THE ROOTS OF EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY: WHY AREN’T WE CHANGED?
An
older man finally gave in to the repeated suggestions of his family and
friends, and bought a hearing aid. At breakfast one morning with his friends he
went on and on about his new purchase. He described how many hours he
researched it on the Internet, how his hearing was tested and how this hearing
aid, which represented the latest in advanced technology, was tuned and custom
fit to his ear. Lastly he noted that he had traveled a great distance to find
the best specialist and then spent nearly half of his entire savings on the
device, but he said it was well worth it. Fascinated, one of his friends asked,
“What kind is it?” The man looked at his watch and replied, “It’s about 9:30.”
If we receive the very finest of a thing,
we expect results.
Last
Sunday Deacon David Hall shared with us his spiritual journey into the Catholic
Church, after more than 3 decades of serving as a Pastor in evangelical
churches. [NB: see Deacon Hall’s homilies
at www.heartforgodltd.blogspot.com] The path opened when he began to pray the
Church’s Liturgy of the Hours and
there discovered a font of writers untapped in his seminary education: the
Apostolic writers of the first few centuries of the Church. As he remarked,
“They all sounded so… Catholic.”
Today I
want to move that story full circle, and talk about the beginnings of the
modern American evangelical movement itself.
You may
be surprised to learn that what we today call evangelical Christianity began with
the celebration of the Mass, and it started precisely with the reality Deacon
Hall expressed last week: “You are what
you eat.”
Remember,
if we receive the finest of a thing, we expect results.
Over
the past few Sundays we’ve heard the 6th chapter of John’s Gospel
proclaimed at Mass. This chapter is called the “Bread of Life Discourse,”
because Jesus teaches clearly and unambiguously, “I am the bread of life,” and He
goes on with shocking words: “The bread that I will give you is my FLESH for
the life of the world.”
Many in the crowd
questioned His words. “How can He give us His flesh to eat?” they asked. Rather than back down, He affirmed even more
strongly that his flesh is real food and his blood real drink. He raised the
level of His rhetoric to paint in black and white: unless we eat His body and
drink His blood we do not have life within us.
We heard the
consequences of His teaching in the Gospel passage read today: “As a result of
this, many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer
accompanied him.” Undaunted and unapologetic, “Jesus then turned to the Twelve,
‘Do you also want to leave?’ Simon Peter answered him, ‘Master, to whom shall
we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are
convinced that you are the Holy One of God.’”
When
Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, an Anglican, was in mourning over the death of her
beloved husband, she attended Mass for the first time with the Italian family
she was staying with, in the city of Livorno, near Pisa in Italy. In the midst
of her sorrow, she saw the peace and strength that this family gained from
receiving the Body and Blood of Christ.
Her
husband had suffered greatly from tuberculosis, and his physicians told him
that the clean air in Tuscany would be good for him. Unfortunately, the bad air
on a lengthy ocean crossing in a crowded 19th-century wooden ship
was not good for him. When they arrived in Livorno, the authorities kept him in
quarantine, where he died without enjoying the fresh air. It was a knife in
Elizabeth Ann Seton’s heart to lose the husband she loved so deeply.
Elizabeth
stayed with the Italian family for a year of mourning. The family was fortunate
to have a chapel in their home, and a priest who offered Mass in the chapel.
She saw the peace and joy that came over those who attended Mass and received
Holy Communion. It was a peace that she lacked, and a joy she did not possess.
When
she returned to New York she longed for that, and determined to become a
Catholic. What brought her into the Catholic Church was the life-changing power
of the Body and Blood of Jesus, taken from the priest’s hands into ourselves.
If we
receive the very finest of a thing, we expect results.
That
sentiment is at the historical root of evangelical Christianity.
The
year was 1640. A 30 year old Jesuit seminary student began to ask a question
that started him on a lifelong journey. He was Jean de Labadie, and at the time
he was only a few years away from being ordained a priest. He devoutly believed
in Jesus and in the Real Presence of Jesus in the sacrament of the altar. He
was a Bible-believing Catholic, who understood that when Jesus said, “The bread
that I will give you IS MY FLESH for the life of the world,” Jesus meant it,
and when at the Last Supper Jesus took bread and wine and said, “This is my
body… This is my blood,” He wasn’t kidding!
