The Road to Redemption – The Church as the Called Out People of God

    Several weeks ago someone asked me where the word "church" came from. My first response was to talk about the Greek word ekklesia, which we translate as church. On further reflection it occurred to me that ekklesia doesn't seem to have any connection to our English word, church. With a bit of research I discovered the answer; however you will have to wait for the end of this article to find out how they are related. Where I want to begin is with a discussion of the concept of the ekkelsia and how we got from there to here.

    The word ekklesia was not originally a religious word. It had two secular meanings. The first meaning is that of people who are called out. In Greece when a city needed to gather its citizens for a discussion about a particular matter or to deal with issues of security a herald would move through the city "calling people out." The people would then gather for the meeting. The second meaning of ekklesia carries with it the image of those who had gathered. So the complete meaning in secular Greek was that the ekklesia was the called out and gathered together people…again without any religious connotation.

    At first glance then it might appear that the early Christians simply borrowed that word from secular Greek and put it to work to describe this new people of God. However there is more to it than that. The word ekklesia had also been in use by the Jewish community for some time. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) the word ekklesia is used almost a hundred times in order to describe God's people. What sets the Biblical usage apart from its secular use is that in scripture ekklesia is always modified by "of the Lord." In other words the Hebrew people are the called out and gathered people of the Lord. This use of ekklesia makes sense in terms of the overarching story of God's people. The people of God were not those who happened to discover YHWH one day and decide to worship. It was always God (as we noted last week) who called people together for the purpose of being a blessing to the world.

    When the early Christ followers used the term ekklesia then (Paul uses it extensively in this writings to refer to the Christ following community) they were not merely borrowing a secular term but were claiming the title of called out and gathered people of God for themselves. This makes sense when we understand their concept of who they were. Early Christians believed that in Jesus of Nazareth God had acted decisively to redeem the world. Through Jesus' death, resurrection and appearances to the disciples and others Jesus had initiated a new moment in history and called forth from the old ekklesia of God (traditional Judaism) a new ekklesia which was to proclaim Jesus as Lord and live in the Jesus' way (which is a reminder to us that the earliest followers of Jesus were called "The Way."). We need to be careful to note here that the Apostle Paul is clear that this new ekklesia is an extension of and not a replacement of the old ekkelsia. According to Paul the Jews are still God's people and the followers of Christ as merely a branch grafted into God's Old Testament ekkelsia.

    The church then began to adopt other words which Judaism had used to describe their ekklesia of God. The church began to speak of themselves as the elect (God had chosen them) and saints (they were to lead God centered lives).

    We are now led back to our original question of the origins of the word "church." The answer is that it is derived from the work of Theodoric the Great (454-526 CE). Theodoric was as an Ostrogothic King who ruled Italy after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He was an Arian Christian who spread the faith into Germany. Along the way he spoke of believers as kuriche, meaning those who belong to the Lord. From this we get such words as Kirche (German), Kirk (Scottish) and Kyrke (Swedish) and Church (English). Of interest is that Spanish (Ilgesia), French (eglise) and Italian (chiesa) maintain a clear sense of ekklesia. Regardless of the name, we are still the called out and gathered people of God.

    

The Road to Redemption – The Church as Community

    

God always calls communities and never individuals. This was a rather remarkable statement. I am not sure when I heard it for the first time it but it didn't quite seem to jive with my church upbringing. The image with which I had been raised was that Jesus was all about the individual. What each of us was striving for was a personal relationship with Jesus. After all salvation was not a collective endeavor and spirituality was individual experience. Therefore I had always assumed that God called individuals and that the church was an add-on which existed solely for the purpose of occasionally pumping people up and aiding believers in doing together what they could not do individually. The idea that God calls communities and not individuals seemed a real stretch.

The more I have studied scripture, the more I have come to appreciate the observation that God does indeed call communities. As a prelude to our discussing the church I want to spend a few lines considering the concept of community in the scriptures. We can begin with the two opening stories in Genesis. In the first creation story (Genesis 1) the crown of God's creative efforts is humanity. As God creates human beings God does not make one individual and then wait to see what happens. God creates them male and female. God, if not creating a community, at least creates a team. In the second creation story (Chapter 2) God creates the man first. God quickly realizes however that the man is not adequate in and of himself (someone once commented that this meant Adam had no idea how pick up in the Garden of Eden) and so Adam was in need of another human who would undergird and complete him. Both stories then tell us that as individuals we are incomplete in and of ourselves.

