"Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. The saying is sure:
If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
if we endure, we will also reign with him;
if we deny him, he will also deny us;
if we are faithless, he remains faithful—
he cannot deny himself." (2 Timothy 2:10-13)
When they tell you they need your support in the cause of "saving God," let it be clear to you that they don't know what they're talking about. When they say that "It's up to us (whoever they allow into the group they label as "us") to save Christianity," you can be certain it's false. And when the loud voices claiming to speak for Respectable Religion claim that God needs their movement, their influence, their power, or their culture war leverage for things to come out all right in the world, your Gospel-configured "Baloney Detector" should be going off with sirens and alarm bells. None of it is so, no matter what they say... no matter who the "they" happens to be at the moment.
I've been thinking about this since this past Sunday, when many of us heard this passage from 2 Timothy read in worship, and how the New Testament-era church was clear that it's never Jesus who needs our help to accomplish his purposes, but rather, we are the fickle (and often faithless) ones who rely on Christ. Whether or not we flake out on Jesus may well be an open question; Jesus, however, is not at risk of running out of energy or giving out on us. At no point is there a concern that Jesus will bail out, give up, or depend on us to save him; there is, on the other hand, constantly the possibility that we will do any of those things toward him. And yet--amazingly--the writer of Second Timothy insists that even "if we are faithless, he remains faithful." Even when we blow it, even when we don't live up to our calling, even when we bring wobbly faith, scandalous sins, or a track record of selling out, Jesus remains faithful. He never needs our help to step up and save the day for him; we always need his.
Or, as I sometimes tell our confirmation students, the position of the Holy Scriptures is that God is not Tinker Bell.
Yeah, that Tinker Bell. You know, the winged fairy character from the Peter Pan stories. The one whose cartoon version graced the opening titles of many of Disney movie over the decades. God ain't like her... at least in one very important way. In the classic stage retelling of Peter Pan, there comes a point at which Tinker Bell drinks the poison that was intended for Peter Pan, in order to save the life of the Boy Who Could Fly. When Peter finds her and discovers what she has done, he realizes she is dying, and then breaks the fourth wall to address the audience for help. "You have to help save her!" Pan insists. "You have to bring her back! If you all in the audience will clap your hands, believe really hard, and say out loud that you believe in fairies, Tinker Bell can be revived and come back to life!" In other words, the magical supernatural pixie creature needs our help to save the day, and to save her life. Fortunately for the fictional fairy, it always turns out that the exact amount of applause the audience gives is precisely the quantity that will resuscitate Tinker Bell, and the play can move on toward its inevitable happy ending. Captain Hook is defeated, and all is well with Never Land, all because when Tinker Bell needed saving, we in the audience did our part.
And, as I say, as much as it works for a theatrical version of a children's story, that ain't how the Scriptures teach us to picture God. It might be tempting to think that God needs our help, or Jesus is enlisting us to fight a culture war for him, or that it's up to us to rescue Christianity from whatever nefarious forces they say are out there. But the Scriptures insist that Jesus doesn't need saving, God's Reign doesn't depend on our political machinations, and the Spirit does not need our help to make the Good News "great" or the church "successful." God isn't Tinker Bell, and Christ does not need our assistance to come through in a pinch. It is always the other way around: we are the ones who need God to be reliable, and we are always the ones dependent on Jesus to be faithful even when we are not. Blessedly, that is precisely what the Gospel gives us.
So the next time you hear the talking heads at a podium, lectern, or TV studio hawking their plan for how we can help save God, or bring back Christianity, or rescue the church, let these verses from Second Timoty come back to your mind. God has never needed our measures of "success," "greatness," "power," or "influence." Rather, God's way of saving us--and indeed the world--comes through precisely the things that look like loss and lowliness, weakness and insignificance. When we get it backwards, we lose what makes the Gospel actually good news, and we sell it out for more of the world's typical power-grabbing dressed up in religiosity.
And you know what? Even when that happens--even when we turn out to be faithless in God's way and sell out for some counterfeit--Jesus still doesn't sell out, bail out, or give out. He remains faithful, even when we are faithless, and even without our clapping from the seats.
Lord Jesus, be your faithful self and keep us from selling out for cheap counterfeits of your good news.
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