by Pastor Jay HutchensThere are lots of reasons for wanting to do a sermon series on “Simple Christianity.”
If we survey the religious landscape of even our own community, we discover how varied is the understanding of what is meant by term “Christian.”
Too often, the word itself has led to endless arguments and debates with groups defining themselves as the ones who have the “right” understanding and labeling others either as ignorant or as outright heretics.
It seems to me that lacking some understanding of the basics of our faith – the things upon which we can all agree – simply serves the purposes of the enemy. Isn’t it the case that when we disagree over technical points of doctrine – we don’t leave it at the disagreement – but there is always a measure of suspicion about the motives, the education, sometimes even the character of the person who disagrees with our own understanding of Jesus and his ministry and teachings.
C.S. Lewis – the great public theologian – who was a convert from atheism to Christianity as an adult – talked about his own task in describing to his radio audience something he called “Mere Christianity.” He said, “Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only service I could do for my unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times."
My own interest in talking about “mere” or “simple” Christianity is in fact, not theological, but missional. Having studied philosophy in college and then spending several years in seminary earning a Master’s degree – the thing that strikes me the most about religious education can be summed up in a phrase we’ve all heard – the more you you know the more you know how much you don’t actually know.
So if more and more education or more and more training isn’t the answer – and if the more you know about church history, theology, and counseling leaves you with more questions – then what is the answer? That question hit me hard after seminary when I left the classroom and entered the ministry of the church. And I have come to believe that the early Christians – the very first Christians, in fact – weren’t paralyzed in their ministry because of a lack of knowledge of the faith and deep theological questions that for them went unanswered.
As a matter of fact, the New Testament describes a church that was not paralyzed at all, but explosive in its growth – adding three thousand new converts on the day of Pentecost after what would seem to be a very simple message from the mouth of the apostle Peter. For Peter said this, “God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father, the promised Holy Spirit, and poured out what you now see and hear… therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”
Peter begins and ends with the resurrection of Jesus as God’s ultimate act of divine power and saving grace in human history. It’s the same message that Paul the Apostle many years later and completely across the Mediterannean Sea in Athens, Greece would echo in Acts 17, “But now he commands everyone to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.”
Like we said again and again on Easter Sunday – if you believe in the resurrection of Jesus – then that belief has some significant consequences for how you live your life. If you believe in the resurrection – like we said – your life can never be the same again – IF you believe that the resurrection of Jesus actually happened.
I say that my interest is missional because I see at the heart of Christianity the same heart that Peter and Paul saw – the affirmation of God’s creation and of life through the divine act of resurrection – the divine act of making alive that which was dead, of restoring to health that which was sick, and restoring to wholeness and completeness that which was broken.
This is at the core of our faith. All else rests on our belief that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. If this belief isn’t part of our way of experiencing God and the world, then anything else you might believe about Jesus simply doesn’t matter.
Paul commented on those who found the idea of Jesus’s resurrection difficult to swallow when he expressed, “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and vain.” (1 Cor. 15:14)
What was so important about belief in the resurrection? Why was it so core and so essential to the heart of Christianity?
I stumbled across the answer to this question in doing pastoral work with hundreds of people who have listened to sermon or sat across my desk, or simply caught me in the coffee line – in reading books and reflecting on what the authors were describing – but more important than that were the thousands upon thousands of conversations I’ve had with people inside and outside the church that have led me to the conclusion that –
Deep inside of us is the feeling that something’s not as it should be. Sometimes, it’s just a feeling – a hint, a voice that something’s amiss in not just our individual lives – but in the world. Perhaps we see all that the world is capable of being and we wonder to ourselves, just why it is that the world isn’t that way. We have glimpses in our lives to relationships of genuineness and authenticity and real family and then we are exposed to incredible pain and hurt that comes out of our family systems.
Or after knowing a time of peace like we experienced in the 90’s, war comes and we see the violent images on television or the internet of dead children – dead through no fault of their own but caught in violence that even our best philosophies can’t seem to explain or give comfort to. We simply know deep down in our hearts that innocent children dying whether through tsunami, war, or human accident is just simply not the ways things ought to be. We are offended, we are hurt, in a small measure – while not taking away from the pain of the victims – we share in that pain – we hurt FOR them in our hearts. Something here seems very, very wrong to us.
