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Book ‘Em (Jer. 1:4-10; Cor. 13:1-13; Lk. 4:21-30)

In Flannery O’Connor’s short story "Revelation," Ruby Turpin is sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, evaluating each person around her. Ruby judges herself to be superior, by more than a grade or two, to everyone there, especially to a poor, unkempt, teenaged wretch seated across from her who is reading a book. Ruby thinks it sad that the girl’s parents did not groom her more attractively. Perish the thought of having a child as scowling as this one.

As for the "ugly" child, Mary Grace, she listens for a while as Ruby chatters outloud about the superiority of poor blacks over "white trash." Then, without warning, Mary Grace fixes her steely eyes on Ruby and hurls her book across the room. The book hits Ruby in the head and she falls to the floor with Mary Grace on top of her hissing into her ear; "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog!"

This, says O’Connor, is the violent, shocked beginning of Ruby’s redemption, the catalyst for her repentance and her heavenly vision. Revelation often begins when a large book hits you on the head.

Now, the Bible is a violent book. That’s good, because we are very violent people. Something about our system of government makes an average of 2,000 New Yorkers want to kill one another. This is the system that we graciously offer to the people of Iraq.

But in Luke 4, in Jesus’ sermon in Nazareth, the violence is different. Here the violence is due not to the aspirations of American democracy or lust for national security, but rather to Jesus. All the Gospels agree that from the moment Jesus sets foot in the pulpit, things get nasty.

A friend of mine returned from an audience with His Holiness the Dali Lama. "When his Holiness speaks," my friend said, "everyone in the room becomes quiet, serene and peaceful." Not so with Jesus. Things were fine in Nazareth until Jesus opened his mouth and all hell broke lose.

And this was only his first sermon! One might have thought that Jesus would have used a more effective rhetorical strategy, would have saved inflammatory speech until he had taken the time to build trust, to win people’s affection, to contextualize his message -- as we are urged to do in homiletics classes.

No, instead he threw the book at them, hit them right between the eyes with Isaiah, and jabbed them with First Kings, right to the jaw, left hook. Beaten, but not bowed, the congregation struggled to its feet, regrouped and attempted to throw the preacher off a cliff. And Jesus "went on his way."

And what a way to go. In just a few weeks, this sermon will end, not in Nazareth but at Golgotha. For now, Jesus has given us the slip. Having preached the sovereign grace of God -- grace for a Syrian army officer or a poor pagan woman at Zarephath -- Jesus demonstrates that he is free even from the community that professes to be people of the Book. The Book and its preachers are the hope of the community of faith, not its pets or possessions. Perhaps the church folk at Capernaum won’t put up such a fight. Jesus moves on, ever elusive and free.

Those of us who have been trained to make rhetorical peace with the congregation marvel at the freedom of Jesus to preach over their heads, to wound in order to heal, to use their own beloved texts against them. How sly of the common lectionary to pair this linguistic assault by Jesus at Nazareth with Paul’s pretty words on love. Poor preachers. Sometimes we love our people in the name of Christ, enduring just about everything with them, and sometimes we love them by throwing the Book at them. No wonder young Jeremiah resisted when God called him to "speak whatever I command you." Smart boy, Jeremiah.

Kierkegaard noted that many great minds of his century had given themselves to making people’s lives easier -- inventing labor-saving machines and devices. He said that he would dedicate himself to making peoples lives more difficult. He would become a preacher.

In a seminar for preachers that I led with Stanley Hauerwas, one pastor said, in a plaintive voice, "The bishop sent me to a little town in South Carolina. I preached one Sunday on the challenge of racial justice. In two months my people were so angry that the bishop moved me. At the next church, I was determined for things to go better. Didn’t preach about race. But we had an incident in town, and I felt forced to speak.

"The board met that week and voted unanimously for us to be moved. My wife was insulted at the supermarket. My children were beaten upon the school ground."

My pastoral heart went out to this dear, suffering brother. Hauerwas replied, "And your point is what? We work for the living God, not a false, dead god! Did somebody tell you it would be easy?"

Not one drop of sympathy for this brother, not a bit of collegial concern. Jesus moves right on from Nazareth to Capernaum, another Sabbath, another sermon, where the congregational demons cry out to him, "Let us alone!" (Luke 4:34). But he won’t, thank God. He is free to administer his peculiar sort of grace, whether we hear or refuse to hear. This is our good news.

As for us preachers: "See, today I appoint you over nations and over Kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy, and to overthrow." (Jer. 1:10) -- with no weapon but words.

Arguing with Muslims

A while back a Duke student was telling me that he and his roommate were not getting along well. I asked him why. "Because be is a Muslim and I’m not." I asked him how that made a difference.

"When we moved in together, he asked me what my religion was. I told him that I was a sort of Christian. A Lutheran. I told him up front that my family and I weren’t the very best Christians, that we only went to church occasionally, and it wasn’t that big a deal to me. But my roommate has this nasty habit of asking embarrassing questions."

"What sort of questions?" I asked.

"Like after we had roomed together a few weeks, he asked me, ‘Why do you Christians never pray?’ I told him, ‘We pray all the time. We just sort of keep it to ourselves.’

"He said, ‘I’ll say that you do. I’ve never seen you pray.’ He prays, like, a half dozen times a day on his prayer rug in our room, facing East Durham.

"The last straw was Saturday morning, when I came in from a date, and he asked me, ‘Doesn’t your St. Paul say something about not joining your body with a prostitute?’

"I told him, ‘Look, she is not a prostitute! She’s a Tri Delt. I told you I am not the best Christian in the world. You shouldn’t judge the Christian faith by me!"’

And I, hearing the torment in his voice, asked, "Well, how should he judge the Christian faith? I ought to write your Muslim roommate a thank-you note. If that Muslim keeps working on you, he may yet make you into a real Christian."

Such are the encounters between Christians and Muslims on campus these days.

I’ve enjoyed the series in this magazine, "Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?" (April 20, May 4, May 18, June 1, August 24). The comments on worship in Judaism and Christianity, compared with that in Islam, have been clarifying and helpful. But there were times in reading those articles that I wanted to protest: "But we have a much more interesting and difficult God than that!" I’m fond of saying to students that the modern question, "Is there a god?" is unbiblical. The Bible’s big issue is, "Who is the God who is there?"

We have a most interesting God. But so do Muslims. And our God looks even more interesting when compared with their God. From my own experiences in a bubbling multifaith environment, when we interface with people of different faiths, the toughest task is to let the other be the other, to attempt to love our neighbor, as Jesus commanded us, in all the neighbor’s differentiation and peculiarity, to bless the neighbor as the neighbor really is, not as the person we would have the neighbor become.

When it comes to faith, it’s often the differences and the peculiarities that we love the most about our religion. This is what Diana L. Eck fails to recognize in books like A New Religious America. Her approach, like that of many, seems to be, "First make Muslims convert into liberal, Western universalists, then render your faith into an abstraction, a generality. Then we can talk." The great theological challenge for Christians is to demonstrate, in our interactions with Muslims, that we have God-given resources for letting the neighbor remain the other and still be the neighbor.

In his book Clueless in Academe, Gerald Graff says that the purpose of higher education is to teach students to argue. Our society, says Graff, is conditioned to avoid engagement with the ideas of others. Better simply to assert our beliefs than truly to listen and to respond to the beliefs of another, and to risk being changed in the conversation. The purpose of higher education is to begin an argument.

Yet most of us learn to converse with other people in such a way that either we don’t encounter them as they are, in all their difference and particularity, or we rework them, making them over in our minds so that we are able to say to them, "Well, after all, we’re both really saying fairly much the same thing, right?"

It would be a shame for us Christians to do that to our sisters and brothers in Islam. On campus I’ve found that our Islamic neighbors can be important allies in our attempt to walk by faith rather than merely to acquiesce to the American Way.

