Pentecost Sermon

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The Painful Work of Prayer

The Painful Work of Prayer

Delivered at Madison Chapel, Madison, MS

The 23^rd Sunday of Pentecost

There is a class at Mississippi College that students in the Christian Studies department regard with fear and respect: the Teachings of Jesus. It is rumored that this class is so difficult that not even Jesus could make an A. What becomes so tough for the students is the formal, in-depth examination of the parables found in the Gospels. How do we interpret them? What type of literature are they? How literally do we take the settings, characters, and events in Jesus’ parables?

Already this Fall we have encountered such troublesome parables as that of the Unjust Steward and the Unjust Judge, both of which are cumbersome yet compelling, and awfully difficult to preach from. The faithful preacher, like those thousands and thousands who have done so before, preaches a message of Kingdom hope in Jesus Christ and hopes no one in the congregation notices how tough the exposition really was. These parables and those like them press our Baptist belief in “Soul Competency” about as far as it can go.

The nature of parables is that they often defy the neat, well-organized logic of the gospel narratives and leave themselves open to many interpretations. We sometimes characterize parables as simple stories that point to a complex truth, but even this category does not capture the totality of what Jesus accomplishes in his parables about the Kingdom.

There are at least four major categories into which the passages of Scripture identified as parables can be located.[1] The first group are maxims: short, wisdom-style sayings that resemble properly-spelled Tweets. “Doctor, cure yourself!” or “No one tears a piece from a new garment and sews it on an old garment” are biblical examples of such parables. They have no characters or plot; they simply exist as proverbs.

The second type of parable is the similitude. These sayings are slightly longer than maxim parables, and they include language that compares two things. For example, “the Kingdom of God is like…” often introduces these parables.

The third category of parables in the Gospels is allegory. These are longer parables in which Jesus likens elements, characters, or actions in a generic situation to a different reality. A great example is the Parable of the Sower: Jesus tells us a parable is coming, tells the parable, and then gives an explicit interpretation of each element of the parable.

Finally, most of the parables in Luke are the fourth type, that is, the short story. In these long parables we have narrative explanation of a hypothetical situation, some character development and plot, and open-ended interpretation. It is this final category that drives us crazy in Luke’s Gospel: what is the Good Samaritan about? What is the point of the Parable of the Two Sons? These longer narrative parables are so thick and rich that they could be interpreted many ways, all of which may be faithful and accurate.

Our temptation as modern readers is to find the point and to make connections between the elements of these longer parables and some aspect of our lives. We usually, though, insert ourselves into the most favorable, heroic character in the parables as we interpret them. For instance, when we read the Parable of the Good Samaritan, we bravely imagine ourselves as the holy outsider bathing the wounds of a stranger in oil and God’s love after others have passed him by. We are challenged to remember the weak and the wounded and to give of our time, talent, and treasure to help those in need. I wonder, though, how many sermons on that parable encourage good Americans to see themselves as the one bloodied in the ditch, or, worse yet, the ones who pass by the dying in the name of ritual purity?

It is certainly the case that Luke’s long parables communicate a theme of reversals, which is a theme of Luke’s entire literary Gospel project. God comes to the poor Mary to bear Jesus; poor shepherds are the first to hear of Christ’s birth; those who are rich are frustrated by Jesus’ teachings; the poor are welcomed into the in-breaking Kingdom; the insiders become the outsiders; and death turns out not to have the last word.

Yet here is a troubling parable about a Pharisee and a Tax Collector. We are told up front that this parable is told “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” Great: we know that this is a parable and that it is, somehow, about self-righteousness. Before Jesus even has an opportunity to speak in Luke’s narrative we already know what side we’re on - the side of whoever in this parable is not self-righteous. We already know the winning team; all Jesus has to do is name the victor and the fool and we’ll be done with this thing.

Sure enough, Jesus paints a pretty poor picture of a Pharisee by putting the most arrogant, self-righteous prayer imaginable on his lips. Shortly thereafter we meet the humble, convicted, humble tax collector beating his breast in shame over his sins. We cheer. “That’s us!” we say. Jesus declares that the tax collector is the winner by saying he is justified by God, and the narrative briskly moves on toward another topic.

