The Gospels make wonderfully clear that the disciples had not the foggiest idea of what they had gotten into when they followed Jesus. With a simple "Follow me,” Jesus invited ordinary people to come out and be part of an adventure, a journey that kept surprising them at every turn in the road. It is no coincidence that the Gospel writers chose to frame the gospel in terms of a journey: "And then Jesus went to,” "From there he took his disciples to,” "From that time he began to teach them that ...”
The church exists today as resident aliens, an adventurous colony in a society of unbelief. As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and self-expression.
Our current situation is made all the more tragic when one compares the societies produced by the liberalism of the Enlightenment with the high-sounding rhetoric in which they were born. "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” These words from the Declaration of Independence remind us of the great sense of adventure that accompanied the creation of our society. The liberal adventure was the creation of a world of freedom. By labeling certain principles as naturally "self-evident,” by offering equality and rights, the Enlightenment hoped to produce people who were free. Detached from oppressive claims of tradition and community, holding the significance of their lives within themselves as an individual, natural right, being given the independence to fashion their own future, they were to become free.
It was an adventure that held the seeds of its own destruction within itself, within its attenuated definition of human nature and its inadequate vision of human destiny. What we got was not self-freedom but self-centeredness, loneliness, superficiality, and harried consumerism. Free is not how many of our citizens feel— with our overstocked medicine cabinets, burglar alarms, vast ghettos, and drug culture. Eighteen hundred New Yorkers are murdered every year by their fellow citizens in a city whose police department is larger than the standing army of many nations. The adventure went sour.
There was a time when unbelief also appeared to be adventuresome, when the denial of God was experienced as an exciting new possibility, a heroic refusal to participate in oppressive social convention. In our day, unbelief is the socially acceptable way of living in the West. It no longer takes courage to disbelieve. As Alasdair MacIntyre has noted (in The Religious Significance of Atheism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1969], p. 24), we Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve! A flaccid church has robbed atheism of its earlier pretensions of adventure.
The Good News, which we explore here, is that the success of godlessness and the failure of political liberalism have made possible a recovery of Christianity as an adventurous journey. Life in the colony is not a settled affair. Subject to constant attacks upon and sedition against its most cherished virtues, always in danger of losing its young, regarded as a threat by an atheistic culture, which in the name of freedom and equality subjugates everyone—the Christian colony can be appreciated by its members as a challenge.
Here we become uneasy with our image of the church as colony. To be a colony implies that God’s people settle in, stake out a claim, build fences, and guard their turf. Of course, in a hostile world, a world simplistic enough not to believe but sophisticated enough to make its attacks on belief in the most subtle of ways, there is reason for the colony to be en guarde. Yet when the church stakes out a claim, this implies that we are somehow satisfied with our little corner of the world, our little cultivated garden of spirituality or introspection, or whatever crumbs are left after the wider society has used reason, science, politics, or whatever other dominant means it has of making sense of itself.
Our biblical story demands an offensive rather than defensive posture of the church. The world and all its resources, anguish, gifts, and groaning is God’s world, and God demands what God has created. Jesus Christ is the supreme act of divine intrusion into the world’s settled arrangements. In the Christ, God refuses to "stay in his place.” The message that sustains the colony is not for itself but for the whole world—the colony having significance only as God’s means for saving the whole world. The colony is God’s means of a major offensive against the world, for the world.
An army succeeds, not through trench warfare but through movement, penetration, tactics. Therefore, to speak of the church as a colony is to speak of the colony not as a place, a fortified position, be it theological or geographical. The colony is a people on the move, like Jesus' first disciples, breathlessly trying to keep up with Jesus. It is an adventure with many unknowns, internal arguments over which turn to take in the road, conversations along the way, visits to strange places, introductions and farewells, and much looking back and taking stock.
When we are baptized, we (like the first disciples) jump on a moving train. As disciples, we do not so much accept a creed, or come to a clear sense of selfunderstanding by which we know this or that with utter certitude. We become part of a journey that began long before we got here and shall continue long after we are gone. Too often, we have conceived of salvation—what God does to us in Jesus—as a purely personal decision, or a matter of finally getting our heads straight on basic beliefs, or of having some inner feelings of righteousness about ourselves and God, or of having our social attitudes readjusted. In this chapter we argue that salvation is not so much a new beginning but rather a beginning in the middle, so to speak. Faith begins, not in discovery, but in remembrance. The story began without us, as a story of the peculiar way God is redeeming the world, a story that invites us to come forth and be saved by sharing in the work of a new people whom God has created in Israel and Jesus. Such movement saves us by (1) placing us within an adventure that is nothing less than God’s purpose for the whole world, and (2) communally training us to fashion our lives in accordance with what is true rather than what is false.
A pastor baptized a baby. After the baptism the pastor said to the baby, in a voice loud enough to be heard by parents and congregation, "Little sister, by this act of baptism, we welcome you to a journey that will take your whole life. This isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of God’s experiment with your life. What God will make of you, we know not. Where God will take you, surprise you, we cannot say. This we do know and this we say—God is with you.”
Perhaps Paul characterized this journey begun at baptism even better when he characterized the way as nothing less than a way from death to life:
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Rom. 6:511)
The Bible is fundamentally a story of a people’s journey with God. Scripture is an account of human existence as told by God. In scripture, we see that God is taking the disconnected elements of our lives and pulling them together into a coherent story that means something. When we lack such a truthful, coherent account, life is likely to be perceived as disconnected, ad hoc. In trying to make sense of life, when we lack a coherent narrative, life is little more than a lurch to the left, a lurch to the right. This is the world seen through the eyes of the "CBS Evening News”: disaster here, insoluble problem there, and then the inevitable "now this” followed by a commercial that helps us recover our sense that our world is all right (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death [New York: Penguin Books, 1986]). No wonder modern humanity, even as it loudly proclaims its freedom and power to choose, is really an impotent herd driven this way and that, paralyzed by the disconnectedness of it all. It’s just one damn thing after another.
How does God deal with human fear, confusion, and paralysis? God tells a story:
I am none other than the God who "brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Deut. 5:6). Knowing that story makes sense out of the following command that Israel "shall have no other gods before me.” The Bible does not argue that idolatry detracts from human self-esteem, or that life is better when lived without idols. Indeed, idolatry is a creative response on the part of a finite creature that has not heard about the Creator. Idolatry is condemned only on the basis of a story we know about God.
Israel is a people who learn this story by heart and gather regularly to retell it.
We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand; and the Lord showed signs and wonders, great and grievous, against Egypt and against Pharaoh and all his household, before our eyes; and he brought us out from there, that he might bring us in and give us the land which he swore to give to our fathers. (Deut. 6:21-23)
In telling that story, Israel comes to see itself as a people on a journey, an adventure. Its ethics become the virtues necessary to sustain Israel on the road. Our contention is that it does not just happen that God’s people tell stories; certainly, the penchant for storytelling has nothing to do with Matthew, Mark, and Luke being primitive, pre-rational people who told simple stories, whereas we are sophisticated people who do not. Story is the fundamental means of talking about and listening to God, the only human means available to us that is complex and engaging enough to make comprehensible what it means to be with God.
