Lent 1
TEXT: Matthew 5:10-12
“Though
with a scornful wonder the World sees us oppressed”
The St. Olaf choir was well into their
repertoire last month when the audience was invited to sing along on the
familiar hymn, The Church’s One
Foundation. I don’t think I was
alone in feeling like it was a decisive moment in the concert. Perhaps it is the alchemical power of music
to uniquely combine disparate parts; perhaps it was the poignant words of the
old hymn; or perhaps it was simply me and just had something to do with my
mood. Whatever it was, during the fourth
verse that night I realized I was no longer present. I had gotten stuck on the third verse. Not so much “stuck”, as I think about it, as
“immersed” – a good Disciple state in which to be. And I have been ever since as I teased out
the threads of that verse to lay across the weeks of Lent – this season of the
church year which began on Wednesday during which we collectively “immerse”
ourselves in what it means to be a people of faith, and how it is that we have
fallen short.
And so it is that we will be spending
time, these next few weeks, with the church’s one foundation – in more ways
than one. We will, to be sure, be
spending time with the hymn, but I trust that through it all we will be
spending time with the Christ whose grounding, centering and forming presence
it is about which the hymnist causes us to sing, and the world around us some
reason to be on guard.
Perhaps you noticed the opening
phrase of this focus verse as we sang it earlier in the service. “Though with a scornful wonder the world sees
us oppressed…” I have been intrigued
with that description: “scornful
wonder.” It sounds almost like an
oxymoron to marry that terrible sense of contemptuous, derisive disdain with
that marvelous attraction of hypnotic fascination. How can something be viewed as worthless and wonderful at precisely the same time? But we have experienced similarly
contradictory moments before with slightly different emotions – as when passing
by a highway accident too terrible to see, and yet being unable to look
away. So what would evince this
paradoxical response of “scornful wonder?”
For the hymn writer, it had to do
with theological controversy. Samuel
John Stone was an Englishman by birth in 1839.
After graduating from
Well, the
church survived that particular disruption – and countless ones since – but the
difficulty is worth us pondering. As the
editors of our hymnal reflected in their notes about this hymn, “The church
lives out its daily life within a tension between the conviction that by its
nature it is one, and the reality that it is constantly torn asunder by
strife. Within the Disciples tradition
this tension is found in the affirmation on the one hand by Thomas Campbell
that ‘the church on earth is essentially, intentionally and constitutionally
one’ and yet, that the current ‘division among Christians is a horrid evil.’ The unity of the church is both a gift and a
promise.” [2]
All this reminds me of the first
tenet of a faithful church that we have been using these past several years as
a measure of our ministry: that we are
called to be a sign of God’s coming reign; an outward expression to those
beyond the church of the kind of community God intends. We are always challenged to ask ourselves and
each other what it is that those outside of the church see when they look at
our work and life together.
Which, ironically, is why I place
great hope in the description the hymn writer has chosen: “scornful wonder.” No, I’m not crazy about the idea of being
scorned, but I am hopeful to the extent that such disdain is matched by
wonder’s intrigue. It suggests that we
haven’t exhausted our last chance to bear a compelling witness. It means that the world – even if for the
moment viewing us with disapproval – nonetheless continues to keep its eyes on
us with some lively measure of fascination.
It continues to watch what we do and how we do it, perhaps out of some
unacknowledged hope that we may still have to offer something they might need.
So why the scorn? It could simply be the rather natural
reaction to the persistent clumsiness of our discipleship. There are those times when the church has been
positively heroic – in its abolitionist days and, albeit in fits and starts, in
its sacrificial pursuit of civil rights.
It has been a deep and overflowing well of charity and compassion when
disaster captures our attention, and a historic engine for education and health
care and child care and social conscience.
But heroism is only an occasional face we wear. For all our prancing and strutting and
asserting our strength, throughout the church’s history we have more often been
the Barney Fife of the God squad, shooting ourselves in the foot and locking
ourselves in our own cell, panicked and bug-eyed and hoping someone will come
by and charitably let us out. If for no
other reason that our chronic fecklessness, we have earned some measure of
scorn.
