The Wild, Hospitable Holiness of Jesus

photo © 2004 Jared and Corin | more info (via: Wylio)

In today's world (a phrase I use more than I probably should), there seems to be a struggle within the church to define holiness.  This hit home to me when a United Methodist Bishop at General Conference in 2008 addressed the homosexuality debate that occurred on the conference floor by saying it was a battle between two competing goods, "holiness" and "hospitality." 

He said that there are some within the UMC who wanted to preserve the holiness of the church, keeping it pure.  Therefore, this camp wanted to keep homosexuals out of the church.  Homosexual practice is a sin and, therefore, the church needs to take a stand against it.  Homosexuals should not be members.  Homosexuals should not be ordained.  The whole notion of "reconciling churches," welcoming the LGBT community, in this perspective, would be anathema.  Keep the church holy.

On the other hand, there were those who theologically emphasized hospitality, welcoming all.  Therefore, when lines were to be drawn about who was "in" and who was "out" in the church, the biblical concept of hospitality trumped all others.  The church should, as a rule, exclude no one.  All are welcomed to the table of Christ.  As the saying goes, "When Jesus is up on that cross, arms outstretched, who is it that he can NOT embrace?"  The implied answer is no one.  All are welcome.

However, are these really two competing interests, holiness and hospitality?  Are they really opposed to one another?

Alan and Debra Hirsch are two missional leaders over at CatalystSpace.  They address the strange holiness of Jesus that was not opposed to hospitality in a blog post entitled, "What Kind of Holiness is This?"

One of the confronting questions we find ourselves repeatedly asking is: What is it about the holiness of Jesus that caused "sinners" to flock to him like a magnet and yet manages to seriously antagonize the religious people? This question begs yet another, even more confronting question: Why does our more churchy form of holiness seem to get it the other way around – to comfort the religious and antagonize the sinners?

Jesus's brand of holiness (the true form) didn't seem to deter the sinners from wanting to get up close and personal with him. The gospel is full of stories of sinners, the bungled, the broken, and the bent clamoring to be near Jesus. Jesus was different. He wasn't like the other holy rollers, the religious folk, of his day. There was something magnetic about his persona that caused even the most desperate to do the unthinkable and violate not only social etiquette of the day, but risk further marginalization by being close to him.

No doubt about it, Jesus' holiness was compelling. The Gospels clearly show us that social rejects loved to be around Jesus. Think of prostitutes, lepers, tax collectors, adulterers, Roman soldiers, Samaritans, Gentiles, and the list goes on. They couldn't get enough of him. In hanging out with people like these, Jesus shows us that one cannot achieve holiness by separation from the unclean.

The holiness of Jesus, it seems, is a redemptive, missional, world-embracing holiness that does not separate itself from the world, but rather liberates it. And it wasn't that Jesus was simply "a nice inclusive guy." Everyone loves a nice guy, but nice guys don't end up murdered on crosses. Actually, as Ben Witherington says, it's not surprising (because of his actions and teachings) that Jesus was crucified. The surprising thing is that it didn't happen sooner!

A lot of what is given to us as "holiness" today is really nothing more than morality.  I'm not saying that I want everyone to be "immoral" but I don't think "immorality" excludes one from the heart of God--and therefore should not exclude one from the heart of the church. And this is not just about homosexuality.   Homosexuality is just the hot-button issue where this discussion, debate, fight, is taking place.  We could have similar discussions about welcoming the drug dealers, the divorced, the unwed mothers, the goth, the tattooed, the addicted, the poor, the.... well you get the picture.

I have recently been dealing with the death of a young man in the community who was loved by many.  I had the privilege of leading a memorial service for the family yesterday.  This young man, somewhere along the way, got into a hole that he just kept digging deeper into as he tried to get out.  Drugs.  Theft.  Lies.  Turning against the very ones who loved him most.  Very difficult situation.  But in his death the survivors are left with the tough questions like, "Did God love him?"  "Could God welcome a sinner such as he?"  "Is he in heaven?"  These are tough questions and I always fall back on the testimony of the love of God.  That's where it starts.  That's where it ends.  Period.  The holiness of God is intimately connected to his hospitality.  It is not opposed to it.

This is a "wild holiness." It calls into question those of us in the church who would be bound to religious codes, separating ourselves from others.

We must again be surprised by the amazing capacity of Jesus to break religious stereotypes and to embody a kind of holiness that embraces the seriously weird and the wonderful, this is the Jesus we follow.

Anti-Bullying Post 1: "Christians Who are Silent are Complicit"

Image by trix0r via FlickrIt's been month now since Rutgers student Tyler Clementi commited suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge.  It's a horrible account.  Tyler's roommate supposedly took a video of Tyler engaging in some homosexual act and posted it on the internet.  Now, I'm not sure if this has been proven, but the information is out there.
The following is found on AOL News.

The Rutgers University students charged with streaming a classmate's gay sexual encounter on the Internet prior to his suicide appear to be in hiding, refusing to defend themselves publicly even as criminal charges pile up and anger builds on their college campus and around the world.

Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, both 18, were charged earlier this week with two counts each of invasion of privacy for allegedly using a camera to view and transmit a live image of fellow 18-year-old Tyler Clementi "making out with a dude," according to Ravi's Twitter postings. Clementi was Ravi's roommate, and he killed himself on Sept. 22 by jumping off New York's George Washington Bridge after finding out about the Web video.

This has led to various responses of support for those in the LGBT community and a call to stop this kind of cyberbullying for all persons.

And, as Christians, we should care.  We should care because we have a Savior who loves us and loves those who are being bullied (and, indeed, the bully-ers).  And, frankly, if we don't stand up against the bullying that takes place in our midst then we are complicit in it.  It's our sin, then.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this since the Tyler Clementi incident.  But I've always been big on combating bullying and people picking on others or stripping them of their power or humiliating them.   Just this past year I participated in the Special Olympics' "Spread the Word to End the Word" -- The campaign to stop the use of the word, "retard."

So, the church needs to stand up for those who are victims and love them with the love of Jesus.  Otherwise, we have a sin of omission on our hands.

"Christians are Such Hypocrites!"

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CHRISTIANS ARE SUCH HYPOCRITES!  Oh, they act all "Goody Two-Shoes" (insert Adam Ant song here) but they sin just like everyone else.  Isn't that the definition of being a hypocrite? 
 

1.  a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, esp. a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.

 

2.  a person who feigns some desirable or publicly approved attitude, esp. one whose private life, opinions, or statements belie his or her public statements.

 

(Thank you Dictionary.com).

 

However...

However...

The fact that there may be persons in the church "who pretend to have virtues" is not so much a problem with Christianity as it is a problem with Christians.  The basic premise of Christianity is that we are sinners in need of redeeming...that "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, so that whosoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life."  When persons join our club, we tell them they need to symbolically get washed in the waters of baptism to get that dirty sin off of them and we recognize that it's a constant struggle to live faithfully...that we're still going to be dealing with sin after JUSTIFICATION and along the road of SANCTIFICATION.

RC Sproul wrote a book in 1982 called Reason to Believe which addressed some of the objections that persons raise to the faith.  One of which is this whole hypocrisy thing.

 

What happens is that people observe church members sinning. They reason within themselves, “That person professes to be a Christian. Christians aren’t supposed to sin. That person is sinning; therefore, he is a hypocrite.” The unspoken assumption is that a Christian is one who claims he does not sin. It reality just the opposite is the case. For a Christian to be a Christian, he must first be a sinner. Being a sinner is a prerequisite for being a church member. The Christian church is one of the few organizations in the world that requires a public acknowledgment of sin as a condition for membership. In one sense the church has fewer hypocrites than any institution because by definition the church is a haven for sinners. If the church claimed to be an organization of perfect people then her claim would be hypocritical. But no such claim is made by the church. There is no slander in the charge that the church is full of sinners. Such a statement would only compliment the church for fulfilling her divinely appointed task.

 

It is true that there are hypocrites in the church.  But that's not the fault of the church.  It's the fault of Christians who have misinterpreted the message of Jesus.

Willimon on the "Peculiarity of Christian Sin"

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I read this over on Richard Hall's "Connexions" weblog.  It's a post by Kim and it's a quote from Will Willimon, Bishop in the United Methodist Church and one of my former professors at Duke Divinity School.

I quote this here because I read it and could hear sermons that I've preached on sin over the years and phrases that have appeared in them.   In the church we are "learning how to be a sinner."  I've used Reinhold Neibuhr's comment that "the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine" and also Barth's quote, "Only Christians sin."  In many sermons I've said, "Sin is a Christian construct.  It takes place in our understanding of our relationship with God.  It moves beyond offense to humanity or the earth or merely bad things to a theological point."

I think the section below, entirely quoted on Richard Hall's site, gets at some good stuff on sin.

Part of the prophetic ministry of the church is to teach people that we are sinners. Think of the church as lifelong learning in how to be a sinner….

Reinhold Niebuhr, citing Herbert Butterfield, is well known for his remark that the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine. Even those who do not know that Jesus Christ is Lord, know sin. Niebuhr was wrong. Christian sin results not from our unhappiness with the limits of human existence and our inappropriate response to our discontented finitude (Niebuhr). Rather, Christian sin is derivative of and dependent upon what Christians know about God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

…. In all of his massive Church Dogmatics, [Karl] Barth did not get around to original sin until the very end. The traditional path had been to begin with the problem, our sin, and then to move to doctrines of redemption and atonement, God’s answer for our sin. Barth refused to take this path because if human beings are as sinful as Christian theology claims us to be, then even our attempts to admit our sin will be deceitful, sentimental, and self-serving. The “sins” of non-Christians are puny. We can only speak about sin after telling the story of our redemption.

As Barth says, “Only Christians sin.” That is, only Christians have inculcated the insights and the sets of practices that make sin comprehensible. Christians learn to sin, not by beginning with the allegedly universal observations about the “human condition,” but rather by beginning with a story of redemption. Only later are we able to move to an account of sin. The joyful story of our forgiveness precedes any honest telling of our sin….

William Willimon, Pastor: The Theology and Practice of Ordained Ministry (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), pp. 270-72.