In the words of that great theologian Lee Corso, “Not so fast, my friend!”

Luke’s parables are hardly as simple as winners versus losers. In many of this Gospel’s longer parables we are presented with extreme people or extreme situations. We hear about the first and the last, the prideful and the humble, the poor and the rich, the outsider and the insider, the one near by and the one far away, the one lost and the one found. We are presented in this parable by hyperbole, that is, with extreme characterizations of people and opinions.[2]

This parable presents two such extremes: the impossibly prideful Pharisee and the super-humble and contrite tax collector. Neither is to be understood as normal, everyday people. They are caricatures of two ways in which people respond to God. Their prayers represent two positions, both spiritual and physical locations that relate people to God and God’s Kingdom. I contend that neither the Pharisee nor the tax collector represent the true way to live in God’s Kingdom. To demonstrate this notion, let us examine the two characters a little more closely.

First, the Pharisee. The words of this religious expert are insulting to our ears. He is self-centered, listing the things that he does that he is sure will earn him favor in God’s eyes: “I fast…I give…I…” The Pharisee is arrogant, prideful, and boasting. He is certainly not exemplifying the type of life that Luke’s Jesus calls for. He is not practicing the virtues of “all who humble themselves will be exalted.” He is not living under the role-reversal of God’s coming kingdom where the rich are sent away empty and the poor are elevated and satisfied. He is very much the clanging gong and crashing symbol that Paul criticizes in his Corinthian correspondence.

The Pharisee is certainly a caricature of what the real Pharisees were like: over-confident in their interpretations of Torah, over-zealous in their application of periphery rules that excluded outsiders in the name of religious purity. We boo the Pharisees because they are the antagonists at almost every turn in the Gospels. This man must be the bad example of prayer and Kingdom life in this parable!

Let us make one final observation about the Pharisee in this parable. Jesus introduces this scene to us by saying that “two men went up to the temple to pray.” Let us not be too hasty in imagining them entering a gothic cathedral on their own to offer prayers on their lunch breaks in an empty sanctuary. From what we know of ancient Temple worship practices, the opportune time for individuals to pray aloud in or near the Temple was the afternoon Tamid service.[3] This was a regular, popular, and well-attended service of prayers frequented by all types of Jewish men. While an organized Temple service is not exclusively mandatory to understand this parable, it is helpful to break through our own post-Reformation assumptions about the scene Jesus is painting for us.

Consider the Pharisee standing apart from a congregation of people meeting for regular prayers. He offers this arrogant, self-righteous prayer not alone but intentionally separated from people he considers less righteous than he. He is there, looking judgmentally at the assembly, pointing to himself as an example of righteousness. This image of the Pharisee certainly makes his prayer even more deplorable to our souls. I liked this “bad guy” more when I could imagine him complete alone praying arrogantly before God. Now I see him belting out his non-prayer in front of God, and everybody.

In this same scene we meet the tax collector. By that title we already understand him to be hated in his community as a sellout to the Roman occupation. He takes his own peoples’ monies and “renders them to Caesar.” He is an outcast by his occupation much as Matthew would have been when Jesus called him from behind his booth.

Now we see this outcast as standing far away. Far away from what? If we can accept as plausible the Tamid service described above, then this tax collector was standing away from the congregation by himself. He was apart, outside, on the edge, and certainly not in the middle of the congregation as he prayed. Even the arrogant Pharisee calls him out as an outsider, as undesirable, as lost.

Both men are standing apart from the congregation, one in judgmental self-righteousness, the other in crippling humility and spiritual segregation. Both stand apart, both represent extremes. The holier-than-all Pharisee, is about to be brought low by the judgment of God!

Oh, what a sweet reversal! The tax collector, the despised outsider, beats his chest and refuses to look toward heaven because of his guilt for sin. He has committed wrong and has been convicted by God of that sin. He stands apart from everyone because he has to and because he cannot bear to stand “boldly before the throne of grace” in his despair. Jesus declares him to be justified over and against the sinfully arrogant Pharisee! Whoo-Hoo! Victory!

