In 1969,
Harvey Cox, then Hollis Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity
School wrote these prophetic words:
Humanity
has paid a frightful price for the present opulence of Western industrial
society. Part of the price is exacted daily from the poor nations of the world
whose fields and forests garnish our tables while we push their people further into poverty. Part is paid by the
plundered poor who dwell within the gates of the rich nations without sharing
in the plenty. But part of the price has been paid by affluent Western man
himself. While gaining the whole world he has been losing his own soul. He has
purchased prosperity at the cost of a staggering
impoverishment of the vital elements of his life. These elements are festivity - the capacity for genuine revelry
and joyous celebration - and fantasy - the faculty for envisioning
radically alternate life situations. Festivity and fantasy are not only
worthwhile in themselves; they are absolutely vital to human life.
Forty
six years later, Pope Francis made a similar observation: many of our leaders
in industry, politics and religion have contracted a type of spiritual
Alzheimer’s disease, he said, where we forget both the lessons of history and
salvation.
Today everything comes under the laws of
competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the
powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and
marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.
... Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order
to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt
not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.(It kills
lives and it kills souls.) How can it be that it is not a news item when an
elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market
loses two points? This is a case of exclusion.
This morning, in part three of my “Fools
for Christ” series I want to explicitly state for you the sources of my theological
roots. Lest there be any ambiguity about my deepest intellectual and spiritual
convictions, I want to share clearly with you why it is I do what I do here and throughout ministry.
Because, you see, from time to time, I apparently confuse people: I’ve been told that I sound like an
evangelical when I preach. I love Jesus
and cherish my intimacy with him so I’m not afraid to talk about that love out
loud. What’s more I am fascinated, intrigued and nurtured by God’s holy word
found in the Bible and cherish the chance to discern its wisdom for our
generation. And therein, my friends, lays the problem:
Some people confuse my love of Christ, my
enthusiastic approach to worship and my reverence for the Scriptures with
fundamentalism. In essence, they mistake style for
content – and by the time they discover that they are 1000% wrong – they tell
me that I have deceived them. So let me be totally transparent: the Lord I serve is NOT a religious terrorist
who wants to beat us into submission or drive fear and shame into our flesh. I
proclaim only a God of love who has saturated existence with grace and aches
for us to rest in the beauty of this gift. I am NOT a 21st century
Jonah.
Others have told me that all my Jesus talk
drives them crazy. How can you insist that Jesus is Lord in
a post-modern context when all meaning is enveloped in relativity? Please, they
tell me, give up your superstitious ways and get with the modern program. And
there are even a few who have concluded that I am just a weird, ultra-liberal, pseudo-Pentecostal,
wild man with no theological
grounding – a spirit-filled, Zen
Buddhist snake handler – a religious loose cannon who knows no decorum and
respects no tradition.
So I thought the time had come to set the
record straight – especially since I’m talking about the foolishness of Christ
for our generation – and I don’t want any stylistic concerns to obscure the
message. In my theological universe, there are eight orthodox, mainstream,
Bible believing, contemporary theologians who have shaped and informed my
spiritual commitments and understanding of God at work in our lives, hearts and
human history:
+ Bono from U2 who sings about grace from
the discipline of rock and roll
+ Eugene Peterson whose reworking of the
Bible into The Message has been revolutionary
+ Fr. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest at
the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, NM
+ Douglas John Hall, the master of
neo-orthodoxy in Montreal
+ Dietrich Bonheoffer (the German Lutheran
theologian who was martyred because of his opposition to Hitler’s racist and
anti-Semitic violence during WW II
+ Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian bard
of Vermont
+ Clarence Jordon of Koinonia Farms in Georgia
+ And Harvey Cox, late of Harvard Divinity
School
Yes, I cherish Henri Nouwen. To be sure I
have read ALL the great liberation and feminist theologians, too and value
their courage and intellectual integrity.
And the works of both Sr. Joan Chittister and Rabbi Abraham Joshua
Heschel have been foundational and inspirational. But Bono, Peterson, Rohr,
Hall, Bonheoffer, Buechner, Jordan and Cox are my go to scholars because they are grounded
in the historic rituals of the church AND awakened to the spirit of renewal,
faith, hope and love that is so essential to the Reformed and reforming
tradition I call home.