If you keep your attributes of God abstract enough -- God is omnipotent, God is omniscient, loving, just -- all three "Abrahamic" faiths appear to be on the same page, or talking about the same God, because to be Muslims, Christians and Jews all believe that God is omnipotent, loving and just. Trouble is, this sort of abstract reasoning is about as revealing as saying that "Mary Jones is a Caucasian, female android." You haven’t said much. And who wants to talk to someone who is just like us?

When you get down to the scriptures of these faiths, the specific stories they tell about God, then the claim that all these often conflicting stories are talking about the same God seems simplistic and silly. Christians and Jews worship the same God because we share many of the same stories. We share Abraham, though we say very different things about him and Sarah. Two thirds of the Bible, and just about everyone of our claims for Jesus, came to us as gifts of the Jews.

But I defy anyone to attempt to read through a translation of the Qur’an, the holy book of Muslims, and come away saying, "Well, Jesus and Muhammad are headed in much the same direction. Muhammad routinely says things that just would not fit into the mouth of Jesus.

What do I really know about the God of Islam anyway? Islam, like Christianity, is more than a set of ideas; it’s a way of life. If I have not attempted to take up the practice of Islam, then my understanding of it will be limited. I recall the Hindu student who complained to me about the silly "World Religions" course that she was taking at Duke.

"The professor makes Hinduism sound like some sort of desiccated philosophy. Hinduism is what we eat, what we do, not some interesting explanation for the vacuity of American middle-class lives!" It was enlightening to see how faith wilts in the hands of detached, academically arrogant onlookers in the department of religion. Their idea seems to be that you must first kill something, then spread it out like a cadaver on an operating table, in order to think about it. The Hindu student’s comments made me embarrassed that I have not been incensed at what is done to my faith in the "Introduction to Christian Theology" class. Hindus and Muslims often remind Christians on campus that we have allowed our faith to be qualified and our intellectual life to be truncated by the limits of Western ways of thought and economics. Christianity, like Islam, is something that we eat and something that we do that makes us determinedly different from what the government would have us be.

If my daily practice of my religion has taught me anything, it is that I have so often failed to live up to what I know about the God who is Trinity that -- well, who am I to criticize others for misunderstanding the truth about God? Fortunately, my faith gives me resources that enable me constantly to confess my stupidity and infidelity. I don’t know enough about the God who has met me in Jesus Christ to say conclusively just who does and who does not get this God absolutely right.

I do know that it’s wrong to paper over and sugarcoat our differences with Islam. Jesus, our image of God -- the Son of God, Savior of the World -- is notably different from much that is said about God by Muhammad. If Muhammad is a prophet of the true God, as all Muslims know him to be, then that God seems not at all like the God Jesus taught us to call "Father." Muhammad was a sort of knight, an astute military man, a government official and a wise teacher who ended his life in serene beatification. Jesus was a teacher who brutally died at the hands of the military, the government and the religious establishment, refusing to lift a hand in self-defense, and then was raised from the dead. Watch the expression on the face of a Muslim when you tell that story. Forgive Muslims and Christians for having difficulty finding points of contact between our two faiths.

True, both faiths talk "love," "peace," "justice," but once again we have remarkably different ways of defining or obtaining love, peace, and justice -- so different that, well, it’s almost as if we were worshiping a different God.

Sometimes students have asked, "What did Jesus say about Muslims?" Of course, the answer is, "Nothing." There’s not one word of condemnation of other religions and other faiths in the teaching of Jesus, except for Roman emperor worship. No, when Jesus is in his most condemnatory, judgmental mood, it’s his own disciples that he beats up on the most. For the Bible, judgment begins not against other faiths but rather with God’s own house, with God’s own people, us.

Last year, during Islamic Awareness Week, Duke had a panel discussion involving an imam from Chicago, a local rabbi and me (representing all Christians everywhere, even though you didn’t vote for me to represent you). During the discussion, the imam said, "Islam is a very tolerant faith. In the Holy Qur’an, if an unbeliever attacks a believer, I am under obligation to punish the unbeliever. If my brother here, the Jew, is attacked by an unbeliever, the Holy Prophet commands me to punish the persecutor."

The rabbi seemed pleased by this. For my part, I said, "Gee. I wish Jesus had said something like that! I’ve got people that I want to punish, folk who need killing. Unfortunately, even when we tried to defend Jesus, he cursed us and told us to put away the swords!"

Frankly, I think Muslims have got it right when they say that Christians in the West appear to have produced, or at least acquiesced to, a pagan, sex-saturated, violent, materialistic society. Muslims seem to despise us not because we’re so free (wrong, G. W. Bush) or because we’re so very Christian (wrong, Jerry Falwell) but because we’re so awfully pagan.

And on campus many Christians have found that we really need Muslims to help us withstand the assaults of pagans in the department of religion and at the local shopping mall, I’ve watched conservative evangelical, Bible-thumping Christian students link up with conservative, Qur’an-thumping Muslim students -- they are brought together by the realization that in many subtle and disturbing ways the modern university is aligned against belief in and fidelity to any God. In many subtle and powerful ways the modern university is designed to produce people who have no god to worship but Calvin Klein and The Gap.

Furthermore, we Christians need to admit that -- considering our lamentable infidelity to the God of Israel and the church -- it’s no wonder that most Muslims are distinctively unimpressed with our God. We invoke God’s name as we bomb, occupy and dominate Islamic countries. We may say on our money "in God we trust," but Muslims suspect that oil, power and wealth are our true hearts’ desire. I wonder if Muslims look at us and think, "You’re going to have to look a lot more redeemed before I’ll believe in your redeemer."

I find it deeply disturbing that terrorists justify their murderous work with appeals to the Qur’an, though from my reading of the Qur’an I can see their point. Perhaps I should find it even more disturbing that the people who led us into the war in Iraq -- and, I presume, most of the young people who have committed abuses in our Iraqi prisons -- are all this day praying to Jesus.

Recently I was asked by a reporter if I thought it was moral for the Southern Baptists to send missionaries to Iraq (I’m not sure that the Southern Baptists are awaiting my approval on this!). I replied that I don’t see any harm in sending Southern Baptist missionaries to Iraq, but I wonder how many Iraqi folk you can convert to Jesus, Prince of Peace, Lamb of God, after you have bombed them into oblivion. Not many, I’d wager (if Methodists were allowed to wager).

The God of Islam and the God of the church and synagogue appear to look enough like God to make dialogue possible, but also different enough to make for an interesting conversation.

I know this: Our God, the God we meet in Jesus the Christ, has given us our Islamic sisters and brothers and commanded us to go and to tell, to witness, and to live our lives in service to the Trinity in such a way that our sisters and brothers might say, "Wow, you really have an interesting God. Tell us and show us more.

I can fully understand why Muslims aren’t that interested in the Trinity, considering our sorry record of fidelity to Jesus, but we Christians are trying to believe what the Jews taught us: that there is only one God (and it’s not us) -- Lord of heaven and earth, God of love -- who commands us to deal with our sisters and brothers as this gracious, forgiving, receiving God has dealt with us.

In strange ways, the modern university campus can be a great place to think about these matters. Years ago there was a student whom I met his first day of the school year. He was tall, utterly white, utterly blond, utterly southern. I saw him walking on campus sometime later, hand in hand with a young woman who was short, utterly brown and (as I was to discover) utterly Muslim and Ohioan. Sure enough, I got a call from his mother. "Have you met Thomas’s girlfriend?" she asked. "Talk to him! They’re serious!"

I called him in for a chat and eventually asked, "Thomas, tell me about Miranda." He told me that they were very much in love, that she was a wonderful person and that they were planning to be married right after graduation.

I said, "Really? Tell me what brought you together."

He said, "We had so very much in common."

I said, "Thomas, you’re from South Carolina, you’re blond and Baptist. She’s Muslim, brown and from Ohio. What in the world could you possibly have in common?"

He said, "Well, you know me -- I don’t drink on weekends and don’t believe in casual sex. And I’m not really into the success-at-any-cost thing. She was the only girl I met who had the same values as mine,"

How do we Christians hope to survive on campus without Muslims?

