Narrowing

One of the most enduring ideas in Evangelical Christianity has to be the Narrow Way. If you don't know the scripture, I'll give you the New International Version so you can get the full Evangelical experience.

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. (Matthew 7:13-14)

My experience hearing this scripture interpreted has been through the lens of Salvation. Or at least Salvation the Evangelical way. What Jesus means here, we were told, is that very few will get to heaven and many will go to hell. That's because it's hard to follow Jesus, I guess. Or maybe it's hard to hear the good news of a narrow path to salvation in order to avoid eternal conscious torment. Hard to be certain even with utmost certainty. That was the Baptist way, anyway.

Matthew 7 is pretty beautiful in terms of teachings, and to me summarizes Jesus wonderfully. Even Jesus thinks so, inasmuch as he says, "So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets (verse 12)." For the first third of this chapter he talks in terms that have fairly baffled readers, offering opportunities for pretty wide-ranging interpretations. When Jesus says, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you," what does he mean? And the injunctions not to "give to dogs what is sacred" or "give pearls to pigs" are downright bizarre on their face.

The Narrowing Class - those Christians convinced of their narrow view of salvation -  will have answers. They will have received answers over years of Bible Study and Sunday sermons. The interpretations they've accepted invariably support the Narrowing view, the sense that most people won't get it, most people won't accept the hard truths Jesus prefers. I suppose they will believe that they have removed the planks from their eyes and have a clear view of the specks obscuring everyone else's vision.

I personally believe that Jesus is right when he says that the road to destruction is wide. Being human is difficult. Part animal, we're always looking for the easiest way to survive and thrive. Part god, we feel the tug of compassion and empathy for other humans in our path. For most of us most of the time, meandering down the wide path is our default behavior. Being selfish comes easy; avoiding the difficulties of thinking of others is perpetually tempting; focusing on our own success is usually our only priority. If most of us are doing it, we must be on a pretty wide path or else we wouldn't all fit.

If that wide road leads to destruction, then what does destruction look like? The Narrowing Christians would say Hell, but that's too easy. I think destruction looks like narcissism. It looks like prioritizing your own success. It looks like doing to others what you don't want done to you, and doing it to them because it's convenient or easy. Ultimate destruction is the evil of treating everyone else like shit and in the process thoroughly corroding your soul.

I think that most Christians have an inkling of what the narrow path means because I believe that all people do. If God is written into our living fabric, if the divinity within each of us is the God of the universe, than we're all tuned in to a common understanding. The narrow road is generosity. It's magnanimity. It's kindness, selflessness, and grace. The narrow road is empathy and mercy. It's all of the things that are hard for animals who are focused only on surviving, but easy for a God who never dies and is made entirely of love.

Sungods

In many ways and at many times throughout history, human beings have worshiped the sun as a god. Really there is nothing more natural for humans, a fact you’ve easily noted if you’ve ever stood in the warm sunlight on a crisp fall day and felt the perfect symmetry of the moment – the hot, bright light beamed from unknowable distances, the crisp chill air hovering against your mammalian-warm skin, the way that time stops when you close your eyes against the sunlight and bask in its ubiquitous brilliance.

Sun worship is about as human a pastime as you can imagine. And why not? The sun brings the new day: new promise, warmth, the beginning of they cycle of life once more. The sun makes things grow, which is the promise of life. The sun has a rhythm that we can predict, and predictability is the definition of human security. And the sun is mysterious. What is it? Where is it? How can it be everywhere and also just right there – way up high and white hot bright, so shiny and intense that it’s impossible to look at, impossible to simply and directly see?

The default view of the divinity of the sun is wonderful in so many ways. The beauty of the sun is that it connects every living thing on earth together. No one above ground avoids the sun’s presence, and the connection among humans is strongest. The sun’s presence in our lives is the great universal, the unifying theme of human experience. It transcends time and place and culture and, except for the tricky nature of idolatry in some instances, even religion.

The sun’s resemblance to a godhead is fascinating. In the Christian and Jewish traditions, God is an omnipresent and omnipotent deity whose judgment none can avoid. Like the sun: everywhere, all powerful, equally applicable. The sun doesn’t care where you live or what you believe, it will burn you if you spend too much time exposed. The sun is coming for you…or is it? The sun is simply doing what it does when it washes the world in light and heat and UV rays, when it punches up the chlorophyll of greenery, when it burnishes our melanin. Like God, the sun acts according to its nature; naturally it’s hot and bright and so massive that the planets in our solar system are irresistibly drawn around it in an eternal and mysterious dance. Theology should be so beautiful.

