August 5, 2012 | 8:00 a.m.

A Tale of Two Christianities

Matt Helms
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 51:1–12
Ephesians 4:1–16
2 Samuel 11:26–12:13a

It seems to me that if there is going to be anything like global unity of churches,
it will have to be negotiated through messy and vexing struggles for authenticity, applicability, and intelligibility, not through the norms of Christendom. . . . It is a task to be performed again and again, and with fear and trembling, no less.

Edward P. Antonio
Beyond the Pale

This past week, perhaps like many of you, I have spent the lion’s share of my nonwork hours devouring Summer Olympic coverage from London. Frankly, it’s hard not to. Athletes from around the globe have come together in a celebration of sport as they redefine what is possible for the human body and spirit to accomplish. The official motto of these games has been “Inspire a Generation,” a task easily completed by the stories of individuals overcoming tragedy and finding triumph in these condensed two weeks of competition. But despite the inspirational quality of these individual stories, I have found myself instead thinking about the macro rather than the micro: what does a competition like this mean in our world today? In a world fraught with political tensions and divisions, what does it mean for Israel, Palestine, and Iran to share the track together as the nations of the world are introduced? What does it mean for a country like Syria or Egypt, suffering from internal divisions, to walk out under one flag? What does it mean that for the first time every country participating in the Olympics sent at least one female athlete to compete? There is an intensive aspirational quality to the Olympic games as well as the inspirational—it is to imagine a level of unity in the world where, at times, little seems to exist. This unity is perhaps best represented by the viewership of the Opening Ceremonies—an estimated 1 billion people around the globe watched them, meaning that these ceremonies would have been one of the most jointly watched events in human history.

However, it is not just the total number of viewers that makes this unity so impressive. It is also the broad range of countries and territories participating in the Games. At the London Games, 204 different countries are competing, which means there is broader representation there than at the United Nations. When we begin thinking about what true global unity might look like, we would be hard pressed to find a better example than the Summer Olympics.

Our passage from Ephesians this morning also deals with a conception of global unity, as Paul wrote almost 2,000 years ago of his vision of a people united in the body of Christ. “There is one body and one Spirit,” he says, “just as you were called to the one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” In using the imagery of a body, Paul describes how all people can bring their unique gifts and talents together, working to build itself up in love. There is a sense in which this unity of body and Spirit is aspirational, as the rest of the text of Ephesians seems to indicate that this community is far from unified. In fact, there seems to have been a clear understanding by Paul that the Ephesians were dealing with deep and contentious divides—divides that sound all too familiar in our context today—and it was against that backdrop that Paul was preaching this message of unity and mutual forbearance. In chapter 2 of Ephesians, Paul writes that “Christ is our peace; he has made both groups [meaning Jews and Gentiles] into one and has broken down the dividing wall, the hostility between us, in order that he might make one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace.” Paul goes on to say that it is through the church that this peace would take place—“through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be known.”

However, if both the Olympics and the church have great global aspirations of unity, we would do well to take an honest look at how well that unity is being made known around the world. My wife and I returned earlier this week from a vacation to Kenya—our first time being anywhere south of the equator and our first trip to Africa—and we were struck by how much it seemed like a different world. We flew into Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, which has ambitions of being a prominent global city. However, it quickly became apparent that there is also a city within a city—Kibera, one of the largest slums in the world, sits just three miles away from the wealthy central business district, where we stayed. As we traveled throughout the country, this tale-of-two-cities feel continued, as there was a marked contrast in the standard of living between the wealthy and poor neighborhoods that we were drove through. But the divide went beyond that, which I want to try and lift out using an admittedly trivial example. On July 27, as almost 1 billion people around the globe watched the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics, my wife and I were unable to tune in because there wasn’t a TV within miles of us. Again, this example is incredibly trivial in the big scheme of things, but I think it represents much more than is readily apparent. At a time when one of the most jointly watched events in history was occurring—1 billion people celebrating the unity of the world—there were billions of people around the world who were not watching, including so many of the people whom we had seen out of the window while driving across the country, faces forgotten or left behind. How can we talk about global unity when that kind of divide exists?

Our interactions with the church in Kenya were even more sobering. More than 83 percent of the population in Kenya is Christian, and religion is rooted in the culture there. But in driving through one of the richest areas in Nairobi, we were told by our guide that the area was home to many of the pastors. Our guide said this without a hint of judgment, but I couldn’t help but feel depressed that my colleagues would be able to live in areas like this while their congregants were presumably in more difficult circumstances. We also encountered a group from Chicago who had gone on a mission trip to baptize non-Christians, apparently unaware that Kenya has a higher percentage of Christians than the U.S. does.

