What is a Christian?

Thank you to those people who offered suggestions for the sermon topic this week. In the end, I have gone with the idea that I do an adult version of the talk I did at Children’s Space last week, on the question ‘What is a Christian?’ Nothing sharpens the mind quite like having to distill centuries of reflection and argument down to a five minute children’s talk. I found it a very useful exercise having to ask the question for our community, for our time, how will we define what it is to be a Christian? So, I offer you roughly the same points as I shared with the children, only slightly expanded.

There are two things. Remembering, and following. Essentially, remembering God, remembering the truth about ourselves, and following Jesus. These are the essence of Christianity, as I see it. Immediately you will notice that I do not start by defining Christianity in terms of salvation, or conversion. And that’s because I think that salvation is a life process that consists of remembering (and sometimes forgetting) and following (and sometimes failing to follow). Not a line in the sand that determines whether one is in or out. I do not define Christianity as a point where we cross over from being destined for hell to being destined for heaven, from being damned to being saved. We might have a moment in our lives where we make a particular decision to follow, and a moment where our memory is restored to us in a sudden and breathtaking way. Or we may not.

You will also notice that I do not define being a Christian in terms of belief. I don’t think that a Christian is someone who agrees with a set of statements about Jesus…whether those statements are about his identity, or the meaning of his death and resurrection. I think that a Christian is someone who is, by God’s Spirit, enabled to follow Jesus - whether haltingly or radically. Someone who in their inner remembering, encounters Christ as present to them, and who identifies themselves as part of Christ’s body on earth. This person can be a child, or someone with an intellectual disability, who understands nothing of the mechanics of the atonement. It is not what we understand, but what we experience and do, that identifies us as Christian.

Does this sound like ‘salvation by works?’ Well, it would, if I was talking about salvation as we have traditionally understood it. But, you see, I’m trying to shift our definitions away from a paradigm where the main story is our essential sinfulness, estrangement from God, and reliance on God’s mercy in order to be saved and enter heaven. This ‘fall/redemption’ narrative is only one of the strands in Scripture, but it’s been the dominant one over the past few hundred years, and I believe it has nearly done its time. There are other paradigms for understanding the flow of the biblical story. There are other lenses through which we can enter into the significance of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection.

I would like to unpack remembering and following a little bit more.

Remembering. With the children, I talked about Remembering God - as the opposite of Forgetting God. We decided that some ways of Remembering God were through prayer, through telling the stories of God and singing songs about God, through sharing in the life of the Christian community, through loving God in God’s creation, through being grateful. And this is part of what remembering means.

The other part is remembering ourselves. I don’t think children need to do this so much…they already are more themselves than we are. That is, they are closer to the identity that they were created to be… less encrusted by a lifetime of damaging choices and endless distractions and protections and distortions.

Remembering has to do with sharing God’s image and likeness. Knowing that we are animated by the breath of God. Knowing that we carry Eden within us, even though we feel estranged from it. That our nature and God’s nature started out as one. How many of us live in the freedom and confidence of these things? Most of us don’t - because we have forgotten how.

Let me read to you from this, my ‘book of the year’ - Christ of the Celts by J. Phillip Newell.

Humanity has forgotten itself. It has become subject to fears and falseness and ignorance…Christ…comes to wake us up, both to ourselves and one another. He carries within himself the true memory of our nature and of the fullness of our relationship with all things…He is the memory of the song. He witnesses to the truth of who we are. 

I do not believe that the ‘gospel’ which means ‘good news’ is given to tell us that we have failed or been false. That is not news, and it is not good. We already know much of that about ourselves…Rather, the gospel is given to tell us what we do not know or what we have forgotten, and that is who we are, sons and daughters of the One from whom all things come. It is when we begin to remember who we are, and who all people truly are, that we will begin to remember also what we should be doing and how we should be relating to one another as individuals and as nations and as an entire earth community…

Christ…comes to show us the face of God. He comes to show us also our face, the true face of the human soul. 

(pp 27-30)

To be a Christian, is to be someone who is on the path of remembering. Someone who knows that there is more to their life than the functions of working and eating and mating and competing for stuff. Who knows that they have an origin and a destiny as a human being that is sacred, and that has to do with the loving embrace of God, and their own identity as an image-bearer of that God.

On one level, it is easy to forget and harder to remember. Remembering asks us to shift out of our practiced ways of thinking and to be vulnerable to a change process and open to a life that is wider and more mysterious than we can imagine.

But on another level, a forgetful life is hard work too. Because deep within us is the longing to remember, the longing to walk this earth as sons and daughters of God. When we have this longing within us, but cannot remember the source of it, or the fulfilment of it, this is when we succumb to hurtful behaviours, to addictions, and to hardness of heart.

Newell writes of the fear and falseness that permeates our world, by writing of his own son who suffered a psychotic breakdown as a teenager, and still suffers from anxiety. His interpretation of his son’s experience is that he is one of the many young men and women who through mental distress and addiction are ‘manifesting the deep fears and anxieties of our age.’

Our country has an alcohol problem. I was talking to an ex-policeman the other day. It is his opinion that if nobody used alcohol to excess, something like 70% or more of the work he did would have been unnecessary. In his observation, most of the fatalities and the violence in our society have alcohol (even more than other drugs) as a factor. And we all know the problem of binge drinking among our young. There are many things that could happen to address this issue at the level of limiting access to alcohol and so on, and I believe that there is some legislation in the pipeline to look at some of these things. But personally, I think that this is a band-aid approach. I think that many people in our culture binge in order to escape this soul-sickness, this unfulfilled longing which comes from being estranged from who we are, and who we are meant to be. I don’t know that this spiritual sadness can be remedied by telling people that they are lost and need to be saved. But maybe it would make a difference if people could be reminded of the beauty of being human, and inspired to listen for the long-forgotten but deeply familiar song of harmony with God.

Simply signing on to the dotted line of Christian doctrine or joining a Christian church or ‘giving our heart to the Lord’ does not necessarily mean that we become connected to the ‘deep root of our being’. The church continues to manifest many of the same behaviours that I’m identifying as symptoms of forgetting. But I would argue that true Christianity is a path of remembering, and it is this path that we as Christians should be walking ever deeper.

The second definition, for me, of what a Christian is, is someone who follows Jesus. All that I have described as ‘remembering’ is to some degree part of many religions - particularly the mystical traditions within these religions. What makes Christianity itself is the movement of God coming to be with us in Christ… showing us what a life full of God looks like, demonstrating for us what a true human being is and does.

For us, following Jesus means making ourselves familiar with what Jesus said and did, and how he said and did things, and then shaping our lives so that our actions are faithful to his. There’s two parts to this - the historical part that involves immersing ourselves in the gospel stories and allowing them to influence our own choices. And there’s the present, existential part, that affirms that Jesus is not stuck in history, but lives now, and can be experienced now. That is, following Jesus involves being united with who he still is, as well as imitating who he was.

What might the historical aspect look like? Are we expected to be nomads, wandering healers, teachers? Ought we to gather disciples around us, whether 12, 72, or 700? Is it for all of us ultimately to die a horrible death? I think not. But, just as a taster, I think we are expected to:

• care for people in need…those who are sick, hurting, lonely, in prison, and those who are poor.

• reach out to those who are marginal and despised.

• love our enemies and not respond violently to violence.

• say sorry for our own faults, and forgive the people who hurt us.

• let go of the things we cling to, whether that’s things, or status, or getting what we want.

• be generous with all that we have

• spend time alone with God

• break the rules, if the rules hold people in bondage

and I could go on.

There are some aspects of Jesus’ life that fit into the category of ‘only for Jesus’ - some of the miracles, perhaps, and the drawing of people’s attention to himself, in saying ‘follow me’, and ‘who do you say I am?’ But in other ways, Jesus showed us how we are all to live, we who take his name and profess to follow him. Jesus, as Emmanuel, God-with-us, was a unique event. Those who witnessed his death and resurrection claimed, surely, he was the Son of God. And yet he is also a blue-print, a fore-runner, or exemplar, of how we are all to be. Part of figuring out how to follow Jesus is to discover how this works out in our own lives. In what ways is Jesus beyond us… our Lord and our redeemer, the One to whom our lives point? This is the Jesus of our prayer and worship. And in what ways is he already within us, the spirit animating our lives, shaping us to be as he was? In what ways are we giving expression to Christ in the world by being ourselves in the world? This is the Jesus of our action and our compassion, and of our becoming.

To follow Jesus, it is necessary that we soak ourselves in his life, reading and re-reading the gospels, and using both creative and studious means to enter into and comprehend the significance of his words and actions. It is necessary that we pray, as he did, to maintain that openness and listening and remembering between himself and the one he called Abba, Father.

But in Christian community we are not just learning what it means to follow Jesus, and supporting each other on that journey. It is in the rituals and the presence of the Christian community that we are actually ‘being’ Jesus Christ himself. Note that I am avoiding the word church here. While for many ‘church’ as we have traditionally understood it, is the most helpful expression of Christian community, it is not the only way that Christian community can be experienced.

I’ve been reading and enjoying Dave Tomlinson’s ‘Re-enchanting Christianity’ recently. In his chapter on the resurrection, he emphasises the idea of Christ resurrected into the Christian community, which becomes the body of Christ. Following Paul, Tomlinson speaks of the body of Christ in the Eucharist, and in the gathered community that shares in the Eucharist. ‘The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?…we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.’ (1 Cor 10.16-17)

As followers of Christ, it is as we gather with one another, and as we participate in communion together…both the communion of the bread and wine and also the sharing of hospitality and care, we experience the living Christ in our lives and in our community. It is this that empowers and enables us to follow Christ in the world, in the daily, ordinary, stuff of life. There is a John O’Donohue poem that speaks of ‘invisible tissue’ between people…there is so much that binds us that is invisible to us, but is nonetheless real, organic, tissue of connection. We are connected by our memories, or energies, our emotions, our shared experience and so on. For followers of Jesus, the invisible tissue includes all these things, and also the Spirit of Christ – what binds us together and unites us is the living, real, but invisible presence of Jesus in us and among us.

So, what is a Christian? For me, the most helpful way of expressing it is to say that a Christian is someone who follows Jesus Christ, individually, and in the company of Christ’s people, and who in doing so begins to remember who they are as image-bearers of God. A Christian is someone who sings for themselves and others the forgotten song that is the harmony of all life in the embrace of God’s love.

What do you think?