A Sermon by John Brierly McCall, D. Min.
John 1:43 – 51
What will become of Christianity? There are two answers. The first is lifted by many loud voices telling you there’s a war raging. This war will determine whether our faith and culture continue to dominate the world stage, or will be destroyed. There’s no middle ground.
These voices warn that change, compromise, or even cooperation are like waving a white flag of surrender. And who is the enemy? Secularism and liberalism, certainly; those who say “happy holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas;” but also other religions and lawmakers and activist judges who threaten to take away the favored status of Christianity in our nation.
That’s the first and most obvious answer. I’ll come to the second answer in a few minutes. We’ll have you out of here before 3 o’clock! But first, some context for our conversation.
When we speak of Christianity, its story and influence, and future, consider the remark by C. S. Lewis, the British skeptic turned believer, a generation ago. He said:
The best argument for Christianity is Christians – their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians — when they’re self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration. When they’re narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths.
Sheldon Van Auken, A Severe Mercy, pg. 47
Any student of history knows that good Christian people, motivated by the Gospel, have opened frontiers, built schools and hospitals, eased social ills, brought hope and love and dignity to God’s people. Christians have also brought the Crusades and the Inquisition, spread syphilis and smallpox to native peoples, have seized land that belonged to others, condoned slavery, oppressed women, and worse.
So when we talk of Christianity we need to distinguish between the essence of Jesus with his life-changing message, on the one hand; and, then, what we as imperfect followers have done with the message.
Let’s refresh our memories. Christianity was first a movement among Jews in Palestine – primarily Jerusalem and Galilee – some 550 years after their people had returned from exile in Babylon and some 150 years after the Roman Empire had occupied their land. God had promised deliverance from the occupations and delivered the word through many prophets. Expectation rose as the coming of the Promised One seemed to be delayed.
When Jesus of Nazareth began to preach and teach many were drawn to him and insisted he was Messiah, the fulfillment of that promise; and began to follow in his way and eventually called themselves Christians. The compelling story in John 1 tells of Jesus’ call to the first of the disciples and Nathanael’s confession of faith. When he first heard that Jesus was from Nazareth, a little backwater town in Galilee, Nathanael dismissed the possibility that this was Messiah, saying, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Phillip said to him: “come and see.” Nathanael approached and immediately knew that this was the One.
John frames this story as one disciple’s call and as much more. This is really the story of every disciple’s call – your call and mine. You’ve heard who Jesus is and aren’t persuaded? Come and see. You seek forgiveness and healing and don’t know where to turn? Come and see. You have a glimmer of faith like one candle in the darkness? Come and see and discover so much more in God’s invitation and welcome.
Many couldn’t believe Jesus was Messiah largely because he was radically different from the expectation: a peasant, a peaceful man. He rode a donkey and not a stallion. How on earth was he going to free the Jews from Roman oppression? How was he, a common country rabbi, going to throw off the yoke of slavery?
The oppressed people needed a military commander to rally the troops not a peacemaker. They wanted someone strong enough to destroy the Roman armies and they got this unlikely teacher instead. He was nothing they expected and everything they needed. From outward appearances he might have seemed a loser; he died on a cross, for heaven’s sake! He couldn’t even save himself. Surely his short-lived fame would fade away. It didn’t.
Instead the community of Christians grew and grew, even through persecutions. Three hundred years later Emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. And from that day to this, the world has mistakenly believed that Christianity is about power, conquest, dominance and victory. For 2,000 years Christianity has been positioned as the religion of winners, not losers; princes, not peasants and paupers; Europeans and North Americans, not Africans or Asians or Hispanics. Quite simply, the Kings of Europe, over hundreds of years, made Christianity a servant of their own politics and power and prejudice. And then they exported it to their colonies and we’ve done the same… even to this day. That’s why some say we must fight to maintain our supremacy.
Those who believe that Christianity is locked in a life-and-death battle will point to the rise of Islam and secularism, and those who say they’re “spiritual but not religious.” They’ll say that Christianity is true and all other religions are false; that God is on our side.
So the first answer to the question “What will become of Christianity?” is that many Christians would have us fight more Crusades in a winner-take-all battle to maintain our power and position, as the religion of rulers, and the rulers of religion.