Today I want to call special attention to
Brother Harvey Cox – the first theologian I ever studied – and a guide and mentor
to me for over 45 years. He was a professor at Harvard and a protégé of Paul
Tillich and Bonheoffer and his modus operandi was articulated in the ground
breaking book, The Secular City.
After living in Berlin for a year, and teaching on both sides of the barbed
wire barrier, he wrote what became his masterwork in 1965 – the central theme
of which made sense 50 years ago and even more sense today. In a clarifying essay penned 25 years after
the publication of The Secular City, Cox
stated that he still stands by his thesis:
Secularization—if it is
not permitted to calcify into an ideology (which I called "secular- ism")—is
not everywhere and always an evil. It prevents powerful religions from acting
on their theocratic pretensions. It allows people to
choose among a wider range of worldviews. Today, in parallel fashion, it seems
obvious that the resurgence of religion in the world is not everywhere and
always a good thing. Do the
long-suffering people of Iran believe that after the removal of their ruthless
shah, the installation of a quasi-theocratic
Islamic republic has turned out to be a wholly positive move? Do those Israelis
and Palestinians who yearn for a peaceful settlement of the West Bank
bloodletting believe that either the Jewish or the Muslim religious parties are
helping? How do the citizens of Beirut and Belfast feel about the continuing vitality
of religion?
His
thinking resonated with me as a young man entering college in 1970 at the
United Church of Christ Lakeland College and it still does. There are blessings
that come to real people when theocratic regulations and blue laws are liberalized
or even abandoned. We know, for example, that as much as we cherish Sabbath, it
is a good thing that grocery stores are open on Sundays. Or that women can
vote. Or that health care is becoming a right rather than a privilege given to
just the wealth. Cox celebrated the blessings of secularization and he got it
right.
What
he left out, however, is something that all well-intentioned liberals tend to
forget but must come to terms with if they are to be honest and faithful: that
is, that all human beings are filled with goodness even as we are sinners.
+ Liberals
don’t like the word sinner – it certainly has been abused and misused – but
like St. Paul told us well before Harvey Cox was ever born: all
have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. All. Like the African-American spiritual makes clear: it’s
not my sister, nor my brother but its ME
O Lord who’s standing in the need of prayer.
+ Secularization,
it seems, created new opportunities for freedom and imagination, while also
opening the door for novel and unexpected forms of fear, depravity,
hopelessness and sin. A friend of mine
who used to work for the Rand Foundation called this reality the doctrine of
unintended con-sequences (which is just a modern way of talking about original
sin): not only can things go
terribly wrong in real life with human beings, they will go terribly wrong given human nature, but we won’t know
when or how this will happen until it happens.
That is why religious conservatives
insist upon rule keeping and playing it safe: they know that chaos is always
lurking just around the corner so better to move slowly than open Pandora’s
Box. By 1969, however, there was no going back-wards in Western culture. The
conservative Islamic revolutions of the Middle East may have tried to turn the
cultural clock back to the Caliphate, but it never really worked – even in
Saudi Arabia where sexual repression and drug addiction among the elite is
rampant.
And if it couldn’t really work there,
there was no possibility of going back to the “good old
days” of conservative,
middle class, WASP values in the US of A once birth control, social mobility
and civil rights became the rule of law. Professor Cox was taking all of this in, you
see, and in his next essay, The Feast of
Fools, he offered some correctives. He had come to see that when religious
rules evaporate in a society for whatever reason, something always races in to
fill the vacuum. For a time in the United States, that something was sensation
– sex, drugs and rock and roll – freedom, abandon and the blurring of lines and
limitations. But by 1969, there was a back lash – the so-called Silent Majority
that was terrified of our unbridled freedom - and Richard Nixon rode this fear all
the way to the White House.
+ Tracing the trajectory of his own social
history, Cox realized that secularization first encourages freedom, but then
morphs into license which provokes fear and repression as a countervailing
force to the inevitable excesses of that original blessing.
+ Did you get all that? What I was trying
to say is that sinful people will always screw good things up – and that
applies to freedom as much as grace – because all have sinned and fallen short
of the glory of God.
