A Diverse Spirituality

Last Sunday we talked about a practical spirituality, a practical faith. How many remember anything from that sermon? A balance between the spiritual and the practical. Let me see if perhaps I can quickly find something here. I wrote a summary of Sunday’s sermon so that you would remember, in which Paul, in Chapter 14, talks about maintaining a balance when we express the gifts of the Spirit in light of a number of different considerations: love, building others up, attentiveness to visitors and unbelievers, a number of things.

Let me quickly read something from last week’s sermon so that you can have an idea of where I am going. Because this morning I want to speak about a diverse spirituality, a varied, diversified spirituality. But before that, I titled this summary, “The gifts should only be expressed within the framework of love.”

I say this here, brothers and sisters: we frequently observe a false controversy in the church. This is not here in this afternoon’s presentation. We observe in the church a false controversy between believers who emphasize order in worship and those who insist on freedom and spontaneity in the Spirit when the church gathers to worship.

How many know what I am referring to? So, I say, many churches are so insistent on an orderly, well-choreographed service that they end up constraining the Spirit and stifling the free flow of the blessings that God wants to send His children as they praise Him with freedom and enthusiasm. That is one wing.

Others want so much to give the Spirit free rein that they go to the opposite extreme: they disdain structures—that is, they despise or disregard them—they forget the limits of time, permit any emotional expression or any impulse from the brothers and sisters, and end up creating an unhealthy mixture of unbridled emotionalism and genuine expressions of God’s movement in the service. Two extremes.

Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 14, which we read last Sunday, to establish a healthy balance between both extremes. He establishes as standards of judgment such elements as love and consideration for others, attentiveness to new believers and unbelievers in the worship service, a spirit of service toward one’s neighbor, and the priority of seeking to build others up before seeking personal satisfaction. These are the values that exalt the principles of the Gospel, the noble attitudes that truly reflect the spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ, who emptied and inconvenienced Himself in order to serve and save others.

The gifts must always be expressed in the spirit of Jesus, which is a spirit that asks: What might the other person be thinking? How is my behavior affecting others? Is it building them up? Is it a blessing? Am I emptying myself so that someone else may be blessed, or am I simply celebrating my own party and leaving everyone to attend to their own needs?

We should not do anything solely to build ourselves up, but above all to bless and build up those who worship the Lord with us. That is why Paul says—and encourages us to imitate him—“I would rather speak 5 words with my understanding, so that I may also teach others, than 10,000 words in an unknown tongue.”

The overriding value here is not expressing or building myself up; it is not even publicly expressing a genuinely spiritual energy. Rather, it is expressing the love of Christ, refraining from doing anything that might cause confusion or become a stumbling block to the weak and ignorant person. In short, it is glorifying the kind and considerate spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ and imitating Him in His gentle and generous behavior.

This is the greatest of all forms of praise and the highest expression of the compassionate and loving spirit of our heavenly Father. Amen.

I am going to leave it there. There are many more things that I wrote in that summary, but I want to get right into the presentation. But I want you to see the flow of the teaching. We seek a balanced church, a complex church, a spirituality that brings together the different nuances of the Word of God. And through this series of sermons, I have wanted to explain myself, to make myself understood, and also to let you know the church you attend and the pastors and spiritual leadership you have, so that we may define ourselves in this year in which the Lord has called us to define ourselves.

Now then, as I was saying, today I want to speak to you about a diverse spirituality. I am using the word spirituality. The first thing I believe we have to ask is: What is a spirituality? When we speak of spirituality—because I want to build something here. That is why I tell you: relax. If you left the beans cooking, run, turn them off, and come back.

These sermons are risky; they are complex. But many times one refrains from preaching them out of fear, and sometimes I believe we disrespect people. You are capable of handling complexity; I am sure of that. Amen.

The first question I want us to examine is this: When I speak of spirituality, what is a spirituality? I say here that it is a specific way of approaching the things of the Spirit. It is a certain spiritual disposition in an individual or a religious group. In our case, there are Christian spiritualities. There are different spiritualities—that is the point—and I want us to analyze some of them so that you may understand the diversity that exists in the body of Jesus Christ. There are different spiritualities, like different approaches, different ways of handling the substance of the Spirit.

It is an attitude of the spirit. I also say here that a spirituality is a kind of constellation of elements; it is a group, a collection of spiritual elements and attitudes that together constitute a way of relating to God and to others, both within the body of Jesus Christ and in the world outside.

A spirituality can be recognized by the things it emphasizes and isolates. It is as though spiritualities see something in Scripture, it captures their attention, and they emphasize and isolate it. I am not going to give some examples of this from Scripture. A spirituality is distinguished by what it focuses on, what it gives primary importance to, even while recognizing that there are other valuable things in the Kingdom of God and in the Word.

There are different spiritualities. Throughout history, different approaches to Scripture have appeared. There are groups, each distinguished by its emphasis on aspects of the Word of the Lord—an interest, a priority, in a sense. These are distinctive features of the different tribes and sectors of the people of God. There are different spiritualities.

For example, I am going to tell you about some of them. I hope this will build you up, so that when you look at the varied landscape of the church of Jesus Christ, you will be able to recognize some of them. This is my own grouping of the different spiritualities, or traditions, we might also say, that we see among the people of God.

There is what I call liturgical and orthodox spirituality. Nowadays, among evangelicals, the word liturgy has somehow become a pejorative term, but it is a noble word. There is a liturgical and orthodox spirituality. Within that spirituality I include groups such as Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, the different Orthodox churches around the world, Episcopal churches, and Anglican churches. They emphasize, number 1, ritual within worship, symbolism, the richness of the sanctuary, a well-organized annual progression of prayers, and the observance of the various festivals of the Christian tradition.

There is something else as well: there is an awareness. That type of spirituality is conscious of the accumulation of teaching that has taken place throughout the church’s 2,000-year history. There is a celebration of the great men and women who have contributed their knowledge and experiences to the wisdom of the church and to theological knowledge: Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Saint Teresa of Jesus, Saint Francis of Assisi, and, in our own times, Bonhoeffer and Barth. There is an accumulation of truths and teachings. Liturgical spirituality is characterized by this appreciation and celebration of that long Christian history.

There is also what I call Pentecostal spirituality: all the Pentecostal churches in the world that emphasize the Holy Spirit, the gifts of the Spirit, power in the Christian life, the supernatural life, spiritual warfare, healing, prophecy, and revelation. Pentecostal spirituality sees God manifesting Himself every day and sees the power of the Holy Spirit.

I would say that its key verse is, “It is not by sword, it is not by army, but by My Spirit, says the Lord.” It is a wonderful spirituality, and there are thousands upon thousands of churches that subscribe to it and emphasize that dimension, although, as you can see, they are more than that. Spiritualities do not exclude other things, but they are distinguished by and emphasize one area.

There is also what I would call evangelical spirituality. We are evangelicals, but the difference between the spirituality I call evangelical and Pentecostal spirituality is that, in simply evangelical spirituality, there is not such a strong emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, spiritual warfare, and that dimension of warfare and aggressiveness in the Spirit that the Pentecostal world emphasizes so much.

That spirituality includes churches and denominations such as Methodists, Baptists, Bible Temple, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Congregational churches. These are evangelical and biblical churches, but they do not subscribe as strongly to the Pentecostal dimension. They do, however, emphasize the Word, the priority of the Word, teaching, theological reflection, character, order, and preserving the faith of the church until Christ comes, with order, sobriety, and harmony. That is something very beautiful as well.

There is a difference. That is why I say that Pentecostals are evangelicals, but evangelicals are not necessarily Pentecostals. There is a difference.

There is also what I would call activist spirituality. There is a whole constellation of groups, philosophies, and theologies that subscribe to it. It is a spirituality that emphasizes acting upon history, changing the structures of society, and bringing about change, even if by force—changing injustice and changing the unequal structures of history.

For example, there is everything called liberation theology, which was very influential during the 1970s and even part of the 1980s in Latin America, with overtones of Marxism and transformation, sometimes even by force of arms, as in Nicaragua and other countries, where elements of the Catholic Church participated in the revolutions—in El Salvador, Colombia, and other countries as well.

