Proper 6 (June 12-18)
Texts: Romans 5:1-8;
Matthew 9:35-10:8
YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/live/eYk_m4ZFSE8?feature=share&t=600
PowerPoint Slides with Sermon
A CALL TO RELEARN THE GOSPEL
“Good news! God’s reign is at hand! The time to repent, to change your lives, the time is now!” In Matthew 10:7, we see that that’s the basic Gospel which Jesus taught his followers to proclaim two thousand years ago. It’s good to check from time-to-time: Do we have the full sense of what Jesus originally was talking about? Does our proclamation of the Gospel revolve around the coming of God’s reign?
Two weeks, I told a story from my friend Brian McLaren, a highly acclaimed Christian author, about what he hears from the younger generations these days.1 Why are our children and grandchildren mostly missing from church? Through his story about a thirty year-old woman named Charis, I suggested that a main reason seems to be that our basic Gospel message has come to overfocus on the afterlife. Charis, and her generation, seem more concerned about God saving this world which we’ve messed up than just saving souls for the afterlife. Again, the promise of life after death is certainly important. But it’s not the whole good news of the Gospel. It may not even be the most important part.
This morning, I’d like to suggest something even bolder, especially to a congregation of Lutherans. The wider problem has to do with Martin Luther’s Reformation, in the first place. Luther was right to try to get us back on track with a message characterized by grace. If we Lutherans have one word for the Gospel, it’s that word, grace, gift. Following our leader, then, we Lutherans, and most Protestants in general, have come to name the Gospel as “Justification by grace through faith.” We see those key words, for example, in our reading from Romans 5 today: “since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand” (Rom 5:1-2a). Luther centered the Reformation on ‘Justification by grace through faith,’ especially through the letters of Paul like the one to the Romans.
On this particular Sunday, however, we see both versions of the Gospel — and there might be a tension here. We read from Romans 5 the usual Lutheran buzzwords by which we have come to name the Gospel. But we also read in Matthew 10 Jesus’ own words which articulate the Good News for him: “God’s reign is at hand!” In recent decades more and more biblical scholars have noticed that ‘justification by grace through faith’ doesn’t necessarily synch up with the news that ‘God’s reign is at hand.’ What do those two have to do with each other? How is it that God’s reign actually came into this world, came into history, through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And how is that related to justification by grace through faith? So, if the younger generations have a problem with an overemphasis on the afterlife in our Protestant version of the Gospel, perhaps it could be addressed by first addressing this wider problem of Protestants having somewhat missed the mark on the Gospel for these past five hundred years! I believe that what’s at stake is nothing less than the survival of the church and its faithfulness to Jesus.
Let’s try to shed further light on this problem by hearing again from my friend Brian McLaren. Remember that before he became a full-time author and presenter, he was a full-time pastor. I’d like to share a substantial excerpt from one of his books that shares a story about his own change of mind and heart regarding the Gospel itself. His conversions of sorts is something I’ve gone through, too, which I now endeavor to pass along to others in my preaching and teaching. It’s been brewing for about fifty years now. Perhaps you’ve already been thinking about these things and have heard and read about such changes. I find Brian McLaren to be a leader in articulating this new clarity about the Gospel. And I offer it to you this morning. Brian writes,
Like a lot of Protestants, for many years I “knew” what the gospel was. I “knew” that the gospel was the message of “justification by grace through faith,” distorted or forgotten by those pesky Catholics, but rediscovered by our hero Martin Luther through a reading of our even greater hero Paul, especially his magnum opus, the Letter to the Romans. If Catholics were called “Roman Catholics” because of their headquarters in Rome, we could have been called “Romans Protestants,” because Paul’s Roman letter served as our theological headquarters. As its avid students, we “knew” without question what it was about. To my embarrassment, though, about fifteen years ago I stopped knowing a lot of what I previously knew.
A lunchtime meeting in a Chinese restaurant unconvinced and untaught me. My lunch mate was a well-known Evangelical theologian who quite rudely upset years of theological certainty with one provocative statement: “Most Evangelicals haven’t got the foggiest notion of what the gospel really is.” He then asked me how I would define the gospel, and I answered as any good Romans Protestant would, quoting Romans. He followed up with this simple but annoying rhetorical question: “You’re quoting Paul. Shouldn’t you let Jesus define the gospel?” When I gave him a quizzical look, he asked, “What was the gospel according to Jesus?” A little humiliated, I mumbled something akin to “You tell me,” and he replied, “For Jesus, the gospel was very clear: The kingdom of God is at hand. That’s the gospel according to Jesus. Right?” I again mumbled something, maybe “I guess so.” Seeing my lack of conviction, he added, “Shouldn’t you read Paul in light of Jesus, instead of reading Jesus in light of Paul?”
. . . I had always assumed that “kingdom of God” meant “kingdom of heaven,” which meant “going to heaven after you die,” which required believing the message of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which I understood to teach a theory of atonement called “penal substitution,” which was the basis for a formula for forgiveness of original sin called “justification by grace through faith.”
