June 8, 2008 | 8:00 a.m.

I Am Not a Christian

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Genesis 12:1–9
Matthew 9:9–13

I was on the outside when you said
You said you needed me
I was looking at myself
I was blind, I could not see.

U2
“I Will Follow”

I am not a Christian.

This is probably not a sermon title or an opening line you expect to hear from a pulpit like this, in a sanctuary like this, in a church like this. Admittedly, though, it is a statement that is intended to shock and surprise. It is intended to give you pause and make you think. How can a pastor dressed the way I’m dressed, in a place like this, get up here to read a passage from the Bible and then claim that he is not a Christian? Especially when he’s pretty sure that he means it.

Now I take a little comfort in the fact that there are some legitimate precedents to statements such as this. After all, Jesus was known for saying some pretty shocking and unexpected things. “The last will be first and the first will be last.” “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born anew.” “This is my body. This is my blood.” These are statements meant to provoke thought and demand reflection.

When Jesus speaks this way, I have often thought of it as something akin to a koanin Zen Buddhism. A koan is a deliberately difficult statement, sometimes flat-out absurd or nonsensical, that is intended to challenge conventional thinking and provoke deeper thought en route to enlightenment. A famous koan that has become something of a cliché in our culture is this puzzling question: Two hands clapping make a sound; what is the sound of one hand? Equally clichéd in our culture is this one: If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

My favorite koan is one I first heard in college when I was studying comparative religion. It goes something like this: If you meet the Buddha walking down the street, kill him!

This statement is shocking on a few different levels. On the one hand, Buddhists are typically not violent people, so a command to kill is quite surprising indeed. More perplexing, of course, is that it is the Buddha himself who is the object of this violence. One would think that those who follow in the ways of the Buddha would respond differently upon actually meeting him.

I’m sure there are multiple interpretations and suggested ways to understand this statement. As I was taught it, it means that if you encounter an understanding of the Buddha that you can fully comprehend and grasp as if meeting someone on the road, you have veered from the path toward enlightenment. Meeting the Buddha on the road is a metaphor for externalizing and compartmentalizing Buddha nature into a system or an institution, and in doing so, you lose sight of what enlightenment is really about and how one is to achieve it. Killing this Buddha therefore means ridding one’s mind of this false construction and returning to the path toward true enlightenment. A similar Christian teaching speaks of putting God into a box, which, of course, is also to be avoided.

It is in the spirit of Jesus’ wild sayings and Zen koans that I stand before you this morning and claim that I am not a Christian. In fact, what I mean when I say this is actually quite similar to killing the Buddha. I suppose I could have said, “If you meet Jesus walking down the street, kill him!” But that sounds more like a Good Friday sermon. Plus, killing Jesus means something a little different for Christians, as would meeting him walking down the street today. Yet the underlying message of the Zen koan is transferable to meeting “Jesus” on the road. If you meet a Jesus of your own construction, a Jesus that looks like you want him to look and speaks what you want him to speak, you might want to think twice before you follow him. If you belong to a church of your own construction, a church made up of people just like you that only says and does things that make you comfortable, you might want to think twice before becoming too proud of what God is supposedly doing in your midst.

It has become a cliché in our culture to disdain “organized religion” or the “institutionalized church.” People claim to be spiritual but not religious. Some people are in fact victimized by the church and our propensity to distort the gospel based on our own prejudices and fears. Such victims lose sight of the truth and the goodness that lies at the heart of Christianity and end up leaving it altogether.

For years throughout seminary and beyond, I maintained a dialogue with a good friend of mine from high school. She is one of these recovering victims of the church. She felt so abused by the kind of close-minded, exclusionary fundamentalism that is prevalent in the South that we grew up in—a fundamentalism, I might add, that I once fully subscribed to—that she rejected Christianity altogether. She found a welcome home instead in neopagan spirituality and witchcraft, something similar to Wicca but not so formalized. To be honest, I completely respect her spiritual beliefs and over the years have found many elements of it to be quite enlightening in my own spiritual journey. Quid pro quo, I spent lots of time trying to get her to see that there are other ways of being a Christian than the way we were raised to think was the only way. I wanted to redeem Christianity for her and show her that we’re not all so bad.