There is also what is called Dominion Theology, which talks about turning the United States, for example, into a Christian society, and if power has to be taken through elections so that the United States may be a Christian society, amen. But it is a theology that is not content merely to reflect theologically; rather, its adherents also want to act and take an active part in human affairs.

Feminist theology, for example, seeks to correct aspects of male domination, and its adherents often complain that Christian theology is a theology viewed through the eyes of men—and what about women, they say? And so it also speaks about the liberation of women through the study of the Bible. That is what I call activist spirituality.

There is another spirituality that I call prophetic spirituality, which speaks about social justice, caring for minorities and those who do not have political power, mercy, and giving attention to cities with their specific problems. And there is a difference between prophetic and activist spirituality, in the sense that activist spirituality is prophetic, but not all prophetic theology is necessarily activist. Not everyone who recognizes inequalities and the importance of mercy necessarily wants to become involved in political activism, revolution, or other things like that. But I call it prophetic because its adherents use those texts in the Old Testament and other passages of Scripture where the prophets denounced injustice, denounced the abuse of the poor, and denounced disregard for those who have no power: widows, orphans, those in prison, and so forth. It is a prophetic spirituality that speaks a great deal about love and mercy toward the poor and the helpless.

There is also what I call fundamentalist spirituality, which emphasizes the fundamentals—hence the word—of the Word of God. And it is a spirituality conceived in conflict with those liberal theologies that existed here in the United States, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, when the entire liberal movement truly began to have a major effect on this nation. And many evangelicals, seeing what was happening to this nation as it moved further and further toward heresy, as it has continued to do, rose up in protest and began to emphasize the distinctive features of the Christian faith in order to counteract and counterbalance that movement toward the heresy of Christianity here in the United States.

That is, it is a spirituality that rises up against something—it is polemical, which is why I say it is often militant. And I also see that spirituality very much, for example, in the way Southern Baptists are very emphatic about doctrine and are sometimes resistant, for example, to the Pentecostal movement; they resist tongues, for example, and the Southern Baptists have gone so far as to require their missionaries and the people who are going to work with them to reject tongues, and if they do not reject them in their doctrinal confession, they cannot work for them.

I have great respect for the Southern Baptists, but I want to point out that polemic against the gifts of the Holy Spirit as well, and against the Pentecostal movement. Fundamentalists go back to the fundamentals and say, that is where we stand, and that is what we are. And it is always a somewhat polemical mindset.

But this is important because we have to recognize it. If you do not recognize the terrain through which you are navigating, you will get lost, you will become disoriented, and that happens to many Christians. Will you give me a little time to develop all this? I think it is worthwhile.

There is also what I call a holiness spirituality—everything related to the emphasis on holiness unto the Lord. We serve a holy God; we must be morally upright, we must consecrate ourselves to the Lord and be a people set apart. I am reminded of the teachings of the Wesley brothers in the eighteenth century, the holiness movement in the nineteenth century and even in the twentieth century, the African American churches, and the Latino churches, Pentecostal churches as well. There are churches that emphasize holiness in dress, in behavior, and in all these things.

There are Pentecostal sectors that are also holiness sectors, and they combine the two. In the Pentecostal movement during the Azusa revival, many of the people who became involved in the Pentecostal movement came from the holiness movement. And that is why there is a blending of the two, but there is a distinction there because not everyone in the holiness movement is necessarily Pentecostal.

And there is also what I call a separatist spirituality, which was seen especially in the eighteenth century among the Anabaptists in Germany; the Mennonites of our time, who come from that entire tradition; the Brethren; and other groups like them as well; Count Zinzendorf in Germany and Austria. Separatists, as the word suggests, want to separate themselves radically from the world. They do not swear allegiance to flags, they do not go to war, they do not recite the Pledge of Allegiance, the oath of allegiance to the American flag. They want to be a community that is, as it were, separate from the world, but they are not activists; they reject the world, reject sin, and in a sense withdraw from society, wanting to be like a pure church that rejects worldliness and even rejects the corruptions of other churches, as they see them.

These are different spiritualities, different groups and sensitivities of the spirit that are manifested in the body of Jesus Christ. They are there: when I go to an Anglican or Catholic church, I see one kind of spirituality. When I go to a Puerto Rican, Caribbean, or Guatemalan Pentecostal storefront church in Roxbury, I see Pentecostal spirituality. When I visit a Mennonite or Quaker church, I see that aspect of separation from the world; I also see in Quaker churches the whole aspect of social justice and other things along those lines.

