A good friend (who is also a fine example of a sinner) serves as pastor to a congregation in Wisconsin (emphasis on the last syllable). The congregation began in 1988 and the building went up in 1990, without a basement.
On occasion he's preached an imaginative sermon in which he says he'd been stuck for what to do for a sermon and that he'd wandered through the church basement. He would say he'd encountered the ghost of Martin Luther down there, or found Noah's diary, or come upon an early-1960s piece of kid's Sunday school artwork (with a handwritten note from God attached). A nice bunch of clever dream sequences spun from whole cloth for the sake of delivering the gospel.
How careful we must be with the word we've been handed! My friend just got the news that a parishioner has left the congregation because, "He lied. There is no church basement."
If what comes from the preacher's mouth is not factual, does that make it untrue? Students in my New Testament course grapple with that question when dealing with four different gospels, with four different timelines, with four different points of view, and a Jesus who's almost four different people. "How do we know what's true, then?" they ask.
We so easily fall for the proposition that truth can be gleaned from facts. It's part of the air we breathe in this culture, from dissecting a frog in 7th grade science to the latest article in the journal Nature. We look for truth in facts, in the measurable, in the definable, in the tangible, and in what Paul in Corinthians calls the perishable.
But the preacher of the gospel calls that stuff mere stuff and in turn says what is truly true. It is a relational truth: Jesus Christ, true God and true human being has died and is risen...for you. We know it's true because this promise does something to sinners like us. It's true in its power to change absolutely everything.
Basement, shmasement, I say. You want truth? I'll give you truth: You are dead in your sin, bound and captive to yourself, to your own future and your own narrow life. Jesus Christ comes for you now. At this very moment he is wandering around the basement of your heart to create some new life there.
What? Your heart doesn't have an actual basement? Don't let that cardiac ultrasound fool you. It's there and Jesus has set up his resurrection carpentry shop in it. He is even now grabbing hold of whatever detritus he can find, whatever dust-covered antique hurt or bitterness lie in its corners, whatever bits of trash and rottenness he can find. And he's turning his surroundings there into an exact model of his own heart — with a basement swept clean and fit for eternity.
I'm a sinner who preaches. And I lie about all kinds of things, especially to myself. But I cannot lie about this. As Luther said in the Heidelberg Disputation, "A theologian of the cross sees something and calls it what it is." What the preacher sees is success and power that are truly facets of death and the grave. The gospel preacher sees the foolishness of the cross, the lie of imagination, and the disaster of death as a perfectly satisfied Christ shaping his materials into his risen form.
"When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.' 'Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?'" 1 Corinthians 15:54-55
1 comment:
In grad school I had a prof lecture for over an hour on the sublime in romantic poetry. Suddenly, in mid-sentence, he threw his lecture on the floor and stormed out of the room crying "Lies! All lies!"
It was the truest thing he ever said.
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