Who Says?

This sermon was preached for the regular morning worship services on 1/29/06. It is based on the story of Jesus preaching in the synagogue in Capernaum, Mark 1: 21-28.


Once upon a time, in a small rural town not far from here, there was a 12 year old girl. This little girl was just beginning to grow into adolescence, and she was very self-conscious about her changing body and the fact that she wasn’t as thin as all of the other girls. This little girl took ballet classes, and participated in the annual springtime ballet recital. One evening, as the little girl and her ballet classmates were lined up in tutus and tights, preparing for their entrance onto the stage to perform for their parents, one of her classmates—pretty and thin, but more than a little bit mean-- leaned over and, with great authority, said to this little girl, “You know, if you don’t get thinner thighs you’ll never get a husband.”

Once upon a time in a country not far from here, there was a famous and respected religious broadcaster. This broadcaster used some of his time on television in front of millions of believers for the purposes of Christian prayer, evangelism, and charity. But he also used the authority of his TV show as a platform to call for the assassination of one world leader; to claim that God caused another world leader’s massive stroke as punishment for agreeing to give up land; and to claim that a governor’s fall from a motorcycle, for which he received 15 stitches, was caused by Satan.

What these stories have in common is that they’re about the twin and intertwining themes of authority and truth. The mean classmate and the religious broadcaster are both people who spoke with great authority. What is clear, in each story, is that not all who speak with authority are actually speaking the truth.

We all live under and respond to many different types of authority, most of them an ordinary part of human life. As children, we live under the authority of our parents until we come of age. As Americans, we live under the authority of our government, our laws, our elected leaders, and our courts. As workers, we agree to abide by the rules of our corporation or workplace. As members of neighborhood associations and health clubs, borrowers from the library and the video store, students in classes—in so many of the settings and services we participate in, even the church, we are bound by the authorities of order and organization, of deadlines and due dates.

Another kind of authority we experience in our daily life these days is the barrage of experts dispensing advice in books, in magazines, in newspapers, on radio, on television, and on the internet. How many times each hour of the local news do we hear local anchors defer to unnamed authorities with the words, “Experts say. . .” “Scientists say. . .” “Researchers say. . .” (I challenge you to count them up one night and report back to me.)

Each hour of CNN or MSNBC brings a parade of so-called authorities--pundits, talking heads, consultants, and think tankers --spinning some kind of opinion or point of view. And some of the local cable access shows—well, I’m not going to go there. Suffice it to say that it gets harder and harder to know which authority speaks with authority—or which authority speaks the truth.

Should we take an aspirin every day—or not? Should we put the baby to sleep on its back or on its front? Did we really land on the moon or was it all a big hoax?

And in our churches and religious communities, we face similar dilemmas—Should we ordain gays and lesbians? Should we be for the death penalty or against it? Should we support the war, or work against it?

For the most part, all these voices and sources of authority—whether civic or commercial, personal or media--have power over us because we give them that power, consciously or unconsciously.

We give them that power—and they retain it--as long as we perceive they wield that authority truthfully, justly, and authentically. The Declaration of Independence expresses this well when it says, “governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed.” The framers were wise to link our consent to authority with the justice of authority. Without truth, without justice, the power of any authority is empty and weak—and, many would argue, need not be obeyed.

In our gospel reading for today, the twin themes of authority and truth come into clear focus.

Mark, in his typical no-nonsense writing style, tells us that, when Jesus and the disciples are visiting Capernaum, the Sabbath comes, and Jesus goes to the synagogue and begins to teach. Mark says, “The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority.”

Moreover, the truth of this authority wielded by Jesus is confirmed by a most unlikely source—a man possessed by an evil spirit—who cries out “I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” Jesus tells the evil spirit, “Come out of him!” and the man is healed.

The crowd in the synagogue instinctively knows that Jesus speaks with authority—but the man possessed by an evil spirit is the first person in Mark’s gospel to recognize and name the truth which powers Jesus’ authority—the fact that Jesus is the Son of God. (Not even the disciples have realized it yet—and it takes them another quite a few more chapters to figure it out!) In this passage, there is no question or conflict about authority and truth: Jesus Christ, Mark tells us, possesses and embodies them both.