In many respects, we have a lot of work to do when it comes to redeeming Christianity. Last week Anna and I joined some friends on a vacation out west to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park. While I was there, I came across a book about Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Indians from northeastern Oregon (Chief Joseph: Guardian of the People by Candy Moulton). I was drawn to this book because I was born near the place in Washington State where Joseph lived his last days in exile, forced by white settlers to leave his home. His was a heroic yet ultimately tragic story of a proud people rooted in an ancestral land that defied an expansionist empire only to succumb to its genocidal path toward “manifest destiny.”

Perhaps what saddened me the most as I read the story of Joseph and his people is that the first settlers to breach this “new” land were Christian missionaries, so consumed by their arrogant and condescending zeal to “civilize” and Christianize the “savages” that they paved the way for the systematic abuse and destruction of entire cultures. Is this what Jesus meant when he said to love our neighbors as ourselves?

How many other atrocities have been perpetuated in the name of Christianity? How many wars and crusades have been waged in the name of Christ? How many slaves have been dehumanized and killed by Christians justifying their actions with the Bible?

Less violently and more subtly, how many people, like my friend, have been victimized and abused by the church? For years in our church, women were treated as inferior human beings, incapable of assuming equal leadership in our community. And while we have moved beyond such ignorance, many Christian churches have not. Yet even in our relatively progressive Presbyterian Church (USA), gays and lesbians find themselves marginalized and excluded from the rights and responsibilities assumed by all who are baptized in common water. I have a hard time finding Jesus’ love in that.

In a few weeks I will join several other pastors from Fourth Church as we travel to the General Assembly in San Jose, California. At this assembly, commissioners from throughout the Presbyterian church will discuss and debate issues like this one and many others that have divided and threaten to tear apart our already struggling denomination. In a time when mainline churches like ours are shrinking in numbers and resources and relevance, I wonder what good there is in continual infighting. As bureaucracies in local congregations and regional presbyteries and the national church suck the life out of our mission and witness, I wonder if we really are lumbering toward a post-denominational, post-Christendom church. And I wonder if that is really such a bad thing.

In the midst of this difficulty, in the midst of people who have been abused and disenfranchised by the church, there are emerging movements of Christians looking for a new way. They write books called A New Kind of Christian (Brian D. McLaren, Jossey-Bass) and They Like Jesus but Not the Church (Dan Kimball, Zondervan). They seek a third way that transcends old labels of “left” and “right,” “liberal” and “conservative,” “mainline” and “evangelical.” They shun bureaucracy and denominations and rely instead on social networking and different forms of connectivity. They put mission before doctrinal agreement. They value diversity and are open to ambiguity.

As one such thinker, Tony Jones, writes, “The modern church—at least as it is characterized by imposing physical buildings, professional clergy, denominational bureaucracies, residential seminary training, and other trappings—was an endeavor by faithful men and women in their time and place, attempting to live into the biblical gospel. But the church was never the end, only the means” (The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier, Jossey-Bass).

“The church was never the end, only the means.”

At the very beginning of the biblical story of God’s special relationship with a chosen people, God calls a man named Abram. God asks this man to gather up his life and move to a new land, where he will be blessed. God doesn’t give this man a set of rules. There is no Bible yet. There are no commandments or laws. There isn’t really much of what we would call religion. Instead, God asks Abram to trust and to follow. God establishes a relationship. And Abram follows.

In the same way, many years later, Jesus called disciples to follow him. He didn’t intend to start a new religion. He didn’t invite his followers to create institutions and bureaucracies. He asked them to love God and to love others as much as they loved themselves. And in response to this simple call, many of them left everything else they were involved in and followed him.

What would that look like today?—because God is calling us still. I must admit that sometimes I struggle to understand how buildings like this and the institutions and bureaucracies of our congregations and denominations fit into that call. But as much as our institutions and denominations and local congregations are in need of help, I’m not yet convinced that they are beyond redemption. And so I’m happy to stay where I am, struggling to answer God’s call.

Yet I find myself inspired by A. J. Jacobs, a Jewish writer who recently spoke here. Jacobs writes what I would call “stunt” memoirs: he read through the Encyclopedia Britannica and outsourced his entire life. His most recent book, The Year of Living Biblically, chronicles a year of trying to live the Bible as literally as possibly. It’s a stunt. It gets peoples’ attention, like Jesus’ crazy sayings and Zen koans.

For the next year, I think I will try an experiment of my own. I won’t refer to myself as a Christian anymore. Instead, I’ll say that I’m a child of God, following in the way of Jesus. I think I like the sound of that. It has a more possibility and less baggage.

I am not a Christian. I’m a child of God, following in the way of Jesus.

Amen.