What I love about the sun that can be hard to love about the gods of human theology is its unassuming criticality to life. Without the sun there is no life, yet it doesn’t need prophets and profiteering preachers to sing its praises to elucidate that reality. The sun is literally at the center of human life, a fact that is central to human understanding, that can’t be denied. It’s worth worshiping because its existence is complimentary to our own.

We could just as easily curse the sun for sunburns, droughts, desertification and death. It would be simple to blame the sun for the perils of winter, bemoaning its relative absence for causing frostbite, sickness, and dark dreary peril. Surely we could build a theology of spite and anger around this great bright force that seems to control our days and seasons, this inescapable light that fills every exposed crevice with gold, only to slink away in the evening and allow the darkness to drench the world again, for a time, for a season. What is this godlike orb that it has such pull on our very existence?

If we fail to see the divine nature in everything that is, we’re left instead with the void of the divine all around us. The sun is an easy candidate for divinity, but why not all of creation as well? Let the sun be a god, and its light be divinity shared with the world. Let the grass then also be gods, and the trees, and the birds in them. Let the rocks by so divine that they cry out their own names, the name of the God who has made all things and inhabits all things and is, even now, making and remaking all things. As a flower goes to seed and seed becomes another flower still. Let that be divine. Let it be the same God that hangs in the sky each day, promising renewal, warmth, danger, mystery, and moments of perfection.

Gospel Ordinary

The Gospel is the good news that Jesus preached. If you had asked me in my youth what that good news was, I would have answered something about salvation from sin and the death and resurrection of Jesus. I think you’re likely to get the same sort of answer from an Evangelical Christian of just about any protestant denomination. A Google search will most certainly produce similar insights.

The angel who told the shepherds about the birth of Jesus of Nazareth said, Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy. That angel was relaying good news (Old English god meaning "good" and spel meaning "news, a story”) to an earthy, quiet group in the middle of the night. That angel was sharing gospel, and that gospel was the birth of a poor baby in unromantic circumstances. The good news was that human life, no matter how humble, is glorious.

Church is an interesting thing to experience. I’ve spent most of my life going to one church or another, and the thing about attending an American Evangelical Protestant Christian Church™ is that it’s tremendously normal. If you go to church, no one will necessarily notice. However, if you go to church and get involved and exhibit the characteristics desirable for the practice – obedience, piety, religious fervor, devotion to the faith – you will usually be celebrated. The churchgoing experience provides opportunities for ordinary people to be celebrated by peers.

It feels good to be celebrated, and it’s likely that most of what we do in life we do in search of being celebrated. Friendships have mutual celebration as their foundation; well, good friendships do. We’re drawn to people who make us feel good about ourselves, even if that feeling is fleeting. To be human is to be social, and to be social is to be insecure. While we each possess insecurity to varying degrees, we all possess it nonetheless. Every human being wants to be celebrated, to have our insecurity assuaged. Ideally we will be celebrated simply for who we are.

Herein lies the good news of Jesus of Nazareth; the man who, as a baby, was celebrated by a sky full of angels simply for being born. Born to a young girl who knew very little about life. Born to a young carpenter who was probably quite poor. Born in an animal pen in a dusty backwater town. Born like all of us are – humbly, writhing and bloody, made in the image of a creative deity who surely imbues our existence with meaning.

The Gospel then is a celebration of each one of us, and spreading the good news is as easy as loving every other human simply because they are. You don’t have to possess the right skills, exhibit the proper behavior, recite the creeds correctly, or believe the same stories. It shouldn’t require anything of you for us to celebrate the miracle of your existence. And it shouldn’t require anything of us for you to do the same in return. The good news is that we’re all human, we’re all in the same boat, and we all contain mysterious multitudes. To be in this world is to be divine.

