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Cultivating the feast of our faith
By Maxie D. Dunnam

In chapter 7 of the Old Testament book II Kings, the story is told of a time when the nation of Samaria was under siege. The Syrian army had formed an unbroken wall around the city, blocking any escape, and the Israelite garrison was slowly being starved to death.

Conditions within the town were appalling. Men went about the streets with blank stares, gaunt, and haggard. Women stood in the doorways with puny, starving children, holding them closely in their arms, seeking to muffle their moans of hunger. Crowds pressed the gates of the royal residence, crying for bread. The king was helpless and at his wits’ end.

A little colony of lepers lived just outside the wall, near the city gate. Four of them huddled together in a wretched hut. With famine raging, they were no longer able to live by begging. Their suffering drove them to action.

“Why do we sit here until we die,” they asked themselves. “If we do nothing, we will be dead within a week. If we go into the city, the end may come even sooner, for people may turn their maddening frustration on us. We have only one chance—the enemy camp. There is plenty of food where the Syrians are. They may save our lives. At the worst, they can only kill us, and we’re going to die anyway” (II Kings 7:3-4).

They crept out of their hut in the evening twilight and moved slowly toward the enemy camp. Every moment they expected to be captured. To their astonishment, it didn’t happen. They reached the outermost circle of tents, and they couldn’t believe it. They saw no one. Was it a trap?

Cautiously, they peeked into one of the tents. It was deserted. And there before them was plenty of food and drink. They gorged themselves. Then into another tent. They were flabbergasted. Scattered on the ground, as though abandoned by men fleeing in panic, was a pile of silver, gold and clothing.

As they moved from one tent to another, the truth began to dawn upon them. For some reason, the Syrian army had fled, leaving everything behind. In and out from one tent to another, the four lepers feasted their eyes on the plunder.

Then the revelation came. According to the Scripture, “They said to each other, we’re not doing right. This is a day of good news and we’re keeping it to ourselves” (II Kings 7:9). They immediately went and shared the good news with the authorities.

The boiling hot gospel
The word of the lepers suggests the stance of the Church. An incredible message has been entrusted to us—a powerfully compelling message of an earth-shattering, world-changing, person-transforming fact. At the heart of it is Jesus, his incarnation, life, teaching, death and resurrection.

If what we teach and how we teach and preach is dull and uninteresting, it must be that we’ve never grasped the depth of our gospel, our doctrine; we’ve never really grappled with and seen for ourselves the powerful consequences of what we believe. G.K. Chesterton once declared, “Christianity, even when watered down, is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.”

Putting that positively, we might say that there’s both romance and power in our orthodox creeds and understanding of the Christian faith. Redemptive, transforming power is in the Cross of Jesus—his sacrificial death for our sins. It’s something to sing about: “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” The energy is there. The fire is there to burn up the filthiness, decadence, and destructiveness of sin and unrighteousness. The energy and fire are there in the fact that God became incarnate, walked the earth, died, rose again and turned evil’s seemingly supreme triumph into its most crushing, irrevocable defeat.

Our faith is based upon the “scandal of particularity,” which finds salvation only in Jesus Christ and him crucified. We warn and guard against the tendency in a religiously diverse world to reduce our orthodox faith to the lowest common denominator.

We also resist the pressure to be intimidated and become defensive when the media portrays all evangelical Christians as fundamentalists and stereotype us as claiming the conviction that we alone know the will of God.

Our detractors within and outside the Church accuse us of being demagogues when we maintain that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.

Let the superficial accusations flow. We will not be defensive or intimidated because that’s precisely who we are: Jesus people, Christ followers, who make the non-negotiable claim that he is indeed who he claims to be—“the way, the truth, and the life.”

Orthodox openness
United Methodism has a media campaign with the sound bite: “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors.” Some of the spots are good, even excellent. Some are bad, even awful. I do want to affirm the theme because, if presented with orthodox integrity, it would be genius: “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors.”

Open hearts – to a gospel that will transform us.

Open minds – not a sloppy, sentimental, all-roads-lead-to-God stance that doesn’t reckon with the fact that what we believe makes a difference. Not an uncritical Pollyanna substitute for tolerance that says, “Believe what you please, as long as you are sincere.” Open minds: An honest respect for others, and a valuing of them enough to enter into honest dialogue that will enable us to earn the right to confess our faith in the One who says, “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by Me.”

Open hearts, open minds, open doors.

Open doors to whom? And for what purpose? Open doors, inviting all to receive the grace of Christ, which will accept them where they are, but will not leave them as they are.

