And if anything in the letter of the Bible got in the way of human flourishing, Jesus reinterpreted it. All your piety and prayer and professions of faith don’t amount to a hill of beans if you don’t love neighbour, stranger, indeed enemy. He taught and acted in this way because, intimate as he was with his Father, he believed it to be the will of God. Everything Jesus said and did was directed to human well-being, whether it was healing an illness, eating with an outcast, or embracing the poor. What was the reason for our Lord’s “loose” behaviour? People. “For the gospels do not leave us in the slightest doubt that Jesus, judged by the standards of his religious environment, was in fact ‘liberal’” – “Soft on sin,” said his opponents – “and that it was … that very fact that sent him to the cross” (Ernst Käsemann). The disputes Jesus had with the scribes and Pharisees had to do, in general, with the way he interpreted the scriptures in particular, with the way he was rather laid back about keeping the Sabbath and observing the rules of ritual purity. No, we’re talking substantive issues here, theological issues – including politics, money, and sex (and if you think these aren’t theological issues, you haven’t been paying attention) – they’re the ones that vexed the early church, and have vexed any serious-minded church in Christian history. Here is material for the wry smile of a Barbara Pym novel, but none for serious consideration. This has to be said because I’m afraid that personal offence is, alas, often the reason why people leave the church today: someone has done something to offend them. One thing they were not about: personal offence. So the question is not whether there were hostile reactions provoked by the life and teaching of Jesus, and acrimonious disagreements in the apostolic church, the only questions are what they were about and how they were negotiated. Even the “God is love” letters of John were written to refute opponents, while the scathing letters to the seven churches in the book of Revelation make “could do better” look like a gold star. Disputes continue in the early church, recorded in the book of Acts, though its author, Luke, does his best to airbrush out their ferocity but it appears, gloves off, in the letters of the pugnacious Paul. I doubt you could find two successive chapters in the gospels where Jesus isn’t getting into trouble, conflict after conflict, with the religious leaders in Galilee or Jerusalem. So what’s the moral of his large and my little story? Don’t address controversial issues lest it divide the church? But then what kind of church is that? And what kind of Jesus? Do they actually match the church and the Jesus in the New Testament? And the answer is they do not. In round numbers, that’s a thousand people.ĭuring the eighties, I myself preached on the embedded heresies of Thatcherism, and at least five miffed members left Bethel, maybe 15% of the congregation thus in a small way I know how Gregory Boyd must have felt. And sure enough, the hornets massed, buzzed, stung – and then flew the nest. “I felt as though I’d stuck a stick into a hornet’s nest,” said Boyd. So, he writes, “In April of 2004, … I felt it necessary to preach a series of sermons that would provide a biblical explanation for why our church should not join the rising chorus of right-wing political activity.” In them, Boyd argued that “a significant segment of American evangelicalism is guilty of nationalistic idolatry.” Hey, this is the USA! What was Boyd thinking?!Īctually, “Some people literally wept with gratitude, saying that they had always felt like outsiders in the evangelical community for not ‘toeing the conservative party line’.” Others, however, howled with rage. As a conscientious pastor, Boyd tried to address the “big issues” of the day. The church has an evangelical ethos, and before the 2004 presidential election Boyd was under a lot of pressure to “shepherd his flock” towards “the right candidate”, that is, the Republican candidate. Gregory Boyd is the Senior Pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Hence this sermon, preached on September 15th. And some are anxious – and others grumble. But saying Yes is one thing, doing Yes quite another. Bethel’s Church Meeting voted overwhelming for this venture of faith. Our two congregations have been growing more closely together for several years, and my hope is that, in due course, we may become a united church, a Local Ecumenical Partnership (LEP). On my retirement in early October, my church, Bethel United Reformed Church, Swansea (UK), is going to be joining the worshipping community at the local Methodist Church. A sermon by Kim Fabricius (his fourth-last sermon before retirement)
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