That is, there are different kinds of… When I go to a Southern Baptist church or a Bible temple, I see those very proper brothers and sisters emphasizing the Bible and emphasizing the order and holiness of the church. There is a mixture of spiritualities that you see throughout all the groups within the church of Jesus Christ.

And that is why I say, brothers and sisters, that it is important to recognize those different spiritualities and the people whose teachings gave birth to those sensitivities: people such as Saint Augustine; Father Las Casas in the fifteenth century, when the Spaniards came to the Americas and he spoke about justice for the Indigenous people who were being exploited by the Spaniards and the conquistadors; Luther, who rose up against the corruptions of the Catholic Church and gave rise to the Reformation from which we are descended; Calvin, concerning predestination and the lordship and sovereignty of God in the church.

George Whitefield, who spoke about preaching, a man who brought revival. Jonathan Edwards here in New England, father of a great Pentecostal revival and an incredible thinker, a first-rate philosopher. Yale has an entire department devoted to studying the mind and the intellectual development that this man made possible—a man of God, on fire for God, but with an incandescent mind for theology and ethics and aesthetics, and many tremendous things. A man of great depth.

What I want, brothers and sisters, is to suggest to you, among other things, that you read beyond what you are accustomed to reading. I sometimes fear that many of my devout brothers and sisters limit themselves to these tasty, juicy little evangelical novels about testimonies, healing, conversion, this, that, and the other, and do not devote time to those more substantial things. Read Calvin’s thought. Read about the Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe and how it came here to the Americas. Read about the thought of a Karl Barth or a Dietrich Bonhoeffer or a Martin Luther King Jr. Because these things are important; these are people whom God has blessed with special understanding, and they have given rise to many wonderful things within the church.

Get your bearings; read about this, because we are part of that heritage. Those people of God enrich and add nuance to our religious thought. We should know them and learn more from them every day.

What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is that each of these spiritualities focuses on and emphasizes one part of the truth of Scripture. Because in the Bible there is holiness, there is the fire of the Holy Spirit, there is mercy for the poor, there is a call to hold fast to the faith once delivered to the saints without changing it, there is a call to separate ourselves from the world—all of that is in there—but often we become fascinated with one aspect of Scripture and then seem to forget everything else. People who fall so deeply in love with the gifts of the Holy Spirit forget the fruit of the Holy Spirit, for example. The Corinthians did that. Paul says, oh, among you there are many gifts, many signs, but you are pulling one another’s hair every day, fighting, taking one another to court—division, heresy, spiritual superficiality, as we see today among many Pentecostals. And so we have to look at those complex dimensions of Scripture.

Each of these spiritualities focuses on and emphasizes one part of the truth of Scripture, but what we see is that the Bible, in turn, encompasses and includes them all. The Bible is the mine from which we extract those different nuggets of gold, and then we take them home—oh, my precious, as the character in that wonderful film trilogy says. It is as though we idolize one little piece of the truth while all around us there is gold, there are diamonds, there is silver, there is bronze, there is everything, and we do not celebrate the fullness of the word of God.

This is very important. We in this church—its senior pastor, and I believe the church’s pastors and the leadership of this congregation at Lion of Judah—find value and usefulness in each of these different traditions and spiritualities. We celebrate something from each of them; we include elements of each one in our practice as a congregation.

That is what sometimes makes us difficult to define. And that is why many people have difficulty understanding why the pastor does this, why he does not do that, why, oh, the service was so wonderful and God was moving and it seemed as though the roof was about to blow off, and then the pastor comes along and begins, ah, now we are going to collect the tithes and offerings. He cut off the blessing; this man does not know how to discern the spirit.

It is because we do not understand that at that moment I am looking at the other dimensions of Christian life: the church must keep moving forward; the church needs… If you leave without giving me the tithes and offerings, just imagine—who is going to pay me at the end of the month? No, I am joking. But we need to pay for the lights, we need to pay for the heating, we need to pay for missions and for the things we want to do. There is a time for everything.

