The Radical Gospel

Over the summer, I had the opportunity to watch the film that came out in August entitled, The Butler. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it is a very moving story of Cecil Gaines. The name has changed but it is actually based on a true story. It’s the story of how Cecil Gaines and his son Louis each approach the racial issues that have gone on in the United States for many years.  It is the story of the radical changes that occurred in America with regard to race over the course of a few decades, culminating in the election of a black president in 2008.  I remember watching some of the election returns on that election night, and when Obama came out with his family, the camera panned to some people in the audience.  Perhaps, you saw it too, some in the audience, particular those from the black community, shed tears of joy and disbelief given their experience.  I think a film like The Butler gave me, a foreigner, some added insight into the emotions of that moment.

If we go back even further, a century or so ago, a change of a different kind occurred.  It’s hard to believe now, but 2013 marks the 95th anniversary of the enfranchisement of women in the United Kingdom!  Prior to that, women were not permitted to vote and in some jurisdictions not even considered persons. I think it started with Mary Smith in 1832. She was a property-owner who quietly petitioned the British parliament to allow women who owed property to vote for their members of parliament.  When the petition went to parliament, there was laughter. The same happened over the ensuing decades. Then, as the 20th century began, the suffrage movement started up.  The largest suffrage group in Britain was known as The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and was under Millicent Garret Fawcett.  But, perhaps, more than any other, the more militant, Women’s Social and Political Union, under Emmeline Pankhurst pushed the agenda.  It was a more radical organization.  Militant in its day, they believed that what had been done in the past, the letter-writing campaigns had not been enough.  They felt that the government had dithered long enough and at some of their gatherings violence broke out.  There was stone-throwing, fights, they damaged property such as sports pavilions on fire and golf courses to get at the men, and painted their slogans anywhere they could, “Votes for Women.”

Notably, the WSPU women were from the upper and middle classes.  They were “Downton Abbey” kind of people and, if they happened to go to prison, they insisted on being called political prisoners.  These particular suffragettes became a thorn in the flesh to the government during the early years of the last century. When war broke out however, the radical suffragettes relented and they helped out with the war effort; but because of their efforts up to that point, when the war ended in 1918, the government gave the vote to women.  Hard to believe, it wasn’t that long ago.  Canada of course, because of its close ties with Britain at that time, followed suit and it was not long before Agnes Macphail became the first woman elected to the Canadian parliament, the Dominion parliament of 1921.

