Sermons

August 28 2005

When we know nothing, what is it that we know?

Reverend Dr Cheri DiNovo

Karl Barth, the twentieth century’s pre-eminent theologian, said that when you preach you should always preach with a Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, and this week it’s kind of hard to preach without thinking about that incident with Pat Robertson. For those of us who aren’t aware of it, here’s how it went.

Pat Robertson basically called for a Fatwah against Hugo Chavez, who is the duly and democratically elected president of Venezuela. He literally asked for the assassination of Chavez. He did this too, this makes it even worse, saying he was acting in accord with one of another of the twentieth century’s per-eminent theologians, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Seeing that Bonhoeffer was part of a plot to kill Hitler, Robertson claimed that he was also acting as a Christian, in calling for the death of Chavez.

Then, to make matters even worse, he went on and denied that he’d ever said such a thing, except that it was on video tape. So we have a very public example of someone claiming to be Christian, breaking two of the commandments in the same effort; "Thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not lie"
So the question arises for me, and for the rest of us who call ourselves Christian; "How do we differentiate ourselves from Pat Robertson?" and, "What does it actually mean to be a Christian?"
First and foremost, because Pat Robertson claimed he was acting just like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I thought I would read some of my favourite Bonhoeffer passages. This is really what we are talking about in the lectionary passage today anyway, about taking up your cross and following Christ. Just to set the historical stage, we remember that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was alive during the second world war, the beginning of it anyway, and he saw the rise of Hitler and fascism in his own country. He was appalled and broke away from the mainstream Church to start what he called the ‘Confessing Church’. He started a Church and a seminary that would train Church members and leaders. Meanwhile about 90% of the Christian Church hung swastikas outside of their Churches, allowed that Hitler sat next to Jesus Christ in terms of the iconography of their places and went along to get along with everything that fascism did. Most of the people in the Confessing Church paid for their membership in that Church with their lives.

Bonhoeffer speaks here about costly grace.
This is from "The Cost of Discipleship":
Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him. Costly grace is the gospel which must be ‘sought’ again and again, the gift which must be ‘asked for’ the door at which a man must ‘knock’. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is ‘costly’ because it cost God the life of his Son: ‘ye were bought at a price,’ and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is ‘grace’ because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the incarnation of God."

Now, we often in this sanctuary have been accused of ‘cheap grace’. We have been accused by those in the Pat Robertson camp who see what we practice here as a kind of cheap and easy Christianity. Christianity of the lowest common denominator,. Christianity that doesn’t demand much. Obviously I don’t agree. This is not a ‘comfortable pew’, that you folk are sitting in. It’s a controversial pew that you are sitting in. You are here for a reason, most of you. You are here because of the stances we have taken over the years and they have been costly stances. They cost hate mail, jeering. They cost us a Crystal Cathedral, which we might rather be worshipping in. They cost us money, because when you take stances that aren’t popular with other Christians then you turn those people off who want easy answers to difficult questions. And we have done our share of that in this place.

Let me tell you a little bit about the history of this Church. I remember when I first came here and it was about 8 years ago and started very shortly after that, the evening service. We started the evening service, in a sense, not for everyone. We started it to be a Church of the poor and for the poor. We wanted a Church where poor people were welcome, certainly as welcome as the middle class or the wealthy. We knew there were lots of Churches for the middle class and for the wealthy. In our experience, we hadn’t seen too many Churches for poor people. We knew that if you were going to be a Church for poor people you had to feed people because poor people are hungry people. We didn’t just mean food, although that’s a good start, we also meant the food of the spirit. We knew that you probably needed a different service for poor people because many couldn’t read a bulletin, or read the hymn books. We knew you’d need a different format. We knew all of that. Almost as soon as we started the poor people’s Church here, which still runs and thrives, there were other people in this congregation who said, "Why do we have to have ‘those people’ in Church?"