Declared justified? Yes. Example to follow? Not Exactly. Both men are caricatures of two approaches to righteousness, neither of which are ultimately appropriate for God’s people.

It is easy to pick on the Pharisee because of his arrogance. It is easy to preach about Christians who are “holier-than-thou” and think that they have a corner on righteousness. These folks have usually selected some social evil that they have sworn off of or picketed against and have thus found for themselves some sort of moral high ground above and apart from the less righteous churches and people. The caricature of the hyper-arrogant Pharisee sounds like a lot of Baptists I know, and certainly a lot of religious folks. The sermon about the evils of arrogance and prideful prayer almost writes itself.

It is similarly easy to lift up the humble, repentant tax collector as a paradigm of Christian prayer and piety. Here is a man too broken to look to heaven as he prays. He, like the Pharisee, stands apart, not wanting to be near the congregation in shame and conviction. He begs God for forgiveness and mercy, terrified that he has sinned more than God can forgive. He is the perfect foil to the arrogant Pharisee - he is as humble and contrite as the Pharisee is arrogant and boastful.

I say be neither. The Pharisee is obviously not what we want in our Christian discipleship. He represents all of the arrogant, wall-building tee-totaling ignorance of Christians who find their justification in their deeds or non-deeds rather than in God’s righteousness. Certainly we should look to the example of the tax collector for our inspiration to repent. Yes, he is certainly a better example righteousness before God and a perfect image of the unforgivable outcast receiving justification.

But both men are standing apart from the community of God. Both men are extremes in their positions; both are outsiders with no intention of moving into the writing, messy middle of Christian congregation. The Pharisee remains apart in the name of Purity; he has earned his righteousness by his deeds of segregation and self-elevation. The tax collector stands apart in all-consuming guilt and brokenness. He beats his chest and begs forgiveness, but never moves into the community of people who have received it.

Both men need to move. They are both in places where they feel safe: the one in his piety and the other in his pain. Both need to grow through participation in the community through which God’s Spirit speaks to each of them. The Pharisee needs to hear the community live out Christ’s call to humbly walk with God though the way of the Cross rather than in judgments that only serve to condemn and exclude. The tax collector needs to hear the testimonies of those who have been broken by their guilt for sin and who have been restored to wholeness through the Spirit of God. He needs to hear the words of those who go “boldly before the throne of Grace.” These men are caricatures in Luke’s parable because they need each other to be real - they cannot possibly stand in the real world as they are.

The parable is about our places of comfort before God, the spiritual nests we have constructed and from which we pray. It is a call to leave those places of comfort and move into the messy middle of Christian discipleship. Our self-righteousness can become a wall against inclusion or participation in the broader work of the Kingdom of God. We can win battles of theology or culture and lose sight of the real nature of the Gospel in the process. Similarly, we can carry our good-old Baptist guild so far that we never move beyond the call to conviction and repentance toward the more difficult work of conforming to the image of Christ.

To those who are far off in their habits or holiness: come to the congregation of people who haven’t yet figured it all out. Teach us. Mentor us. Help the congregation of those praying to God live lives of godly practice in things like tithing and spiritual practices like fasting. Move from the comfortable place of condemnation to the painful place of praying for the forgiveness of sins and the humility that comes with it.

To all those who are buried under guilt for their sins: come in to the congregation of people who have been pricked by God’s holiness too. Come in to the fellowship of the sinful and the not-yet-perfected. Come and rest in the seats of those who have tasted and seen that the Lord is good and that the Lord is more than guilt and conviction. Move from the comfortable cycle of sin-conviction-guilt-repentance toward a discipleship that makes real transformation possible as we learn to conform to the image of Christ together.

These are the people in our congregation and in every congregation. They may not be standing on the edges of the community in self-righteous condemnation or constant guild for sin, but they are away from the hard, beautiful, painful work of prayer that comes with knowing that our hope for righteousness comes from God alone, but thanks be to God so does our forgiveness and newness of life.

This is the community where the Spirit has been poured out on all flesh. It is the community that finds life in the places that were barren. It is the place where all can feast at the table of God’s mercy whether they found temporary comfort in their self-righteous rule-making or their constant need for confession. The day that Joel envisioned is the day when the community can bring in the outsiders that are already inside the community and draw then into the real, warm, filling feast that is the Kingdom of God. Amen.