So, we will risk being labeled fundamentalists or literalists or conservatives by our detractors, especially by the media, which is charmed by a radical Bishop John Shelby Spong but won’t take the time to grapple with a C.S. Lewis or a Dr. Thomas C. Oden. We will take the risk and bear gladly “the scandal of particularity.”

In his book The Strong Name, James S. Stewart wrote: “It is well to remind ourselves that Christianity has nothing to fear intellectually, any more than it has to fear ethically and spiritually from the forces of the opposing camp. Our creed makes sense of the universe, far more so than the dreary theories of any skeptic ever could.”

He went on to ask: “Must we suddenly grow ashamed of Paul and Irenaeus, and Augustine, and Aquinas, and Luther (and Wesley).…Why should we forget that all down through the ages there have sprung from the bosom of the faith lives of incredible loveliness, character, of supernatural quality, men and women—some of them of dazzling distinction, many utterly obscure—whose intensity of God-consciousness, whose serenity of mind in the face of desperate trouble, you simply cannot explain apart from the fact of Christ? Read the latest and wittiest exposure of the defects and irrationalities of the Christian faith: then go back and read Augustine’s Confessions or Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. Does not that fusillade of clever skepticism look strangely unimportant and even tawdry now?”

Proclaiming good news
This is a day desperately needing good news and we will not keep it to ourselves. We must proclaim it. The stronghold that secularism has on our culture will not intimidate us. Nor will the clever arguments of the skeptics or the grandstanding antics of the likes of the Jesus Seminar and radically revisionist bishops and theologians threaten us. We will not be paralyzed by the tentative victors of the culture wars, or charmed by the old heresies dressed up in the latest apparel of language and metaphor.

At Asbury Theological Seminary, in our main quad, we have Wesley Square. The centerpiece, you would guess, is a statue of John Wesley. It’s a replica of the sculpture of Wesley preaching in the marketplace in Bristol. When we placed the statue there, I thought long about what would be the most appropriate word of Wesley to place with him in the square. What word did I most want our students to center on when they stood in Wesley’s presence?

So, on a bronze plaque at the edge of the square where the statue stands are these words: “I am not afraid that the people called Methodists should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid, lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case, unless they hold fast both the doctrine, spirit and discipline with which they first set out.”

Is that not a prophetic word for all of us?

Within United Methodism, our founder’s fear is justified. We have “the form of religion without the power” because we have failed to hold fast “the doctrine, spirit and discipline with which [we] first set out.”

Demonstrating the gospel
 September 11, 2001, and all that has happened since, is a horrific reminder that the connection between belief and behavior has been severed by fanaticism and sin. Suicide bombers remind us that religious faith can be perverted into the most grotesque acts of evil. Abusive priests of the Roman Catholic Church, and clergy of all denominations, show us how doctrinal purity may be twisted by sinful character.

The faith we proclaim is too often rendered impotent because our behavior contradicts our belief. We need to be vigilant in contending for the wholeness of the Christ-way, “faith working in love” through demonstration.

I suggest three forms of demonstration that we need.

1. Resistance. During the first week of September, the Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles was dedicated. It has been a controversial project, with costs soaring to $163 million. I haven’t seen it, but I was intrigued by a review of the cathedral that was written back in September of 1997 when a groundbreaking service was held. There were models of the cathedral at the service and, on the basis of the models, a Los Angeles Times reporter wrote the following about the cathedral.

“Moneo, the famous Spanish architect of the Cathedral, is creating an alternate world to the everyday world that surrounds the cathedral, a testimony to the grandeur of the human spirit, an antidote to a world that is increasingly spiritually empty.”

Then he wrote this sentence:

“The cathedral, set in the midst of the secular city, will be an enclave of resistance.”

What an image…the Church as “an enclave of resistance.” I believe that must be a part of our demonstration as orthodox Christians.

The Church has never been able to get organized in her resistance to the world. In fact, the Church has never been able consistently to understand what it means to be “in the world but not of the world.” We’ve known at every period of our history that the very nature of the Church provoked some form of resistance. There is always the sense in which Kingdom ideals are in conflict with the culture in which the Kingdom is set. But how the church relates to the world is a matter of historic debate.

Why, then, should we be surprised that theological revisionists would order mission and ministry on the conviction that the Church’s task is to respond and adjust to the world, not try to convert it. We don’t need to adjust to the world, we need to convert it. Scripture is diminished, even denigrated, in this stance of adjusting and identifying because priority is given to listening to the world without the crucial reference point of first listening to the Word of God.

