Tomorrow is Memorial Day, a
holiday first known as "Decoration Day" in the 19th century and then
“Memorial Day” in the 20th. In the first years of Decoration Day, families and
friends would visit cemeteries and decorate the graves of all the departed.
After the Civil War killed over 750,000 soldiers from both North and
South—more than the total dead from all other American wars before or since--
the holiday changed to a day of remembering those who had died in that war,
and, as Americans became involved in more wars in the 20th century, the
observance gradually expanded to include those who had died in all wars fought
on our behalf.
Today is also Trinity
Sunday, the day on which we Christians give thanks for God’s self-revelation to
us. As we reflect together on the readings for this Sunday, the sacrifice and
example of those who have died in the service of our country--from Bunker Hill
to Afghanistan--will be ever present in our hearts and minds, and we will more
formally give voice to our observance in the prayers.
At the end of the week following Easter, Kathy and I attended
our first gathering of the Conference of North American Cathedral Deans. This year the group met in Toronto, and an
advertised highlight of the Deans’ Conference was a lecture by a Canadian
theologian which promised a solution to the divisions between conservative and
liberal Christians.
A solution to the
conservative/liberal religious divide?
Sign me up! You can imagine that I was all ears as the speaker launched
into his topic. Who wouldn’t want once
and for all to solve this problem? But
as the talk developed, it turned out that his definition of the
liberal/conservative Christian problem differed pretty radically from
mine. He defined “liberal” Christians as
those who place primacy on the doctrine of the incarnation, that is God’s
coming into human flesh in the person of Jesus. And by his lights,
“conservative” Christians are those who emphasize the doctrine of the
atonement, that is the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross. After several minutes of intellectual
gobbledygook, the speaker proved at least to himself that both doctrines
actually were the same, and so ended by happily announcing that there really
were no disagreements between liberal and conservative Christians at all. Problem solved, case closed.
Immediately I raised my
hand. “Your discussion, “I said, “does
not take into account a whole other category of Christians whom I see in church
every Sunday.”
With great curiosity the
speaker leaned forward and regarded me.
“Really? Who are those?” he asked.
I replied that in every
church I have served there is a third group of people. They are not sure they believe that Jesus was
the incarnate Son of God. They are not
sure that Jesus’s death on the cross and resurrection ever happened. When and if they say the Creed they do so
with their fingers crossed. Yet they are drawn to Jesus and his life and
teachings and they want to follow him in worship and ministry. “Where,” I asked, “would you place them?”
The speaker looked at me for
a minute as if I had been speaking to him in Swedish. Finally he replied. “Why do I have to place them anywhere? If they don’t believe in the virgin birth and
resurrection, and if they can’t say the Creed, then they’re not
Christians.”
To call what happened next a
rumble would be a bit excessive, but the response of the urban cathedral deans
in the room was electric. One after another took to the microphone and spoke
to the expanding, pluralistic reality of the belief patterns of contemporary
church-goers. The theological academics
on the panel seemed really to be taken aback. They couldn’t seem to imagine the
reality of a contemporary, urban North American church. We
didn’t fit into their system.
Today is Trinity Sunday, and
I am not, in the words of a priest friend of mine, going put us all through the
“mental root canal” of trying to explain the Trinity in sound bites. But this is a good occasion to ask the
question implied by my experience at the Deans’ Conference: what do you have to believe to call yourself
a Christian? Or to put it another way,
is there a particular set of ideas a follower of Jesus needs to assent to at
all?
As we ponder that question,
today’s Gospel gives us a good place to start.
In Jesus’s words, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you
into all the truth.” [John 16.13] It has
taken me a lifetime of living in and with the Christian tradition to begin to
understand that Christianity is not a fixed set of unchanging, timeless truths;
it is always growing, evolving, changing .
The more I study and look back at the early church and the centuries
following it, the more I begin to understand how widely various Christian
believing has always been. In the words
of the great British historian of Christianity Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Christians
who think of doctrine as ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be’
don’t know their history.” [“One Enormous Room”, London
Review of Books, May 9, 2013]
“When
the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” In John’s Gospel account, what Jesus offers
his companions is not a timeless set of rigid doctrines. What Jesus offers his companions is a relationship.
In his earthly life, that relationship was lived out as Jesus and his friends
gathered around an inclusive and welcoming table to celebrate the abundance of
life and God’s creation. In his ongoing
and risen life, Jesus offers us a new relationship, now with the one he calls
the “Spirit of truth”, the one we call the Holy Spirit. And that Spirit is not some gaseous, aerosol
spray divine presence floating around the air someplace. The Holy Spirit is the ongoing presence of
God in and among and with us as we live and work and struggle and suffer and
love together. God is in and with and
among us. That Spirit of truth is
embodied in us and will help us figure it out.
So theological truth is not
about a mental formula that you have to get right in order to belong. It’s about an evolving, growing experience of
God’s presence as we make our way in the world. In Paul’s words from today’s
brief reading from Romans, we
boast in our
sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces
character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us,
because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that
has been given to us. [Romans 5:3-5]
Suffering produces
endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope. The Christian
faith is not a set of abstract propositions.
It is a lived reality. What we believe
about God, ourselves, and the world changes over time because we change and the
world changes and even God changes over time. “Christians who think of doctrine
as ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be’ don’t know their
history.” Jesus did not come to give us a rule book. He came that we might live with him and each
other and in so doing let that Spirit of truth guide us into all the
truth: the truth that comes out of each
person’s own, unique life experience. Only
you can tell your truth, and only I can tell mine; but in community, you and I
can share our particular truths as we live together into the big truth toward
which the Spirit guides us.
Now
this will sound like a shocking thing for someone like me to say, but I say it
with a growing conviction that I’m right.
The answer to the question, “What do you have to believe to call
yourself a Christian?” is not found in any set doctrinal or dogmatic
formula. The answer to that question is
found in Jesus’s promise of a Spirit of truth who will lead us, together, into
all the truth. To put it bluntly, you
don’t have to believe anything to call yourself a Christian. All you have to do, if you want to call
yourself a Christian, is to follow Jesus.
Following Jesus may sound easier than saying the Creed or signing the Westminster
Confession, but in fact it’s a lot more demanding. Christianity isn’t about what you think. It’s about what you do. Following Jesus means
coming together with similar pilgrim souls to listen and discern what God is up
to in the present moment. Following
Jesus means praying for others, yourself, and the world. Following Jesus means living compassionately
with yourself and those around you.
Following Jesus means working to make God's world the joyous, abundant,
blessed place God intends it to be.
Following Jesus means being open to the perpetual, ongoing newness
continually offered to us as the Spirit of truth leads us, with gradually
deepening insight, into all the truth. To be a Christian means simply to live
like a Christian, as Jesus and his companions did. If we do that, the Spirit will help us figure
it out.
Today is Trinity
Sunday. Let us give thanks on this day
for the truth we know personally and together.
Let us remember that truth discloses itself to us gradually over
time. And let us together call ourselves
Christians not by saying what we think about God but by showing how we live
with God: as free, loved, forgiven
people who love and accept and bless each other and the world. That’s how Jesus
lived, that’s how his companions lived, and his promise on Trinity Sundays is
that you and I can live that way, too.
Amen.
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