First Things
Genesis 1:1-5;
Mark 1:4-11
It still
regularly amazes me that the revised common lectionary – the cycle of readings
that so much of the Christian church follows each week – so often speaks
directly to the concerns that press in on me as I consider the word that God
calls me to proclaim to you and with you week to week.
The readings
this morning are about first things. Out of the chaos of nothingness, God
breathes creation. From the chaos of empire and acculturated religion, God speaks
an incarnate word and the ministry of Jesus begins. God breathes. God speaks. Creation
responds. First things.
For some time
now, I’ve been feeling a need to return to first things, for we cannot move
effectively into new things if we fail to understand – or, perhaps better – if
we fail to stand under first things, if we fail to be claimed by them and to
live our lives under that claim. This is true for how we worship, thus the note
in the bulletin this morning about a small change in our order of worship. This
is true for how we live our faith in the world as a congregation, and so we
will spend time in the coming weeks exploring the theological reasons for the
stands we have taken as a community of faith. And this is true for how we live
as individuals in the world, and so we will spend time in the coming weeks
thinking about questions such as “how does Jesus’ way of living shape my own
way of life?”
Why are first
things important? We are an extremely rare thing in this world, and anything so
rare must be firmly grounded or it will be swept away by tides of fashion and
majority opinion. A faith community particularly called to articulate and live
out of a progressive theology stands lonely amidst the rising tide of
conservative megachurches and fundamentalisms of various stripes. A faith
community deeply committed to radical hospitality and inclusive community –
particularly with respect to our gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered
sisters and brothers – stands all but isolated in the Commonwealth of Virginia,
and while we know that there are similar communities elsewhere in the United
States, in the global church we are an exile community rejected by the
neofundamentalist expression of Christian faith in most of Africa and the
conservative Pentecostalism and Roman Catholicism of most of the global south.
We are, indeed,
an extremely rare thing in this world, and anything so rare must be firmly
grounded or it will be swept away. I do not believe God intends that we be
swept away, and I, for one, intend to stand firmly in this place for as long as
God gives me voice and calls us together to be the church in this community.
But we do not
stand here unopposed, and when we give voice to our commitment to build a
progressive, inclusive and diverse community of Christian faith here we can
expect to be attacked. Last fall we experienced that in response to our stated
policy on weddings, and it continues. Just last week I received another letter
calling my faith into question and saying, “If you are a Christian, please do
not lead your flock astray. Preach the truth. Preach repentance from sin, not
acceptance of it.”
I don’t want to
make more of the opposition than it merits, but I don’t want to ignore it
altogether either, for, as they say in community organizing circles, opposition
is information. For example, several of our critics have taken us to task for
stuff they found, or didn’t find, on our web site.
Now, on the one
hand, we are clearly not a megachurch with all kinds of resources to throw at a
web site so we will probably never have a web presence – or any other kind of
presence – that is truly comprehensive and without error. On the other hand,
what critics found missing falls clearly under the heading of “first things.”
For example,
the stuff about me on the web site is biographical rather than theological. As
“theologian in residence” for this community, that should not be so. In
response, I am updating my personal statement of faith and we’ll get it posted.
You deserve no less and, if we are standing in the public square, the broader
community deserves no less either. Likewise, there’s not much on the web site
about this faith community’s mission and vision beyond the statement that we
print each week on the front of the bulletin. As important and suggestive as
that statement is, it is far from thorough. We will work on that as well,
drawing on the work of session, the pastor nominating committee that called me
and the revisioning work of the congregation prior to the process of calling me
here.
Those are relatively
simple fixes, but the agitation of opposition has pushed me to wonder about
first things at a deeper level, and I have come to the conclusion that we need
to reclaim first things at an individual level as well as a corporate level.
Indeed, the catch phrase that we use so often – “the church progressive, the
church inclusive, the church diverse” – is couched in terms that are political
and sociological rather than theological. This choice is considered and, I
believe, necessary in an era that does not speak an informed theological
language, but we, as the community of faith described with these secular terms,
ought to be ready always to describe the deeper theological commitments, values
and traditions that we stand under and that lead us to particular expressions
of faith be they individual, social or political.
If we fail to
attend to first things we risk becoming merely another collective “of a
nebulous sort of ‘fellowship,’ or of random activism, or of undifferentiated
‘spirituality,’ or of moralisms old or new, or simply of ‘nice’ people who
don’t quite know why [we] are [here] but feel [we] ought to be.”[1]
That will not
be enough to sustain us in the days ahead.
If, as the
apostle Paul suggests, one of the central ministries of the community of faith
is to be stewards of the mysteries of God (1 Cor. 4:1), then we ought to be
talking together deeply about these mysteries, about their meaning for our
living together as church in and for the world. Only then can we be those
people who are able to give an account of the hope that is in us (1 Peter
The world is
desperate for hope these days. Let us be those people who are ready, willing
and able to share good news of very real hope.
This season of
focus on first things must not be merely a season of quiet contemplation.
