Sectarianism Sucks

Regi Stone is the worship leader at Christ Church Nashville, the congregation I serve. Every Sunday he leads us in singing joyful songs that lift up our hearts. He composes many of the songs we sing, and other congregations around the country have adopted them for their own worship services.

That’s pretty much the extent to which I have known Regi.

The other day however, he sent me a prototype for a new worship magazine he is about to launch. I was blown away! The magazine was filled with stunning photography and wonderful articles by people from all parts of the Lord’s church. It was visually and theologically committed both to contemporary worship and to a deep 'rootedness' in the soil of our ancient faith.

Like many believers, I have been troubled by the American worship wars of the last decade or so. Some churches sing hymns but refuse to sing newer worship choruses. Other churches banish the organ, damn the choir to the outer regions of Hades, and only sing songs written in the last five weeks.

Largely, these churches are built around specific generations. Older people tend to like hymns; younger people tend to like praise choruses.

When the conflict gets really hot, each group refuses to share community with those whose musical tastes differ from its own.

Me? I like ancient, liturgical worship. I like Russian Orthodox chant. I like the great hymns of the Reformation. I like songs that make me think as well as feel.

I also like Matt Redman, Israel Houghton, and The Gettys.

I like C.C. Winans and really great black gospel choirs.

I really want it all. I want access to every part of the Lord’s church and all that every part of His church offers.

I think sectarianism sucks.

Jesus didn’t seem to like rigid religious categories either.

Nor cultural categories, for that matter.

Jesus was not a monk. He came from a working class family that lived in a poor village.

Nazareth was a crossroads where caravans of merchants made their way to and from the various cities and towns of what we now call the Middle East. This means he was exposed to many different types of people and languages.

Jesus was not the sort of Jew one might have found in Jerusalem, someone who might live most of his life with only minimal contact with those of other ethnic backgrounds. It would be too much to call Jesus cosmopolitan, certainly. However, neither would it be accurate to say he was from some isolated, rural background. Jesus was a child of the empire. He was keenly aware of his peoples’ heritage and that his people were a disadvantaged minority within the Roman Empire.

He was familiar with both farming and fishing, as we can see from his parables.

He seemed neither ill at ease with the wealthy nor the poor because he demonstrates an ease and familiarity with both.

He was not an ascetic, one who to seeks to gain God’s favor by living a severe life. In the time of Jesus, there were many such people, men who wandered through the desert trying to kill off all the desires of the flesh. Such people would provide a model for later Christian monks. John the Baptist may even have been one of them.

Jesus did not speak ill of the ascetics, but he was not one of them.

He was a friend of sinners and a lover of life.

He was, by his own testimony, a wine drinker and a meat eater. In fact, the gospel writer makes a point of the fact that Jesus began his ministry by blessing a wedding party and making more wine for it. The way he intentionally began his ministry demonstrated his claim that he came to give life, not to destroy the legitimate pleasures that enhance it.

He spoke often about Heaven and the appropriate use for self -sacrifice.

Upon occasion he would go on a spiritual retreat. During those time, he experienced severe, one might even say ascetic, deprivation. However, that was not his normal lifestyle.

Jesus was not overly fond of religious strictures and control and he famously challenged the Pharisees who adopted religious control as their core attitude toward life.

At the same time, Jesus believed most of what the Pharisees believed.

The Lord’s disciples were zealots, tax collectors, and fishermen. That would be like having a church with truck drivers, florists, members of the John Birch Society, and leaders of Acorn.

You just can’t nail Jesus down. He escapes all efforts to categorize Him.

So if you just hang out with Christians who sing like you, preach like you, and vote like you; well, it’s quite likely that your perception of Jesus has become terribly narrow. You may not know Him as well as you think.

Regi Stone has a great idea and I hope it soars to success. I’m going to try to help that happen if I can.

He doesn’t have an ax to grind or battle to win. He just wants us to listen to what others think about worshipping God – in song, in art, in prayer and in life.

Someday, Francis of Assisi is going to meet Matt Redman. The two of them will have a long conversation with Charles Wesley and Oral Roberts. John Calvin will ask Joel Osteen to explain his sermons and Sir Christopher Wren will want to know what the heck we were thinking when we decided to build church buildings that look like office parks.

Regi wants to do all that now.

Well, why not?

Jesus did.

Thank You, Mr. President

In 1919, Woodrow Wilson chaired the first meeting of the League of Nations.

A devout Presbyterian, the nation’s twenty-eighth president tried to bring a sense of justice and morality into international affairs. While campaigning to convince congress to join the League of Nations, he had a stroke and collapsed.

He never fully recovered.

Wilson’s idealism still evokes both scorn and praise. Some believe his high ideals represented the best side of our country. Others view him as dangerously naïve.

