Sr. Warden Mike Kugler's Talk at Northwestern College Chapel 23 January 2015

The Gospel:  Mathew 6

Please pray with me:  God above us,  God among us;  God before us,  God within us:

High King of Heaven, bless our time together.  Amen

This morning I’ll talk about Christian freedom, the Good News, and academic freedom.

Notice the verses surrounding the Lord’s Prayer.  In this early part of Mathew Jesus places Himself at the center of the Kingdom of Heaven.  This Kingdom is so different from the kingdoms Jesus’ audience would have recognized, or us.  This Kingdom’s power and strength doesn’t rest in wealth, military might, expert training or elaborate ceremony and ritual.  It rests in the meek, the poor in spirit, those who love their enemies and turn the other cheek to their violence.  Those people, the salt and light of the Kingdom, are hardly qualified to be kings, queens, presidents, senators, or governors.  Jesus was no less controversial when He turned to religion.  He utterly dismissed public practices we would call religious or pious.  Don’t let anyone know about your compassionate actions to others.  Don’t let anyone see you praying.  Don’t pray mini-sermons, but keep it simple and short.  If you are fasting or by implication doing any religious activity don’t let anyone know about it; hide your piety from others.  I’ll put it this way: don’t use your public life as a “witness” to others.  Keep your holiness on the DL.  Piety and righteousness are always vulnerable to desiring approval from others. 

          Religious and moral life is typically a system, a program, with rules and procedures.  In our world we often turn them into ways of solving problems, a kind of medicine for the soul and heart and mind.  The Good News is different.

Pig story.

However remarkable, it is still a pig.  Now, think of the Good News of God in Jesus Christ.  No matter how glorious and sublime, no matter how remarkable, isn’t it just like any other religion’s program of moral, purity and ritual demands?

          No.  God’s Good News is remarkable.  Jesus has freed us: free from the demands of moral and religious perfection, as if God’s wish for us is to live lives of religious and moral zeal, purity, obeying rules and carefully scrutinized by ourselves and others.  In Christ’s love and grace, live in freedom.  This freedom is shocking.  Look at Paul’s response in Galatians 5:  “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”  Hear his summary of this part of the letter:  “For you were called to freedom . . . .  Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.  For the whole law is fulfilled in one word:  ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ . . . . (5:1, 13, 14) 

          But even Paul couldn’t imagine this one, simple law alone, and proceeds to explain how loving your neighbor means avoiding sexual immorality, strife, drunkenness, envy, sorcery and more.  I think he adds this long list—all of it wise moral advice, surely;  especially avoiding sorcery—because simply saying “God wants you to love one another. That is a righteous life”, well that sounds too easy.  What is particularly religious or pious about loving others, and being free to do whatever else you want?  Paul, like many of us, struggled to make sense of Jesus’ strange commands, His shocking picture of the Kingdom of Heaven, even to the point of misunderstanding Him. And for much of my life I did misunderstand.

It’s easy to misunderstand.  It is a foolish story, even scandalous, offensive.  People like me get saved by God’s gift, despite my being unworthy.  Why aren’t we embarrassed or offended to find ourselves followers of Jesus and believers in this story?  Yet God is willing to risk misunderstanding such freedom, and grace, in order to tell us in ways we understand. We’re naturally moral, religious creatures; humans always have been as far as we can tell.  God talks to us in whatever way is necessary for us to hear Him, pay attention, and turn our live to His life giving love.  We’re likely to turn the Good News into more religious work, another moralistic job, turn Jesus into some kind of religious program director for the big summer camp-slash- quit-smoking clinic we sometimes make of the Christian church.  We misunderstand Him and His word all the time.  Hebrew Scriptures as some kind of timeless moral and political guidebook?  Why not?  Genesis 1 and 2 as a literal eye witness account of the origins of creation?  Sermon on the Mount as a kind of constitution for social and political life?  Sure.  Marriage only between a man and woman?  Often, we emphasize all that.  But why?  I think we do it because we have basic religious and moral beliefs, and when we hear such crazy News from another land in the mouth of Jesus, News that seems Good but is also strange and even upsetting, we can’t help but revise it to more closely fit what we already believe.

