BLOG 5/22/18. “FORSAKING ALL OTHERS …”

BLOG 5/22/18. “FORSAKING ALL OTHERS …”

With the wedding of royal couple fresh in our minds, it might be a good time to take a fresh look at vows, at faithfulness and unfaithfulness. The royal couple looking deeply into one another’s eyes took a vow to forsake all others and to cleave to each other until death did them part. It would have been unthinkable for them to make some exceptions. “O, Meghan, I forgot, I have a date with a previous girlfriend next week. I forgot …” Or, that’s O.K. Harry, I can visit with my other boyfriend.” Outrageous? Of course it is.

OK, what are you getting at, Henderson?

I’m getting at the reality that there is a whole lot of shabby stuff that goes on inside the ostensible Christian communities that is akin to some kind of spiritual adultery. The classic Christian baptismal vow had in it a vow to renounce the works of Satan, and of darkness, and to embrace Jesus Christ alone as one’s Lord and Savior. In one version, it was to renounce all other lords and loyalties. But the vow to embrace Christ alone, and forsake or renounce all other loyalties that were in conflict … was at the threshold of one’s entrance into the Christian community. That has somehow become diluted and trivialized and remote to our thinking.

Then there is the apostle’s word that we are not to be “conformed to the world,” but rather to be continually transformed by the ongoing renewal of our minds, so as to be able to prove what was the will of God, i.e., what is the transformational thinking and behaving of God’s new creation in Christ. There are no exceptions here. The thinking of the local tribal religions, or of the empire, or of the trade guilds, or the economic forces—whatever—are to be renounced and forsaken continually. The clear implication is that if we do not engage in that renouncing, or forsaking, that we are in a very real sense committing something like spiritual adultery. (After all, we (the church) are the bride of Christ!)

And yet it is so commonly practiced, what with the political idolatries, the economic principalities and powers, the environmental exploitation, the disdain for other ethnic groups, or heartlessness toward the poor and homeless and sick and hopeless within all of our daily lives. In this election season, one needs to ask whom one is voting for and what are his or her principles and policies? How do they conform to our primary calling to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, and to renounce all of the forces of darkness that so defile our social, cultural, environmental, economic, and political ethos?

In my own career as a teaching shepherd within the Christian community, I have been publicly rebuked by those “in house” church folk over my insistence on racial justice, my opposition to nuclear warfare, or my dismay at our national callousness at the cost in the lives of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants in our nation’s saturation bombing of Iraq in the Gulf War. Those inside my own Christian community held in contempt all those who held Christian principles as primary, rather than the policies of corporate America, or the military establishment.

But my readers also face such challenges every day in their neighborhoods or workplaces. Yet we are called by our baptismal vows to be agents of the Light, to be the ongoing incarnation of God’s new humanity, that instruments of peace and order and justice, … and to affirm those who are agents of such Kingdom of God ethics, even if they do not profess our faith.

Every time we gather together for Christian worship should be an occasion to renew those baptismal vows of our allegiance to Jesus, his teachings, and his mission—and to, likewise, renounce and forsake all other lords and loyalties that are at odds with Jesus’ new creation. This is a lifestyle choice, with radical ethical implications, yet it is by the “word of their testimony, the blood of the Lamb, even if it cost them their lives” (Rev. 12:1l) that God’s people overcome the world. Single-minded in faithfulness to our Savior, that’s our holy calling. Got it?

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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