Authority and truth—twin and intertwining themes, twin and intertwining realities, twin and intertwining dilemmas. We know and recognize Jesus, in the Bible and in our own lives, as the greatest example of one who speaks with ultimate authority and ultimate truth.

But we also know from the thousand choices and voices and decisions of our daily experience that not all who speak with authority speak the truth—and how on earth are we expected to tell the difference?

How do we know when someone—a mean classmate or a famous broadcaster—or a preacher or pastor, even-- is speaking with authority? How do we know who’s speaking the truth —particularly religious or Christian truth? If it was hard to do in Jesus’ time—how much harder it must be to do in our plugged in, 24 hour news, information overload world. Who can we trust?

It’s not an easy question—and there’s certainly no easy answer. It’s a question that could probably consume us for weeks and months. One possible solution might be that classic Presbyterian principle, “Jesus Christ alone is Lord of the conscience”—giving each one of you individually the freedom and the responsibility to come up with your own answer. And of course, really, that’s exactly what each of you must do, in your own heart of hearts.

However--I’d like to offer a few suggestions or principles that can maybe help you—and all of us—out—and maybe could be a good starting place for the discussion.

First of all, authority is relational.

What I mean by this is that true authority is built on the pillars of knowledge, trust, community, and history. We acknowledge authority to be legitimate when we know it well; when it has proven trustworthy; when it is acknowledged and recognized not just by one person, but by a whole community; and when it has demonstrated these things time after time, year after year. True authority is not a one-way street; it requires interaction and relationship, trustworthiness over time, the verification of community.

We know the authority of Jesus because we have a personal relationship with him. Because of that personal relationship we know him and over the course of that relationship we have come to trust him. Our relationship with him is confirmed and strengthened by our participation in the community of faith.

We can find these pillars of knowledge, trust, community and history actively working in our life together as a church, as we grant authority to various individuals and groups to lead us and act for us. We choose our pastors and other leaders—those in authority-- by means of processes, nominating committees and corporate elections that –although they might seem cumbersome--utilize our knowledge, trust, community, and history.

When we confer authority in this way—and when we recognize these features in those would claim authority--I believe we’ve taken a big step in knowing whether authority is legitimate or not.

The second principle I would like to present to you is that true, legitimate authority—religious or secular—is never to be found hand in hand with violence or hate.

Author Charles Kimball, in his book “When Religion Becomes Evil,” presents five characteristics that should ring alarm bells in all of us if they are ever presented as truth by someone in authority. These five characteristics are primarily religious, but I think they’re applicable to secular, political, and even personal settings as well. They’re a clear and compelling witness that the claim of authority is false and in fact dangerous.

The five characteristics identified by Kimball are:
1. fanatical claims of absolute truth
2. blind obedience to totalitarian, charismatic, or authoritarian leaders.
3. actively trying to usher in the end times
4. justifying religious ends by any means
5. any and all forms of dehumanization

I’m sure there are some other things you might want to add to this list—but it’s a pretty good starting place for recognizing dangerous and corrupt authority. Any preacher or leader who advocates any of these things—no matter how good looking or well spoken they are—you need to get out of there and fast, and take as many people with you as you can!

The third principle I’d like to share with you is this -- authority can sometimes be found in unlikely places.

Let’s return to our gospel reading for a moment. The man possessed by an evil spirit is not only the first one in Mark’s gospel to proclaim Jesus’ identity. He is also the only one in our whole gospel reading for today who recognizes that Jesus’ identity is the source of Jesus’ authority. There were other people in the synagogue that day. But, as Mark tells us, they were so caught up in amazement and wonder at the possessed man’s healing that they miss the truth of what he really said—and who Jesus really is.

The people say, “What is this? A new teaching—and with authority! He even gives orders to evil spirits and they obey him.” They’re so mesmerized by authority that they completely miss the truth—the good news that the possessed man announced for all to hear--that Jesus is “the Holy One of God!”

