Why DID We Crucify Him?

 
I’m still thinking critically about the present-day view of Jesus, the view of which Deepak Chopra advocates by painting a rosy-cozy picture of a “third” Jesus.  Awhile back we saw Machen’s comments that were excellent and appropriate.  From a different “tradition,” here’s Bishop Willimon’s take on this whole thing.

“It is odd that we have made even Jesus into such a quivering mass of affirmation and oozing graciousness, considering how frequently, unguardedly, and gleefully Jesus told us that we were sinners.  Anyone who thinks that Jesus was into inclusiveness, self-affirmation, and open-minded, heart-happy acceptance has then got to figure out why we responded to him by nailing him on a cross.  He got there not for urging us to ‘consider the lilies’ but for calling us ‘whitewashed tombs’ and even worse.”

Right.  If Jesus just gave us some neat statements on realizing our potential, why in the world did we staple him to a tree while cackling like demons?  We need Jesus because he called sin sin and chased it to the cross to pay for it and take the damning curse from those who trust in him.  I don’t really care about my lack of self-actualization and low self-esteem.  My dark and depraved heart frightens me much more.

Qutoes from William Willimon, Sinning Like a Christian (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005), 8.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Conversations with Barth on Preaching

“Preaching is utterly dependent upon a God who raises the dead and who calls some people to tell about it.  If there is no God to make the preacher’s sermon ‘work,’ then the preacher is the greatest of fools.  The messenger is disposable by, dispensable to, and derivative of the message.  We have this treasure in earthen vessels.  The treasure is more interesting and powerful than the vessel.  Today’s preachers find themselves in a vulnerable, dangerous situation when a pleasing personality is more important to a congregation than a truthful one, when charm and wit, warmth and ‘love’ become more valued in a preacher than being a person who is willing to stand up and speak the truth as God has given it.  The truth that is communicated through personality (Phillips Brooks’s definition of preaching) is so much more important than the personality.”  [William Willimon, Conversations with Barth on Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006), 243-4.]

Amen.  It is a “dangerous situation” for the preacher and his congregation: he may be tempted to preach what they want to hear and they may be tempted to judge him according to his personality rather than the message he brings.  Willimon knocks it out: the vessel is a bunch of dirty clay compared to the treasure that comes from his mouth.  Mess this up and the gospel gets shoved off to the side.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

The Sabbath and the Small Church

Here’s some more great stuff from Preaching and Worship in the Small Church by Willimon and Wilson (Nashville: Abigdon, 1980).  This time the authors write about the primary activity of the small church: Sunday worship.

The authors lament the fact that a hundred other things have taken the place of Sunday worship in American churches.  Sunday school, Wednesday night prayer services, youth groups, ladies’ groups, mens’ groups, singles’ groups, college groups, endless committee meetings, social-action programs, and so forth threaten the “centrality of Sunday” (p. 39).  “Sunday worship became the victim of the ‘full-program church’ mentality.”  Long ago, a defining part of the definition of being a Christian was: “he goes to church on Sunday.”  Now that person is “quickly informed that that was only a small part of the Christian life.  ‘What you do outside the church is more important than what you do inside the church,’ was how the slogan went.”  All the other programs and events and meetings and groups “conspired to convince people that worship was only one small part of the full program.”

“Such thinking had an undeniable appeal to the pragmatic, utilitarian, work-oriented society, such as we have in the United States.  Time spent in worship tends to be thought of as idle time – unused time.  We are a nation of doers and achievers.  How can ‘acts’ of worship compete in importance alongside activities such as Christian education, counseling, youth programs, board meetings, Bible study groups, and charitable work?  The ‘active’ church with its doors always open, meetings in progress every night of the week, newsletters recruiting participants for a host of activities, insuring that every person is kept busy throughout the week (provided that person truly wishes to be an ‘active’ church member) has become the paradigm for any church that aspires to greatness” (p. 40).  “Even the worship services of those [busy] churches frequently have a breathless, hurried, distracted quality” (p. 42).

The authors continue the discussion by explaining the fact that doesn’t seem obvious: small churches don’t (can’t!) usually have those programs, events, committees, and so forth, but that is good news.  Because they lack these programs, the authors argue, “small churches celebrate Sunday in a fashion that puts many of their larger sister churches to shame” (p. 41).   “Congregational worship is a reliable barometer of the life of the small church.  Here the church family will celebrate its victories, lament its defeats, act out its deepest needs.  The small church will often express an intense sense of ownership of its Sunday worship practices.”  Often, Willimon and Wilson note, many small church parishioners will violently react to radical change in Sunday service.   They say well that this should be viewed as a positive thing: it shows that the saints there value the Divine service above other church “stuff.”