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[1] See West, Audrey, “Preparing to Preach the Parables in Luke,” Currents in Theology and Mission 36 no 6, 405-13.

[2] See Holmgren, Fredrick C., “The Pharisee and the Tax Collector,” Interpretation 48 no 3, 252-261.

[3] See Hamm, Dennis, “The Tamid Service in Luke-Acts: The Cultic Background Behind Luke’s Theology of Worship,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 25 no 3, 223-224.

On Welfare

On Welfare

Delivered at Madison Chapel, Madison, MS

The 21^st Sunday of Pentecost

In his 2011 book The Triumph of Christianity, Rodney Stark explains how the great story of Christianity is one of progressive consolidation, reformation, and differentiation.[1] He concludes that Christianity’s triumph is history is a function of its adaptability and portability: the Gospel has been communicated in so many places, languages, and societies that it has been able to survive persecution, progress, and patronage.

Triumph as a result of Christianity’s need for survival has become a now-fading ethos of triumphalism. There can be little doubt that the world we created in America has either crumbled or never was real to begin with. We are left in an unfamiliar position: the church in America is not accustomed to holding a position of declining cultural influence.

But are we actually in a period of decline? The Gospel and its ecclesial expressions are more prevalent than ever, but these expressions are not “our” type of church, so we perceive that it is the Church, and therefore the Gospel that is failing.[2] Although the discussion and sensationalism of the “marginalization of Christianity” is false, we do find ourselves in a new place, a no-man’s land between what we thought was important and what is next. This “margin” is where we find Jesus in his encounter with the ten lepers.

As we have no doubt heard, leprosy was as much a social disease as it was a physical ailment in the ancient world. Contracting any number of skin diseases was cause enough to be separated from one’s community. The experience of losing the functioning community was grotesquely paralleled by the loss of physical functions brought about by the disease. Once these lepers had been excluded from those things they knew, they were forced into a new community somewhere else and with someone else.

In the masterfully-crafted Lukan narrative we encounter Jesus, who is between “merely” preaching, teaching, and healing and the great turmoil that will surround him upon his arrival into Jerusalem, the city to which he has “set his face.”[3] It is this margin, this in-between-ness that serves as a theme for the passage. The lepers are between societies, moving from absolute exclusion toward (we hope) reception and welcome. Jesus is moving from the rural ministry of Galilee toward the cross. For this moment, though, all of these characters are “between Samaria and Galilee.”

Jesus is here acting and moving between culture and religion. He is speaking between both so that both may hear and know that the in-breaking Kingdom of God is something more than either. It is not such a leap to suggest that the Church in our beloved Mississippi is, at this very time, in a place of “margins” and between-ness.

The setting of our Baptist churches in Mississippi is a convergence of the triumph and triumphalism of Evangelical Christianity. We are living out the consequences of the two great forces of these triumphs: mission and dominance.

Baptists have been motivated from the very start by a conviction to share the Gospel to the entire world.[4] We have shed our tendency toward restorationism, that is, the belief that the Baptist way is the only way to be the true Church, but we hold to the idea that we are a faithful representation of the New Testament Church and that evangelism and discipleship are the central tasks of that Church.[5]

Because of our powerful conviction to evangelize we have accomplished great things as Baptists. Our sense of mission (not exactly “missions” or “missional”) has urged us into all the world. We have planted and supported churches and ministries the world over that have helped millions of people confess Christ as Lord. We have worked for the relief of people in need by providing food, shelter, and medical care in the name of Christian charity. We have dug wells, build homes and hospitals, supported businesses, and helped progress where we could, knowing that the work of Kingdom ministry is both spiritual and physical.

Our mission has transformed into dominance, though, especially in our own State. We have looked upon our God-given successes and interpreted them as positions to be defended. We have looked upon the broader culture and have seen something to conquer.

