American culture has made the cross into a plus sign,
Leonard Sweet told AEC attendees in his opening keynote speech Friday night.
“We’ve gone from the song ‘Make Me a Blessing’ to ‘Bless Me,’” he said, noting
with some sadness the tendency of today’s Christians to focus on what God means
to them rather than on carrying out God’s mission to others.“Maybe we’re too wrapped up in ‘beliefism,’” he said,
basing his remarks on two stories about Jesus that show the essence of
Christianity. He claimed the whole story of the Bible and of God’s dealing with
humans can be wrapped up in three couplets or six words.
The first couplet comes from the story of Zacchaeus
climbing a tree to see Jesus. “What were Jesus’ first two words to the tax
collector?” Sweet asked rhetorically. “Come down” out of that sycamore tree
“for I must abide with thee,” recalling the words of a familiar Sunday school
song.
“There’s no better poetic form of justification by grace
than those two words: come down.” We have a God who “came down,” he
emphasized, playing with the metaphor as he did repeatedly during his succeeding
five sessions. “This is what it means to incarnate the world in which we live.”
Highlighting a second favorite New Testament story, Sweet
then recounted the story of Lazarus, a close family friend, dying before Jesus
could reach him. Dramatizing the grief of Mary and Martha over their brother’s
death, Sweet noted that Jesus didn’t try to console or counsel his woman
friends. He simply bid them “peace” and went straight to the embalmed Lazarus
and said two words to him: come out—the second couplet.
“I can think of no better way of expressing the doctrine of
sanctification,” he said, “God coming down to tell us to come out.”
Sweet asked his listeners to notice the division of labor in these two stories—God’s and ours. God is the only one who can free us
from the grave, he said, but only we can free each other from the grave clothes.
Sweet then gave a quick history lesson, noting that while
many of us seem stuck in a print culture, our world is now only 10 percent
linear. “We got our start 500 years ago with a 95-point sermon (referring to
Luther’s 95 theses pinned to the church door). By the time it got to Jonathan
Edwards it was down to 28 points, John Wesley got it down to 22 points, Philip Schaf to 12 points, Dwight L. Moody to 9, Billy Sunday to 7, Billy Graham down
to 3; Robinson now says it’s down to 1.1 point.”
We defined Christianity as a set of beliefs, a belief
system. But it’s now not about beliefs; it is about relationships, he said.
Since our world is now only 10 percent linear, we’ve got to
embrace what we’ve missed over these past 500 years. Christianity is a
relationship, he said, quoting Jesus’ call to “follow me”—not to follow a
set of beliefs but a person.
______________
God didn’t send us
propositions and
statements; he sent us a Savior.
We are now in
relationship society.
______________
God didn’t send us propositions and statements; he sent us
a Savior. We are now in relationship society. The more computerized and
technological we become, the more we hunger for relationships. Today’s young
people want relationships, high-touch, a Survivor experience.
Sweet is saddened by
Chase Bank’s new slogan of “the right
relationship is everything.”® That’s our slogan, he reminded his audience, but
the bank (the world) stole it from us.
One of the characteristics of this new culture is the
flattening of the middle, making the ends huge. “We, in a linear culture, have
bent everything to the middle—middle-class, middle management, mainframe
computers, mainline religion. Quoting Ecclesiastes 7, he claimed Christian
orthodoxy is paradoxy. It is not either/or but both/and. The middles are
flattened.
Trained in the modern world, we have little appreciation
for the more Eastern way of thinking, the yin-yang concept, the heart of
either is present in the heart of the other. Jesus is fully divine and fully
human. God is masculine and God is feminine.
Sweet ended with a question: will God have a church for his
mission? Do we understand how to incarnate our world?
