BLOG 1/25/15. CHRISTIAN FAITH: COMFORT OR OFFENSE?
It is an issue, or a question, that has confronted Christ’s followers, and his church, from its very inception: Is Christ’s gospel a message of comfort, or is it an offense? The answer: it is both. The Christian church keeps devolving itself into safe religious institutions, but the temptation has been there from the beginning to conform itself more to its culture than by being faithful to the teachings of Christ. A recent Facebook communication reported a pastor lamenting that he so often felt they were only producing ‘sophisticated consumers’ rather than faithful disciples.
Our invitations to faith in Christ focus on the promises of Christ’s gospel: love, forgiveness, reconciliation, new life, meaning, hope, and such comforting promises. But it is easy to forget that Jesus also issued warnings to those who would follow him. He promised his hearers that the gospel of the Kingdom of God was not coy about the fact that men would hate us and persecute us, and despitefully use us as we sought to express the righteousness of God. We are taught by the apostle that we shall reign with Christ if we suffer with him. Peter added the word that if we are insulted for the name of Christ, we are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon us (I Peter 4:4).
Jesus always gave his invitations to follow him with the additional qualification that if anyone would follow him, then that person must take up his cross and follow, even forsake every other lord and loyalty, and be willing to lose his/her life. That kind of invitation would not go down to well in our multitude of comfort zone churches, populated by ‘sophisticated consumers.’ But it only fits the larger context of what Jesus came to be and to do in inaugurating his New Creation, his eschatological Kingdom of God. That New Creation, and the New Humanity that is the communal dimension of it, has built in the understanding that we have been delivered out of the dominion of darkness (Satan) and into the dominion of God’s dear Son—the kingdom of Light.
That’s radical stuff. It makes Christ’s people and his church to be always counter-cultural, and controversial. It is an ongoing intellectual and moral struggle to know how to not be conformed to this world, but to be transformed. We are not to make of ourselves those unpleasant, negative religious types that seek to nay-say everything they don’t like. This is never ending in our cultures that are always creating new idols: ethical, political, social, economic, popular, etc. Every different neighborhood, and every new generation produces these in different forms, which require the church to find its way to communicate the love of God to all of those whom Jesus came to seek and to rescue, and who are often so amoral and disreputable and arrogant, … of just “decent godless men.”
Peter reminds the church that we are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation … that we may proclaim his excellencies right in the midst of these irreligious folk so often captives to the passions of folk still living in the darkness. But … he encourages us to conduct ourselves with such grace among those folk that they may see our good deeds and glorify God in due time. He tells them that their New Creation lives should trigger an inquiry from those very folk about what makes us such a different breed.
What we know is that God seems to work most powerfully where the darkness is the greatest, but this can also bring with it a severe reaction and persecution—all kinds of consequences. In the final book of the Bible there is a telling passage that speaks of God’s saints overthrowing the works of the devil by the blood of the Lamb, by the word of their testimony, even if it killed them. To be sure, our calling to Christ, and into his saving embrace and newness, also includes our willingness to be the “sweet aroma of Christ unto God” even when it costs us our careers or our lives. The gospel includes demands as well as promises. But that very calling is what history is all about. To avoid this calling with its ‘offense’ makes us irrelevant to history.
