Brad
Sullivan
Proper
12, Year B
July
26, 2015
Saint
Mark's Episcopal Church, Bay City, TX
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21
I had a wonderful week on our mission trip last week. We were divided into groups, and my team
spent our days digging post holes for fences with Habitat for Humanity through
some of the rockiest soil I’ve ever seen.
Hard work, but very gratifying, and the youth were great, working hard,
cheerful, and loving being there.
We also spent each night in worship and had time with our
work crews to discuss questions that the preacher gave. Some in my group had other questions about
our faith, so we got together after dinner on Thursday along with several other
youth, the other adult from our group, and we had this great conversation of
faith.
One thing kept coming up during this conversation which I
finally addressed to the group. The kids
kept asking about whether this group or that group would be going to hell. I finally said, “guys, who goes to heaven and
who goes to hell”, that’s not really the gospel.
Gospel of Jesus can’t be summed up as, “believe in Jesus or
go to hell.”
If it were that simple, I think Jesus would have stated it
that simply. Having showed his signs,
having multiplied food in the sight of 5,000 people, I think Jesus would have
simply told the people, “I am the co-eternal Son of God through whom all the
world was made. Believe that fact or go
to hell when you die.”
Jesus didn’t say that, and I don’t think the Gospel is as
simple as that.
“Believe in Jesus or go to hell” is not the Gospel. These youth were not a part of churches in
which such a gospel was taught, and yet that is what they had gleaned from what
they had heard, maybe from popular Christianity. There certainly is a lot of “believe in Jesus
or go to hell” out there for people, young and old, to latch onto, but “believe
in Jesus or go to hell” is not the Gospel.
Restoration of creation, repentance & forgiveness, reconciliation,
love, unity with God – that is the Gospel of Jesus.
Look at the problem Jesus came to fix. In the beginning of creation, Adam and Eve
walked with God. They were naked and
unashamed. We were made to be in deep,
openhearted relationships with one another, bone of my bone and flesh of my
flesh relationships. We were made to be
fully our true selves with God and with each other, without fear, naked and
unashamed, walking together in unity and love.
When we disobeyed God, what was the immediate
consequence? Before even the punishment
that God gave, we felt shame, and we hid from each other and we hid from
God. The immediate consequence of our
disobeying God was disconnection from God and disconnection from each
other.
That is what Jesus came to restore, our deep open heart to
open heart relationships with God and with each other. When Jesus had the 5000 people sit down
together on the grass, he took 5000 disparate people, and he had them eat a
meal together. He had them do what
family and friends do together. He
gathered up 12 baskets full of bread from the 5 loaves and 2 fish. 12 baskets for 12 tribes of Israel. Jesus was showing the people that he came to
restore them and make them whole.
Jesus was God who had become human. He united humanity and divinity, even closer
than they were united in Eden. That was
the restoration Jesus came to bring. We
were made to be united to God, united to the creator of all life, goodness, and
love. Jesus united humanity and divinity
so that we may be forever united to God.
Jesus brought us back to our original Edenic state.
Believe in Jesus or go to hell? That is a farce, a perversion of the Gospel,
and a dangerous one at that. I know
people who have believed in Jesus, but also doubted, and because of their
doubts, been told by members of their church that they are going to hell. As a result, they have stopped believing in
Jesus at all. “Believe in Jesus or go to
hell” is what many preachers preach, and what many young people hear. It is short, easy, simple, and leaves no room
for doubt. Children and youth who are
taught this version of the Gospel, therefore, will easily and readily declare
who is going to hell based on their doubts or questions, and by doing so, they
drive people away from Jesus.
The young people I spoke to have likely not had preachers
tell them, “believe in Jesus or go to hell,” and yet that dangerous perversion
of the Gospel is so prevalent that they had still gleaned it as their basic
summation of the Gospel.
The gospel of Jesus cannot and must not be mistakenly summed
up as “believe in Jesus or go to hell.”
Doing so breeds fear, shame, and disconnection…everything Jesus came to
heal us from. Think about the evangelism
that goes with it…making people feel afraid enough or feel badly enough about
themselves that they will turn to Jesus.
That’s what advertising agencies do! Women are bombarded with images of airbrushed
women, tacitly being told that if they don’t fit into a similar body-type, that
there is something wrong with them.
Women are marketed and sold make up, tacitly being told that their faces
are not worthy of being seen, without makeup covering them entirely, all so
they can buy stuff from these companies.
How terrible.
Men are made to believe by advertising and marketing that
unless they are muscular, chiseled, great smelling and uber-masculine, they are
not worthy as human beings. All so they
can buy stuff from the very companies making them feel badly about
themselves. How terrible.
The false gospel of “believe in Jesus or go to hell”
evangelizes in the exact same way as companies trying to sell us stuff by
making us feel badly about ourselves.
They make us believe we are wicked and worthless sinners, destined only
for eternal torment, unless we assent to or believe in the fact of Jesus’
divinity. How terrible. There is no good news there.
We are unquestionably flawed – we make bad decisions which
hurt ourselves and others. We sin. The gospel of Jesus offers us forgiveness,
guidance, new direction, and a new life so that we don’t have to be defined by
our bad decisions. We don’t have to be
defined by our sins, but are defined as beloved children of God…children who
need guidance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and love. Jesus, the good shepherd, offers us those
things. Like the 5000 people, Jesus fed,
Jesus knows we are hungry too, for guidance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and
love, and he would never leave us unfed.
That is the gospel of Jesus.
The God of all the universe united himself perfectly to us
by becoming human in the person of Jesus.
Jesus brings us back to Eden where we may be naked and unashamed before
God and where we may be naked an unashamed before each other. Jesus told his disciples when we walked on
the water, “do not be afraid.” “It is
I[, the creator of the universe]; do not be afraid.”
What two things do we generally fear more than anything
else? Death, and disconnection. We fear death, and we fear being disconnected
from others. We fear being rejected by
others, being the target of gossip, being on the outside, not worthy of others’
love. Amidst all this fear, Jesus says,
“It is I[, the creator of the universe]; do not be afraid.”
Jesus came to restore our connection to God so that we might
also live wholehearted, connected lives with each other, once again being naked
and unashamed, living open heart to open heart connection with each other, and
seeking repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation in order to do so. Jesus also came to show us that we needn’t
fear death because our lives continue on after we die. We get to keep on living with God in Christ. Even after our bodies have died, we get to
return to Eden.
That is the Gospel of Jesus.
When I said this to the young people on that mission trip,
their faces seemed to say that their minds were blown, and they sat there
saying, “we want to hear more. Can we
skip Eucharist.” We were about to go
have Eucharist, and I said, “no, we can keep the conversation going later, but
we’re not going to break communion in order to do that. We’re going to join with the whole body and
have communion together. That is also
the Gospel of Jesus.
Our young people, and people of all ages need to hear the
Gospel of Jesus, not a false perversion of it.
We all need to go out there and preach this Gospel. Preaching in this case, was a conversation,
it wasn’t on a street corner. We need to
tell people the good news of Jesus, not the scary, manipulative false
advertising that is so often mistaken for the Gospel.
Let us pray. Almighty
God and Father, we pray that Jesus may dwell in our hearts through faith, as we
are being rooted and grounded in love. We pray that we may have the power to
comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and
depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that we may
be filled with all the fullness of God, for that is the Gospel of Jesus. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment