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From September 24, 2006 Your phone rings. It's the president of the community college. Would you be willing to teach a course? You see, the president tells you quickly, the school has just signed a contract with the Chinese government and come spring the campus will host 25 students. Along with language courses and classes exploring American culture, the college intends to offer an elective course in Christianity. You are the perfect instructor, the president insists. "I'm flattered," you say. "Let me get back to you on that." You hang up and immediately begin to ask: what are the essentials of this Christian faith? How to communicate all this to students with precious little understanding of a faith so prevalent in western Kentucky? After some prayer, you decide to give it a go. And there you are, the first day of class, with a room full of students, each with a brand new copy of the New Testament and open, eager minds. "This semester we will take an unusual approach," you say speaking as clearly as you ever have. "We will study just one gospel passage. Just one. When we're done, you will have a sense of the basics of Christianity. So much that is key to Christianity. Now open your New Testaments to the second gospel, Mark, and find chapter nine, verses 30 through 37." You begin to read. "They went on from there and passed through Galilee..." They. They. Jesus was a gatherer of people, not a lone wolf or a guru meditating alone in a mountain cave. Lesson number one: for believers, Christianity is never just about "he," about Jesus; it's also about "we." Those who follow Christ aren't merely a collection of devotees; we are a community devoted to Christ and to one another. To be a Christian is to be a part of, not apart from. "They went on from there..." You repeat what you just said: to be a Christian is to be a part of, not apart from. Jesus and his disciples rarely stayed home. Instead, they were a part of the world and they took the Good News out into that world rather than waiting for the world to come to them. Evangelism, we call this. Mission, too. This approach is more than meets the eye. It reveals something important about Christianity's foundation. Dig deeper, you encourage your class. In Jesus, Christians see God. In Jesus, we see God expressing in a fleshly way God's need to come to us, to walk with us. That's the essence of Christmas, you tell them. God's nature is to seek us out. "They went on from there and passed through Galilee." In Jesus we witness God's initiative, God's continual stepping toward us, God's perpetual journeying in our direction to meet us just as we are, where we are. This Christianity calls grace, a gift freely and fully given. Grace is a gift that has the power to change everything. Especially because God's grace doesn't hold back. It not only seeks us out; it willingly goes the distance. You read again from Mark: "For he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, 'The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.'" Christianity, and this you write on the chalkboard, Christianity is at once a religion of utter grace and true grit. Jesus' earthly journey didn't just have him criss-cross Palestine sharing his marvelous Good News; it took him all the way to the cross and the horrible bad news of Golgotha. At the heart of the Christian story rests a special kind of shame, the scandal of the cross. And it was a scandal, you tell your students, a unique scandal: God's own Son died a humiliating death because of human scheming. The cross was a shameful, shameful thing. And yet instead of hiding the shame of Good Friday, instead of pretending it isn't there, Christians enter into it. But as key as Good Friday is, you explain, Christianity is not summed up in the cross. This is not our pinnacle moment, not the ultimate expression of our faith. Jesus' journey took him through the shadowed valleys of suffering, it took him to the cross and an innocent's death. But Golgotha was not the culmination of Jesus' journey. Jesus' journey took him further; it took him beyond the cross, beyond the dead-endedness of the tomb, and into completely transformed, resurrected life. Resurrection is the cornerstone of Christianity. But, you tell your students as they continue reading in Mark, Jesus' dying and rising is not as easy to understand as we might wish. "For he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, 'The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.' But they [the disciples] did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him." And here you'll make a confession to your students. Even now, even two thousand years after Jesus' resurrection, even after centuries and centuries of Easter celebrations, we still have a hard time making sense of Christ's passion and resurrection. And so we live with the mystery it is to us, even as we hold on to the hope it gives, the courage it imparts, the assurance it provides that nothing and no one is ever lost to God. As you go about teaching Christianity 101, your students remind you that spring break is around the corner. So you do a little recap before they board their bus for Daytona Beach. Remember, you tell them as they head out the door, Christianity is founded on grace. It is all about holy love that seeks us out, gathers us up, and consistently, persistently