ANOTHER NEW RELIGION?

March 20, 1988, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51:10-17
John 12:20-32

"_..when I am lifted up. from the earth, I will-draw all people to myself.”
-John 12:32

It has occurred to me that the religion people often reject is
not my religion, or any religion that I recognize, but the religion of
their childhood, old religion, legalistic, pie-in-the-sky—when-you-die
religion.

People are always teiling ministers why they aren't religious... You'll
be making the normally inane small talk in a social situation and after you
have revealed what you do for a living your conversation partner says —
“Oh, I used to be religious, when I was a child. My parents used to force
me to go to church every Sunday. It was awful. I haven't been back since
~ except, you know, for weddings and funerals." There is usually a lot of
nervous laughter and uneasiness.. Sometimes there are horror stories about
awful preachers, cruel Sunday School teachers, rampant hypocrisy... . One
man once told me that he hadn't been back to church ever since an army
chaplain insulted him during the Korean War.

Now I am generally pleased that people do:.this. I observe that
disbelief is not easy... that we spend a lot of time explaining it -
trying to reassure ourselves, I suppose, that it's okay not to believe.
But it has occurred to me, after a fair number of instances in which I
found myself in the curious position of trying to defend a kind of
religion that was essentially indefensible, that what thoughtful people
often reject is a caricature, an aberration, a religion that ought to be
rejected.

. A recent issue of The New Yorker contained Pauline Kael's review of a
“new British documentary film, Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done. Ms. Kael
titled her review "God's Pickpockets." The film focuses on that most
visible expression of religion - the televangelists and their prodigious
ability to generate cash. The documentary shows Kevin Whittum, a victim of
a terrible bone disease, asking viewers to send money in to the P.T.L., and
then reveals that Mr. Whittum is actually under contract. In the second
part the film explores the gap between the beliefs and practices of some

hugely successful religious enterprises and the values and teachings of
Jesus. The head of a Bible College testifies that Mother Teresa is
condemned to hell because she hasn't had the born again experience, In an
inner city chapel destitute men are shown sitting for hours listening to a
minister droning on, in order to earn a reward of a thin sandwich before
they are put out and locked out for the night.

The last line of Pauline Kael's review is a haunting question... one
which thoughtful people have asked a lot recently: “How could Christianity
have become so debased, so mean?" There are two answers to that important
question. The first is that it is only possible for Christianity to be
debased if it forgets the one who said, “And I, when I am lifted up from
the earth, will draw all people to myself..."

The second reason is that religion has a way of forgetting its most
important ideas. The business of religion, William Stringfellow once
remarked, is religion, i.e. the rules and regulations, the structures and
institutions which have been spawned by the original idea. That is not
unique to religious institutions, by the way. The first priority of an
institution - every. institution — is survival. The larger and more complex
institutions become, it seems, the more they invest their creativity and
energy in the goal of institutional survival - and the further they stray
from the original idea.

Thus Dietrich Bonhoeffer, before he died, called for a religionless
Christianity. And Hans Kung, in a remarkable assertion in his new book,
Why I Am Stili A Christian says -

"J would not wish to maintain that everything connected
with the institutional upholders of Christianity is
Christian."

Kung views himself.as a faithful churchman - but his conscience
compels him to object.

"I cannot think that the one to whom Christianity appeais,
Jesus of Nazareth, would today take up the same attitude

as (church) authorities on the questions at issue..." and

then he lists them — "birth control, remarried divorced people
at communion, ordination for women and married men."

Now that should not produce any smugness for Protestants. There are
plenty of examples for us - of religion badly out of step with Jesus. Some
Protestants continue to push for book banning and censorship in public
schools - have fought and continue to fight racial segregation... And in
the sorrowful events in Belfast, cheered on and supported by right-wing
zealots in America, Protestants showed themselves capable of despicable

bigotry and violence.

It is an old dynamic. It begins early in the story. We have been
thinking about the idea of the Covenant during this Lenten Season... God's
promise to be God to his people. —- God's gracious presence with those
people... Part of that story is how the Covenant is debased by the
religion the people create to remember it and celebrate it.

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God comes to Noah and tells Noah that he will never be forgotten. God
comes to Abraham and Sarah and promises to be God to them and their
descendants. God comes to the people as they wander in the wilderness.

The message is the same. I will be God to you. I love you as a mother
loves her children. I want life and joy for you as a father wants that for
his family. I want you to live in justice and to be a light to the rest of
the world - my big, diverse, extended family. And those magnificent,
sweeping ideas keep being reduced and subdivided and squeezed into the
rules and laws of religion. Instead of bringing the creation together in
the Creator's love, religion becomes exclusive, narrow and nasty. Instead
of welcoming everybody to the banquet table, religion acts like an
exclusive club and starts to devise ways to keep out. undesirables.

And then tragedy. The nation is defeated in battle by Babylon... Its
armies are overrun. Jerusalem is ravaged and the Temple, the visible
reminder of God's promise, is leveled. The people are lined up and marched
across the desert to Babylon where they exist in captivity for decades -
humiliated, exiled, separated, lost. "How shall we sing the Lord's song in .
a foreign land?" they ask. "How can we be faithful to the Covenant if we
can't be religious in the Temple?"

Then one day the word comes: “We're going home... We're poing back
to Jerusalem - to rebuild and begin again -.and this time we'll get it
right!"