It so often happens that radical actions bring about change. And I think in his day, the Apostle Paul was a radical. It wasn’t that he engaged in violence to push his agenda, but he was a radical thinker. In the midst of the first century that gave birth to Christianity, Paul brought something new. We always have to remember that Christianity was founded in a very Jewish society, a culture marked by specific thoughts and values and actions and acceptable behaviours. Its tradition was steeped in Torah.
Now if we study Torah in its very narrow sense, it means the books of our bible; those we know as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.  These are the books that gave God’s basic law to the people and taught them how to live, but it was found that these laws tended to be general at times. Things like, “Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy,” and so over generations and generations, rabbis would interpret these and let people know what obeying the Torah actually meant. An oral law grew up around the Torah that people had to follow, and some in the first century, like Jesus, referred to it as a yoke around their necks. There were “dos” and “don’ts” and “you have to do this and that.”
I remember some of that from my early years because some parts of the church have had similar thoughts and pietism.  When I was very young, I grew up in a fairly staunch, Methodist family. Methodists have generally moved on and aren’t so staunch these days, but at that time they were known for their piety.  I remember the Sabbath Law, for instance. We just couldn’t do anything on our Sabbath, which was Sunday. We had to obey, and we went to church in the mornings, church in the evenings and Sunday School in between, and that was about it for Sundays. As a young person Sunday could be a terrible ordeal.
I got a new kitten recently.  It’s very young and destroying the house.  It jumps and bounds around all over the place; it’s crazy! It reminds me about what young things do, and young children no less.  Young people, just want to bounce around and have fun and so on a Sunday, being told to sit all day was rather arduous.  I remember one Sunday in particular we went down to my grandmother’s house in a little village in Northern Ireland, and I’m not sure when we arrived, but it was long, sunny summer day and Sunday afternoon dragged on and on.  All the children just wanted to get outside and play and run around. Well, a few of us somehow managed to get out from underfoot and gathered in a field behind my grandmother’s house.  Amazingly, someone just happened to have a ball and someone else happened to have a bat and someone else happened to have a box that we used as a wicket, and so we started playing cricket.  And we started imagining we were our favourite players. My favourite player at the time was the English fast bowler, John Snow, and I pretended I was John Snow when bowling.  Others really liked Gary Sobers from Barbados (he was magic as a player). So there we were, playing away; playing cricket on “the Lord’s day.”  And as we played, the noise levels began to rise and I bowled a ball that hit the wicket and shouted, “Howzat!” That’s what one says in cricket,” but as the noise increased, it was not long before my grandmother came out and some of her friends, and they gave us a lecture. They picked up the ball first, gave us a lecture about our transgressions, while we stood around like a bunch of Charlie Browns kicking the dirt, heads were down, knowing that we had really erred seriously.  That was life in that culture and it was hard to break free from that.
I think, likewise, it is good to remember that Paul had been a member of a very pietistic, Jewish culture at the time.  Paul lived amidst all sorts of customs and traditions.  It was a culture always en garde against the widespread influence of the polytheism that surrounded it.  A culture concerned about the moral laxity of its neighbours.  Paul, had even fought for religious purity himself. On behalf of the high priest, he’d gone out and persecuted a little group that were known as, Christians. He was on his way to Damascus, one day, to persecute this group when a great light appeared and a voice that cried, “Saul, Saul” (his name before he became a Christian), “Saul, why do you persecute me?”  For three years after this event, Saul, or Paul, went away to Arabia and he pondered what had happened. For three years, the Spirit was at work in him.  Then he went to check things out further with Peter and some of the disciples in Jerusalem.  Then he set out to preach the good news of Jesus Christ to the world.

One of the places that he went was to Galatia, in what we now know as Turkey. He preached, and we’re told that some people there believed, and eventually he left someone in charge, and he went on to other places to preach some more. But then we’re told that some others came in, including Peter at one time. Some others came in and they began to influence the young Christians and told them that they needed to be circumcised if they were really to be followers of God.  They told them that they needed to stop eating with people who weren’t believers, or weren’t Jews, and that they weren’t allowed to play cricket on the Sabbath Day!  Apparently some of the Galatian people began to follow those dictates, and Paul was incensed, and said, “Oh, you foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? You don’t need to be circumcised. You don’t need to follow Jewish Table Laws. In Christ, you are free. Jesus Christ died for you, just as you are. You’re made right with God through faith, not by following aspects of the law or doing things to your body.”

Now to us, a couple of thousand years later, that just seems like normal stuff.  We’ve lived with the tradition of Christianity for generations, but in its day, Paul was being as radical as Emmeline Pankhurst was in the early days of the 20th century.  That was as radical, say, as the Gay Pride movement was 25 or 30 years ago.  People would laugh when Paul came along and said these things, and just say “Oh Paul, you know everybody knows that the people who follow God are to be circumcised. Everybody knows you shouldn’t eat at the table with Gentile sinners. We’re called to be holy, we’re called to be separate people.” They would ridicule Paul, and then when that wasn’t working, they were quite dissatisfied with him and it turned into force and then persecution, because this was something radical that Paul was doing in the midst of the society that he was a part of.

But Paul kept going. He kept going because he had had an encounter with God, something that changed him. He’d been a Pharisee. He’d been moving along up the Jewish ladder towards, perhaps, being a Rabbi himself one day.  He was steeped in his tradition.  But God had come and that changed everything. Paul had to re-think everything.  He had to re-visit all his thoughts, things that were precious to him, ideas that he had grown up with.

