Saving Jesus from the Church How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus ROBIN R. MEYERS I dedicate this book to all the men and women who have chosen the parish ministry as their life’s work, and yet do not wish to be considered harmless artifacts from another age. May all those who labor in the most misunderstood, dangerous, and sublime of all professions be encouraged and inspired by the possibility that one’s head and one’s heart can be equal partners in faith. Lest the church end up a museum piece whose clergy are affable but laughable cartoons, we must once again dedicate ourselves to this wild calling—one that led us away from more comfortable lives and into the only profession where radical truth-telling is part of the job description. May we fear no man and no creed, save our own timidity, and may we encourage and support one another in pursuit of religion that is biblically responsible, intellectually honest, emotionally satisfying, and socially signifi cant. CONTENTS PRO LO GU E A Preacher’s Nightmare: Am I a Chris tian? 1 ONE Jesus the Teacher, Not the Savior 13 TWO Faith as Being, Not Belief 35 THRE E The Cross as Futility, Not Forgiveness 55 FOUR Easter as Presence, Not Proof 75 FIV E Original Blessing, Not Original Sin 97 SI X Christianity as Compassion, Not Condemnation 117 SE V E N Discipleship as Obedience, Not Observance 141 EI G H T Justice as Covenant, Not Control 163 NIN E Prosperity as Dangerous, Not Divine 183 TEN Religion as Relationship, Not Righteousness 203 EPI L O GUE A Preacher’s Dream: Faith as Following Jesus 223 Acknowledgments 233 Notes 235 About the Author Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher P R O L O GUE A PREACHER’S NIGHTMARE: AM I A CHRISTIAN? m I a Chris tian?” What a strange question for an ordained Aminister of the gospel to ask. Born a minister’s son and raised in a parsonage, I spent my childhood in the conservative Church of Christ, where no musical instruments are allowed in worship. As a college student, I discovered the Congregational Church and the liberal United Church of Christ, which I was warned to avoid, and then never looked back. The UCC has been my home ever since, a brave and messy denomination that has been speaking truth to power for a long time and in- sisting that we make more room at the table for those who are forgotten. Try as I might to be a “normal” kid (as a teenager I once hid copies of Playboy in plain sight, lest I be mistaken for a saint), I was a member of a generation that got its marching orders from Bob Dylan and Martin Luther King Jr. When I was at the tender age of sixteen, two of my heroes were gunned down just weeks apart, one on a hotel balcony in Memphis, the other in a hotel ballroom in California. The faint smell of tear gas hung over many college campuses in those days, and the New York Times reported that God was dead. The last thing I wanted to grow up to be was a preacher. As fate would have it, or destiny (if I could figure out the dif- ference between the two), the seeds of the ministry had already 2 Prologue been planted in me. A double PK (preacher’s kid and profes- sor’s kid), I had been invited at age fourteen to offer my fi rst public prayer at the Communion table of the Riverside Church of Christ in Wichita, Kansas. Chances are it was awful. But the dear souls there told me it was wonderful. One woman even went so far as to say, “Robin, that prayer surely found its way straight into God’s ear, and you will be a preacher like your father someday.” Now, forty years later, twenty-five of them spent as a UCC minister in my native Oklahoma, I came home one cold Janu- ary afternoon after serving Communion to my beloved fl ock and took a nap, which is my Sunday ritual. Parish ministry is tiring in ways most people do not understand, and a Sunday afternoon nap is as sacred to a middle-aged clergyman as the Psalms. Rising before dawn and still fooling with the sermon (or fi nishing it), many of us preachers are obsessive-compulsive types who believe that no matter how many times we have done this before, this time we will get it right. Preaching is, after all, an audacious and dangerous act. After the service, we stand in line, listening to “Good sermon, Reverend” a hundred times (all of which can be erased if just one person says, “Good morning, Reverend”), come home, wash off the aftershave and perfume residue from all those hand- shakes and hugs, sit down to eat, and then lie down to sleep. It’s a ritual as old as the priesthood, but there is also something subversive about it. Sleeping at odd times of the day can open the heart to strange dreams, when the ego stands down and the id and superego collide without a mediator. This day was no different, except for the dream. I woke up wondering if I was a Christian. I had folded myself into a fetal position and drawn the covers over my head. From the other room, I heard the talking heads of TV yelling at one another, arguing over what to do now that we were mired in this hopeless war in Iraq and creating ter- Prologue 3 rorists faster than we were killing them. The morning paper brought the same news we hear every morning—another sui- cide bomber had done what is unthinkable to those of us who consider our lives worth living. As I drifted off to sleep, I tried to imagine it: a place where human heads roll down the street like apples scattered from a fruit stand, and wailing mothers search for the remains of their children, only to find a shoe and one hand. In my dream I saw a woman holding that hand, grape-colored and dusty like a glove with entrails. If we have become numb to this, then what have we become? It is not a good idea to think of such things before falling asleep, of course, but this is the world we live in; this is the soundtrack of our lives. We shop frantically while fl ag-draped coffins bearing the remains of our dead soldiers (“babies,” as Kurt Vonnegut called them) get off-loaded in the dead of night like so many burned or broken biscuits from the ovens of war. We hear the droning script of patriotism—members of Con- gress, all wearing those standard-issue American fl ag lapel pins, urge other people’s children to be brave and “defend our freedom.” War is now “outsourced” like everything else, and then we spin the results to hide the reality of a demonic chaos. If Dante came back, his new vision of hell would surely include the Baghdad morgue. Meanwhile, the music in my dream was provided by right- wing talk-show hosts, crooning like backup singers in a concert of death. TV preachers did the drumming, slicing the world in half with the rhetoric of entitlement. The judgment is coming, they were saying, but instead of sheep and goats, one axis is God’s chosen, the other, God’s despised. We love Jesus, so we are entitled to kill for the cause; the others are crazy infi dels whose resistance to the crusade is inexplicably evil. A preacher smiles and says, “They just want those seventy virgins.” The moment I opened my eyes, with the dream still fresh and vivid, I wondered about the future of the church to which I 4 Prologue have given my life. Is it toxic now beyond redemption? Should it be allowed to die, so that something else can take its place, or should we go in search of Jesus one more time? It was as if an animal had curled up on my chest while I slept, bringing with it an urgent message from somewhere east of decency: if this is Christianity and these are Christians, I must not be one. In the dream I had a flashback to Saddam Hussein’s execu- tion by American proxies. Rome never does its work without co-conspirators. I saw his neck snapped and torn open, his eyes bulging in death. Someone captured it on a cell phone and in the Bible Belt, where I live, e-mails started circulating that praised God for this righteous act of vengeance. It was as if we had melted the wicked witch of the West with help from an “awesome God.” Finally we had an out-of-the-closet Chris tian in the White House, but what came out of the closet instead was torture. Winking and water boarding, and yet who can be surprised? Mel Gibson had just made a frightfully successful movie in which the One who tortures is God. In my dream, those in power never took responsibility for anything, nor could they seem to remember anything, espe- cially if it was important. The counsel of Jesus to let our speech be “a simple yes or no” was as foreign as the idea of actually helping the poor. In my dream, the image of Jesus had morphed from a Rembrandt portrait of a sad but radiant face into a bobble- headed doll in the back of a stretch limo.