Gospel
/This sermon series, "Wrestling with Words” intends to consider, ponder and mediate on words that have been overused, misused or used so narrowly that to us they have lost their meaning. Our intention is not so much to perfectly understand or define, but wrestle with these words so their profound beauty and texture and depth come alive to us again.
This week we continue with the word "gospel" as the “good news” pronounced by Jesus, announcing a new way of being here, now, under the peaceable reign of God, which brings mercy and goodness to all people.
There may be no Christian word more familiar, and more worn by use, than “Gospel.” If you spend much time around the church, particularly the Evangelical church, you will hear “gospel” over and over. The first four books of the New Testament are called “Gospel”; we are to believe the “Gospel”; churches and pastors and authors and evangelists claim to present the “Gospel”; we have Gospel music, Gospel truth.
Growing up in the church, I was told what the Gospel was early and often:
Jesus died for your sins and if you believe in him, you will go to heaven and live with God in Heaven forever when you die.
As I say that I have particular flannel graph images in mind - some of you remember these. Cross, tomb, angels, flames, Jesus flying in the air, simple, straightforward, Gospel. Believe, and be saved.
I suppose it could have been disturbing as a five year old at backyard bible club, with sticky hands from lemonade popsicles and my craft stick cross with elmer’s glue drying beside me, to be told that I was a very bad sinner who deserved unending torture - but you know, this was followed so quickly with good news - Good News! - that Jesus loved me and died in my place and all I had do to was believe that this was true and I would instead go to a place where I’d be happy forever, and this sounded so good and comforting. And I believed, I really did.
It wasn’t until I was past college that I really started to wonder if this Gospel was truly good news. I made a friend who had become a Christian in his early 20’s. Someone told him the gospel on a bus, and he believed it. But he *believed* all the parts that sticky-fingered, five-year old me had felt permission to gloss right past. He believed that humans, including himself, were vile wretches deserving eternal suffering. He believed that the justice of God meant that God was pleased to pour wrath on his own son in order not to pour that wrath on humans. He believed that every person he loved that did not believe this, was doomed to eternal suffering. And it utterly paralyzed him. He lived, not in freedom or hope, but in constant anxiety. Every interaction was perhaps the only chance he had to convince some miserable wretch to repent and be saved. And he lived like it.
I counseled him to chill out. God loves them, I would say, and it’s not up to you to save everyone. But I was troubled. This friend, I came to realize, believed what I had called “good news” my whole life. But when you stepped out from the complacent pleasure of being one of the “saved”, and saw what he saw, this was not good news for most people, not at all.
Could this be the Good News? Is this the Good News Jesus taught? It was time, I thought, for a fresh look at this Gospel.
PROCLAMATION: God is with you
Gospel. The word in English derives from “Godspell”, or “God-story”, the story about the Divine among us in Jesus. God story: What is God like? How does God relate to us?
When it appears in our Bibles, the word “Gospel” translates the greek work “evangelion”, “evangel”, “evangelical”- which meant “good news”, a proclamation of good tidings.
Good news: in the Roman empire, “evangelion” was a pronouncement of royal birth, or (more often) the good news that a battle had been won. Often the battle would be Rome against an upstart city. The legions would crush the revolution, and a rider would come into town:
Good news! The empire (basilea) of the divine Caesar, Son of God, Savior (Soter), Lord (Kyrios) has come near. If you will only trust him, you will be saved (we will not slaughter you), and you may even be made citizens of this Empire and worshippers of Roma, the eternal city.
The Jewish people, crushed under Rome, knew that this was not the good news they were looking for. They saw the veiled threat through the words of peace. This people, formed in the upheavals of exile and the trauma of occupation, was shaped by a sacred story of their own. They had a different good news.
The Good News of the Hebrew Bible, as we heard in our reading this morning, is: “Your God Reigns!” And this is good news because this God who reigns is very unlike the various empires that rolled like crushing waves over Israel. This God cares for the oppressed and orphaned, the slave and the exile, and works justice for them. This God is a father, a shepherd, a rock, who lifts the needy from the dustheap and seats them beside princes. Unlike the peace of Roma, enforced by war and threat and military power, the peace of this God would set all to right and bring flourishing and justice to the earth.