In reflecting on these experiences, I couldn’t help but feel like the church in Kenya and this church from Chicago had fallen short—short of its command from Jesus to help the last, the lost, and the least, and short of the aspirations of Paul and many of the earliest Christians who envisioned the church as a unified body. Rather than reflecting Christ’s body, global Christianity seemed tremendously scattered and fragmented—a tale of two Christianities—in which there are those who are part of the emerging global network and those who are forgotten. And I continued to hold on to this judgment after I returned—held onto it, that is, until I sat down to prepare for this sermon and found the text of 2 Samuel waiting.

In one of the great all-time biblical twists, the prophet Nathan tricks David into condemning himself for killing Uriah and stealing his wife, Bathsheba. By framing the story as a legal case of injustice and theft, David does his kingly duty and passes judgment down on this case—for indeed, it is a clear case of injustice and theft. However, Nathan’s proclamation “You are the man!” exposes David’s hypocrisy and strips away all of the self-justifications that David had given for why it was permissible to steal Bathsheba away. By the end of the passage, we hear David admit, “I have sinned before the Lord.”

It is a fantastic, convicting passage, but there is also a degree to which it is uncomfortable, because we can see ourselves in it so well. It was easy for me to judge the pastors living in wealthy neighborhoods and church groups going to baptize rather than provide basic needs because it did not force me to confront my own hypocrisy. But this story did. I was convicted that my wife and I were able to afford a trip like this, being driven around a country where so few people even own a car. I was convicted of being a pastor at a church on Michigan Avenue, in a city divided and carved up by neighborhoods, including many that fall under the category of forgotten. In David’s judgment and subsequent self-condemnation, I began wondering about the ways in which each of us are blinded, whether intentionally or unintentionally, to the ways in which we are creating a tale of two Christianities, separating the privileged and the forgotten, despite trying to follow Christ’s teachings.

But how can we take our discomfort with this and turn it into something productive? After all, each of us is aware of the great divides in our city, nation, and world, yet most of us feel powerless to change it. There are, of course, no easy answers, but one of the best ways to begin to examine our lives and systems is to listen to those outside of them. In recent years, there has been a swift rise in the amount and quality of scholarship in the Global South, and these scholars have been vital in demonstrating the perspective bias that is inherent in most traditional scholarship from the West or North—a charge that most in the West and North are quick to resist. However, as with David, oftentimes we are unable to recognize our own biases because we are so ingrained in the world and worldview of those around us. If we are bold enough to listen to these voices critiquing our norms and habits, we will have found ourselves one step closer to a united world.

Now, in the words of Richard Ward, a preaching professor at the Iliff School of Theology, “Unity does not mean uniformity.” Indeed, as Paul writes in Ephesians, the wisdom of God is known through its rich variety. In his example of the church as a body, he states that there are numerous gifts and each are necessary, just as he argued in 1 Corinthians that each body part is equally necessary to the whole. There is deep joy in difference, and it does not come at the expense of unity.

A recent book project titled Beyond the Pale has sought to bring scholars from the Global South into conversation with the big names of the past—the Augustines, Luthers, Calvins, and Barths of the world—and to read their theology in their own context. This “theology from the margins,” as it is often called, is a vital way of understanding a world that has too often been forgotten or cast aside in the name of theological norms. One of the authors, Edward Antonio, writes in the book, “It seems to me that if there is going to be anything like global unity of churches, it will have to be negotiated through messy and vexing struggles for authenticity, applicability, and intelligibility, not through the norms of Christendom. . . . It is a task to be performed again and again, and with fear and trembling, no less.”

The facts and figures are startling: a recent Pew survey found that 60 percent of the world’s Christians now live in the Global South. Nigeria has twice as many Protestants as Germany, the birthplace of the Protestant Revolution. In this rapidly changing world we live in, we as American Presbyterians who are deeply committed to the church united and universal have a responsibility to hear our brothers and sisters who have been forgotten. It will be difficult, because like David we will need to take a hard look in the mirror at ourselves and our practices, but we have received this challenge to continue carrying the Olympic torch of global unity further than it has been before. The church has the ability to forge a deeper global unity than an event like the Olympics ever will. We can reach out to populations that have been forgotten and give them a voice—a new era of unity founded not on uniformity but on Paul’s vision of building one another up in love. By struggling for relationships, a task performed again and again, we can dare to imagine a united church, one in which there is no East and West, no Global North or Global South. May it be so. Amen.