Growing up as a ministers son, I was expected to be in church every Sunday. In my younger years, I would routinely sit with my older brother or sister. We would usually engage each other in some kind of playful distraction during the sermon time. When in junior high, I remember having a regular spot in the balcony where I could watch other people below. Watching others was my regular distraction during the sermon. When I reached high school age, I began to sing in the choir. We sat behind the pulpit and we were looking at the back of my fathers head during the sermon. In this position, I often actually listened to what my father said.
Looking back on those days now, I realize that I needed to be shocked during a sermon, in order for me to be wakened from my usual mental slumber. There were a few occasions when I was stunned by what my father did or said. Those incidents forced me out of my usual mental and emotional lethargy and made me consider the deeper content of the faith. Those alarming times were formative in forcing me to consider something more significant and true to life than the conventional message of Christianity.
One such instance arose because of my fathers Lutheran heritage. Although he was now a minister in the Congregational Church, he retained some of the spirit of Martin Luther when it came to the Roman Catholic Church. One Reformation Sunday, he was explicit in a lengthy criticism of Catholicism. I knew my sister was livid, as she liked to date guys who were Catholic. Since both of us had Catholic friends, we decided we wouldnt talk to our father during Sunday dinner. He understood our silence and complained how he could handle other members of the congregation being upset with him, but was hurt when his own children couldnt speak with him about their concerns. This was an experience that forced me to consider inter-religious disharmony and how it could invade and damage family life, as well as destroy the harmony of the larger human family.
A second incident that left me reeling, was my first ever experience of what I understood as Truth. I cant tell you what the sermon was about, nor the subject of the particular revelatory statement. All I know is for the first time in my life, I thought to myself, that is the Truth, with a capital T. This was a whole body experience, like being baptized by immersion.
A third incident was startling and unanticipated. The church was in the habit of gathering used clothing to distribute in the mission fields. On this particular Sunday, my father brought the contribution box out of his office, displayed some dirty and torn clothing from the box, laid it on the altar, and offered a prayer for those who would be served by this ministry. I can only imagine the dismay and embarrassment of the person who had put those trashy clothes in the donation box.
Although I dont know for sure where I got it, or when, Ive been reading Meeting Jesus again for the First Time by Marcus Borg. Published in 1994 and underlined by a previous owner, the theology and presentation of the historical Jesus is exceptional. Borg contrasts the conventional religious wisdom of the time with the Spirit-driven wisdom of Jesus. Jesus often leaves people stunned or shocked by his teachings or actions.
Consider the story of the stoning of the woman caught in adultery. The purity codes of the time demanded that punishment, even in the face of a commandment against killing. The response of Jesus was shocking. He invited each of those who would stone her to examine their own sinfulness and he had compassion on the woman.
Or consider the story of the Good Samaritan. Here are two religious folk, following the religious purity rules, who are prepared to ignore and avoid an injured alien. It takes a Samaritan, a religious outcast, to exercise compassion and care for the one in need.
Borg reminds us that Jesus shocks us constantly, out of our slumber with the conventional religious wisdom of the day. Jesus forces us to consider a Spirit driven wisdom, that upsets our norms and makes us dig deeper into a life of care and compassion.
Borg writes: What then is the way that leads to life? The narrow way, the way less traveled, is the alternative wisdom of Jesus. It has two closely related dimensions. First is an invitation to see God as gracious rather than as the source and enforcer of the requirements, boundaries and divisions of conventional wisdom (whether Jewish, Christian or secular). Second, it is an invitation to a path that leads away from the path of conventional wisdom to a life that is more and more centered in God. The alternative wisdom of Jesus sees the religious life as a deepening relationship with the Spirit of God, not as a life of requirements and rewards.
Especially for our time, we need our religious communities to be reminded of the shocking stories of Jesus. So often he betrays the conventional wisdom with unexpected responses of love and compassion. There are also the disruptive stories our megachurches need to hear, like the overturning of the tables of the money-changers in the Temple, or the story of the Widows Mite.
If we actually look to Jesus, Christianity should be shocking. Conventional religious and secular wisdom would be revealed for its shallowness. Jesus would invite us to dig deeper. We might then recognize our spiritual connection to all others, be more open to Truth, and exercise kindness and compassion in all our activities. The spirit lives below the surface.
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