Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 25, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The other night at a meeting of a community group I have been attending in Snohomish that is facilitated quite coincidentally by my colleague Deborah Adams of the UCC church in Everett, someone raised the issue of the Holocaust. How, she asked, could that unspeakable tragedy have happened in a country in which virtually all of the people were Christian? She then asked a very profound question: "Has religion failed us?" Virtually simultaneously, almost with one voice as though we had rehearsed it, Deborah and I immediately answered: "Absolutely."

The other day, in response to a question one of you asked me, I was doing some internet research that led me to several sites maintained by very conservative Christians. The materials on those sites reflected the belief of most Christians today that the Bible is literally true and inerrant in every word, that only Christians, indeed, only Christians of a particular sort, are saved, and that "saved" means to avoid going to hell when you die. I thought: I’m a Christian, and these people are Christians, but we simply do not believe the same things.

Recently, again in response to a question several of you have asked me, I wrote a piece that many of you have read on my understanding of what it means to say that Jesus died for us. In that piece I said that the notion that has today become essentially synonymous in the popular mind with Christianity itself, namely, that we humans are so sinful that not even God can forgive us without first offering God’s own Son as an atoning sacrifice as the price of our sin, is a medieval idea based upon medieval conceptions of the human existential condition and medieval understandings of debt, shame, and honor. I said that this notion of salvation reflects neither our idea of our own existential condition nor our experience of a compassionate God.

“Sing a new song,” the Psalmist says. These recent experiences of mine, along with many others I could recount, have driven home to me recently just how urgently we do indeed need to sing a new song, a new song of a reformed and renewed Christian faith that speaks to people like us, people living in our time and place, with our cares and concerns, fears and anxieties, hopes and joys, people who long for a living relationship with God but who find contemporary popular Christianity overly simplistic, unacceptably anti-intellectual, unconvincing, unsatisfying, and with regard to some of it’s positions on social issues morally unacceptable.

Popular Christianity, represented by the very conservative Christian churches of which there are so many in this area, does not speak to us. It requires us to believe a great many things that we simply do not believe. It tells us we are horrible sinners, but most of us don’t believe that. It tells us that God required the slaughter of God’s own Son before God could forgive our sin, and most of us don’t believe that either.

It tells us that the Bible is literally true and inerrant in every respect, and most of us don’t believe that. It tells us that when the findings of science conflict with a literal reading of the Bible we must reject science and believe that the Bible contains scientific truth, and most of us don’t believe that either.

It tells us that God saves only those people who happen to have heard of Jesus Christ and who give intellectual assent to the idea that he is our Lord and Savior, and most of us don’t believe that God condemns all people who believe differently from us.

It tells us that ancient (and modern) cultural prejudices against gay and lesbian people are Gospel truth, and most of us don’t believe that. It tells us that God favors men over women, requiring the subjugation of women to men and the restriction of women to certain divinely ordained roles, and most of us don’t believe that either.

No, this kind of conservative popular Christianity does not speak to us. It does not connect us to God. We find its judgmental and angry God unapproachable, unlovable, and inconsistent with the God of compassion that we know in Jesus Christ. We find its rejection of the fruits of humanity’s intellectual endeavors unacceptable because we cannot compartmentalize our minds from the rest of our humanity. We find its insistence that God loves and saves some people and rejects and damns the rest to be morally offensive. To us, this kind of Christianity is the old song, the song that God is calling us to stop singing in favor of a new song of a reformed and renewed Christian faith.

There is a great deal that could be said, and that needs to be said, about that new song. This morning, however, I want only to suggest a starting place. That starting place is Jesus’ commandment, which is repeated several times in the Gospel of John, that we are to love one another. We find that starting place in this morning’s passage from John. In the key line from this morning’s lesson Jesus says: "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you." John 15:12. Jesus then tells them what that means: "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." John 15:13. That, he says, is how we are to love one another, that we lay down our lives for each other. This commandment of self-giving love sets the key for our new song.

Now, although we are not always called literally to give up our lives, Jesus’ statement here does tell us what Christianity is all about. Christianity is all about love; and not just any old kind of love but about a particular type of love. It is about the type of love that puts the other first, that is willing to give itself up if that is what it takes to love another human being. It is about a love that gives and does not demand that anything be given back to it in return. True Christianity looks not to its own wellbeing but to the wellbeing of the other, of the world.

And look at how different that understanding of the fundamentals of Christianity is from the doctrines of popular Christianity in our country today. It starts not with sin as does popular Christianity but with love. It doesn’t require us to suspend our minds or to believe unbelievable things. It just requires us to love. It doesn’t make distinctions. At least as I understand it, it doesn’t exclude gays and lesbians, and it certainly doesn’t exclude or limit the role of women. It doesn’t even exclude non-Christians (or non-Jews or non-Jewish Christians, since John was writing to a community of Jewish Christians and not to Christians like us). It is a commandment to love everyone. It says that anyone who follows the commandment of love is a friend of Jesus. When we begin our understanding of our faith with love rather than with sin and judgment, things do indeed look very, very different.

And so let us sing a new song to the Lord indeed. Let us sing a song of love, God’s love in Jesus Christ for all people. Let us sing a song the doesn’t depend on faith in a book, that doesn’t condemn us all as hopeless sinners, that doesn’t require us to check our minds at the church door. If we sing that new song consistently and well, our spirits will be renewed. We will know the presence of Jesus Christ in our lives in a way that popular Christianity can never give us. We will find peace and hope and joy in abundance. Our new song will lead us to new life in the love of God.

And not only us. As I have worked and worshipped here over the last fourteen months or so, I have become convinced that there are people in this community longing to hear our new song and to join us in singing it. Some of those people have joined our number in the last year. Some of them are some of you here this morning. I know there are more out there who would love to do so if they just knew about the new song we are singing. We can touch those peoples’ lives, giving them the peace and hope and joy that we are discovering ourselves, and they can help renew and invigorate our congregation, if we can only reach them. So let’s sing our new song not just here in this sanctuary but on the streets and from the rooftops of Monroe, Snohomish, Sultan, Gold Bar, and every other place in this area where God’s children live. That new song will make us whole, as people and as a church. Let it be. Amen.