A Terrific Moment: Jesus and Zacchaeus

“Terrific” is not a word that I use often, but you can see how it fits here. Zacchaeus had the most remarkable moment of his life in the passage we heard this morning. If he had spoken English, he might have said, “Wow! That was terrific!” As it is, whatever he said was in Hebrew or Aramaic (something like “Metzuyan!” according to Google translate), and we would not have known what he said if we had heard him. What was so wonderful, so amazing about this encounter with Jesus? Let’s look together at this familiar story and see where it takes us.

The Story

We don’t know very much about Zacchaeus. From the song many of us learned as children, we know that he was short – “Zacchaeus was a wee, little man and a wee, little man was he.” This sets us up to think of him as not very important. I am a little sensitive about my height – not very, but a little. I remember when someone I met called me by another friend’s name, my first internal reaction was, “Don’t call me that! He’s really short!” I can sympathize a bit with Zacchaeus in his lack of height.

The fact is, however, that he was probably a fairly important person. As the head of the tax bureau in Jericho, a fairly wealthy city, he had political power and influence, as well as a lot of money himself. When people saw him, they probably thought more about his wealth than about his height. He reminds me of the subject of one of Simon and Garfunkel’s early songs:

They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town,

With political connections to spread his wealth around.

Born into society, a banker’s only child,

He had everything a man could want: power, grace, and style.

It’s a depressing poem, revealing the emptiness that lies beneath a surface of glitter and wealth. This reality is a perennial human reality. Paul Simon wrote the song in 1965, and he based it on a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, written in 1897. This same reality was present when Jesus walked the earth, and it is part of our own lives in the 21^st Century. Real life is deeper and more vital than the surface of what Richard Foster calls “money, sex, and power” – the title of one of his books on Christian discipleship.

These three aspects of life are the most common ways that human beings try to give meaning to life. Money, sex, and power are good things. They are God’s gifts to us in this life, but when we make any of them the goal of life, they lead to nothing; they leave us empty. We need something else at the centre of our lives. Zacchaeus had money and power, but they were not enough. He knew they were not enough.

Luke doesn’t tell us more, but we know this much. Zacchaeus had money. Zacchaeus had influence and power. But Zacchaeus’s life was empty, and he knew he needed help. When he heard that Jesus was coming through Jericho, he joined the crowd who was hoping to see this travelling teacher and miracle worker. He reminds me a bit of the woman who had “an issue of blood” (whom Bev preached on a few weeks ago): If I can just see him, I may learn something.

But he was short, too short. He saw a sycamore tree by the road, handy and easy to climb. I don’t know if climbing a tree was seen as dignified in those days, but I suspect that it wasn’t. Dignity was not on his mind at that moment, and he climbed the tree. This would give him more than a glimpse; he expected to see Jesus well.

Well, he did! He got more than he could have hoped. Jesus stopped under the tree, looked up and invited himself to Zacchaeus’ house. The old Sunday School song says, “I’m coming to your house today.” I learned it as “I’m coming to your house for tea”, which tells you that I grew up in an English colony where we did everything over a cup of tea. Given his culture, I suspect that Zacchaeus provided wine and olives and figs and bread.

The story tells us that Jesus went to Zacchaeus’ house, while the crowd grumbled that a teacher of Jesus’ reputation should not be the guest of so obvious a sinner. They saw Zacchaeus as a traitor. He was a Jew by birth, but he served the Roman Empire. His name means “Innocent”, but he was guilty of cheating many people in the whole community. Rome told him how much he needed to bring in through taxes; as the “chief tax collector”, he mobilized the machinery of the Empire to bring in more than that and took his cut off the top. How could Jesus compromise himself by inviting himself to the home of such a corrupt man?

Zacchaeus responded quite differently than the crowd had. We don’t hear what Jesus said to him, but the previous chapter in Luke 18 gives us an idea of what he might have said. The rich young ruler could not part with his wealth to follow Jesus, and instead he parted with Jesus rather than leave his wealth. Zacchaeus states his readiness to follow Jesus with two powerful declarations: “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” He does not say, “I give everything away.” He does say, “I will cheat no one again, and I will pay back anyone I have cheated.” The “four times as much” makes it clear that Zacchaeus had considerable resources and that he was not trying to save something for himself. He was ready to follow Jesus, no matter what it cost.