The feeling may be much more personal than what I’ve described thus far. Life may have been difficult for you and deep down you know that you were created for something so much better and more meaningful than what you’re experiencing right now. You battle depression – because sometimes all you can think about is why your life turned out the way it did while others around you seem to be so blessed and happy. Why do you battle addiction? Why do relationships seem so hard for you? Why does it seem that you never have money? Why did YOU come from a dysfunctional family? Why is it that YOU can never get ahead? And it may be that the feelings of being lost and never at home in the world always hover over you.
Each one of us – no matter where we come from, how educated we are or how well off we may be – have experienced at some time in our lives the disconnect – the disconnect from others, the disconnect from ourselves, the disconnect with the way the whole universe seems to operate. We’ve looked up to the stars and wondered quietly or out loud – does this life really amount to anything at all? And after we’ve screamed and shouted until our throat hurts and after we’ve jumped up and down and become angry and mad lashing out at anything or everything or wasted ourselves away in defiance until we can no longer move – at that moment when we finally collapse and are quiet… we hear a voice.
It comes at first as a voice of sadness. Sadness for all that has been lost during that time the scales covered your eyes. Sadness for all the brokenness and hurt and pain you’ve gone through. Sympathetic sadness for all those who are suffering even now because they don’t have eyes to see or ears to hear. It’s a tragic sadness, really. It’s tragic because… again, deep down, we sense, we are aware that it doesn’t have to be this way at all.
But in the end, the voice is a simple one. One that calls gently to us back to some hidden wholeness that we always sensed was present – a sign of God’s prevenient, nurturing grace. It’s a voice that speaks healing words to our soul – “Be still,” it says, “and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10).
My prayer for you is that you would become attune to this voice calling you back to a world that is set aright, where peace and justice matter and prevail. Where community is real and people mean what they say and when they say they love you and each other – it is not as the world loves, but deeper, more joy-filled, and meaningful.
This is my prayer for you because I believe that we need to be comforted by the voice of God we hear. Hearing the voice… discerning the voice of God… means that we must do a little bit of training – training that involves learning how to tune out the other voices we hear – the other messages, the worldly messages, that communicate to us values that aren’t really values at all. It’s hard training because the language we have learned from the world is all around us each and every day. We hear it spoken from every corner and we hear it spoken so much and so articulately that it sounds natural to us. We’re comforted by the language, the voice of the world because it’s what we’ve come to know. And it has even the sound of ultimacy to it – until God’s voice intercedes and intervenes.
This means that we have to first recognize that the language and voice of the world is not the natural language of those who would hear God. The enemy has won nine-tenths of the battle for our souls if he can just get us to accept the way he talks about life and the world as real.
Think about this because it’s so important. If the enemy can get you to think about other people in terms of how they fit into your agenda – the enemy has won. If the enemy can get you to define the word “success” by how much money you make or how much you do or accomplish… then the enemy has won. If the enemy can get you to define your life in terms solely of the present moment, focusing solely on your present pain, present happiness, present comfort, present desires without any thought for the eternal… then… the enemy has again won. If the enemy can get you to focus all the time on your wounded-ness – and continually think how much you deserve because life has been so unfair to you – then, the enemy has won.
Don’t let the enemy define how you think about your life. “The thief,” Jesus says in John 10:10, “comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
That’s why Jesus frequently talks about those who have ears to hear, because not everyone has been equipped to hear the voice of God when God speaks, or when God whispers, or even when God screams with prophetic shrillness into our lives! The prophet Jeremiah proclaims with characteristic loudness, “Hear this, you foolish and senseless people, who have eyes but do not see, who have ears but do not hear: Should you not fear me? declares the Lord. Should you not tremble in my presence?”