This is a great word for those of us who are members of smaller churches (quite a few of us I’m guessing!).  It is tempting to emulate the mega-church down the street and literally “get busy” as a church.  The problem with this is, as the above notes reflect well, that the busyness swallows the Divine service on Sunday.  The church gets spread out so thinly that it is like a beehive with the saints all buzzing past each other.  The only time they actually stop doing something is during the pastor’s prayer and brief sermon on Sunday morning, around 30 minutes total.  The rest of the service is filled with activity, swirled in with the activity during the week.  The 30 minutes of “rest” or quietness becomes a footnote in the life of the saint: every second of the rest of the week has a full calendar screaming out to get to work!

I’ve noticed the benefit of worship in a small church.  Sunday is different.  We stop.  We think.  We laugh.  We cry.  We rest.  We sit still and be quiet, learning how to receive from God as passive listeners to his word.  We are fed by Jesus.  We teach our kids to quit fussing around (which we ironically do all week!), we practice the cycle of God’s time.  This goes against the grain of our nature and culture, but as Willimon and Wilson say, this is a great way for a small church to recover their own unique sense of mission and restore their positive self-image.  When we in small churches “boldly claim the fundamental significance of Sunday for [our] congregational life” we will be a great light of rest to the darkness of the busy world around us.  And above that, we’ll be reminded that we’re pilgrims who depend on God’s word to live each week of our lives.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

(Still) Sinning Like a Christian

Willimon speaks well on sin in this book, Sinning Like a Christian (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005).  The introduction is great – as is the rest of the book.  In the intro, he says that we Christian sinners understand sin: “it is to sit lightly on our meager moral triumphs, knowing that they are tinged with more than a touch of sin, and at the same time to be gentle with our neighbor’s failures, not expecting too much from people like us” (p. 12).  Later in the intro Willimon notes with Scott Peck that if you really want to see sin, genuine evil, you need to start by looking in the church: it is the nature of evil to “hide among the good” (p. 14).  What Willimon is saying here, I believe, is that we Christians have the standard for what is truly evil, and that standard tell us that it is not simply out there, but in here, in us.  It is easy to go on a moral crusade against abortion or homosexuality, but at the start and end of the day the chief place the Christian has to face sin is inside her/his heart.

When you hear the word “sin” or “evil” as a Christian, you don’t start by pointing to something in the world, but yourself.  That’s what Willimon means by “sinning like a Christian;” he also agrees with Luther – simil iustus et peccator.

Here’s one blurb on pride.

“As frail, mortal, vulnerable creatures, we react to our vulnerability in futile ways, one of them being our pride.  There is something incredibly pitiful about modern, twenty-first century North American people telling ourselves that our greatest need is for more self-esteem, more self-confidence, more self-assurance – pitifully revealing how little esteem, confidence, or assurance that we have in ourselves.  Of course, from a Christian point of view, that’s the problem – ourselves” (p. 46).

This is a fascinating book well worth reading, even if you’re not all the way on board with everything Willimon writes.  In reading it, you’ll learn something quite sinful about sin, your sin.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

A Small Church: Maybe Not So Bad After All!

Though this book was penned in 1980, it still speaks volumes to our present “church” situation.  William Willimon and Robert Wilson wrote it: Preaching and Worship in the Small Church (Nashville: Abingdon, 1980).  Here are a few helpful quotes/comments.

Some people “have a gnawing feeling that the small church is somehow second-rate and does not quite measure up to what it ought to be in today’s world.  Other persons…view the small church as an anachronism, kept alive by stubborn people who are holding on to an institution that should be allowed or even encouraged to die.  They see such churches as impediments to the development of the kind of congregation needed today.  In the meantime the small congregation continues to exist, doing what it and the Christian Church have always done, albeit imperfectly: winning adherents, nurturing them in the Christian way of life, gathering them each week for worship and preaching, and in many rural communities, finally burying them in the adjacent cemetery, confident that they have successfully run the race and received the reward of the faithful” (p. 14).

Willimon and Wilson lament the fact that the capitalistic notion that “bigger is better” has made its way into the church’s thinking.  “If the figures are going up, the congregation and its pastor are presumed to be succeeding.  If they are remaining the same or decreasing, something is obviously wrong” (p. 30).  Pastors of small churches are less important than pastor’s of big churches; a pastor has not “arrived” until he’s the senior pastor of a huge church.

