What is a "Christian?"

A friend recently reflected on what it means to be a Christian. This seemed to me to be a worthwhile exercise, so here are a few brief thoughts on the matter. First, and most obvious I think, is that a person saying she is a Christian does not make it so. In fact, as my friend David Dark points out, calling oneself a Christian seems a tad presumptuous, even tacky, to use one of the late, great Will Campbell's favorite words. Second, and equally obvious, is that regular attendance at a religious institution's services does not a Christian make. Consuming products that have been labelled "Christian" for marketing purposes, whether they be formal services, music, television, books, education, jewelry, or Jesus fish magnets, does not make a person a Christian. Products cannot be Christian. Third, a person is not a Christian simply because he believes in God, Jesus, the Bible, etc. Jesus made this clear when he stated that not everyone who called him Lord would participate in God's kingdom. James reiterates that belief, on its own, is of no use. Everybody believes something, including demons, according to James. Belief, like religious talk, is cheap. What makes a Christian, it seems to me, is doing God's will. What counts is not what we think about Jesus, but whether we actually do what he said. Jesus made this plain on several occasions. As noted above, he concluded his Sermon on the Mount with the admonition that what counts is what we do, not what we say. That in order to have a house built on a rock, we have to put Jesus' teachings into practice. He reiterates this point in Matthew 21 in his parable of the two sons. John records Jesus saying in chapter 14 that if we love him, we will keep his commandments. It's the doing that really matters. So what does this doing look like? Some of it is very challenging and counter-cultural, such as being committed to nonviolence, loving people who would do us harm, and not serving money or treasuring material things. In Matthew 25, Jesus made clear that he is particularly concerned with what we do for people who regarded as "the least." Do we care for the poor, the malnourished, the sick, the imprisoned? These are people that are seldom even on the radar of many self-professed "Christians" who can regularly be found warming up padded pews in church buildings and constantly have the name of Jesus on their lips. Jesus seems to indicate that his followers should be especially interested in caring for people who find themselves excluded from faith communities. Thus, as we seek to be Christians, we must ask ourselves how well are we loving and caring for people that some religious institutions would blasphemously claim are outside the reach of God's grace. Jesus boiled it all down by saying that we must do for others what we would like to be done for us, which sums up the law and the prophets, and that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. So, am I loving others selflessly, or am I my own primary concern? How do I welcome others, even when it inconveniences me? Am I willing to sacrifice my own comfort, my own agenda, my own preferences in order to lovingly meet the needs of others? More personally for me, how do I treat people who disagree with me? My honest responses to questions such as these demonstrate how narrow is the road.

Fear Leads to Anger . . .

Over the past two days, I have witnessed two different people in unrelated social media discussions vehemently arguing about doctrinal issues. The first was arguing about the meaning of the Greek word for baptism in the New Testament and the implications for modern Christians. The second was arguing in favor of the Calvinist belief that all people totally depraved and incapable of any good whatsoever. The first person came across as mean-spirited and self-righteous during his argument. The second was not as mean-spirited, but certainly convinced of the rightness of his beliefs. Both seemed defensive, angry, and unwilling to consider the perspectives of people who disagreed with them. Both quoted Paul extensively but did not quote Jesus once. Jesus, it seems does not lend himself well to any doctrinal position whatsoever. Paul, on the other hand, serves as a fine foundation for elaborate doctrinal constructs. Honestly, I don't think Paul ever got over being a Pharisee. But I digress. Observing these two people as they militantly advanced their respective positions to the best of their ability, not entirely able to keep their anger in check over having someone disagree with them, started me thinking. Why do we have this tendency to argue in such a self-assured manner about religious doctrines? Why are we not okay when people disagree with us? Our Buddhist friends teach that such defensiveness is the product of suffering. I tend to think that religious folks who are constantly trying to convince others of the rightness of their doctrinal beliefs are suffering from a fear of being wrong. The church has placed so much emphasis on orthodoxy - right beliefs - that we have caused people to be terrified of getting something, anything, wrong. I was brought up thinking that being a Christian was a matter of believing the right things about God, Jesus, the church, baptism, etc. Salvation was predicated on these right beliefs. If I turned out to be wrong on just about any issue, my salvation was in jeopardy. When this much emphasis is placed on having all the right answers, and there is so much corresponding fear of being wrong, folks will fight tooth and nail to prove that they are right, even about matters to which no human possesses the definitive answer. The remedy, I contend, for the fear that causes so many religious people to be angrily and self-righteously defensive about their doctrines, is love, which casts out fear. We must internalize the truth that we are loved not based on the rightness of our doctrines, but because we are children of God. We, in turn, love others not based on whether they agree with us on every issue, but because they bear the image of the divine. Love frees us from the egotistical compulsion of having to be right and the perpetual fear of being wrong. I know this because I have been wrong. I was really, really wrong about a terribly important matter that had implications both for my faith and for my career. Although I was wrong, I was okay because I was loved in spite of my wrongness. I hope more people can know they are loved unconditionally so they will no longer feel the need to justify themselves through angry, self-assured defenses of their various doctrines.