The second major story in the book of Genesis which points us in the direction of community is that of the call of Abram. At first glance this story would appear to work against the idea that God calls communities; why else would we call it the call of Abram? However if we look beyond its title what we see is that God did not just call Abram. God told Abram to take his family (Sarah, his nephew and his slaves…as well as all of their goods) and go to the land which God would show him. What Abram is also told is that God will give him many descendants and that through those descendants God will save the world. Even though salvation ultimately comes through Jesus of Nazareth, it is the collective community of Abram that is the incubator into which the messiah is born, which teaches the messiah the message of salvation, and which orients the messiah's view of the world.

The Old Testament continues with the idea of community by using the image of "the people of Israel." It is the people of Israel that God frees from Egypt. It is the people that God leads through the wilderness. It is to the people to which God gives the land of Promise. It is to the people of Israel that God gives judges, prophets, priest and kings. It is the people of God that God chastises and that God saves. While there may be charismatic individuals whose stories we read (such as Samson, David, or Elisha) ultimately their stories were always sub-plots in the larger story of God's people. Their work and witness was never about individual spirituality but was always intended to impact the community.

We continue with this image of community as we enter the New Testament. Unlike many of the prophets who had come before them, who acted as lone spokespersons for God (even as they were speaking to the entire people of God), both John and Jesus called men and women to follow them (you can find the names of some of the women in Luke 8). John and Jesus understood that what they were called to create was a kingdom of persons whose lives were linked together as they served the one, true living God. At Pentecost the Spirit is given to the disciples and on that day a community of 3,000 is created. Finally wherever the Apostle Paul traveled he did not simply make individual converts but created communities. Over the next several weeks we will spend some time with the community we call the church and see what meaning it has for us.

The Road to Redemption – The Trinity

    The church was at a crossroads. What were they going to do with God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit? As I mentioned in an earlier article the church had come to sense that in Jesus, God was fully present. In the same way the church understood that God was present in the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit was a personal agent that empowered Jesus. These three were united in scripture in a way which could not be ignored (Matthew 28: 19 "Go therefore and baptize in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit; 2 Corinthians 13:13 "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all."). The problem with these beliefs (that God was fully present in Jesus and the Spirit) was that the church also professed that God was one; a singular entity. So how was the church going to keep God one and yet understand God as fully present in both Jesus and the Spirit?

     The end result was what we have come to know as the doctrine of the Trinity. Perhaps the easiest way to understand the Trinity (if there is such a thing) is the summary offered to us by St. Augustine. Augustine (354-430 CE) used three statements to help explain the Trinity. Here they are:

1. The Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Spirit is God
   
2. The Father is not the Son; the Son is not the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is not the Father
   
3. There is one God and only one God
   

This way of speaking about God was not new to Augustine. Much earlier Theophilus of Antioch (c. 170s CE) and Tertullian (c. 210s CE) both wrote clearly about this relationship in which God was one and yet there was God the Father, God the Son (Logos) and God the Spirit (Sophia). Their purpose for writing was to defend against the beliefs that either there were multiple gods (God, Jesus, Spirit) or that Jesus and the Spirit were not really God but simply created entities through which God worked.

    These discussions about God, Jesus and the Spirit came to a head in the 4^th century when a bishop name Arius (we talked about him several weeks ago) made it clear that in this universe there are only two real substances, God and what God created. There is no in-between. Therefore Jesus and the Spirit cannot be God and thus must be creations. This proclamation split the church. Some argued for the unity of God as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit while others sided with Arius that Jesus and the Spirit were lesser created entities. If the church was to stay united it had to develop a formula, or doctrine, which would settle the debate in a manner which was consistent with the scriptural references that spoke of the Word (Jesus) and the Spirit as being eternal and one with God, yet also referred to God as one.

    As mentioned above the church settled on the doctrine of the Trinity. What is interesting in all of this is that nowhere in the Creeds is the word "Trinity" actually used to describe the relationship of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In fact the word "three" is not used either. The word Trinity (first coined by Theophilus of Antioch) was simply the most easily accessible way to speak of this relationship. Two reasons it was not used in the official Creeds was first because it is not a Biblical word and second because it seemed to focus on the separation of God (into a tri-Godhead) rather than the unity of God.

     Why does the Trinity matter? It matters because it reminds us that in Jesus we have seen the fullness of the very love God. It matters because it reminds us that in the presence of the Holy Spirit we are encountering God's own self. It matters because it reminds us that God became incarnate among us in Jesus and continues to be present among us through the Spirit. In many ways the Trinity tries to explain a mystery which is unexplainable…yet at the same time affirm truths to which we need to hold.