I remember that very well, ‘those people’ because I think that whenever we hear our own voices, our inner voices, saying, ‘those people’, that what we’re doing is being a little bit like Peter, a little bit like the Satan that Jesus told to get behind him. Why is Satan, what is Satan, by the way?
Satan is not, despite what we may think, a horrid little red guy with hoofs. Satan, biblically, means ‘the accuser’. That’s what it means in the original Greek. It means the one who accuses you and it’s an accusation that comes from a certain point of view. It’s the accusation that wants things safe and predictable, but primarily safe. Satan wants a sure thing. Satan is like a really good salesman, a really good sales man, one that givesyou two for one. You remember that Satan in the temptations of Christ, promised Christ all the worldly successes. Promised him political success, food and riches, if only he’d buy one, he’d get two for the price of one.

There’s another meaning of Satan biblically and this comes more out of midrash and the mystical traditions, out of the Kabballah. Satan there means ‘chaos’. Satan is not only the accuser but Satan is what is loosed when things descend into chaos. Satan is fear. Satan is when we lose any predictability, when we don’t know what is going to happen next, when we’re frightened. That is when that version of Satan is unleashed on the world. So at these two extremes, Satan the sure thing, the promises, the wealth, the easy road, also the absolute opposite, the gas chamber, the fear, the horror, the evil. These both are the faces of Satan.

Peter displays one of them of course, when he talks about safety and security and of course, Jesus says, "Get behind me!" There’s a reason looking ahead that we all sit in front of an instrument of torture, we all sit in front of the cross. It’s neither easy nor comfortable. We, when we sign on to be Christians in the confessing Church, sign on not for the easy road but for the difficult road, the road that’s going to cost us, the road of discipleship. It’s never going to be a popular road. In fact, if it’s a popular road it’s not the right road. The popular road is never, ever the right road.

So we sit in front of this cross and we look ahead to the kind of Church, the Church of Jesus Christ which tells us to be Christian. you have to do three things; you have to love your neighbour as yourself, that’s much more difficult to do than it is to say. You’re called to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul, again not an easy task. Finally, the most difficult task of them all, we are called to follow Jesus Christ and we know where that road ends.

Someone asked me this week, "How do you know when you’re doing the right thing, the ethical thing, the moral thing. How do you know if it’s just following Jesus Christ. Isn’t that sort of like saying, anything goes?" Absolutely not! It’s the absolute opposite of saying, "Anything goes." Because when we follow Christ, where do we follow Christ to? Certainly we follow Christ to prisons, for sure we follow Christ to hospitals, for sure we follow Christ into those dark, dead places, the worlds of addictions and mental illness. This is where we follow Christ to.

Christ didn’t lead his disciples into easy places, he led his disciples into places where their faith would be tested, over and over and over again, That’s where he led his disciples and that’s where we follow Christ. As we follow Christ into those dark places, also places of joy eventually, but not in the short term, we also walk along that road with ‘those people’. So I was thinking to myself, because I knew, a la Karl Barth, that I would have to speak about the Pat Robertson ‘sayings" and that I would have to speak about this biblical passage, a difficult one, what was the call upon us now? I thought the call really upon us now in the confessing Church in the year 2005 this week, is to pray for Pat Robertson because in my head he immediately became one of , ‘those people’.
I heard a wonderful talk by Seymour Hersch, Pullitzer Prize winning journalist and he spoke about the Iraq war and why we shouldn’t be there. He said something very interesting, he said that the most dangerous person on the face of the earth is an idealist with limitless power. He described George Bush, not as an evil man, but as an idealist.

Here is a man with the ideals of democracy with limitless power who wants to instill that ideal in everyone he knows, every where in the world. That’s very scary!

That’s why we don’t follow the Church of easy grace and easy power. That’s why we’re called back again and again to follow Jesus Christ, the one who dies, the one who has no power and loses what little he has in three short years, the worst evangelist in terms of numbers of all time. He takes a Church from 5000 or so at The Sermon on the Mount and whittles it down to 3 or 4 by the time the crucifixion happens. That’s the Savior we follow.

Who are ‘those people’ we should be praying for today? With that thought let us continue worship in prayer.