The holiness of belonging to *this* world (with @BrianZahnd)

In Brian Zahnd’s May 26th sermon “New Creation (Not Evacuation),” he confronts the neo-Gnosticism of the evangelicals who think we can trash the Earth because God’s just going to blow it up anyway, taking on in particular the key prooftext of the rapture fan club, 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Zahnd uses the analogy of going to the airport to receive a relative who’s been away on a long trip, like a military deployment. People who read rapture in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 are like someone who goes to the airport to pick up Jesus, except that they’ve packed their suitcases to get on an outbound plane rather than getting their house ready to receive Him. There’s a lot of good stuff in Brian’s sermon but the best part is a poem he wrote about the holiness of belonging to this world.

Zahnd points out that there’s a big difference between “the world” that Jesus stood against and the physical creation that we’re called to be stewards of. When Jesus talks about “the world” (ha kosmos), he’s talking about the power systems among the “Gentile princes” whom he critiques in Mark 10:42-45, a social order whose beneficiaries are designated by the word privilege in today’s discourse. The “friendship with the world” that James 4:4 describes is the acceptance of less-than-Christlike assumptions about “how things are” in the privileged normative paradigm of our society that cause our behavior to be “worldly” (except for a token set of “moral issues”), and reduces our “discipleship” to Bible verse memorization and quibbling over ideology which becomes our loyalty test. One of the most incredible ironies of our time is the way that many evangelicals justify their privilege and worldly behavior by redefining “the world” Jesus opposed to mean solidarity with the people and ecosystems outside their gated communities that actually defined Jesus’ ministry.

In any case, preaching against this attitude, Brian says, “One of the holiest things we can do is belong to this world.” He offers an astute explication of the “We’re just pilgrims passing through” prooftext in Hebrews 11:13-16 that often gets pulled out in these conversations. Zahnd says, “Abraham was looking for a city whose builder and maker is God but he wasn’t looking for it in heaven; he was looking on Earth.” To be a pilgrim seeking a heavenly city whose foundations are laid by God does not justify being a nihilistic Gnostic who is indifferent to the creation God has called good. Abraham’s faith doesn’t have anything to do with an otherworldly place anyhow, but rather laying the seeds for a people whose fruit he had to trust God to provide in the distant future. It’s about time, not space.

The one thing that should define us as Christians is that we are the best at showing solidarity to others because the holiness we have received from Christ removes the distracting baggage of sin that keeps us from loving our neighbor. I actually preached on this topic down here in the Dominican Republic this past Sunday using Ephesians 4. If we are Christians and not Gnostics, we should hope to gain a greater and greater capacity to enjoy humanity because insofar as others are really human, they are icons reflecting God’s glory in all the particularities of their human beauty (the degree to which we don’t glorify God is the degree to which we have been dehumanized). Zahnd captures this sense of the holiness of belonging to humanity and God’s good creation in the following poem:

Belong
(Antidote for Gnosticism)

Let Christ inform all of life
Don’t be a religious cliché
Be a real human being
Belong to the human race
Belong to the woods
Belong to the city
Go for long walks
Learn to appreciate art
Take up the violin
Cultivate culinary skills
Read War and Peace
Laugh more than you do
Weep now and then
Listen to live jazz
Pray
Eat a peach
Do something ridiculous
Go dancing
Stop judging
Start loving
Plant a garden
Climb a mountain
Memorize a long poem
Learn some astronomy
Become a bee-keeper
Go back to college
Take up a new hobby
Make some new friends
Read the Bible
In a new translation
Get rid of bumper stickers
Learn a foreign language
Watch a foreign film
Change your mind
Drink only good coffee
Trust the sommelier
Talk to your neighbor
Not about religion
Go to church
Go to the circus
Don’t confuse them
Be human
Belong