The Church Is A Very Idolatrous Place

By Bill Gnade @ http://contratimes.blogspot.com/2006/11/church-is-very-idolatrous-place.html

[This rather lengthy essay is solely for the Christian reader who lands on Contratimes. Surely non-Christians are invited to read it, but I think it might be rather tedious for an outsider. But I might be wrong.]

I was asked last week by a Contratimes reader whether I would be writing about the unfortunate scandal which is the resignation of Rev. Ted Haggard, (former) president of the National Association of Evangelicals (USA). I replied that I was unsure. This morning, I am no more certain about that sad tale, but I am approaching certainty about things that have led to so much disappointment in not merely the evangelical church in America, but in the Church everywhere else. Not being a man of temperate mind who might reasonably restrain himself from over-reaching, I rush toward those things from which even the devil flees. It might be either a fool’s response or the mere motto of a common hero, but I have only one reply to those who might question my ambitions: ‘Well, someone’s got to do it.’

Prologue: Who Are You?

Remember the very first question God asks in the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve flee the scene of the crime. The First Question is not about identity; it is not about who one is. Instead of being a question that might pique the interest of a mere existentialist, it is one that a rescuer or cartographer might ask: Where are you? It is about location and position, it is not about why or when. The question implies relationship: Where are you so I can BE with you? The query implies all the wonders of help and aid, succor and salvation: I need to know where you are so that I might give comfort. There is not even a what or when. Just a simple question about placement.

Please recall the devil’s slithering statements in the garden. Notice that they are all directed at sowing seeds of status: the serpent attempts to inflate Eve’s sense of who she is. He doesn’t care about where she is, he appeals to her sense of identity: “You will not surely die ... for God knows that when you eat of it [the forbidden fruit] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” No doubt these words insult the God of the universe, and Adam as well, for the serpent implies that neither can be trusted (particularly Adam). God is keeping something from you, and you will be all the greater if you ignore what Adam and God have said. The serpent directs his comments directly at Eve’s ego, at her sense of self-worth. His goal is two-fold, like the fork in his tongue: to sow doubt and distrust between Eve and Adam, and to cause the eyes of Eve to swell wide in lust for something that will give her an advantage, an edge. It is, for a moment, all about Eve.

To what does the serpent appeal when he tempts Jesus the Christ after our Lord is driven into the desert moments after baptism? Does he not appeal to Jesus’ sense of identity, of self? “If you are the son of Man, then ...” The temptations flow like a poet’s triplet, shaped in well-metered and seductive phrases; conditionals unconditionally stated: If this, well then, of course THAT. There is nothing here about relationship, or position or place (at least not directly). It is about identity, about pride and self-esteem: If you are the son of God, then surely you can seize the kingdoms of the world. But if you don’t, surely you are a rather insipid and pitiable God. What, pray tell, is there to envy in all that fussing about obedience? Even a clod can be austere; it takes a real God to create. Create, or be damned by the blandness of your humility.

Think of any prophet, any man or woman of God. Think of Jesus Himself, or some apostle or saint of the Church. What is the most common retort against the prophetic message? What do the people say who despise the word of God preached in Palestine, or in the courts of Corinth? Is it not always something like this: Who are YOU to speak such words? Was not Jesus rejected, not because of WHAT He said, but because He, a mere Galilean, a mere son of Mary, presumed to teach the qualified, the esteemed, the wise? There was no real trial held against the man who stood as God before the Sanhedrin, for in a trial testimony would have been heard against what the accused said. Debate would have ensued. Instead, we find mere gossip, mere ad hominem attacks dripping with sarcasm: No man of this stature, of this position, could be the messiah, the God of Israel in human form: this man is not good enough to be God’s Son, born of a mere woman, the son of a mere carpenter. Jesus’ nature, not His words, was attacked; His character was impugned. As His accusers spat on Him and struck Him on the face, they taunted Him, keeping up the tempter’s cruel insinuations: If you are truly the Son of God, then tell us who strikes you; show us your power by coming down from this puny cross! The attack is always to sully and berate the character and reputation of Christ and His prophets. It is never to engage in what He said, or the message proclaimed. It is all about casting mud, stones; about striking with the scourge of cords knotted at the tip of the tongue.

The messenger is indeed always shot. But he is not shot for what he has said. He is shot for daring to say it.