Damn Preacher (Lk 6:17-26)

All I know about Jesus is what I heard him say. That’s all I know about almost anybody. It’s not true that "deeds speak louder than words." Only words speak. The old "I’d rather see a sermon than hear one" is only partly true. Most ministerial speech these days tends to be in the affirmative mood. We pastors are, in the acerbic words of Stanley Hauerwas, a "quivering mass of availability." Give me an activity or attitude that appeals to you and I will -- after some sensitive, caring, pastoral reflection -- find theological justification for it.

Still, after that unpleasantness in Nazareth, with Jesus rhetorically slashing and burning through the congregation, it’s good to hear him in a more affirmative mood two chapters later. The dust settles, Jesus at last gets down on our level and speaks. It is a wonderfully self-revealing moment. Jesus did not get to finish his sermon at Nazareth a few weeks ago. Now with everyone attentive, and Jesus himself calmed down, he will lay out his program in detail.

Matthew remembers this sermon as being much longer. But despite the brevity of Luke’s version, he adds four woes to the Matthean blessings -- woes that negate the opening affirmations, reversing our systems of value. Those woes are a key to Jesus’ homiletic.

Whereas my most "prophetic" sermons are in the imperative mood -- do this, do that, you should, you ought -- Jesus preaches in the indicative. The sermon is a picture of who’s in and who’s out in God’s kingdom. I tend to begin sermons with anthropology: descriptions of what we are doing or should do, who we are or who we wish we were. I do this because I assume that most people are more interested in themselves than in God. As Luke says, the huge crowds from all over Judea came not only to "hear him" but also "to be healed," to plug into the therapeutic "power" that "came forth from him." We tend to ask not "What is God really like?" but rather "Jesus, what have you done for me lately?" Narcissism is a hard habit to break.

Jesus is more theocentric in his preaching. A sermon is a sermon when it’s about God. We learn implications for human behavior only after we learn who God is and what God is up to.

Another thing. The discourse is eschatological. It’s a vision not of present arrangements, but of what God will get when God’s kingdom is come, God’s will is done on earth. One doesn’t hear much eschatology in my mainline denomination these days because most of us have got it so good. We’re sitting on top of all this world has to offer and we don’t want to be, in Luther’s words, "damned for the gospel" in order to be dragged kicking and screaming into some other world. Eschatology says that God is disruptive and dangerous before being creative. In this inauguration address, Jesus declares war, announcing an invasion related to a whole new world.

"Blessed are you, who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God." Jesus blesses those whom the world curses -- the poor, the unemployed, the dispossessed and the oppressed. "Blessed are you hungry people, you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep. Blessed are you who are hated by others because of your love for me."

If that were all there was to Jesus’ sermon that day, then we might remember it as one of the sweetest sermons ever preached. But then, true to form (Luke 4) Jesus moves from blessing to cursing.

You rich, damn you! You have already "received your consolation." You were good at working the kingdoms of this world to your advantage. Now, in God’s kingdom, you shall be cursed.

For those of you who are full, stuffed with all that can be consumed in this culture, having found so many ways to satisfy your gnawing hunger, what more can God do for you?

In God’s coming kingdom, you shall be damned to emptiness. Wipe that smirk off your face, you drugged, self-satisfied happy ones! There’s a new savior in town. Time for tears.

Damn you who are acclaimed and praised, who are asked to write articles for the CENTURY, called to Waco to receive a gold medal for being a top-tier preacher. You carefully weigh your words, being sure never to offend anyone with the truth. That’s the way the false prophets preached before you.

Jesus’ sermon is a repeat of Mary’s song (Luke 1:45-57.) God takes sides and loves with a love that is not impartial. If we are going to be with this God, the sermon implies, we’ve got to get down on God’s level.

Is this anyway to preach? It’s certainly not how I learned to preach. In Not Every Spirit, Christopher Morse demonstrates that the early Christians were persecuted not for what they believed (Jesus Christ is Lord) but for what they refused to believe (Caesar is Lord). We pastors are distinguished not only by what we graciously support, but also by what we condemn. Any homiletic that seeks to make peace with hearers cannot be faithful to the gospel. Ralph Wood pointed out that in the great Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church in Germany, every credimus, "We believe . . . ," is followed by a damnatis, "We reject. . ." Alas, when it came time for the rest of the German church to say "Nein!" It had lost the theological means to know there was even something about the world worth rejecting, as well as lost the courage to say "No!"

Carlyle Marney chided pastors for ministry that had degenerated into therapy. "You little preachers!" Marney used to say when he was my mentor "You are always saying, ‘Bless, bless, bless’ when you ought to be saying. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn!"’

Answering Pilate: Truth and the Postliberal Church

The scene had taken place before, and, alas, it would be repeated millions of times. A Jew, back still bloody from a nasty whipping, stood stripped before a gentile bureaucrat. What was to be done with this troublesome Jew, who seemed determined to undermine peace and justice?

"Are you a king?" Pilate asked. Jesus answered, "I came into the world to bear witness to the truth" (John 18:3438). Pilate then asked a wonderfully philosophical question, "What is truth?" Perhaps Pilate learned that question in his student days at the academy in Rome. The young Jew was unable to converse about truth with a university-educated philosopher like Pilate. After all, he had simply told his disciples, "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6).

It frightens us to hear such open talk about truth. We are more concerned with how to live in a world where there is a plurality of truths—and with how to do so without killing each other—than we are with truth. Pilate himself was trying to deal with this problem of pluralism. It was difficult enough keeping Jews in their place—with their Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes—without a young Nazarene claiming to be the truth. Pilate’s response to Jesus’ claim was to try to get him into a philosophical discussion about truth. And then, when this rabbi refused to enter the discussion—refused to be rational—he had him killed.

I’m not sure that we’ve gotten much beyond Pilate in handling pluralism. We are heirs to the liberal theological enterprise which assumes that there is some universal experience that can be characterized as "religious." The plurality of religions, the liberal assumes, is the varied expression of a universal human experience. We shouldn’t be too dismayed by the wide array of religious expressions in our society, according to this view, for the basic experience behind them transcends their particular expressions. But if we encounter an expression that is contrary to whatever we have defined as the "basic religious experience"— as happens, say, when a devotee of Campus Crusade tells a Mormon that she is going to hell—we dismiss this perspective as an unreasonable aberration, an inadequate expression of our basic religious aspirations. The liberal, despite his or her claims of openness, is really quite imperialistic in insisting that all religions be evaluated on the basis of some allegedly universal criteria.

We can contrast the liberal approach with what, following Yale Divinity School professor George Lindbeck, we can call the postliberal approach. For the postliberal, theology is not a description of some universally available experience, but rather an expression of the faith held by a particular religious community. From this perspective, a Christian theologian does not simply state an experience which "oft was felt but ne’er so well expressed," but articulates the convictions of those who have been personally and socially transformed by a religious community. A Jew and a Christian differ not in using a different language to describe the same experiences of God, but in having learned different languages and listened to different stories, which have given them different experiences of God.

In The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Westminster, 1984), Lindbeck contrasts the cultural-linguistic understanding of religion with the experiential-expressive understanding assumed by liberals. The cultural-linguistic approach denies that there is a universal, experiential core to all religions; it recognizes that different religions evoke fundamentally different experiences. Buddhist compassion, Christian love and the sentiment of fraternity in revolutionary France are not versions of a single attitude; they are very different ways of experiencing and being oriented toward self and world.

The liberal theological enterprise promised to give us a way to talk to one another on the basis of some universal aspect of religion—a sense of the holy, for instance. The problem is that there are religions in which a sense of the holy has little or no importance. Thus the experiential-expressive approach lacks empirical support, and tends to distort the religions it purports to understand.