Early Christians, interestingly, began not with creedal speculation about the metaphysics of the Incarnation—that is, Christology abstracted from the Gospel accounts. They began with stories about Jesus, about those whose lives got caught up in his life. Therefore, in a more sophisticated and engaging way, by the very form of their presentation, the Gospel writers were able to begin training us to situate our lives like his life. We cannot know Jesus without following Jesus. Engagement with Jesus, as the misconceptions of his first disciples show, is necessary to understand Jesus. In a sense, we follow Jesus before we know Jesus. Furthermore, we know Jesus before we know ourselves. For how can we know the truth of ourselves as sinful and misunderstanding, but redeemed and empowered without our first being shown, as it was shown to his first disciples?
By telling these stories, we come to see the significance and coherence of our lives as a gift, as something not of our own heroic creation, but as something that must be told to us, something we would not have known without the community of faith. The little story I call my life is given cosmic, eternal significance as it is caught up within God’s larger account of history. “We were Pharaoh’s slaves . . .
, the Lord brought us out . . . that he might preserve us.” The significance of our lives is frighteningly contingent on the story of another. Christians are those who hear this story and are able to tell it as our salvation.
To illustrate this we think of a story. A pastor we know retired sometime ago from the pastoral ministry. Recently, he was invited to come back to Shady Grove and preach at the church he had served for five years in the sixties—five stormy, difficult years. He regarded the warm invitation with some irony since this was the same Shady Grove congregation that had once asked the bishop to move him, only a year after he arrived, because the church had become angry and divided over his constant appeals to the congregation on the issues of race, and the then-current Vietnam war.
Of course, in one sense, they were not the "same” congregation, nor was he the same preacher. Twenty years had passed, years which perhaps now enabled them to account for what had happened there. He decided to accept their invitation.
The Sunday of the homecoming arrived. As the service progressed, the former pastor noted the differences that had taken place in the congregation. Twenty years before, the neighborhood was beginning to change in racial composition. Now, the surrounding community was 80 percent black, 20 percent white. Back then, he had told them that, if they didn’t integrate the congregation and welcome black members, they would die. Perhaps their life together had proved him right. The congregation was now about 20 percent black. The average age was much greater than he remembered, but the congregation was still alive with a new group of younger black members.
When he stood up to preach, he took as his text the Hebrews 11-12 account of faith as the story of various people. "By faith, Abraham . . . By faith, Noah,” and so forth. He told them that the homecoming had, for him, proved the reality of the Hebrews' definition of faith. Faith consists in each of us being a part of a pilgrimage, a stepping out, just like Abraham, just like Sarah.
He recalled the turbulent years that Shady Grove experienced in the sixties, the debate on whether to welcome all persons into the congregation. He recalled the person who, at the board meeting, so eloquently testified to her belief in the necessity of the church to be a witness in a time of racism. He pointed to persons in the congregation who, in amazingly bold and creative ways, determined that Shady Grove would not only be open to all who came, but would actively go out and seek all people to become part of their life together. He remembered a prayer that Sam Jones, now in his eighties, had prayed in which he asked for courage to meet the challenges of a changing world. Someone toward the rear of the sanctuary now shouted an "Amen!” "You know, you really came together as a church,” he said. "You became better people than even you thought you could be. I confess that you were more of a church than I thought! It took courage, but you showed that you had it. I wish some of the people who meant so much to this congregation, who have gone on to their reward, could see you now. I think they can see you now.”
This storytelling within an ordinary congregation may seem rather unspectacular. Indeed, that which impresses us about this episode is that it is such an ordinary sort of moment for the church. A congregation takes its cues from scripture when it engages in such storytelling. After all, this is very much the same way that the author of Hebrews chose to deal with a congregation of his day: by telling the story of faith, of people like Abraham and Sarah journeying forth to a place they knew not. Surprise: These pioneers in faith who stepped out, basing their lives on something they could not see, taking their place in a journey whose destination had no exact determination, were our mothers and fathers in faith. In Abraham and Sarah, Cain and Abel, Noah and Shady Grove, what we have is not first of all heroic people, but a heroic God who refuses to abandon God’s creation, a God who keeps coming back, picking up the pieces, and continuing the story: “And then ... ” “And next ...”
In his sermon, the preacher caught up the congregational struggles of the people at Shady Grove and, surprise again, they came to see themselves moving with Abraham and Sarah, as saints.
One of the great responsibilities of a preacher is to help congregations like Shady Grove catch a glimpse of what an adventure it is in our little times and little places, to be part of this story.
In a world of unbelief and its consequences, even the recitation of a story like that of a church so ordinary as Shady Grove is bound to sound adventurous, even heroic, because the world’s cynicism and unbelief make the courage, continuity, and conviction of anybody, even ordinary people, appear to be adventuresome and heroic. An unbelieving world can make a saint out of almost anybody who dares to be faithful.
The retired preacher (“worn out preachers” they once called retired Methodist preachers) was no hero. He was just a good teller of stories. Fortunately, here is a community that needs, more than heroes, leaders who enable the church to maintain its connection with its essential stories, which determine the shape and the significance of the church in the first place. So in the church, we learn to trust ordinary people, just as the folk at Shady Grove had learned to trust their preacher, even to invite him back home to tell the story, because he was the sort of person who could tell the story in such a way as to remind them of how they got there.
Of course, the story the faithful preacher tries to tell is also the preacher’s story.
In telling the story of Shady Grove, this retired preacher—perhaps like many retired persons, a bit cynical, a bit doubtful over what his years of ministry
meant—came to see his own life as a significant part of the journey. We want the clergy to see how much better it is to be part of an adventure than merely to be "a member of the helping professions.” More about that later.
To be saved is to be on the road again. Too often, we depict salvation as that which provides us with a meaningful existence when we achieve a new selfunderstanding. Here, with our emphasis on the narrative nature of Christian life, we are saying that salvation is baptism into a community that has so truthful a story that we forget ourselves and our anxieties long enough to become part of that story, a story God has told in Scripture and continues to tell in Israel and the church. Neither the disciples nor the folk at Shady Grove Church knew what they had gotten into when they said yes to the invitation of Jesus. And that is part of what makes salvation so exciting: The church gives us all sorts of new opportunities to experience the depth of God’s love, giving our lives direction we would otherwise lack.
For instance, today’s upwardly mobile "yuppies” are often criticized for being too greedy and materialistic to have children, since many a yuppie couple is content to remain a "DINK” (Dual Income, No Kids). We suggest that their materialism and lack of childbearing are both the symptoms of a deeper malaise. These unfortunate young adults know, even if subconsciously, that their lives are empty and pointless, devoid of direction or purpose. At least they are moral enough not to bring children into this emptiness.
Indeed, one of the most revealing conversations we might have today would be to discuss why we have children in the first place. The vacuity of our society is revealed by our inability to come up with a sufficient rationale for having children. About the best we can muster is: "Children help us to be less lonely.” (Get a dog; children make parents more lonely, not less.) And, "Children help give meaning to life.” (Such children are seen as another possession like a BMW.)
Christians have children, in great part, in order to be able to tell our children the story. Fortunately for us, children love stories. It is our baptismal responsibility to tell this story to our young, to live it before them, to take time to be parents in a world that (though intent on blowing itself to bits) is God’s creation (a fact we would not know without this story). We have children as a witness that the future is not left up to us and that life, even in a threatening world, is worth living—and not because "Children are the hope of the future,” but because God is the hope of the future.
