Turning the World Upside Down

The Message of Repentance
Luke 13:1-5
2009.01.29
09SR Session Five

Note: the following notes are unedited, but posted now for sake of the quotes. An edited version of the sermon manuscript will be posted at a later time.

One of the biggest reasons I wanted to study more about Augustine is because of his significant influence. His life and work continue to shape (at least some parts of) the church today. From what I knew, Augustine impacted his community, his culture, his time, and beyond. I was eager to see his approach and to see if there was anything that we could learn in our current church context.

We are a splintered and insignificant body in the world. I know, I’m painting in broad strokes, and I can’t speak with exhaustive insight, but to me, it seems like our churches typically make news for all the wrong reasons. We make the news when a pastor commits adultery, comes out as a homosexual, or is caught abusing a child. We make the news when we convert old NBA arenas into 12,000 seat church auditoriums. We make the news when evangelical figure-heads (proudly) attribute terrorist attacks to our national unrighteousness. We do not seem to be changing the world; if anything, our influence is being pushed further into the margin.

We are not “turning the world upside down” like the early church (cf. Acts 17:6). That was the description of the city leaders who weren’t particularly pleased about the influence of the gospel, but they could not ignore or deny it.

Augustine impacted his world in a similar way. How? What did he do? Why was he so effective? My thesis is that God was pleased to change the world through Augustine because he saw sin for what it was, and repented. He turned the world upside down by turning away from sin.

Turning away from sin, in our personal choices as well as in our conversations, has not been the priority. In some cases, repentance is not even on the radar of the church’s life.

These are the two loves: the first is holy, the second is foul; the first is social, the second selfish; the first consults the common welfare for the sake of a celestial society, the second grasps at a selfish control of social affairs for the sake of arrogant domination; the first is submissive to God, the second tries to rival God; the first is quiet, the second is restless; the first is peaceful, the second trouble-making; the first prefers truth to the praises of those who are in error, the second is greedy for praise, however it may be obtained; the first is friendly, the second envious; the first desires for its neighbor what it wishes for itself, the second desires to subjugate its neighbor; the first rules its neighbor for the good of its neighbor, the second for its own advantage. (Literal Commentary on Genesis, XI. 15.20)

Three approaches to the world:

1. Some things to be avoided and rebuked. against the world

2. Some things to be shared and enjoyed. with the world

3. Some things to be loved and worshipped. above the world

This morning I want to highlight four fruitless approaches that are common in our churches. These are attitudes and methods that are ineffective, and I think actually counter-productive. These are four pseudo-gospels, artificial and misleading messages. Then we’ll consider one more gospel, the gospel I think found in the Bible and preached by Augustine.

The Social Gospel

The social gospel has been around for a long time, but is still going strong in many corners of the “church.” The social gospel focuses on meeting temporal needs. It hears Jesus calling us to feed the poor and clothe the naked. It hears James say that pure and undefiled religion is to visit orphans and widows in their affliction.

Those who believe the social gospel rightly criticize much of the contemporary church’s indifference toward the needy. So they collect money to provide clean water to kids in Africa. They work domestically to change laws about abortion and marriage. They start soup kitchens, homeless shelters, adoption agencies, and support groups for alcoholics.

When we turn the helpless away, saying “be warmed and filled” without providing when we can, we prove that our faith is worthless. However, no one gets to God because we gave them clean water, if that is the only thing we gave them. Dirty drinking water may be a problem, but it is not anyone’s biggest problem. Everyone’s biggest problem is sin that alienates them from God.

Not everyone who serves food to the homeless or who donates clothes to a shelter misses the point. There is a place for us to take care of temporal needs. But the church will not turn the world upside down by collecting more winter coats, building hospitals, or teaching people how to read. Again, not everyone, but many who take the social gospel approach never get around to talking about sin, if they acknowledge “sin” at all. They do not talk about Jesus as the crucified Savior; He is a kind miracle worker who feeds the five-thousand and heals sick people.

This is really no “gospel” at all. It is a pathetic and short term, substitute “good news.” And no matter how much liberals claim this is the more loving approach, it may be eternally worthless. Even more, it keeps people from the best joy. Joy and peace come from having the Messiah, not from knowing that the next meal is in the refrigerator.

The social gospel fails to see sin for what it is, as the problem.

The Selling Gospel

The selling gospel assumes that if we can package Christianity the right way, we can get anyone interested. If we present our message in an attractive way to our target audience, we will create a positive image and have a successful product. If we give people what they want, they’ll be likely to be interested in what we’re selling.

