Biblical Basis for Progressive Christian Faith

THE BASIS FOR PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANITY

4^TH Sunday after Epiphany – Year C

February 3, 2013

Montevallo Presbyterian Church

Rev. Wayne McLaughlin

Jeremiah 1.4-10

Psalm 71.1-6

1 Corinthians 13.1-13

Luke 4.21-30

The great Black writer on Christian faith, Howard Thurman, told about his grandmother who had once been a slave. When he was young she taught him many Biblical stories. Later in life when he was a seminary student he realized that she had never taught him anything from the writings of Paul. He asked her about that. And she said that she didn’t like Paul. She said that when the Black preacher preached to the slaves he always talked about Moses and Jesus. But once a month when the white preacher came he always preached from Paul on passages like, “Slaves obey your masters.” She told Howard that she had taken her scissors and cut out all of Paul’s letters from it.[1]

We all do the same thing. Maybe not literally, but with the scissors of our minds. All of us like some parts of the Bible and not others. We tend to read certain parts and ignore other parts. It doesn’t matter whether you are conservative or liberal, you gravitate to particular sections of Scripture.

Anyone who believes all the Bible either hasn’t read it all or is crazy. The Bible wasn’t meant to be carried forward in time as a total package.

There are parts of the Bible that need to be left behind. They are out of date. They served their purpose at one time. But no longer. Of course we keep all the parts in our Bible because they show us how people of faith once perceived God and the world. They remind us that we have progressed in our understanding.

We progressive Christians are sometimes accused of not being Biblical. That we don’t preach the Bible. But I never have heard one conservative preacher preached on the text, “Slaves, obey your master.” No, even conservatives stay away from many passages in the Bible.

We who are progressive Christians derive our faith perspective directly from the Bible. And this morning’s appointed readings from the Revised Common Lectionary were a surprise for me when I read them. My sermon outline is all laid out in the three readings. Each reading gives one of the three principles or defining marks of progressive Christianity.

JEREMIAH 1.4-10

God calls young Jeremiah to be a prophet. The prophetic tradition is the first defining mark of progressives.

When I was growing up in a fundamentalist Baptist Church, any time I heard about prophets, it was about someone predicting the future. Not until I got to college as a religion major did I learn to actually read the prophets and see what their mission was. It was fortune-telling. Jeremiah, Isaiah, Micah, Hosea and all the rest of the prophets are concerned not with predicting the future, but with the sins of the present. The prophets call governments to account, and the religious establishment to account, and the wealthy to account. The prophetic tradition is all about the call for justice and peace.

They are concerned about the poor, the weak, the powerless, the hungry, the oppressed. They are concerned about the fair treatment of people and the earth. They criticize narcissistic nationalism; self-righteous religion; and false worship.

This is the prophetic tradition of the Bible, a tradition Jesus was part of. In our time Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophet of God. Progressive Christians preach the prophetic tradition and act in accordance with it concern for justice and peace.

1 CORINTHIANS 13.1-13

In the epistle lesson St. Paul writes a long passage about love. He describes the characteristics of Christian love. And he says that the greatest of all the spiritual gifts is love. (Love is the Mohammed Ali of virtues.)

Progressives Christians believe that love is at the center of everything. It is what the Bible is all about. Jesus said the same thing. He said the greatest commandment is two-fold: love God, love other people. It’s all about love.

Years ago the New Testament scholar Walter Wink wrote any article about the moral questions revolving around sexuality. He surveyed various attitudes and practices in the entire Bible dealing with sex. And he concluded that the Bible does not have a sexual ethic. Rather, it has a love ethic. It’s all about love. Without love, says Paul, we are like a noisy gong. (A gong faith is a wrong faith. So, I say to you, ‘Don’t be a gong.’)

Progressive Christians preach love. We think love is the bottom line. We also believe that we need humility in determining how to live out love in our lives. But as Paul says in 1^st Corinthians 13, now we know only in part; we see ‘through a glass darkly.’ (That’s the older version of the verse.) It’s like when you get out of the shower and try to see yourself in the mirror: it’s all fogged up. Maybe you can see something moving in the mirror, and you know it’s you, but if it was something else you wouldn’t know what it was. So, everything is not clear to us. We have limited knowledge and limited understanding.

We are not like some conservative Christians who have an answer for every question. Progressive Christians don’t claim to have all the answers. We are at least partly agnostic. We have to learn to live the questions. That calls for humility, which as Paul says, is part of what love means.

LUKE 4.21-30

Which brings me to the third mark of progressive faith as illustrated in the gospel reading. Jesus reminds his congregation that when there was a famine in the land, God did not send help to Israel; rather, God sent Elijah to a woman in Lebanon. And another time when there were many people needing to be healed of leprosy, God sent Elisha to a man in Syria instead of Israel. Jesus struck a nerve that day. He was saying that God doesn’t give priority to national borders or ethnic origin.

[A side note: The people got mad and tried to throw Jesus of a cliff—a physical cliff (not a fiscal cliff). But he didn’t fall for it. We progressives aren’t naïve. We know there are cliffs out there. And we know that there are people who want to push others off the cliff. (Or off the subway ledge.) It is a lion-eat-zebra world. (I prefer to label myself as a pragmatic progressive in the Reinhold Niebuhr mold.)]