If we lack good reasons for having children, we also lack good reasons for deciding not to have them. Christians are free not to have children not because of most contemporary rationales ("I don’t want to be tied down.” "I would not bring children into this messed up world.”), but because we believe in the power of God to create a people through witness and conversion rather than through natural generation. The church must be created new, in each generation, not through procreation but through baptism.
It is our privilege to invite our children, and other’s children, to be part of this great adventure called church. Christians ought to ponder what an amazing act of faith it was for Jews in the face of constant and death-dealing Christians and pagan persecution to go on having babies. People of God do not let the world determine how they respond to tomorrow.
When Jesus commissioned his disciples and sent them out (Luke 10:1-24), he told them to take no bag, purse, or sandals—the sorts of accessories required for most journeys. Here was a journey in which they were to take only confidence in his empowerment. The story ends with disciples coming back, utterly surprised that the same power of good, which they had experienced in Jesus, was also working in them (10:17-24). When it comes to the confirmation of the truth of the gospel, disciples are often more surprised than anyone else when, wonder of wonders, what Jesus promises, Jesus really does give.
In a way, although Jesus unburdened the disciples of so much of the baggage the world considers essential, he did not relieve them of all burdens. He relieved them of false baggage so he could lay upon them even more demanding burdens. For in laying upon them the necessity to trust not their possessions but only him, Jesus showed them that here was a journey which required the cultivation of certain virtues. One should not start out on a dangerous journey without being equipped for the dangers that one may face. So, in any good adventure story, we find a constant testing of the traveler’s character and, during the testing, a transformation in the character of the adventurer. The quest requires the adventurer to rely upon and develop his or her virtues in ever new ways.
To launch out on a journey is to move toward some goal. Of course, in the journey of faith, we have no clear idea of what our end will be except that it shall be, in some form, true and complete friendship with God. For now, our daily experiences of testing and confirmation of that friendship sustain us. Perhaps this explains why Jesus' ethic was so thoroughly eschatological—an ethic bound up with his proclamation of the end of history. Ethics is a function of the telos, the end. It makes all the difference in the world how one regards the end of the world, "end” not so much in the sense of its final breath, but "end” in the sense of the purpose, the goal, the result.
This eschatological observation is made all the more self-evident, a verifiable truism, because we know that our society doesn’t seem to have any notion of where it’s going. Perhaps that’s why some of the older ones among us remember, with a fondness which is rather surprising to those who are younger, the years of World War II. Then, for a time, we had national purpose and therefore national direction. A "good” war requires sacrifice and virtue. Unfortunately for America’s sense of self-worth, our last war was not a particularly good one; that is, Vietnam did not provide us with the sort of story that enables us to sustain ourselves as a community for the next generations, a story that makes the young proud of the sacrifices of their parents. That war disrupted our older national accounts of ourselves as a virtuous nation.
For the church to be a community that does not need war in order to give itself purpose and virtue puts the church at odds with nations. Yet the church knows that this observation alone, and no other reason, puts it in the middle of a battle, though the battle is one we fight with the gospel weapons of witness and love, not violence and coercion. Unfortunately, the weapons of violence and power are the ones that come most naturally to us, so now we must ponder how we maintain the qualities needed to stay in this adventure called discipleship.
Christian ethics, as a cultivation of those virtues needed to keep us on the journey, are the ethics of revolution. Revolutionaries, whose goal is nothing less than the transformation of society through revolution, have little patience with those among them who are self-indulgent, and they have no difficulty disciplining such people. The discipline they demand of themselves is a means of directing the others to what is true and good. Having no use for such bourgeois virtues as tolerance, open-mindedness, and inclusiveness (which the revolutionary knows are usually cover-ups that allow the powerful to maintain social equilibrium rather than to be confronted and then to change), revolutionaries value honesty and confrontation—painful though they may be. The stakes are high, the temptations to counterrevolutionary behavior are too alluring, the road ahead too difficult to accept anything less from the revolutionary community. To the outsider, particularly the outsider who is part of the powers-that-be, the ethics of the revolutionary may appear harsh, uncompromising, even absurd. But given the world view of the revolutionary, the ultimate vision toward which the revolution is moving, revolutionary ethics make sense. This is, in its own secular way, an ethics of adventure not unlike the ethics of Christians.
As we noted in chapter 2, Christian ethics depends upon the Christian story. Christian ethics makes no sense apart from the recognition that we are also on an adventuresome journey which requires a peculiar set of virtues. For example, when Christians discuss sex, it often sounds as if we are somehow "against sex.” What we fail to make clear is that sexual passion (the good gifts of God’s creation) is now subservient to the demanding business of maintaining a revolutionary community in a world that often uses sex as a means of momentarily anesthetizing or distracting people from the basic vacuity of their lives. When the only contemporary means of self-transcendence is orgasm, we Christians are going to have a tough time convincing people that it would be nicer if they would not be promiscuous. Note how limited is our society’s discussion of the threat posed by AIDS. About all we can do is to appeal to the basic urge for self-preservation and self-interest: You must be careful with whom you have sex because you could kill yourself if you love the wrong person. Ironically, such selfinterest is the driving force behind the sexual mess we are in. Because of the threat of AIDS, our society has lost one of its last pitiful means of overcoming our enmity between one another—sex. Fear of AIDS transforms sex into yet another means of making us strangers to one another.
We believe that it is only when our attentions are directed toward a demanding and exciting account of life that we have any way of handling something so powerful, so distracting, so creative, and so deadly as sex.
A journey requires not only an end, a goal, but also the ability to keep at it— constancy. Travelers, in the midst of the vicissitudes of the journey, learn to trust one another when the going is rough.
The modern world represents a particular kind of threat to the integrity of the personality, namely, that our propensity to change direction, to break our commitments, is made into a virtue. We call our pathological inconstancy "Passages,” "Adult Development.”
Constancy requires a particular kind of change. If we are to be true to the quest, to keep a demanding goal before ourselves, we must be people who are ready to be surprised, ready to forgive and to be forgiven. The people of Shady Grove Church, for instance, could not remain constant and committed to their desire to follow Jesus without being willing to change, to be converted. So we cannot define constancy. We can only point to it as it unfolds in a life, such as the life of the people at Shady Grove Church, where we see, over time, a people being true to their originating telos, still on the way to the goal, through twists and turns, eyes still fixed on the quest—friendship with God in Christ.
Modern people usually seek individuality through the severance of restraints and commitments. I've got to be me. I must be true to myself. The more we can be free of parents, children, spouses, duties, the more free we will be to "be ourselves,” to go with the flow, to lay hold of new and exciting possibilities. So goes the conventional argument.
Yet, what if our true selves are made from the materials of our communal life? Where is there some "self” which has not been communally created? By cutting back our attachments and commitments, the self shrinks rather than grows. So an important gift the church gives us is a far richer range of options, commitments, duties, and troubles than we would have if left to our own devices. Without Jesus, Peter might have been a good fisherman, perhaps even a very good one. But he would never have gotten anywhere, would never have learned what a coward he really was, what a confused, then confessing, courageous person he was, even a good preacher (Acts 2) when he needed to be. Peter stands out as a true individual, or better, a true character, not because he had
become "free” or "his own person,” but because he had become attached to the Messiah and messianic community, which enabled him to lay hold of his life, to make so much more of his life than if he had been left to his own devices.
Our experience of ourselves as dependable, coherent persons of constancy within the congregation has implication for the rest of life as well. So we can speak of marriage as an adventure, but only because for disciples, marriage is now subsumed under the category of an aspect of our adventure in Christ. How on earth could we explain how ordinary people could risk commitment to another person for a lifetime, especially since we have no way of knowing all the implications that this commitment entails? Through such common commitments to constancy as getting married or having children, we have the uncommon experience of trusting other people in a world that would make us strangers. We learn the virtue of patience, of being willing to be part of the journey, even when we are not always sure of when or where it ends. What extraordinary patience it requires, in a world that demands results, for a pastor to have to wait twenty years to see even a glimpse of the Kingdom at a place like Shady Grove. How long did it take the Hebrews to get from Egypt to the Promised Land?
If our society has lost good reasons for getting married and having children, we appear even more so to have lost good reasons for staying single. About the best we can muster, in regard to staying single, is that we do not want to be "tied down,” or we want "to keep our options open.” Yet for those who are on the adventure called discipleship, singleness becomes a sign that the church lives by hope rather than biological heirs, that brothers and sisters come not through natural generation but through baptism, that the future of the world and the significance of our future is ultimately up to God rather than us. The telos, the end, gives meaning to our choices. Ultimately, there is for us only one good reason to get married or to stay single, namely, that this has something to do with our discipleship.
In a fragmented world that is a world perpetually at war, Christians can again recover how exciting and exhilarating it is to be a people of peace. "Peace,” in and of itself, does not sound too exciting. Yet when we recover the sense of ourselves, even in places like Shady Grove, as a people of a peace unlike either the world’s war or the world’s peace, we again sense the adventure of discipleship. In scripture like Deuteronomy 6 or Hebrews 11, in a sermon like the one at homecoming at Shady Grove, we are invited to see ourselves and our lives as part of God’s story. That produces people with a cause.
We really are, if we are to believe Hebrews or Deuteronomy, examples of God’s determination to bring the world back into a right relation to its Creator—which finally is what peace is about.
Under such a story, life ceases to be the grim, just-one-damn-thing-after-another, sort of existence we have known before. The little things of life—marriage, children, visiting an eighty-year-old nursing home resident, listening to a sermon—are redeemed and given eschatological significance. Our fate is transformed into our destiny; that is, we are given the means of transforming our past, our history of sin, into a future of love and service to neighbor. We are contingent beings whose meaning and significance is determined by something, someone other than ourselves. True freedom arises, not in our loud assertion of our individual independence, but in our being linked to a true story, which enables us to say yes and no. Our worst sins arise as our response to our innate human fear that we are nobody.
Knowing who we are by the story of the power and purposes of God makes a difference in the lives of ordinary people like those at Shady Grove Church. They are thereby given a power to be free from the strong social forces, prejudices, and conventions that determine the lives of so many who do not know such a story. Our enemies, our wider society, our past, cannot define us or determine the significance of who we are, since God in Christ has already done that for us. The modern world tends to produce a steady stream of victims, people who by economic circumstance, social class, education, race, intelligence, or psychological problems are told that they are hapless victims who would be happier if they accepted their fate rather than whine.
The people at Shady Grove, by telling the Story, were enabled to tell their story in such a way that they could look back on their history with honesty (repentance) and see their future as a gift (forgiveness), as an account, no less significant than Deuteronomy 6 or Hebrews 11, of God with us.
It is probably no accident that, for Shady Grove Church, their struggles with the issue of racism focused their own experiences of the power of the gospel. Few American issues today reveal any better our need for some means of confession and forgiveness than does our racism. Because we have experienced a story of how One came to us and received us as strangers and forgave us as friends, we expect to receive strangers and to be offered forgiveness elsewhere. Our story enables us to have community on the basis of something more substantial than "melting pot” blandness, to have community rather than eternal hostility among subgroups because we are so different. Shady Grove received the gift of membership in a peculiar community. Our particular community knows the story that tells how the Risen Christ returned to his friends, even when they were his betrayers, and because we know it, we know to expect him to return to us, to stand among us, to forgive us, even to bless us.
The disciples went forward by looking back, by rejoicing in the sense of hope that comes from the realization that God does not leave us alone, and will not let us stay as we are. Through him, we really are getting somewhere.
It would be difficult for us to open a discussion on Christian ethics in a more questionable way than to cite someone who to many people, particularly many mainline moderate-to-liberal church people, is anathema—Jerry Falwell. In using Falwell as an example, we run the risk of confirming your hunch that what we are proposing here is a brand of neo-conservatism, pietism, or worse— fundamentalism, cloaked in odd language.
We cite Falwell not to support his agenda (to the extent that we understand it) but to suggest that the fundamental issue, when it comes to Christian ethics, is not whether we shall be conservative or liberal, left or right, but whether we shall be faithful to the church’s peculiar vision of what it means to live and act as disciples. Indeed, to our minds, there is not much difference between Jerry’s ethical agenda and that of the American Protestant Mainline. Whether they think of themselves as liberal or conservative, as ethically and politically left or right, American Christians have fallen into the bad habit of acting as if the church really does not matter as we go about trying to live like Christians. That is the great misunderstanding we are out to correct in this chapter.
Not long ago, on one of his typical Sunday television broadcasts, Jerry Falwell did something quite typical—he asked for money. He was pleading for funds for his "Save A Baby Homes.” According to Falwell, his organization is establishing homes, all over the nation, where a young woman who decides to continue a difficult pregnancy may go and receive free, caring support. She can live at the Save A Baby Home through her pregnancy rather than have an abortion. The Roman Catholics have conducted a similar program for some time.
Jerry said something to the effect that, "If we do not give our resources, our money, to this venture, if Bible believing Christians do not demonstrate through our gifts that we are willing to give to, and to sacrifice for, and to support these young women, then we have no right to stand by self-righteously and point to them saying, ‘Sorry. Tough luck. Abortion is a sin. It is your problem.’”
More than Falwell would have known, his statement begins to move toward a Christian point of view—not in the sense of abortion being wrong (which it may be)—but in the sense that any Christian ethical position is made credible by the church. The way most of us have been conditioned to think about an issue like abortion is to wonder what laws, governmental coercion, and resources would be necessary to support a "Christian” position on this issue. The first ethical work, from this point of view, is for Christians to devise a position on abortion and then to ask the government to support that position. Because we are fortunate enough to live in a democracy, we Christians can, like every other pressure group in this society, push for the legislative embodiment of our point of view.
Liberal Christians will argue that this is what Falwell and his Moral Majority tried to do with their efforts to pack the Supreme Court with "Right to Life” ideologues and their push for a Constitutional amendment banning abortion. If they cannot play fair and persuade or convert everyone else in America to their point of view, they will force all of us to adopt their view through legislation.
Yet liberal Christians, more than they know, have the same point of view as Falwell. They also expect the society to uphold their ethics. If the polls are correct, however, liberals have the advantage in that their view, on a matter like abortion, is the majority view, the predominant stand of people who hold power in this society. Most of us already believe in "freedom of choice.” Most of us already affirm that a sensitive matter like abortion is a purely personal issue, nobody else’s business. Most of our laws and the majority of our society already support this conventional ethical position.
What impressed us about Falwell’s statement was that it began to recognize that Christian ethics are church-dependent. More is at stake than simply the hypocrisy of the church—the church legislatively demanding the state to do what it cannot do even among its own members through persuasion and conversion alone (although there is much to Falwell’s assertion that the world must be rather cynical about a church that makes all sorts of ethical pronouncements but seems unwilling to sacrifice its own resources to back up those pronouncements). In acting as if the church’s ethics were something that makes sense to every thinking, sensitive, caring American despite his or her faith or lack of it, the church is underestimating the peculiarity of Christian ethics.
Christian ethics, like any ethics, are "tradition dependent.” That is, they make sense, not because the principles they espouse make sense in the abstract, as perfectly rational behavior, which ought to sound reasonable to any intelligent person. Christian ethics only make sense from the point of view of what we believe has happened in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Practically speaking, what the church asks of people is difficult to do by oneself.
It is tough for ordinary people like us to do extraordinary acts as Jesus commands. This practical insight is possibly behind Falwell’s Save A Baby Homes. More than these practical considerations, what the church asks of people is difficult to see by oneself. Christian ethics arise, in great part, out of something Christians claim to have seen that the world has not seen, namely, the creation of a people, a family, a colony that is a living witness that Jesus Christ is Lord. Tradition, as we use the term here, is a complex, lively argument about what happened in Jesus that has been carried on, across the generations, by a concrete body of people called the church. Fidelity to this tradition, this story, is the most invigorating challenge of the adventure begun in our baptism and the toughest job of Christian ethics.
The habit of Constantinian thinking is difficult to break. It leads Christians to judge their ethical positions, not on the basis of what is faithful to our peculiar tradition, but rather on the basis of how much Christian ethics Caesar can be induced to swallow without choking. The tendency therefore is to water down Christian ethics, filtering them through basically secular criteria like "right to life” or "freedom of choice,” pushing them on the whole world as universally applicable common sense, and calling that Christian.
How bland and unfaithful such ethics appear when set next to the practical demands of the story.
Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them . . . Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. . . . Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so [they] persecuted the prophets who were before you.
You are the salt of the earth.... You are the light of the world. . . .
Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them . . . . You have heard that it was said to the men of old, "You shall not kill.”
. . . But I say to you that every one who is angry with . . . brother [or sister] shall be liable to judgment . . . . You have heard that it was said, "You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. . . . It was also said, "Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.” But I say to you that every one who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, makes her an adulteress; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.... Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? . . . Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5 RSV)
It might be possible for Christians to argue that our ethics are universally applicable, that the way of Jesus makes sense even to those who do not believe that the claim "Jesus Christ is Lord” makes sense. Christians could then join hands with all people of goodwill who want peace, who work for justice, who affirm life, and who strive for the good. You do not need a strong community, the church, to support an ethic everyone else already affirms. It might be possible for Christians to take this approach to ethics (indeed many contemporary Christians have), until we collide with a text like Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. There, even the most casual observer realizes that he or she has been confronted by a way that does not make sense. In the Sermon on the Mount, the boundaries between church and world are brought into clear relief: "You have heard it said, . . . but I say to you.” The "You have heard it said” refers to Torah, to the word of the faith-community itself. While Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel honors that Torah and demands obedience to it, in the Sermon he intensifies it, drawing the obedience demanded of Israel into sharp relief, and thus depicts again for Israel how really odd it is to be a people called by God.
Here is an invitation to a way that strikes hard against what the world already knows, what the world defines as good behavior, what makes sense to everybody. The Sermon, by its announcement and its demands, makes necessary the formation of a colony, not because disciples are those who have a need to be different, but because the Sermon, if believed and lived, makes us different, shows us the world to be alien, an odd place where what makes sense to everybody else is revealed to be opposed to what God is doing among us. Jesus was not crucified for saying or doing what made sense to everyone.
People are crucified for following a way that runs counter to the prevailing direction of the culture. If Jesus had argued, in his Sermon on the Mount, that it makes good sense to make peace with someone who has wronged you because such behavior will bring out the best in the other person, that it makes sense to carry a Roman legionnaire’s pack because such an act will help to uncover the basic humanity even among the Roman occupation forces, then Jesus might justly be accused of being a naive romantic who had not the slightest inkling of how human beings really behave. Yet Jesus makes no such claims. Rather, as the concluding verses of the Sermon make explicit, disciples turn the other cheek, go the second mile, avoid promiscuity, remain faithful to their marriage vows because God is like this. "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:43-45).
Our God is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish, makes his sun to rise on the good and the bad. This is the God who is specifically, concretely revealed to us in Jesus, a God we would not have known if left to our own devices. Our ethical positions arise out of our theological claims, in our attempt to conform our lives to the stunning vision of reality we see in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Disciples of Christ are those who journey forth from the conventional to base their lives on the nature of God, to "be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (5:48).
Which, of course, sounds unbelievably presumptuous. As Jesus noted on another occasion, "One there is who is good” (Matt. 19:17). For the Sermon on the Mount to push a life-style based on the assertion that we merely mortal human beings are to act like God borders on the absurd. How is it possible for human beings who are vulnerable, finite, and mortal to be nonviolent, utterly faithful, and perfect even as God is perfect? What sort of gargantuan ethical heroism would be required to foster such an ethic?
It is here that we often say things like, "Well, Jesus was speaking for himself. He was the best person who has ever lived. He never intended for us to follow this way literally.” Yet what impresses about the Sermon is its attention to the nitty-gritty details of everyday life. Jesus appears to be giving very practical, very explicit directions for what to do when someone has done you wrong, when someone attacks you, when you are married to someone. It is clear that Jesus certainly thought he was giving us practical, everyday guidance on how to live like disciples.
Or we say, "The Sermon on the Mount is intended for individuals, heroic ethical superstars. Saints. It was never meant to be embodied in social structures.” Most of us first had this point of view articulated by Reinhold Niebuhr in his book Moral Men and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960). Niebuhr’s argument, in brief, was that at best, Jesus' ethics apply most directly to the individual or relations between two persons. When we join together in groups, a more realistic, practical approach is required, one that takes into account the nature of human beings in society. Jesus may have talked about loving our enemies, but we more sophisticated modern people know the impracticality of such love when applied to the complicated social questions of our day. So we work for justice, which, Niebuhr said, is a kind of embodied, realistic, socially applicable form of Jesus' simpler, more individual love. Fortunately, justice is something good to work for, because even those sophisticated modern people who know nothing of the claim that God "makes his sun to shine on the just and the unjust, his rain to fall upon the good and the bad,” do believe in justice.
Unfortunately, such reasoning is yet another example of the sort of theological rationalization so typical of the post-Constantinian church. The Sermon on the Mount is after something that Niebuhr, and most of the modern church, forsook— that is, the formation of a visible, practical, Christian community. Jesus is here teaching his disciples (5:1-2). Although "the crowds” (5:1) are not excluded from this teaching, since the Teacher has as one of his capacities to invite all people into this Kingdom, here is a sermon for those who hear the summons to become salt and light for the world, for those who want lives by which others will "see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (5:16). By these words we all might become children "of your Father who is in heaven” (5:45). These are words for the colonists. The Sermon is not primarily addressed to individuals, because it is precisely as individuals that we are most apt to fail as Christians. Only through membership in a nonviolent community can violent individuals do better. The Sermon on the Mount does not encourage heroic individualism, it defeats it with its demands that we be perfect even as God is perfect, that we deal with others as God has dealt with us.
Which leads us to say that we are not advocating community merely for the sake of community. The Christian claim is not that we as individuals should be based in a community because life is better lived together rather than alone. The Christian claim is that life is better lived in the church because the church, according to our story, just happens to be true. The church is the only community formed around the truth, which is Jesus Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life. Only on the basis of his story, which reveals to us who we are and what has happened in the world, is true community possible.
In a world like ours, it is tempting to seek community, any community, as a good in itself. Liberal society has a way of making us strangers to one another as we go about detaching ourselves from long-term commitments, protecting our rights, thinking alone. Our society is a vast supermarket of desire in which each of us is encouraged to stand alone and go out and get what the world owes us.
The Western democracies tend to have a problem with meaning. They promise their citizens a society in which each citizen is free to create his or her own meaning—meaning which, for most of us, becomes little more than the freedom to consume at ever higher levels. Perhaps one of the great attractions of Marxist societies for some Western intellectuals, including Christian intellectuals, is that Marxist and Socialist societies tend to be the last bastion of the old-fashioned ideal that the state is capable of giving us meaning in life. At a time when most Western democracies have become more modest in their claims that merely being an American or a West German gives meaning and purpose to human existence, a basis for morality, Marxism and its imitators still offer a society built on "Solidarity with the Workers,” or "Peace and Justice,” or some other communal ideal that offers to give significance to insignificant individuals.
Merging one’s personal aspirations within the aspirations of the nation, falling into step behind the flag, has long been a popular means of overcoming doubts about the substance of one’s own life.
When people are very detached, very devoid of purpose and a coherent world view, Christians must be very suspicious of talk about community. In a world like ours, people will be attracted to communities that promise them an easy way out of loneliness, togetherness based on common tastes, racial or ethnic traits, or mutual self-interest. There is then little check on community becoming as tyrannical as the individual ego. Community becomes totalitarian when its only purpose is to foster a sense of belonging in order to overcome the fragility of the lone individual.
Christian community, life in the colony, is not primarily about togetherness. It is about the way of Jesus Christ with those whom he calls to himself. It is about disciplining our wants and needs in congruence with a true story, which gives us the resources to lead truthful lives. In living out the story together, togetherness happens, but only as a by-product of the main project of trying to be faithful to Jesus.
It is important to recognize that all ethics, even non-Christian ethics, arise out of a tradition that depicts the way the world works, what is real, what is worth having, worth believing. Tradition is a function and a product of community. So all ethics, even non-Christian ethics, make sense only when embodied in sets of social practices that constitute a community. Such communities support a sense of right and wrong. Yet most modern ethics begin from the Enlightenment presupposition of the isolated, heroic self, the allegedly rational individual who stands alone and decides and chooses. The goal of this ethic is to detach the individual from his or her tradition, parents, stories, community, and history, and thereby allow him or her to stand alone, to decide, to choose, and to act alone. It is an ethic of great value in our type of society because the corporation needs workers who are suitably detached from communities other than their place of work, people who are willing to move at the beck and call of the corporation. Growing up, becoming a mature, functioning adult is thus defined as becoming someone who has no communal, traditionalist, familial impediments. This heroic, radically individual and subjective ethic was best articulated by Kant and survives today in perverted form in the so-called Contextual or Situation Ethics—as well as in the conventional ethical wisdom of the average person in our society. What I do is my own damn business. First be sure in your heart that you are right and then go ahead. I did it because it seemed right to me. What right have you to judge me?
What we have failed to see is that even the Kantian ethic, based on the myth of the isolated, rational individual, arises out of a story, an account of the way the world works, and is backed up by a community. Individualistic, contextualist ethics is dependent on a "community” that exists by devaluing community and a "tradition” whose claim is that we become free by detaching ourselves from our tradition. The life together of this post-Kantian community begins, not by an announcement of the in-breaking of God’s kingdom, but rather by the proclamation that each of us is free to discover our own ethics for ourselves, to grow up and become adult—liberated, autonomous, detached, free individuals.
The Sermon implies that it is as isolated individuals that we lack the ethical and theological resources to be faithful disciples. The Christian ethical question is not the conventional Enlightenment question, How in the world can ordinary people like us live a heroic life like that? The question is, What sort of community would be required to support an ethic of nonviolence, marital fidelity, forgiveness, and hope such as the one sketched by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount?
Back to the opening example of Falwell’s Save A Baby Homes: Whenever Christians think that we can support our ethic by simply pressuring Congress to pass laws or to spend tax money, we fail to do justice to the radically communal quality of Christian ethics. In fact, much of what passes for Christian social concern today, of the left or of the right, is the social concern of a church that seems to have despaired of being the church. Unable through our preaching, baptism, and witness to form a visible community of faith, we content ourselves with ersatz Christian ethical activity—lobbying Congress to support progressive strategies, asking the culture at large to be a little less racist, a little less promiscuous, a little less violent. Falwell’s Moral Majority is little different from any mainline Protestant church that opposes him. Both groups imply that one can practice Christian ethics without being in the Christian community. Both begin with the Constantinian assumption that there is no way for the gospel to be present in our world without asking the world to support our convictions through its own social and political institutionalization. The result is the gospel transformed into civil religion.
Yet Falwell is right if, in his Save A Baby Homes, he implies that there is no way for Christians to think of an issue like abortion without at the same time thinking about the church. Christians are not about the business of urging ordinary people individually to launch out on heroic, individual courses of action. The Sermon on the Mount cares nothing for the European Enlightenment’s infatuation with the individual self as the most significant ethical unit. For Christians, the church is the most significant ethical unit. In a sense, the traditional designation of "social ethics” is a tautology. All Christian ethics are social ethics because all our ethics presuppose a social, communal, political starting point—the church. All our ethical responses begin here. Through the teaching, support, sacrifice, worship, and commitment of the church, utterly ordinary people are enabled to do some rather extraordinary, even heroic acts, not on the basis of their own gifts or abilities, but rather by having a community capable of sustaining Christian virtue. The church enables us to be better people than we could have been if left to our own devices.
So our response to an issue like abortion is something communal, social, and political, but utterly ecclesial—something like baptism. Whenever a person is baptized, be that person a child or an adult, the church adopts that person. The new Christian is engrafted into a family. Therefore, we cannot say to the pregnant fifteen-year-old, "Abortion is a sin. It is your problem.” Rather, it is our problem. We ask ourselves what sort of church we would need to be to enable an ordinary person like her to be the sort of disciple Jesus calls her to be. More important, her presence in our community offers the church the wonderful opportunity to be the church, honestly to examine our own convictions and see whether or not we are living true to those convictions. She is seen by us not as some pressing social problem to be solved in such a way as to relieve our own responsibility for her and the necessity of our sacrificing on her behalf (for our story teaches us to seek such responsibility and sacrifice, not to avoid it through
governmental aid). Rather, we are graciously given the eyes to see her as a gift of God sent to help ordinary people like us to discover the church as the Body of Christ.