We Baptists have lived into the worst definition of triumphalism, “a sense of pride that renders [us] insensitive to [our] own limitations and unappreciative of the contributions of others…[it] occurs whenever a church identifies the salvific work of God through the Church of Jesus Christ too closely with its own ecclesial life.”[6]

We exhibit “Evangelistic Triumphalism” when we “define the mission of the church almost exclusively in term[s] of evangelism…these churches under-invest in the nurture of new believers into the life-long pilgrimage of Christian discipleship.”[7] This type of triumphalism creates us-versus-them categories: “[it] celebrates its effectiveness and success in communicating the Gospel with American society, but it devalues the summons to continue to break down the walls of alienation that divide people inside and outside the church…it fails to…become the presence of Christ in the world.”[8]

We are also guilty of exhibiting “Counter-Cultural Triumphalism.” This shameful tendency pits one church or denomination against a cultural exponent, trend, or even another denomination. We “fall prey to triumphalism in the celebration of [our] obedience to [our] lofty vision of the Kingdom of God, a vision exercising judgment against all systems of worldly power as well as against those churches adapting their lifestyle according to indigenous cultural forces.”[9]

Evangelical Christianity holds sway in our state, but as it has settled into a de facto dominance of our culture it has shown its own faults. The Christian triumphalism that we have inherited can only end in ways that inhibit the Kingdom of God.

We can dominate the culture. We can exclude, persecute, and boycott. We can plant ourselves so firmly that we cannot move no matter how hard the Spirit blows. We will lose the Gospel of the Cross when we aim to rule.

We can retreat. We can develop the Church into a seceded territory within a condemned culture. We can be isolated in our certainty of truth. We can build a pristine Baptist ghetto where we are right and the world can go to hell. Our triumph, or rather our bitter defeat and withdrawal, means the loss of our God-commissioned witness to the world.

The false reality of Christian triumphalism needs to be replaced with a kingdom-specific perspective on our role in this or any State. If the church finds a true home in the margin, the no-man’s land, then our ideas of either dominion or retreat must be abandoned for the good of that same Church.

Jeremiah’s letter to the Exiles is an essential case study for such a re-evaluation of our more authentic life as a Baptist church. The captives who have been taken to Babylon lived a highly pressurized life on the margin. They were expected to assimilate into the broader Babylonian culture, much as we see demonstrated with Daniel and his friends. They were pulled into a choice between becoming more “hard shell” and preserving their Temple-less religion or losing their identity as a people called by God. Certainly this choice was not one black-and-white decision but was rather the understandable consequence of the innumerable life choices each exiled family made.

Our great fear is that as we accommodate to the broader culture that we will lose whatever distinctiveness we have as Baptists, a long-held and fundamental belief that persists in our denominational psyche. If we hear the words of Jeremiah to “seek the good of the city” we imagine theological liberalism, a loss of distinctive identity, and a Church as transient as the culture around it.[10] The exiles feared the same things that drive our neighbors and us into the hegemony of triumphalism, that is, that the calling of God will be subsumed into a generic, American Christian civil religion.

Christian triumphalism tempts us to pray for “the good old days” rather than for “the good of the city.” “The temptation, all too easy, is to cling to the dream that this is a passing phase, quickly to be reversed; or worse to demonize the wider society and to cut oneself off in a counter-cultural ghetto…The future of the Church, its wellbeing and welfare, will be wrapped up with its ability to work for and to contribute to the welfare of the society in which it is set.”[11]

We can see the shifting cultural tides as a new Babylonian Captivity of the Church, prating for either God’s swift return or God’s punishing justice on our “enemies.” This is certainly the stance of the fundamentalists, who would rather burn it down or shut it down than work, truly work for the good of any city. The lack of compromise seems to be the faithful stance - the Gospel or nothing! - but in fact it is a symptom of the fear and paranoia that we are losing the power we never really had.

Let us be a people about the welfare of the city. We need to re-imagine the church’s role and responsibility in our present setting. Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles stings the hearts of those who see “fighting the good fight” as digging in against the world around us. It is a God-ordained call to give up on the good-old-days and to get on with the holy business of doing life together.

