The Buddy Jesus Dogma

Last week it was Descartes and Douglas Adams.  This week?  Kevin Smith!

Luke 12:49-56; Hebrews 11:29-12:2; Psalm 82; Jeremiah 23:23-29

In the late nineties, a rather dark satirical movie was released by Kevin Smith called Dogma.  The whole premise was built around a campaign by a catholic cardinal, played by George Carlin, to “revamp” the catholic church.  He decides the crucifix is too archaic and depressing a symbol and gets rid of it in favor of something new.  In the words of the film, “Christ didn’t come to Earth to give us the willies… He came to help us out. He was a booster.”  He then proceeds to reveal a statue of what he calls the “Buddy Christ”, Jesus with a huge smile on his face, giving something like the Fonzie-esque “’Eeeeeyyyyy” sign.

Now, the buddy Jesus is meant to be a comment on how Christianity keeps fighting to be relevant in culture by reinventing itself as current, hip, marketable, popular, whatever, but what tends to happen is it get downright fluffy.  We look at something like the Buddy Jesus and say, “No-one would fall for that, it’s too hokey.”  But sadly, in recent years many a denomination and many a church has fallen prey to the exact kind of thinking that led to the Buddy Jesus in the first place.  Somehow the church has it its collective brain that people want a fluffy, happy Jesus that loves them and lets them do whatever they want – but I’m fairly sure that’s not how it works.

It seems like, along with just about everything else in this country, the church has polarized itself in two distinct directions.  There’s the group who is trying hard to be culturally relevant, looking at all the “happy” texts of Scripture and focusing on how Jesus loves everyone and the freedom we have in Christ.  Then there’s another group who is trying just as hard to say how wrong the first group is and pointing to the more restrictive texts of Scripture, emphasizing that we have to do everything the bible says or we’ll make God angry, or something along those lines.  But when it really comes down to it they’re both half-right.  And they’re both half wrong.

God is love.  God isn’t loving, he doesn’t have love, God IS love.  His very being is Love.  The second group seems to think that God’s love is like human love, where we have to earn it – even though they’ll almost never phrase it like that, that’s what gets danced around.  The other side forgets some important parts to love, something every parent knows, and that sometimes the loving response is to say “No”.

Sometimes we might think God’s reasoning is arbitrary, much as a child thinks a parent’s reasoning is arbitrary.  “Why can I touch the cookie sheet before its in the oven but not while it’s in the oven?”  The parent knows that the cookie sheet in the oven is hot, but the child doesn’t yet have that awareness.  So we wonder why God permits some things but not others, and when God says something is bad its usually for a very good reason.

The Christians who focus on the loving side of things miss that discipline and restrictions is part of love.  The Christians who focus on the slightly legalistic side of things miss that love also involves permission and responsibility.  In our lesson from Jeremiah, God is rebuking people who claim to be speaking in his name but end up drawing people away from God, or even are willfully drawing people away from God.  Now, while I think it’s only a very small minority of people who call themselves Christians who are being willfully deceptive, the well-meaning majority can just as easily pull people away from God.

This may come as a shocking statement to some of you, but the trend in Christian evangelism for a long time was making the Good News sound good to unsaved people.  A lot of stuff came out of this movement: there was a resurgence of the “personal Jesus”; there were a number of different “scripts” to follow when someone wanted to “give their life to Jesus”; worship services were restructured across the country to be more “seeker-friendly” by including popular-sounding music, and preaching with less “Christian-ese”; a movement sprung up teaching that when one has enough faith all your problems go away.  A lot of these things are good, but not all.  The two big things they missed were that being a Christian tends to lead to different problems (Jesus didn’t say to “take up our cross, deny our selves, and follow him” for nothing) and that in countless places in Paul’s letters the gospel is described as either offensive or foolishness to those who don’t believe.

That’s why Jesus is saying he isn’t bringing peace but division.  In the context he’s talking about believers split against unbelievers, sometimes dividing families in half.  Some of us know this well, having either family or friends where part of the family is Christian and part is not.  It definitely leads to division, because to someone who doesn’t believe being a follower of Christ doesn’t make sense.  The answer isn’t to try and make Christianity seem more appealing by compromising Scripture, but instead to focus on the Truth that Scripture expresses.  Neither Jesus nor the early Church compromised their teachings, even when faced with imminent death or injury, and even when something that we’d think of as offensive happens, amazing numbers of people still believed.