He
asked a good question, which we might phrase simply, “Are we truly what we
eat?” If it is the very flesh and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ that
we receive at Mass, why are our lives not transformed powerfully and completely
by this food we call the Bread of Angels? After all, a mere glancing touch of
Jesus healed and transformed in the Gospels, and if we consume his body and
blood should we not be completely changed?
Jean de
Labadie left the Jesuit Order before his final vows, and was ordained a priest
for a diocese in France. The same question burned in his mind and heart,
becoming a furnace of passion from which he delivered brilliant sermons and
drew many people. He was moved from the small country parish where he served to
the cathedral parish in the city, where more people were moved by the strength
of his preaching and devotion.
Still,
his heart was restless. He left the diocese where he served and for a time
entered an Oratory to find close fellowship among brother priests as well as
more time for prayer and study. He left there, and spent some time as chaplain
of a monastery of nuns in Western France, where he encountered the teachings of
the Catholic Bishop Cornelius Jansens. Bishop Jansens asked the same question:
how do we experience the Grace of the Mass in our lives in a concrete and
visible way? Why do we not experience
complete transformation when we receive communion?
After
all, If we receive the very finest of a thing, we expect results.
Restless
to pursue his question, Labadie became a follower of Calvinism and the Reformed
tradition in Geneva, Switzerland. However, he still believed in the Real
Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, disagreeing with the Calvinists that the
bread and wine remained only bread and wine, only symbols of Jesus in our
midst.
Eventually,
the Calvinists excommunicated him and drove him out of Geneva. But it was during
his time in Geneva that a young man named Philip Jakob Spener often went to
hear the sermons of Labadie and became enthralled with the same question: if we
truly take into ourselves the true flesh and blood of Jesus, should we not be
changed by the experience? Spener had left the Lutheran church over the same
question, thinking that there was too much emphasis on the external FORM of the
liturgy, and not enough on the INTERNAL conversion of the person. He found in
Labadie a sympathetic soul, for both had asked whether we place too much
emphasis on words and gestures, to the exclusion of paying attention to our
souls.
Spener
and Labadie found that pursuing an answer to the question led them away from emphasizing
the external behaviors, the lives and actions of Christians, and into the soul.
They sought an inner conversion, a regeneration, that would change the
Believing Christian from the inside out. If a person were regenerated in
Christ, that person would then naturally give evidence of it in how he or she lived
his life. First, however, came the inner rebirth.
Labadie took
another step: he concluded that the true church consists only of those who are regenerated or born again in that way. And if
a person is truly born again in Christ, he should feel it and be able to
describe it and tell others about that experience. Personal witness, personal
testimony to one’s conversion experience, was an essential part of being a
Christian. Without a conversion
experience and a story to tell about it, one could not be certain of being born
again in Christ.
Frustrated with
so little evidence of born-again Christians in Catholic and Protestant Reformed
and Lutheran traditions, Labadie started what he and Spener would come to call
a “little church within the Church,” or a little church of true saints. It was
a community of Believers committed to living a lifestyle very different from
what the world offered, a lifestyle withdrawn from the world and its vanities.Philip Jakob Spener would become a major influence in the beginnings of what came to be called the “pietist” movement, which grew apart from the formalism of Lutheran worship and stressed the need for a conversion experience, of being regenerated in Christ or “born again.” Labadie would go on to found his own sect of Christianity, in which the personal experience and personal testimony of conversion was an important part.
Interestingly, neither Labadie nor Spener ever lost their faith in the true presence of Jesus in the sacrament of the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Jesus. This deep faith in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist brought them into conflict with many Reformation Protestants. Later in life Spener wrote a creed of what he believed, and in it he professed, “I acknowledge the glorious power in the sacramental, oral, and not merely spiritual eating and drinking of the body and blood of the Lord in the Holy Supper.”
Philip Jakob Spener is rightly called the “father of Pietism,” but he and the preacher whose sermons influenced him so much – Jean de Labadie – were simply asking why we are not totally transformed by the power of the Eucharist when we receive the Body and Blood of Jesus.
He and
Labadie, as also Bishop Jansens, probed what it means to say, if we receive the
very finest of a thing, we expect results.