This is the third mark of progressive Christianity: inclusiveness. God is always crossing borders, breaking boundaries, expanding the circle of fellowship. God will not be fenced in. God is owned by no nation, no race, no religious system, no theological system, no ideology, no scientific worldview. God pushes truth outward—wider, broader, more encompassing.

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So, there you have it. The Biblical basis of progressive Christian faith. We believe that the parts of the Bible that carry forward the prophetic tradition, the ethic of love, and the trajectory of inclusion are the truly Christ-like parts of the Bible.

As Paul says in the Love Chapter, when we were children we thought like children and reasoned like children. But as we grow and mature, we put away childish ways of understanding God, ourselves and the world. In other words, we progress.

We believe in working for justice and peace. We believe that love is at the center of all we do. And we believe not so much that ‘the circle will be unbroken,’ but that the circle we be eternally expanding to include the whole cosmos.

1279/10:15

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[1] Peter Gnomes, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart (New York: William Morrow, 1996), 50.

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Still being born...

IT HAS TAKEN ME A LONG TIME TO BE BORN. I began my life in the warm, secure womb of fundamentalism. Gradually I emerged from that womb into a more open, liberal point of view. But from time to time I backslid. (Backsliding is a term from evangelical Christian talk that indicates a person going back into sin after being saved.) Several times in my life I turned from my liberal perspective and went in the opposite direction, going back to a more secure conservative position. My theological point of view has been on a roller coaster ride over the years. I have tried to go back into the womb of security from time to time.

A few years ago I finally let go of any desire to go back to Egypt and committed myself to the ongoing journey to the land of milk and honey. The author of the Letter to the Hebrew in the New Testament speaks to me when he/she says, “But we are not among those who shrink back and so are lost, but among those who have faith and so are saved” (10.39).

Acceptance

I HAVE COME TO ACCEPT THE FACT that I will never fully accept myself. In my head I accept myself as I am. But in my gut I continue to doubt myself and live by the motto, ‘I’m not good enough.’ So, my acceptance is schizophrenic. But it is sufficient. I accept my non-acceptance.

I remember...

I REMEMBER…

…climbing the tree in the front yard and hanging upside down on a branch; I liked looking at the world in an upside-down way; perhaps that’s why I became a liberal

…playing tackle football with no padding in a vacant lot with several boys including my next door neighbor whose first name was Layman; I remember how he ran straight toward me at blistering speed, and how I fearlessly tackled him; and how a few years later he went to Vietnam and never came back

…sitting in the seminary cafeteria and hearing that Attorney General John Mitchell had resigned

…walking up a wooded path with Pat at a State Park and being surprised by a snake and how we both screamed and ran like crazy

…sitting in fourth grade class at Charles D. Jacob School when the teacher left the room and someone began passing around a note with the word ‘fuck’ on it; I had never heard or seen that word; so I asked Eddie what it meant and he gave me my first sex education lesson by telling me that ‘fuck’ means a man and a woman put their peters together

…being a few feet away from President Kennedy at Freedom Hall when I played trumpet in the DuPont Manual Band

…marching in the band in the Derby Parade, trying not to step in the horse dung left in the street by the horses ahead of us.

post-fundamentalist

I’m Getting Old, So I Wrote Some Things Down

thoughts on what I’ve learned along the way

I grew up in a fundamentalist church. I was taught that the Bible is inerrant (no mistakes or inconsistencies). In some ways it was like being shut up in a room with no windows. I didn’t know what was outside the Southern Baptist Church theology. I believed that if I accepted Jesus as my Savior, I would go to heaven; and if I didn’t, I would go to hell. So, as an eight year old sinner I accepted Jesus into my heart, and they told me I had been born again. They told me I would have joy and peace.

They didn’t mean bad. My parents and Sunday School teachers and my pastors all believed they were doing what was best for me. They cared the best they knew how. But they too were living in a windowless room.

As I grew older I found out that my Southern Baptist worldview didn’t line up with the way life really is. In college (a Baptist college!) my eyes were opened to a more historical understanding of the Bible. For the first time I learned of the ‘prophetic’ tradition of Scripture as embodied by Martin Luther King, Jr. In college and seminary (a Baptist seminary!) I was enabled to break out of the house with no windows and breathe the fresh air of objective history and ecumenical theology.

As I continued to read and study after my seminary days, I discovered that Christians often caricature other religions, and that our exclusive theological stance is based on ignorance or insecurity.  I found out that there is ‘grace’ in Buddhism and other Eastern religions; that the Jewish religion is based as much on grace and mercy as Christianity is; and that even secularists, atheists, and agnostics can embody the love of God.

My belief in a God-up-there slowly and silently ceased. The theologian Paul Tillich saved me from that distant God who made up the Salvation Game with its pedantic rules. Tillich taught me that what we call God is Being-Itself. (Now, I might want to say God is ‘Becoming.’)

I tend to be logical and rationalistic. Too much so. But I have finally figured out that I cannot figure out God. I believe that there is Something More than what meets the eye. But that Something cannot be grasped or apprehended by human logic or reasoning. (Even the term ‘some-thing’ objectifies God in a way that is unacceptable. God is not a ‘thing.’ God is ‘no thing,’ i.e., ‘nothing.’)

And here is one of the most important learnings over the years: All religious and theological language is symbolic. Every time I attempt to say anything about God, my human language falls short. But I can point. Like the Buddhists say, The finger points to the moon, but the finger is not the moon. All we can do is point. 

(more later)