5 Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus:
6 Though he was in the form of God, he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit.
7 But he emptied himself by taking the form of a slave and by becoming like human beings. When he found himself in the form of a human, 8 he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
9 Therefore, God highly honored him and gave him a name above all names, 10 so that at the name of Jesus everyone in heaven, on earth, and under the earth might bow 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (CEB)
“The Screwtape Sermons: Exploring
Scripture With C.S. Lewis,” Week Three
We’ve
all seen the ads, right? A cute baby—or a
little boy or a little girl, or if you’re a pet owner, a cuddly little puppy—and
the subtitle below it that says something to the effect of, “Have you
considering adopting? Adopt me!” And it’s cute, and it’s heartwarming, because
it’s this little miniature being that oozes adorableness and we’re supposed to
go weak at the knees and instantly dial the adoption number and sign up for our
very own child/pet starter kit.
Okay,
now take that same ad and take out whatever cute person or animal your mind’s
eye put in there, and then put in a fully grown adult. Put me in there if you need to! It’s a little less appealing now, right? Adopt a fully-grown man with terrible
allergies and an affinity for single-malt scotches? C’mon.
But that’s what is happening: young adults—folks around my age—whose
biological parents are gone will form emotional bonds with another adult of
their parents’ generation, and those bonds will be so strong that they will legally
become that person’s child.
And
I can already hear the question you may want to ask me: why on earth would
someone do that? Here, I’ll let one
woman, Cassie, says this, about being adopted—at my age—by her 67-year-old
roommate, Mary Alice, after leaving her biological mother at age 14:
I come from a very broken
background. While living here, I saw the
dynamic that Mary Alice had with her son, Chris. It was like, “Wow, ok, this is a family. This is a mother.” I had seen families on television. But a family unit, until then, was something
of a mystery to me…When I thought of a mother, I thought of a person to bring
you Kleenex during a heartbreak, to bring me chicken soup when I was sick. She was that.
She is that. When you don’t have
a sense of identity and you find it, you’re comfortable in staying there. People who have had that their whole lives,
who know where they belong, who feel warm, comfortable, and loved, they don’t
question what it would be like not to have that.
And
it really is a profound experience when you get down to it: someone choosing to
make official a fundamental change in identity because of a loving relationship
that has suddenly and amazingly formed.
It’s like getting married, or, dare I say it, like becoming a Christian!
This
will be the last sermon series before the holidays are upon us…that still
sounds crazy to say. But yep, this is
it—the last sermon series before we spend four weeks on Advent and two more on
Christmas. This is a series that I have
wanted to do for a long time, but never quite found the right spot in the
calendar until now. And it’s a bit
different than my usual series, which are often about a book of Scripture or a
book by a contemporary author, or some other theme…this series is centered
around a person: Clive Staples Lewis, the 20th century Christian
writer and apologist who wrote a great many books you may have heard of: the
Chronicles of Narnia, the Space Trilogy, and Mere Christianity. He’s a popular fellow in a great many
Christian circles, and so I decided to use him as the proverbial guinea pig in
this new experiment of mine in taking a slightly different approach to a sermon
series. We began the series by touching
on perhaps Lewis’s most famous work, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,”
which contained allegory about the most basic of Christian belief: Christ’s
crucifixion and resurrection. Last week,
we turned to not just belief, but practice, in Lewis’s 1942 book “The Screwtape
Letters,” and now we arrive at potentially Lewis’s most famous nonfiction book,
“Mere Christianity.”
“Mere
Christianity” is actually a series of books—or talks, really—in one. Lewis gave a number of talks on BBC radio
from 1942 to 1944 at the invitation of the BBC’s director of religious
programming, and those talks make up the content of “Mere Christianity,” which
is designed to be a primer on basic Christian beliefs and practices; rather
than take on major controversies, Lewis aimed to offer a crash course of sorts
on the foundations of Christianity, and to offer that course in language as
accessible as possible while also being precise with his word choice. An consequence of Lewis’s comprehensiveness
was his reporting on aspects of Christianity that he himself struggled with or
disagreed with and would have preferred to leave out altogether from his
interpretation—yet he does not, and he writes why in his section on social
morality, charity, alms, and his vision for a truly Christian world, saying
this:
…I am going to venture a guess as to how
this section has affected any who have read it.
My guess is that there are some leftist people among them who are very
angry that it has not gone further in that direction, and some people of an
opposite sort who are angry because they think it has gone much too far. If so, that brings us right up against the
real snag in all this drawing up of blueprints for a Christian society. Most of us are not really approaching the
subject in order to find out what Christianity says: we are approaching it in
the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own
party. We are looking for an ally where
we are offered either a Master or a Judge.