I see the church as something complex: it is partly spirit and partly flesh and bone; it is on the earth, it is an institution, and room must be made for everything. We must praise the Lord, we must collect tithes and offerings, we must preach the word and edify the Lord’s people, we must celebrate Holy Communion, we must educate the children, we must disciple people, we must evangelize visitors, we must do everything; there is a diversity of things, and we try to include them all. And our church tries to maintain that balance.

For example, I give thanks to the Lord because this week I have seen the love of our brothers and sisters manifested toward families who have lost loved ones during the week. I have seen brothers and sisters pray with people who have been in pain, go to the hospitals and spend time there, go to visit… We are saddened to report that Sister Mayra [inaudible]—I do not know how many of you knew her—passed away this week. She was with us for a couple of years, came to know the Lord here at the church, and went to be with the Lord this week.

I was able to see how brothers and sisters from this congregation—I give thanks for Sister Anita Valverde, Mayra, and others—were there with her over the course of months, visiting her at home and ministering to her; she was so grateful. Last week I went to visit a hospital for people who are in their final days, and there I found ten women warriors, each with her sword in hand, praying for that sister and ministering to her. What a blessing.

And, for example, I believe, however, that when we go to visit brothers and sisters who are sick in the hospital, we should not be concerned only with, well, I want to do the good deed of visiting this person; rather, we also have to think, okay, I do not want to stay too long either. I want to pay attention to the fact that this person does not feel well, withdraw after a few minutes of praying for and blessing the person, and then continue on my way.

That is, even when doing good, one has to be thinking about different things. That is what I call balanced spirituality. If you are going to visit someone who has just given birth, look, glory to God, but that sister does not have her makeup on either; she is going to feel… Wait until she is a little better and then go and visit her, but many people say, no, I have to go…

Brothers and sisters, do you understand what I mean? We have to have balance in life, and our spirituality has to be balanced in that way.

What I am saying is that at Lion of Judah we value those different traditions. For example, if you look at our church in the area of social transformation and social justice, we have Alpha, we have the Academic Resource Center, we have the Worth the Wait youth ministry in the area of sexuality. We have counseling ministries, English as a Second Language. There are different ministries because we believe in social justice; we believe that the church is a transforming force in the culture, and we devote time, money, space, and energy to that dimension of Christian life, and in doing so we identify with those spiritualities that emphasize social justice, the needs of the poor, transformation in the city, and all these important things.

On the other hand, we also have a side that closely resembles holiness spirituality because we speak about holiness and morality. And let me say in passing, for example, that not only were we very active in the controversy concerning marriage—we believe in the holiness of marriage—but we also believe that in marriage the husband must not oppress his wife, and that is holiness, and that the wife must respect her husband as well. Amen.

And we must also be considerate of others; we must preserve marriages so that they may be a blessing to our children. All of that is holiness, and I am going to devote a sermon to what I see as an encompassing and complex holiness, which is not merely moral, not merely about adultery, promiscuity, and homosexuality, but is also the fruit of the Holy Spirit, consecration to the Lord, the surrender of our entire being to the Lord—that is true holiness. But we emphasize holiness.

We resemble evangelicals in placing great emphasis on the Scriptures; that is why we have discipleship classes, why we place such emphasis on educating our children, why we have Awana, which provides systematic teaching, and why we want to give our children solid foundations in the word. We believe that manifestations of the gifts must be framed by the word of God and that, even if something seems spectacular, delightful, sensational, if it is not endorsed by and does not fit within the framework of Scripture, it is not going anywhere among us.

In that sense, we are very much like evangelicals in their emphasis on the Scriptures. We are Pentecostals; we are very much like Pentecostal churches, in the sense that you have seen the freedom with which we praise the Lord, the time we give to worship; we believe in spiritual warfare, healing, deliverance, all the things that happen… when the people praise God, things happen… we know that the power of God moves in the midst of praise, and in that respect we are very much like the Pentecostal tradition.

And I believe—I even appreciate aspects of Catholicism and Christian Orthodoxy. I have benefited from studying the great thinkers of the Church throughout the centuries. I love that respect for apostolic authority that I see in the Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches. Sometimes I love entering a church and feeling that contemplative atmosphere made possible by the beautiful stained-glass windows of a cathedral, or the smell of incense, or the dark wood, or the dim light of a cathedral or an Anglican, Episcopal, or Catholic church.

