Proper 4 A

“Be doers of the word,” we read in James, “and not merely hearers.” That well-known verse from James summarises what we get here in Matthew at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.

I spent last summer writing a course called “Introduction to Christianity as a way of life”. It ran for two months in the autumn. If I had the energy, I would lay it on again this year, but there is just too much going on right now. I think I will recruit someone else to run it.

The course was motivated not just because of my growing conviction that Christianity is far more than a set of beliefs. The motivation also came from a concrete experience early in my ministry. Here’s the story: Mike Sugano and his wife became members of the first church I served, in Chicago. They’d come to St James as many other young adults had, as something like refugees from the narrowness of an otherwise thriving, large evangelical church, looking for something more solid to bite on and for more social action. Mike had literally been converted on a streetcorner. When he and his wife divorced, he naturally found much of his emotional support in his family and in the Chicago Japanese community—Mike worked for a family firm, and he was the only Christian there. So it was no surprise to me when he started attending the Chicago Buddhist temple. Gyomay Kubose, along with his son a friend of mine, was the founder of this community and the leader there.

It was good for Mike to return to his roots. What bothered me was something he said when he came to me one day, and, sitting in my office, explained to me how important this was and what it meant to him. Christianity, he said, was a way of believing, while Buddhism was a way of life. I winced. That wasn't the way it was supposed to be. But that, by and large, was the way it was. And I recognised this as coming from Kubose, too, as Kubose had his arguments with Buddhists who practised a merely cultural form of Buddhism, attending temple and reciting sutras, the kind of religious practice Jesus is complaining about here in those who attempt to ingratiate themselves by crying “Lord! Lord!” Buddhism needs to be a personal, disciplined way of life, Kubose would say, and that is what he taught. But I would argue the same for Christianity.

I could see very clearly what Mike meant. The problem is spelled out right here in this Sunday’s gospel reading, Matthew 7.21-29. Mike had come to us from a Christian community in which “belief” was all important, and in which backsliding seemed to be the greatest sin (one did not dare to doubt these beliefs, therefore). And he had come into a community whose young pastor hadn’t quite got his bearings yet, and a mainline Presbyterian church that was itself only beginning to discover its convictions and its commitment to act on them. We were learning together. In general, I thought, Mike was right about Christianity. Christianity was pretty much being practiced as a set of things to believe in. If you accepted them, you were in. If not, you were out. Liberals, to the great annoyance of the evangelicals, bonded together in the exhilarating freedom of doubt, but often without the further pursuit of taking the next step toward understanding, and without the concomitant commitment to growing in discipleship, or action. The mainline church did not easily find the strength to rise from the miasmal swamp of rummage sales and pot-luck suppers and meetings dominated by concern for membership decline. In any case, belief can’t just be faith seeking understanding, even if, against the odds, it should get that far. Faith needs to grow in understanding, but it also needs fulfillment in action, in discipleship, as a way of life, or it is no faith at all. This option just wasn’t being made available to people, generally, in American mainline Christianity. The practice of Christianity actually seemed to mitigate against what it had to offer people. Sadly, Mike was largely correct. I couldn’t argue against him. The Christianity he knew was a way of belief, not a way of life.

So I was determined from that moment on to explore this whole business of Christianity as the way of life that was itself the foundation of what we professed as belief. The heart of Christianity, for me, is an act, not a set of words. It is that act explicated in the biblical idea of pouring out the self for others (or for God, which is the same thing), which is a new way of life different from a life that is ego-dominated and clings for its security to the false god Mammon. This new way of life is symbolised most perspicuously by the cross. It is an act that demands an Exodus-like departure from social/political structures that are inauthentic, oppressive or crippling, and often requires actual re-location. It is an act that responds to being “called out”. The “ekklesia” therefore (the assembly of those who have been called out) is the community that acts, and the new life in Christ we discover in the way of the cross involves a discovery of new, deeper identity more original than before, an identity formation that is practised as an experience of individuation, but an identity that is fundamentally social. The way of the cross leads to that community of three crosses that expresses the crucifixion not as death in isolation but as life in community, and richly so, in contrast to those who did a runner. The end of the process, “salvation”, is no other worldly affair, nor is it an individual affair. The idea of taking Jesus Christ as one’s personal saviour mocks the invitation to become fundamentally and inextricably engaged with the world around us. Salvation is life together. The cross, therefore, becomes a way of life, resurrection, a re-defining of life and death. The Christian life includes this readiness to empty oneself, to “die”, as it were, without fear of letting go. Those who seek to save their lives will lose them, Jesus says. Ordinary piety never seems to grasp this, and prefers to focus on the promise that, if we believe as we are told, death doesn’t really happen. It is amazing how what goes contrary to Christianity’s fundamental message can become its central orthodoxy.

Too many churches put the emphasis on believing in the symbols and the metaphors on a literal level, symbols and metaphors that are meant to release the Christian from an old way of life and propel us into the way of the cross. An awful lot of Christian orthodoxy still clings to the old securities, too anxious to let go of the ego. Our common human fears are too strong to allow us to respond to the invitation Jesus is giving to live as he lived and do what he did, without fear of death. Churches that fear to proclaim the gospel in this way are churches that have built their houses on sand. They comfort us by saying we don’t have to fear death because death, for Christians, isn’t real. But comfort is cruel if it is a lie. The story of death overcome in scripture is the story of life that lives on a stronger foundation than the anxiety of its on non-being.

On judgement day (to use a compelling poetic image central to biblical literature), Jesus will say he doesn’t know those who attempt to ingratiate themselves to him by calling out “Lord! Lord!” “Knowing” in biblical languages is no mere intellectual affair of the mind. It is an engagement of the whole person, as in the physical act of love making. The late OT scholar Bob Boling used to say it was the Hebrew Hokey Pokey: you put your whole self in. The threat of rejection may seem cruel, until we realize tht this is simply telling, in story form, the condition that exists when the nominal Christian has never truly known Jesus through the life experience of doing, through discipleship, through taking this leap beyond the boundaries of ordinary securities to live without fear engaged with the prayers of the world around you. That’s what it means to know Jesus. And if you don’t know Jesus, well, you don’t know Jesus. All the classic spiritual disciplines are here to introduce us, but for some reason we just haven’t found it important to practise them.

The Sermon on the Mount concludes with the observation that Jesus teaches with authority, not as the scribes. The Greek word for authority, "exousia", is usually translated as "power". It is related to the word for "being", and means power or authority in terms of the freedom to do or create according to one's own autonomous being. The plural form, "powers", relates to governmental authority. The authority of Jesus as the power to act is thus distinguished from the authority of the scribes, whose role is to preserve every jot and tittle of what has been received from the past. What the scribes offer is a kind of paint-by-the-numbers form of discipleship, in which the best disciples are those who do not paint outside the lines. Such mind-numbing pedagogy abhors the kind of self-assurance that can say, "You have heard it said. . . . but I say unto you".

By contrast, Jesus teaches by inviting his disciples to learn through doing, and he promises that they will do even greater things than he does. What disciples do is critical, not what they repeat or what they believe of what has been received. They will be doers of the word, and not merely hearers.