The Idols Of Christianity

When a pastor presides over a church that contains over 10,000 members, I think it is prudent to ask if something has gone terribly wrong. This might just be my own quivering insecurities wondering aloud, but I have never shied away from my own self-doubt, so I see no reason not to ask such questions. But when a single man is shepherd over ten thousand sheep, surely there is something amiss. For isn’t it part of the pastor’s mission to tend such sheep until they can begin to care for themselves? Is it not the case that the best leader, or the best exemplar, leads his followers to be better leaders than himself, and better exemplars? Does not a good shepherd find other shepherds, or, at the very least, wise sheep, to help protect and nurture a flock too large for one good shepherd?

I am not one to recoil in fear that my sins might be made public. To do so is to idolize pretense, the artifice of etiquette and propriety erected around far too much of our lives, insulating us from the unseemly fact that we all are messy with sin. Somewhere along the line the Church accepted the broader culture’s sneering remarks that the Church was the household of the holy. Oddly, the Church has idolized this in forgetfulness, for it has forgotten that the Church is not the household of the whole but the hospice for the broken. And it has been held hostage to this idea, an idea which leads to all sorts of vicious disappointments. Christians too often recoil in shock that they should be called “hypocrites!” by their less-devout peers; but both critics and criticized have forgotten that the Church is the very place one would most expect to find hypocrisy. Sinners -- though this side of heaven redeemed by Christ through confession, grace and sacrament -- are not suddenly raptured out of the consequences of their own sin, nor are they given a magic key that locks away the sinner that lives in the crawlspace of each human heart.

I have written here -- with tears and righteous rage -- about the distortions of women depicted in the pornography industry, and the great evil of prostitution and sexual slavery. And I have confessed my sin, for I have participated, as a mere voyeuristic consumer, in the industry of pornography I so thoroughly despise and damn. Nearly every man reading this, I am sure, understands my confession; and for some of them, the mere mention of pornography has already lured them away from here to search for salacious images on the internet. That pornography is an addiction is a bit like the sun being hot: it is made to be that way. And those of us who have been caught in this or any other addiction know that there is no deliverance to be had from the self that dragged us into addiction’s hell in the first place. Deliverance comes from outside -- in confession, accountability, discipline, grace, sacrament, and the calming Spirit of God. But even all these things do not themselves deliver: the thorn of the flesh will have to come out later, burned away in the fires of purgatory, where there will be loss.†

All this to say that we should not ever be shocked when our pastors or priests fall into sin. We all fall into sin. Moreover, let us jettison this idea that a person of faith falls into sin. A man does not fall into sin the way a climber falls off a ladder. A man falls into sin the way a carpet falls onto the floor: he’s already there.

But why this fascination with holiness? Simple, really. It is our futile attempt to make ourselves impressive: we are trying to raise ourselves above criticism. In other words, we are trying to rebuff the scoffers who shout out “Who are you to talk about morality?!” We put on airs, we surround ourselves with the finery of moral rectitude in order to stand above the (moral) mêlée, and above the riff-raff. As literacy, wit, pedigree, wealth, education and claret separated the aristocracy from the rather uncouth servants in the wing, so vestments and austerity and impressive Christian credentials separate the saint from the sinner. Or so it all goes. We are in love with the accoutrements of proper behavior, though not because we are in love with morality, but because we are in love with being above reproach. But we forget that the poor will always be with us, and that we are the poor. There is no one who is whole in the church or out. But we all too often try to pretend that we win the fight over our accusers by showing them that we are indeed WHO we think we are.

But these are not the only idols we embrace. Yes, too often we worship moral posturing. Yes, we are much impressed by well-credentialed men and women who, in the parlance of the street, have 'real cred.' We love to show off our great churches with grand boasts that God MUST have anointed the pastor of the 12,000-member parish (or how else to explain the pastor’s success unless he is a “mighty man of God”). Many early Christians fought against the printing of the Bible in the vernacular, the common parlance, for fear that such accessibility would make every reader a Pope, a master of theology. Proponents of the popular pressings declared that it would bring the Word of God to the masses. But in sad irony we today have well-credentialed men and women, some standing on the left side of the church and others standing on the right, who constantly remind us that we cannot read the Bible for ourselves at all without their keen insights in ancient history, early Christian psychology and sociology, or semitic linguistics. Idols abound.