The second answer to the question is quite different. As disciples of Jesus Christ we’re not followers of a warrior. We’re disciples of Jesus the liberator, the healer, the one who released the powers of heaven by letting himself be broken on the cross.
Jesus’ spirit and wisdom have made it possible for his followers to endure persecutions in early Rome, facing lions and gladiators in the coliseum. African slaves, brought to this land by God-fearing Christians, learned the Gospel from their masters and then lived through the horrors of their plight by singing spirituals in cotton fields, and waiting for the chariot to come and carry them home.
This liberating Jesus was the life-blood of the Civil Rights movement in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, and still. It was the Gospel that stirred Martin Luther King and millions of good people to resist the indignity of racial prejudice, not by returning violence for violence but by peaceful social protest and the firm refusal to give in to injustice.
That’s the kind of faith in action that Jesus would recognize because that’s just how he lived. And that, I believe is where Christianity gradually will go. The way in which we embody the Good News of Jesus Christ has to change; not because some of us say so, but because of the world that’s unfolding around us.
My personal prayer is that we can find a way to come to a global table and bring our distinctive claims to Truth and sit with others who also know Truth, though likely calling it by different names.
Christianity is at a turning point now because of two particular events that have set the stage. One happened recently and the other will happen in the near future. First: sometime within the last couple of decades we European/North Americans became the minority among Christians. There are now more Christians in Asia and Africa than in Europe and North America. Caucasians no longer dominate Christianity. So-called “Third world” Christians have the power to determine a different course in the future.
http://features.pewforum.org/global-christianity/population-number.php?src=prc-newsletter
The second fact is this: Islam is expanding rapidly. There will be more Muslims than Christians – maybe in a hundred years, maybe in fifty. Estimates show about 2.2 billion Christians and about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, about 32% and 20% respectively. Eventually, we will fall to second place among the world’s religions. Already in urban areas of Europe and North America empty church buildings are being reborn as mosques. Employers around the world are facing increasing pressure to accommodate religious practices, no longer so much for devout Christians but for their Muslim employees who are called to pray five times each day.
The old idea that majority equals morality, or that might makes right is staring us in the face. But now the shoe is on the other foot. Anglo-Saxon Christians (particularly of the male variety) are no longer setting the agenda and calling all the shots. Let’s be clear: the Gospel is alive and well, but it looks and sounds quite different from the way you and I have always known it. God’s mighty deeds, and Jesus’ liberating love are being proclaimed in languages and cultures we can barely imagine.
I’ll never forget the first time I heard an Asian Christian preach to a bunch of New England Congregationalists about what following Jesus meant to him. My eyes and heart were opened in a brand new way, hearing testimony to what God was doing in a land that I had naively thought was primitive and literally God-forsaken.
The second answer to our question about the future of Christianity for the new millennium, then, is this: how are Christians going to live as neighbors in a multicultural, multi-religious global community in which we’re no longer the most powerful player? Are we able to be faithful, enthusiastic Christians if we’re not the pre-eminent voice?
We can certainly ignore the inevitable and pretend it’s not happening. Still, I’m sure we’d do better to hear the insights of Henry Kissinger when he wrote:
For any student of history change is the law of life. Any attempt to contain it guarantees an explosion down the road; the more rigid the adherence to the status quo, the more violent the ultimate outcome will be. [Years of Renewal]
Since I believe so firmly that God is at work in the midst of such changes, I’m not feeling fear and trembling but much more a sense of fascination. The biggest change, I believe, is that we as Christians must repent, literally turn around, and claim again the Gospel the way Jesus lived it. Following him is not about power but about freedom; not about victory but about liberation; not about winning by making others lose, but about the love of Jesus that makes all of us whole.
If Christianity is to survive we must abandon the notion that we can bring people to Jesus by imposing our will, or waging our wars to prove how much God loves them!
If Christianity is to survive we have to present the Good News as invitation not a threat, and draw attention to the light of Christ, without accusing anybody else of living in darkness.
Our greatest danger is not from others, from secular humanists, from other Christians, or even from Muslims. The threat comes from the inside. And the greatest danger comes from our demand that the world remain the way it used to be.
That won’t happen. This new age calls us to be unapologetic as Jesus’ disciples and to be very clear just what that means. I, for one, welcome the changes and the challenges, and give thanks to God that we can follow Jesus in a time such as this.