The Gospel: Ethics or Hope?

Challenging sermon this morning at the Kirchentag closing service. Looking forward to dong a proper write up of it in the next day or so. For now the Peacher, Dr Danielle Garrone, a Waldensian from Rome, called us to hope in Christ, not Christendom, or ourselves. He suggested that a Church losing the script comes off the message of the gospel, and starts banging on about collateral moral issues that it thinks will engage people outside, but never seem to:

I fear ethics has become the area that we hope will attract people's interest, because we do not have enough hope to expect such interest in the gospel itself. Protestants tend to prefer to do social ethics, and Evangelicals to concentrate on sexual ethics, whilst Catholics engage in both. All of us are open to the temptation to use ethics as a way to gloss over our own lack of giving account of the hope that is in us...

Nail Your Colours to the Fußboden

Kitting up for the Bremen Kirchentag, I notice one essential for non-flaky Christians everywhere — Die Luthersocke.

Each pair bears the immortal slogan — “Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. (Here I stand. I can do nothing else)”

Available to all in five colours (not only Anglicans), it’s a sure-fire way for clergy everywhere to prove their Standhaftigkeit and disprove idiotic allegations that they aren’t resolute enough. Good for lazy so-and-so’s, too. Your own personal Diet of Worms to go (or not, as the case may be). The Boy can now nail his feet to the burning deck, whence all but he have fled. God helps those who help themselves for 7 Euros, here. Amen.

Ecclesiology: fifth element?

5. Church as Pilgrimage
A lot of eclesiology is based on how the ship is running, but the real question is where the ship is going! Christians do not see history as a giant circular recycling exercise, but a journey which begins in a garden and ends in a city. Between those points the community travels together, but with ragged edges. Certainly all pat attempts to specify who’s in and who’s out of the community don’t quite work. In the NT the Church is a community is one of hope, awaiting transformation and fulfilment on the basis of what it has corporately received, tying the two together under cover of bread and wine. It’s impossible to define exactly what its future goal will be like, though you can dream and paint and produce poems about it. It’s an experimental enterprise, throwing up new ideas and inspirations, some of which are better than others. Nobody knows the day or the hour; but everything short of this goal is provisional — an important safeguard against taking ourselves too seriously. Different elements in the whole may fall out, but in the end the Kingdom emerges from the Church which is less than the kingdom, and all will be revealed. Reformation, renewal from within, is written into its DNA.
Where do we think it is all going, and what longing gives rise to the community’s passion? What kind of hope inspires Christians, and how do they incorporate this dimension in their art, beliefs and song?
‘Christendom is dead. The Church as Jeremiah and Paul knew it is resuming its character as a movement, a pilgrimage.’ (James A Sanders)
Right Wing danger:
becoming mired in existing structures to the point of paralysis. Taking them too seriously; turning them into weapons to butress confidence or exclude others, producing a Church process driven by fear and compulsion, rather than inspired by passion and hope. Taking the past too serously, and the future not seriously enough.
Left Wing danger:
turning hope into a political programme and absolutizing it, whilst losing a grip on the historical roots of faith — an under realistic sense of the deposit of faith, and over realistic sense of ideals. Taking the future too serously, and the past not seriously enough.
Perpetual Issue:
Misunderstanding the provisionality of the whole exercise. With everything dissolving around us, we travel on the cusp of the world to come with no enduring city. Our actions require anchoring, or, to change the metaphor, our static elements are springboards for action not absolutes.

Many thanks to JohnG’s comment on my last post that introduced this dimension to the model.

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