This was their story, and though there was a lot of disagreement about what would usher in that day (military power? personal piety? cultural separation?), there was agreement on the basic outlines of the desired end: a Kingdom of Peace.
Now into this picture comes a man with the revolutionary name, Joshua - Yeshua - Jesus - announcing a new proclamation which we read in Mark 1:
Repent! For the Kingdom of God is at hand.
To unpack this:
Repent - metanoia, think about your thinking - rethink everything.
For the kingdom (basilea, empire) of God is so close you can reach out and touch it. The day is here!
Jesus comes proclaiming the Good News of an alternative empire already in the midst of this oppressed people. In this morning’s reading from Luke, he proclaims:
The spirit of the Lord is upon me for he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor: He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
This message was later unpacked further by the church, borrowing the language of Rome:
Good news! The empire (basilea) of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior (Soter), Lord (Kyrios) has come near. If you will only trust him, you will have abundant life (The divine with be with you and in you), and will be citizens of this Empire and worshippers of God, making the earth into an eternal city of peace.
May we just pause here to digest all that historical background? May we just notice that the Gospels are full of this proclamation of Jesus: you, whoever you are, whatever you have done, whatever has been done to you - God is with you.
May we just notice how different this Gospel is to the one I saw illustrated on flannel-graph with sticky lemonade popsicle fingers?
Not: God is angry, but fortunately Jesus died to take your punishment so you can go away from here and be with him.
Instead: You, whoever you are, God is already with you, his good reign is unfolding and is bringing about a world of peace, here.
Jesus taught his disciples a prayer to help them meditate on this Good News:
Our Father, always and everywhere around us,
may your name and character be treasured.
Let your peaceable reign come among us.
Let your good will be accomplished among us,
that earth would become an extension of heaven.
You generously give us all that we need this day,
You graciously free us from every debt,
overflowing with abundance
so we may forgive every debt owed us.
Guide us away from what would ensnare us,
keep us safe from the one who would entrap us.
This prayer paints a picture of the Good News Jesus proclaims: a world where we are not alone, but cared for, where we are not in scarcity but abundance, where at its core, reality is Love, so we are freed to love. This is the God-spell, the God Story, that Jesus told.
DEMONSTRATION: The Cross & Resurrection
Now you may wonder at this point: What then of Cross and Resurrection?
When I began years ago to rethink “Gospel”, my desire was not to make up something new and alien to the text of our Bible, but to return with richer understanding to the message we find there. But whatever the writers of the Gospels thought they were doing, they certainly thought they were proclaiming Cross and Resurrection, for these are given a vast amount of space in each book. How to make sense of this matters.
If we think of “Gospel Proclamation” as “Jesus died to pay for your sins” then it’s really obvious what part the Cross has to play in this story. But it may not be so obvious to us how the cross relates to the Gospel proclamation: “God is with you.”
For the past 800 years, the primary metaphor by which the Western Church, both Catholic and later Prostestant, has understood the Cross is a picture called “Penal Substitution.” The scene is a courtroom; God is both judge and aggrieved party; humanity the wretched offender; the deserved punishment to be meted out, death and eternal separation from God. But now to our undeserved surprise we find that this punishment is taken by the Son of God on the Cross; in his divinity Jesus is able to absorb the wrath and raise again. We are freed.
Some version of this is understood as The Gospel in most of the church today. But we should notice that, until being articulated by Anselm of Canterbury around 1200 AD, this was not anything like the main way Christianity understood Jesus, the Cross, the Resurrection, the Gospel.
In early Christendom - and, to this day, in the Eastern Orthodox church - two metaphors are used to explain what God is up to with the cross: Christus Victor, and Union.
In the Christus Victor image, humanity is held captive under death. Rome may be the oppressive empire, but death is the true oppressor that must be undone. After his ministry of proclaiming that God is with us, Jesus hoodwinks Rome and Death into taking him on the Cross. Empire and Death do their worst. It is no contest, for the divine life of Jesus easily breaks the power of death, and Jesus leads a triumphal march of humanity back into life. God is with you - even into death - and the resurrection proclaims, death is not the last word, it poses no obstacle to the irrepressible divine life which salvages humanity.