I am just the same. There are
bits in this section that I wanted to leave out. And that is why nothing whatever is going to
come of such talks unless we go a much longer way around. A Christian society is not going to arrive
until most of us really want it: and we are not going to really want it until
we become fully Christian.
Until
we become fully Christian. That state
alone honestly is probably an impossibility—let’s begin with that right
now. Even pastors—those of us Christians
who have turned pro—aren’t that, because we are more than just pastors. I’m also a son, a brother, a fiancé, a coach,
a friend, an American, and, sometimes, an inveterate wiseass with an R-rated
vocabulary. I am all those things, just
as you are all the things you are, and not always do they fit nicely one on top
of another. Instead, they create a Venn
diagram where hopefully they overlap as much as possible, but sometimes, they
just don’t. And those moments that they
don’t is what I’ll talk about today.
Last
week, I talked about how Paul defines Christianity as a lifestyle—not a
doctrine or a set of beliefs, but something that we choose every day when we
get out of bed to practice or to not practice.
Paul tells us all these things that we are to do as Christians, and as
for the “how,” Paul does what any preacher worth a flat dollar does—he just says,
“Hey, Jesus did it. Be like Him.”
Except
Paul does it with poetry, and in doing so, as New Testament scholar Ernest
Saunders writes, he “really invents the Christian meaning of the secular Greek
word ‘tapeinophrosyne,’ commonly translated ‘humility.’ The dictionary meaning is…lowness of
rank. In Christian use, however, it
characteristically refers to the “littleness” of the child, in a favorite image
of Jesus.”
Okay,
Jesus as a child we get, right? He’s the
Son of God. But Jesus as “little” is
something I want to balk at. I *want*
Jesus to be big, bigger than anything else I could ever imagine!
And
therein lies the paradox that this poem speaks of. Jesus was—is—in fact made of stuff far bigger
than we could ever imagine: He is made of God’s own divine substance. But in order to do what He did, He had to
sacrifice all of it, empty Himself of all divinity, in order to take human
form. Saunders calls it “the scandal of
the Gospel.” He says: “God declares
himself not in stupendous power, nor celestial majesty, but in an insignificant
poor man who gives up everything including his life for the sake of others…He
made himself of no account, worthless, insignificant…a Somebody who was willing
to become a Nobody. That’s the paradox
of Jesus. Only a few have been able to
take him seriously…we can deal with majesty, but we are nonplussed by
humility. We understand pomp and
circumstance; we are puzzled by voluntary poverty. Power we can comprehend; love is a
mystery. Yet it is that strange kind of
world over which God is truly king, modeled before our very eyes in the person
of Jesus of Nazareth.”
All
of those things that Saunders lists, though—majesty versus humility, power
versus love—they all have a common denominator, and you could boil it down to
the same format that he uses: we understand control, but we remain mystified by
surrender. Our approach to God is, let’s
be honest here, often a conditional one.
We say something along the lines of, “Hey, big guy, I sure could use
your blessings for X, Y, or Z right about now.
I mean, I’m not sure what you want me to offer to you—I don’t feel like
I have the time or money to give to you and your church, and I’m not ready to
change anything about how I give of myself to others, or treat others decently…I
mean, I am what I am, right? You created
me, so really, it’s your problem!”
We
don’t need a show of hands here, but how many of you have had a prayer—at some point,
any point in your lives—go a little bit like that? I’m willing to bet that is all of us, myself
included, and if you say no, you’ve never done that, then I’m pretty sure you
might be fibbing.
And
perhaps nowhere is our need for control so destructive as when we approach
Christianity and Scripture and Jesus Himself to validate what we already think
is true, rather than what is actually true, and
if it turns out that the Gospel repudiates what we want to be true,
well, we find a way to wriggle out of it.
I’ve had “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it!” type of
people tell me about how Jesus’ command to the rich man to sell everything he
owned and give the proceeds to the poor doesn’t apply to them because Jesus was
saying it to a specific audience, therefore, they don’t need to follow it. And I just want to be like, “Did you just try
to find a loophole for something your Lord and Savior says to do? Okay.
Okay.”
In
other words, we approach God with an agenda, and that agenda is ours, not His. But what happens then is nothing short of a miracle: God says, "You know what? I still love you!"
Because I am not fully Christian myself—I am
all these other things I listed earlier, plus I am at least something of am
materialistic capitalist—I have not sold everything I own and given it to the
poor. I have not done what Jesus says to
do, even though I call myself a Christian and a pastor. But, as they say in twelve-step groups, you
first have to admit you have a problem, and that you are powerless over
it. Then the real transformation can
begin. And so it is with Christianity,
too. Only when we surrender our little
power to the grace and mercy and love of God do we really, trul change.
But when we do...that is when the amazing stuff can really begin.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
November
10, 2013
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