Earlier in this sermon I said that “Not everyone who speaks with authority speaks the truth.” This gospel reading also proves the opposite: “Not everyone who speaks the truth speaks with authority.”

Who in the ancient world would have less authority than a man possessed of an evil spirit? And yet this man without authority proclaims the truth of Jesus’ identity and power for all to hear.

We can learn from this gospel reading to be more attentive in our own lives to people without authority—children, the poor, the homeless, the sick, the refugee, the ordinary and non-famous person--maybe even the person next to you in the church pew!—who may indeed be proclaiming the truth for all to hear, and who may be calling us forth to greater roles of leadership and service.

Not all who speak with authority speak the truth. Not all who speak the truth speak with authority.

As you ponder authority and truth for yourself, may you know the love, and comfort, and presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ--who speaks, and IS, both truth and authority.

Amen.

The Great Divorce

This sermon was preached on January 22, 2006, at the evening contemporary service. The focus here is on CS Lewis's book "The Great Divorce."

It’s no accident that CS Lewis wrote so many of his theological works in the form of imaginative and fantastical fiction. He was, after all, a professor of English literature whose academic specialty was Medieval and Renaissance English. By creating magical stories like the Narnia books, unforgettable characters like Screwtape the tempter, and lyrical parables like his book called “The Great Divorce,” Lewis was able to transcend the dry and scholarly language of theology and make his thoughts on Christianity, eternity, heaven and hell accessible, real, and compelling for his readers.

So far in this sermon series you’ve talked already about the imaginative world of Narnia, long beloved as a children’s adventure story, and the theology that lies at its center and makes the whole story a parable about sin, grace, atonement, and resurrection. Last week we talked about Lewis’s short book “The Screwtape letters,” a book narrated by the demonic villain, and the startling and enlightening perspectives on Christianity we can glean from this suprising point of view.

This evening we’re going to focus on Lewis’s book, “The Great Divorce,” published in 1945, another narrative born out of Lewis’s amazing imagination that offers us his views of a complicated theological topic—the subject of Heaven and Hell. Now writing a parable about heaven and hell has a long tradition in literature—from Dante’s Divine Comedy (divided, if you’ll remember, into three parts—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso)—to Milton’s Paradise Lost—continuing, if you like, to the present day and Mitch Albom’s recent bestseller “The Five People You Meet In Heaven.”

“The Great Divorce” takes its name in response and opposition to one such book -- the strange prophetic book by William Blake, published around 1790, called “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. In the preface to “The Great Divorce,” Lewis explains, he is setting out to explore the great divide between Heaven and Hell, not their similarities.

Lewis rejects moral relativism by saying that Heaven and Hell, or good and evil, can never be reconciled, as Blake and other philosophers have attempted to do; instead, he tells us, life and God require us to choose between good and evil, Heaven and Hell, and that choosing one means abandoning the other.

Lewis says, “I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot develop into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, with backward mutters of dissevering power—or else not. It is still either-or. If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven; if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.”

The plot of “The Great Divorce” basically follows an ordinary man—perhaps Lewis himself, as the book is written in the first person—as he finds himself in a grey, rainy, and deserted city; as he jostles other would-be passengers to board a bus; and the bus starts off, then leaves the ground, and flies through a grey abyss until it arrives at a new country, beautiful and green and mountainous, and perpetually on the verge of sunrise.

It is, in fact, heaven—or, as one of the other characters tells him, The valley of the Shadow of Life—and in Lewis’s imagination, heaven is an interesting and confusing place. As Lewis imagines it, everything in heaven—the grass, the rocks, the trees, the flowers, the rain, the fruit—is “much solider than the things in our country.” Everything is hard, like diamonds, and heavy—Lewis can’t pluck a daisy or pick up a leaf, and the grass is sharp and hard.

Even more bizarre, Lewis and all of the others from the bus who have just arrived are strangely insubstantial—like Phantoms, or ghosts. He can see the grass through his feet—and walking is difficult because the hard grass hurts his transparent feet.

Into this strange but beautiful environment come some solid people—they are substantial, timeless, glowing with light and clothed in robes. They are a sort of ambassador from further out and further up in the celestial mountains, come to persuade the ghosts to come with them—to the Higher Reaches of Heaven. On the journey the ghosts will, little by little, become less and less transparent and more and more real—as they prepare for Morning to break, as one day it must.

