A couple of days ago I slipped a line into a comment, that this blog deliberately finds the third rail in the lectionary and skips down the third (electrified) rail. If the passage makes my head hurt, it goes in.

For our faith is simple, but as many have said, the simple is not easy. And this leads to a discussion of what faith is: by a confrontation and by examples.

For Christ did not appease. He did not soften his message: which was this —I am the only way to peace with God. Without faith in me, you are damned: for your own words and acts will bear witness against you.. He was no therapist, sitting in a room saying words of comfort. Nor was he enslaved by the need to be popular. Appeasing those who have pride and arrogance (like me) he did as much as he told those who continued to live in depravity that they were righteous.

And this leads to a question: what is this faith?

John 6:41-51
⁴¹Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” ⁴²They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” ⁴³Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. ⁴⁴No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. ⁴⁵It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. ⁴⁶Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. ⁴⁷Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. ⁴⁸I am the bread of life. ⁴⁹Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. ⁵⁰This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. ⁵¹I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.

Hebrews 11:13-22

¹³All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, ¹⁴for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. ¹⁵If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. ¹⁶But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.

¹⁷By faith Abraham, when put to the test, offered up Isaac. He who had received the promises was ready to offer up his only son, ¹⁸of whom he had been told, “It is through Isaac that descendants shall be named for you.” ¹⁹He considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead — and figuratively speaking, he did receive him back. ²⁰By faith Isaac invoked blessings for the future on Jacob and Esau. ²¹By faith Jacob, when dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, “bowing in worship over the top of his staff.” ²²By faith Joseph, at the end of his life, made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave instructions about his burial.

What we are asked to believe has three or four impossible things.

Firstly, that the universe, was created, and not by a hacker.

I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:

universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27….

and when he’s finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what’s going to happen; then down it comes–and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.

Now THAT is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually made available on the Internet (for free, of course) every hacker in the world would download it right away and then stay up all night long messing with it, spitting out universes right and left. Most of them would be pretty dull universes but some of them would be simply amazing. Because what those hackers would be aiming for would be much more ambitious than a universe that had a few stars and galaxies in it. Any run-of-the-mill hacker would be able to do that. No, the way to gain a towering reputation on the Internet would be to get so good at tweaking your command line that your universes would spontaneously develop life. And once the way to do that became common knowledge, those hackers would move on, trying to make their universes develop the right kind of life, trying to find the one change in the Nth decimal place of some physical constant that would give us an Earth in which, say, Hitler had been accepted into art school after all, and had ended up his days as a street artist with cranky political opinions

Well, Neal Stephenson (you will have to download the text from the link attached: it is a good essay and explains why he uses emacs, by the way) has missed one point: and this is the second point that is impossible: this God cared enough for his creation to for contracts or covenants with them and to keep his word. For that reason, the ancient patriarchs had faith in this God, and placed their hopes in him, not in any tribe or nation.

For spengler is right, humans cannot withstand the thought of mortality. They seek immortality either by faith, or in their family, or their tribe. They want their names to be remembered. This is why many cultures (not merely the Jews) recite their genealogy, keeping the names of their forefathers alive.

But this moves to the really impossible things. This God became a man, and walked on this earth. And this freaked the locals out. They said about Jesus that he was known, as were his parents — how could be come from God? Where was the spectacle? For we did not see it in Nazareth — and those stories from Bethlehem are not to believed, because (as the Hobbit would say) ‘people are queer over there’. And this leads to our second passage. Again, Christ is claiming to be one with God.

If you can accept this, the idea that he would die in our place, and rise, conquering death and hades, is not that impossible, it is instead grounds for worship.

But this we need to teach. The church exists to teach this. Without it, we are mere mummers, saying words that had power: calling the gelded steer a bull.

The church that I attended as a child was not a black church, naturally, but rather a combination of old low church Germans and New England Anglo-Congregationalists. In fact, that is pretty much my ethic composition in a nutshell. The church was demographically old, and the vestiges of Christianity that I did see were mostly among the older congregants of German extraction. Many of those men were veterans of one or both of the World Wars. Anyone younger than that was, pretty much across the board, atheist/agnostic and attended and were active in that church because it provided the cover or pose of Christianity without any awkward and discomforting talk about Jesus. No joke.

I remember being drug to a search committee meeting as a young child, probably aged six. One pastor had just left and there was a steady rotation of interim pastors every week. The search committee was discussing the pastor candidates around a table in the church basement hall and I was off several feet away sitting by the piano listening and occupying myself. The name of one of the pastors that I actually enjoyed came up. I enjoyed him because he would preach strongly and even raise his voice during the sermon, and he wore a pretty sky-blue robe, which I liked. At this, one of the search committee members said, and I’ll never forget this, that he didn’t like this pastor because “he talks about Jesus too much.” The committee agreed. That one sentence, spoken nearly 30 years ago while I was sitting and playing twenty feet away, was utterly critical in my Christian formation. At age SIX the seeds of contempt for pseudo-Christian hypocrisy were planted, fertilized and well-watered.

Barnhardt is quite correct to have contempt for such pale, insipid, falseness. The gospel is wonderful, powerful, life-giving. If we do not declare Christ and him crucified we are no longer the church, but Tories, Kiwanis or Bolsheviks in religious attire.

Be not that. Preach the gospel, in all its glorious impossibility and offensiveness.

__________
Note:
Sunshine Mary as a good precis of what the gospel is, it is now linked to under “Kirk” in addition to being linked above.