The old debate about whether Christian ethics should emphasize the personal or the social, individual conversion or social transformation, was misguided. Augustine, in trying to make sense out of the demands of the Sermon on the Mount’s advocacy of nonresistance to evil, claimed that such action requires, "not a bodily action but an inward disposition” (Augustine, Reply to Faustus, 22, 767). He thus began a lengthy attempt to solve the human dilemma posed by the Sermon by moving its demands from the outward and the practical to the inward and the subjective. Such interpretation is not supported by the text itself, which has as its role, not to cultivate some subjective attitude, but rather to form a visible people of God. Our ethics do involve individual transformation, not as a subjective, inner, personal experience, but rather as the work of a transformed people who have adopted us, supported us, disciplined us, and enabled us to be transformed. The most interesting, creative, political solutions we Christians have to offer our troubled society are not new laws, advice to Congress, or increased funding for social programs—although we may find ourselves supporting such national efforts. The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers.
The Christian faith recognizes that we are violent, fearful, frightened creatures who cannot reason or will our way out of our mortality. So the gospel begins, not with the assertion that we are violent, fearful, frightened creatures, but with the pledge that, if we offer ourselves to a truthful story and the community formed by listening to and enacting that story in the church, we will be transformed into people more significant than we could ever have been on our own.
As Barth says, "[The Church] exists ... to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to [the world’s] own manner and which contradicts it in a way which is full of promise” (Church Dogmatics, 4.3.2).
Ethically speaking, it should interest us that, in beginning the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes, Jesus does not ask disciplines to do anything. The Beatitudes are in the indicative, not the imperative, mood. First we are told what God has done before anything is suggested about what we are to do.
Imagine a sermon that begins: "Blessed are you poor. Blessed are those of you who are hungry. Blessed are those of you who are unemployed. Blessed are those going through marital separation. Blessed are those who are terminally ill.”
The congregation does a double take. What is this? In the kingdom of the world, if you are unemployed, people treat you as if you have some sort of social disease. In the world’s kingdom, terminally ill people become an embarrassment to our health-care system, people to be put away, out of sight. How can they be blessed?
The preacher responds, "I'm sorry. I should have been more clear. I am not talking about the way of the world’s kingdom. I am talking about God’s kingdom.
In God’s kingdom, the poor are royalty, the sick are blessed. I was trying to get you to see something other than that to which you have become accustomed.”
The Sermon rests on the theological assumption that if the preacher can first enable us to see whom God blesses, we shall be well on the road to blessedness ourselves. We can only act within a world we can see. Vision is the necessary prerequisite for ethics. So the Beatitudes are not a strategy for achieving a better society, they are an indication, a picture. A vision of the inbreaking of a new society. They are indicatives, promises, instances, imaginative examples of life in the kingdom of God. In Matthew 5, Jesus repeatedly cites an older command, already tough enough to keep in itself, and then radically deepens its significance, not to lay some gigantic ethical burden on the backs of potential ethical heroes, but rather to illustrate what is happening in our midst. This instance is not a law from which deductions can be casuistically drawn; rather, it is an imaginative metaphor, which hopes to produce a shock within our imaginations so that the hearer comes to see his or her life in a radical new way.
It is morality pushed to the limits, not so much in the immediate service of morality, but rather to help us see something so new, so against what we have always heard said, that we cannot rely on our older images of what is and what is not.
We miss all this when we reduce the Beatitudes to maxims of positive thinking, new rules for getting by well. How many moralistic sermons have we heard urging people to be peacemakers, or meek, or feeders of the poor? The indicatives become moralistic imperatives, new rules which lead to conventional forms of ethical activism, anguish, or security, depending on the particular species of self-deception at work in the practitioner. So peace "makes sense,” for everyone knows that if we do not negotiate a treaty with the Soviets, we may blow ourselves to bits. It makes sense to make up with someone in your church before offering your gift at the altar, for this will make for a more unified congregation.
As Richard Lischer asks, "But why should the Teacher be crucified for reinforcing what everyone already knows?” ("The Sermon on the Mount as Radical Pastoral Care,” Interpretation 41 [1987]:161-62.)
What if all this is not new and more stringent rules for us to observe but rather a picture of the way God is? Of course, we are forever getting confused into thinking that scripture is mainly about what we are supposed to do rather than a picture of who God is. If Jesus had put forth behavior like turning the other cheek when someone strikes you as a useful tactic for bringing out the best in other people, then Jesus could be justly accused of ethical naivete. But the basis for the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount is not what works but rather the way God is. Cheek-turning is not advocated as what works (it usually does not), but advocated because this is the way God is—God is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. This is not a strategem for getting what we want but the only manner of life available, now that, in Jesus, we have seen what God wants. We seek reconciliation with the neighbor, not because we will feel so much better afterward, but because reconciliation is what God is doing in the world in the Christ.
We are confident that Matthew would say the Niebuhrian assertion, that the Sermon is only for isolated individuals, is perverse precisely because it is as individuals, cut off from the community which reveals to us the way things are in God’s kingdom, that we are bound to fail. The whole Sermon is not about how to be better individual Christians, it is a picture of the way the church is to look. The Sermon is eschatological. It is concerned with the end of things—the final direction toward which God is moving the world. Matthew 4:23-25 sets the context for the Sermon. Although delay of the parousia, the return of Christ, is fully admitted by Matthew (24:48; 25:5, 19), this delay serves to underscore Matthew’s interest in the formation of community rather than to diffuse it. The church is on the long haul, living in that difficult time between one advent and the next. In such times, we are all the more dependent on a community that tells us we live between the times, that it is all too easy to lose sight of the way the world is, now that God has come. Because we know something about the direction in which the world is moving, we are encouraged by that picture and guided by the shape of its depiction of the way things are now that God has redeemed the world in Jesus.
Yet we have been conditioned, by our very best theologians like Niebuhr, to be deeply suspicious of eschatology. Despite nearly a century of biblical scholarship having demonstrated how utterly eschatological is the teaching of Jesus, we mainline Protestants have charged eschatological thinking with being "other worldly,” "escapist,” "pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by” thinking, which is inimical to Christian activism today. How curious that liberals have always charged that eschatology destroys ethical behavior when the biblical evidence suggests that eschatology is the very basis for Jesus' ethical teaching.
There is no way to remove the eschatology of Christian ethics. We have learned that Jesus' teaching was not first focused on his own status but on the proclamation of the in-breaking kingdom of God, which brought an end to other kingdoms. His teaching, miracles, healings indicate the nature and the presence of the Kingdom. The Sermon on the Mount begins as an announcement of something that God has done to change the history of the world. In the Sermon we see the end of history, an ending made most explicit and visible in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Therefore, Christians begin our ethics, not with anxious, self-serving questions of what we ought to do as individuals to make history come out right, because, in Christ, God has already made history come out right. The Sermon is the inauguration manifesto of how the world looks now that God in Christ has taken matters in hand. And essential to the way that God has taken matters in hand is an invitation to all people to become citizens of a new Kingdom, a messianic community where the world God is creating takes visible, practical form.
