A Broadly Narrow Way

 Text: Mark 10: 17-31

A slightly bawdy and belittling song from the musical South Pacific begins this way:

My doll is as dainty as a sparrow,

Her figure is somethin' to applaud.

Where she's narrow she's as narrow as an arrow,

And she's broad where a broad should be broad.

I hope the tune of "Honey Bun" will not be looping through your brain during the rest of the sermon.  What's been replaying in my brain this week is the question of where should we be broad--and where narrow.  I have been wondering, thanks to today's Gospel reading, about the places where the Jesus Way is narrow and where it is broad. Some scriptures emphasize Jesus's broad invitation to all people to follow him along an expansive, limitless journey: Samaritans, poor people, children, all.  Other scriptures suggest we follow Jesus on a path that is as “narrow as an arrow”--to use Oscar and Hammerstein's simile--or, to use Jesus's phrase, we approach the realm of God through an opening as narrow as "the eye of a needle.”  

If we had to choose between those two adjectives to describe our congregation, we would probably choose broad over narrow.  We at Open Table tend to think of ourselves as broadminded, meaning we think we have made room in our minds for some new ideas that we did not inherit from our families or receive unquestioningly from the majority culture. Some of these departures from the ideological and theological "straight and narrow" have been liberating and healing.  But today's Gospel reading reminds me that Jesus taught that God's way is both inclusive and in some sense restrictive. 

Today's Gospel story focuses on Jesus's warning to a good man that the path to God is too narrow to travel with riches in tow.  To keep moving toward God, this man needed to give all his possessions to the poor, according to Jesus.  And the good man, unwilling to give up such wealth, went away very sad.  For him, the journey with Jesus was too rigorous, too narrow.  Like this good man, we can get only so far along the Jesus Way with our encumbrances.

There are times when you and I need to reaffirm the breadth of God's love, captured so well in the words of a favorite hymn:

There's a wideness in God's mercy, like the wideness of the sea.   
There's a kindness in God's justice that is more than liberty.

For the love of God is broader than the measure of our mind.

And the love of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.

A church like ours knows how to sing those broad words.

But today we are mining a particular Gospel story.  So I want challenge you, as I challenge myself, to be broadminded enough to consider the possibility that we might be making the Gospel into a broader way than Jesus intended.  For today, let’s imagine Jesus’s Way as a narrow spiritual path.

One way progressive Christians can make Jesus's way too broad is by accepting the false dichotomy that a person or society either conforms to an ethic based on strict authoritarianism or gives in to runaway moral relativism. Because progressives doubt that Christian ethics can be based simply and solely on literal interpretations of biblical commandments and edicts from religious leaders, we must take extra care not to sound as if we're endorsing an "anything goes" ethic of self-indulgent individualism.  Wary of being judgmental, we sometimes fail to articulate our own values and teach them to our children.  We might, for instance, be so committed to affirming the wide range of healthy human sexual expressions that we fail to develop guidelines for healthy sexuality.  It's easy to come up with a list of dos and don'ts.  It's hard to create processes to determine what is ethical in a rapidly changing culture.  Living in the freedom of Christ is not a license to behave however we wish. The Jesus Way of love is not so broad that it includes harmful behavior. Let's be guided by an ethic of love and integrity that is narrow enough to be truly loving and just.

Our emphasis on the breadth of the Gospel also has the potential to weaken our personal commitment to the Way of Jesus. Sometimes people enter congregations like ours after hurtful experiences in past churches.  They are gun shy, which is to say they are Bible shy and Jesus shy, since both the Bible and Jesus have been aimed at them.  So we try to make it easy to participate here to whatever degree feels comfortable.  We even have joked about people being embarrassed to tell their friends they are attending a church so we allow them to be “in the closet"--the “Christian closet."  But even the majority of us who are “out” Christians certainly don’t want to shove our religion down someone’s throat.

Eventually, of course, many of us find we can’t help sharing in natural conversations about our church family, about ways we are being shaped here, about the deepening of our spiritual lives that comes from following Jesus’s generous but hard way.  We won’t let others’ pushy proselytizing prevent us from sharing about a way that has been strengthening for us.

Jesus is said to have warned, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord' will enter the kingdom" (Matt. 7:21).  To me that was not a threat of hell but a simple statement of fact that not everyone who says they are a follower of the Jesus Way is actually committed to that difficult but healing way.  We at Open Table have opened up membership to all who wish to follow in Jesus's ways of love, spiritual and social transformation, radical hospitality, grace-filled inclusion, and joyful encounters with the Holy.  There is not, in other words, a doctrinal test for membership.  Our members do not have to attest to any particular beliefs.  We can mean different things when we talk about following in the way of Jesus.