The prophet Jeremiah, in one of the loveliest images in the Bible
wrote: .

"Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord,
when I will make a new covenant.

I will put my iaw within then,

I will write it upon their hearts;

and i will be their God, and they

shall be my people."

Five and half centuries before Christ a prophet by the name of
Jeremiah was describing God, not in traditional terms. as an angry,
judgmental authoritarian, but as a loving parent, who stoops and takes her
people - her dear children -— by the hand and leads them out of bondage. It
is a touchingly intimate theology... God is a lover: God is like a mother
who tends to her children; like a father who watches over them and cradles
them.

God's law is not written on tablets of stone. This God's law gets
inside them - in their hearts - where they live.

This is not just a- bigger and better religion with stronger rules and
fancier liturgies. This is something new.- a new Covenant... Its content
is God's grace, God's inclusive love, God's justice, God's peace.

I want to draw a direct line between that magnificent insight of
Jeremiah's and the central event of Christian faith: the crucifixion.

At a level deeper than we are able to understand or explain, the
crucifixion of Jesus addresses us. It has not been a cheerful week. It has
not been a good week for summery spirituality and possibility thinking...

A Protestant terrorist threw a hand grenade into a crowd of Catholic
mourners in Belfast. . And at the funeral of one of the casualties, the crowd
killed two British security agents. Israeli soldiers shot more
Palestinians. .Tensions mounted in South Africa. _ Iran and Iraq continued
their war; and several battalions of American troops were dispatched to
Honduras.

The world, to borrow an image from St. Paul, seems to be “groaning in
travail." What our Lord knew - with everything in him - was that his dying
was God's way of staying with the world, not abandoning it. It was God's
way of making good on their new Covenant.

The crucifixion of Jesus happens in the middle of the world. The
crucifixion of Jesus means that in the middle of the worst darkness some of
us dare to see God's presence. The cross is the promise that God has not
given up on us. God continues to love. God continues to work for
reconciliation and healing even in the midst of the worst and cruelest
human events. It is the final mystery. This public execution, this
ugliness becomes - by faith ~— the source of hope and beauty and peace... for
the world and for. each of us.

It is not yet another new religion with better prayers and hymns. It —
is a covenant, a promise, written in the heart. It is, Jeremiah realized, a
an. intimately personal promise that.God will. be God to us; that each of
us will be son or daughter. to God. That new Covenant is not carved in
stone. or written on a _scroil. It is in our hearts.

It is there, of course, in the perimeter of our own heart, where we
have our being. It is in. our heart where the deepest hurts hurt and the
noblest dreams and worst fears and highest joys reside.

It is when we are who we are and when we ask those questions we dare
not ask out loud... Do I matter? Does my life count? Is there anything
lastingly significant. about these years I am living? When I die, will
anybody care?

Professor William Muehl who teaches at Yale - put it personally and
powerfully:

"The people to whom the Gospel is to speak today are not huddled
fearfully in the shadow of ancient altars... they are rather wandering
about aimlessly, troubled by the increasing suspicion that no one literally
gives a damn about what they. do." [All The Damned Angels, p. 38]

To that modern dilemma - meaninglessness, aloneness and exile - the
Gospel speaks a word and it is the word of the cross. The cross, final
mystery, means that you matter, ultimately, to God... That God knows your
name.. That you and your life are important to God... That there is oo
nowhere you can go that God will not be with you. This dying means that
the worst that can happen has already happened - to God's son and,

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therefore, you can live with the confidence that God will be there - in the
valley of the shadow of death - with you and for you.

The cross means that God knows every darkness, every exile.

The crucified one means that nothing can ever separate you from God's
love.

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to
myself..." Jesus said.

Five centuries before, Jeremiah put it. -

"IT will make a new covenant with then,
I will put my law within then,
I will write it upon their hearts."

We are not persuaded, or changed, or converted, by much arguing. It
requires an act of love. It takes something that will get inside us,
something in our hearts.

Every year at about this time I recall one of my moments of clarity
and conversion. Stil] exploring Christianity as an intellectual option (a
process I have in no way abandoned) - I had about concluded that the
academics were right; we are alone in this universe, and that better
marching orders could be found in the Holy Trinity of Sartre, Camus and
Kafka than in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

I concluded that the coup de grace, literally, was the
crucifixion... It was so consistent with humankind's clear propensity to

kill its best people and best ideas...

And then Walter Phillips, an Australian Doctoral candidate, older and
wiser, with whom I could say these things, finally - in Holy Week in fact -
said simply:

"John, the crucifixion is not only what the worid did to
Jesus. It is what God did - and does - for the world."

It is final mystery and final meaning...

The best any of us can do is fall silent as we are drawn to this one
who was lifted up -

to resolve, somewhere in our hearts, simply to love
him, and somehow to live in a way that reflects that love...

and to recall every time we see a cross, that it was his, and
that what happened was for us.

+t tt tt t+ tit +

The music of the Passion is strong and honest: we only sing it in
these weeks - and to sing it is, in the best sense, to pray it. One of the
strongest and most beautiful is a very old hymn — Ah, dearest Jesus -

As you sing it - pray it -

"Therefore, dear Jesus, since I cannot
pay Thee, I do adore Thee, and will
ever pray Thee, Think on Thy pity and
Thy love unswerving, Not my deserving."

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