Christianity Stinks

My son’s friend and his father were recently driving through Warwick past a cow pasture on a hot summer day.  Overwhelmed by the smell, they quickly closed the car windows and sped toward fresher air.  “Wait,” said the boy, “I want to go back and smell it again.”

“Why?” said his father. “It stinks back there.”

“Yea,” said the boy, “but it stinks real good."

Have you ever got in trouble over how you smelled? Whether you’re a teenager who smokes or a cheating husband, aromas can condemn you.  The scent of either tobacco or perfume, as different as they are, can make for a long night when you walk through the front door. For some people, the most useful accessories to have in their car are not a flashlight and road flares, but Altoids and a can of Ozium. 

Smells are pervasive. They are hard to get rid of.  There is something about smells that is difficult to cover up.  Scents seem to attach themselves to us, and even eminate from us.

Smells disclose how faithful we are to our promises to stop smoking, stop drinking or even to stop cheating on a spouse.  They follow us around, revealing where we’ve been, who we’ve been with, what we’ve done. But for all of their objective persistence, smells are also subjective.

Our sense of smell is very closely tied to our sense of memory.  Consequently, whether we find a scent pleasing or not, is subjective.  What one person likes the smell of, another may find objectionable.  Some people love the smell of gasoline, while others find it nauseating.  A perfume one women loves may conjure up the image of bathroom deodorizer in another.

Smells are both pervasive and subjective.  According to the apostle Paul, the pervasive nature of scents as well as the subjective reactions they produce, are much like the Christian life.  He describes himself and all Christians as the “aroma of Christ”. As such, our influence in the world is both inescapable and open to interpretation.  When we follow Christ authentically, we release the scent of God into this world.  It is a scent that gets into everything like the smell of gasoline, while at the same time both attracting and repelling people.

Paul was writing to a church he had founded in the city of Corinth.  This church was going through a lot of conflict and controversies.   We aren’t even sure how many letters to this church we have in our Bibles.  While those who assembled the New Testament divided Paul’s Corinthian correspondences into two letters, many scholars believe I & II Corinthians actually preserve the remnants of three or more letters.  In fact, the verses we read today may actually be the start of a fragment of yet another letter.

However many letters there were, as we saw a couple of weeks ago, within these pages we encounter Paul both correcting the Corinthians about their practices and beliefs, as well as defending himself to them.  It seems Paul was being accused of everything from preaching a false Gospel to being a charlatan evangelist. 

In response, rather than get dragged into a point-by-point defense of himself or getting manipulative, Paul simply directs his critics to get a whiff of him.  “You want to know the truth about me, “ he says, “check out the smell I’m giving off.”  Living in a Mediterranean climate in the days before deodorant, that was a very gutsy thing to do.  But it was also gutsy to invite people to examine his life and see if it measured up to what he preached.

 When it comes to being a faithful and authentic follower of Jesus, Paul is confident that he passes the sniff test.  When you are accused falsely or attacked by someone, sometimes the best course of action is not to get defensive, but to let your life speak for itself.  If you are a person of integrity, if you practice what you preach, you will pass the sniff test.  Ahh, but that’s the challenge of this passage.  It forces to ask whether we or our church pass the sniff test.

In the days of the Roman Empire in which Paul lived, when generals conquered a city, they would parade the citizens through the streets in a triumphant procession.  Part of this parade would include people who would march with incense burners that would spread the pleasing aroma of spices like cinnamon. Paul draws on this imagery in his letter.  While it is unclear whether he sees himself and other Christ followers as conquerors or captives, he is adamant that Christ-followers spread the knowledge of God through the world like a fragrance.  Like a smell, that knowledge of God gets into everything.  It drifts and it lingers.  It’s inescapable.

This aroma of Christ, like any scent, produces a variety of responses among those who breathe it in.  Some people love it and some people are repulsed by it.  Paul says to those who are on the path to life, it is the fragrance of life.  To those on the path of self-destruction, it is the stench of death.  Paul was being transparent here.  I believe he was telling his critics, what you find objectionable about me is the smell of Christ on me.  The aroma of God is seeping out from me and you don’t like, because of your own baggage, so you’re attacking me.  In reality, it is Christ that is offending you.

Between being a 150-year-old building and the almost Noah-like weather we’ve had recently, this worship space can easily smell musty.  For some people, that smell brings back good memories and feelings, for others, not so good.  This past week, part of our new cleaning team of Gail and Rita were here vacuuming and scrubbing for the better part of a day.  So, this church smells pretty good this morning.

However, if we want to be a healthy church, Vision must not only smell clean and fresh physically, we must also give off the aroma of Christ.  Quite frankly, it’s easy for a church to stink.  Churches that stink are driving many hurting and broken people  away while holding their noses in disgust. These are the people who need church the most.  It’s easy for a church to stink of hypocrisy, of irrelevance, of boredom, of apathy, of fear, of sexism, of homophobia, of ignorance, of liberal elitism or conservative judgmentalism.  As we explored a couple of weeks ago, it can also wreak of hidden agendas and BS.