I do not agree with many of their teachings, but I love that sense that, when you enter that holy place, you breathe in that silence, that stillness. Many times, evangelical churches do not have adequate reverence for the presence of God, and so we become overly familiar with the Lord—but God is holy, terribly holy.

I believe that we should preserve a little of that respect and that reverence, and that respect for authority that I see among our Catholic brothers and sisters and in the hierarchy, which I believe also has its proper place in the Christian life when exercised in a healthy way.

That is to say, I see value and blessing in many of those traditions, and I believe that, as I say, a healthy Christian spirituality takes a little from those different things. For me, the biblical text that I forgot to read at the beginning is 1 Thessalonians, chapter 5:21, which says, “Test everything and hold fast to what is good…”

We always have to do that. We examine; our radar is watching all the different spiritualities and traditions, and we learn from this and that; we take from here, we take from there, we discard things, and we keep what is good, and we always come out ahead because we are at home in every world—as long as it comes from the word of the Lord.

I use an illustration from mixed martial arts. You know that for many, many years the martial arts have remained in the public eye separately from one another. We have taekwondo, we have jiu-jitsu, we have judo, we have the martial arts that come from Thailand and Western Asia, from Japan, from China—some mystical, others purely physical, such as taekwondo—but all these different… kickboxing, which was an early form of that blending of boxing with taekwondo. And notice what has happened over time: people realized, especially when the Brazilians came onto the martial arts scene—the Brazilians created a blend of jiu-jitsu, wrestling, judo, boxing, and a number of other things—and when they went to some major international competitions, they walked away with all the titles. And people realized, wow, it is good to blend the different martial traditions and create a synthesis of them. No one could handle them because they had blended different arts and created an unbeatable synthesis.

And today, that partly explains the tremendous craze for mixed martial arts. They have displaced professional wrestling and the different styles of martial arts, although those still exist—but people have realized it. By the way, I do not celebrate mixed martial arts on television, nor do I openly condemn them, but I do not believe that we should celebrate the violence, the brutality, that is displayed. But I do celebrate the principle of combining skills, taking what is good from one thing and another, synthesizing it, and using the best of each tradition.

I see the advantage that diversity and inclusiveness bring to the Christian life and to other dimensions of human experience as well. Brothers and sisters, people are accustomed to seeing only one or two of these spiritual elements I have mentioned—these spiritualities—coexisting in a church or ministry. And when they see several of them, they think, no, these people are confused, these people are indecisive, these people have not clearly defined themselves; and when they see that mixture, they do not know what to do with it.

Many people do not understand: Well, what is Lion of Judah? Is it a Pentecostal, evangelical, holiness, social justice, liberal, conservative, fundamentalist church? What are we? Because they are used to seeing just one thing, or two at most. We say, no, there is blessing in all these energies. We take from here and from there, and we create a blend that I believe is the biblical blend—or rather, the blend of the Holy Spirit.

Many people see contradiction or indecision in that mixture of things. But I believe that what is really there is, rather, complexity. Brothers and sisters, it is a mixture of the different things that we believe are part of the biblical synthesis. It is important, brothers and sisters, to develop a historical awareness of the evolution of the Church’s thought, to see how the thought and theology of the Christian Church have developed and acquired nuance throughout the centuries, to see that progression.

For example, I see in Scripture, in the book of Acts, how at one point the Apostles dealt with the issue of Gentiles entering the Church, and they were not prepared for that. So they had to deal with the question: What are we going to do with these Gentiles? Do we turn them into Jews, or do we leave them with their traditions, respect their traditions, and simply confine ourselves to the most basic things of the Gospel? And that is what they did.

The Church has always had to develop its thinking. When the conflict between the Jews and the Greeks arose, they developed this whole matter involving those whom we call the deacons of the Church. So the Church has always been developing in this way; the Church’s thinking has had to deal with these things.

I believe, brothers and sisters, that being aware of this diversity throughout history, of the Church’s different traditions, frees us from many errors—errors that have already been experienced in the past and that we can avoid when we understand this trajectory of the Church.