They praise the small local church that has simply (i.e. w/o parades, programs, politics and pet issues) preached the word and administered the sacraments.  “Congregational worship is a reliable barometer of the life of the small church.  Here the church family will celebrate its victories, lament its defeats, act out its deepest needs” (p. 45).

“To the pastor who is serving or who may serve a church of small membership, we have a final word.  If you measure the success of your ministry by the size of the crowd, the prestige of the church you serve, or the praise of denominational authorities, you are in deep trouble in the small church.”

“But if you sense that you are called of God – if you know that your ultimate authority and final validation of your ministry come from the faithful service and celebration of the Word and its confrontation by God’s people, your servant hood will continue to be blessed.  You will have the joy of knowing that you are faithfully proclaiming the Word, and that you are an instrument of God’s grace for the people who worship in a church of small membership” (p.123).

This is advice for myself, a pastor of a small church!  The blessings of a pastoring small church quite possibly outweigh the blessings of pastoring a larger church.  May the capitalism be knocked out of my church thinking.

For an earlier post from this book, see “Willmon on the Busy Church.”

shane lems

sunnyside, wa

Barth on Domesticating The Wild Word (Willimon)

Building on a few earlier posts from this book (William Willimon, Conversations with Barth on Preaching [Nashville: Abingdon, 2006]), here is another Barthian theme that throws the furniture around.

“The domesticating of revelation… [is] the process of making the gospel respectable.  When the gospel is offered to man and he stretches out his hand to receive it and takes it into his hand, an acute danger arises which is greater than the danger that he may not understand it and angrily reject it.  The danger is that he may accept it and peacefully and at once make himself its lord and possessor, thus rendering it innocuous, making that which chooses him something which he himself has chosen, which therefore comes to stand as such alongside all the other things that he can also choose, and therefore control” (p. 181).

He nailed it.

Willimon capitalizes on this often, which is one of the things that makes Willimon worth reading.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Willimon on Barth II

This should be in the library of everyone interested in homiletics, Willimon, or Barth: William Willimon, Conversations with Barth on Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006).  Even if you’re not a Barthian, this book will “get” you; I’m not, and it did.  Or, as Flannery O’ Conner put it, “I like old Barth: he throws the furniture around.”  This book will throw your furniture around!

Here are two of Willimon’s points that summarize Barth’s theological preaching:

“Preaching is the proclamation of the Word of God.  It is neither moral exhortation (the gospel is demeaned and our human situation is denied by reducing preaching to moral exhortation), nor a heartfelt expression of the preacher’s personal piety (who cares?).  Preaching is not a skillful representation of God’s word (the task of theology).  Preaching is not, despite the history of rhetoric, primarily a matter of persuasive speaking.  Persuasive speaking is God’s problem, not ours.  A sower goes out to sow and, without careful preparation or planning, just begins slinging seed.  Of course, in such effusive sowing, there is much waste, for this sower seems determined to overwhelm the world with words.  In fact, most of the seed falls onto infertile ground.  It is up to God to give the growth, not us preachers.”

“The hearing of God’s word is not an example of democracy in action, with the hearers making savvy choices in what they will accept or reject.  Preaching is dramatic, effusive presentation of God’s word, so that God’s word is heard through it, if God wills.  ‘Proclamation is human speech in and by which God himself speaks like a king through the mouth of his herald’ (CD, I.1 p 52).  Whether God speaks through preaching is God’s free choice: ‘When and where it pleases God, it is God’s own Word,’ but preaching is nevertheless that dangerous, confident adventure of letting God be God in the church” (Ibid., 72).

Another point Willimon deduces from Barth’s theological homiletics is “that to be a Christian communicator is to be engaged in a struggle, a conflict, a kind of war.”  We are not preaching to a Christian culture.  “Every Sunday we are issuing a declaration of war against some of the most cherished idols of our culture.  The world in which we live is adamantly set against the gospel – and always has been.”  “The Bible is full of violence and war, for there was something about Jesus that brought out the worst in the world” (Willimon, p. 111-112).

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Christ – My Life Coach Helping Me Overcome My Bad Habits?