Those who see the exile as a punishment for faithlessness need to re-evaluate their setting; it is better to understand the exile as a consequence and as a further revision to God’s dealings with God’s fickle people. To pray for the welfare of Babylon is to invite danger into our hearts; for certainly as we ourselves invest in the good of our own city we run the risk of interacting with people who disagree with our most precious faith.

What is a Baptist church’s role in the midst of a city and state like ours? Certainly it is to maintain those things that make us Baptists to begin with. We will preserve our conviction that the proclamation of the Gospel, though our lives and words, is foremost in our identity. We will pray for our city, its works and its wants. We will participate in it so far as our consciences will allow. We will hold up the Gospel of Jesus Christ and bear witness to that Gospel in our lives, words and deeds.

We have not been taken into exile, and we are not a persecuted minority; however, we do find ourselves in a season of transition. Will we embrace the city springing up around us or will we pray for our own triumph?

My vision of the church in Mississippi during this time of transition is of a group of disciples who abandon both their ability to dominate and their desire to secede. The church in this way neither leads the culture nor follows it, but rather participates in the wider culture on the church’s own terms.

I wonder about those 10 lepers. At least one of them had no business going up to Jerusalem to the priests - he was a Samaritan. Jesus healed these margin-men, but the joy of that moment goes even beyond that cure. The 9 lepers went on to the priests and were restored to everything they had ever missed and remembered. The one leper eventually went to the city, but he went within the entourage of faith in Jesus, who was going to Jerusalem to show what God was doing in the midst of the Old-Time Religion.

Doing the spiritually difficult work of being a part of the broader community means following some of the forms and patterns we are accustomed to, but it also means holding on to them loosely as we follow our God into the world. Let us seek the welfare of the city, the place where God is at work. In doing so we will find our welfare, for when everything else is gone, we should be a people near to our God.

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[1] Stark, Rodney, The Triumph of Christianity, Grand Rapids: Harper Collins, 2011.

[2] One of many examples of this scenario is the proliferation of Assemblies of God congregations. See http://www.religionnews.com/2013/08/09/assemblies-of-god-defies-denominational-decline.

[3] Cf. Luke 9:51.

[4] I would focus here on Baptists in Mississippi, although this statement is surely true for all Baptists historically. Leonard, Weaver, and many others have written extensively on Baptist origins and fundamental identifiers. For the purposes of this sermon, see Leavell, Z.T. and T. J. Bailey, A Complete History of Mississippi Baptists from the Earliest Times (2 vols.), Jackson, MS: MS Baptist Publishing Co., 1904.

[5] I would include ministries of relief and mercy in these two broader categories, lest I be accused of short-circuiting my own argument below.

[6] Tupper, Frank E., “Biblicism, Exclusivism, Triumphalism: The Travail of Baptist Identity,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 29 no 4, 411-426.

[7] Ibid, 421.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 422.

[10] “Theological Liberalism” is probably a misnomer. See Roger Olson’s article on the subject: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/10/what-is-liberal-theology

[11] Riches, John, “Sermon on Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7,” The Expository Times 118 no 12, 600-601.

The Resurrection Stone

The Resurrection Stone

Delivered at Madison Chapel, Madison, MS

The Thirteenth Sunday of Pentecost

            I had the opportunity to travel to Greece in 2007 for a course on Paul and his Grecian churches. Much of the religious culture that we encountered there was Greek Orthodox, a branch of Christianity that seems to be a throwback to ancient times with its Greek liturgy and fascinating architecture.

            What has stuck with me from the tours we took of various churches in Athens, Corinth, and Thessaloniki, is the sense of historical participation that is build into the Eastern Orthodox liturgy and worship. In many of the churches we toured the sanctuary is painted from five feet off of the floor to the very ceiling with images of people praising Jesus Christ. At the highest point in the room, usually a domed ceiling in the center of the space, Jesus Christ sits surrounded by angels. Surrounding this image are circles of worshippers: the Old Testament heroes, the Apostles, the Fathers, then the saints of the Orthodox faith whose feet are painted just below eye level on the walls of the room. The effect of all this painting is that as you stand anywhere in that room you are drawn into a sense of participation in the eternal worship of Jesus Christ. You are the next generation, the next circle of the faithful looking upward and singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” along with all of those who have gone on before. One gets a sense of the immense scope of tradition and history that is celebrated in the liturgy of Greek Orthodoxy just by standing in the room where worship happens. My voice, my eyes, my spirit was added to those of the great cloud of witnesses painted on the walls. Standing in those cathedrals you can hear the voices of long-dead saints hanging both in the air and before the Throne.