The Road to Redemption - The Holy Spirit (3)

    Our discussion of the role of the Holy Spirit has been, up to this point, pretty tame. We have looked at the work of the Spirit in everything from creation, to the empowerment of the prophets to its role at Pentecost in forming the early church. What we have not looked at is one of the most visible and also divisive aspects of the Spirit, speaking in tongues. For those of you not familiar with this gift of the Spirit it is manifested in two basic forms. One is private which occurs when a believer in personal prayer is overcome with the Holy Spirit and begins to utter unintelligible words and phrases. The second form is public in which a believer is overcome with the Spirit and begins to speak unintelligible words or phrases in the midst of worship. While speaking in tongues is not an issue at First Presbyterian of Birmingham I believe it is important that we spend a few minutes looking at speaking in tongues before we leave the topic of the Holy Spirit.

    The origins of speaking in tongues can be found in the books of First and Second Samuel where we read of Saul and the prophets having ecstatic experiences. While speaking in tongues is not specifically mentioned it is hard to imagine that their ecstatic experiences did not contain some sort of unintelligible speech. The additional ending of the Gospel of Mark (16:17) includes a mention of Jesus' followers speaking in other tongues as well. The Book of Acts records a couple of events (10:46, 19:6) in addition to the day of Pentecost in which people appear to be filled with the Spirit and speak in tongues. The core of this teaching though can be found in Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth. In this letter he reminds the believers that there are spiritual gifts of which speaking in tongues is of particular value. He even reminds them that he speaks in tongues more than any of them. However Paul is clear about several aspects of this gift. First speaking in tongues is in worship only allowed where there is someone to interpret (meaning the gift of tongues is intended to bring a message from God). Second speaking in tongues cannot interrupt the decency and order of worship. Finally, and most importantly, speaking in tongues is not mandatory for all believers and it is not the greatest gift (that would be love).

    The modern revival of this spiritual gift (it is only briefly alluded to by the early church fathers and then vanishes) came through the Azusa Street revival. The Azusa street revival began in 1906 in Los Angeles through the preaching of William J. Seymour who claimed that speaking in tongues was the proof that one had actually received the Holy Spirit (and thus salvation). His preaching attracted persons of all races (unheard of for that time) and from all denominations, including Presbyterians. Though the revival ultimately died out by 1913, hundreds of missionaries carried his message and theology across the nation and the world. In this way the modern Pentecostal movement was begun. Denominations such as the Assemblies of God, the Church of God in Christ, the Pentecostal Holiness Church and the United Pentecostal Church all have their roots in Azusa. Worldwide these denominations taken as a whole are second in membership only to the Roman Catholic Church.

    So where do we as Presbyterians stand on all of this? Unlike many of the Reformers who claimed that the gift of tongues was no longer operative, we believe it is still around as a legitimate gift (surprised?). In the Presbyterian publication, The Work of the Holy Spirit (182^nd General Assembly, 1970) it is written that, "By way of conclusion, the practice of speaking in tongues, when inspired by the Holy Spirit, should neither be despised nor forbidden. At the same time, tongues should not be over emphasized; normally they belong to private worship." In other words we Presbyterians take a nuanced Biblical view. First speaking in tongues is still around. Second it is not a necessary part of worship or our spiritual lives. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it is not required as a proof of our salvation (a tenant of many but not all Pentecostal denominations). If you have questions about this you can speak with me and I will be happy to fill you in further.

    

The Road to Redemption - The Holy Spirit (2)

    Presbyterians have never been big fans of the Holy Spirit. I believe that is because we are not sure what to do with it. Both God and Jesus seem very predictable. We can study them. We can write books about them. We can place them in neat little pockets. The Holy Spirit on the other hand seems to be very unpredictable. The Spirit shows up at unexpected moments, causes people to speak in tongues, dance in crazy ways and utter often uncomfortable prophecy. The Spirit is the wild card in how God deals with the world. If we are not careful the Spirit might make us do things that are not as orderly as we would like. None-the-less the Spirit is just as important for the church as are the other two members of the Trinity (God the Father and God the Son).