Week
after week after week, you and I come into the doors of this church, and when
we leave we are little different. In the Sacrament of Penance – Confession –
people tell me that they commit the same sins over and over again. If the real
Jesus Christ enters our bodies and souls in communion, how can we ever be the
same person again – and yet we leave the church little changed than when we
arrived. Why doesn’t the reception of
Jesus in communion change us completely?
Labadie,
Jansens, and Spener were not the first to ask this question, and they will not
be the last.
Why
doesn’t the reception of Jesus in communion change us completely?
I have
a theory. WE DON’T WANT TO CHANGE.
It’s
reminiscent of the old joke which asks how many psychiatrists it takes to
change a light bulb: “Only one, but the light bulb has to WANT to change!”
We
don’t want to change. WE LIKE OUR SINS. We may know that our sins are wrong,
but we are comfortable in how we live. We don’t have a reason to change.
How
many people know that their diet or lifestyle is not healthy, yet don’t WANT to
change, and so they wait until their first heart attack. Only then do we see
them on the treadmill and checking food labels in the grocery store for fat
content.
No one
changes out of comfort or convenience, but out of need or pain or fright.
When Saint
Peter responded to Jesus, “To whom else shall we go?” it was because he also
said, “We have given up everything to follow you, Lord…”
When Elizabeth
Ann Seton was drawn to the Lord in His Body and Blood, it wasn’t because she
was comfortable, it was because her heart and soul had been ripped from her
when her husband died. She was suffering deeply in pain and grief, mourning and
loss.
When Saint
Augustine heard a young child chanting the words, “Pick up and read” outside
his window, he did just that: he picked up a Bible and opened it lazily. It
fell open to the Letter to Romans and he read an invitation to convert his life
— a life in which he no longer found excitement or fulfillment. In his
spiritual autobiography, the Confessions,
he recalled that as he took his first steps toward Grace and conversion, he
could hear his sins calling out to him, “You will have us no more!” He enjoyed
his sins; he liked his sins; even knowing they were wrong, he did not want to
give them up. Every few steps toward God saw Augustine falling back to his
sins, because he did not really want to change. The inchoate state of his
conversion is reflected in his famous and pithy prayer, “Da mihi castitatem, sed nondum” — “Lord, give me chastity, but not
yet!”
We
don’t want to change. And so we don’t.
Change
never comes from being comfortable or complacent in life. It comes from panic,
terror, grief, humiliation. Change is not borne from contentment; it rises from
misery and blackness.
It is
possible to receive the very finest of all things and not expect results,
because in our deepest and most genuine, truest self we have to admit that WE
DON’T WANT the same results Jesus wants: WE DON’T WANT TO CHANGE.
The
most effective evangelical preachers and churches understand this. Without
revivals that provoke powerful emotions, conversion is mostly an agonizingly
and profoundly slow process; without arousing terror that the End Times are
here, few people will want to be reborn right now; without music that reaches
into the deepest feelings of the human heart, few will open their lives to
Jesus here and now.
Being
regenerated in Christ – being born again – rises from a soul which deeply feels
emotion. Very few people have ever thought
themselves into life-changing faith in Jesus Christ: ever since Jesus Himself
walked along the Sea of Galilee, He has offered His hand and His grace to those
who look around and find themselves in difficulty: those who WANT to change.
Today,
although the REAL food and REAL drink of the Body and Blood of Jesus is offered
every day, most of us prefer to feast on the fast food and comfort food that
reinforces our lifestyle. To take the Body and Blood of Christ into our souls,
and not just into our gut, would mean that we would HAVE to change. We don’t
really want to.
I
simply ask you to tuck away this thought: when you ARE ready to change, you
don’t have to go somewhere else to look for Him. He’s been here all the time,
waiting, hoping, longing. If not today, then when life hands you a surprise, a
challenge, a moment of darkness or fear, a reason to want to change, just remember that He is here, in the tabernacle,
on the altar… the food of angels, the
Body and Blood of Jesus, with the power to change you completely. Bread of the
finest wheat.
After all, if we receive the very finest
of a thing, we expect results.
Rev.
William J. King
Sunday,
August 26, 2012