Having ears to hear the word of God as it is spoken and revealed into your life, requires having your ears opened to God. We can’t do the opening, but we can surrender ourselves in such a way to God, so that God can perform the work of giving us eyes to see and ears to hear.
Have you noticed how often in scripture Jesus is healing blindness and deafness? There are always many levels to Jesus’ miracles of healing. When he heals the man who his deaf and dumb in Mark 7, one wonders if the attention is on the fact that a miracle has occurred or if the man can now hear and can now “talk plainly” as the text says in 7:35.
Isn’t this the miracle we desire most of all? To be able to hear plainly the voice of God and to be able to speak plainly about things in this life that really matter? To know and speak and communicate in the language of love that God spoke when by the “Word” the universe of was created? This is the word we desire to know. This is the language we long in our hearts to speak.
My friends, the only way to learn a language that heretofore has been foreign to you is to immerse yourselves in it. I had to learn this lesson the hard way when I was an undergraduate. I had taken four years of high school French. When I entered Texas A&M, I was pretty cocky that I was going to place out of French. I took the entrance French test and failed it! Failed it after four years of having to learn to twist my mouth around in a myriad of unusual configuration just so I could perfect my French pronunciation!
As if to show the French faculty what they could do with their test, I enrolled in beginning German. Like French, I struggled for several semesters through German basics, German reading, German pronunciation which always sounded like you were trying to cough something up! Finally, my last semester of German I actually traveled to Germany where for six weeks we traveled the country and lived with a family where we weren’t allowed to speak English. In that kind of environment, you soon become bored of pointing at things to get people to respond and eventually through immersion in that language environment, you’re forced to actually start speaking and understanding the language. The sad thing for me was, it was in my sixth week of study that I finally began to pick up the language so much so that I began to actually dream in German. Frightful thought.
The voice of God which is heard in God’s language of love is learned the same way – through immersion. Oh you can do like I did with my French – you can dabble in it. You can do just what you have to do to get by in class. You can memorize just enough vocabulary that you can pass the quizzes. And in doing that you’ll get out of it pretty much what you put in.
If we are earnestly desiring to hear the voice of God plainly and clearly, then quite simply we must be in the places where the language is spoken. I had to actually go to Germany before I could become “immersed” enough to learn German. On this earth, God has formed communities of believers who gather and speak to each other the language they’ve heard God speak to them. Isn’t that incredible? That when we sing or pray or preach we are rehearsing out loud what we have heard God say to us as a faith community.
And what happens when we speak differently? We find ourselves thinking differently and then even behaving differently. The world changes for us because we have changed our definitions about some pretty basic things. Life becomes for us the life that God so graciously grants us to laugh, to have joy, to know real love. Love becomes sacrificial and “other-oriented” rather than selfish and self-seeking. Work takes on the character of a “vocation” or as the latin word is translated – a “calling” whereby we are called to fulfill a divine purpose by how we spend our time during the day. We aren’t just receiving a paycheck but we are giving back to this world a measure of love, and grace, and mercy by what we do.
And ultimately, we listen to and hear and then speak the language of the resurrection. It’s a different kind of language than what we’re used to… to be sure. Everyday, we should rejoice in the fact that God so loved the world that he… well you know the rest. There is LIFE when we listen for God’s voice. There is HOPE and RESTORATION and HEALING inside of the community that practices together the language of God, indeed what we have come to know as the WORD of God. Like Paul and Peter and a whole cloud of witnesses that have gone before us – we discover that there is life after death and because of that death cannot rob us of our deep joy when we respond to the call of the creator to come, be still, and know that he is God.
You know, I’m on a mission. I am! It’s not a mission to get everyone to agree with my theology. It’s not a mission to “convert” others to my point of view. No. I’m on a mission of healing. I want, like Jesus, to open up ears so that people can hear…not my voice…my voice just wants to sing a grander song… but the voice of the creator – a creator who chose to speak his saving word through his awesome, loving, divine and human son – Jesus Christ.
And I suspect this is true. That if ears are open to God, then the sheep will hear His voice and desire so much to be in His presence. My friends, THAT is a Christianity that is “mere” – that is in fact, “simple.”
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