The Confessing Movement
Ryon L Price
21 August 2005
Mtt. 16:13-20
What is the church?
Well, it depends on who you ask of course. From the very beginning of Israel’s storied history with God on down through the centuries there has always been some dispute about this most fundamental of matters. Where is the church? What is the church? Who is the church?
Early Christians saw the church as the gathering of the holy in Christ’s name. Wherever two or three were gathered, there was Christ, and there was the church also. Somewhere along the way, however, we have devolved from these theological conceptions of the church and have begun to settle for merely pragmatic conceptions. In fact, with the rise in our hyper-individualized understanding of faith as merely personal salvation, the question itself has become irrelevant in some minds. The church is whatever hook or gimmick we can use to get people in and then get them on to heaven.
Because the church is just a hook for getting people inside the doors, it tends to look a lot like world outside the doors. We live in a high-intensity consumer-driven society and many of our churches are high-intensity consumer-driven churches. You can have it your way in today’s church. The more bells and whistles the better. We have churches with Starbucks for the latte-sipping adults and X-Boxes for the media and entertainment crazed kids. And for all ages, some churches now even have MacDonald’s restaurants inside. Would you like to Jesus size that? Our sensate churches are beginning to look a lot like our sensate society, and very few Christians are pausing to reflect theologically upon what it really means to be the church.
The cultural historians can point a finger to a very definitive moment in history when Christians began to marginalize the church. Armed with philosophical presuppositions about individual autonomy, rights, and self-determination, the liberals of the 17th and 18th centuries, Western culture began to reconceptualize itself. People began seeing themselves through a more individual than communal light. And the church fell in line. The church, like the state or any other massing of people, such as the American Legion down the street, became merely associating of like-minded individuals. In political terms this is called a social contract. People who think a lot alike freely associate together and enjoy ice cream socials, casserole dinners and occasional worship, then freely disassociate from one another when they get their feelings hurt, or disagree with the pastor or the church down the street offers better casseroles. Under this kind of philosophical presumption it is no secret why we live in an era of church shopping and church hopping. Our commitment to the church is shallow because our self-understanding of the church is shallow.
But the true church is more than casserole dinners and, with all due respect to the organization and its members present, the church is something different from the American Legion down the street. The church is not merely a social or civic or political coming together of like-minded individuals. The church is the gathered communal body of those confessing Jesus Christ as Lord.
In response to the decline of the church’s role in society, a lot of faithful Christians are all lathered up about what needs to be done to fix a world gone secular. We are no longer a Christian nation. The good ole days when shops were closed on Sundays and no one had a problem with school led prayer are gone. The old days when everyone thought like we do, or at least professed to, are sorely missed and what we need to do is go back and fix things by contacting our congressman and electing our kind of judges to prominent benches. But today’s text tells us squarely that the foundation of God’s kingdom is not predicated upon what our senators and congressmen say or don’t say about Jesus Christ. What is of most fundamental importance, instead, is what you and I say about him.
After a rather heated exchange with the Pharisees and Sadducees, those most certain that instituting stricter religious control would reform society’s ills, Jesus begins to lament the how easily the people are fooled by empty religious words and practices. Jesus warns the disciples not to believe the pious posturing of the religious establishment. The Pharisees profess to love God with their lips, but Jesus thinks their hearts are far astray. It is not enough to claim to love scripture and the laws while at the same time neglecting the acts of mercy and justice which are prerequisites for the building of God’s kingdom.
I can imagine Jesus, as he walks quietly in line amongst his followers, thinking deeply, perhaps even angrily, to himself, “Who do these people expect the Son of Man to be if he is not the one who restores sight to the blind, heals the deaf and makes the lame to walk?”
As the frustration mounts, Jesus finally has to know: “Guys, who do the people think the Son of Man is?” Their answers are evasive, indirect. Anonymous sources are appealed to. “Well, they say he’s…”
“No, guys, who do YOU think I am?”
Silence. Heavy, dense silence. Finally, Peter, nervous, ambivalent perhaps, can’t hold out any longer. He gets out of the boat. He listens to to what God is telling him and finally he blurts out, “You are Christ, the Son of the Living God.”
Stunned silence again. He said it. Did he say it? He really said it! I imagine being there was like being present when a little baby utters the word “Mama” for the first time. Or perhaps it was like a teenager who, on the last leg of a whirlwind, cross-country trip to visit all the major professional sports halls of fame, says quietly from the passenger seat, “You know Dad, you’re pretty cool.”
I mean this was a big step for Peter and the rest of the disciples. Peter said what all the others were thinking, but not quite ready to say. He expressed what everyone else was hoping for but was not quite ready to admit because doing so would have such dramatic consequences. Once they admitted Jesus was the Messiah their lives could never be the same.
What we say about Jesus says a lot about who we are and how we intend to live our lives. Saying is in fact a kind of doing. When Peter confessed Jesus as the messiah, the Son of Man, he does something with his words; When Peter says “You are the Messiah, the Christos, the Annointed One, he submits himself to Jesus’ leadership. With the confession of Jesus as the Messiah, Peter admits that he is no longer master of his own domain. Jesus is Lord.
