needs to head north. And one of his friends, a girl named Karen, will not be separated from him and so she goes with him. All goes well for a while and the group has many adventures. But, at a certain point the increasing cold becomes too much for Karen and she collapses. Frosty picks Karen up and, to save her life, carries her into a heated greenhouse. Karen wakes up and realizes that Frosty is risking his own life by being in the greenhouse. She tells him that he must go but he brushes her off and says he can stand to lose a little weight. But at this point Professor Hinkle comes along – still following them and still looking to reclaim his hat – and he slams the door to the greenhouse, locking them both inside.
Trapped inside the greenhouse, Frosty melts – he dies. He gives up his life to save Karen from dying in the cold! Does that remind you of any story you’ve ever heard? Didn’t Jesus say, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) Even more important, didn’t Jesus show with his own life what such a statement really meant? And so, I think it is very clear that Frosty’s death in the greenhouse holds many echoes of the central story of the Christian gospel.
But, of course, there is more. It is at this point that Santa Claus comes into the story. He arrives at the greenhouse but is too late to save the snowman. All he finds is an old silk hat, a corncob pipe, a button, two pieces of coal, a puddle of water and Karen weeping on her knees just like Mary Magdalene wept outside Jesus’ tomb. (Coincidence? I don’t think so!) Karen is quite inconsolable in her grief but Santa Claus says that there is a reason for hope. He says that it’s because, and only because, Frosty was made out of Christmas snow and there is something special about Christmas snow – it never goes away. And then Santa flings open the door of the greenhouse and a gust of cold wind comes in and sweeps the puddle of water outside where it instantly retakes Frosty’s shape. Santa puts on the magic hat again and again Frosty comes to life with his same first words: “Happy Birthday.”
Now, if that isn’t a resurrection story, I don’t know what is. And I’m not trying to suggest here that Romeo Muller intentionally borrowed his themes from the gospel story. On the contrary, I don’t imagine that he was even aware of the connection. But somehow, and in a way that even he probably didn’t understand, his story tapped into an eternal truth – the idea that new life can only come through death and resurrection – an idea that has been around for a very long time but that was finally given its supreme demonstration in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
So this is how I see Frosty the Snowman. The story of his “creation” is a reflection of Adam. The story of his “death” and his “resurrection” is a reflection of Jesus Christ, the new Adam. Talk about serious themes! And yet, through it all, the special remains a light-hearted romp especially for kids. But I think the very simplicity of the Frosty story may allow it to bring some fundamental truths home to us.
For example, I’ve always wondered, even when I was a kid, about Frosty’s first words. Both times when the hat is placed on his head and he comes to life, Frosty greets the world with a cheery “Happy Birthday.” Now the first time, it kind of makes sense. It is like he has just been born – his own birthday. But why does he repeat it when he is brought back from the dead? Well, I don’t know what Romeo Muller was thinking when he wrote it that way, but I think I can explain it from a Christian point of view.
There is a connection, you see, between the notion of creation and of resurrection. In our understanding, they are not really two different things. Your hope and expectation for the resurrection ultimately has its foundation in your creation. The God who created you, who took inanimate matter and brought it to life – whether you think of that creation taking place in the womb or in the some primordial soup – is the same God who will raise your earthly remains up to new life after you die.
That is why the Apostle Paul makes such a close connection between Adam and Jesus Christ: “For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” He means that you need to keep in mind that your hope of life after death does not really depend on you, on anything you have done or not done, or on anything that is in your nature. It depends upon God. Your hope for resurrection is based in God and God’s ability to take dead matter and bring it to life. God has shown that he can do that by creating life in the first place and even more forcefully by raising Jesus from the dead. There is really only one miracle – the miracle of life. And what you received in your earthly birth or creation is like to what you will receive in your resurrection, only it will be that much better.
And, finally, there is one other way in which Frosty resembles Jesus. Even after Frosty is raised from the dead, the rising temperatures mean that he can no longer remain with his friends. He leaves to go and live at the North Pole. But he leaves with a promise – the final words of the song: “I’ll be back again someday.” But Frosty was not the first to say “I’ll be back.” (And, no, I’m not talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger.) That was also Jesus’ promise after his resurrection. And I know that, in the case of Jesus we tend to think of that return as a cataclysmic event – something that we wait for expecting that, when Jesus comes, he will set all things right. It is something that will happen at some future date but that really doesn’t affect the here and now that much.
But the Frosty special has put the idea in my mind that maybe we should think of the return of Jesus in a slightly different way. Frosty’s return, in the special, is tied to the date of Christmas – the date of his creation (for he was made of Christmas snow) and the date on which he was raised from the dead. And I think that can remind us that the resurrection of Jesus and our own resurrection which the Bible describes as happening when Jesus returns someday, is really one event. It is all tied up together. It’s all one and the same miracle. And it is a miracle that we can grab hold of here and now. You don’t have to wait until you die to start living the new life, the resurrection. Because of Jesus and the work that he has accomplished, you can enter into that reality here and now. “Happy Birthday” indeed!
So there you have it. You just thought that it was a simple little children’s story. Who’d have thought that it would turn out to be a major treatise on the meaning of creation and resurrection. Christmas truly is a season of magic.
Frosty the Snowman is a fairytale they say. Maybe it is, but it also contains much truth and children know truth when they see it. Some people say that the story of Jesus is a fairy tale too. We believe, and have reason to believe, that Jesus was a real person. Of course, I would insist that his story is even more true than Frosty’s, but there is also a sense in which both stories share a universal truth about the hope for life and new life that we find in our God.