For Grandma

I gave the following remarks at the memorial service of my Grandmother, who passed away last week. On behalf of all the family, thank you for being here. We are all in communion here because we all knew and loved Jo Ann and want to honor and celebrate her life. Over the past few months, death has been close to this family. We remember Connie and Herb’s daughter Ellen Sherrill, who passed away in December, and we continue to pray for and grieve with them. Just last week, sweet Mildred Wheeler passed away. At times like these, together we mourn, and we celebrate. We experience deep sorrow at the loss of people we love, but we also feel deep joy in believing that in death, they, like so many beloved people before them, have been welcomed home. One notable person who I’m sure welcomed Jo Ann with much love and great joy was her husband, Joe Harwell, who died in 1987. After so many years apart, it is good to know that are together again in the family of God. Just before Thanksgiving, my aunt Sara posted a photo on Facebook of Granddaddy as a very young man in his Army uniform. I pulled it up on my phone to show it to Grandma. It was one of those moments: an eighty-six year old woman looking at a long-forgotten picture of her young, handsome husband, whom she loved. And it is especially appropriate for us to be mindful of their reunion today, which would have been Granddaddy’s 90th birthday. When someone we love passes, we experience a little extra clarity. We are reminded that life is precious. Relationships are precious. They are the currency of God’s kingdom, we might say. We are reminded of how often we foolishly become distracted by and preoccupied with unimportant matters and neglect the most significant things. As Jesus said, “We are worried about many things, but only one thing is really needed.” In the words of Henri Nouwen, “This brief lifetime is [our] opportunity to receive love, deepen love, grow in love, and give love.” We are, all of us, made in the image of God, and God is Love. So love is our reason for being. To love is our God-given vocation. Love is our true identity. Love is the meaning of life. We who love are fulfilling the commandment on which everything else hangs. By our love alone we are known as followers of Lord Jesus. We who love are born of God and know God. All our life is a preparation for death as a birth into perfect, eternal love. Again, Nouwen said, “God’s love for you existed before you were born, and God will love you after you die.” So this brief life is all about sowing seeds of love. When we sow seeds of love, we trust that a power beyond us will cause the seeds to take root and grow. We are not in control of what the seeds become. We just lovingly sow the seeds. And we can trust that when we sow seeds of love, our lives continue to bear fruit even after we are no longer here among our family and friends. It is comforting in times like these to remember our loved ones, recalling the ways in which we felt loved by them and they by us. I want to share with you a few of the seeds of love that Jo Ann sowed in her eighty-six years. In 1969, Grandma went to work for David Lipscomb College for the express purpose of affording her three children the opportunity of a Christian education there. What a tremendous difference that made in the lives of Julia, Sara, and Joey. And my sister Emily and I went on to attend Lipscomb as well, and my cousin Craig is studying there now. Grandma going to work at Lipscomb was a seed sown in love. When I was a little boy, about the age of my own children, Grandma and Granddaddy had a wonderful backyard. I spent hours playing army back there. But there were tall weeds, and the chiggers would eat you alive. Before every adventure in her backyard, Grandma would spray my shoes, socks, and pants with OFF insect repellant. So thorough was her application of the OFF spray to my lower extremities that it must have collected in pools around my feet on her kitchen floor. I can smell it now. A small seed of love. Grandma always sent me a card with a little money in it on holidays. Not just my birthday or Christmas, but any holiday. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Valentines’s. I always knew I’d get a card and a little spending money from Grandma. She didn’t stop when I got married. The cards were then addressed to Sherisse and me. When I was in law school and we didn’t have hardly any money, those cards were a real treat. We used the money for date nights. And Grandma didn’t stop sending cards when I had kids. Then Sherisse and I got a card with twenty dollars in it, and each of my three kids got a separate card with five dollars in it. Thirty-five dollars. And I’ll remember it until the day I die. It let me know she cared about me and my wife and my kids. Seeds of love sown for years and years. Some big, but most quite small. Sometimes, when we sow our little seeds, it seems so insignificant. When I’d call Grandma to thank her for the cards, she would often say, “I wish it was more.” How can small acts of love make any difference in a world so broken by pain and suffering, violence, injustice, greed, fear, and hatred? We must remember what Mother Teresa said, “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.” So we gratefully give and receive these seeds, these tokens of our imperfect love in faith, believing that God can take a life lived in love, however brief or long that life might be, bless it, and use it to make known to us and in us and through us His own unending, unconditional, perfect love. Let’s pray together. Almighty God, Into Your hands we commend your servant Jo Ann. Receive her into the arms of Your mercy, into the peace of Your sabbath rest, and into the glorious company of all the saints. May Jo Ann’s heart and soul now ring out in joy to you as she gazes upon You face to face. And be with all who mourn Jo Ann’s passing. Comfort them with a sense of Your goodness. Lift up Your countenance upon them, and give them peace. Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy; to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.