For example, there is the excess that I see today among groups that emphasize prophecy: sometimes the disorder, the lack of care in what you say to people supposedly under the anointing. I believe in that, and brothers and sisters, there is freedom for prophecy here. The Bible says that we should not despise prophecies, but sometimes people can become so enamored with prophecy that they are not careful in their use of it, and they bring prophecy into disrepute.

But if we knew the history of the Church, we would see that the Montanist movement in the fourth century was characterized by precisely that: an excessive focus on prophecy that led to disaster and to terrible excesses that brought prophecy into disrepute for many people.

If we understand that, we are more careful. Docetism was a doctrine that denied the importance of the flesh and whose adherents said, no, Jesus did not come into the world in the flesh; he did not become incarnate—that was a mirage, an illusion. Nor was he crucified, because the body does not redeem; the body is evil. They deny the body, they deny matter, they see matter as something evil. But no, I believe that God created the world and said, everything is good. I love a good meal, I love art, I love a good sunset, and I believe in the blessing of nature. I believe that the Church is not a disembodied, merely spiritual institution, as I was saying last Sunday. It is a legal institution; it is a transforming institution; it exists in history, it exists in time, and attention must be paid to those things. Attention must be paid to people’s material needs.

The Lord told the disciples, “You give them something to eat.” The disciples were saying, “No, Lord, we have already given them the word; send them home.” And the Lord told them, “No, you give them something to eat.” He emphasized food as well; he emphasized the needs of the body. And Docetism in the fourth century, as well as Gnosticism, said that the body was evil. I believe in the beauty of sexuality; I believe in healthy sexuality within the Lord’s parameters. That is beautiful; it is worthy.

All these things are important; what we are seeking is order and balance among all these things. But if we study the Church’s different traditions and heresies, we realize that, with many of the things we do today, if we understood the past, we would guard against them.

I also believe that this frees us not only from errors but also from presumption—from believing that we are the only ones, that we have discovered something momentous and unprecedented that has never appeared before. I think of Jehovah’s Witnesses: if you look at them, they say, we are the only ones. If you are not a Jehovah’s Witness and are not baptized with Jehovah’s Witnesses, you are lost; you are not saved. I say, wow, and what happened to the twenty centuries of Church history? Did God ignore the Church until the twentieth century? Did he say, “Oh, wait, I have a group of people here for whom I sent my Son to die, and I forgot…”?

What presumption, to believe that we are the only ones. And there are groups that believe that if you are not baptized with them, if you are not one of them, you are not saved. And I believe that we must understand the richness of the Church, how God has revealed himself throughout the centuries. We are not the only ones; many people have thought many rich things, and that helps us to be humble, to celebrate the achievements and teachings of others.

I believe that this should also make us more sober-minded, more inclusive, when we see some new preacher out there preaching a strange and novel doctrine and allow ourselves to be dazzled. That new movement, that church growing by leaps and bounds—and everyone says, “Ah, let’s go to that church because the Holy Spirit is moving there.”

The person who knows how the Church has moved throughout the past two thousand years and has studied those different movements says, “Okay, let’s wait; let’s see what happens.” Because there have been many movements like that in the Church that advanced dramatically and then imploded. As Gamaliel said, if this is from God, it will remain; if it is not from God, it will dissolve in time.

Some movements are like flares: they light up the sky and the night for a moment, but likewise disappear in an instant. When you understand this, you say, “Okay, let me examine this in the light of the word of the Lord. It sounds very nice, but let us see what the Bible says.” And if it is from God, you accept it; you do not reject it because it is new. But if it is not from God, you say, “Well, perhaps another day.”

I also believe that this should help us be more tolerant of people who appear to be different from us but have something there from which we can also learn and which we can celebrate. It helps us be less inclined to condemn thoughtlessly or adopt impulsively. As the Word says, we end up testing everything and holding fast to what is good.