Jesus’ final comment is interesting: “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” Here he says that God’s salvation is present when Zacchaeus shows that he means business. Zacchaeus steps out in faith, and Jesus confirms his step. The step includes “his house”, which suggests a fuller understanding than the individual salvation we normally think of. Real freedom in Christ is both individual and communal.

Working Out What This Means

To understand the essence of what happened, I turn to an idea that I have described before. You can think about your life as a story, and we must choose who we want to write our story. There are not many real choices in this life. I did not choose my height; it was given to me without my consent. I have some control over my weight, but even that depends partly on genetics, not just on how much I eat. The colour of my hair, my personality, my love of music – all of these were given to me. I work with them, and I can change them to some extent, but I did not choose them. There is, however, one real choice that each of us must make: Who will write our story?

In the end, this choice comes down to two basic possibilities. Either I insist on writing my own story, or I allow God to write the story of my life for me. Most people insist on writing their own story. You know the 1969 Paul Anka song (Anka was a Canadian songwriter), which Frank Sinatra made famous:

And now the end is near

And so I face the final curtain

My friend, I’ll say it clear

I’ll state my case of which I’m certain

I’ve lived a life that’s full

I’ve travelled each and every highway

And more, much more than this

I did it my way

There speaks the voice of Canada: I want to do it my way. I want to write my own story. The Mamas and the Papas described the same idea in a hit from 1965: “You gotta go where you want to go/ Do what you want to do/ With whoever you want to do it with.” These songs are from the 1960s, and children of the Sixties believe this completely: I want to be in charge of my own life.

Zacchaeus had made his choices and written his own story, but he found that the result was an inner emptiness. In another song from the 1960s, Peggy Lee describes that emptiness with the eloquence of despair:

I remember when I was a very little girl, our house caught on fire

I’ll never forget the look on my father's face as he gathered me up

in his arms and raced through the burning building out to the pavement

I stood there shivering in my pajamas and watched the whole world go up in flames

And when it was all over I said to myself, is that all there is to a fire

Is that all there is, is that all there is

If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing

Let’s break out the booze and have a ball

If that’s all there is

She describes a full life, each time returning to the empty refrain. The whole sets to music the old saying, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” I believe that this describes what Zacchaeus had learned about life, and this is why he climbed a tree to see Jesus. And Jesus found him! When Jesus found him, Zacchaeus gave up the right to write his own story and became part of God’s story. He gave up the right to organize his own life and received God’s life.

What Did Jesus Say?

Jesus said, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.” Luke doesn’t tell us exactly what happened to trigger this announcement. What happened that led Jesus to announce salvation? What did Jesus say to Zacchaeus that led him to his decision. What did Zacchaeus do that showed that he was saved? If we look at this question through the lens of story, we can ask who Zacchaeus wanted to write the story of his life. He had gone his own way for many years, and he didn’t like the story he was in. He was alone and lost, and he knew it.

Although we don’t know what Jesus said, we do know that he usually said just one thing when people asked how they could be saved: Follow me! That’s what he said to the Rich Young Ruler in the previous chapter: “Sell what you have and give to the poor and follow me.” When it came to the point, the young man could not give up his wealth and make Jesus the author of his story. Zacchaeus could and did.

This offer of salvation combined with Zacchaeus’ embrace of salvation is seen in his willingness to give up everything to make things right and follow Jesus. I think the key to the whole event was that he stopped trying to write the story of his own life and stepped into God’s story.

Shakespeare has expressed what Zacchaeus may have felt in lines that his character MacBeth speaks (Act 5, Scene 5):

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

That speech of course comes from someone who knows his life is about to end. He knows that he will die, and that his life has meant nothing. But all of that changes when we meet Jesus. Our lives belong to God, who writes the play and gives our lives meaning.

Writing about the Second Coming, C.S. Lewis has described what it means to know that God has written the story in which we live. Listen to how he puts it:

The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph. This seems to some people intolerably frustrating. So many things would be interrupted. … Not now, of all moments!