Much of the action of the Great Divorce happens in conversation—as Lewis converses with other Ghosts, as he converses with the Bright People, and as he witnesses other Ghosts talking to other Bright People. One by one, the characters and the conversations reveal souls that are troubled, that are angry, that are willfully ignorant, that are so attached to the things of Earth that they have no time or attention to pay to the Heaven that lies open before them, beckoning.

One of the ghosts a theologian who, having come from Hell and standing on the brink of heaven, can’t bring himself to say that he believes in a “literal Heaven and Hell”—only that he believes in it in “a spiritual sense”. When the Bright Person who is talking with him says in astonishment, “Is it possible you don’t know where you’ve been?” and tells him, “You have seen Hell; you ar ein sight of Heaven. Will you, even now, repent and believe?”, the theologian ghost says, “I’m not sure that I’ve got the exact point you are trying to make.”

Another lost soul Lewis observes speaking to a Bright Person is an artist ghost who wants to paint heaven and who is absolutely downcast when told that painting for its own sake doesn’t happen in heaven.

The Bright Person tells the artist, “Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you’ll never learn to see the country. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about him.” Ultimately the artist is unconvinced.

This theme of attachment to the things of the world, and setting those things up as idols to be worshipped for their own sake, is a constant theme in “The Great Divorce.” Again and again we see the lost transparent souls give up their hope of heaven and instead cling to their resentments, their failed relationships, their grief, their self-pity, their self-involvement, and their avarice. One by one we see them turn away from the bright mountains and head back to the bus to be taken back down to the grey city which is hell.

And, once or twice, we get a chance to see a transparent ghost—even those burdened down with things like murder and lust—break their attachment to the things of this world and make the choice to continue towards heaven—and we get a chance to see their miraculous transformation as they become bright and holy creatures.

As I was reading the Great Divorce, I was struck by several of Lewis’s theological convictions that seem to be themes not only of this book but of much of his writing.

The first of these convictions is, as I pointed out at the beginning of this sermon, that moral relativism is dangerous and can lead us astray. Lewis is convinced of the absolutes of good and evil, and of heaven and hell—and he is convinced that life is a series of choices, that we are always being asked to choose between right and wrong, that we are always being asked to choose which Master we will serve and to live out that commitment in concrete ways.

The second of these convictions is Lewis’s conception of heaven itself as a pilgrimage or journey. The characters in Lewis’s books always seem to have to work hard at getting to Heaven after they have died. Instead of entering directly into glory, they must spend some time being tested; they must choose to head for the High Reaches and go through pain and turmoil on the way to recognizing and claiming joy. They must all go continually further up and further in, and on the way they discover that the further up and further in they go, the bigger everything gets—like an onion, except that as you go in and in each layer is larger than the last.

The third of Lewis’s convictions that runs throughout his writings is his concept of heaven itself. I don’t think very much about heaven—and I don’t find a lot of the movies and books written about heaven to be completely helpful But CS Lewis is different—his concept of heaven seems to me to be compelling and somehow right.

For Lewis, heaven is reality—and this earth is merely the shadowland, the dull reflection of the infinite love and joy of that heavenly reality. Lewis says, “Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.”

At the end of the Chronicles of Narnia, in the book called “The Last Battle,” all of the characters must leave Narnia behind and go into a new land—and despite their sorrow at leaving, they soon discover that the new land is just like Narnia—except that everything is more colorful and more clear and, as one of the characters says, “More like the real thing. . .as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.”

As you explore CS Lewis and his writings for yourself, my hope for each of you would be that, in your own journey through his imaginative and thought provoking books, your own heart and mind and soul will be inspired and challenged and comforted by his vision of heaven—and that you might discover, yourself, the reality of heaven promised to us through Jesus Christ.

Amen.

