THE BASIS FOR PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANITY
4TH 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They are out of date.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 1st 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.
_____________
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
[1]
Peter Gnomes, The Good Book: Reading the
Bible with Mind and Heart (New York: William Morrow, 1996), 50.
**
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