Cupholders and Counterfeits

Cupholders and Counterfeits--April 11, 2019

"When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified." [1 Corinthians 2:1-2]

You know it's not about the cupholders.  Nobody needs to tell you that.

When you are in the market for a new car, it goes without saying that the number one feature you should be looking for is not whether it has sufficient numbers of sufficiently large holes for setting beverages.  Depending on your needs and situation, you might be looking at the engine (whether it's four, six, or eight cylinder, for example), at the transmission (if you prefer driving a stick to an automatic), at the gas mileage, the brakes and safety features, or whether it is two or four-wheel-drive. You might even be most interested in balancing sticker price with the long-term costs of maintenance. Something along those lines.  But cupholders should not be the number-factor.  The point of a vehicle, after all, is to get you from one place to another.  Cupholders won't get you anywhere.

Similarly, if you should find yourself at a car dealership sometime, and the salesman comes up to you with that slicked back hair and fake smile to declare, "Boy, have I got a deal for you--I've got a car with a fantastic set of cupholders for you", this should be a warning sign to you.  Such a salesman either doesn't know what he's talking about, or (worse) thinks you are the sort of customer who doesn't know what really matters.

But you know all of that already.  And it would be nonsensical to imagine someone getting hoodwinked into buying a car based solely on the cupholders.

And yet, sometimes we let the same thing happen to the Gospel.  Sometimes we forget what this faith of ours is all about, and we let ourselves get sold on the accessories.  You'll find religious-sounding folks hawking their diet books, parenting strategies, rules about what they think women are and are not allowed to do, and schemes for making money, all packaged and sold with a cross on the label and marketed as "Christian-based", as though the Gospel were primarily about losing weight, having well-behaved kids, getting a raise, or prescribing gender roles.  You'll find folks whose version of Christianity comes with a commitment to supply-side trickle-down economics bolted to the back like a trailer for some reason, or others who see Christianity as first and foremost a way of preserving renaissance European culture, or who market their faith as a way of keeping bad things from happening in your life.  And to be quite frank, it's all a bunch of baloney.  It's selling cupholders and floormats--things that are not only unessential, but often just extra accessories that got tossed in at some point.  And none of those things get you anywhere.  They all just trade the Mystery for the mediocre.

Ask Paul what the Gospel is really all about, and he goes right for the engine of the whole thing: Christ himself--and him crucified.  The Christian faith is not first and foremost a self-help program, marriage and parenting curriculum, or partisan political platform. Those are all cupholders and floormats.  The heart of the matter, the Mystery of God, as Paul puts it, is Christ himself, forever wearing the nail scars, as the One who brings the living God as close as a breath.  

In other words, it's about Christ--the Christ who goes to the cross for us.  It should be obvious, but all of the clutter in your average "Christian bookstore" makes it rather clear that it's not.  All sorts of other versions of Jesus are out there--as many as we have individual tastes in this era of infinitely customizable commodities.  There's Tough Guy Manly Jesus you'll hear about from time to time, when folks try to make Jesus into some kind of rugged survivalist who would have joined a local militia.  There's Business Success Jesus, who gives entrepreneurial direction to aspiring tycoons and who tells them that he wants them all to be rich.  There's curiously White American Jesus, whom so many preachers (also white Americans) have recast in their own image to make Jesus a defender of the Constitution draped in the Stars and Stripes, who says that the USA is synonymous with the Kingdom of God.  There's Vaguely Inspirational Jesus, who never has anything of substance to say, and certainly never challenges us, but just keeps telling us to keep shooting for our dreams with all the heft of that kitten from the "Hang in there!" posters from an earlier decade.  And there are a million other fake Jesuses out there, too.   Paul calls them all impostors.

The way you know the real Jesus is that his power is in surrender, his strength is in weakness, his victory is in defeat, and his throne is a cross.  The heart of the Mystery--in fact Mystery himself, if you will--is not a program for self-help or a figurehead to project your political leanings onto, but a crucified criminal, tortured to death by the Respectable Empire of the day, who yet breaks the power of death on that same cross he was nailed to. 

A God who turns the tables on the winners and the losers by becoming a Loser for us--that's what the whole Christian faith is about, despite all the ways we Respectable Religious people have tried to dress Jesus up as the mascot of our own personal, national, cultural, or political preferences to make him seem more like "our kind" of a "winner."  That has the power to move us--that's got the roar of an engine to it.

Today, let's set aside all the ways we have been getting suckered in to focusing on cupholders, so that we can be captivated by the One who has always been at the heart of it all--Jesus of Nazareth, the Crucified Christ of God.

Lord Jesus, keep us centered on you and on your cross, and don't let us fall for any of the counterfeits we want to chase after.