If that seems a lax standard for membership, ask yourself which is easier: to sign off on certain statements about Jesus that no one can fully fathom and parrot a creed regularly or to try earnestly to align one's life with Jesus’s life and teachings as we try to love God and love neighbor as we love ourselves? Some might see us creating too broad a category for legitimate church membership. I believe ours is a more exacting commitment. 

But it’s possible for us to forget our commitments. For instance, we, on the congregational level, can let a handful of congregational leaders do most of the work.  We can fail to hold all members responsible for regular and even sacrificial contributions of time and skills and financial resources. Because some of us have been burned out by churchy demands in the past or are already committed to good work elsewhere, we can be afraid to ask too much of our members and participants. Which means we fail to call out the giftedness of everyone.  Which means we fail to flourish as fully as we might.

Clarence Jordan, who helped Millard Fuller found Habitat for Humanity, told about meeting a country preacher in the Deep South in the 1960s who was leading a relatively large and amazingly integrated congregation of black and white and rich and poor people.[i]  When asked how the church had achieved such a beautiful mixture of people, the preacher explained that on his first Sunday as pastor he preached from the book of Galatians, reading "For as many of you as have been baptized into Jesus, there are no longer Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, males or females, because you are one in Jesus."  He closed the Bible and declared, "If you is one with Jesus, you is one with all kind of folks.  And if you aint, well, you aint." 

Jordan asked what happened after that. "Well," the preacher said, "the deacons took me into the back room and told me they didn't want to hear that kind of preaching no more." 

The preacher persisted and soon the deacons left the church.

"Then what happened?" asked Jordan. 

"Well," said the country preacher, "I preached that church down to four people.  Not long after that, it started growing.  And it grew.  And I found out that revival sometimes don't mean bringin' people in but gettin' people out that don't dare to love Jesus."

My aim is certainly not to preach our numbers down!  But that country preacher was right about this: Jesus's way is too narrow to contain prejudice or meanness or ego or privilege.  We cheapen the way of Jesus when we downplay the cost of followship.

Which leads me to a final way we might make the Jesus way too broad.  I believe we can inadvertently, in the name of freedom of thought, permit theological laziness. I ask that we continue to honor wide-ranging views here, but let’s also expect theological rigor of one another. Not all theological positions can be equally valid. Not all claims about God or the way of Jesus can be equally true.  We certainly appreciate ambiguity and paradox. We admit the Bible itself speaks variously on topics so Christian theologies bump up against one another.  So let’s not settle for flimsy answers—even if it means our deepest questions are never completely answered.

For instance, when we wonder about the reasons for human suffering, a predominant biblical theme expressed in today's Psalm and the Hebrew Bible reading, we are challenged to structure a framework to hold our tough questions. We realize that the belief in a God who orders or allows every action in this universe collides with the idea that humans have choice (free will) as well as the belief that God's ways are always loving. Even if we were to say that God chastens us for a time so that suffering can serve some ultimate good, we would still have to confront a God who causes short- term pain--which gives us a God who is cruel some of the time. We, just like the Psalmist and like Job, might feel as if God is causing or allowing pain or injustice in our life or in the world.  That's how it feels.  And we, like Job and the Psalmist, might pray to God to relent.  But if we believe in a loving God, then we have logical limits on any understanding that God is the author of suffering. So our theologizing gets complicated. We all have theological positions that shape us. As a congregation that regularly tries to do theological reflection together, let’s give space for diverse theologies even as we cultivate both disciplined spirits and disciplined minds. 

But staying in our heads is another danger for broadminded Progressives.  We bring to the public sphere an ability to expose root causes rather than simply apply band aid solutions to social problems, and we are pretty good at advocating and educating and creating new solutions, but we are prone to talking about issues rather than doing something.  We read and study and debate but sometimes fail to get around to doing. We are challenged to narrow the possible courses of action and then to pour our energies into that narrow, well-focused plan.

Likewise, we want to remain clear about Open Table’s mission and identity.  We can welcome everyone without pretending to the best place or path for everyone.  Our language and liturgy and symbols can stretch and accommodate—but not infinitely. We cannot be all things to all people. People may visit us and find we're not the best fit for them.  And we should be happy they figured that out.  People may be active with us for some time and then realize the path they are on no longer coincides with the path we are traveling.  And we can bless them as they make the next part of their journey with another group of sojourners.  We have the capacity to bless folks in their comings ad going with grateful hearts.

Here is our challenge, dear friends: to be broad in our welcome and our love; to be narrow in our focus, in our theological rigor, in our commitment, and in our ethical conduct.

PRAYER: Lead us, Jesus, in your way.  Where it broadens, expand our hearts.  Where it narrows, let us shed what is not essential.  Where it darkens, let us see by your light.  Amen

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[i] http://day1.org/1473-the_peril_and_the_promise_of_being_met_by_jesus  Will Willimon tells this story in “The Peril and the Promise of of Being met By Jesus”