I don’t know just who this man Jesus of Nazareth was, or whether his mother really was a virgin, or if his birth was the culmination of a sweeping divine narrative of reconciliation and spiritual redemption. I can’t attribute motives to his life, the ways he taught common people and ran in the circles of society’s rejected class. But this much seems obvious – that Jesus brought good news to people, and celebrated them for who they were without requiring anything of them. Personally I like that kind of news.

The Pull of a Small God

The theological tradition of most of my life is obsessed with the size of God. Often we were called to revere God for their sheer vastness; to recognize the presence of God in the grandest natural landscapes; and to find our love for God by virtue of their incredible creative power.

There's something to be said for recognizing the scope of God, for considering what it means that God is omnipresent. It's necessary to consider our concept of God as the power that compelled all things into existence. It's worthwhile to contemplate the significance of God's presence across the span of existence and outside of the constraints of our conception of time.

It may be useful to consider God on this scale, but it's extremely hard to find anything relatable about a god of this size, strength and power. The theological tradition of my life has too often attempted to compel me to feel personally connected to God by virtue of this vastness. The thinking has been that recognizing the unfathomable nature of God will somehow lead me to want to personally connect.

Which is ludicrous, of course. Imagine the awe you feel looking out from some great height at a vast landscape - a towering series of mountain peaks, an immeasurably wide valley, a deep circuitous canyon. You are in awe of the scale of it, of the landscapes grand presence. You look over and over it trying to fathom the vastness.

But it's not until you've drawn near to the landscape that you truly appreciate it's character. When you've climbed its mountains, wandering through shady copses and stepping over icy creeks, hiked under the imposing walls of its canyons, you're immersed in the beauty and diversity of it. You are in awe of its scale when you consider it wholly, but what you love about the landscape is what you can touch, feel, and discover.

God is like a landscape in this way, and it strikes me that the dominant theological traditions in America are terrible at remembering the importance of this truth. In Christian theology, Jesus is the manifestation of God on earth. He represents the character of God in ways that we can see and touch and hear; in ways we can directly relate. The stories of Jesus show us a man who is humble by nature; who resists powerful institutions and their dogmatism; who is attracted to (and attractive to) the marginalized members of society - the dirty ones, the forsaken ones, the shamed ones, the forgotten ones.

This man who is God's ambassador among us is ultimately destroyed by the institutions of power around him. The religious powers and the governmental authorities conspire to eliminate him. They bring their considerable power to bear to destroy a peaceful, humble preacher of love because his very gentleness and inclusiveness is a threat to their influence. Somehow the smallness of Jesus - his minor position as one man with no political power or wealth or influence - is such a threat the authorities of society that they feel the need to murder him.

Consider the truth that God's greatest interaction with humanity is through the small, short-lived, minor presence of the man called Jesus. Meaning that the thing that draws people to God is not God's grandiosity; not God's unfathomable scale and authority; not God's immeasurable breadth, depth and height; not God's presence as a being of uncertain substance that sits outside of human time and thought and rules by impenetrable and unimpeachable justice. We're not drawn to a God so unrelatable as all that. We're drawn to a common man who seeks justice by loving those who society has deemed unlovable. We're drawn to a person of such fervent love and mercy that his very presence among us is a threat to the powers that be.

The Temple, The Church

I'm not at all sure where church as we understand it has its origins. It is possible that the "first church" that we read about, the gathering of Believers in Christ after his death and resurrection, is an archetype. Certainly they were followers of Jesus, and it is true that they gathered together to worship and encourage one another. In a sense they were very much representative of church as we experience it in 2017.

However, they didn't have a distinct building in town. There is repetitive mention of the temple in the book of Acts, and of disciples teaching there about the news of Jesus. But it's clear that the disciples aren't welcome in the temple courts; they are arrested, and the leaders of the Jews are hostile to them and their message. So they didn't have a church as we would recognize it.

They met together a lot, according to scripture, but usually in each other's houses. They also began to "plant" churches in other towns and cities, but these were typically groups that gathered in houses as well. This pattern likely continued for centuries. The first evidence of a purpose-made church is possibly a modified home near the Euphrates River from around 240 A.D. It took official government approval, by way of Constantine, before church buildings really took off in the fourth century.

There are some lessons here. The first is a lesson about holiness. Worshipping Jesus in your living room does not confer holiness, and neither does doing so in an elaborate, beautiful, expensive cathedral. Holiness is not place-specific. God doesn't avoid the humble churches or elaborate chapels, nor does He scoff at living rooms, bedrooms, or overpasses.

