Is your faith the "real deal?"

In the fall, I purchased a small, flat-screen TV so I could curl up in our living room for some cozy wintertime viewing. As it turned out, the 32" telly was pretty much the exact size of our fireplace opening, so I sat it there on the hearth, its black screen a double for the gaping hole behind it. A day or two later, the rain started, and didn’t stop.

Before long, I had the TV almost constantly streaming a crackling fireplace from a Youtube channel, complete with a mellow jazz playlist that transitioned to Christmas tunes mid-way through December. This faux fire was remarkable in its effect, providing a great sense of cheer during that dark, grey month. A number of people commented that it even conveyed an impression of actual warmth. It wasn’t the real thing, but it looked and almost felt like the real thing.

Fast forward, and I was reminded of this when thinking about the people who were there on site to witness both the ministry of John the Baptist and of Jesus of Nazareth. Did they recognize that despite similarities in their message, only one of them was "the real thing?" Did they know which one it was?

Choosing to follow Jesus instead of John was far from a straightforward decision. John was a well-known and respected prophet; as Reza Aslan proposes in his book, Zealot, Jesus was likely one of John’s disciples and it was for this reason he came to John for baptism.

Correctly or not, Aslan asserts that the biblical account of Jesus going straight to the desert after his baptism, to be tempted by Satan, was instead Jesus returning with John the Baptist to the wilderness from which John has just emerged, to learn more from him and to commune with his followers.

Lest this startle you, Aslan reminds us that today’s expectation that historical writing should relate a series of verifiable, observable events is a product of the modern age. He says this notion of history "would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers, for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths."

In aid of revealing a truth, then, and to encourage early Christian believers, the gospel writers doubled down on Jesus’s superior status by attributing to John various admissions of his own inferiority. In today’s reading from Matthew, John says "the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, 'He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.' And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God." 

In other chapters John talks about not being worthy to tie up the sandal of the one who is coming after him. Here, John is seen re-directing two of  his own disciples away from himself and towards Jesus. And others, but not all, of John the Baptist’s disciples did indeed turn to Jesus,  most particularly after John was imprisoned and killed.

Reza Aslan writes:

It would be back in Galilee, among his own people, that Jesus would fully take up John’s mantle and begin preaching about the Kingdom of God and the judgment that was to come. Yet Jesus would not simply mimic John. Jesus’s message would be far more revolutionary, his conception of the Kingdom of God far more radical, and his sense of his own identity and mission far more dangerous than anything John the Baptist could have conceived. John may have baptized by water. But Jesus would baptize by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit and fire.

So we are back to the image of fire. And I can tell you that there is one foolproof way to differentiate between the crackling flames on my TV screen and the crackling logs in a hearth, and that is that one can shoot out a spark that catches you on fire, and one can’t. Jesus’s message of love for all, his promise of release from bondage, and his invitation to eternal life indeed spread like wildfire after his resurrection, carried across land and sea by people who were ready to give their everything to the realization of this new hope for humankind.

It can be tempting to look back and say, well, it’s EASY to get that fire in your belly when you’re right there on the spot, at Ground Zero of a revolutionary new movement. But in the millennia since, the truth of Christ’s message has continued to set people’s hearts on fire, and emboldened them to countless acts of self-sacrificing love and courageous resistance to injustice.

So today I am asking us to reflect on our own experience of faith, individually and here in community at St. Clement’s. Are we following the real, or the almost-but-not-quite real? Are we worshipping a God who can catch us on fire?

Joash Thomas is a Canadian theologian whose recent book, The Justice of Jesus, encourages us to recognize the ways our Western Christian church has allowed itself to become domesticated. How it has tempered its prophetic ability to challenge the status quo, because it has for centuries defined and enforced the status quo. But he doesn’t leave us there. In a positive and hopeful manner, the author offers pathways out of a colonial mindset and into the heart of Jesus’s passion for justice.

As he notes, "if our gospel is not good news for the blind, and liberation for the oppressed, then our gospel is not the gospel of Jesus Christ."

We can learn much from churches outside Europe and North America. Joash is of south Indian descent, and can trace his family’s spiritual lineage back to the apostle Thomas - yes, "Doubting Thomas" - who is believed to have brought the liberating gospel of Jesus to India in 52 AD. "Think about it this way," he writes,"Some of our ancestors were worshipping Jesus in the same era when many white Europeans were still worshipping pagan gods like Thor."

His point isn’t that one branch of Christianity is superior to others; "all of us," he says, "have inherited our faith from imperfect people." But it does mean that we must learn from each other if we are to worship the Jesus who wants us to be afire for true justice. "Every pocket of the global church has blind spots," he writes. "This means we all need each other’s eyes to see more clearly so that we can be faithful in the present."

Today we are entering the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, a global, ecumenical event that first began in 1908. Its goal is to seek not the uniformity, but the unity of Christian believers. It takes as its mandate Jesus’s words from John’s gospel, in which Jesus prays at the Last Supper that all his followers be as one, so that the world through them might believe.

This week offers not just opportunities for prayer, but for active curiosity about what we may learn from and appreciate about other denominations and theological perspectives. What is it, in our tradition or in another’s, that brings our faith alive in real ways, with tangible results? What can we bring to our spiritual practice that helps us align ourselves more and more with the vulnerable people who Jesus championed, and less and less with the forces that abused or abandoned them?

These aren’t always comfortable questions to ask, and even less comfortable to answer. Because Jesus warns us that discipleship is costly. It is only human to want to stay in our safety zones, to prioritize our own and our families’ needs, to avoid rocking the boat. But when the disciples’ fishing boat was being wildly rocked by towering waves, Jesus, famously, was hunkered down and taking a peaceful nap. Might we, too, learn a faith that is so strong that it is not rocked by storm or sacrifice?

At St. Clement’s, we are enjoying a steady growth in our numbers of visitors and parishioners; it is encouraging and cheering to witness new friendships being formed, new ministries suggested, new leaders stepping up, new energy being released. I hope all of you feel as proud of this community as I do.

But I have to remind myself that Sunday attendance figures aren’t the metric by which God evaluates the success of a church. God longs for us to be afire with love, and to make real the peace and justice of Jesus in our homes and communities. Settling for any less than this is like trying to warm ourselves in front of a televised fireplace, enjoying the sight and the sound of the flames, but ultimately being left cold.

So may God give us the will and the courage to follow the real Jesus, the Jesus who calls us to think past borders and boundaries, and to unleash tangible acts of radical love. May God help us appreciate any differences between us, and use them to God’s ultimate good. And may God call us, in all our glorious diversity, into unity as God’s children, beloved now and always, Amen.