How Attending Church Services Can Save the World (with a fun excursus on why we hate God)

“With that we are told: if you meet an enemy: think first about your own enmity against God and about God’s mercy toward you.”

“The cross is not the private property of any human being, but it belongs to all human beings; it is valid for all human beings. God loves our enemies – that is what the cross tells us.”

 “Now we hear: do not repay anyone evil for evil. The Evil One wants to instill one thing in you, namely that you will also become evil”

(all above from a sermon by Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Romans 12 in 1938. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition, Volume 15)

The conversion that Jesus Christ brings is not a change of mind, but a change of behavior over against all that our best mind can muster. Paul starts this portion of his letter to the Romans with this: “do not claim to be wise.” We’ve got it all figured out, don’t we? There is justifiable war and unjustifiable war. There is justifiable violence and unjustifiable violence. There is a time when it is just plain right to kill our enemy. Paul, here in Romans 12, tells us “not so fast” with our thinking, our figurings, our wisdom.

In his letter to the Corinthians Paul speaks of God’s wisdom as being very different than ours (I Corinthians 1-2). Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes of how we are told, when facing hatred (and our desire to payback, retribute) we should remember our hatred of God (and God’s ways) and how God refuses to hold that against us.* What I wonder about is how, now that we are more and more abandoning regular spiritual practices of bible reading, prayer, and community of faith worship, we are ever going to be able to enter such remembering, such consideration. How could we referent God and any activity of God if God isn’t in our purview any longer? What will bring us to any engagement with the wisdom of God (again, First Corinthians 1-2, for how wisdom is not wise words but revelatory action that is anything but logical when it comes to what any respectable God would do) when we have no knowledge of or prior engagement with this wisdom of God? We will be left to our own devices, to our own wise ways. As our nation and politics boils in words and violent acts of revenge and retaliation and as our global ecology burns and melts from human behaviors of production and consumption and our international relationships are determined by warfare, I am given good reason, it seems to me, to be skeptical of our human wisdom, the “best our minds can muster,” as I said.

Could there be another way? We will not know unless we pay attention to what we term “revelation,” that is to say, a word from outside our human reason and experience. Find a church, my friends, where you can go and hear of and from Jesus (I know there’s the argument that says you can do this listening to God on your own without a faith community. I do beg to differ, and not for reasons of friendship with folks. But, this is an argument for another day. Then there’s the challenge of actually finding a church that delivers Jesus and not some conservative or progressive social and political agenda. I didn’t say this whole thing is easy!). Don’t do this finding a church in order to be spiritual or to feel better or any such thing. Do it in order to give our world a chance of seeing another century.

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*BTW, significantly not to be forgotten here is that much of the time when folks say they don’t believe in God it’s because they hate how believing in God would mean that Someone actually not only has some influence over what will become of them but more than that, determines what will become of them. They want to be free, not only about deciding where to go to lunch, but also what happens to them after they die.  Granted, these days there is enough to hate about God simply because so many of God’s so-called followers are so hate-filled and bigoted and prejudiced and morally two-faced and repugnant. But leave that aside for a moment if you can, and just look at God straight up. Really? I really don’t have control over my destiny? I can’t even determine to go to nowhere or nothing but only dirt in the ground or whatever you might call not a Bad Place (ok, Hell) or a Good Place (ok, Heaven)? No, we really can’t. I don’t like that situation either. God, Someone who has agency when I do not, is not my cup of tea. But, there is something I have heard. Actually someone of whom I have heard, that puts a marvelous turn on all of our inabilities if not darkness. The Apostle Paul uses that same word, “but,” to make the big turn on the trajectory of his message in his letter to the Romans. “But now….” is what he writes. After chronicling the vast landscape of religious pomposity as well as moral vacuum, he announces, “But now…!” He writes: “But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.”(Romans 3:21-22) Of whom have I heard? Jesus of Nazareth. The take on him is that he is God. That’s what we Christians say. And if that is true (which, friends, is too good not to be true), then here is someone who takes this God whom taken “straight up,” as I said, from being silent, demanding and retributive to being loud, promising and distributive. So, on the hatred of God: we do naturally and without any arm twisting and in all honesty, not like God. Perhaps “hate” is too strong a word, but I actually don’t think so. The conversion to loving God is possible but is continuous and never complete and we must be taken there, daily, sometimes kicking and screaming, by the promise of Jesus that God is for us and not against us.