But we think thus because we keep on assuming that we know the play. We do not know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. The Author knows. The audience, if there is an audience (if angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven fill the pit and the stalls), may have an inkling. But we, never seeing the play from outside, never meeting the characters except the tiny minority who are “on” in the same scenes as ourselves, wholly ignorant of the future and very imperfectly informed about the past, cannot tell at what moment the end ought to come. That it will come when it ought, we may be sure; but we waste our time in guessing when that will be. That it has a meaning we may be sure, but we cannot see it. When it is over, we may be told. We are led to expect that the Author will have something to say to each of us on the part that each of us has played. The playing it well is what matters infinitely.

Lewis’ point is that our lives find meaning as part of God’s story. If we refuse to play our part, our lives are meaningless – “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Zacchaeus chose to be part of God’s story, to follow Jesus, to do what God called him to do. He no longer cared if he had the money to pay Rome. He could do his job, and he could do it well; but what mattered most was to know Jesus and to follow Jesus and do what Jesus called him to do. Now his life had meaning. Now God had found him and saved him. What about you? What about me?

28 June 2020

Steinbach Mennonite Church

Texts:

Psalm 119: 137-144

¹³⁷ You are righteous, O Lord, and your judgments are right.

¹³⁸ You have appointed your decrees in righteousness and in all faithfulness.

¹³⁹ My zeal consumes me because my foes forget your words.

¹⁴⁰ Your promise is well tried, and your servant loves it.

¹⁴¹ I am small and despised, yet I do not forget your precepts.

¹⁴² Your righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and your law is the truth.

¹⁴³ Trouble and anguish have come upon me, but your commandments are my delight.

¹⁴⁴ Your decrees are righteous forever; give me understanding that I may live.

Luke 19: 1-10

Jesus and Zacchaeus

19 He entered Jericho and was passing through it. ² A man was there named Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was rich. ³ He was trying to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was short in stature. ⁴ So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree to see him, because he was going to pass that way. ⁵ When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down; for I must stay at your house today.” ⁶ So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him. ⁷ All who saw it began to grumble and said, “He has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.” ⁸ Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” ⁹ Then Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham. ¹⁰ For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost.”

The Damascus Road: (Not) For Everyone

Introduction

Saul (also named Paul) on the road to Damascus is one of the best known Bible stories, and also a difficult story to say what it means for us today. Many Bible passages are harder to apply than we think. What the author meant to say in the original contexts is one thing; what that passage says to us today is another. In this case, there are several themes we could look at.

We could examine the theme of Jew and Gentile in God’s reign. That would be a worthwhile examination, and fits well with the larger story of Acts. The way that our hero changes his name from Saul (a Jewish name) to Paul (a Roman name) reflects this idea. At different times in his ministry, Saul-Paul acts as a Jew or as a Roman citizen. In 1 Corinthians 9 he says that he uses whichever identity will help to bring people to Christ (verses 19-23). In today’s passage, God sends Ananias to Saul and God tells him that Saul is his chosen instrument to bring salvation to the Gentiles. This is a good theme worth exploring, but we leave it aside this morning.

We could look at the relationship of Law and Gospel. As a Pharisee, Saul had committed himself to the Law of Moses. That commitment fueled his anger when he set off on the road to Damascus to kill anyone following “The Way”, this new sect of people following the Rabbi Jesus. He saw correctly that Jesus challenged the central position of the Law in Judaism and replaced it with himself, so he set out to defend the law and to persecute Jesus’ disciples. Paul called himself a Pharisee to the end of his life, but here in Acts 9 he changes from being a Pharisee for the law (Philippians 3) to becoming a Pharisee for the gospel of God (Romans 1.) This is also a good theme, but we leave aside it as well.

We could consider the continued growth of the church in places like Damascus and Antioch. The persecution in which Saul participated led to the growth of the church outside of Jerusalem, fulfilling Jesus’ words in Acts 1:8—“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” God uses such terrible events as persecution to bring about good results, which encourages us in our own troubles. But this theme also we leave aside.

I want to look at something else: Why did God use miraculous dramatic phenomena to convert Saul? The drama is there for a purpose. Why is it there?

Paul’s Conversion

At one level this incident is too unusual to serve as a model for us. God does not strike most people blind as part of their conversion. When our baptismal candidates tell their faith stories, we don’t have many who heard a voice speaking to them from Heaven or saw a vision, while other people with them heard the voice but saw nothing. Our faith stories would be more exciting if they included the kind of supernatural phenomena that Paul experienced, but in fact such things are rare. So why did God appear so miraculously to Paul, and not to everyone else? Sometimes we may think that God does not appear to us like this because God is done with miracles. We may think that we should not expect to see such things today. I agree that we should not normally look for miracles, but it is wrong to think that such things no longer happen.

Last week I was at a meeting in Ontario. As we ate lunch, a visitor (I’ll call him John) started telling stories of an international church he had pastored in an Arab country. The church was made up of expatriates with no Arab believers, but over the years he said he saw about 20 Arab Muslims come to faith in Jesus—mostly through dreams of Jesus. Here in one such story. (Note: I may have the details right or not. This is as I remember the conversation. John gave me permission to tell the story, keeping it anonymous, but it is still his story.)

A man had a series of dreams in which he saw Mohammed. Finally he called out that he wanted to follow him. Mohammed turned to him and said, “Don’t follow me. Follow him”, and pointed to a shadowy figure. As the man looked, the figure turned to him, and he saw that it was Jesus. (John wondered what Jesus looked like, but this man could not tell him; only that he knew it was Jesus.) One Sunday as he was driving home, the steering wheel of his car locked up going through the intersection where he would normally turn. The steering wheel then turned on its own accord, through several more intersections, almost as if possessed. Finally he pulled off the road to find a telephone and call for help. He saw a church across the road and went to it to use the phone. It happened to be Easter, and John was conducting the Easter Sunday service. He said that they all saw this robed and turbaned Arab enter the service and sit down. When the service was over, John was greeting people at the door, but did not see the man. After everyone else had left, John went in to look for him. He found him prostrated at the cross. When he asked what was happening, he heard the story I have told. That man became the first Muslim-background believer in their church—because Jesus came to him in a dream.

John told another story similarly miraculous, one of about 20 he had observed. I believe that God still acts in miraculous ways in our world. Although such events are rare, they do take place.

A Hard Question

So why does God not intervene like this in everyone’s life? Surely then everyone would be saved! This is a hard question, and we do not know the answer. I can tell you only what I think is probably happening. God’s normal path for all of us is to invite us to come to him: “Come all who are worn out from carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Or, in the words that Jesus uses to the church at Laodicea (Revelation 3:20): “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.” In context, these verses are directed to Christians, but they express the essential invitation Jesus gives to all. We have the choice to accept his invitation. This is why Paul describes his own ministry as one of invitation in 2 Corinthians 5: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and has given to us the ministry and message of reconciliation. We are Christ’s ambassadors, therefore I appeal to you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God!” (My own free paraphrase.)

Now for choices to be real choices, they must also be free. If Jesus overwhelms us with his presence, so that we worship God by force, that is not conversion. That is judgment. But God knows everyone’s heart, so when God intervenes so dramatically, we can guess that the person involved was truly seeking God with all their heart. I believe that was true for Paul. He had committed himself fully to God’s Law because he wanted to know God. The Law says, “Love the Lord you God with all your heart.” Paul did that, and God intervened dramatically to turn him from the way of death to the way of life.

This is truly beyond our understanding. This is mystery in its fullest sense. When we push this idea out to its logical end, either Paul freely chose to follow God—and so he initiated his own salvation, or God chose Paul without Paul’s choice—and so God initiated his salvation. Would God save Paul against Paul’s will? I don’t believe so. Dare we suggest that somehow Paul earned God’s grace? Of course not. Both choices, it seems to me are wrong.

Paul himself describes what happens this way (Philippians 2:13): “Therefore, my dear friends, … continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.” Work out your salvation—seek God with all your heart. God works in you—we can do nothing without God’s grace.

The question comes back now in a different way. We can see why God does not always save people this way—God leaves us with a choice to respond to the divine invitation. But why did God save Paul this dramatic way? Again, we really don’t know, but again I have a guess. The Pharisees were a major roadblock to the spread of the gospel, because they wanted to keep Gentiles outside God’s reign. By bringing Paul into Christian faith, God opened the door to the whole Gentile world. You can see this in the angel’s words to Ananias, “This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel.” Similarly in the story I told of the Arab seeker, there is a major population of our world who are closed to the invitation Jesus gives; their dramatic conversion through dreams breaks through the barriers that people have erected against the gospel.