J.L. Austin called this kind of saying as doing a “speech act.” You can probably think of some other speech acts. The first was uttered by God. “Let there be light.” There are others with less cosmological consequences. “Tag. You’re it.” “I bet.” And there are still some with great consequence to us: “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” Or, one closely related, “I now sentence you to life.”
Speech sometimes falls short of action however. I cannot make you my sweetheart just by telling you you are my sweetheart. Certain conditions must be met before words can both say and do. Otherwise, as JL Austin notes, we end up a lot like Don Quixote, challenging windmills to duels (How To Do Things With Words, p.27). To challenge a windmill to a duel is more an act of folly than it is an act of speech.
As baptists we do not expect windmills to accept a challenge to fight. Nor do we expect an unconfessing, secular world to believe just as we believe, pray just as we pray and act on the Sabbath just as we act on the Sabbath. This was the error of Christendom. And it is the error radical Islam is making in these grave times as well. As Baptists, though, we affirm the separation of church and state and so we know the church is not synonymous with the world. The church is, instead, the gathered body of those who confess Jesus as the Son of God and choose to live their lives accordingly. And on that confession, the very bedrock of our faith as baptists, Jesus builds his kingdom.
What does “kingdom” mean? Simply put it is where the king reigns. Clarence Jordan, in the Cotton Patch Gospels, his down on the farm, colloquial translation of the gospel texts, called it, “the God movement” (The Cotton Patch Gospels, xiv). For Jordan the kingdom was where God is moving in the hearts and lives of people living in community with one another.
In 1942, after graduating from seminary with a PhD in New Testament Greek in addition to his agricultural science undergraduate degree, Clarence and his wife Florence along with another couple moved to Americus, Georgia seeking to live in radical Christian community with one another. There they founded Koinonia Farms. Intent upon embodying the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount, they committed themselves to the radical qualities of koinonia – meaning fellowship. On Koinonia Farms Clarence and the other members of the fellowship practiced equality for all peoples, the rejection of violence, and the sharing of all possessions. In short, they were seeking to live as the book of Acts tells us the first generation of Christians lived – in radical fidelity to the making of the kingdom of God among them.
For Clarence Jordan and that brave band of saints, the gospel was not something merely to be passively received. To confess Christ was to become a part of the making of the new community. It meant to bring the kingdom come. The church was not a place where like-minded people come merely to eat casseroles and reminisce about the old days. Instead, what gathers and binds the people of God is their common future. Their common destiny to be made new in the resurrection of Christ. Death has been defeated and all its power robbed. Our future is peaceable life with one another and God forever and eternity.
With the church the waves of human destiny break upon the shores of the earth. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. The God movement, rolls, bathing the earth in love and peace and the reconciliation of peoples. Wave by wave by wave the gospel baptizes our course, jagged edges and remakes us into the very image of God. The barriers of bigotry, hatred and greed are broken down and we are reconstituted in the new humanity, which is the body of Christ.
The kingdom of God is a radical, tidal movement indeed.
Not long ago I made the mistake of telling a man at a social function that Irie and I had been married for three months. He was later informed by my wife Irie that no, we had in fact been married only two months. Yikes! I learned then and there that exaggerating the duration of one’s marriage is not the best way to curry favor in the eyes of one’s wife. The gentleman later introduced us as the couple which had been married five months – I three and Irie only two.
As a man, who TODAY marks his three-month anniversary, I am no expert in marriage. But I do know marriage is a reflection of Christ’s marriage to the church. Marriage is a promise sealed in the act of speech. “I do.” Marriage is not merely a social contract between individuals who may disassociate when things are no longer convenient. Likewise, when we say Jesus is Lord, we jump into the wave and commit ourselves to the God movement.
The problem with waves is that they are often unpredictable. We cannot control where the rush will take us.
Peter had no idea what he was getting into. (And I know that some of you hearing this are thinking the same about me and my three-month long marriage!) I suppose that is the point. With the confession of Peter the gospel story begins to take a serious turn. Jesus begins to challenge the very concept of what Peter thought it meant to believe in and follow the Messiah. Jesus would not be the political insurrectionist the people wanted. He would not save the Jews through coercive violence. He was not establishing a political dictatorship, nor a theocracy. Sacrifice and self-emptying would instead be the hallmarks of Jesus’ God Movement. And Peter himself would later be called to go and do the unthinkable. He would be called to eat with unclean gentiles and would, we are told, finally himself be called to give even his very life for the sake of the one he calls Lord.
What is the church? The church is the movement of God on earth. It is the movement of the Holy Spirit marching onward throughout the world beckoning us, just as Christ himself beckoned the disciples, to “come and follow.” The church is the movement of God, which stirs the hearts of those who confess Jesus Christ as their Lord and bids us to take up our crosses and follow him.
For as the apostle Paul compels us in the second chapter of Philippians, we are all to have the same mind of Christ Jesus, who did not see equality with God as something to be robbed, but humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore God gave him the name that is above all names; that at the name of Jesus one day every knee shall bow, on earth and under the earth, and tongue confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord.
The Movement has been set into motion. The tide is upon us. The kingdom of God is breaking upon our shores. Are you prepared to dive in?
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
