Craigville Tabernacle. 8/26/07
2 Samuel 12: 1-7a
Luke 18:9-14
Inconvenient Christian Truths
Gabriel Fackre
No doubt you will recognize that my sermon title is borrowed from Al Gore and
his film and book, “Inconvenient Truth.” But I want to take it in a different direction and
ask about inconvenient Christian truths. Yet not so different in one respect. That
similarity is in the first sentence of St. Luke‟s reading today.: Jesus “told this parable to
some who trusted…that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” Ah, the
Achilles heel of the one who loves to points out inconvenient truths to others, and is too
often contemptuous of them. Thus, preface to talk about inconvenient truths is this
reminder to Al Gore and to myself: acknowledge your own complicity, even hypocrisy.
“No one is righteous, no not one” as the Psalmist puts it. Yes, there is a legitimate
prophetic moment to “point the finger,” as when, in the other Scripture reading, Nathan
did to David when he ran amok, and the prophet rightly said to the king: “you are the
man!”
But Al , even as you prophetically raise our awareness of the peril of global
warming, remember you have three homes, one of them with 20 rooms and 8 bathrooms,
and that you own stock in Occidental Petroleum, a company accused of drilling in
environmentally sensitive areas. And, to come a little closer to home. while I gave
testimony at a recent global warming hearing at Cape Cod Community College, and like
many of you are changing all our light bulbs to florescent ones and other such efforts to
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help the environment, I have to admit to driving an 11 year old gas-guzzling Jeep—and
compound my hypocrisy by rationalizing that I, after all, do need this four-wheel drive to
get into our backwoods location. Yes, inconvenient truths hits both ways
Yes, we must speak them, just as Nathan did to David. There is a place for the
second person singular, yes, and plural too. But we do it in full awareness of our own sin
and shortcomings. There is an “I” and a “we” behind every “you” in Christian talk of
inconvenient truths..
Well, what are some of them ? I‟ve been gathering a list from friends over the
past weeks in preparation for today.
I heard this one from a priest friend who is in our weekly book discussion group.
He noted that we are pretty sure that the Mafia with its massive money and power still
controls politics in Sicily. But when we look at people running for president of our own
country, it seems to be assumed that those who have raised the most money for their
campaigns are probably going to win the candidacy of each of the major parties! We can
criticize the Mafia, but what about our own system here? Hypocrisy! We say anybody
can get to be president of this country if they are good enough. Good enough? It should
be with gold enough. A very inconvenient truth.
Since we are on the subject of our country, what about this “war against terror”
we are in right now? Wow, what an ambitious world-wide goal, even more so than World
War II when Churchill, just trying to fend off the Nazis from his own country and called
his people to give their “blood, sweat and tears.” But how many of us are giving any
comparable “blood, sweat and tears,” and this time to save the whole world from “global
terrorism”? The very inconvenient truth is that we are pretty much going about our
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business as usual with very little, if any, sacrifice. Didn‟t even the president tell us, “I
want you to go out there and shop”? I don‟t see any call for blood, sweat and tears—
except among those poor soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the thousands
of Iraquis and Afghans getting slaughtered. The inconvenient truth is that we are out
there shopping with the rest at the Cape Cod Mall.
Well this is pretty general. Let‟s take some specific inconvenient truths for
Christians. First a favorite Christian conservative issue: abortion. Some (not all) so-called
Bible-believing evangelicals go so far as to say abortion is murder. And they would like
to institute legislation that supports that. But ask them this: “You say you go by the Bible.
Well where in the Bible does it say that abortion is murder? .Where even does it speak
about abortion?” .Actually, there are only two sentences in all of Scripture that mention
the subject:. Exodus 21:22 requires a fine for persons who, while fighting “injure a
pregnant woman so there is a miscarriage.” The following words are, “If any harm
follows, then you shall give life for life” thus distinguishing between abortion and
murder! The other verse is Hosea 9:14 where the author berates the people of Ephraim
for their sins and pleads with God to give them abortions! “It says, “Give them a
miscarrying womb and dry breast.”!. Here we have a very inconvenient truth that the
Scripture, which these folk say is the literal word of God ,does not support their
passionately held view.
Or while we are on this subject, let‟s take other “pro-lifers,” for example, the
official Roman Catholic Church view that opposes abortion. But there is an inconvenient
truth here going back to what Thomas Aquinas called “the principle of double effect.” As
applied to this matter, if an operation is required to remove a diseased and life-
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threatening organ in a woman‟s body that requires the surgeon‟s knife to go through and
kill a fetus, this is an ethically legitimate act in Roman Catholic teaching. We don‟t hear
about this inconvenient truth from the priest who denies communion to politicians who
acknowledge this exception to the rule.
Well, just to be fair, let‟s speak frankly about the inconvenient Christian truth
ignored by mainline Protestant Church pro-choicers that say, as we will this morning, the
Apostles Creed including the line that Christ was “conceived by the Holy Spirit..” I take
that to mean that all life from conception forward is hallowed by Christ‟s incarnation--
not from birth, but from conception, and thus all life is sacrosanct, including a fetus. Yes,
abortion may be necessary in some cases, but it is a necessary evil, short of God‟s
overall-purpose for human life. Very inconvenient Christian truth for liberals as well as
conservatives.
