The Church of the Ascension
April 29, 2007
John 10:22-30

In the name of the Risen Lord. AMEN.

Like so many of us weekend jock types, I spent a good part of Friday evening engaging in my favorite sports activity: I browsed in a bookstore in the Time Warner building at Columbus Circle.  Even at this age, it is a sport I could still letter in – albeit not one that is exactly cardiac intensive but certainly one that works for me!

In my looking about, I came upon a book I had just heard reviewed entitled God Is Not Great:  How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.  Mr. Hitchens is a critic and journalist, British by birth now living as an expatriate in DC.  Another recent title that by measure of sales qualifies as a big hit is Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.  Dawkins is a world celebrated scientist and arguably the most famous living atheist since Madeline O’Hare’s death.  Both of these learned men claim that religion has done far more harm than good and that most of what stands for conflict and warring in this world one way or another winds its way back to religion.

It is difficult to say exactly what my reaction is to such claims.  It is not that they are new or sensational ideas, though their proliferation does seem to be on the rise.  The fact that we are embroiled in a war that clearly has religious overtones if not specific derivation not surprisingly raises the question for some people: “wouldn’t we just be better off with out any of it?”  Perhaps the most disturbing part of my response is a certain resonance with it.  Religion has made a pretty good sized mess of the world.    

The problem with these authors, as I see it, is that they have made the thoroughly understandable but wrong leap in equating God and religion.  The distinction is not even a subtle one to me: God is God; and, more importantly God is neither the same as nor controlled by religion.  And, yet, for those who have been traumatized by religion or the perception of religion, throwing out the baby, in this case the notion of God, along with the bathwater of religion just seems easier.

Reading and praying the gospel lesson for today, I was reminded of how thoroughly true it is that hardly anything is really new.  The religious leaders of Jesus’ day were suffering from the same sort of all or nothing literalism of some of our secularists like Dawkins and Hitchens.  God bless them, these religious leaders of Jesus’ day; we paint them in our simplistic understanding of scripture and history as evil Christ-killers.  In fact, they were a great deal like us: they had their tradition, years upon years of what they believed to be truth, rules for how to live their lives with holiness.  Everything had a place – both in the practice of their worship and in the tightly organized dogma of their faith.  All of that sounds pretty familiar to me.

When we read stories about the Pharisees and other “buy guys” in the gospel, I think what we sometimes fail to get is that on many levels they wanted to “get it.”  They wanted to find the Messiah. They kept looking at Jesus and listening to him, judging the kind of response he got in the crowd, the focus groups of his day if you please.  They followed him about wondering why he didn’t seem to be unduly impressed by them.  For reasons probably unknown even to them, they just couldn’t ignore him.  He had something they wanted.  His charisma, his way with people, his gentle presence, his easy laugh, and obvious intelligence stunned them.  If they had not struggled with believing that he was extraordinary, they would simply have ignored him, but they didn’t.  He was not to be ignored not for his charging about with great fanfare and drama but for his love which simply could not be missed, a love so apparent that even the one who spoke his judgment and sentence, Pilate, recognized him as more than what his accusers said.  These religious folk of the day would have taken him in a moment as their own had he been willing to play by their rules.

In the lesson today they say to Jesus, “Why keep us in suspense? Just tell us.  If you are the Messiah, tell us and tell plainly.”  What they were saying is: “We know religion; our lives are devoted to it.  We know the law inside and out; we believe in God; we seek God’s will; we give to the poor; we go to temple.  Just tell us plainly if you are the Messiah.  If you are the real thing, then become like us, we will package you into the religious model our Messiah must follow, and all will be well.”

They failed to realize, just as some of our current secularists and as some of us pious observers do, that God and religion are not the same thing.  Jesus looked at them, I suspect with amazement, and said, “I have told you again and again; and, yet, you do not believe.”  Jesus had shown them a new way, but, alas, they did not like the way of this Messiah.  His way toppled their hierarchy; it made the low high, and the high low.  It refused to bestow worthiness on any save for the grace of God.  It challenged every cherished aspect of the temple system, the manner of worship, the esteemed rules, arguing that love always wins over regulations.  It made the dramatically democratic claim that every soul can have access to God and even more astonishingly that the kingdom of God already exists in every human being.  This was not a Messiah they could accept; it cost them too much – their entire way of life.

It is an old story and one worth our pondering.  Christ is not the creation of the church, and at least for me there is always some question about whether the church in the way it has developed is really his creation either.  Jesus was unwilling to become what the Pharisees wanted him to be in order for them to accept him as the Messiah.  He still isn’t.

In the name of God: AMEN.