What’s the point of religion? To make us behave? To make us better people? To give
religious leaders power? Some would say that religion, and Christianity in
particular, is all about where we go when we die. The primary purpose of Jesus, they would say, is to give us
a way to get into heaven and to avoid going to hell. For them, the church’s main motivation to invite
others to be Christians is to save them from eternal punishment and instead
provide a path to an utopian disembodied afterlife.
Recently, I took part in a pastor’s network about
church growth. For many churches,
particularly small ones, growth is a controversial topic. Some people don’t want their church to
grow. They want it to stay small
so that they know everyone and feel comfortable. Some people want their church to stay small so they can have
power and control over others, especially the pastor. During one of our sessions, we explored the reasons why a
church must grow. For one thing,
it was Jesus’ command for the church to grow, to go and make more
disciples. For another, the
biblical record about the early church is one of growth and the biblical
authors continually celebrate that growth in writings such as the Book of Acts.
As many of you know, I am a firm proponent of
growing churches, especially this one.
My rationale for this comes principally from those reasons I just
mentioned, as well as a few others that I’ll get to later. However, some of my colleagues in this
network had other motivations that I did share with them. Like many of the Christians I mentioned
earlier, they believed the primary reason to grow the church is to save people
- specifically to save them from hell.
Providing people an escape from this horrible fate is the main reason
they believe Jesus came and why it is so important for churches to preach the
gospel to the world.
I would argue that such an outlook comes very close
to claiming that the church is really saving people from is God - an angry
wrathful God, or at the very least, from that God’s harsh eternal
verdicts. Is that really the Good
News we are proclaiming? Is that
the Good News Jesus proclaimed?
Taking it a step further, many Christians also
believe that in order to be a real Christian, you must believe in a literal
hell as a place with literal fire - otherwise God will send you there. Conversely, it seems that the only
people who believe in hell are the ones who are sure they are not going
there. I’ve yet to meet someone
who claims, “I believe in hell and I’m sure that is where I will spend
eternity.” The fact that for many
people, hell always functions only as the fate of others, should clue us in
that we may need to rethink our beliefs and attitudes about it.
Let’s start with how does God decide who goes to
heaven and who does not? Again,
there are many opinions on that subject.
Everyone from the most educated theologian to the average pew sitter
will have an opinion. Ask some
people, mainly those outside the church or those who only dabble in it, and
they will tell you if you live a good life and do good things, you’ll earn your
way into heaven. In
response, most Christians would say that’s incorrect. We don’t earn our way to heaven through good works. Sadly, many Protestants have falsely
accused Roman Catholics of such a view of “works righteousness” claiming
Catholics rely on good works and sacraments for their salvation. That is a gross misrepresentation and
oversimplification of Catholic theology.
For many Christians, coming to the realization that
good works don’t get you into heaven is how they would describe their
conversion to Christian faith.
Instead, they would say that salvation (remember salvation is defined
here as simply not going to hell) is all the work of God. It is purely through
the grace of God that we are put in good standing with God. We are saved through faith. While I wholeheartedly agree with that,
I also believe that this concept is often misunderstood. Too often, “having faith” is reduced to
merely another “work”. It just
becomes an intellectual one. You
just have to have the correct belief about the gospel. By gospel, these folks would mean that
Penal Substitution theory of atonement we explored a couple of weeks ago. “All you have to do,” they would say,
is agree that that theory is true and you will avoid hell and go to heaven
instead.
So, with all those various beliefs, how can we
determine who goes to heaven and who goes to hell? What if we’re asking the
wrong question? What if the point
of Christianity isn’t to get into heaven but to get heaven’s purposes
accomplished in this world?
The problem for me is that whether one puts the
emphasis on our actions saving us, or our beliefs saving us, the effect on
one’s life in the present can be the same. The concerns of the everyday world,
the suffering of the here and now, become less important. Christianity becomes all about an
afterlife, with little concern for the present world and its troubles, since,
in man believer’s minds, it’s all about to be destroyed anyway. Furthermore, the popularization of a
particular interpretation of Jesus Second Coming only adds to the problem. The relatively recent belief (recent in
terms of church history) in misguided concepts like the Rapture, and that the
end of the world is very near, has taken many Christian’s eyes off the problems
of poverty, injustice, violence and environmental destruction, and fostered a
downright escapist attitude among some churches.
The most infamous example of this was that of James
Watt, Secretary of the Interior during the Reagan administration. When asked by Congress his views about
protecting our national parks for future generations, he responded that he was
not that concerned since, “I don’t know how many future generations we can
count on until the Lord returns.”