The League of Nations did not last long.

Italy ignored its protest of its invasion of Ethiopia.

Germany withdrew when the League protested Hitler’s persecution of Jews.

Few deny Wilson’s good intentions. Many deny that his intentions were realistic.

History is full of great schemes for achieving utopia. Religious people create cults. Political people create agencies. Artists create stories and sounds. Some of us are moved. Some of us laugh. Some of us die. But century after century, dreams fail and hopes are crushed. Wilson’s “war to end all wars” was followed by a war even more terrible. The twentieth century witnessed a continual eruption of despotic idiots like Stalin, Hitler, and Papa Doc.

So what are we to make of the greatest dream of all, the day when “men will beat their swords into plowshares and not learn of war anymore?”

One thing for sure, good intentions won’t do it! Even the good intentions of the world’s greatest man won't do it.

If Jesus is a mere man, then his words just stir people to believe in one more hopeless dream.

If he is more than a mere man, then his words may be much more than good intentions.
Of course, most people believe Jesus was a great man. However, only Christians believe that He was incarnate God.

Even through the mists of time and legend, he is compelling to human beings everywhere. His teachings are so clear, his virtue and grace so transparent, that people the world over seem drawn to him.

Hindus put pictures of him in their temples.

Buddhists draw parallels between his teachings and that of their master.

Muslims revere him as the greatest prophet of all.

Even atheists are usually reluctant to speak ill of him.

On this point most of the world agrees: Jesus was an altogether wonderful and magnificent human being.

So who was he?

He was born to a poor family in occupied Palestine, a border province and outpost of the Roman Empire.

By the time he was born, the Israel of King David and Solomon was as legendary as medieval Europe is to us. Most Jews no longer spoke Hebrew. Most did not even live in the holy land.

Jesus was born in the Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire. So there is little doubt that he spoke Greek and Aramaic. He could also read Hebrew, because we know that he did the public reading for a Synagogue service on at least one occasion.
All these things are interesting but are maddeningly trivial in comparison to what we would like to know. The details of his life are few. We know next to nothing about his childhood, for example.

We have a record of his birth, his teachings, miracles and his death. Oh, and we know about a small event called the resurrection!

We also have the stories of the next few centuries in which millions of human beings began to worship him as God.

We also have the effects of this man upon history. The explosion of medicine, education, science, and art in following centuries are a witness to his hold upon the world’s imagination.

And, the story has not even ended yet! Every year, millions more of the world’s peoples respond to the message of Christ. As Europe and North America grow cold and indifferent to his life and teaching, the rest of the world seems more intrigued than ever. Despite what academia and media pendants say, Christianity remains the world’s fastest growing religion – by far. It is one reason why many parts of Islam has become so militant: Africa has turned to Christ in our lifetime and encroaches upon the heartland of Islam.

Why?

Because Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.

He was not just a dreamer.

He was God.

So our twenty-eighth president may have gotten it wrong. Perhaps he was, as people claim, a hopeless romantic. He probably did die of a broken heart, as many romantics do.

But if Wilson was wrong, his error was just about timing and means.

The Kingdom of God will come when God decides. We can’t make it happen. We can’t even predict when it will happen.

We can worship the One who will someday make it happen.

We can serve Him by serving others until it happens.

We don’t become broken hearted over what we are unable to accomplish. But we don’t give up either. We keep praying. We keep working.

Someday there will be a real League of Nations.

The Jew will take the Egyptian by the hand and say, “let us go up to t \eh House of the Lord and offer there our sacrifice unto the God of Jacob.”

When that Jew and that Egyptian get there, they will see a throne. On that throne there will be a man who not only had good intentions but the power to turn his good intentions into reality.

Perhaps this year. Perhaps next. Perhaps a generation from now. But someday.

Thank you Mr. President for daring to dream.

Sleep well.

When you wake, you will see everything you hoped for.

Those who laughed will not see it.

The Kingdom of God is for the pure in heart; the ones we often call naive.

Eek, a Witch!

On this day in 1692, the leaders of Salem, Massachusetts began their investigation of Sarah Osborne, Sarah Good and Tituba, a Native American woman, who were suspected of performing witchcraft in their community. Finally, 150 people were tried for "Certaine Detestable Arts called Witchcrafts & Sorceryes."

Nineteen of these were hung from the neck until dead.

The people were probably guilty of using native medicine to cure disease. Even if one believes in witchcraft as the bible defines it, the Salem suspects were not witches. And, they probably did a lot less damage to the human family than the leaders of Bear Stern and the other robber barons of our time. But this is not a political blog and so I – with great forbearance and discipline – now turn my attention back to the matter at hand!