To assume a universal aspect to one’s faith may be unfair to other religions. Stanley Hauerwas says, for example, that it is unfair for Christians to assert that the figure of Christ on the cross is a representation of all human suffering. What Christians learn from the cross is that all human suffering should be cruciform. Similarly, the messianic reign of God should not be taken as a symbol of human hope for the future; rather, it is on the basis of that eschatological vision that futuristic thinking is to be judged. The scriptural definitions of goodness, beauty and justice should transform our cultural notions of these realities, not the other way around. In our lifetime, however, biblical interpretation and theology have largely assumed that Christians must translate their particular language into terms intelligible to the wider culture. Tillich’s attempt to address his day’s "cultured despisers" of religion has set the agenda for subsequent theologians and given us the primary paradigm for our thinking—the translation of Scripture into extrascriptural categories.

It is not surprising that the experiential-expressive view of religion has been fervently embraced, particularly by those of us who work in the academic village. It assures us that our differences are not so troubling. It also fits nicely with the American view that the inner self is the source of all value. Perhaps, above all, it gives us an account of religion that is not dependent upon a religious community, a corporate embodiment of faith. In the terms of the experiential-expressive approach, we all start with our personal religious experiences and then adjust them in light of others’ experiences. The academic enterprise tends to regard this dissolution of traditional ties as the very goal of education—educare means "to lead out." Truth, it is thought, must be something affirmed by the autonomous individual if it is to be authentic.

Faith communities, Lindbeck charges, have become purveyors of this kind of religious commodity rather than intentional communities that socialize their members into comprehensive forms of life. When I hear a student say that he has "decided that Judaism makes about as much sense as anything else" or another claim that "Catholicism is my religion but I don’t want it to destroy my individuality," I am reminded that our society encourages us to think of the self as somehow prior to social influences, an innate given rather than a communal gift. "Fulfillment" comes from shedding the layers of the social self in order to penetrate the inner depths of one’s ego rather than in engaging in communal action.

Someone may say, "If the world is to avoid nuclear annihilation, we must become more unified, not more diverse and particular. Bless those who seek some generalized, foundational principles capable of unifying our diverse religious quests." But from a Christian point of view, we must care for the distinctiveness of our language and the distinctiveness of our community formed by that language because that language is true. I would be forced to say this even if I didn’t believe that saying so would help us to deal with moral fragmentation. I believe that the life, death, teaching and resurrection of Jesus constitute the truth that enables me to live with hope and therefore peace. At the same time it is precisely the particulars of the story of Jesus that enable me to deal responsibly with those who disagree with me—without demanding that they adhere to some specific standard of reasonability.

The liberal may well object that postliberalism fails to make religion intelligible either to the cultured or the uncouth despisers of religion. Without agreement on foundational principles, how can unbelievers understand us? But the postliberal would respond that unbelievers are not aided by our attempts to translate religion into culturally acceptable categories—any more than one is helped to learn French by reading English translations of French novels. Religions, like languages, must be understood on their own terms, learned, as we would learn French grammar, from the inside.

To the extent that religious people have allowed their convictions to be qualified by the liberal search for foundations and universals, they have lost their ability to see the world accurately. Their imaginations have become blunted, and they have lost whatever interesting things they have to say either to other religions or to our culture.

Consider, for instance, a recent campus debate about nuclear weapons. There were, as usual, two opposing views. One was that nuclear weapons are bad, because they give us the ability to destroy the world, and we should disarm rather than threaten the survival of civilization. The other view was that although nuclear weapons are bad, the Soviets have them, and if we don’t have them we might be subject to nuclear blackmail; unsavory as they are, the weapons help us ensure the survival of our way of life. I left the debate thinking, "At least both sides agree that the fundamental issue is survival.

My problem, as one who attempts to answer to the Christian story, is that survival cannot be the issue. I am part of the story of martyrs, and of accounts of Gethsemane and Golgotha. Those who collaborated with the Romans to put Jesus to death did so, according to the story, out of a concern for national survival. Christian heroes are those for whom survival was definitely not the issue. Perhaps Americans and Soviets are in this current mess because their only concern is survival. The Methodist bishops’ pastoral letter on nuclear arms, In Defense of Creation, is bound to be ignored by a society that sees that bishops talk no differently than do politicians. Do Christians have anything particular to offer to the discussion, or do they simply accept the parameters of the discussion as defined by the secular world?

Christians are in an awkward intermediate stage in Western culture: having once been culturally established, they are not yet clearly disestablished. This helps make liberalism attractive, since it keeps people vaguely related to the church. Through translation, we attempt to show that Christians are really interested in what interests "the best" in our culture. We translate Christian eschatological hopes into Marxist revolutionary ones, or we translate salvation into self-fulfillment. Our bishops speak out on "important issues," showing society that the church cares about the same things society cares about—and in the same way. We keep people interested in the church even though they no longer worship its God.

To reverse this situation, we must stop redescribing our faith to conform to what is already known. We must begin teaching a language and way of life that transforms the self. Lindbeck recalls that pagan converts to Christianity did not first have a religious expression and then decide to become Christians. Rather, they were attracted to the church’s way of life and then submitted themselves to the sometimes painful discipline of being a Christian. When we reduce the Christian story with its particular, historical claims to the level of general, universal principles, we are left with precious little upon which to build a society. In our desire as religious people to be significant partners in national discourse, we have lost a distinctive voice. Meanwhile, people like Jerry Falwell trouble us because they refuse to find some religiously neutral or nonconfrontational way to state the social implications of their religious convictions.

My goal is not to make the church a sect, but simply to make it faithful. Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic approach reminds us that the notion of pluralism cannot eliminate the question of truth. And my truth, the truth which is Jesus of Nazareth, cannot be proved, dismissed or discussed without reference to the concrete community he forms.

If such talk of truth makes my neighbor, the rabbi, uncomfortable—and I can understand how it might—I can only point out that Jesus is my sole reason for defending the rabbi against the onslaughts of either fascist politicians or liberal theologians who will not embrace him until he becomes "rational" or "enlightened" in other words, something less than Jewish. As a Christian, I embrace him not because of my belief in universal human goodness or my perception of the commonality of our faiths, but because I am trying to follow a Master who came to me, a stranger, and embraced me as a brother, and who bids me do the same to others. The truthfulness of my faith must be judged on how well it teaches me to live without murderous fear or nihilistic despair. Without the resources of the Christian story I simply don’t have the resources to live peacefully in this violent world.

"Tolerance" is too often a vehicle for condemning those who demand that their differences be taken seriously. The liberal appeals to reason as the basis for toleration, but if some refuse to adapt to our current levels of toleration or our definitions of reasonableness, then there is only one explanation for their peculiarity—they must be without reason. Mere tolerance has rarely provided the moral resources necessary to stop an Auschwitz or a Cherokee Trail of Tears. As Rosemary Radford Ruether notes in Faith and Fratricide, "German Jews made a fundamental error in assuming that their place in German society could be assured by embrace of liberal values. The liberalism with which Jews allied themselves ... harbored fundamental ambivalences toward the Jews. The price of emancipation was also seen as one of cultural assimilation ... paving the way for Jewish conversion to Christianity. All liberals took for granted that ghetto Judaism represented a bad moral, spiritual, and intellectual condition. The price of emancipation was the destruction of Jewish self-government and autonomous corporate identity ... the Jew could become a ‘German’ or else" (pp. 217-218).

What can be our defense against tribalism if we permit discussion of the truthfulness of our various claims? The answer is that the truthfulness of any set of convictions is not in their alleged "universality" but in their practical force, the sort of lives they produce. Christians like Desmond Tutu and Mother Teresa of Calcutta are the only evidence we have that Jesus is "the way, the truth, and the life. " Christianity is not another philosophy or some primitive system of belief; it is a community of people who worship the Jew whom Pilate sent to the cross.

That community may not seem very interesting to some when they think of the churches they know, nor may it seem like an adequate resource for sustaining American democracy amid religious diversity. But no one can know me, as a Christian, unless he or she knows that community; nor can I know anyone else as a Jew, a Muslim or a Buddhist, except as someone for whom these qualifiers are more than mere accidents of birth. And as for whether our various faiths are a help or a hindrance to the success of this particular nation, I see no reason why that question should be the test of our convictions. My faith has reason to be suspicious of Pilate in any guise.