Here is where the Good News is suited to the kind of lives we should live as members of a liberal arts college.  This building, Christ Chapel, is the living heart of this campus.  It symbolizes two deep convictions we try to obey.  We honor Christ, the living representative of God, God in flesh alive for us and creation.  We also honor the rigorous disciplined work of scholarship in every field from accounting to music to philosophy to science.  God made the world, declared it good, and we honor Him by studying it.  You’ve probably heard talk about “integration of faith and learning”.  We claim that we can and must negotiate the tensions, disagreements and common ground between them and the claims of God in Christ.  Northwestern is not a church per se; it is not a liberal arts college alone.  We who work here have signed on to honor both to the best of our ability.  That is really hard, challenging and at times frustrating.  If you have not felt that challenge, difficulty or frustration here, we or you or both are not working hard enough.  As Tom Hanks said about baseball in A League of Their Own, “the hard is what makes it great.”  God in Christ has freed us to do this strange, hard work.  Wacky, huh?

We aren’t a church;  our task here is to honor the pursuit of knowledge and training despite fear for our spiritual and moral lives.  How? Because we trust God’s power and love to protect and care for us, to conform us to Christ through our skills and knowledge, in the long run of His Kingdom.  We might have to change our minds or become very uncomfortable with a new truth, maybe argue with someone over a tough problem.  We study Scripture, we pray and worship, we build one another up as the Body of Christ, we serve others;  but as a liberal arts college, those goals must accompany all this serious intellectual life of the mind.

For myself, I’ve changed my mind on a number of serious questions.  None of these changes were arbitrary or casual.  The evidence and argument forced me to change my mind.  Might I wrong about any or all of them? Sure.  But I’ve worked pretty hard to answer the questions and at 55, after 25 years of thinking, reading and arguing about some of this, with 20 years teaching here, I think I’m right.  But it was really difficult. It cost me some sleepless nights;  it strained my relationships with friends.  I see the consequences from student opinion in my course evaluations.  But that is the job we’ve been given here.  I don’t like disagreement; I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.  I don’t even like being up here now.  But this is my job; its my calling.  And many of my colleagues feel the same way about their work.

We have a duty to pursue truth, to discuss problems openly, even if we risk offending someone.  We might offend our administrators, we might challenge our board of trustees, members of our denomination.  Academic freedom does have its limits.  The Faculty Handbook for example states that it ends where it intrudes on the freedom of our students, meaning I can’t use the classroom to try to create disciples for my ideological convictions.  But academic freedom includes the public and frank discussion of any subject legitimately part of the classroom and its disciplinary field, part of the way members of that field take up the subject, and which treats different viewpoints with respect.

It is a freedom of questioning, not only asking “What?” and “Why?” but questioning in the sense of skepticism:  “Why is that true?”  This kind of freedom is often confusing, unpopular or frightening.  Our peculiar problem is that we have two basic sources of authority we have to hold onto simultaneously: the authority of our academic disciplines, and the authority of the Christian faith based on the Scripture as we understand it broadly in the Reformed tradition.  I think there is a great threat here at NWC to the peculiar freedom we enjoy and defend.

As some of you know we are often challenged by members of our own community, board members, students, even on occasion faculty, dismayed over what is portrayed in our art gallery, on our stages, in our campus newspaper, and even in our classrooms.  Often these worries are about sexuality; sometimes about science; sometimes about art.  As I stated earlier I understand the Good News to be so strange, so unusual, that it calls into question all the moral and religious convictions we carry around with us so naturally that we can’t even distinguish our beliefs from our call to be followers of Jesus.

Remember the context for the Lord’s Prayer?  Jesus criticized His own Jewish religious tradition, the moral and religious expectations of His family, His teachers, His audience, even His own disciples.  That is what it means to be really free; that is the strange, shocking freedom Jesus returned to over and over again when He taught that His Kingdom was the kind of place where God saves everyone, even the worst sinners, gives them cuts in line into the Kingdom in front of the most righteous.  That is the shocking freedom St. Paul mentioned in his letter to the Galatian church where even their enemies spied on them to try to figure it out (2:4);  where Paul near death told the Philippian Christians that he counted all his life, including his work as a Christian missionary, as nothing compared to knowing Christ in His death;  and where the epistle to the Colossians tells us that God takes all our moral and religious convictions, which we inevitably fail to maintain, and nails them to the Cross of Christ.  That is how shocking the Good News is.  Yet Christians of all kinds have repackaged this that so it becomes a new set of moral and religious rules.  You are told you are free, that God’s grace is free, to get you in the door. But if you want to stay inside, stay in the Kingdom, you have to obey a new set of rules.