As God’s faithful people, we are sometimes called to resist the forces that drive the world. The witness of people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who paid dearly for their convictions, must never be lost from memory. Bonhoeffer’s words ring on in clear opposition to those who would adapt rather than seek to change culture.

“The Church is always on the battlefield…struggling to prevent the world from becoming the Church and the Church from becoming the world. The world is the world and the Church the Church, and yet the Word of God must go forth from the Church into all the world, proclaiming that the earth is the Lord’s and all that therein is.”

Resistance, then, is a part of our proclamation and at the center of our demonstration.

• We resist experimenting with pagan ritual and practice.

• We resist radical feminism that blatantly stomps on the heart of our faith in the triune God: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

• We resist accommodating to the prevailing patterns of sexual promiscuity, serial marriage and divorce.

• We resist condoning homosexual practice, blessing homosexual unions, and ordaining practicing homosexual persons.

• And listen: We resist consuming the world’s goods without regard for the poor.

• We resist resigning ourselves to the injustices of racial, ethnic, gender and age prejudice.

• We resist ignoring the historic Church’s longstanding protection of the unborn.

• We resist physicians assisting people in accomplishing their own death.

In a word, we resist the moral/ethical relativism that is the operative dynamic of our culture.

Our task as an enclave of resistance is to subvert the calloused, materialistic, secular culture of which we are a part—to subvert that culture at its root by living as though we believed that “persons do not live by bread alone”—that there is a Kingdom reality of love in which all those things that are expressed in Romans 12 are operative. Our love is without hypocrisy. We abhor what is evil and we cling to what is good. In honor we give preference to one another. We are able to rejoice in hope—but we’re also able to be patient in tribulation.

2. Servant witness. Our demonstration must not be resistance alone; it must be servant witness after the style of our Savior and Lord, “Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and came obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8 NRSV).

I had an experience at my annual conference a couple of years ago that took me back. I had written all the ministers of the conference, urging them to support a petition taking what I thought was the moral high ground on sexuality issues, which would be coming before the General Conference.

A retired preacher was expressing his appreciation for my strong stand but, then, he threw me a curve. He started talking about a preacher who had baptized a baby born outside of marriage. There was anger in his voice and condemnation. He used the word “bastard” as a label for this child. And there was venom in his voice as he talked about the father of the baby being present at the baptism.

“How could the preacher do it?” he angrily exclaimed. “Baptize this baby born out of wedlock and the father allowed to be present.”

I thought I was talking to Simon the Pharisee, and I thanked God he was a retired, not an active, preacher.

I wondered. Had he missed it throughout his entire ministry? Orthodox people can be calloused, self-righteous, even mean. We are called to humility and to servant ministry, which will be a sign of Christ’s presence in a world that needs desperately a model of a “new creation”—a new humanity that knows the fullness of joy that comes not from being right, not from being served, but from serving, and giving our lives, as it were, “a ransom for many.”

3. Holiness of heart. In addition to resistance and servant witness, our demonstration must be a holiness of heart and life that is a joyous response to the grace of God. It is only as we recover the transforming dynamic of holiness that our proclamation will be heard and that the Church will be the enclave of resistance she is called to be.

The prophet Ezekiel makes this clear. In chapter 36, there is a challenging word about our prophetic tasks, our prophetic presence, and why our holiness is so crucial:

“Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord God: it is not for your sake, oh house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations, to which you came. I will sanctify my great name, which has been profaned among the nations and which you have profaned among them; [Now, listen to this.] and the nations shall know that I am the Lord,’ says the Lord God, ‘when through you I display my holiness before their eyes’” (verses 22-23).

Ezekiel is saying that God’s honor must be restored in the sight of the nations, and this honor is connected—in fact, is integral—to God’s holiness. Get this now. God’s honor is at stake. The covenant He had made with Israel had been profaned by Israel as well as by the heathen. Godless powers had carried Yahweh’s people into exile. The covenant had to be restored.

Note God’s Word: “The nations shall know that I am the Lord, when through you I display my holiness before their eyes.”

The world is not paying attention to the Church today and will not pay attention to the Church in the future until those of us who call ourselves “God’s own people” vindicate God’s holiness “before their eyes.”

How do we recover holiness? Listen to one other word from John Wesley: “If you preach doctrine only, the people will become antinomians; and if you preach experience only, they will become enthusiasts; and if you preach practice only, they will become Pharisees. But if you preach all these and do not enforce discipline, Methodism will become like a highly cultivated garden without a fence, exposed to the ravages of the wild boar of the forest.”

