Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 13, 2009

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.

Let’s be honest here. Some, maybe most or all of you, think that I always make things more complicated than they need to be. I hear that critique. I know that my approach to things can make them more complex and difficult than they may appear on the surface. To the charge of making things complicated I plead guilty. After all, when I dedicated my book to my father I wrote that he taught me never to be satisfied with superficial answers. So I plead guilty, but I also plead extenuating circumstances. Or rather, to take a concept from the law of defamation, I plead truth as a defense. In law, you can say as nasty a thing as you want about someone else, and they won’t have a claim against you as long as what you said is true. So, I plead truth as a defense. You see, things, especially the things of the Christian faith, really aren’t simple. Or at least they aren’t as simple as a lot of people make them. And he Christian life isn’t simple. It just isn’t. More about that in a bit.

As evidence in support of my defense of truth to the charge of making things complicated, I offer as Exhibit A Proverbs 1:22a, which we just heard. In that passage Wisdom, who in the Bible’s so-called Wisdom literature, including the book of Proverbs, is virtually a female manifestation of God, says: “How long, O simple ones will you love being simple?” She then gives a stern reproof of the people for not following the wisdom of God. The necessary inference is that the wisdom of God isn’t simple. Indeed, simplicity here is cast as the opposite of wisdom. These verses tell us that if we want to be wise, we need to give up being simple. We need to give up simple explanations and look at the world and at God in all of their inherent complexity.

Our reading from Mark doesn’t use the terms simplicity and wisdom, but I think it really does make the same point. There, Peter makes his famous confession that Jesus is the Messiah, that is, the Christ. So we think that Peter is being wise. We think he gets it. We very quickly learn, however, that he is actually being quite simple. He doesn’t get it at all. Jesus tells Peter not to say anything about him being the Messiah. Then he says why. He says that he must be rejected, must suffer and be killed, then rise on the third day. That, he is saying, is what it means for him to be the Messiah. And Peter doesn’t get it. He says “No way! That can’t be how it is! That can’t happen to you!” And Jesus responds by calling him Satan and telling him that he has his mind set on human things, not divine things. In other words, Peter is being simple, not wise. He is thinking in the simplistic ways of the world, which would have Jesus reigning in triumph, not in the wise ways of God, which have Jesus suffering, dying, and rising again. Understanding a Messiah like that is a whole lot more complicated than understanding a Messiah who behaves according to the world’s expectations. But, as St. Paul says, Christ crucified is precisely the wisdom of God. 1 Cor. 1:24 Christ crucified is the wisdom of God but foolishness to the world. And a crucified savior is complicated. A savior coming at the head of a conquering army is simple. God gave us the complicated one.

We see the same thing in the part of our passage from Mark that comes next. Jesus says that those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for his sake will save it. Say what? That doesn’t make a lick of sense! Not according to the world’s simplistic ways of thinking. The simple view is: You save your life by saving it and lose your life by losing it. Jesus says no. Look deeper. Understand more deeply. See that it is by giving your life in service to God’s people that you truly gain your life. That’s complicated. It takes some work to understand it. It’s complicated, but it is God’s way. It is God’s truth, and it isn’t simple.

So what’s the point here? What are we to take from all this talk about the things of the Christian faith not being simple? Well, one thing to take from it is that simple answers to the questions of life and the questions of the faith are probably not faithful answers. Laurie told us in the choir last Wednesday evening about an experience she had recently with a simple answer that clearly is not faithful. She heard someone say that the earth is only 6,000 years old and that anyone who says anything critical about the Bible isn’t a Christian, or words to that effect. That’s a very simple way of understanding things. It takes the Bible literally and factually, and to do that it overlooks all of the insurmountable difficulties that that way of seeing it raises. Then it counts back the generations from Jesus as they are given in the Bible and comes up with the scientifically untenable claim that the earth is only 6,000 years old. It’s simple. You don’t have to think. You don’t have to struggle with the nature of the Bible and Biblical authority. You don’t have to struggle with the question of the relationship between faith and science. You just turn faith into science and reject real science. Simple. Wrong, but simple. God has given us minds to understand, and that means understand the faith and the Bible in all their complexity as well as understand so many other things. Simple answers aren’t faithful to God because they require us to deny the mental abilities God has given us. That’s one lesson to take.

But there’s another lesson to take from the understanding that the faith really is more complex than it so often is made to appear. That lesson is that the life of faith is not simple. There are lots of simple answers that people give to the question of how we are to live the life of Christian faith. Some say just reject the world, retreat from it, withdraw from it to the fullest extent possible, and worry only about the purity of your own soul. That’s one simple way to understand the life of faith. Others say that there is no conflict between the life of Christian faith and the life of the world. That one’s far more prevalent today. It says: There’s no conflict between Christian faith and the use of violence to promote American national interest. It says that there is no conflict between the Christian faith and the prejudices of society. Indeed, it uses the faith to prop up and justify those prejudices, as so many Christians did to justify slavery and so many Christians do to condemn God’s gay and lesbian children. They point to verses in the Bible that condone slavery or condemn homosexual acts and say: That settles it. The world’s prejudices are confirmed as God’s way. Simple. Wrong, but simple.

No, the life of faith is a lot more complicated than that. It’s complicated because it requires us to live neither apart from the world nor entirely according to the ways of the world but in the tension between the ways of God and the world in which we must live and in which God calls us to live. The Christian faith calls us to be in the world but not of the world, and that’s not easy, that’s not simple. It raises all kinds of questions: How does our faith call us to be in the world? When do our obligations as citizens and our obligations as Christians conflict? And when they do, how are we to respond? Does our faith call us to sacrifice? If so, what? How much? When? When our faith commitments create tensions within our family or between us and our friends, what are we to do? Those are not simple questions. I know that many of you struggle with them, as I do.

So, I plead guilty to making things complicated. But I also plead truth as a defense. I think that I’m guilty only of recognizing the complexity of things as they really are. But then, so is the Bible. How long, O simple ones, will you delight in being simple?, it says. And so was Jesus. He’s a Messiah who’s nothing like what a Messiah is supposed to be. He calls us to live according to a wisdom that is not of the world. And that’s not simple. The good news is that as God calls us into this complex world and this complex life, God goes with us every step, giving us the wisdom to do it. Thanks be to God. Amen.