So he wrote to the Galatians and said, “Who has bewitched you?  It’s not about circumcision, it’s not about table manners. It’s about Jesus Christ, it’s about faith in Christ.”  It can never be about upholding the whole law. We can’t do it, it is impossible to do all the time. But God has encountered us just as we are, whether we’re Jew or Greek, or slave or free or male or female.  We see this in how the Spirit is falling.  The Spirit is falling upon people of every nation, not only upon Jewish people. The Spirit hasn’t come just because we follow the law; it’s has come when we have faith.  Take Abraham, for instance, says Paul.  Why was Abraham considered right with God? Was it because he followed the law? No, because he lived before the law came with Moses. Was it before he was circumcised? No, because he lived before that. Scriptures tell us that Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. And so it’s faith. It’s belief. It’s Christ. These things are at the centre now, nothing else.  To say that in that environment, in the first century, that was a radical, radical thing.  It was as radical as the suffragette movement, as radical as people thought Martin Luther King was, as radical maybe as The Black Panthers.  There was something new going on, God has made a new covenant, a new testament in Christ, centered on faith and belief.

Now here we are, we’re in the 21st century, and I wonder if it’s possible for us to hear those words again. Let’s think about the church. Throughout the ages, the church has existed and at times it has been good, at times it’s fallen behind a bit, at times it’s responded very slowly to change, at times it’s been more radical and it’s led the way. In the early days of the church, for instance, it took stances against violence, Roman games and gladiatorial fights and things like that. The church’s radical stance helped bring about change for the good. In the 19th century, the church spoke out about poverty and they were in the forefront of bringing education and social aid to the masses and people in need and it all came through the Methodist and the Presbyterian and the congregational churches and then the United Church in the 20th century. The United Church even sought to Christianize the entire social order of Canada.  In faith, it stepped out and tried to make changes.  It influenced governments and social policy over generations. In more recent years, the United Church has taken more radical stances and here we are in the early years of the 21st century. As a church we’re really good at some things. We’re still good at opening our arms to the disenfranchised and helping others and doing works of service throughout the world. But there are some people who feel that in our radical service, we’ve entered into a way of being in which we are sort of tolerant, and we’re open to others and we tell people, “if you’re like that, you’re one of us and you’re in with God.” It’s as if we say, “If you engage the world and you help those who are down and out, and  you serve, then you’re right with God, you’re one of us.” If you do as we do, you’re on the right track; you’re right with God. But there are those who feel that in doing this, we’ve missed the boat entirely, that we’re reducing Christianity, reducing what it is to being or acting.   Perhaps, it’s akin to what Paul saw in his day, following the law but forgetting about faith, belief, Jesus Christ.

I remember a friend of mine in one of my former churches.  He was very active in a number of different ways in the church.  He was heavily involved in a ministry that took in clothes and supported those who could not afford their own clothing.  Occasionally, he would take clothing to a needy family and, one day, after being out with a family, I said to him, “Did you tell them why you’re doing that?”
He looked at me quizzically and said, “No, am I supposed to?”  “Well, it would help,” I said, because you know, the church has been in decline for a good many years, and we’d like to grow, so we’d like to pass on the message of the light we have in Christ.  Perhaps in doing that others will find the salvation that we have in Christ.”
He just looked at me and said “Really? I thought we were just to do it without saying anything.”

Today the word of the Lord comes to us again through Paul. He says no one is made right with God by anything that you do or say, it is through faith in Jesus Christ.  That was a radical statement back in the first century, and maybe it’s a radical statement now when we think of the church and what we have become.  Perhaps, we need to step outside of what have become our mores and traditions and our views and what we consider right and wrong, and re-discover the centrality of Jesus Christ.  God, who is at work and continues to be at work in the world.  All of the things that we do to look after others are important but they need to be centered on one thing, Christ, and maybe that has become as radical a statement now as it was in the days of Paul.  So the question is, “How can we, as individuals, make that true in our lives today?”