If you have spent any time within the church, you know such sentiments
are not uncommon in recent decades.
Although you may not buy into such a view, you probably have felt
pressure to go along with such beliefs or risk being labelled un-Christian.
Thankfully, God is doing a new thing in all of
God’s churches, all across the theological spectrum. Evangelicals, Liberal Mainliners, Roman Catholics and
Pentecostals are all awakening to the fact that the substance of our faith is
not limited to just the apocalyptic or the afterlife. A new emergence of God’s Spirit in our churches and in the
world at large, is moving new generations of Jesus followers to work for the
things that Jesus cared about.
Just last week, I heard MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough refer to the Evangelical
branch of this movement as “Matthew 25 Christians.”
I think that’s a good label for all of us. In Matthew 25, Jesus tells the parable
of the sheep and the goats. The
story sets the scene of a Final Judgement in which Jesus is portrayed as a
shepherd separating sheep from goats.
The sheep enter his timeless kingdom, while the goats are sent to
eternal doom. Surprisingly, the
criteria which is used to separate these flocks is not what we might
expect. What differentiates a
sheep from a goat is not their faith.
It is not their beliefs about the Bible, Jesus, the cross, heaven or
hell or even about gay marriage, abortion or taxes. The differentiating factor, says Jesus, is whether they fed
the hungry, gave a drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked or visited the sick
or imprisoned.
This parable isn’t a throwback to the idea of
salvation by works. The point of
this story isn’t to motivate us to rack up brownie points with Jesus by feeding
the hungry and clothing the naked.
Whether it’s performing good works or believing a particular atonement
model, doing either merely to gain a reward or avoid punishment would make us
the shallowest of creatures.
Christianity is at its worst when it preys on those sinful human
motivations.
Instead, Jesus is pointing us to a much bigger
reality. Here’s a whacky thought:
I think Jesus told this story, not to give us the magic formula for getting
into heaven or avoiding hell, but so that the hungry actually would be fed, the
thirsty actually would get a drink, the naked actually would be clothed and the
sick and imprisoned actually would be visited. Jesus portrays his presence not just as some wrathful judge
who returns at the end of time, but as a constant reality in our lives right
now. He tells both flocks, when
you did this for least of these, or when you did this for the ignored and
forgotten, you did it for me. In
other words you weren’t doing all this to accumulate rewards on your Jesus
Mastercard. When you did it, you
were serving your Master and the Master is just beneath the surface of this
world.
N.T. Wright is an Anglican bishop, theologian and
popular author. In his book Simply
Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, he explains that the church has often
got the relationship between heaven and earth wrong. Unlike the view of pagan pantheists, heaven and earth are not
identical. The evil and suffering
of this world belie that truth.
However, unlike the view of Enlightenment Deists, heaven is not some far
off place that is the home of a distant and uninvolved deity. Instead, Wright says, heaven and earth
are not that far apart. It is as
if a thin veil separates the two.
For Jewish people, the Torah or Law of God was a place of this
thinness. For us, the teachings
and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus are places where heaven and earth
meet. Even today, sometimes that
veil is particularly thin during the sacraments, in prayer and worship, or when
we serve in any of the ways described in Matthew 25.
Walk into any Christian bookstore and you will find
scores of titles both fictional and non-fictional, dealing with the end of the
world. Sometimes it is referred to
as the Apocalypse. However, the
word apocalypse does not mean “the end of the world. Apocalypse literally means “the unveiling.” I guess by that definition I am an
apocalyptic preacher because I believe that as disciples of Jesus we are
pulling back the veil of heaven here on earth. When we live out what Jesus taught us, whether in our personal
relationships or in the larger arena of the world, that veil becomes little more transparent. In turn, that allows others to see God
just a little bit better, so that they would want to follow Jesus too. Not because they fear his return, but
because they have experienced a part of that return for themselves and
participated in it. All of this is
possible, not due to our own goodness or moral ability. What pulls back the veil is the
goodness of God in the Spirit of Jesus that operates through us.
We believe we will be raised to a new life after we
die. We’ll explore that in a few
weeks. But our post-death
existence is neither our motivation nor the point of following Jesus. It is not why we invite people to be a
part of Christ’s church.
The ultimate question for us is not the one the evangelists of my youth asked, “If you died tonight do you know where you would go?” The ultimate question for us may just be, “As we live today, do we realize where we are?”
A message from Matthew 25 by Don Heatley, pastor of Vision Community Church, Warwick, NY.
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