We don’t do saints well in Baptist life. We have heroes, it is true, but our heroes generally represent our own pet causes more than our devotion to godly faithfulness. We unofficially canonize preachers who preach our brand of theology or those who champion the social causes that we support. We are wary of saints as we are of creeds - in our denial of either we belie our de facto devotion to both.

            I have been so moved by the painting of the Greek churches because I crave membership in a great tradition, one that has icons and saints, smells and bells, demands and devotion that is deeper than the individualistic, consumer-based model of spirituality that I have come to embody. Baptists have such a poor sense of history that we often ignore or even mock those we call “traditionalists” for their dusty and inflexible devotion to irrelevant forms of Christianity. We are a people who rely on the conversion experience as a moment more important that any moment which has come before. We set the date of our baptism as a watershed event and measure everything as being before or after we “met Jesus.”

            But I want tradition. I want spirituality. I want, no, I thirst for something deeper and bigger and dustier than the flashy, polished, needs-meeting ministry of my culture. I want to be able to look and saints and heroes of the faith in the way that the author of Hebrews does - as imperfect examples of how to live a godly life in the world that is being redeemed by the Spirit of God.

            Perhaps we can learn something from our Catholic and Orthodox cousins. Be appropriating a Baptist version of sainthood we can avoid our Baptist navel-gazing and re-conceptualize spirituality by providing ourselves with a stronger sense of spiritual lineage, that is, a sense of purposeful connectedness with the past and the future. Our commitment to scripture as the primary authority for Christian faith and practice will enable us to avoid treating these spiritual heroes as icons in stained glass; rather, we will tend to conceptualize the lives of such saints as windows through which to gain a fresh perspective on scripture and on the life and teaching of Jesus himself. So long as we see the Saints and spiritual heroes as examples, as windows to the true Godly life made real in Jesus we will avoid the perils of misguided honor and worship.

            We would do well to examine the lives of the saints and those spiritual heroes who have journeyed this way before us. Through such reading and prayerful examination we may learn what being a member of this Baptist priesthood is all about. We will surely find a connectedness across the broken years of history to the people and traditions of our Faith from which we have been separated because of our peculiar Baptist experiences here. We will find that the examination of the lives of the faithful is useful, beneficial, and even desirable. More than this, though, is the sense of participation that will fill us.

            We should not engage the writings of and about Christian saints and heroes out of historical curiosity; rather we should examine them to help us understand our own lives as examples to those who come after us. Morgan comments that, “The long Christian tradition of sanctity views exemplary Christians as bridges between earlier lives of righteousness, even the life of Jesus Christ himself, and future righteousness.”[1] We Baptists are much more familiar and comfortable with this idea. We speak of “witness” and “testimony.” We are to be living examples of the transforming and redeeming power of Jesus Christ for others to see. Surely it is not so strange to think of ourselves as participating in someone else’s “great cloud” one day, though I confess it seems arrogant to do so. Perhaps by examining the lives of those spiritual heroes we will see ourselves, at least in part, as real participants in what God is and has been doing in the world.

Being a real participant in the real work that God is doing in our world can be a little intimidating. My tradition of Baptist life has formed me to think of the Gospel as evangelization with little afterward. The idea, then, of being ushered into a Kingdom where people do real work that does real good for a very real God seems more than I can bear. It is in those moments when the work of God lands me in the middle of very real and very powerful situations with families and communities that I need the cloud of witnesses to be real.

            The people mentioned in the Hebrews list are far from perfect. They are not holy; they are not canonized. They are real. They are prostitutes, adulterers, doubters, deserters, murderers, and thieves. They are like that rowdy lot in Tiger Stadium or Cameron Indoor, pressing in on both home and away players, cheering and chanting and pleading in their imperfection for us to taste and see that the Lord is good. They are pleading for one more foot to land in front of the other. They are cheering us on and worshipping the Lord in the same breath. They cry, “Holy, Holy, Holy!” as though it was an invitation hymn.