Or a church can give off the fragrance of forgiveness, of unconditional love, of justice, of righteousness, of healing, of hope, and of service. A true church wreaks of Christ. 

Let’s not kid ourselves, just like other aromas, some people will find the scent of Christ objectionable.  For some, getting a powerful whiff of God’s presence can be scary.  Inhaling the pneuma, the Spirit, confronts us with our faults and what needs to change within us.  That may cause us to gag a little bit.

For others, the aroma of Christ and of serving others in his name may be objectionable, because it will take you to some foul-smellling places.  I read an article in Sojourners magazine a few years back, written by Ryan Beiler who recounted the story of his encounter with a homeless man.  Beiler sought shelter for this mentally-ill man who was standing in front of his office building with his pants down.  He put him in his car and gave him a ride to the clinic and found him a place to stay.  All the while, he was acutely aware of how he was encountering the face of Jesus in this dirty and deranged vagrant. I remember the article, not so much for the story, although it was certainly inspiring.  I remember it for its first sentence.   The article began, “I gave Jesus a ride and now my car smells like urine.”

Discipleship does not always smell pretty.  It often leads us to smell like the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed or the unpopular.  It may make us smell irrational, idealistic or even superstitious.  Following the way of Jesus, may make us an offensive odor in this world.  However, we have the assurance that while the aroma of Christ may not always be pleasing to people, it is always pleasing to God.

My grandparents lived in Fair Lawn, NJ which was on the border of the city of Paterson.  Those of you who know that once industrial area (so industrial that is often referred to as “cancer alley”) realize it was not known as an exceptionally great smelling locale.  Like many Northeastern cities, it smelled of truck exhaust, smoke stacks and garbage.  And that was on a good day. 

Yet my grandparents’ house never smelled like that.  Grandma’s kitchen always smelled like freshly baked cookies.  To this day, when I smell cookies baking, I am immediately brought back to her kitchen and many wonderful memories.  For years, I thought that smell was unique to my grandmother and her superior baking abilities. 

When I was in high school, I made friends with Ken.  He was the drummer in my first band and also lived in Fair Lawn, the same neighborhood as my grandparents.  One day, while standing in his kitchen, I suddenly had a flashback of me sitting with grandma in her kitchen.  Then I realized, it was because I was smelling freshly baked cookies.  Most peculiarly, his mother was not baking cookies at the time.  We were several blocks away from my grandparents, so I knew it wasn’t grandma’s cookies that I smelled. 

I stepped outside onto the front walk and found the source of that wonderful aroma.  There, high above the housetops was the neon sign atop the tower of the headquarters of Nabisco.  As it turned out, the whole neighborhood smelled like freshly baked cookies.  It was a realtor’s dream.

When we hear that as individuals or as a church, we should be giving off the aroma of Christ, that sounds like quite a challenge.  There are so many things that stink in our lives.  So many resentments, past mistakes, and ways we have hurt others that give off foul odors.  So is it any surprise that when you get a bunch of us together in a group as a church, we stink even more?  How in the world can we give off the aroma of Christ when are nothing but flawed human beings who often wreak of ego and self-interest?  Or as Paul asked, “Who is up to this task?”

The truth is, we are not.  But the good news is that Jesus Christ is up to it - and that is exactly what Jesus is up to in the world.  He transforms us to give off the aroma of Christ instead of the smells of our own shortcomings.

Ancient peoples, including Jews and Christians, often used sacrifices or incense in their worship.  The metaphor they used to explain it was that it created an aroma that was pleasing to God.  It wasn’t that they thought God had a literal nose.  But that these liturgical elements and the prayers and change of heart that accompanied them, would mask the more odorous elements of human behavior before God.

The Bible describes Jesus as the final sacrifice.  As that sacrifice, he blots out everything about our lives that stinks.  Like the cookie factory in my grandparent’s town, he transforms a foul cancerous city into a warm loving kitchen.  He takes all those things we worry people will smell on us, all those things we try to cover up to others, and replaces them with the fragrance of his forgiveness and unconditional love.

In our faith, that’s what we call the atonement.  Contrary to how it is often portrayed, the atonement is more than just a one-time personal deodorization act.  It is an act of community as well.  When you smell good, you feel confident.  When you and I have that transformation of the aroma of Christ in us, we can be confident too.  With that confidence, the confidence of children of God, we come together as a community, as a church - a healthy church. 

A healthy church is like an air freshener.  In a world that wreaks with the stench of violence, death, war, and hatred, we give off the fragrance of Christ’s love and reconciliation.

The truth is Christianity stinks - but it stinks real good.