“Sages, leave your contemplations,” one of our Christmas carols says. I believe
it was Karl Marx who said that the philosophers had done a good job of
describing the world, but the point was to change the world. If we, as church,
merely describe the condition of world and of our lives in it, then we are
failing to live into our calling to be partners with God in the transformation
of the world and of our own lives. The good news of the gospel begins with a
call to repentance – to transformation.
Now, none of us
will ever truly comprehend the mysteries of faith – that’s why we call them
mysteries rather than facts, and that’s why we call it faith, not knowledge.
Nevertheless, we seek deeper understanding in order that we might more deeply
stand under and live out of “first things.”
So, what are
these “first things”?
Well, let’s
start with our reading from Genesis. It begins with God. Indeed, it says, “In
the beginning, God ….” So we begin with a focus on God, and God’s action in history.
But, these few verses inform us right off that we do not begin with just any
old god, but rather, we begin with a God who creates, a God who brings forth
order out of chaos, a God who calls creation good, a God who is active in
creation and remains active in history, a God who intends that the order of
creation have the character of goodness.
All of this is
gift. All of this is grace. Creation does not merit being created. Why is there
something rather than nothing? Because God intends it: utterly amazing grace,
to begin with.
As an aside
that is important in our cultural context, it is crucial to remember that
Genesis is a theological text. These are theological claims about the character
of God. They are not claims or observations about the processes of creation.
This is faith seeking understanding of God, not geology seeking understanding
of fossil formation or biology seeking understanding of the origin of species
or cosmology seeking understanding of black holes. There are no grounds in
Genesis, well and rightly read, for foisting off on the science departments of
public schools the teaching of a certain conservative theological world view
cloaked under the name of creation science or intelligent design.
Now, that may
be a “mere” aside, but it reminds us, in quite contemporary terms, precisely
why it is important for us to understand “first things.” First things matter in
our lives and in the lives of our children.
It matters that
the story we stand under begins with amazing grace. It matters because grace
frees us from the constant seeking after God’s approval as if the fate of
history – our own very personal history as well as history more broadly
understood – as if it were all up to us. None of us can carry that burden, and
the God whose story begins with the grace-filled action of creation does not
expect us to bear it. Indeed, in both personal and social spheres, if we are
honest and if we understand these first things, we realize that “if it is to be
… well it better not be just up to me.”
This
foundational truth runs profoundly against the grain of the American
hyper-individualism that likes to say, “if it is to be it’s up to me.” What a
load of garbage – theologically speaking, of course.
From too many
pulpits the church has blessed this cultural garbage by focusing on individual
sinfulness and individual salvation. For too long. For too long the church has
used the language of grace without trusting the grace it pronounces. For too
long the church has placed walls of doctrine around its doors and barred
entrance to anyone with doubt. For too long the church behaved like a voluntary
association of like-minded individuals, thus denying the beauty, wonder and
diversity of God’s human creation. These theological errors then leave it up to
each individual to proclaim an orthodox confession in order to experience God’s
grace – as if our understanding of God could establish limits on God’s action. According
to such a theology, orthodoxy itself would calm the chaos and create space for
God to act.
That is
theological garbage. God does not need the church – in orthodoxy or apostasy –
in order to act in the world with grace and mercy, love and justice. Too often,
in fact, the church has blocked the way to that grace and mercy, love and
justice.
Freed from that
load of garbage we can seek the companionship of God and the community of faith
to help us bear the loads of living that come the way of each creature – loads
of doubt, loads of our own failures, loads of our own sinfulness, loads of loss
and grief, loads of suffering injustice. Contrary to contemporary American
culture, a truly Biblical ethic is essentially communal. We are in this
together, for better and for worse, in times of certainty and those of doubt,
in unity and in discord, in sickness and in health. As we become truly the
community that God calls forth, then, in companionship with God we can become
partners with God in the work of transformation.
Listen
carefully to Mark’s word to us, from, as he puts it, “The beginning of the good
news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The beginning of the good news, the
gospel, underscores first things. The good news is, again, the radical grace of
God. It begins with the incarnation of the transformed human being: Jesus. It
begins with the incarnation of radical grace in the person of Jesus of
Nazareth. First things.
But the gospel
understands the reality of the human condition. It knows us as we are: a broken
people living chaotic lives standing in need of grace. So it begins with grace,
and it begins with a call to repentance, to turning, to transformation. Grace
in the midst of chaos and the call to respond to grace even amidst the chaos.
First things.
If we are going
to live out of these first things and do so in a manner that reflects God’s
particular calling to this community of faith, then we’d best start
understanding them, because we are living in progressive, inclusive and diverse
Christian community. So, in the weeks ahead, we will look forward by glancing
back to first things and first questions: who is God? What is grace? Who is
Jesus? What is sin? Who is the Holy Spirit? Others that you suggest. And, with
each of these “first things,” how are we to live in light of what we proclaim?
Putting first
things first for the church at Clarendon.