Brothers and sisters, I will finish with this. What I am saying is that our church—my own spiritual emphasis, I believe—is distinguished by this recognition that there is much within the family of God from which to learn and which to celebrate, and that even when we vehemently disagree with what certain groups within the Christian Church think, we have to say, “Okay, why are they placing so much emphasis on that? Might there be something in the Bible from which I can learn?” And when we take a closer look, oh, yes—for example, everything related to social justice. There are many liberal groups. I do not subscribe to liberalism; I believe in the doctrine and the Word once delivered to the saints. But I also believe that conservative Christians have often forgotten the rights of the poor, and we have sided with the powerful and have not called the rich to account for their neglect and exploitation of the poor.

I believe that, to its shame, the Church has not been the prophetic voice that it ought to be, that it ought to have been—for example, here in the United States during the time of slavery or during the time when African Americans were excluded. To its shame, the Church in Germany during Hitler’s time followed Hitler, and only a few German Christians denounced Hitler. Where was the revelation of God?

So I have learned that those brothers and sisters who are sometimes so liberal that they make me want to strangle them nevertheless have an intuition from the Bible about loving the poor, the helpless, the widow, the orphan; about visiting the prisoner; about loving those who have no power; about mercy—and I have learned from them. I have held fast to what is good and rejected what I believe is not from God. We have to do that as well.

I will finish with an illustration that many of you may have heard: the story of the six blind men and the elephant. It is a very famous story in world literature in which, we are told, six blind men approached an elephant. Having never seen an elephant, they did not know what an elephant was; blind from birth, they approached an elephant, and each one began to touch a part of it. And the blind man who touched the elephant’s trunk said, “An elephant is like a tube, and that is its essence—a tube.”

Someone else touched the elephant’s legs and felt their strength and hardness and said, no, the elephant is like a pillar. Another touched the elephant’s immense ears and said, no, the elephant is like a hand fan. Another touched the elephant’s tail and said, no, that is not right; an elephant is like a rope. Another touched the elephant’s belly and felt its strength and hardness and said, no, an elephant is like a wall, like a partition. And each one was arguing with the others because he said, no, the elephant is like this; no, the elephant is like this. And they brought the six blind men before the king, and he said to them, the problem is that you are seeing only one part of the elephant. The elephant is all those things, because it is made up of all those things.

And likewise, brothers and sisters, I believe—I would say—that God is much more complex than an elephant. Christian doctrine is tremendously complex, and many times we fight with one another in the body of Jesus Christ because one person has seen one thing of the Kingdom and another has seen something else, and we say, no, that is not how it is, instead of looking at the beauty in those different insights.

I believe that what we have to do in the Kingdom of God, brothers and sisters, is see the good in each of those traditions and learn from them. I am not advocating what I would call an indiscriminate relativism. I am not saying, oh, let everyone believe whatever they want, and let us celebrate all heresies, and let no one say anything about the things that are false. No, I believe what I am saying is that every Christian tradition has aspects of truth and also aspects of limitation and falsehood. We have to discern wisely, examine everything, and hold on to what is good.

I would say that the first thing is that we have to know God well, have experiences with God, study the Word, and immerse ourselves in the Word. That is why I encourage you: take the discipleship classes, read your Bible, study the great themes of Scripture, the great figures, the great Chapters, the great principles of the Word of God; become thoroughly steeped in it, because we live in times of great heresy when it is often very difficult to distinguish lies from truth, and each one of us needs first to fill ourselves with the Word of God, to know well who God is, and then to analyze these different movements, learn from them, and hold on to what is of God in them.

And in that way, I believe we are going to be healthy Christians, solid Christians. We must immerse ourselves in the wisdom of God that comes through the scrutiny of His Word and then approach everything, examining everything in the light of that divine understanding. That is what I seek, brothers and sisters: a church that is solid, a church that is balanced, a church that is complex, a church that recognizes the beauty of God’s revelation throughout His entire body.

May the Lord help us, brothers and sisters, to do this and to be that kind of church. Amen. May God continue to bless you, and Father, we ask for Your wisdom; we ask for sobriety to discern what is Yours and what is not Yours, and to be a sober people, an intelligent, wise people, a people who can benefit from all the beautiful blessings You have given Your children throughout the entire history of Your Church.

We celebrate Your complexity, Lord; we celebrate the multifaceted beauty of Your Word. Help us to be like Christ—balanced, complex, all-embracing, Lord. We ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen.