Towards Sunday, February 14 (First in Lent)

Lenten Theme:  What Christianity Is Not

We know we are Christian, or at least we think we are – kind of, maybe.  Yes, we’re sure we are.  We must be. 

Or we know we’re not, because what Christianity is – or what we think it is, isn’t something we can really identify with, or want for ourselves. 

But how well do we really know what Christianity is?  Sometimes it’s hard to know and say what it really is, and maybe one way of coming closer to it, is to get clearer about what it is not. 

Douglas John Hall – the closest thing to an “official United Church theologian” for the last generation – has written a book titled What Christianity Is Not, and the chapters of his book provide the themes for our worship and the sermons for the six Sundays leading up to Easter. Each chapter – and each week in worship, focuses on a common and current misunderstanding of what Christianity is, as a way of trying to find our way towards a little clearer understanding of what it really is.

 

This week: Not a Culture Religion

Scripture:  Luke 13:18-21 ("The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of floor until all of it was leavened.")

 

We are always tempted to merge Christianity and our way of life, our culture.  Our faith is necessarily expressed in cultural form, with which it then becomes identified, so anyone who wants to be Christian must then also adopt our culture. 

But Christianity at its truest is not a religion and not bound to any culture.  The Bible argues a lot with religion – as in the prophets’ denunciation of self-satisfying religious practice (e.g. Amos 5:21-22), and the way the New Testament contrasts Pentecost where God’s Spirit comes down to overwhelm and transform humans (Acts 2), with the Tower of Babel where humans try to reach up to heaven and control its blessings for their own benefit (Genesis 11). 

Religion is a cultural, human attempt to control the Divine for our benefit (“God bless America”? “Gott Mit Uns”?  “Allah be praised”?), and leads to conflict between cultures over which religion is best – a problem in today’s world.  

Christianity, though, is a “prophetic faith” rooted in the prophetic tradition of Judaism which stands apart from its host society and is free to critique it.  Rather than feeling obliged to prop up or perpetuate any culture, Christianity is about God’s loving and ongoing critical transformation of us and of any culture – something hard for us to learn as long as we live still in the dream of Christendom, and with the idea that our goal is to “establish Christianity.” 

We are tempted to lament the end of Christendom and our disestablishment; but might this be part of God’s good will today?  Does this free us to hear anew what Jesus says about being “like yeast” in the world – like the earliest church was in its time? 

 

Do we see anyone living like “God’s yeast” or as “the yeast of God’s kingdom” in our time and for our culture?

 

Yeast in Jesus' day was not the fine, cultured, nicely packaged thing we have today.  It was actually seen as something impure and unclean because wild yeast spores in the air, when they entered any food or drink, would ferment and sour it, and make it go bad.

 

So what is Jesus saying about how the kingdom of heaven enters the life of our time?

And about the kind of community he gathers, and empowers us to be?