    The Spirit of God appears in the New Testament in its earliest writings, those of the Apostle Paul. In fact the role of the Spirit is critical for Paul's understanding of how God and Christ work in the world. We see this in that a believers' faith journey is entirely dependent upon the Spirit. Faith begins when the Spirit enters into the life of an individual and insures our adoption (Romans 8:15) as God's children. This same Spirit then gives us a new way of seeing the world; through Christ's eyes and not through our own (Romans 7:6). The Spirit gives us hope (Romans 5:5), helps us to pray (Romans 8:26), shows us God's love (Romans 15:30), guarantees our salvation (II Corinthians 5:5) and empowers us to say that "Jesus is Lord" (I Corinthians 12:3). We see additional evidence of the Spirit in Paul's life. Each time Paul makes a move from one location to another it is the Spirit of God that drives him (Acts 16:5-7 is a good example).

    Paul's experience and understanding of the Spirit appear to coincide with that of writer of Luke-Acts. In Luke it is the Spirit that incarnates Jesus in Mary, fills Elizabeth, Zechariah and Simeon, descends upon Jesus at his baptism, sends Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted, anoints Jesus for ministry, and according to Jesus is a gift that will be given to the people. The book of Acts continues this focus on the Spirit where the Holy Spirit is mentioned more than 50 times. Just as the Spirit played a key role in Paul's life it does the same for the other Apostles. The Spirit helps the Apostles discern God's will, empowers them to proclaim the Good News, demonstrates the presence of God and God's salvation, helps them see the future, fills believers and guides their journeys. Some commentators have said that the book should not be called the Acts of the Apostles but the Acts of the Holy Spirit. While the other Gospels mention the Holy Spirit it is not as central to their story telling as it is to the author of Luke-Acts.

    The Holy Spirit continued to play a role, though not as prominent in the writings of the early church fathers. The Spirit finally got its due when it was incorporated into the Creeds of the church in 381 at Constantinople. In that rewriting of the Nicene Creed the bishops added the language, we Believe in "the Holy Spirit, the Lord and life-giver, Who proceeds from the Father, Who is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son, Who spoke through the prophets." These words are a reminder that the Spirit is integral to the life and work of God's people.

    All of this brings us back to the Presbyterian reluctance to deal with the Spirit. Once again, if the Spirit plays this large a role in the scriptures and the Creeds why haven't we emphasized the Spirit more? My answer would be not only that the Spirit is unpredictable (as noted above) but that the Protestant church wanted to lift up the importance of the scriptures above all else. This meant that the scriptures were more important than church tradition as well as personal religious experience. If the church were to proclaim that the Spirit was still speaking and acting then it might mean that the scripture was not closed, new understandings of faith and life might emerge and people might worship in ways that were not decent and in order. This was simply too much to bear as the Protestant Reformation worked out its fundamental belief structure. Fortunately as time has gone by even we Presbyterians have begun to reassess the work of the Spirit.

    

The Road to Redemption – The Holy Spirit (1)

    As a newbie twenty-something Christian
I was taught that the Holy Spirit first showed up at Pentecost when the disciples were in the upper room following the resurrection of Jesus. There they awaited "power" from on high. The Spirit arrived like "flames of fire" and empowered the disciples to bravely proclaim the Good News about Jesus. It was a great story and made quite an impression. My Christian friends went on to explain that one of the great differences between Jews and Christians was that Christians had the Spirit of God and Jews did not. Jews only had the Law, the Torah. It came then as quite a surprise to me when I actually read the Bible and discovered that the Spirit of God had been around a bit longer than a month or so after Jesus' resurrection. So I wondered what was this Spirit thing, how long had it been around and why would Christians want to claim the Jews never had it? Here is what I discovered.

    First I learned that the Spirit of God is personal; that the Spirit is not "The Force." Even though the Hebrew (ruach) and Greek ( pneuma) terms for Spirit also refer to breath and wind the Spirit is more than a mere force. We see this in the opening words of the scripture (Genesis 1:2) in which we read about the Spirit of God hovering over the pre-creation chaos as God prepares to bring order to creation. This sense of the "personhood" of the Spirit can also be glimpsed in Job 33:4 where Job says, "The Spirit of God has made me and the breath of the Almighty gives me life." The Spirit is also connected to the image of Wisdom which has a life of its own.

    The second thing I learned was that the Spirit of God is not only personal but that it has been around as long as God has been around (again note that it was present at creation and that if is identical to Wisdom, that Wisdom is part of God's essence). In some of the most ancient books of the Old Testament we read of God's Spirit being at work, giving people gifts to use, causing them to have ecstatic experiences, encouraging people to rebuild the Temple, calling men and women to prophesy and then telling them what to say.