From a God We Hardly Knew (Isa. 9:6)

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given;

and his name will be called Wonderful Counselor,

Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace [Isa. 9:6].

Probably most of us have had the experience of receiving, right out of the blue, a gift from someone we really don’t know all that well. And, perhaps, to our consternation, the gift turns out to be nice, something that we didn’t know we wanted and certainly didn’t ask for, but there it is, a good gift from someone who is not really a good friend.

Now, what is the first thing we do in response?

Right. We try to come up with a gift to give in return -- not out of gratitude (after all, we didn’t ask for it) or out of friendship (after all, we hardly even know this person) , but because we don’t want to feel guilty.

We don’t want to be indebted. The gift seems to lay a claim upon us, especially since it has come from someone we barely know. This is uncomfortable; it’s hard to look the person in the face until we have reciprocated. By giving us a gift, this person has power over us.

It may well be, as Jesus says, more blessed to give than to receive. But it is more difficult to receive. Watch how people blush when given a compliment. Watch what you do when your teen-aged son comes home with a very expensive Christmas present from a girl he has dated only twice. "Now you take that expensive sweater right back and tell her that your parents won’t allow you to accept it. Every gift comes with a claim and you’re not ready for her claim upon you." In a society that makes strangers of us all, it is interesting what we do when a stranger gives us a gift.

And consider what we do at Christmas, the so-called season of giving. We enjoy thinking of ourselves as basically generous, benevolent, giving people. That’s one reason why everyone, even the nominally religious, loves Christmas. Christmas is a season to celebrate our alleged generosity. The newspaper keeps us posted on how many needy families we have adopted. The Salvation Army kettles enable us to be generous while buying groceries (for ourselves) or gifts (for our families). People we work with who usually balk at the collection to pay for the morning coffee fall over themselves soliciting funds "to make Christmas" for some family.

We love Christmas because, as we say, Christmas brings out the best in us. Everyone gives on Christmas, even the stingiest among us, even the Ebenezer Scrooges. Charles Dickens’s story of Scrooge’s transformation has probably done more to form our notions of Christmas than St. Luke’s story of the manger. Whereas Luke tells of God’s gift to us, Dickens tells us how we can give to others. A Christmas Carol is more congenial to our favorite images of ourselves. Dickens suggests that down deep, even the worst of us can become generous, giving people.

Yet I suggest that we are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people but because we are proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story -- the one according to Luke not Dickens -- is not about how blessed it is to be givers but about how essential it is to see ourselves as receivers.

We prefer to think of ourselves as givers -- powerful, competent, self-sufficient, capable people whose goodness motivates us to employ some of our power, competence and gifts to benefit the less fortunate. Which is a direct contradiction of the biblical account of the first Christmas. There we are portrayed not as the givers we wish we were but as the receivers we are. Luke and Matthew go to great lengths to demonstrate that we -- with our power, generosity, competence and capabilities -- had little to do with God’s work in Jesus. God wanted to do something for us so strange, so utterly beyond the bounds of human imagination, so foreign to human projection, that God had to resort to angels, pregnant virgins and stars in the sky to get it done. We didn’t think of it, understand it or approve it. All we could do, at Bethlehem, was receive it. A gift from a God we hardly even knew.

This theme struck me forcefully a few years ago while counseling someone from my church. It was December. She was telling me about her worry and confusion over a number of problems. Having taken several counseling courses in seminary, I knew how to be a good counselor. That is, I knew to keep quiet, listen patiently, ask questions, and offer no direct guidance. After I had given her ample opportunity to vent her feelings, I remarked as I had been taught: "I believe that you have the solution to your problems within you. I believe that down deep, you know what your real problem is and that you have the resources to handle it."

You have heard the message before. One certainly does not have to come to the church to hear this popular gospel: You have, within you, the solution to what ails you.

And then it hit me. It was the middle of December, late in Advent. In less than two weeks I would be standing in front of the congregation reading the nativity story from one of the Gospels, demonstrating through a strange story of a virgin birth to a peasant couple in Judea that the solution to what ails us has very little to do with us. After having tried for generations to cure what ails us, God reached for something strange, radical and inconceivable. God put on our back doorstep a solution so radical that many missed it.

Rabbi Michael Goldberg, in his book Jews and Christians: Getting Our Stories Straight, says that as a Jew he is impressed in reading Matthew’s account of the nativity by how utterly passive the actors are. As a Jew, he answers to the story of the Exodus, a story of how God liberated the chosen people through the enlistment and prodding of people like Moses, Aaron and Miriam. But the Christmas story implies that what God wants to do for us is so strange, so beyond the bounds of human effort and striving, that God must resort to utterly unnatural, supernatural means. It tells of an unimaginable gift, from a stranger, a God whom we hardly even knew.

Working with students at a university, I’ve decided that this truth is a major reason why many children come to despise their parents. It’s humbling to see one’s life, talents, capabilities, values, weaknesses and strengths as gifts from one’s parents. We would rather be self-made men and women, standing on our own feet, striding bravely into a new world of our creation. It’s humbling to look into a mirror at 21 and admit, "My God, I look just like my old man."

I suspect the difficulty of receiving is a factor in marriage, too. It’s painful to be thrust in such close proximity to another human being, day after day, year after year, until one gradually comes to see that one’s identity and character are due, to an alarming degree, to what one has received from one’s spouse. Marriage is an everyday experience of living in the red -- debtors to someone whom we have just begun to know.

If one asks the Gift Records Office of my school who are our most antagonistic alumni, they’ll tell you they are the ones who were here as students on full scholarship. We talk a great deal about "right to life," "freedom of choice" and "self-determination," but not too much about indebtedness.

It’s tough to be on the receiving end of love, God’s or anybody else’s. It requires that we see our lives not as our possessions, but as gifts. "Nothing is more repugnant to capable, reasonable people than grace," wrote John Wesley a long time ago.

Among the most familiar Christmas texts is the one in Isaiah: "The Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel" (7:14) Less familiar is its context: Isaiah has been pleading with King Ahaz to put his trust in God’s promise to Israel rather than in alliances with strong military powers like Syria. "If you will not believe, you shall not be established," Isaiah warns Ahaz (7:9). Then the prophet tells the fearful king that God is going to give him a baby as a sign. A baby. Isn’t that just like God, Ahaz must have thought. What Ahaz needed, with Assyria breathing down his neck, was a good army, not a baby.

This is often the way God loves us: with gifts we thought we didn’t need, which transform us into people we don’t necessarily want to be. With our advanced degrees, armies, government programs, material comforts and self-fulfillment techniques, we assume that religion is about giving a little, of our power in order to confirm to ourselves that we are indeed as self-sufficient as we claim.

Then this stranger comes to us, blesses us with a gift, and calls us to see ourselves as we are -- empty-handed recipients of a gracious God who, rather than leave us to our own devices, gave us a baby.

Have a Happy Day (Lk. 23:28)

Jesus, turning to them said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children" [Luke 23:28].

When asked to rate their happiness level, the Irish turn out to be just about the happiest people in the Western world. The Republic of Ireland tops the happiness list, with the people of Northern Ireland (surprise) a close second. Happy Ireland is followed by Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark and, at number six, the U.S.A. Among the most unhappy Westerners are the Spanish and West Germans; among all nationalities, the Japanese are very unhappy and at the bottom are the reportedly miserable Italians.

Although researchers are reluctant to specify what contributes to happiness, one factor seems to be whether or not the nation has recently lost a war. Thus we find the Japanese, West Germans and Italians at the bottom feeling bad. South African whites are near the top of the happiness scale. Evidently, a little violence at home doesn’t make these folk too blue.