We don’t need innovation or entertainment.

This selling gospel takes many forms. It often starts with surveys that quiz people about their desires and dislikes, informing us how to overcome consumer resistance. Church services too long? Shorten them. Music too slow or boring? Use pop songs or write Christian lyrics to a rock beat. Preaching too long or boring? Replace preaching with videos or drama, or encourage conversation. Sunday worship inconvenient? We’ll change the oil in your car if you visit. Lifestyle to restrictive? Don’t worry, we get tattoos, use cuss-words, and wear jeans with holes in them just like you.

Does this mean we can’t wear jeans with holes? No. But think through the problems with the selling gospel. First, we are ministers, not marketers. Christ didn’t come to overcome consumer resistance. He Himself didn’t do that.

Second, using the world to change the world makes no sense. We cannot accomplish spiritual things with fleshly methods. We will not raise people to better joys by appealing to their lesser, worldly joys. We can entertain them with clean jokes, but is that the best we can offer? It’s like trying to scratch and itch with a feather; it makes the problem worse, not better.

Third, we cannot expect to bring people to Jesus with the same things Jesus commands them to repent from. How can the church lure people to otherworldly values with worldliness? How can the church lure people with worldliness when Christ commands us not to love the world, or the things in the world, and not to be conformed to the world?

Like the social gospel, the selling gospel is not really “good news.” It doesn’t confront sin, it tries to add clean fun.

The Soiled Gospel

I hinted at this group in session three. If the first two groups fail to see sin as the problem, the last two groups do. The soiled gospel approach knows that everyone is a sinner. All of us are wicked and wretched. This group is extremely suspicious of anyone, especially professing Christians, who don’t admit they are the worst of the worse. Whereas the selling/seeker approach tries to present a positive image, this soiled group calls that superficial, and criticizes Sunday-best churches for failing to be transparent and authentic. No perfect people.

The soiled gospel group embraces the fact that men are foul. They demonstrate this in their clothing; they would never wear a suit to church because they would never presume to look so clean and orderly. Dirty hair and scraggly beards are back in a big way, and the external represents the internal attitude. They write minor chord songs about how the church is a spiritual whore.

The soiled gospel doesn’t try to reach people by showing them how much fun we can have, but by showing others we’re sinners just like they are. There are no perfect people allowed. It almost comes across that the more sinful, the more connection. The more miserable and slummy we show our transparent selves to be, the more we identify with hurting and miserable people.

Are we bad? Yes. Should we act righteous if we’re not? No. But nor should we keep living in unrighteousness to be “real.”

Good people delighted to hear about the past sins of those who have now shed them. The pleasure is not in the evils as such, but that though they were so once, they are not like that now. (X. iii.)

This is the primary problem with the grunge, emergent approach. While it may do a commendable job of acknowledging our spiritual condition and conduct, it does not seem to acknowledge the transforming power of Christ. There is almost a reveling in sin and depravity rather than repenting from it. So it is not “good” news. There seems to be little to no hope of purity. Passions and pleasures are not reoriented for holy things, as if that were an impossibility while remaining in these bodies on this planet. We’re left in our unrighteous condition, but at least we can be a community of miserable people talking about our Jesus tattoos.

The Secluded Gospel

The fourth fruitless approach also recognizes that sin is the ultimate problem. And unlike the soiled approach, this group believes that there is hope for a pure life, but that hope only comes by removing ourselves as far away from the world as we can get. God wants His people holy, set apart, so they take that literally and build compounds, or at least they create rules that force isolation from whatever is bad.

The secluded gospel group is ironically proud of their purity. They can’t believe that others don’t perceive how wrong it is to associate with anything that has the appearance of evil, or to associate with those who associate with anything that has the appearance of evil.

Augustine faced this in the Donatists, who feared that their spiritual potency would be lost by contact with the unclean (Brown, 219). The “Donastist church was a group on the defensive…immobilized by anxiety to preserve its identity” (ibid, 221). So they withdrew.

This approach is still strong today. These Christians are great at creating their own bubble and then criticizing anyone who is outside of the bubble, Christian or not. Repentance is defined as removal of themselves from the world, not as a way to be salt. They don’t hide their light under the bushel basket, they take their light and go miles away from the darkness.

This is not “news,” let alone good news. Even though somehow they heard the gospel, there is fear of getting close enough to sinners to tell them about it. Though Jesus ate with tax-collectors and granted forgiveness to adulterers, we’re not Him, so we better be more careful. Turning the world upside down won’t happen if we watch from a distance.

Each one of these four so-called gospels are man-centered. They are not man-centered in the same way, but it is the common thread. The social gospel is overly concerned with man’s physical needs, the selling gospel is overly concerned with man’s fun, the soiled gospel puts focus on man’s confession, not God, and the secluded gospel is overly concerned with man’s isolation.

Man-centered gospels are destined to fail. They “relate themselves absolutely to the relative: they make an ultimate goal out of man’s earthly life and secular well-being” (Needham, 45). Skits and pep rally services are insufficient to deal with the issue.

Committed to the fragile world they had created, they were forced to idealize it. (Brown, 309)

Let us pine for the City where we are citizens….By pining, we are already there; we have already cast our hope, like an anchor, on that coast. I sing of somewhere else, not of here, for I sing with my heart, not my flesh. (quoted in Brown, 315)

The attitude in each group determines their methods and message. So what attitude and approach should we take? What method and message is appropriate for the church?

The Saving Gospel

We have a great opportunity to provide clarity and make an impact, against the false gospels. Political answers and financial answers won’t work. Diagnose the problem as original sin and then provide the solution.

Should we give food, clean water, and warm clothes to people who need it? Yes, but that is not their greatest joy. Should we go to great lengths to avoid offending people? Yes, but that is not the same thing as overcoming consumer resistance. Should we mourn that we’re sinners and refuse to fake righteousness? Yes, but that doesn’t mean we should keep living in unrighteousness. Should we avoid worldliness and flee temptation? Yes, but that doesn’t mean we take the gospel with us.

Augustine saw the Christian’s task in culture as a threefold responsibility. “He must become holy; he must coexist with sinners in the same community as himself, a task involving humility and integrity; but he must also be prepared, actively, to rebuke and correct them” (Brown, 223).

The Donatists “regarded their church as an alternative to society, as a place of refuge, like the Ark” (Brown, 224).

I believe that the place we need to start is repentance, personal and proclaimed.

Personal repentance, or repentant hearts, keep us from being cold, inconsistent, jerks when evangelizing. We know that we’re sinners. We are humbled by that in a way that enables us to be bold with the gospel without being arrogant. It also enables us to speak with sweetness yet without compromising, because sin is still the issue. Our humility doesn’t keep us from telling others to repent, but our God-given desire for holiness doesn’t keep us from telling others to repent arrogantly.

If we want God to use us, the church must return to proclaiming repentance. If what we said earlier in the week is true, that repentance is the gateway to superior pleasure, we must not act like temporal food is better than eternal food, or that superficial joy is better than spiritual joy, or that transparent misery is better than transparent purity, or that isolated righteousness is better than global worship.

The church must live in repentant community.

Please pardon us if our country, up above, has to cause trouble to your own. (quoted in Brown, 288)

Repentance is the only way to engage the culture, the only way to be in the world but not of it, the only way to be critical of sin but not judgmental, the only way to pursue holiness in humility, the only way to speak with authority but not arrogance, the only way to be bold but not beat people, the only way to think and live theologically in a world where the real problem is sin and the ultimate goal of culture is God’s praise.

Like in Augustine’s time, a person’s worst enemies are not outside him. They are inside, in sin and in doubts (see Brown, 159).

Being missional, as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t mean learning how to skateboard. It means taking Jesus’ mission as our own. He came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance (Luke). He had numerous opportunities to communicate repentance.

There is a delight which is given not to the wicked (Isa. 48:22), but to those who worship You for no reward save the joy that You Yourself are to them. That is the authentic happy life, to set one’s joy on You, grounded in You and caused by You. (X. xxii.)

Conclusion

He who loves God loves himself thereby, [so] it follows that he must endeavor to get his neighbor to love God, since he is ordered to love his neighbor as himself. (The City of God, XII. 6)

Suffering and death is around us. The best thing we can do is call men to repent.

We do not want to be Augustinian monks, but Augustinian disciple-makers. God may use us to turn the world upside down, but not if we don’t practice and proclaim repentance.

Our testimony is valuable, like Augustine. If told well, it relates the experience of someone they can see with the ultimate subject. Repenting from our sin is a powerful witness to our classmates, co-workers, and community.

If your delight is in souls, love them in God…and draw as many with you to Him as you can. (Confessions, IV. xii.)