But it could also be the result of
what some would call the church’s “fall from power.” Like some of the “dot com” darlings that came
on like a bang but fizzled like a faulty Roman Candle, the church at large has
not fared very well these past few decades, at least by external standards,. The fancy word is “hegemony” -- the
predominant influence of one group or institution over another or others. It wasn’t that long ago that the “church”
ruled. From nativities in the public
square to prayer in schools, from blue laws that sheltered Sundays to protected
Wednesday evenings for church activities, the influence of the Christian faith
was pervasive and assumed. At least
where I grew up, political candidates listed their church affiliation on their
brochures because if a person wasn’t manifestly a part of a congregation they
didn’t stand a chance. But one by one,
incrementally as water dripping into stone, that dominance has eroded.
It’s not that
the church plays no part. Any look at
the last series of national elections lends evidence of the enduring power of
the faithful. But a hold has been broken
– the church doesn’t automatically, any longer, get its way – and the rest of
the culture doesn’t know whether to gloat or stand speechless with
surprise. And so it does a little of both,
with something like “scornful wonder.”
But there is a
deeper, more fundamental reason the world treats us with both repulsion and
attraction. In the New Testament,
reflecting the ministry of the early church, the word for “witness” was also
the same word for “martyr.” It didn’t
start out that way. The original sense
was simply “witness,” but because Christian faith so often led to violent
persecution and death, the darker meaning accrued. It started out, perhaps, by misunderstanding.
Christians were criticized as
“standoffish,” not engaging in the same kind of social activities and
festivities as were common. And there
was some truth to that complaint. It was
common for social meals to begin with toast and an invocation to various pagan
Gods, and Christians simply couldn’t participate. So they didn’t. Most parties were held in the vicinity of a
pagan temple, after a sacrifice had been made, followed by the invitation to
“come and dine” at the deity’s table.
Again, Christians couldn’t accept.
And though Christians may not have openly advocated an end to slavery,
they did treat everyone as the equals they believed all people to be, butting
them head on to the commonly accepted view of the day. In all these ways and countless others,
Christians came off as “weird,” “peculiar,” and finally even “seditious” when
they refused to name the Caesar a God.
They were, to
put it in a word, “different”, and different-ness has never been well met. It carries the unmistakable scent of
judgment, and no one likes to feel judged.
It’s not that Christians have necessarily gone around openly and
self-consciously condemning and criticizing and disapproving – although many
have certainly done so. “It is simply
that the Christian ethic in itself was a criticism and condemnation of pagan
life and standards.” As the familiar
British scholar William Barclay puts it, “people will always seek to eliminate
that which silently condemns them.” [3]
George Bernard
Shaw is reported to have said, “the finest compliment the world can pay an
author is to burn his books, because the world thereby shows that it regards
these books as so dynamic and explosive that they cannot be allowed to continue
and affect the minds of [people].” [4]
The same might
be said of a Christian – that a “time serving, compromising, facing-both-ways,
hypocritical, uncommitted Christian will never be persecuted.” [5]
Different-ness is, after all, part of
our call. We are called to be saints, which in the original language
is the same word as holy, which is
simply and breathtakingly defined as different. Standing in the gap between the way the world
is and the way God means it to be, we are called to be different – more
reflective of the latter than the former.
And the more we live as we are called to live, the more of a rub we will
create, and the more scorn we are likely to attract. But then whose praise would we rather seek?
Blessed are you, Jesus promised, when people revile you and persecute you
and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great
in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before
you.
And it is, after all, with more than
simple scorn that the world observes
the difference with which we attempt to live.
It is with scornful wonder. Fascination as well as disaffection. Who’s to say if the wonder might someday
overwhelm the scorn – and by whose holy example?
Rejoice, then, and be glad in the
nourishment of your faith, and do everything you can to feed the wonder of
those for whom the gospel of grace is an acquired taste.
[1] Kenneth
W. Osbeck, 101 Hymn Stories (Grand
Rapids: Kregel Publications, 1982) pp.
243-244
[2] Chalice Hymnal: Worship Leader’s Companion (St.
Louis: Chalice Press, 1998) 272.
[3] The Beatitudes and The Lord’s Prayer for
Everyman (New York: Harper and Row,
1963) p. 116.
[4] Ibid, p. 119.
[5] Ibid