April 21, 2000

Community Service

Rio Linda United Methodist

Pastor David G. Mullen

Standing Before God

The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 1 Cor.1:18

In his remarkably unsettling book, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard makes much of the distinction between the crowd and the individual. He used the distinction to address the issue of responsibility for one’s life. The crowd avoids and denies personal accountability, while one who is no longer in what we could term, "group think", but is conscious of being an individual before God. In other words, there is a huge difference between a lynch mob and the responsible person.

This theme of the crowd and the individual is woven through the events of Holy Week and Good Friday. On Palm Sunday, it was the crowd who hailed Jesus, "Hosanna to the Son of David!" On Good Friday it is the same crowd who screamed, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" Because a crowd doesn’t think, the crowd feels its beyond accountability. It can lavish glory on a Sunday and clamor for death on a Friday. Like dirty newspapers are blown helter-skelter down a city street, so the crowd is driven around by mindless impulse.

Mindless. God entered human history, and yet the crowd did not see him for he was. In the story of our Lord’s suffering and death notice that no individual stands up to Jesus. All his accusers–the Pharisees, scribes, and priests--come after him as the crowd, in groups, plotting murder. Surely the death of this upstart from Galilee was the right and proper thing for them, for Rome, even for God! Thus saith the crowd! And it was the crowd that jeered at Jesus and lunched on Calvary’s hillside as if at the county fair, while our Lord suffered and died.

The crowd, fleeing responsibility, dangerous and murderous, is the thread of death and violence and rebellion running throughout human history. It was the crowd that grumbled and complained in the wilderness after the deliverance from slavery in Egypt. It was the crowd that thought slavery was ordained by Scripture and the very basis of a thriving American economy. It was the crowd that hard the went along with Hitler’s program to eradicate all the Jews in Europe. It is the crowd that resents the poor and despises the homeless. The crowd exalts racism. The crowd screams for vengeance, the crowd rejoices in the death penalty. It is the crowd that divides up our congregations and churches into opposing cliques and parties, each out to get the other, losing all sense of the blessed tie that binds us together. Methodists, you know well what that is like, because your church is suffering through that crowd madness now. We Lutherans are enduring the same thing over certain issues. And I assume the Baptists and the Nazarenes have their issues, too. Whatever the controversy, whatever the current rage, every crowd demands that its will be done, not God’s, or worse, equate its will with God’s!

No crowd wants to hear what the Scriptures say, "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." But that’s exactly what Good Friday is about. The cross calls to each every person to full accountability before God. The Lord Jesus dies because of you. Because of Me. Because of every mindless, self-righteous, judgmental, resentful, covetous human being he dies. We put him there. Good Friday is about how things really are, not how the herd instinct likes to imagine things to be. Good Friday is about leaving the crowd and becoming an individual before God.

The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but–but!-- to us who are being saved it is the very power and wisdom of God. Saturday night at my church we will celebrate the Easter Vigil. At the heart of the service is Baptism. We will baptize those new to the faith. And we renew our own baptismal vows. It is a powerful service, and I love that each year God’s gives us people new to the faith, clear on who and what they’ve been and now eager for the life of discipleship. They are signs to the rest of us of what faith is about: Individuals, honest about their broken, rebellious lives, and humbled before the cross of Jesus, overwhelmed at being saved. They know that once baptized they no longer belong to themselves. They will have been claimed and named by our Maker. And they may no longer hide in the crowd.

The enthusiasm and simple and clear vision of the converts–and each year our churches are blessed with them, are they not?!-- help us each reflect again on our own lives. Can you remember the time, the day, perhaps even the hour, when you first were called from the crowd and became an accountable individual before God, admitted your sin and your need for a Savior?

In truth, a day of reckoning, and a time of crisis a gift from God. To be called from the crowd is face the truth about ourselves–and not about anyone else. No, when we come to Christ in faith, there is no room for pride, blame, excuses. And on the Day of Judgment, in being a member of the Church the issue will never be how our life of discipleship looks compared to others; certainly it will NOT be a matter of thinking others are far worse than us. No, we will only be asked what it is that we have done, whether we have loved and forgiven and served others with a glad and giving heart.

Daily life is therefore like going through Good Friday and Easter over and over again, for in a sense the moment of judgment–as well as salvation–is an eternal now. We might say that daily life is baptismal life, dying and rising with Christ, letting the old self die in order for the new faithful self to thrive. For the Spirit of God gives us faith and calls us out of the lunching crowds on Calvary’s hillside to come and stand as an individual at the foot of Jesus’ Cross. What is fundamental is this: You and I have broken God’s heart. See his Son hanging there, innocent, sentenced to capital punishment. This is what we’ve come to, we in our crowd-think, our evasions, our blaming and excuses. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do, Jesus cries. He dies for you. He dies for me. This is the foundation of our faith.

My brothers and sisters, the church is not another crowd lost in mindless passions, but is rather called to be an assembly of individuals, forgiven and humbled by the need for the Cross, knit together in Christ, learning how to be more and more like the one who saved us. "Purity of heart" is to will that, and nothing else. Amen.