First Sunday of LentGenesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
Matthew 4:1-11In the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction category was the story from a few days ago about the Kentucky Baptist Convention leading what they’re calling “Second Amendment Celebrations” where churches around the state give away guns as door prizes to lure in nonbelievers in hopes of converting them to Christ.
At one such upcoming event organizers are expecting as many as 1,000 people where they will be given a free steak dinner and the chance to win one of 25 handguns, long guns and shotguns.
The goal is to “point people to Christ,” says a church sponsoring the event, and the Kentucky Baptist Convention said 1,678 men made “professions of faith” at about 50 such events last year, most of them in Kentucky.
Is anyone asking any questions about this?
My friend, Pastor Joe Phelps in Louisville, Kentucky, is asking a few. In an op-ed piece he raises questions about the appropriateness of giving away guns in order to entice men to listen to a message about the Prince of Peace. He asks what’s keeping us from giving away whiskey (he is in Kentucky, after all) or lottery tickets or even porn DVDs. And then he asks harder questions about what kind of religious experience it is when we invite men to come in for a gun and a steak and hope they walk out with a gun and Jesus? (After all, we’re not asking anyone to change or repent or give up anything for Jesus.)
Twenty-five years ago Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon published the provocative, readable, and best-selling (within the small world of pastors) book Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Their lead chapter was entitled, “The Modern World: On Learning to Ask the Right Questions” in which they said that the modern church has allowed the world to determine the questions: “Why is the church not relevant?” “How can a modern world read an ancient Bible?” “What’s the kernel of ‘real’ Christianity that we must believe?” etc. So for example, we end up with a church that abstracts the Jewish Jesus from some sort of “Christ of faith” or getting saved, and having Jesus in our heart is abstracted from toting an assault rifle, or being in church on Sunday is abstracted from making sure the trains run on time on their way to Auschwitz on Monday.
Hauerwas and Willimon say that the vocation of the church instead is to be the people of God, who follow Jesus Christ, and turn the questions around. Rather than seeking to make the gospel credible to the world, we are to be a people who make the world credible to the gospel. Or as William Stringfellow used to say, “Instead of reading the Bible Americanly, I want to read America biblically.”
This means listening to God ask us some hard questions. What Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis calls “uncomfortable questions” asked by God of us in Genesis 3: “Where are you?... Who told you that you are naked?” (3:9, 11), and “From the tree – the one that I commanded you not to eat from – you ate?” (v. 11). And then the tragic question Davis says that God asks human beings over and over again down through history to our own day: “What is this that you have done?” (v. 13). She goes on, “We see that all along, from the beginning of the world (as Genesis tells it), the Divine Mystery has been calling radically into question our chosen modus operandi, our propensity for going our own way and thus going away from God” (Wondrous Depth, p. 8-9).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in a lecture in 1932, “We prefer our own thoughts to those of the Bible. We no longer read the Bible seriously. We read it no longer against ourselves but only for ourselves.”
I wonder if part of the issue about giving out guns in the interest of evangelism in Kentucky is that we assume there is no discrepancy between what we want and what we believe God and the Bible wants. We don’t read the Bible against ourselves. In the midst of the dangerous rise of National Socialism in early and mid-1930’s Bonhoeffer learned that we had better listen to God’s hard questions.
Bonhoeffer was convinced that as we listen for God’s questions, as we learn to read the Bible against ourselves, we can learn to ask questions in turn. In April, 1936, Bonhoeffer asked in a letter, “How can I live a Christian life in the real world, and where are the final authorities for such a life, which alone is worth living?” He went on, “First I want to confess quite simply that I believe the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions, and that we only need to ask persistently and with some humility in order to receive the answer from it… One must be prepared to really question it. Only then will it open itself up…That is because in the Bible it is God who speaks to us. And we cannot simply reach our own conclusions about God; rather we must ask him… the God who loves us and will not leave us with our questions unanswered.”
Davis comments, “Wise readers of the Bible are those who are able to free themselves of what they think they already know and listen for the unexpected thing that God now has to say to them” (p. 13).
Lent is the time the church listens again to God’s hard questions; questions that keep us from assuming too much and thinking of ourselves too highly. When we start giving out guns in the name of Jesus Christ and never ask ourselves if anything is wrong, it is time to shut up and listen to God. And if we listen, God might very likely have something to say to us that is both unexpected and hard.