What if the best in our old religious
traditions could create a spiritual dialectic that not only accepted the
ambiguities of human freedom, but taught, trained and helped every day people
to embrace freedom and grace with a playful and humble respectability? That
is what The Feast of Fools wrestled
with: a playful and humble respect for grace and freedom. It was a way of doing
spirituality and formation that not only grabbed my imagination, but shaped my
spiritual, intellectual and practical work as a pastor for over 30 years. It
became the core of my doctoral dissertation and gave shape and form to my
prayer life, too. Further, the insights of Harvey Cox pushed me towards
ministry back in 1968 and sustain me today when the burdens of the institutional
church become too ponderous, ugly or just plain boring.
And one more confession: it was Cox who encouraged
me to take the foolishness of Christ seriously. St. Paul was explicit: the ways
of Jesus are NOT socially, politically or economically congruent with the
status quo. Speaking to the status seeking believers of first century Corinth
he said:
Look we are
fools for the sake of Christ… We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor,
but we in disrepute. To the
present hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed and beaten and
home-less and we grow weary from
the work of our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we speak kindly. We
have become like the rubbish of the world, the dregs of all things, to this
very day.
You can be religious and a part of the status quo; you
can attend to the rituals of tradition and philosophy and seek the ways of
power. But you can’t be a faithful follower of the one who died on the Cross
without giving up all illusions of traditional power and prestige. Because if
you want to follow Jesus, like Andrew and Simon Peter or James and John in the
gospel for today, you have to become a fool: one who trusts that God’s
blessings are greater and more authentic than all trappings of social
respectability, power and prestige.
In retrospect, you see, I was drawn to Cox – and through him
to the foolishness of Christ – because he incarnated for me a way into Christ’s
foolishness. As a straight, white,
middle class man I needed a guide into the foolishness of Christ because I came
of age in Darien, CT – a wealthy suburb for New York City executives – and I
went to church in Darien. My youth group was VERY, VERY affluent in Darien: we had ski
weekend trips that were NOT subsidized. We did mission trips all over the
country and there were NO scholarships available. It was just assumed that
every family had lots of discretionary cash.
Now this was mostly a sweet place to grow up and I am
grateful for the education I received and the friends I made as a working class
kid amidst the splendor. But there were not obvious role models in Darien for
becoming a fool for Christ. What’s more, being on the outside of affluence and
looking in I could see that all that money and power and prestige didn’t make
my peers any happier than me. In fact, in
my junior year of high school I had three friends who tried to kill them-selves
– and one succeeded – making it clear that not all that glitters is gold. How
did St. Bob Dylan put it? In some places money doesn’t talk, it swears – and
leaves a whole lot of young people hurting, empty and afraid, too.
It was in this vacuum of hurt and chaos that Cox
offered me an alternative – it was neither religious fundamentalism nor liberal
naiveté – but rather the foolishness of Christ. And do you know where I first heard
the theology of Harvey Cox and his invitation to become a fool for Christ? Any
idea? “Godspell.” The Broadway musical “Godspell” began as a
Master’s thesis project for a young student at Carnegie Mellon University who
later went on to work in a spirituality and the arts project at St. John the
Divine Cathedral in NYC. It seems that
this young student had read Feast of
Fools and wrote a play about the foolishness of Christ as his master’s
thesis. He even portrayed and described the character of Jesus in his play as a
harlequin. A clown. If you’ve seen it, you know what I am saying is true.
Now in the Broadway play, “Godspell,” and the book Feast of Fools by Harvey Cox, there are
two core ideas, two alternatives to the social stagnation of religion in
America and the empty cruelty of a secular society obsessed with greed and fear:
festivity and fantasy.
+ Festivity is a commitment to joy: it is a
celebration of life, the practice of hope despite all the evidence to
the contrary, a willingness to give your life up for the common good. Festivity is a spiritual discipline, a
decision to see grace in every moment and trust that God is in charge – always
– it is the path of awe born of devotion rather than obligation. Jesus put it like this: I desire mercy not
sacrifice… for I have come so that your joy may be full. Are you with me? Festivity is a commitment to joy.