Affluence also seems to contribute to overall life satisfaction. When asked to rate their satisfaction with life as a whole, the Danes, Swedes, Swiss and Norwegians were high. But money alone doesn’t produce happiness. Although the Irish earn only about a third of the per capita income of Americans, they manage to be a good deal happier. And they are positively delirious when compared to the Germans, even though individual Germans are almost three times wealthier. Affluence hasn’t brought the Japanese much happiness. They rank low with the Greeks, even though they earn more than twice as much per capita.

Some have theorized that the more religious a people, the happier they are -- the staunchly Catholic Irish and the equally staunch Afrikaner Protestants, for instance. But as we walk our final steps in the Lenten journey toward Golgotha, it’s difficult to know how much happiness could be produced if we were just a bit more Christian.

In his "Homage to Clio," W. H. Auden expresses contempt for the happiness of a crowing rooster. Hearing "A cock pronouncing himself himself/though all his sons had been castrated and eaten," Auden says, "I was glad I could be unhappy." The rooster manages to be so gleeful in the morning because his brain is the size of a pea. With gleeful people walking about the streets of Johannesburg or stumbling merrily over the ruins of Belfast, I, like Auden, am glad that it is still possible to be unhappy.

A friend of mine, a pastoral counselor, theorizes that depression is "an ecclesiogenic illness." The church, with its infernal challenges of the disparities between what is and what ought to be, is the source of people’s depression. Presumably, without the church, we should all be as happy as Auden’s rooster, crowing delightedly over our barnyard, even though our children are being served on somebody’s else’s table.

Fidel Castro recently declared in an interview that "everyone in Cuba is happy" and, in a speech last year in Managua, that "revolutionaries must always be optimistic." With everyone ordered to be happy in the new Cuba and gleeful revolutionaries in Nicaragua, it should be great, at last, to have the stuffy old church out of the way so that it no longer can smear ashes on our foreheads on Wednesday or make us trudge up a hill behind a Jew on Friday.

"Leave happiness to the animals," counsels Austin Warren. "If a poet gets too happy, his poetry won’t be any good." The one real atheist whom I know tells me that being rid of the poetry of religion is like having a great burden lifted off his shoulders. The prospect of no guilt, no sin, no disparities, and no one and nothing to violate is quite appealing, one must admit.

But I simply don’t understand how atheism leads to happiness. As a Christian, one feels a kinship only with atheists who are pessimistic, like Sartre. With no transcendence and with things as they are, there is little left except bleak pessimism. For someone to be simultaneously atheistic and optimistic strikes us as the dumbest of all possible attitudes. Contrary to Marx, how can one have it both ways except through the most exaggerated effort at ignorance? For roosters, optimism comes easily.

A few years ago, the priest at a North Carolina Catholic church placed his usual array of Lenten crosses, draped all in black for Good Friday, out in front of his little church. Soon Father Ed received a call from the North Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce: "Look preacher, we’ve been getting complaints about those crosses out in your churchyard. Now inside the church, who cares? But out front, where everybody can see them, they are offensive. The retired people here don’t like them -- find them depressing. The tourists will not like it either. It will be bad for business. People come down here to get happy, not depressed."

Maybe Marx was right after all.

Letting Go Down Here (Rom. 6:3)

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized

into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? [Rom. 6:3].

Life is an uninterrupted succession of leave-takings and good-byes. Just when we begin to feel comfortable with our surroundings, someone or something dies, reminding us that, down here, nothing lasts. Sooner or later, we come to that stage in life when all the people who are worth knowing and all the things worth having aren’t here. No matter how bright the sun shines, "down here" seems a little less beautiful since their departure.

Death, decay, departure are unqualifiably bad news down here, despite Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s advice to consider our finitude as natural, even beautiful. "In my beginning is my end," wrote the poet: Or, as Augustine put it: "It is as when a physician leans over a sick man’s bed and declares, ‘He is dying; he won’t get over this,’ so on the first day of our life, one could look into our cradle and say, ‘He is dying; he won’t get over this."’ Life, even the best of it, is so -- terminal.

All this is terribly bad news if all we have is "down here." So we put the best face on it -- eat right, play hard, get as much as we can. Our materialism is so compulsive, our militarism so obsessive, our mechanisms of denial so fierce because in the myriads of little, daily dyings, we know the abyss to which it all leads. Few are as foolish as the rich fool of Jesus’ parable whose barns made no eternal difference. But if our possessions and bombs can at least give us some shred of joy today, before bleak tomorrow, who would deny us that?

The church’s peculiar Lenten claim is that in dying we live, that all who are baptized into Christ are baptized into his death. The letting go required of us in baptism -- that fearful sinking into dark waters -- is a sort of dress rehearsal for the daily dying which is life. So Paul said to the calculating Romans: "Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death; so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life" (Rom. 6:3-4).

In this faith, we grow up by learning to come down, to let go, to release our grip on our claims of self-sufficiency and self-significance and self-perpetuation. At baptism, the church should be giving the child mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, not a kiss on the cheek, for he or she has only begun to die.

I have no idea what the philosophers do with this morbid insight. To me, pessimism and nihilism seem like the inevitable -- quite understandable -- modern response to the facts of life and death. If one considers the facts, optimism on the part of unbelievers is utter stupidity.

What the believer does with the facts, says Paul, is to embrace them with a curious kind of realism. When we were baptized, the church was quite candid about the transitoriness of it all. Knowing how we could easily spend our whole lives lying about death, the church got all that over with right at the beginning by holding us under the waters of baptism. Early, back on Ash Wednesday, we were told, "You are dirt and to dirt you shall return" (Gen. 3:19) At the beginning, we were assured that our things, our kings, our empires and our projects don’t last. The church pried our fingers loose, one by one, from these alleged securities and pushed us into dark waters, waters that (surprise!) turned out to be our womb rather than our tomb. Rather than falling back into nothingness, we fell back upon everlasting arms. Death? How can we fear what we’ve already gone through?

We find that, quite surprisingly, we began really to live because we did not have to. All the really interesting people were those who had somehow learned to let go.

Is Paul’s talk of baptismal dying too mystical? I posed that question to a group of ordinary, everyday laypeople in an ordinary Mississippi church. "Has anyone here had to die in order to be a Christian?"

Silence. Then they began to testify.

"I thought that I couldn’t live in a world where black people were the same as white people. When segregation ended, I thought I would die. But I didn’t. I was reborn. My next-door neighbor, my best friend, is black. Something old had to die in me for something new to be born."

Another said: "I used to be terribly frightened to be alone by myself. When my husband went out of town on business, I either went with him or took the children and stayed with a neighbor. But the night that my eight-year-old child died of leukemia, I stopped being afraid."

"Forgive me," I said, "but I don’t get the connection.

"You see," she explained, "once you’ve died, there is nothing left to fear, is there? When she died, I did too."

When he spoke of what happened to him on the Damascus Road, Paul never knew whether to call it being born or being killed. In a way, it felt like both at the same time. Whatever it was, it had something to do with letting go.

On Being a Survivor (Mark 10:45)

For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many [Mark 10:45].

"The issue," said one, "is survival of our civilization, our whole world, even. If we don’t do something about nuclear proliferation and do it now, civilization as we know it is gone."

In summation, her opponent countered: "The issue is survival of our American way of life, our children’s survival, and their children’s children. Without a strong national defense, we are at the mercy of those who have a bigger bomb. And then where will we be?"

Pro- or anti-nuclear, the question is one of survival -- survival of civilization as we know it.

And yet, here we are again in Lent, following a Jew down a road to a place of the skull where survival is definitely not the issue. We are reminded that it was in Gethsemane that he discovered -- in spite of his prayers -- that, for him, survival would not be the issue. The cup would not pass to another.

Come to think of it, our faith is full of people like Mary, Paul, Stephen and our Lord himself for whom survival was low on the list of priorities. These folk contested "civilization as we know it," and paid for their beliefs with their lives. If I remember the story correctly, it was "civilization as we know it," and all that it stands for, that sent them to Calvary in the first place. Up they went, convinced that "civilization as we know it" was passing away.

