BLOG 11/2/16. QUASI-CHRISTIANTIY: “NO SPERM, NO EXCREMENT, NO BLOOD.”

BLOG 11/2/16. QUASI-CHRISTIANITY: “NO SPERM, NO EXCREMENT, NO BLOOD”

Sometimes one wonders why, given the seeming omni-presence of ostensible Christian communities, there is not more cultural impact or transformation? Perhaps one factor would be that for those who teach, who otherwise are zealous for the message of Jesus, and for the authority of Christian scriptures, an inadvertent lapse into something of a modern counterpart of the ancient heresy of Docetism, which error denied the real humanity of Jesus. To say, that it is one thing for Christian teachers to seek accuracy in expositing a passage of scripture and to seek skill in exegeting its meaning, … while it is another thing at the same time failing to connect that passage with the existential application, its flesh-and-blood application in the lives of those listening.

It rather reminds me of the concluding reflections of the narrator in Nikos Kazantzakis’ classic work: Zorba the Greek.  The narrator is a Greek intellectual who seeks to escape the bookish tedium of academe, and signs on the re-open a mine on the island of Crete. Along the way he becomes dependent upon the boisterous, lascivious, mysterious, un-inhibited Zorba, who has a zest for life. At the end of his reflections, he looked at his own life in contrast with the free spirit of Zorba. He contemplates: “For the first time in my life, it all seemed bloodless, odorless, void of any human substance. Pale-blue, hollow words in a vacuum. Perfectly clear distilled water without any bacteria, but also without any nutritive substance. Without life.” For him life had turned into a lucid, transparent game, unencumbered by even a single drop of blood. No blood, no sperm, no excrement.  Everything turned into words … into musical jugglery … decomposing the music into mute, mathematical equations. Alas!

This stings. It describes so much of the preaching I have heard in my life, and the subtle tendency I have tried to resist in my own career as a teaching-pastor in the church, i.e., to be satisfied with an orthodox exposition of a Biblical text with no attempt to relate it to the “blood and sperm and excremental” realities of the very human persons to whom that teaching of mine, or others, is addressed. It is one thing for me to give an accurate explanation of the words of Jesus’ great commission, and yet not somehow engage my hearers in the passion of Jesus to seek and to save those very persons with whom all of us rub shoulders every day, persons struggling to survive, to find meaning for their often messy lives, seeking to be their own gods, and to find in themselves the resources, the relationships, the hope that is just beyond their finger-tips. This not to mention the huge ethical decisions that may be lurking here and there which we cannot escape.

It becomes apparent when scriptures become ‘devotional’ and church assemblies become ‘worship experiences’ that don’t enflame us anew with a passion to be the incarnation of Jesus and his New Creation in the midst of all the often intractable and excremental realities of our human sojourn. I have often noted this in well-meaning expositions of the Sermon on the Mount, which make those Beatitudes into some kind of subjective experience, without realizing what a radical (and often dangerous) set of ethical guidelines they are, and how costly—how they are reduced to devotional meditations that have no costly immersion into the blood and sperm and excrement that so often confronts us in daily life and decisions.

It becomes apparent when, so often, church communities advertise the ‘perks’ and social advantages, and activities of their community. To become a follower of Jesus is to engage reality at a very profound level, and to engage others redemptively, and it is very costly, and it is lived with a zeal and a passion to be engaged with Jesus in causing his kingdom to come and his will be done on earth … even at the risk of one’s life. It is anything but bloodless, sperm-less, without excrement ‘devotional religion’. It would be a favor to one’s teacher for one to ask: “So what?” when the application is obscure. The word of Christ is not bloodless or odorless. It is to throb with life in the lives of those who embrace it. Take it from there, and run with it. OK?

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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