This imagery was very popular among the earliest Christians, in part because it was so easy for them to see the empire which persecuted them as Death, and the divine life among them as promising victory. There are wonderful early icons of a wimpy, woeful devil pushed aside by a resolute mighty Jesus, storming the gates of hell to release all held captive there.
But it was the Union image which took hold for much of the church throughout the ages. Athanasius was one of its clearest articulators in the third century. Humanity, wrote Athanasius, is woefully cut off from the life of God. We have tried to do this life on our own, by our own power - but were never made to do so. Jesus comes proclaiming that the life of God is now breaking in, because Jesus *is* the life of God breaking in: Divine and human joined together, showing what God intends for all humanity. The Union of Divine and Human in Jesus is what saves (liberates captives, sets free from exile)—what leads us back to our own union with God.
And the Cross? Well, in the cross, the divine enters into union with the bitterest human suffering, the deepest injustice, the oppressive violence of empire, so we may see that God is truly with us in our darkest places. The love of God is so deep that while we were yet unwilling to trust and live in God, God shares and carries our darkness and horror and even death.
As Athanasius writes of the cross: in what other kind of death does a man die with his arms outstretched to embrace the world?
And Resurrection? The Divine union is so abundantly LIFE that it cannot be defeated. The way of Jesus is Vindicated: His proclamation is true. God is, always has been, and ever will be, with us.
INVITATION: The Animation of Divine Love
So. The Gospel is Proclamation of good news: God is with you.
The Gospel is Demonstration of good news: God is with you in the darkest places, God is with you bringing you to life.
And the Gospel is finally an invitation to abide in this good news: to be animated by Divine Love.
In the very early days of the church, the Bishop Irenaeus taught that the Gospel shows Jesus came, not to reconcile God to us, but to reconcile us to God. God had never withdrawn; it was we who did not trust that we were the Beloved. It was we who needed to see the union of God and Human, the nearness of God’s love in our darkest places. It was we who needed to see the eagerness of the Divine that we would be empowered to bring about goodness wherever we go.
This Gospel is a new God Story.
A new story about reality: this world, despite all appearances, is caught up in the dance of Divine Love. The Proclamation of the Kingdom invites us to see God with us, pursuing justice even in every horror, God with us working for liberation in the midst of oppression, God with us and inviting us to partner for the salvation of others - return from exile, liberation from bondange, healing from despair and devastation.
Reality: rivers, neutrinos, stars, bumblebees, rainforests, topsoil, humans, eagles, amoebas, energy, gravity, you: upheld by generosity, treasured by divinity, never to be abandoned but always to be restored.
A new story about identity: You are the Beloved, amidst the community of the beloved. You are beloved, and so is your neighbor, and so is your estranged sibling and your boss and your enemy and the person you never want to see again. Humanity is not wretched, vile, rejected, under threat of damnation - but treasured, loved, pursued, known.
A new story about creativity:
God is with you, and with you in everything; and because you are most truly the Beloved of God, you are welcomed to join your life with God’s in creative goodness.
You are invited to be part of what God is up to in the world:
“The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons with God himself at the very heart of this community as its prime Sustainer and most glorious Inhabitant.” (Dallas Willard)
Shaped by a sacred story and sharing at a common table, we are awakening to God, who is love. As we awaken to divine love, we grow and are transformed—for this love evokes human flourishing. Love frees us to create, to forgive, and to participate in the sacred work of cultivating life in this world. Love animates generous living, proclaims news that is truly good, and culminates in God’s dream of peace in a world integrated by divine love. (Pearl’s Rhythms)
Conclusion: Awakening to Divine Love
This is the Gospel, the Good News. Here at Pearl, we call it the invitation to awaken to Divine Love.
To close, I want to invite us to sit quietly and meditate on the words Jesus taught us, words that picture the Good News in all its vibrant, hopeful glory:
Our Father, always and everywhere around us,
may your name and character be treasured.
Let your peaceable reign come among us.
Let your good will be accomplished among us,
that right here would become an extension of heaven.
You generously give us all that we need this day,
You graciously free us from every debt,
overflowing with abundance
so we may forgive every debt owed us.
Guide us away from what would ensnare us,
keep us safe from the one who would harm us.
For you are the one who governs all things well,
you are the one who upholds all things with love,
you are the one who makes all things new,
and that is just the way we want it to be.