The other day I was talking to a man who has become a close friend of a Hungarian government official. "Have you ever met a real-live, lifetime, 100 per cent atheist?" he asked. "I mean somebody who is an atheist the same way I am a Methodist."

I confessed that I had not.

"Well, this woman is that kind of person. I thought, when I first met her, that getting to know somebody who lived her whole life, every minute, every day, without even a thought, not even a hint of God, would be a real revelation for me. I figured that she must be strange, different, like somebody from another planet."

"You know what I found out?" he asked, getting close to my face, gripping me by the collar of my overcoat.

"No, what did you find out?" I asked.

"There’s not a damn bit of difference between her and me. She isn’t somebody strange; she is just like your average, everyday, commonsense American. Like me, she never wonders, ‘What does God want me to do now?’ Like me, she doesn’t lose sleep expecting God to come down and do something about the world. She just goes about her life, deciding on the basis of what’s in her own best interest, what’s practical, what’s possible. That little ‘godless communist’ could pass for you or me anytime."

In discussions of bombs, Volvos, church pensions and what to do on Tuesday, survival cannot be the issue. We follow one who preached that civilization as we know it is passing away, whether we get a mutually verifiable arms agreement or not. Perhaps that’s how we got into this nuclear mess to begin with: survival became the issue for us -- the only issue. What can a people who have nothing else but survival to live for do except to build bigger bombs? As long as that’s the only issue, the only point of living, the only standard by which to judge our actions, we shall cling to our bombs as the only transcendence we have. Even though it isn’t much, as gods go, the bomb is all we have. So we will hold tight.

As his disciples flee into the darkness with their swords, he is dragged away by Caesar’s men who come after him with the sword. The sacrificial victim of "civilization as we know it," he bids us to let go.

The Things That Make for Peace (Luke 21:5-191)

Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, . . . famines and pestilences, and there will be terrors and great signs from heaven. . . . do not be terrified. .. . This will be a time for you to bear testimony [Luke 21:5-19].

Tourists from everywhere shuffle by my window 365 days a year, having come to admire the beauty of this neo-Gothic cathedral amid North Carolina pines. Why do so many thousands come to see Duke Chapel? My guess is that it’s because in a world of disposable diapers, non-returnable soft-drink bottles, throw-. away cartons, biodegradable shopping bags and plastic everything, it is reassuring to encounter something substantial. So much that surrounds us is so transitory. Everything changes, decays, is tossed on the garbage heap of time, but this place -- eternal-looking, serene, with stone upon stone, arch upon arch -- shall last. Or so it seems.

"Tourists" of another time -- the disciples -- were walking by the temple in Jerusalem one day, admiring its massive beauty. So many stones. Arches upon arches. Jesus then came out of the temple, and the disciples approached him to give him a tour of the temple buildings. But Jesus, who was their guide on a tour to a land called Truth, said, "The days will come when there shall not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down" (Matt. 24:1-2)

It must have been difficult for the disciples to conceive that Herod’s great temple, one of the wonders of the world, would be torn down, stone by stone, until it was nothing but a heap of rubble. Such a thing was unimaginable. The temple, the very center of national life and pride, the very seat of God, destroyed? Unthinkable!

Yet that is what Jesus told the disciples about this supposedly eternal temple of God, and barely 40 years after he spoke these words it lay in ruin. Jesus’ words rang true:

"Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences; . . . terrors, . . . great signs."

We are unaccustomed to hearing such talk around places like Duke Chapel. Most mainline, liberal religion -- of the sort preached from my limestone pulpit -- has had as its goal adjustment to and satisfaction with the present order rather than speculation or concern about the future. Some of our best biblical scholars have enabled us to read passages like Luke 21 without having to take them seriously. But talk about such biblical texts and about the end of the world is no longer the sole property of late-night radio preachers and shouting Bible-pounders. Even United Methodist bishops speak of apocalypse now. Their recent pastoral, in Defense of Creation, warns that we live in a fearful time when all creation is threatened. The bishops foretell a nuclear apocalypse that would entail "incredible fire storms," and in which "hundreds of tons of sooty smoke would absorb so much of the sun’s rays that only five per cent of the normal amount of light would reach the earth. . . . all land plants would be damaged or destroyed, temperatures [would] plummet for several months, . . . All biological life on planet earth would be gravely threatened’ (p. 7) We hold the powers of life and death within our hands, declare the bishops. Our nuclear weapons could destroy every living thing upon the earth. The end is near, they say, and the doomsday clock is ticking -- if we don’t take matters into our own hands and work for peace. "Only an informed and caring citizenry can stand in the way of such power to destroy" (p. 7)

Ironically, however, it is just that sort of thinking that may have gotten us into this nuclear madness in the first place. The theological presuppositions behind the bishops’ call for peace are flawed. To put it another way: the people who believe that the bomb is our only hope and the people who believe that doing away with the bomb is our only hope have much in common. As Christopher Lasch remarks in The Minimal Self (Norton, 1984) , the modern world makes "survival artists" of us all. Fearful about the water we drink, the air we breathe, the great mushroom cloud looming over us, we get by as best we can and grab what we can. And when you are very frightened, you tend to hold on very tightly -- even to things that do not last.

Those ancient words from Luke sound so foreign to our ears, so primitive with their prediction of wars and rumors of wars, of stones upturned, of pestilence and signs from heaven. Yet, strangely enough, we are coming to believe them.

Jesus says, "As for these things which you see, the days will come when there shall not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down." And we say, "Jesus, we believe you. Though there may be many who do not believe in you, we all believe you -- nuclear winter, ecological disaster, thinning ozone, shrinking resources, exploding populations -- tell us about it!"

When asked about possibilities for the future, about prospects for tomorrow, Jesus responded frankly, saying that, for us, there will be an end -- stones cast down, famine, pestilence, terrors, signs from heaven. It’s in the Bible: the end is near. And because of our bomb, and Carl Sagan’s bleak predictions for the future, it’s in us. The nuclear threat has put us in a unique position: we may be the first generation in a long time to understand Jesus on the subject of the end.

Despite Jesus’ predictions, however, the world did not come to an end during his own generation. The temple was destroyed, yes, but not the whole world. The world went on. Paul told early Christians not to marry, not to worry about whether they were slave or free because this world was soon to end. But it didn’t. So Paul was wrong, too. The end did not come in A.D. 70 when the temple was destroyed, or when the Roman Empire fell. There have been wars and rumors of wars, but still the world endures. The end has not come. Jesus said that the end was here, but it wasn’t.

Quite the contrary. It is the Christian belief that we have already seen "the end," that the world has come to a decisive crisis in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. In his death, the entire history of the universe has reached a turning point. At that moment, when he was nailed to a cross, the conflict between life and death, good and evil, God and Caesar was resolved in favor of God’s lordship over existence. A new Kingdom was established -- a Kingdom not dependent on whether we work out a mutually verifiable arms freeze with the Kremlin, but one based on what God has done and is doing for us and the world rather than on what we do.

Jesus admonishes, "When you hear of wars and tumults, do not be terrified." But how is it possible to think of the future and not be terrified? Robert J. Lifton calls it "nuclear numbness’ ‘ -- paralysis brought on by terror of the future. Not to be terrified is possible only for those who are convinced that something decisive has happened in the life and death of Christ, that God has entered our world and -- despite what we do with the world -- will not desert us. There is no way to think about the future realistically without thinking with faith in the fact of God’s loving grasp on the future.

So much of our current thought about war -- and peace -- arises from our terror rather than from our faith. You may criticize the Pentagon’s Dr. Strangelove generals, but are they so different from the peace activists? Why wasn’t there a peace movement in 1946? The bomb existed in 1946; why weren’t the United Methodist and Roman Catholic bishops protesting it then? Because it was our bomb. There were ripples of concern when they got the bomb, but we were still convinced of our survivability. By the mid-1980s it had finally dawned on us that our government could no longer protect us from nuclear annihilation, that we could no longer survive such a cataclysm. Suddenly, peace made sense. So the United Methodist bishops reject the traditional just-war argument because "we are convinced that no. . . use of nuclear weapons offers any reasonable hope of success" (p. 13) If we don’t get peace, what might happen to us? We might not survive, the end might come -- and then where would we be? As the prophets of old said, not everyone who cries "peace, peace" is talking about God’s peace.