Well, let‟s take another hot issue—building a casino in Massachusetts, or even
more, the existence of a lottery in our state-- gambling in any form. Apart from the moral
cost to communities and the poor who suffer the most from such, let‟s examine the matter
in terms of Christian doctrine.. Back in the earliest centuries of Christian history, one of
the great struggles of the church was with a very powerful Roman religion, the worship
of the goddess Fortuna. That religion taught that “Lady Luck” ruled the world; everything
happened by chance and you prayed to that goddess. The Christians in those days said,
“No way, don‟t worship this goddess. Christ rules the world not Lady Luck or any other
presumed divinity, including the emperor, Caesar. That was the very first Christian
creed—“Jesus is Lord”-- and it got the Christians into a lot of trouble with the Romans.,
like martyrdom in the Coliseum. ( Here, by the way, is a button that says it, given out at
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the UCC General Synod this summer. Help yourself, there is a basket of them in the
back.) What does this have to do with gambling? When you support a casino or even put
a quarter in a slot machine, or buy a lottery ticket,, ask yourself: am I worshipping the
goddess Fortuna?
I know these things are very hard sells. It was, for example for my parishioners
when I was a pastor to steelworkers in a Pittsburgh mill town. One night at a meeting
after my sermon on how the numbers racket was ruining families in our town because of
the worship of the goddess Fortuna, Jack Tong looked at me and said, “Pastor, you know
these hymns you keep selecting that are new and hard. Well, I look up at the hymn board
every Sunday with all those numbers and say, “If you can‟t sing „em, you may as well
play „em.” Yes, hard to get through on an inconvenient truth.
We‟ve been talking about Christians mostly so far but how about the “new
atheism” that is getting a lot attention lately in our country with advocates like
Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and others. They say they are opposed to religion
and go around the country evangelizing for their worldview. What—“evangelizing”?
How is that not also a religion itself complete with its own god, namely the unprovable
assumption that there is no God? And one of the tenets of this religion of atheism is an
absolute trust in human nature to fix things rather than some Deity. Trust human nature?
Who are they kidding? We‟ve tried that in the West since the Enlightenment and look at
the mess the world is in. Of course, now religion is on the return in some places and is
causing us wars and tumults of wars. But it is a question of what kind of religion and the
real practice of it, not whether we have one or not.
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Well, I‟ve succeeded in making everyone mad—folks in mainline Protestant
churches, fundamentalists, evangelicals, Roman Catholics, atheists, other religions. That
is why we hare having a talk back session today for anyone interested.
We‟ve been concentrating so far on inconvenient truths about our failures in
morality, doing the right thing. But we have also just mentioned “Jesus is Lord” so we
should dig deeper into some theological matters. Let‟s take this symbol of Jesus at the
very center of our Tabernacle.. When was the last time you had a good conversation—
even in church-- about the cross? I mean the classical Christian teaching about what God
did on Calvary for you and me and for the whole world? Of course, in fundamentalist
churches they talk about it—often saying that God up there punished Jesus down here,
and if you believe that, you get saved. But in fact Scripture doesn‟t make this distinction
between God and Jesus, since Jesus was God as well as a human being. “God was in
Christ reconciling the world,.” as St. Paul said it in 1 Cor. 5:19. God did not beat up on
Jesus, but God himself in Christ-took all our pain, suffering and sin and wiped them
away, the “crucified God” as the theologian Jurgen Moltmann describes it. This is a very
inconvenient truth for the Bible-thumpers who find it hard to believe that God himself
suffers for us. But my question is, do we in the mainline churches talk much about the
cross, especially this cross in the heart of God?
Well, take another look at that cross up there. Notice that it is empty. It‟s an
Easter cross that announces the resurrection as well as the crucifixion . But do we really
believe it?. If we did, we would not be so down-in-the-mouth these days about how
awful things are in the world. Yes, they are pretty awful. But it is also true, that because
Jesus Christ role from the dead, as another great theologian put it during the very worst
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days of World War II, the world is not “some sinister wilderness where fate or chance
hold sway, or where all sorts of „principalities and powers‟ run riot unrestrained and rage
about unchecked…Yes they do exist. .the whole creation groans” as St. Paul says…But
that same creation is already consecrated through the resurrection of Jesus Christ…It is
only as shadows that they can still beset us...for Jesus Christ has already borne away sin
and destroyed death and will finally tread them down under his feet on the day of his
coming again,” says Karl Barth. When you believe that these seemingly terrible forces
have already been defeated by Christ on Easter morning, he goes on to say, we get the
courage to take on all the evil around us instead of singing the blues about how awful
things are and retreating from the fray. How inconvenient to really believe in the
resurrection.
But now a final inconvenient Christian truth, one that takes us back to this cross
and why it is so central to our religion. The great psychiatrist, Karl Menninger wrote this
book a couple of decades ago: Whatever Became of Sin? Good question. We find it
inconvenient to thank about it. A UCC theologian,. H. Richard Niebuhr, put it this way in
describing a tepid mainline Christianity that was content to believe in “a God without
wrath who brings humans without sin into a kingdom without judgment by a Christ
without a cross.” Notice how both these comments return us to this (the cross). After all,
there is no Easter without first a Good Friday. And there is a Good Friday because the
fundamental problem for the Christian religion is, as Menninger recognized., our self-
centeredness, our sin . The Christian story is what it is because of the second chapter, the
stumble and fall of the human race away from the invitation of God for us to be together
with God, with one another, and even with nature. Instead we shake our fist in the face of
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God, turn away from our neighbor in need and rape mother earth.. Thank God we have a
confession of sin in our worship services at the Tabernacle and a declaration of pardon
and that that symbol up there.
And what makes it possible for us to face into them is that those arms of Christ
outstretched on the crossbeam were and are wide enough even to accept people like us.
Yes, there is even a place for crucifix, like this one on our bedroom wall. At the end of
the day, the gospel is not the bad news of inconvenient truths but the Good News of
forgiveness of our sin that brings us up from our penitent knees with overflowing
gratitude to Christ the Easter Lord and the determination that follows from that
thankfulness to take up our own cross and follow him.
Amen
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