Those stories led me to my third discovery, that the Spirit is God's agent of both creation and renewal. One of the most profound uses of this imagery is in Isaiah 42:1 where we hear God say, "Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen in whom I delights; I have put my Spirit within him; he will bring forth justice to the nations." The reference is to the suffering servant whom God has called to take on the sins of the world in order that the world might be made new. In a sense anywhere the world or the church is being made new, God's Spirit is there.

    I even learned why the church taught that only Christians had the Spirit. The reasoning is in some ways complex, yet at the same time rather straight forward. When the church and the synagogue split apart (somewhere between 40-70 years after Jesus' death and resurrection) the church adopted a very strong anti-Jewish bias. This bias was based partially on the persecution of Christians by the Jews because the Jews saw the Christians as heretics. We can read of this anti-Jewish bias in the Gospel of John and in Revelation. This bias slowly but surely influenced every aspect of Christian doctrine, including that of the Spirit. The Jews, along with every other non-Christian group, were seen as outsiders who were not entitled to God's Spirit. The Spirit became a possession of the church.

    Unfortunately for the church, scripture tells us that the Spirit "blows where it wills." In other words God's Spirit is not a possession of the church. The Spirit of God is as free as God to go wherever it wishes and do whatever it pleases…including impacting non-Christians (there are Biblical warrants for this). Our challenge then is to be open to the Spirit when it comes that we might be renewed and empowered for ministry and mission.

The Road to Redemption: The Struggle Over the Nature of Jesus Part 4

    We are finally at a place where we can gain a clearer picture of the nature of Jesus as we in the orthodox churches have come to perceive it. The place I would like to begin is with a quote from Gregory of Nazianzus (329-390 CE) as he wrote about The Word (or Logos). "Remaining what he (the Word) was, he assumed what he was not." I realize that his may seem very esoteric but it is actually a rather simple way of speaking about the Incarnation (which we will celebrate on Christmas day). So let's unpack it.

    "Remaining what he (the Word) was" – the Word according to the Gospel of John was in the beginning with God and was in fact God. Thus the Word remained what he was (unchangeable and enteral) when he became incarnate. Thus the Word continued to be God in every way.

    "He (the Word) assumed what he was not" – the Word then "assumed", or took upon himself, what he was originally not…true humanity. This means the Word took on our vulnerability, suffering and death. Thus the Word became human in every way.

    These understandings (along with the understanding that God is one) helped to form the basis of the first great creed (creed is a statement of belief…from the Latin word "credo" which means "I believe") of the church, Nicaea. Soon after the church was legalized in 313CE by Emperor Constantine the disputes about the nature of Jesus came into the open. While this might not seem like such a big deal it became one when bishops on either side of the controversy tried to stop their church members from trading with church members on the other side of the controversy. Constantine would have none of this and so called the bishops together at Nicaea in 325 in order that they find common ground.

Nicaea was the first creed of the church to use non-Biblical language. While this was a cause of concern to some, most of the bishops believed such language was needed in order to clarify what the church ought to believe (and not believe) about the nature of Jesus.

    The central theme of Nicaea was that in Jesus of Nazareth God had fully come into human history as a human being. This was made clear with statements such as:

• Jesus is made of the "same essence (reality) of the Father"
  
• Jesus is "God from God, Light from Light, True God of True God"
  
• Jesus was begotten not made (you and I are made) and thus is eternal with God
  
• Jesus was "incarnate, becoming human"
  
• Jesus "suffered"
  

The most famous phrase in the creed is "homoousion to patri" which affirmed that Jesus was the same reality as God. This replaced another similar phrase which said Jesus was only "like" God.

    This creed was slowly but surely refined over the next 300 or so years. In fact the creed that we call the Nicene Creed is actually the creed edited in Constantinople in 381. Ultimately this creed was augmented by something called the Definition of Chalcedon in 451. Chalcedon insured that the church understood that Jesus:

• Was perfect in deity and in humanity
  
• Was actually God and actually human...with a rational (fully human) soul
  
• Had two natures (divine and human) which were not combined yet were not separated
  

In other words the creed and the definition try to help us understand the deep and profound mystery of God becoming en-fleshed in human history. Even though they are composed of mere human words they guide us into the belief that in Jesus of Nazareth we encounter the fullness of who God is and the fullness of what humans are supposed to be. This is the core of what it means to be a Christian; that we hold these two difficult ideas in tension and allow the Jesus they describe to guide our lives.