I think, then, that God uses such dramatic conversions to open doors to the gospel so that more and more people can hear the invitation to come to Jesus and receive life. I don’t know this. Isaiah asks us who can know the mind of God (Isaiah 40:12-14), and I certainly cannot say that I do. I am only guessing, based on the simple truth that we do know: God wants to save sinners. God wants to save everyone. Hear God’s words to Ezekiel (33:11): “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, people of Israel?” Again, as Jesus said about Zaccheus (Luke 19:9-10): Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” Jesus came to save, not to condemn. You see that we can refuse the invitation, but Jesus desires no one’s death. Jesus wants all people to come to him and receive life. That is why he came to Saul so dramatically.

Years later, Paul remembered this coming with gratitude (1 Corinthians 15: 3-10): “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins …, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day …, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. For I … do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”

Bring It Home to Us

So what do we do with Saul’s conversion today? What is God saying to you and to me this morning?

Some simple points.

1. Jesus, Be the Centre

Every one of us has placed something at the centre of our lives. For Paul, it was the Torah, Law of God. For you and me it may be our membership in the Mennonite Church. It may be the good name of SMC—or of one of the families here. It may be a commitment to be properly Evangelical, or Anabaptist. I must tell you and remind myself, anything other than Jesus at the centre becomes an idol and can separate us from God. You don’t have to be a renegade to push God away. All you have to do is put something other than Jesus at the centre of your life. I plead with you this morning, keep Jesus at the centre. Nothing else will do. A Spanish song I have come to love says, “Solo Dios basta”: Only God can fill us; only God can satisfy.

2. Jesus, Do This in Us

Sometimes we think that we can make this change—from one centre to another in our lives—on our own. We can’t. You cannot on your own place God fully at the centre of your life. Something else will always come in, and we cannot save ourselves. It is just not possible. Sometimes we call ourselves “Jesus-followers”. Our own congregation’s mission statement echoes this language: “Steinbach Mennonite Church is faithfully following Christ in worship and service by making disciples, building community and reaching out to the world.” We are Christ-followers. But this image contains a weakness; it can suggest that you and I just need to follow Jesus, and that we have the strength to do this. We don’t.

This past week we had a course on Anabaptist history and Theology at Providence. One of the members of the class recalled several different people in his congregations who said something like this near the end of their lives: “I hope I’ve been good enough to go to Heaven.” Ouch! Our hope of salvation rests in Christ’s work on the cross for you and me, not on anything we can do. I remember C.J. Dyck teaching the same course at AMBS about 35 years ago. One day in class he told us about an old Amish Bishop he had visited. C.J. asked him, “Brother, is your salvation by grace, or must you earn it with your life?” The old Bishop replied, “Oh brother Dyck, it’s all by grace! It’s all by grace!” He was right. This leads to my last thought.

3. Christ IN You

Conversion for Paul—and for us—is a complete change of heart and mind. We are reborn (to use the image from John’s gospel) so that Christ lives within us. Paul describes this mystery in Colossians 1 as “the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now revealed to the Lord’s people.… This mystery is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

The mystery revealed in Paul’s conversion and in all of us is that Christ lives in us. Whether you come to Christ in a quiet way through your parents’ upbringing (my mother came to Christ at age five), or whether God breaks into your life with dreams and visions and lightning flashing—in every case it takes a miracle. Whether you come from a life of addiction or a life of good deeds, it takes a miracle. Whether you come from a life of heartbreak and pain or a life of ease, it takes a miracle. Whether you come from a life of fighting for justice or a life of success in all you do, it takes a miracle.

For Christ to live in you and in me takes the miracle of God’s grace. One thing for certain that the story of Saul-Paul tells us is that God will do whatever it takes to bring you to faith and give you new life. In the end, the Damascus Road is for everyone.

Steinbach Mennonite Church

22 May 2016

Acts 9: 1-19

Boundaries

Conversion and Reversion: The Place of Boundaries

Blogs are too brief to develop ideas fully, so this blog backs up to an earlier idea: The way that religion functions as a pattern for living. Patterns create clear boundaries, so that one can tell if you are in the pattern or outside it. The plain dress that my parents grew up with is an example of such boundaries. Women who wore the headcovering were inside the boundary and could be trusted to follow the pattern of simplicity and obedience that the boundary enclosed.