"The American and Soviet peoples share a common humanity, a common aversion to war, a common horror of nuclear weapons, and a common hope for their economic and social well-being" (p. 17) , the bishops affirm. Let it also be said that we share a common idolatry, a common desire to save our own hides no matter what.

If we could only get the Russians to agree to peace. What will happen to us, Margaret Thatcher wants to know, if the U.S. negotiates away its missiles on British soil? But we aren’t too worried about the British. It’s our hides that concern us. We have lived quite nicely for 40 years with Eastern Europe enslaved, but we have had peace. We want peace, and so do the Soviets -- to be left at peace to run the world on our terms. Get that bomb away from Israel or Pakistan -- it might disturb our peace. Without peace, our peace, how can we survive?

After the failure of the Reykjavik summit a woman wrote to me to say how deeply depressed she was over the failure of President Reagan to win peace in our time. "These two leaders held the fate of the world in their hands. They had the power to enable me to put my child to bed secure tonight." It has at last come to that. The hopes of all the world are on the shoulders of men like Reagan and Gorbachev.

Jesus, when questioned about peace, was up-front about it: You will have no peace; there will be wars and rumors of wars, tumults, signs from above -- but do not be terrified. Peace based on a desire for mere survival can be idolatrous, can be unjust in our acceptance of some lesser evil -- the enslavement of Eastern Europe, a totalitarian government, a monolithic defense establishment -- in the name of security and order. As Luther said, security is the ultimate idol. the bishops state that "our No to nuclear war and weapons is more than a matter of ethical calculation. It is a refusal to participate in that nuclear idolatry that presumes to usurp the sovereignty of the God of shalom" (pp. 34-35) But does another idol lurk behind this call for peace? A peace movement arising out of terror is as idolatrous as peace based on the bomb. Jesus was put to death by a politician who wanted peace with justice, and Caiphas noted that one man’s death was not too great a price for peace in our time.

That great theologian General Alexander Haig once said that "there are worse things than a nuclear war’ ‘ -- a stupid statement, yet in a sense it represents what Christians believe.

"My peace I give to you," said Jesus, "not as the world gives peace" (John 14:27) The peace we should desire is that peace, his peace. And it is only God’s to give, for it is based on the recognition that it is not our task to make history come out right or to save the world -- through either our bombs or our peace -- because, in Jesus Christ, history has already come out right. We have already seen the end.

The bishops do not have to construct for us a future out of our fears. The quest for peace should begin not with talk of nuclear numbness but with repentance for our gospel numbness. Christians can and should work for peace. But we work as those who know something about the end -- something which the world may not know. Jesus wept that Jerusalem did not know the "things that make for peace" (Luke 19:41-44) As Jesus says, frightening times like ours are a "time for you to bear testimony." It is time for us to help clarify the moral issues that are at stake in our desire for peace.

There can be no better work for us than -- in our own way, in our own place -- to testify to the fact that God rules the world; nations do not. History has already come out right, for the lordship of Christ has been established. There is only one thing that lasts in this world. There is only one truth which is sure. And there is only one name wherein is our hope.

Take Heed to Yourselves (Luke 21:29-34)

Look at the fig tree, and all the trees; as soon as they come out in leaf, the summer is already near. So also.. . when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. . . . take heed to yourselves . . . [Luke 21:29-34].

Ah, to be free from time’s tyranny, measuring time as our ancestors did -- by the gentle passage of seasons, by sunrise and sunset, not by seconds, minutes and hours.

I live according to the chronology of the academy. We scholars are in the business of cautious observation and careful deliberation. Many a good thesis has been ruined because its author rushed to judgment, failed to weigh carefully all the facts, prematurely eliminated a possible solution. The key to good research is patience, restraint, caution.

"Scholars don’t make good managers," says one management theorist. "They are trained not to decide."

There is a story told about the physicist Max Planck. When he died and went to heaven St. Peter met him at the gate saying, "Professor Planck, this door leads to the Kingdom of Heaven, but this door leads to a discussion about the Kingdom of Heaven." You know which one the scholar chose.

The word decision comes from the Latin meaning "to cut off, to sever." Better to discuss things, defer judgment, refer the matter to a committee for further consideration, than to make a decision. Why go on record as believing that the earth is round when someone may discover next year that it’s really flat? Wait. Observe. Be patient. There’s still time.

No wonder that many prudent people simply decide not to decide. They drift, or sit quietly in a corner watching the vast, multicolored parade go by. One day they may decide, but not now, not with so many options open. Not today. We musn’t prematurely close out possibilities.

Besides, as Christians we know that even if we are late in deciding things, there is always grace. Matthew tells the story of a man who goes out at dawn and hires some workers for his vineyard. Later in the day he hires some more workers, and then, an hour or so before quitting time, he hires still more. At the end of the day he calls the workers together and pays them all the same wage. The ones who have been out sweating since dawn get no more than those who started an hour before dusk. There is grumbling. "Do you begrudge my generosity?" the master asks.

We love that parable, because it suggests that there is still time. So what if we haven’t gotten our lives together today? We may be the 11th-hour workers who by grace receive as much from God as do those who have been working in God’s vineyard since infancy.

Jesus says that when you see the fig tree blossom, you know what time it is. Jesus had no Greek view of history. As a Jew, he viewed history not as a never-ending circle but as a straight line with a beginning and an end. Someday, there will be no tomorrow. The door will open and then it will shut.

That view isn’t popular these days. Nor was it popular for the church in Luke’s day. It’s difficult to live every day believing that there may be no tomorrow. By the time Luke’s Gospel was written, the church had been waiting for 75 or 80 years for the return of Christ, and that was a long time to be standing on tiptoe. It’s difficult to maintain a sense of crisis for 80 years.

"There will always be a tomorrow," some must have begun to say. "After all, there have been about 29,000 tomorrows since Jesus told us that he would return for us." The once-taut church relaxed, settling down into the everydayness of things.

But to live as if there will always be a tomorrow is to live like a fool. One of the best-selling religious books of all time is a rather shoddy piece of rehashed millennialism called The late, Great Planet Earth. Fifty million people paid good money to read Hal Lindsey’s view of the end. It is not only people like Lindsey or Jerry Falwell or James Watt who think about the end. With the ecological crisis, the threat of nuclear war, and international monetary problems, everyone is thinking in apocalyptic terms -- except the liberal, contented church, which long ago made its peace with the present and trusted in tomorrow.

Jesus says that for us all there will be a day when there is no tomorrow. The invitation comes, the door opens, the word is spoken, and it is time.

When I was serving a little church in rural Georgia, one of my members’ relatives died, and my wife and I went to the funeral as a show of support for the family. It was held in a small, hot, crowded, independent Baptist country church. They wheeled the coffin in and the preacher began to preach. He shouted, fumed, flailed his arms.

"It’s too late for Joe," he screamed. "He might have wanted to do this or that in life, but it’s too late for him now. He’s dead. It’s all over for him. He might have wanted to straighten his life out, but he can’t now. It’s over."

What a comfort this must be to the family, I thought. "But it ain’t too late for you! People drop dead every day. So why wait? Now is the day for decision. Now is the time to make your life count for something. Give your life to Jesus!"

It was the worst thing I had ever heard. "Can you imagine a preacher doing that kind of thing to a grieving family?" I asked my wife on the way home. "I’ve never heard anything so manipulative, cheap and inappropriate. I would never preach a sermon like that."

She agreed with me that it was tacky, manipulative, callous. "Of course," she added, "the worst part of all is that it was true."