In the final book of the Harry Potter series the main characters are introduced to a magical object called the resurrection stone. This curious little rock has been imbued with the power to call forth the dead at the pleasure of the living.

            When Harry comes to the end of his own journey, in a moment when he faces the embodiment of evil, he uses the resurrection stone to call forth courage. What the stone reveals to him are the spirits of his long-dead parents and his recently killed friends. He does not call them forth from the beyond to deny them peace or rest; he calls on them in his moment of need.

            “He closed his eyes and turned the stone over in his hand three times.

            He knew it had happened, because he heard slight movements around him that suggested frail bodies shifting their footing on the earth, twig-strewn ground that marked the outer edge of the forest. He opened his eyes and looked around.

            They were neither ghostly nor truly flesh, he could see that. Less substantial than living bodies, but much more than ghosts, they moved toward him, and on each face there was the same loving smile…

            Lily’s smile was widest of all. She pushed her long hair back as she drew close to him, and her green eyes, so like his, searched his face hungrily, as though she would never be able to look at him enough.

            “You’ve been so brave.”

            He could not speak. His eyes feasted on her, and he thought that he would like to stand and look at her forever, and that would be enough.

            “You’re nearly there,” said his father. “Very close. We are…so proud of you.”

            “Does it hurt?” The childish question had fallen from Harry’s lips before he could stop it.

            “Dying? Not at all,” said Sirius. “Quicker and easier than falling asleep.”

            “I didn’t want you to die, “ Harry said. These words came without his volition. “Any of you. I’m sorry…”

            A chilly breeze that seemed to emanate from the heart of the forest lifted the fair at Harry’s brow. He knew that they would not tell him to go, that it would have to be his decision.

            “You’ll stay with me?”

            “Until the very end,” said his father.

            Harry looked at his mother.

            “Stay close to me,” he said quietly. And he set off.”[2]

This tender scene is how the “great cloud of witnesses” functions for me. It is easy to think of Abraham and David and Joshua and Paul and Matthew as holy characters who seem too different from me to be a part of my own spirituality. I need people a little closer to home. I need some holy heroes that point the way along this Way because they have been that way themselves. I need heroes, witnesses, saints not made in my own image but in the image of those seeking the image of Jesus Christ.

            That is the essence of our Christian discipleship - the imitation of Christ. Such imitation is in the practices of Jesus himself, but it can also be found in observing the lives of those saints who were closer to that image than I am. It is in mentoring the believers who follow behind us on the journey of faith. It is in showing the way even as we stumble along and look ahead for guidance. It is to stand at the base of that great basilica and see ourselves as the next generation of believers in a very real God who does very real things and sing our part in that Holy, Holy, Holy that never stops.

            In our troubles and in our struggles we are not alone. In our successes and failures we are not the only ones. We belong to a community that extends from God’s first words to Abram through the call we each have heard to run that good race. This extended community includes those whose faithfulness has actually ended in success.[3] It includes those saints who have found the solid footholds and who have, through their writings, come back to guide us along the way.

            We are not alone. The journey is too much for any of us to do alone, but it is enough to have a cloud of witnesses to guide and to cheer us on. Together, standing with one another and in the midst of this host, we will walk the Way and do the work of God in this place. Is not God a God who is nearby? Is not this great cloud of witnesses with us?

Take heart, then, my dear friends. Let us do that holy work of moving forward in our faith and help others find their way. Keeping our eyes on Jesus, our feet on the path, and our ears tuned to the sounds of that great crowd saying, “you’re almost there.” Dear God, “stay close” to us. Amen.

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[1] From Morgan, Ron, “The Great Cloud of Witnesses: Evangelical Christians and the Lives of the Saints.” Fides et Historia, 35 no 2, 19-27.

[2] Adapted from Rowling, J.K., Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. New York: Scholastic, 2007, p. 698-700.

[3] Renwick, David A., “Hebrews 11:29-12:2.” Interpretation, 57 no. 3, 300-302.