There are idols of liturgy, there are idols of simplicity. One church is better because of its stained glass, though the absence of such excessses makes a different church the truer Christian witness. There are idols of worship: one group pits its worship against another’s. There are idols of music, with the Grand Choir of Perfection at The Church of the Heavenly Voice elevating souls in a cappella bliss, while the praise band at the converted movie theater down the street cranks out praise choruses that can’t be heard without electricity. There are idols of spiritual gifts, or the lack thereof. Some Christians adore their erudition, rightly dividing the word of truth; while others adore their intuitive grasp of God’s inner voice, whispered in angelic tongues. Some Christians worship conversion stories, even their own. Some follow Christ in order to be the next C. S. Lewis or G. K. Chesterton, Billy Graham or Mother Theresa, imitating, not the steps of Christ, but the heroes that get all the attention. Some worship prophecy, posturing as prophets, the ones hallowed and praised during Bible studies or Sunday School flannel-graph presentations (no doubt there are men bound to an idol thinking that they are one of the forthcoming two witnesses described in Revelation 11). There is the idol of aesthetics, where Christians insist that more is less or less is more; when beauty becomes the fine line between faith and heresy. There is the idol of place, where Christianity is believed to be more powerful in an ancient British chapel than it is in a new geodesic dome in northern California; Christ is more real in the Holy Selpucher than he is in the basement of Pine Street’s Household of Power (or vice versa). There are idols of ministry, where sharing the gospel with prisoners, or cannibals in Papua New Guinea, is deemed greater than breaking bread with one’s neighbors; or where inner-city work with gangs is more courageous than sharing Christ with middle-class white males at a golf course in suburbia. And there are idols of experience, where supernatural visitations by Christ in the dark trump a plain faith, or that speaking in tongues more than Smith means Jones is all the more anointed.

There is even the idol of priesthood, where priestly duties become something adored: priests who elevate themselves -- or are elevated by others -- rendering parishioners nearly superfluous and dumb: we do not need to know or do such things because Father O’Malley takes care of all that. Sadly, Father O’Malley may very well permit, even foster, this sort of idolatry.

All of these, of course, are a response to one thing, and one thing alone: Who are you? Are you the great Christian man who writes books destined to be read for the next several generations, proving your merit, your anointing, your having been chosen? What -- Do tell! -- proves that you’re important in Church History? Are you the great prophet, hurling down corrections to the foolish and floundering, the cursed and disobedient?

Who, who are you - really? Who are you to presume to teach, to speak, to lead, to guide and rebuff and encourage, unless you are published, lauded, respected, honored and proven? Where is your great church, your impressive curriculum vitae? What Biblical language do you know? From where did you take your degrees? Are you a member of the true church?

Call it all a victory for the serpent. We are all trying to impress him without hardly a wonder whether we are impressing God. God wants to know where we are. But we like to show our brothers and sisters where we’ve been, impressing them: this is who I am. But God is not so impressed, nor is the serpent. The serpent snickers, for he has gotten us to pursue emptiness. God, of course, weeps real tears, and sheds real blood. Where are you? He shouts from Gethsemane. Where are you? He shouts from the lonely, forsaken cross. Sadly, Peter is not there, he is among the people trying to impress them with who he is: I am not one of them! But Peter finally got it: His Lord did not say, Whoever is like me is for me, and whoever is not like me is against me. No. Only those who are with Christ are for Him. It is all about being there. It is not about what you bring, or who you think you’re bringing. It’s about where, not who.

What I am not saying

What I am not saying in this essay is that I think there is no true Church, or that ministry is unimportant, or that speaking in tongues or singing praise choruses are bad things to do, or that being inspired by the saints is misguided. Nor am I saying that churches can’t be large or even gigantic. What I am saying is that the fact of sin is the egalitarian force in the church: we are all sinners and that makes us all the more equal. This does not mean that every person’s call or vocation or anointing -- or however one wants to name it -- is equal to everyone else’s. God knows we are all called. The point of all of this is that the very fact that we are called by God can become an idol: we can idolize our anointing, even WHO we have become in Christ. This is the great temptation of the devil offered to Christ in the desert: the devil asks Christ to worship His own self, His own gift and anointing. It is indeed possible to fall in love with love, to worship worship, to praise praise. And that is what we must fight against. For the fact is this: We are who we are not because of who but where we are. We are in a place, a position, and that position is all that ultimately matters, and that place is this: we are in Christ. Christ is the only who that matters. We just need to watch out for the idols that call us to come out of Him.

If there is one image that gives us a sense of what this all means, it is the shepherd and the sheepfold. The sheep are blessed because of where they are, behind the fence with Christ. They are not blessed because of who or what they are. And should one sheep separate from the flock, Christ the Shepherd leaves to find that one lost lamb. He does this solely because of where the lamb is, and where it is not. It has nothing to do with who that lamb thinks it might be, or even who it thinks it should be.

What a relief. It is not all about us.

Peace, in the sheepfold.

†1 Corinthians 3: 10-13