Now boundaries are good. Although bounded-set thinking has its problems,[1] boundaries—and the pattern they enclose—are necessary to enable us to cope with life. If we had to work out from the beginning what to do in every situation what we should do, we would live paralyzed lives. We would be unable to act, because we would be constantly analyzing each action to decide whether it is right or wrong. Boundaries and patterns serve as a useful shortcut so that we can function according to a high moral and ethical standard.

But boundaries—and the patterns they enclose—fit only the situation in which they were created. A friend described to me the way that her Catholic community responded to her contact with non-Catholic friends. It reminded me of my own BIC background: We socialized with our own and avoided outsiders. That practice of separation (whether Catholic, with its understanding that it is the only true church, the mother church, or BIC, with our understanding that we had regained the purity of the first church) worked within the setting in which it was created. But in a new setting, North America as we know it today, it is simply out of place.

For many years missionaries from widely differing backgrounds have found themselves working as sisters and brothers when they go to countries with no significant Christian presence. Similarly, as Christian faith becomes a minority option in North America,[2] Christians of various backgrounds do not have the luxury of separating from each other in the way that we once did. We belong together, and the old patterning (which promoted separation from other Christians)  is actually destructive.

One can consider a variety of boundary issues (one thinks of the old saying, “Christian boys don’t smoke, drink, dance, or go to movies, and they don’t go with girls that do”) that have lost their relevance as the pattern they enclose has less and less to do with the world we live in today. So boundaries are good, but the centre of the Christian faith (which in the long run creates the boundaries) is essential.

I suspect that one primary source of reversions from Christianity (whether in the sense of moving from one church to another, or in the sense of leaving Christian faith) is the way that we have often substituted the pattern we know (complete with its boundaries) for the Christian faith in itself. That faith is primarily centred on a relationship with Jesus Christ, which is why Bruxy Cavey has emphasized the saying in his own ministry, “Christianity is not a religion; it’s a relationship.” 

References

Hiebert, Paul G. Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1994.

 

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[1] I am working on a paper on bounded-set thinking and centred-set thinking in which I develop these ideas more fully. The terms and their relationship to who belongs in the church were mediated to missiology through the work of Paul Hiebert (1994).

[2] This assertion can be debated. See the work of people like Reginald Bibby in Canada and Christian Smith in the USA for a good picture of religion in North America today.

Negative or Positive?

Reversion: Some Negatives—Some Positives

Reversion, I argue, is often like a new conversion—from the worldview and faith with which one grows up to a new form of that faith, or to a new faith entirely. As with conversion in general, then, reversions take place because the old worldview meets a new context, and the old worldview does not fit that new context very well.

But conversion is always specific.[1] It is a specific person who converts (for example, to Christian faith) or reverts (leaves their religious faith). The general description flattens out the specifics of each case and therefore to some degree falsifies each case.

So a specific person might leave the faith of his/her parents because he/she does not want to live up to the standards (moral and ethical) that their parents did. Certainly in my background those who left the BIC were sometimes seen as simply “backsliding”—turning away from God in a decisive way, and thus condemning themselves forever. Although such a view of reversion is judgmental (and therefore problematic), it is also sometimes correct. Some people do not want to be good, so they abandon a worldview that says they should be good.

This kind of negative reason can also apply when the one who reverts wants to live a moral life according to North American standards[2] (they do not seek to be “bad people”), but are unwilling to commit to the rigour of the high ethical standards of, for example, the Sermon on the Mount. This dynamic is one reason that the BIC have always held that each person in each new generation must come to his/her own true faith in Christ. We emphasize conversion even for those who begin their life with a Christian worldview within a Christian family.[3]

But is reversion simply negative? Is it simply a rebellion against one’s parents, or worse, against God? I admit readily that one of my deepest desires is to pass my Christian faith on to my children, and to see them pass it on to their children in turn. But that desire is not enough to say that reversions are simply bad.

Those who leave the church of their parents, but retain their Christian faith, may indeed have internalized that faith more deeply than those who simply remain—and become increasingly nominal. The fact that reversion is also a kind of conversion suggests that it has a genuinely positive side. (This truth suggests that responding to reversion, or seeking to preserve our children in their own version of our faith, must include some way for the new generation to process and choose—and real choice includes the possibility of saying no.)