+ Fantasy is a commitment to prophetic
playfulness: it is a way of living that imagines and
embraces life as it should be, not simply as it is. It embraces existence
trust that every person matters and every soul has value – no one is taken for
granted and all life is sacred – and that means plant life, dirt life, water
life, animal life and human life – including infirm life, insane life and
inchoate life. Jesus put this commitment to us like this: unless ye become as like a child, you shall
not enter the kingdom of God… so be not anxious. Fantasy is a commitment to
prophetic playfulness.
And the more time I spend with the
Gospels, the more I am certain that a life constructed
upon a foundation of
fantasy and festivity is what attracted Andrew and Peter to follow Jesus, don’t
you think? Jesus offered them a way of living that had meaning and depth beyond
the obvious. It was baptized in joy and infused with possibilities. Jesus
showed them how to trust God even while gazing at life as through a glass
darkly. He showed them how to turn bread
and wine into a feast of faith and devotion. He turned the ancient prophetic
poems of Israel into deeds and dreams that restored joy and justice – grace and
gratitude – hope and true humility – to the heart of real life. The kingdom was
not abstract or post-poned for some later time, it was about being embraced by God's love every day and in every way. The
text tells us that Andrew and Simon Peter immediately dropped their nets and
followed Jesus when his foolishness was revealed. And no wonder – it was good news. No wonder people followed…
+ I did – when I first heard “Day by Day”
from the show “Godspell” I knew
that the foolish way of Jesus was for me. Earlier I had been touched and
encouraged by his grace in an alternative church in Washington, DC, but it was that song that pushed me out of
my safety zone and helped me follow Jesus into ministry.
+ My father, you see, didn’t want me to
become a minister. He hated most ministers – his own father had been a minister
– and he was a broken man who dumped my dad and grandmother for another life
just as the country was coming out of the Great Depression. My father hated the
humiliation he had to face as a pastor’s kid forced through a public divorce in
the 30’s. And let’s not even mention the shame of his poverty.
My dad and I fought about my calling for
decades – it was ugly and mean-spirited and heart-breaking – and while we
finally resolved it, it took its toll. But you know what: I did it any how – not as an adolescent prank
– but because at some level I got
what Paul was saying whenever I put on “Day by Day” on my record player. When
reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we speak kindly. We become
like the rubbish of the world, the dregs of all things, to this very day…
because we are fools for Christ.
Look, I’m not saying that I was better
than my father – not at all – just that I had been touched by a power greater
than his rules, my fears and all the middle class pressure and
tradition that people told me would give my life meaning but pushed my peers
towards suicide. It was the power of Christ’s foolishness that made sense to me
– and the longer I’ve trusted it – the truer it has become for me. And back in
the day, whenever I needed a reminder about the truth of Jesus and his foolish
wisdom, I went to that song. Not to church.
Not to the Bible. Not even to prayer – although that song “Day by Day” IS a 13th century
English prayer albeit with a distinctively 20th century folk-rock
back beat – I went to that song. And that’s what I want to make
clear to you today: in order to follow Jesus, to live into his foolishness and
embrace his Cross, we need encouragement.
+ Today’s psalm – Psalm 62 – tells us in
the first Hebrew verse – not the Anglicized poetry of our Psalter, but the
actual Hebrew – that: only as I move
towards God am I at rest. Only in God is
my being quiet.
+ So beautiful, so true; so think about
that: only as we move towards God’s truth – God’s will – God’s presence and God’s
foolish wisdom do we find a stronghold – a resting place – quiet and order in the
midst of chaos.
Back in my day, Feast of Fools and “Day by Day” helped me reconnect and move towards
God, but my way isn’t your way. You need your own way – your own rescue and
stronghold – your own path to help you turn back towards the Lord. Now I don’t know what encouragement –
resting place – or strong hold helps you – I just know that you need it. I need, you need it and we all need it. That’s
why the Psalm ends by telling us there is ONE
thing God has spoken – and it is not a word of judgment – and it has nothing to
do with preserving the status quo.
· + The one thing God has spoken is this: the
loving-kindness of the Lord – God’s grace – lasts forever: It is
patient; it is kind; it is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on
its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in
wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all
things, hopes all things, endures all things.
· + As an affirmation of this truth, I’d like
you to join me by singing that old prayer/song, “Day by Day.” Even if you don’t
yet have your own way into the reassurance and quiet rest of God’s love, let your
heart trust that God’s love is real. Take a chance be a REAL fool for Christ.
