Questions for the Pulpit

with your rector, Harold Munn
March 20, 2008

Given the fragmented state of the Christian Church worldwide over the course of history, how could we begin to move back toward the vision Jesus had for His church?

We have to think about two reasons why the Christian Church is fragmented. One is that Christian people have not become completely loving: our journey into Christ's love is not yet completed, so we fight and abuse each other. Sadly, we do not show forth Christ well. However, since we are not called to preach about ourselves, but to preach the new life in Christ, this is not an insurmountable obstacle to people coming to know God in Christ.

The second reason for the fragmented church is that one tradition will never be wide enough to encompass all that can be known about Christ. For example, in Christ there is a deep solemnity. That solemnity might be well communicated through traditional Anglican liturgy. There is also great joy and energy in Christ. That joy might be better communicated in a Black revival service. There should be no difficulty in having different traditions emphasizing different aspects of the experience of Christ.

In the Anglican church there are some who believe that blessing same-sex marriages is a fulfillment of God's plan, while other people believe that is to be unfaithful. Some of us believe that, while disagreeing, we can continue to recognize each other as trying to be faithful, while others believe that one side in this issue is so mistaken that they can no longer be called followers of Christ. My perspective is that we can remain in mutual respect while continuing to disagree. Those who hold the opposite view (that one side is so wrong that they must leave) are causing our church to fragment.

Why do we give so much prominence to the Jewish Old Testament in our liturgy and our Bible? Much of it seems irrelevant to Christian faith.

The reason the Old Testament seems irrelevant is that we often focus on the stories of an angry God. Those stories seem primitive and unworthy of humanity, who is called to the love of Christ.

However, the Old Testament is not as full of violence as we often think. There are constant stories of God's compassion and patience and call to justice throughout the Old Testament. These stories are not as easy to understand instantly as are the stories of battles, so we tend to focus on violence.

Remember that in the Old Testament, the writers took the long view. They described how God acts between nations because the Old Testament covers a period of several thousand years. Nations are often at war, as is true today, but the writers of the Old Testament understood that, in spite of the wars, God was working out a plan for humanity. Sometimes we mis-read their intention and think that they believed that God was primarily violent.

In the New Testament the focus is on one person, Jesus, and his small number of early followers. The time described is less than 90 years.

Therefore, there is far more opportunity to cover major world events and the conflicts of nations in the Old Testament than there is in the New Testament. The Old Testament is very valuable to Christians because, whether we know it or not, it is in the Old Testament that there are detailed descriptions of God being far beyond what humans can understand; there are detailed descriptions of how subtle God's action is in human history; there are developed descriptions of how God appears in a wide variety of cultures from nomads, to urbanized people, to refugees.

When the early Christians wrote about Jesus, they were assuming that their readers already had a good grasp of the fact that God is fully involved in the life of humanity, and that knowledge came from being familiar with the Old Testament. If we had only the New Testament, we might totally miss the fact that God is involved in the whole human race and that God has expectations of how nations are led.

It's hard to take the miraculous aspects of the Bible (e.g., the virgin birth) as literally true. Why do those sorts of miracles not seem to happen in our time?

There are several reasons why those kinds of miracles don't happen in our time. Since science became important, we have thought that miracles meant some event that goes against scientific knowledge, such as walking on water or a virgin birth. The ancient idea of miracles was that they were dramatic signs.

Miracles were always thought of as having a message: if they didn't have a message, they weren't important. Jesus walking on water during a storm was not a message that Jesus could stop gravity. Rather, it was a message that Jesus can calm the storms around us. That turns out to be true of the most important storms. As we put our roots down into Jesus, we have a growing sense that we are always safe no matter what storms we encounter in life. That certainly feels like a miracle, but it has nothing to do with stopping the physical force of gravity! The same is true with the virgin birth. The original "sign" meant that God was doing a new thing, just as if God had started creation all over again. Humanity had reached a new low, and so God was going to do another garden of Eden - and make a new human person.

The sign had nothing to do with some impossible biological or genetic process that proved how powerful God is. Rather it had everything to do with proclaiming that God began an new human race in Jesus. If we choose to be part of that new human race, then we experience a miracle, our own lives become filled with Christ's life. That feels like a miracle, but it has nothing to do with proclaiming God can do impossible genetic tricks! If we remember that "miracle" meant "wonderful sign" then we will have a much better appreciation of the miracles in the Bible.