responds with life-giving new possibilities to old death-dealing ways. Christianity is about the Jesus who makes all this visible and accessible to us. When your class is back from Florida's diversions, it is time for them to take two big, challenging bites. Digesting what they learn won't come quickly; it certainly doesn't for Christians who spend a lifetime mastering what seemed to come so naturally to Jesus. Back to Mark now, you say, pointing your students to the second half of their gospel primer. "Then [Jesus and his disciples] came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, 'What were you arguing about on the way? But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.' [Jesus] sat them down and said to them, 'Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.'" It won't be easy, this lesson. Sure, you tell them, the principle Jesus is teaching is straightforward. Lowly servanthood is the prize; the world's wild applause for achievement is the booby-prize because it's always conditional and therefore unstable. What makes the lesson hard, you tell your class, isn't the idea that the smaller we chose to be the more God's bigness shines out. What's difficult (they will appreciate your honesty, believe me) what's hard is taking this understanding and making it a lifelong practice. It's a two-fold challenge because seeking greatness through humility rather than ambition takes some real doing (the ego being what it is), but it's also a challenge because this servanthood approach to living runs counter to much of what Americans value and reward. To pursue the greatness Christ calls us to means we risk being misunderstood and sometimes even laughed at for what seems foolish. And so, just to flesh things out for the class, you decide to tell the story from John's gospel where Jesus' rubber really meets the road. On the last night they were together, instead of reminding his dusty disciples how important he was, how he was the Son of God and they should bow down to him for what he was about to do not just for them but for all humanity, Jesus simply knelt down in front of each one of them with a bowl of water and a towel. And he washed their calloused, road-weary feet. Greatness doesn't get any greater than that you tell your students, trusting the vividness of the story will speak for itself. "My how the semester has flown," you find yourself saying in May, wishing you had a whole new semester to devote to your remaining two verses. But you don't. So you do your best. You ask a student to read aloud. "And then [Jesus] took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me." This verse says more than we think it does, you insist. Children were real nobodies in Jesus' day. Sub-human. Disposable, even. (Infanticide was an accepted practice. So was abandonment of babies to trash heaps. Like you, your students will struggle with the inhumanity of that reality.) So Jesus' embrace of that child, his clear affection for her was unexpected. But even more unexpected, radical even, was for Jesus to suggest that this child was holy: that welcoming her was the very same thing as welcoming him and the God who sent him. Again we see Christ the great gatherer. In life, he drew to himself the broken, the voiceless, the cast off, the unvalued. Anyone and anything that had been discarded, deemed worthless, Jesus pulled close and reclaimed, restored, and resanctified, made holy again. And to this very day, as the living Christ, Jesus continues this profound and profoundly mystical work. Anyone and anything that dwells on the margins of society, whatever we humans try to push away or hide or destroy or strip of its grace-bestowed holiness, Christ calls to the center, and makes this the center of his concern and his reconciling power. How this happens, like resurrection, Christians accept as mystery. That this happens, Christians proclaim as truth. In Christ, everything, everything is made new again. It is through Christ that God works to fashion a new heaven and a new earth. In each human heart, in each relationship, in every situation, and indeed throughout all of creation. Your students' heads are spinning. And understandably so. It has been a full, full semester and you have given them so much to digest. So as a benediction, as a way to send them out into the world and back to China you say this: Christianity isn't about understanding with the mind. It isn't a philosophy, a method of thinking. It is a way of living that comes out of a connection with the God whom Jesus knew very intimately. Christians spend their whole lives learning the basics, learning with the heart what seemed to come so easily to Jesus. And we don't ever do this alone. The same God who created and called creation good, the same God who spoke through Jewish prophets and then sent Jesus to fulfill every promise, the same God Jesus carried in his heart, this same God is the one who is always with us. For Christians there's no grade to earn, no test to take, no project to turn in order to graduate. For Christians, Christ's school of love is always in session. And there's never a time when he's not with us, helping us learn even more of what it means to live together freely, fully, and joyfully. This, this we call grace. Amen. ©
Rev. Karen Winkel |
"Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen
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