Nowhere in the Sermon are believers encouraged to abandon this life or the world. Rather, we are to see the world aright, to grab hold of the world wisely.
The world is a place of trial and testing for disciples, but also a place of great opportunity for serving "the least of these” and thereby serving Christ. The urgency of the Sermon is not merely an urgency of time; it is a moral urgency brought about by our realization that an old world is passing away and we are the first-fruits of God’s new creation.
The eschatological context helps explain why the Sermon begins, not by telling us what to do, but by helping us to see. We can only act within that world which we see. So the primary ethical question is not, What ought I now to do? but rather, How does the world really look? The most interesting question about the Sermon is not, Is this really a practical way to live in the world? but rather, Is this really the way the world is? What is "practical” is related to what is real. If the world is a society in which only the strong, the independent, the detached, the liberated, and the successful are blessed, then we act accordingly. However, if the world is really a place where God blesses the poor, the hungry, and the persecuted for righteousness' sake, then we must act in accordance with reality or else appear bafflingly out of step with the way things are. Is the world a place where we must constantly guard against our death, anxiously building hedges against that sad but inevitable reality? Or is the world a place where our death is viewed and reviewed under the reality of the cross of Christ? It makes all the difference, in this matter of ethics, what we are looking at.
Jesus' eschatological teaching was an attempt to rid us of the notion that the world exists indefinitely, that we have a stake in the preservation of the world-as-is. Israel had always described the world as a story, which, like any story, has a beginning and an end. Although the "end” here is not necessarily "end” in the sense of finality, it is the means through which we see where the world is moving. The question, in regard to the end, is not so much when? but, what? To what end? We cannot journey forth until we have some indication of where we are going. By indicating the end, Jesus proclaims how God accomplishes his final purposes in the here and now. So discipleship, seen through this eschatology, becomes extended training in letting go of the ways we try to preserve and give significance to the world, ways brought to an end in Jesus, and in relying on God’s definition of the direction and meaning of the world—that is, the kingdom of God. Our anxious attempts to preserve ourselves lead to violence, whether we say our self-preservation is in the name of peace-with justice or national security. So the first step to peace is letting go of ourselves, our things, our world. The cross, of course, stands for us as the sign of one man’s ultimate dispossession of this world in order to inaugurate a new world.
Christians, we have been told recently, should work for peace. But what good is a peace movement that works for peace for the same idolatrous reasons we build bombs—namely, the anxious self-interested protection of our world as it is? Christians are free to work for peace in a nonviolent, hopeful way because we already know something about the end. We do not argue that the bomb is the worst thing humanity can do to itself. We have already done the worst thing we could do when we hung God’s Son on a cross. We do not argue that we must do something about the bomb or else we shall obliterate our civilization, because God has already obliterated our civilization in the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We do not argue against the bomb under the supposition that our millions we now spend for bombs will then be spent on food for the hungry. Apparently, peace sustained by necessarily larger, non-nuclear armies will be more expensive than nuclear peace now is. The world of nations has no means of being at peace other than means that are always violent, or at least potentially violent. Nor do we argue for peace because, if we do not get peace, we have no hope. Our hope is based not on Caesar’s missiles or Caesar’s treaties but on the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth. People often work for peace out of the same anxieties and perverted views of reality that lead people to build bombs.
The bomb may be an expensive, risky means of self-transcendence, but, after all, it is the only means we have and any means of self-transcendence is better than none. Our ethics derive from what we have seen of God.
The removal of eschatology from ethics may account for the suffocating moralism in our church. Moralism comes up with a list of acceptable virtues and suitable causes, the pursuit of which will give us self-fulfillment. "The Be Happy Attitudes.” Or Christianity is mainly a matter of being tolerant of other people, inclusive, and open—something slightly to the left of the Democratic party. Being Christian becomes being someone who is a little more open-minded than someone who is not. E. Stanley Jones said that we inoculate the world with a mild form of Christianity so that it will be immune to the real thing. The aim of such inoculation is security—not security in Christ, but security from Christ and from having to rely on him and the shape of his Kingdom to give meaning and significance to our lives.
Without eschatology, we are left with only a baffling residue of strange commands, which seem utterly impractical and ominous. We ignore the commands on divorce and lash out at our people on peace. The ethic of Jesus thus appears to be either utterly impractical or utterly burdensome unless it is set within its proper context—an eschatological, messianic community, which knows something the world does not and structures its life accordingly.
The Sermon begins with, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (5:3). Martin Luther comments that this is the first Beatitude because, even if one feels spiritually rich at the beginning of the Sermon, one will feel terribly poor and needy by the end! How meager is our righteousness when set next to this vision of God’s kingdom! That insight would bring great despair were it not that we also believe our God forgives us. We have learned, in the colony, that it is not only difficult to forgive, it is difficult to receive forgiveness, because such an attitude reminds us of our utter dependency on God. We are poor in spirit. And in our poverty, God blesses us. In the colony, every time we come to the Lord’s Table, we are given important training in how to forgive and to receive forgiveness. Here is a community in which even small, ordinary occurrences every Sunday, like eating together in Eucharist, become opportunities to have our eyes opened to what God is up to in the world and to be part of what God is doing. If we get good enough at forgiving the strangers who gather around the Lord’s Table, we hope that we shall be good at forgiving the strangers who gather with us around the breakfast table. Our everyday experience of life in the congregation is training in the arts of forgiveness; it is everyday, practical confirmation of the truthfulness of the Christian vision.
Without that dependency and confidence in divine mercy, which blesses rather than damns the "poor in spirit” (like us!), the Sermon can only appear as something impractical or burdensome. Our ethics always depend on the story, the whole story of what God has revealed himself to be in Christ. Our hope is to recover the sense that we try to live the Sermon on the Mount because this is in the nature of our God and it is our destination that we should be such people.
The colony is the vessel that carries us there. It is not apart from but within this vessel that we not only know this truth but are carried along with it.
Like our brothers and sisters, the Jews, we Christians cannot imagine God dealing with us in ways other than the social, communal, familial, colonial. Even as God promised to form a new, unusual people from the children of Abraham, so in Christ, God promises to form a peculiar people through the cross of Christ. The Sermon, like the rest of scripture, is addressed neither to isolated individuals nor to the wider world. Rather, here are words for the colony, a pre-figuration of the kinds of community in which the reign of God will shine in all its glory. So there is nothing private in the demands of the Sermon. It is very public, very political, very social in that it depicts the public form by which the colony shall witness to the world that God really is busy redeeming humanity, reconciling the world to himself in Christ. All Christian ethical issues are therefore social, political, communal issues. Can we so order our life in the colony that the world might look at us and know that God is busy?
For us, the world has ended. We may have thought that Jesus came to make nice people even nicer, that Jesus hoped to make a democratic Caesar just a bit more democratic, to make the world a bit better place for the poor. The Sermon, however, collides with such accommodationist thinking. It drives us back to a completely new conception of what it means for people to live with one another. That completely new conception is the church. All that we have heard said of old is thrown up for grabs, demands to be reexamined, and pushed back to square one. Square one is that colony made up of those who are special, different, alien, and distinctive only in the sense that they are those who have heard Jesus say "Follow me,” and have come forth to be part of a new people, a colony formed by hearing his invitation and saying yes.