Those who leave Christian faith entirely are in a different situation, but again it is not simply negative. I remember a friend who has left Christian faith for a form of agnosticism, while exploring a variety of religious options—from none to Buddhism to others I know nothing about. He could have held on to his Christian faith by presenting his friends and family with a mask, concealing his real self. Such dishonesty tears the soul and in the end does not truly deceive. His choice to state his own stand openly (that is, to revert from Christian faith) is a far better step than the pretense of maintaining a false faith.

The positive effect of reversion is greater than simply embracing honesty. If reversion comes from slippage between an old worldview and a new context, then reversions reveal that slippage to those of us who remain in the church and love the church deeply. We are not stuck with problems that we cannot identify. Reversions reveal the problems that we must deal with to remain relevant and vital. Those who revert are our best friends in dealing with these problems, helping us to see problems in our worldview that we are unable to see without their help.

References

Smith, Christian with Melinda Lundquist Denton. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. New York: Oxford, 2005. 

Smith, Christian with Patricia Snell. Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults. New York: Oxford, 2009.

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[1] In the last blog I said that the next blog would talk about why patterned boundaries are inadequate for passing on one’s faith. Instead I am digressing to some reasons for reversions.

[2] This is what Christian Smith (2005) calls “moral therapeutic deism”, which constitutes the fundamental religion of most American youth of all religious backgrounds today. See also Christian Smith (2009).

[3] Whether or not this emphasis on conversion works is the subject for a different series of blogs.

Who Reverts?

Conversion and Reversion: Who Reverts?

I’ve said that reversion takes two forms. The first is the meaning I think that the organizers of the conference on ex-Mennonites have in mind: One might leave the church of one’s parents, but remain a Christian in one’s general worldview. The second is the way that I think of it missiologically: One might leave the religion of one’s parents, meaning that one becomes non-Christian.

Who then is likely to revert (in either sense)? When people think of the church in Zimbabwe, they might think that we are looking for someone who leaves a traditional religion (such as the worship of Mwari vaMatonjeni at the shrines in the Matopo Hills) for Christian faith. Then after trying Christianity he/she might return to the traditional religion.

I suspect that this is the less typical case. More typically (I suspect) the one who reverts is the child or grandchild of Christians, and then rediscovers some form of the traditional religion renewed for today. Similarly in Canada, I suspect that those from a Christian background who “revert” and embrace some form of First Nations spirituality are not themselves first generation converts.[1]

What happens is similar to what happened when their grandparents first converted. The religious worldview answers their grandparents learned from their parents were inadequate for new challenges. Similarly, the answers that they now have are inadequate. Why they are inadequate belongs in the next blog.

When we think of those who leave the church they grew up in, but remain Christian, I suspect a similar dynamic is at work. The Brethren in Christ (BIC) of my youth had a strong group identity which tended to keep members in the church, even when they moved to a part of the country where the BIC were not. One of the ways that we exerted pressure to keep people in the group was through the use of boundary behaviour. We were separate from the world, and we used clear markers to maintain our separation.

So my mother wore a covering until I was 15 years old, and my father wore a plain vest with no tie. Over time, as one generation learned from their parents how to live, the patterns we learned (represented by but not limited to these boundary behaviours), came to be seen as irrelevant.

So those who leave the church of their youth, while remaining generally Christian, are generally not those who paid the price to become part of the church. My maternal grandmother, for example, came from a Lutheran background. Becoming BIC meant that she had to embrace the plain dress and give up the fine clothes and jewelry enjoyed in her life before belonging to the BIC. It is unlikely that, having made that choice, she would go back on it. But the same issues are experienced quite differently in the lives of her children and grandchildren (and so on).

To some extent, the choice that someone from the new generation makes to leave is a kind of conversion, embracing a new worldview, with new religious commitments.

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[1] Missiological research suggests that, if the theological process is not fully contextualized, the fourth generation after first contact with Christian mission will become nominal in its faith, and is ripe for either secularization or embracing a revitalisation of the traditional religion. I do not have a reference here, but simply my memory from missiological studies.