The Screwtape Letters

I preached this sermon on January 15, 2006, at our evening contemporary service. It was part of a series on CS Lewis. This was my attempt to give the congregation a taste of "The Screwtape Letters," one of Lewis' classic books. Since "Screwtape" is told from the perspective of a "tempter" engaged in a struggle for the soul of a human "patient," I wrote my own "Screwtape letter" and used long quotes from the book.

My dear Verminette,

Congratulations on your recent graduation from the Tempters Training College. In a short few weeks you will be taking on your first real assignment and beginning the momentous task of guiding a real human patient away from the Enemy and into the embrace of Our Father Below. I am sure that this experience will more than confirm your early promise and that you will be well on your way to continuing our family’s proud tradition of achievement for the Kingdom of Noise. I certainly need not tell you of the consequences you will suffer if you should fail.

As you begin to guide your patient in pursuit of the Miserific Vision, I am sending you this little book entitled The Screwtape Letters, purportedly authored by one of the Enemy’s most famous advocates, CS Lewis.

As you will see when you begin to read it, however, the book consists of letters sent by Screwtape--one of our finest Tempters and now a very highly placed assistant to Our Father Below--to his nephew Wormwood, then a beginning Tempter like yourself.

No one knows how these letters came to be in Lewis’s possession—he says in the foreward to the book that he has “no intention of explaining how this correspondence fell into his hands,” and probably we shall never know.

However, these letters do offer some of Screwtape’s most profound and practical suggestions for securing the effective damnation of a patient. Had the unfortunate Wormwood taken them more to heart—but then, I have no wish to frighten you, any more than is necessary to focus your mind.

As an aside, I must tell you that I find it difficult to imagine how any of the hairless bipeds manages to make any sense of this book. How strange it must be for them to read Screwtape’s sly, ironic, and scathing social and theological commentary, as he speaks of their God as The Enemy, and of our Master as The Father Below. And how disconcerting for them to gain a glimpse of the methods—ordinary and simple as they are—by which we gradually lead them from the Enemy’s music and light into the Noise and Darkness of Hell.

My dear Verminette, if you are wise enough to read this book you will discover Screwtape’s masterful elaboration of what differentiates Our Father Below from our Enemy.

To quote Screwtape, “To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His.

"We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full ad flows over. Our aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself; the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.”

Imagine, Verminette—our Enemy actually loves the hairless bipeds and seeks to unite with them instead of consume them! What a horrifying thought.

Verminette, the Screwtape Letters will give you many examples of techniques and strategies you can put to practical use on your own patient. You will see in the letters that the state of the patient’s soul fluctuates as he experiences conversion to Christianity, doubt, dangerous friendships, war and love. Screwtape examines each of these experiences and the opportunities each provides for Wormwood’s patient to turn to our Enemy or to slip to our Father Below.

In particular, Screwtape recommends that Wormwood promote in his patient gluttony, sexual immorality, the distraction of immediate sensory experiences, skepticism, fear, boredom, living in the future, and the corrupting of spirituality.

Some of these strategies may be familiar to you, Verminette. But you may not be familiar with some of the others. Living in the future, for example. You should pay particular attention to Screwtape’s analysis of this technique and why it can be so effective in tempting patients to Our Father Below.

Screwtape says, “The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present—either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

"Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear.

"Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present: fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.”

Another unusual strategy Screwtape advocates is the corruption of the patient’s well-meaning spirituality. In one of the earlier letters Screwtape advises Wormwood that “One of our great allies at present is the Church itself.”

“Do not misunderstand me,” he goes on to say. “I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate.

"When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print.

"When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like “the body of Christ” and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.

"At his present stage, you see, he has an idea of Christians in his mind which he supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial. His mind is full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the other people in church wear modern clothes is a real—though of course an unconscious—- difficulty to him.”

Screwtape tells Wormwood, “Never let it come to the surface; never let him ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.”

Verminette, this letter is already too long and I have just begun to describe the valuable lessons you will find in “The Screwtape Letters.” I do hope that I have been able to give you a taste of the book and whetted your appetite for reading it in full. Please do attend to its lessons, particularly the fate of Wormwood. Should you also let a soul slip through your fingers, you will know his fate in a distinctly personal way.

Your affectionate auntie,

Nightshade