But my lunch mate’s questions unsettled all that. They bugged me so much that I started rereading the gospels with new intensity, and it became clear that my knowledge needed to be doubted and at least some of my accumulated learning needed to be either unlearned or supplemented. Jesus’s one-word preface to his gospel — “Repent!” — made sense to me as never before (Mark 1:15).
Increasing numbers of us gain courage to speak what has become joyfully clear to us in this fresh reading of the gospels: Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion to replace first Judaism and then all other religions, whether by the pen, the pulpit, the sword, or the apocalypse. (In fact, in light of everything we know about Jesus, doesn’t it seem positively ludicrous to imagine him gathering his disciples to announce, “Listen, guys. Here’s my real agenda. We’re going to start a new religion, and we’re going to name it after me”?)
Instead, he came to announce a new kingdom, a new way of life, a new way of peace that carried good news to all people of every religion. A new kingdom is much bigger than a new religion, and in fact it has room for many religious traditions within it. This good news . . . wasn’t simply information about how individual souls could leave earth, avoid hell, and ascend to, heaven after death. No, it was about God’s will being done on earth as in heaven for all people. It was about God’s faithful solidarity with all humanity in our suffering, oppression, and evil. It was about God’s compassion and call to be reconciled with God and with one another — before death, on earth. It was a summons to rethink everything and enter a life of retraining as disciples or learners of a new way of life, citizens of a new kingdom.2
Brothers and sisters in Christ, do you see how big might be? How daunting, really. Do you see how much work we need to do? We’re talking about unlearning a significant part of what we were taught about the Gospel and relearning what Jesus’ original Gospel was most truly about. That’s huge! And a little bit frightening, especially for my generation, us older retirees. There’s the age-old question, Can you teach an old dog new tricks? Why should we want to relearn some of this? But again, my bottom line and always in the background for me, and hopefully for all of us, is to have a Gospel to pass on to someone. To our children and grandchildren.
Again, I’m not saying we have to relearn everything. The grace part of what Luther taught is extremely important. It’s the foundation of our message. But to carry forward the Reformation in our time, five hundred years later, we need to get a better grasp of what the offer of God’s grace is more fully about. It’s not just about saving a few souls for the afterlife. It’s about saving God’s “very good” Creation. All of it. It’s about joining with our children and grandchildren to make this world we’re leaving them a better place. So it’s about addressing the major issues of our time: Like climate change and the political upheaval it will bring about due to mass migrations away from the many places on this planet which are becoming uninhabitable. And addressing issues like the rise in authoritarian politics, very often mixed with racism and homophobia — the rise of neo-Nazism. This is scary stuff, but I think we need to think about wading very, very carefully into some of the politics of this, armed with a very different kind of politics and strategies from Jesus, from God. Why? Because God’s reign is at hand, and God’s reign has a politics. We need to learn it.
In the mid 1930’s, Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a book called The Cost of Discipleship,3 which he wrote it under the shadow of the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany. One of the chapters is on today’s Gospel Reading from Matthew 10, which we will continue reading next week. The most famous chapter, though, was the first chapter, titled “Costly Grace,” in which Bonhoeffer confronts what he calls “cheap grace.” Next week’s Gospel Reading gives us even greater opportunity to talk about the difference between cheap grace and costly grace.
This morning, I’d like to leave us with a suggestion about cheap grace from what we’ve been talking about so far. If we overfocus on salvation in the afterlife, while neglecting what God is doing to save this very good creation, I think that’s our first example of what Bonhoeffer means by “cheap grace.” And especially after COVID, I think people have sensed that maybe their time might be better spent elsewhere than at church. Increasing numbers of people are thinking: ‘Gee, if all I really need to do to be saved for the afterlife is to believe a few things about Jesus, then I’ve got that down. I believe those things. I’m saved. Why do I need to go to church all the time when I’m already saved?’ In short, I’m suggesting that people are increasingly not showing up at church because our grace has been too cheap — not worth making the investment of time and personal involvement.
But what if we relearned the costly nature of grace as discipleship to Jesus who is calling us to make a personal investment in fighting to save God’s very good Creation. Do you think people might show up for that? Stay tuned next week and the weeks to follow. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Lutheran Church of the Resurrection,
Racine, WI, June 18, 2023
YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/live/eYk_m4ZFSE8?feature=share&t=600
PowerPoint Slides with Sermon
Notes
1. Brian McLaren, Faith after Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021), page 134.
2. Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (HarperOne, 2010), 137-39. I played the an edited clip from the audiobook version of the book.
3. Bonhoeffer simply titled the book Discipleship, but the first English translations extended the title to The Cost of Discipleship, which is still more familiar in the English-speaking world. But the definitive translation and edition is now Volume 4 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works and is again titled Discipleship (translated by Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, Fortress Press, 2001).
