Meaning the Words--October 26, 2022

Meaning the Words--October 26, 2022

"Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed.  You know that when you were of the Gentiles you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak.  Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says, 'Let Jesus be cursed!' and no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit."  [1 Corinthians 12:1-3]

Let's clear something up:  treating Jesus like your mascot or personal possession is easy.  It's cheap.  It's popular.  And anybody can do that.  They can even dress it up in the language of piety to sound deeply devout--but it's still about trying to use Jesus to endorse your own agenda.  And, to be even more honest [perhaps uncomfortably so], it's a really common thing to do, even among Respectable Religious folk.

But to make the claim that Jesus is "Lord"--well, that's really saying something.  Or at least to mean that claim, rather than just mouthing it as pious lip-service or reciting a creed from memory like a parrot that doesn't understand the sounds it has been trained to mimic, that's a big deal.  To name Jesus as Lord isn't about invoking Jesus' power or status to back up our own agendas, but rather it is about declaring our allegiance to his agenda.  And that is something that we need the Spirit's help to do--on our own, we keep trying to crown ourselves sovereigns over our own lives like Napoleon.  It takes the pull of the Spirit in our lives to redirect our hearts and hands to give our allegiance to Jesus and his upside-down Reign where the last are first and the lowly are lifted up.

That was certainly even more evident in the first century when Paul first wrote these words.  We have become so familiar with the phrase "Jesus is Lord," and we can so callously utter them without consequence in our lives, that we might well miss just how radical a claim it really is to confess Jesus as Lord--if we dare to take that claim seriously.  In Paul's world, it was as stark a statement as saying that up is down or day is night.  It was as risky--and counter-cultural--a claim as Copernicus saying that the Earth went around the Sun rather than the accepted conventional wisdom [insisted on by the Keepers of Respectable Religion in his day, mind you] that the Earth was the center of the universe, with the Sun and all the planets orbiting it.  To say that Jesus was and is "Lord" was a clear rejection of the Empire's claim that Caesar was Lord--in fact, it was that very statement that the Empire demanded its subjects, including Christians, affirm.  And it was that very claim that ancient Christians refused to endorse--they would not mouth the words, "Caesar is Lord" or offer even a pinch of incense to Caesar on an imperial altar, even though that defiance cost many Christians their lives.  From Paul's perspective, nobody just glibly said "Jesus is Lord," because everybody in his world knew that saying those words risked a death sentence--and nobody gambles with their life so recklessly if they don't really believe the words they are saying. [To borrow an insight of C.S. Lewis, while plenty of people in history have died for things they believed in that turned out to be incorrect or outright lies, nobody dies for a lie that they know is a lie.]

For that matter, even to people who weren't big fans of the Empire, it looked simply absurd to claim that a man who had been crucified by the Empire was actually the Lord of the universe.  To the watching world, it seemed obvious that whoever is doing the crucifying is really in charge, and whoever is getting crucified must be weak, foolish, and defeated.  But Christians, from the very beginning, made the outrageous claim, not only that Jesus was and is the true Lord of all, but that his way of accomplishing victory and establishing his Reign was precisely at the point that looked like an utter loss: the cross.  Nobody says something like that by logical deduction.  Nobody, at least not in Paul's time, makes a claim like that because it is popular.  Nobody who heard the story of a homeless, weaponless rabbi getting executed on Caesar's orders would have said, "That's predictable. It sounds exactly like the rabbi won and the Empire lost"--well, nobody except someone who had been given the eyes to recognize it by the Spirit of God.

That's actually what Paul had said back in the very first chapter of this letter.  The message about the cross sounds like weakness and foolishness--utter nonsense!--to the watching world, but to those who have been called by God and given the eyes of faith to recognize it, we see in the cross the power and wisdom of God.  By sheer logic, conventional wisdom, and "common sense," it looks like Jesus is a loser who got crushed by the powers of the day, but by the direction of the Spirit, we can see a completely different understanding: that the Crucified One is indeed the Lord of all creation, and his way of reigning is the power of self-giving love that was willing to be killed by his enemies [and for their sake] rather than to kill them.

In a sense, this is exactly what we meant the other day when we talked about being a Christian and being "re-storied."  To be a Christian is to learn to tell a different story from what the rest of the world tells--about Jesus, about true power, about the world, and about who is really Lord.  To a world that just keeps rehashing the same old tale of "Might makes right," and "You've got to look out for your own interests first," the story we call the gospel sounds ridiculous.  But we have been shown by the very Spirit of God a different story--one in which the loser turns out to be the victor, the cross turns out to be Jesus' triumph, and the powers of the day are exposed to be empty husks.

In our time, the trouble is that church folks have gotten so used to reciting the phrase, "Jesus is Lord" that we run the risk of forgetting how radical a notion that really is.  We keep wanting to take the title "Lord Jesus" and slap it on our same old notions of power, and Respectable Religious folks keep wanting to let Jesus get co-opted to prop up their political agendas [often to support things that don't sound very Christ-like, at that], or to pretend that Jesus blesses our selfishness.  But when Paul talks about confessing "Jesus is Lord," he doesn't mean just reciting those words as an empty slogan or magic words to guarantee we will get what we want or have divine endorsement on our power-grabs.  The only way to really mean "Jesus is Lord" is to recognize that the One you are calling "Lord" is the One who laid down his life and endured execution by the Superpower of his day, and that his kind of lordship doesn't look like imperial conquests but the washing of feet, the welcoming of outcasts, and the love of his enemies.  Jesus' lordship doesn't come at the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun, but with a towel and basin and nail-scarred hands.  The only way anybody can possibly see such an outlandish claim as the God's-honest truth is if the Spirit of God shows it to us.

Today, then, let's be done with the cheap ways we try to misuse the name of Jesus on our own personal or partisan agendas.  Let's be done with using Jesus as a mascot to endorse our own wishes for control, money, or status, and instead allow Jesus' upside-down reign to surprise the world, ourselves included.

In other words, let us dare to confess that Jesus is Lord... and let us dare to mean it.

Lord Jesus, let us mean what we say about you in the ways we live this life according to your upside-down Reign where the last are put first and the lowly are lifted up.