That is not the Good News.  God became human to reveal Himself and His love to humanity, and doing so He reconciled humanity to Him.  Jesus’ obedience to the Father forced the very moral, religious and political authorities to kill Him.  But God restored Jesus to life and confirmed Who He Was and Is and Shall Be.  Now that you know the truth, live in obedience to that act of love. That is what a worthy life looks like.

For liberal arts students like us, the Good News suggests a worthy life.  We are free to ask everything, read everything, look at everything, talk openly about everything, encouraged the entire time to love one another as we do that work.  Those questions, books, art, discussions will not always be beautiful, hopeful, encouraging, kind, or loving.  They might even be offensive.  But that is the risk we take to learn the truth.

What then does love look like here?  It looks like loving truth enough to ask the hardest questions, and challenge even our friends.  They don’t get away with shoddy work; how would that help?  Academic freedom isn’t exactly like freedom of speech;  it is limited to real academic work.  If a claim lacks scholarly credentials, if it isn’t a real part of an academic field, it doesn’t belong in our classrooms or any other formal setting.  Love has to shape our response to any claim made here, and love at NWC means being skeptical because the truth matters enough to risk that what is obvious or what everyone agrees upon, isn’t necessarily true.  Love means always trying to keep the person making the argument as beloved of God right in the front of you.  Love means protecting the person who makes the minority argument, the unpopular argument—as long as it is an argument and not just flaming or trolling—even if the college authorities go after them.  Our academic freedom as a Christian college, which in this place is love in action, is only as strong as our loving ability to defend the person making the most offensive scholarly argument we can imagine.  I’ll say it again:  Our academic freedom as a Christian college, which in this place is love in action, is only as strong as our loving ability to defend the person making the most offensive scholarly argument we can imagine.  Think of the Christian story for a moment:  really ancient documents testify to a God who made the universe, revealed Himself to and through an insignificant Near Eastern people, became one of them in the flesh, was killed and resurrected, and now waits for the day to return and restore us and the world?  Paul said it was offensive, even scandalous.   If you don’t believe me, read 1 Corinthians and the Gospels, and think about it awhile.  If that story doesn’t confuse or offend you, have haven’t been paying attention.  As the German pastor and activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in a Christmas sermon, “the Throne of God in the world is not as human thrones, but is in the depths of the human soul, in the manger.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, 102).  Compared to such a strange and offensive story, what could we possibly talk about that is more difficult?

We can take this risk because of the hope within us rooted in the living Christ.  We hope this story of Jesus as God in the flesh, living a life like us and murdered for His obedience to the Father, but brought back to life to give us His life, is true.  Such hope makes love for one another possible, trust in God’s love and power to make it all work in the end, trust in the truth no matter how shocking or dismaying it is.

I encourage you to fight for the truth.  Argue for it.  Even run the risk of offending someone doing so.  To speak against falsehoods and fake science;  against voodoo scholarship;  against prejudice disguised as truth.  I encourage you to love one another as you do so; to figure out how to love one another AND love the truth.  Doing both, defend one another’s freedom to ask, say, write, preach, publish what they can defend with reason and evidence.  We are free because we are Christ’s slaves bought with a price, and commanded in gratitude to love one another.

I close here:  do all this with hope.  Be hopeful that Christ joins us to Himself in this good academic work, be hopeful that He will fill us with life from His Holy Spirit, be hopeful that following Him we can be His slaves of love for the reconciliation and healing of others.  Finally, be filled with hope that He will complete this work and complete His re-creation of the cosmos in Christ to the ending of the age.  Go in hope; go in trust; and go in freedom.

Amen;  go in peace.