So God is not bound to our choice locations for worship and teaching. He could just as easily be at the park among friends as they enjoy one another's company as He might be at a communion service at the local Baptist church. Or He might not be at either place. (But really that isn't true; of course God is present at both places, just as surely as He is present everywhere; it's the peculiar closeness of His Spirit that may be missing.)

If it is possible then that God isn't especially active in our purpose-built places of worship, why then are we so dead set on believing that that's where He should be? It may have taken Christ's followers a few hundred years to set up this institution of church as we've come to understand and expect it, but it likely wasn't for a lack of desire. The earliest believers simply weren't physically able to construct churches for themselves. They were too busy dodging authorities to do so. Many of them died during this time.

What Christians really needed in order to establish the purpose-built church was the OK of the government. This is still true all over the world. The truest representations of the Kingdom of Jesus happen to be loathsome things to the Empires of Man. I don't expect for this truth to ever change in this life.

And yet the history of the church experience as we know it is representative of the opposite phenomenon. From Constantine on, the Empires of Man, particularly in the West, have allowed and in many cases encouraged the growth of the institution of the church. One might have to conclude that this institution as we've received it is maybe not the truest representation of the Kingdom of Jesus. I would go so far even as to make it a rule - if the authorities of men take no issue with your church gathering, then the Kingdom isn't very close at hand.

This is not to say that the constant threat of martyrdom is a blessing. Who among us wants to live life that way? I can assure you that the early church didn't welcome the persecution, even though they likely understood it as necessary. There is certainly something to be said for worshipping in safety.

Yet Jesus told us that we would suffer persecution, and that we should be glad when it came. Now martyrdom is certainly persecution, but death is not the only way we could be punished. How about being beaten for standing up for what is just? Or simply being ostracized because you stick to your convictions? Those sound like persecution to me. They also sound like the actions that officials have taken against Christians throughout history. Many times those officials were representatives of the state; many times representatives of the church. A lot of the time they were both.

The most damning indictment of the institution of the church as we experience it may very well be its institutional nature. On one hand we can praise God for Constantine; look what his empirical reign did for the growth of the Christian religion. On the other hand, what good did it actually do? If a false Gospel experience is spread more widely and quickly, is it a net positive or net negative? I for one believe that anything short of the Good News of Jesus is necessarily a loss.

The institutional experience of church life seems to be what we're stuck with. The average American experience is one peppered with institutional interactions. In a typical week we go to work, stop by the bank, visit some stores and restaurants, and once or twice go to church. The starkest differences among these experiences are the times of day, the mix of people at each location, and the expectation that I should be happy when I arrive.

The church is really just our modern temple, a place where the most studied believers among us stand stalwart as guardians of our faith practice. It's interesting that Jesus so often went first to the Synagogue (or temple) in each town he visited in order to preach. It would be tempting to believe that he went there because God's people were there, and God's word was being taught. It's more accurate though to assume he went there first because those were the people in town who most needed to hear his good news.

I suppose the same is true in our day; and just as in his day, Jesus isn't often welcome. You see, he's a disruptor. Whereas the Jews had a grudging peace with their Roman rulers, Jesus's very presence threatened to upend it. His teachings challenged all that was established and enforceable. His message threatened the institutional nature of the temple just as surely as it threatens the institution of the church.

No Radicals Here

Most churches in America have a flagpole. On one such flagpole I noticed the hierarchy of flags - the American flag up top, the Christian flag below, and, in some cases, a state flag third down the rung. So in case you missed it, the symbolic order of precedence on this particular flagpole is America / Christianity / Texas.

I saw this particular flagpole on my way to work and, although I have seen literally hundreds of church flagpoles before, on this day I noticed the flag order and it stirred up some thoughts. I initially wondered what would happen at that church if the Christian flag (more on that later) were flown above the American flag. Immediately I began to think of cultural norms, like those norms that dictated, at least to this church, that they fly the flag of our country above a flag that, at least symbolically, represents the Christian faith.

A couple of helpful background notes are in order. The United States Flag Code (Chapter 1 of Title 4 of the United States Code) provides advisory codes for the display and care of the flag of the United States of America. This includes how the flag should be flown in various circumstances. This code is law but penalties are not enforced. For example, burning the flag in public has been determined to be an expression of free speech and entirely legal, even though the Flag Code forbids it.