Lord, help us! We are seeing it happen. The wild boar of the forest has been loosed in the highly cultivated garden of mainline churches of the Christian movement. Our lack of holiness of heart and life often betray, even annul, our call to orthodox faith and righteousness.

The path of holiness is a precarious one, but let me mention two principles that we need to keep at the center of our awareness. One, holiness by its very nature is an enemy of the relativism that is the operative dynamic of our culture. Second, obedience is the operative word for holy living.

Oswald Chambers has written, “The golden rule for understanding spiritually is not intellect, but obedience. If a man wants scientific knowledge, intellectual curiosity is his guide; but if he wants insight in what Jesus Christ teaches, he can only get it by obedience.”

When we talk about holiness, we are talking about discipline, not legalism; conviction, not intolerance; and sacrifice, not asceticism. We are talking about obedience that gives freedom and joy – discipline that produces holiness and happiness.

Connection

In 1992, my wife Jerry and I went to Varna, Bulgaria, as a part of the Executive Committee of the World Methodist Council. The big event on the agenda was the presentation of the World Methodist Peace Award to Pastor Zdravko Beslov, who was then the superintendent of the Methodist Church in Bulgaria.

As was the case with all the Eastern European countries under the communist regime, the Bulgarian church had suffered immensely. Pastor Beslov had been imprisoned off and on during the past 30 years. One prison sentence lasted for six years. During that time, he contracted arthritis and could hardly walk at the time we met him.

He kept the fellowship of the church alive by writing Methodist members and ministers who had been driven underground, mailing the letters from different post offices so they could not be traced.

Our service of celebration in bestowing upon him the Peace Award was an unforgettable celebration of the obedience, courage, resistance, persistence, and ardent commitment to the Christian faith; a faith for which people were willing to risk their lives—indeed, a faith for which many died.

We had a great worship service in a new convention hall, which had been built for communist use but had been used only twice by the communists before their fall. Now, this was the first time it was used for a public gathering of Christians.

A layperson named Bedros Altunian, who participated in the service, was an electrical engineer who had helped build that convention center. During that service, he read from Psalm 124—the psalm of the Bulgarian church.

“If it had not been the Lord who was on our side…when our enemies attacked us, then they would have swallowed us up alive, when their anger was kindled against us; then the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would have gone over us; then over us would have gone the raging waters. Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us as prey to their teeth. We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” (NRSV)

Early in the communist regime, when churches were being taken over and/or destroyed by the communists, the church in the center of Varna had been destroyed. The bell tower was pushed down. Two young men, in the middle of the night, took the bell out of the destroyed tower and buried it in the backyard of one of those young men.

While we were there for the meeting in 1992, we broke ground to rebuild that church. We started raising money through the World Methodist Council and World Evangelism. As is the case in most situations in settings like that, building proceeded only as money was available to buy materials and pay laborers.

After about three years in that process, the building project was closed down. It was a political action, not yet traced as to whether it was at the opposition of the Orthodox Church or the communist hangover in the political administration. The building process was halted for almost three years. 

During that time, however, six new Methodist congregations were started on the edges of that city. When the Church was squashed in the center, it squished out on the edges.

Well, the church in the center city has been completed. On Sunday, Sept. 29, 2002, there was an official dedication. The present superintendent of the church in Bulgaria, who also is pastor of the church, presided at the dedication. His name is Bedros Altunian, the layperson who had read Psalm 124 ten years previous.

Additionally, Bedros Altunian was one of the two young men who took the bell out of the destroyed bell tower and buried it in his backyard. That bell is now a part of that church in the center city of Varna and, for the first time in nearly 40 years, that bell officially was rung on Sept. 29.

What a witness to the romance and power of the orthodox faith. What a proclamation! And what a demonstration! Resistance, servant witness, and holiness. G.K. Chesterton was right when he declared, “Christianity, even when watered down, is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.” Imagine what it would do in our society if it were not watered down.

Our demonstration will authenticate our proclamation of the gospel. Our apologetic of experience will join with our apologetic of reason to make our commitment to orthodoxy alive, exciting, convincing, inviting.

This is a day of good news. We’re cheating the world and are being unfaithful to God if we keep it to ourselves.

Maxie D. Dunnam is president of Asbury Theological Seminary. This article is a revised version of his keynote presentation at the Association for Church Renewal conference October 24-26, 2002, in Indianapolis.



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