Seeker Sermons

When I returned to North America in the 90s the Seeker movement had already won the day. Dressed down preachers in big box churches, and those who followed them brought practical sermons about how to be a better husband, how to have a great family, how to honor God with your money, how to ____________. 

The Bible’s credibility was earned by its wisdom. If the Bible could provide for you the life you’ve always wanted, then the Bible’s value would be self-evident. The Christian life was true because the Christian life worked. 

The Collapse of the Christian Assumption

Now almost 20 years later it seems (at least if you see the world through skeptical bloggers) it’s all come apart. This morning I read another installment of “the church has failed me” novel. The life you’ve always wanted was a lie and the church was unable to deliver. The church was mean to girls and gays and we’re not buying it anymore…

No person’s land now stands between complementarians and egalitarians. One side is godless because of its refusal to submit to revealed truth while the other immoral because it fails to love their neighbor as themselves. 

“How To” only Works within a Story

All “hows” are dependent upon some imagined good end to pursue or evil to avoid. You can only preach a “how to” sermon if everyone has already agreed upon some vision of a common good. I see that in churches today. Communities are puddles of ideas and assumptions. The water of those puddles are the stories of the rain that created them. 

Every couple of months I guest lecture for a friend’s college class on “Myth, Ritual and Magic” on the Christian myth. Myth is everything. You only have meaning within your myth. Take away the myth or the story and everything is just sound and fury. 

Leviticus

In a couple of weeks I’ll be starting a series on Leviticus. Leviticus is one of the strangest books in the Bible for us today. It makes no sense. Why should some God care about people slaughtering their prize livestock? It makes no sense. 

Leviticus is like the seeker sermons of the 90s but we are strangers peering in with disgusted wonder. 

Christians have long had a complicated relationship with the book. We might easily dismiss it as “ceremonial law” or “dietary law” but we reach back into it if we find a moral law that we want to enforce. Not to many folks are buying it anymore. Is Leviticus a vestigial organ? 

Holy Holy Holy

If there is one message the Old Testament wants to give us it is that God is different. 

If someone comes from another country, visits you in your home and you find footprints on your toilet seat you know they do things differently from you. 

The point in the leaving church piece that caught my eye was the “your love doesn’t look like love” part. 

The older I get the more I realize that love isn’t obvious because love, like “how” is dependent upon a story. 

Part of Christianity’s struggle today is because of its success. Many many people commonly believe that the Great God is available to them for intimate and common relationship and that this god’s can be accurately known with little or no effort, revelation or pain. That’s no small assumption, but we don’t realize that. 

We wonder how it would be to relate to an alien species to arrive in a space ship but blithely assume God is a powerful buddy somehow annoyed and frustrated by what annoys and frustrates me. No wonder many atheists have simply written off this God as a mirror of our own imaginations. They have a point. 

The response of the commonly spiritual is that any God worthy of omniscience and mercy would need to be able to accommodate and understand our limitations. That’s a good point too and one that has to be taken into consideration in any reading of a book like Leviticus. This God is strange. This God is loving. The relationship will be sometimes weird, often problematic, sometimes wonderful. 

Gratitude

The problematic premise behind most American how-to strategies is that they are mechanical. God can be worked. God can be managed, God can be used to provide outcomes we desire. I believe the consistent message of the Bible is that this is both pointless and offensive. Any such God is unworthy to be God. You may have a stream or a physical system but you don’t have a God. 

No parent wishes to be treated this way by their child. Parents want their children to respond to them in trust and gratitude. You learn how to please mommy by knowing mommy and gifts given for the purpose of joy are always welcome.