The Flag Code is a part of our cultural norms in America, so even though it isn't enforceable law, the pull of compliance on a cultural level is strong. The code says that anytime the American flag is flown with other flags on a pole, the American flag always flies at the top. The reason for this is the place of prominence that our nation holds in the social hierarchy. To fly a state flag above it would be to symbolize the greater status of that state over and above the collection of states that is the U.S.A. It would be disrespectful and socially and culturally offensive.

Many different organizations and institutions have flags. None of them is supposed to be flown above the flag of the United States of America.

The Christian Flag is a modern invention, first conceived in 1897 in (where else?) the United States of America. It is a standard meant for all Christendom as a symbol of Jesus Christ and his kingdom. The blue square in the upper left represent the blue sky, heaven, and faith and trust. The cross upon this blue is the symbol of Christianity and is red, representing the blood of Jesus. The rest of the flag is white, representing the purity of Jesus, the perfect sacrifice.



The Christian Flag was adopted by a collective church organization in 1942 as the official flag of Christendom. There is even a pledge of allegiance in various forms. The flag is a kind of soft symbol of Christianity mostly used in the United States, but also popular in Latin America and Africa.

It's easy to imagine why the Christian flag came to be. It is, in almost every way possible, an immodest copy of the flag of the United States of America (including the pledge). The same three colors are present - red, white, and blue. The blue square sits where the blue union sits on the US flag. The red cross replaces white stars, swapping one icon for another. Visibly it is a wonderful complement to the American flag. Incidentally it also complements the Texas flag.

There is no better symbol that I can imagine that so embodies the unholy devotion of the American Christian church to the nation of its birth. We love this nation so much that we have caricatured our devotion in a copycat cultural riff on the most powerful national symbol available.

As if this devotion isn't enough, we also follow the cultural code (and the Flag Code) in how we display this symbol of Christendom. And how do we display this symbol of the kingdom of Jesus Christ upon the earth? Why, below the American flag of course.

I love the symbolism of this display for so many reasons. First there is the very fact of the Christian flag - it betrays our need to fit in while also standing out; our inability to be truly "set apart" in our actions because the very flag is a cowardly attempt at being separate while being entirely included. There is the symbol of the Christian flag below the American one, which makes every effort to avoid controversy or offense by claiming the superiority of the American ideal to that of Jesus and his kingdom. There is finally the institutional symbol of the church itself as an important cultural building in the municipal landscape, a place prominent enough to warrant a flagpole at all, much less one with so much weighty symbolism flying from it.

As I looked at that flagpole the other day I wondered - what would happen if the Christian flag flew up top? What controversy would it stir for that congregation? By extension of this question I thought about our place in American society, us Christians. We have fit in so well for so long one begins to wonder how we would even begin to look "set apart." Certainly having our own Americanized symbol one rung below our national one isn't a bold statement of faith.

As with everything I am led back to Jesus, that radical itinerant preacher who stirred up so much trouble in his Roman province that the state saw fit to kill him. The American image of Jesus is a benign, placid, and conservative one, but the descriptions of his life and teaching in the Bible don't fit this image at all. He was a tough character who refused to bend to the cultural norms of the day. In fact he often made heretical (and treasonous?) statements about the coming Kingdom of God and it's power to tear down religious institutions and whole nations. I can't imagine Jesus designing a flag for his movement; he was too busy preaching a radical message of faith, love, and mercy.

There are radicals in America these days preaching extreme messages of inclusion, love, and mercy for the Least of These. What's telling is that so few of them are Christians by confession or cultural definition. When I look around at my fellow believers and at myself, I see no radicals here. The rabble-rousing message of Jesus has been so tamed that the idea of making waves with the Gospel is not only uncomfortable, it's possibly un-Christian by our standards. But if we lose the radical truth of the Gospel of Jesus we lose the Gospel itself.

What we need is not a familiar symbol of Jesus and his kingdom, but rather his kingdom itself. His radical, life altering kingdom that according to the King is right at hand. What we need is to be as radical as Jesus was, even if it offends our cultural norms, including the norms of the church. Especially the norms of the church.