Here’s what Willimon says about Horton’s new book which diagnoses the Amerincan church, Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008): “Here the roots of our current theological malaise are exposed and we see the wrong turns we took when we began taking ourselves more seriously than God.  Michael Horton diagnoses our trouble in stunning, unavoidable character.  Therapeutic, utilitarian deism is named, nailed, and defeated with the best weapon God has given us – the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Presumptively evangelical Christianity is exposed as the latest recruit to the cause of insipid, culturally compromised liberalism.  I am judged in the process.  Robert Schuller’s vapid ecclesiology is us all over.  My sermons are only slightly less silly and compromised than Joel Osteen’s.  Mea culpa.  Mea culpa.  Mea Culpa” (p. 10)

Here are a few blurbs from the book:

“My concern is that we are getting dangerously close to the place in everyday American church life where the Bible is mined for ‘relevant’ quotes but is largely irrelevant on its own terms; God is used as a personal resource rather than known, worshiped, and trusted; Jesus Christ is a coach with a good game plan for our victory rather than a Savior who has already achieved it for us; salvation is more a matter of having our best life now than being saved from God’s judgment by God himself; and the Holy Spirit is an electrical outlet we can plug into for the power we need to be all that we can be” (p. 19).

“It is not heresy as much as silliness that is killing us softly.  God is not denied but trivialized – used for our life programs rather than received, worshiped, and enjoyed” (p. 24).

“While God wants to give us everlasting life, we settle for trivial satisfaction of superficial needs that are to a large extent created within us by the culture of marketing” (p. 34).

This is hard hitting stuff, and much needed hard hits.  Read this book and take the blows; it will help purge you of the dross and drivel of self-love and positive thinking that has taken the American church captive.

One more note: this is the perfect book to give your elders and pastors after you get a copy for yourself.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Willimon On Barth

Here’s a unique and wonderfully interesting mix: Willimon writing a homiletics book with a purposeful Barthian bent.  If you’re a preacher, you’ll love this book but also probably hate it.  One page you’ll be underlining or highlighting whole paragraphs, the next you’ll probably write question marks beside every line.

Let me just throw out a few quotes.

“Barth cautioned that the Bible has little interest in most of the questions that people bring to their study of the Bible.  People have been conditioned to think that it is their task to approach the Bible with the pressing questions of the day, there seeking moral guidance.  Scripture, however, has the much greater calling of announcing the new world of God’s reign.  In various ways, and in many voices, scripture is about God’s glory and sovereignty.  The Bible is not about how we might climb up to God, Barth explained; scripture is always about how God has miraculously, triumphantly descended to us.  [Writing against Schleiermacher, Barth said] ‘And our fathers were right when they guarded warily against being drawn out upon the shaky scaffolding of religious self-expression.’”

“‘The church comes into being because God’s word is spoken.  The church does not constitute the Word but is constituted by the Word.’  Hence, her subservience to the Word, and the Word alone, gives the church a marvelous freedom from all earthly sources of revelation, including Adolf Hitler.  For our purposes let us note that Barth’s chief opposition to Hitler, and Barth’s main motivation in writing, was his insistence that the church must be free to preach what the church is told by God to preach.  Barth’s objections to the Nazis were first of all a matter of homiletics.”

Here’s Willimon doing a bit of a side bar on story/history: Barth criticized Strauss (reconstructing the life of the ‘real’ Jesus): Strauss “gave us a Jesus reduced in stature and hammered into shape, perhaps, a Jesus who is perhaps a trifle groomed, domesticated, and made practicable when compared with all the strange things which are said of him in the texts. …Though some of the Jesus Seminar think of themselves as ‘progressive Christians,’ they are really reactionary in their rendition of the new California, upper-middle-class accommodationist Jesus.”

I’ll probably return to this book from time to time here on our blog, but for now let me just say that though I certainly disagree with some major aspects of Barth’s theology, I deeply appreciate this and other similar books.  Read it!

Quotes taken from William Willimon, Conversations with Barth on Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon, 2006), 15, 21, and 37.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Our Father

“Some people are offended that we are taught to address God as Father. The greater offense may be the little word Our. In this prayer we are taught to pray, not as individuals, but as the church. When we say ‘Our,’ we are not being possessive. Many a person has come to grief attempting to domesticate God as a cheerleader for the American way or as a cosmic Federal Express. We say ‘Our’ because of the astounding recognition that this God, the one who created the universe and flung the planets into their courses, the great God of heaven and earth, has willed to become our God. Before we reach out to God, God reached out to us and claimed us, promised to be our God, promised to make us God’s people. Thus, not because of who we are or what we have done, but rather because of what God in Jesus Christ has done, we are privileged to say, ‘Our Father.’”

William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas, Lord Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer and the Christian Life (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 25.

shane lems

sunnyside wa