In my last blog, I talked about why the Bible condemns wizards, witches and soothsayers. Their practices create a system in which the material world becomes less valued than the spiritual world. God doesn’t want that. Even though many theologically impoverished gospel songs and fiery sermons make the same mistake, that doesn’t make it right. God is the creator and sustainer of the material world. He wants us to appreciate that world. He doesn’t want us to disdain it or try to escape it.

In fact, God himself became a man!

Now that’s making a real statement! What more could we ask?

Obviously, the belief in the incarnation separates Christianity from all the other religions of the world. In my last blog I mentioned that even Judaism rejects our belief in the incarnation.

Judaism teaches that because God is a Spirit, He cannot be either imagined or represented in any material way.

Most of the great Eastern religions believe that a god might from time to time assume a human shape... but to actually become a man? To them the visible, material world is a “veil of illusions,” something a religious seeker must seek to overcome. Why would a god put himself into the very situation that his followers are encouraged to escape?

In contrast to all other religions, Christians believe that human beings are both material and spiritual.In fact, we believe that reality itself is both material and spiritual!

There are only three basic ways to view reality.

Either reality is material or spiritual, or both material and spiritual.

If reality is material, then all abstract and invisible categories must be viewed as being at best just useful metaphors or recreational figments of our imagination. In this view, things like love and thoughts are products of brain matter; little hiccups of neuropeptides; eruptions of endorphins.

If reality is spiritual, then all material, visible things are mere manifestations of thought. In this view, things like viruses and the taste of vanilla are simply “printouts” of either human or superhuman thoughts.

The third view is the incarnational one, that belief that reality is both material and spiritual and that each sphere impacts the other.

That is the Christian view. It separates us from New Agers on one hand. It separates us from secular humanists on the other.

The Nicene Creed asserts that “we believe in God, the creator of all things, visible and invisible.” This means that Christians believe in a single Creator. Thus, we believe that everything in creation was formed according to a common plan. We believe that this creation and everything in it – whether belonging to the visible or invisible part of the universe – is, or ought to be, subject to a single government: the kingdom of God..

Thomas Aquinas, reflecting on this incarnational view of reality, said that God made three orders of creatures: material creatures called animals, spiritual creatures called angels, and incarnational creatures called human beings. This means that when God became a man, He crossed the line from being purely a spiritual creature to becoming an incarnational creature. He became like “one of us, just a stranger on a bus.”

So the doctrine of the incarnation forces Christians into a solitary position among world religions.

On one hand, Hindu, New Age, and other types of Pantheistic faiths deny – at least to some extent – our materiality.

On the other hand, materialists (the intellectuals of Western society for the last two hundred years) deny our spirituality.

One side claims, in effect, that our spirituality is an illusion. The other claims that our materiality is an illusion. In contrast to all of these, Christianity claims that human beings are incarnational, that they consist of both matter and spirit. We believe this will always be the case, even in eternity. For “we believe in the resurrection of the body.” This explains why the belief in God’s incarnation is so important to us. We believe that our God came to us incarnated as a man because He wanted to suffer with us, identify with us, and relate to us.

This doctrine has inescapable consequences. For example, how can we disdain our bodies, while we worship a God who has taken a body like ours for Himself? For that matter, how can we disdain the world or any material thing in it, since we now know that our God is capable of clothing Himself in matter? Or how does this belief, that we are not just spiritual beings, impact worship? Should we really aim for a worship that is wholly “spiritual?” Or should our worship have something of the material about it?

Believing in the incarnation as we do, what should we expect worship to look like?

Here we are again, talking about worship! As we have been saying, all genuine theology leads us to worship. For Christians, worship involves a declaration that the “stranger on the bus,” is no less than God in a human form.

As for the Salem witches, it is one more example of power overpowering compassion and so-called spirituality defying common sense.

Add Salem officials to history’s dance of dunces; ignorance posing as piety, dragging defenseless people to their deaths who were only trying to survive a plague by asking Indians how to cure their illness. Add to their number the likes of Freud, the old fraud, with his penis envy and Oedipus complex. Add Ann Rayn, who still hypnotizes millions into various forms of respected heartlessness. Add Howard Stern, Hugh Hefner and Jerry Springer – all rich from cynically exploiting the weaknesses of common men and women.

“My people are destroyed because of their lack of knowledge,” the prophet cried.

That’s why they sometimes cause such enormous harm.

It's nothing that worship would not cure; if only they could taste of the powers of the world to come. There are thin places in that curtain that separates matter from spirit and the God-Man, Jesus the Christ, has come to lead us there.

It’s a lot better than witch-hunting -- or stealing billions of dollars because you have powerful friends in high places, for that matter.