Musings: Notes From My Daybook

At Northlake we are preparing for VBS--one of the highlights of the year!  This year we go to Rome and to the world of the early Christians.  One of my small tasks is to represent something of the preaching of the early church so I have been reading a lot of sermons from the second to the fourth centuries lately!  One of the best preachers of the fourth century and really of all time was John Chrysostom.  As a preacher myself I found his words on the tension and trouble of appealing to people's attention and acclaim to be a wonderful word to remember.  So I share with you:

    There are many preachers who make long sermons; if they are well applauded, they are as glad as if they had obtained a kingdom; if they bring their sermon to an end in silence, their despondency is worse, I may almost say, than hell. It is this that ruins churches, that you do not seek to hear sermons that touch the heart, but sermons that will delight your ears, just as if you were listening to singers and lute players. And we preachers humour fancies instead of trying to crush them. We act like a father who gives a sick child a cake or an ice, or something else that is merely nice to eat – just because he asks for it; and takes no pains to give him what is good for him; and then when the doctors blame him says, “I could not bear to hear my child cry”. That is what we do when we elaborate beautiful sentences, fine combinations and harmonies, to please and not to profit, and not to better your conduct. Believe me, I am not speaking at random; when you applaud me as I speak, I feel at the moment as it is natural for a man to feel. I will make a clean breast of it. Why should I not? I am delighted and overjoyed. And when I go home and reflect that the people who have been applauding me have received no benefit, and indeed that whatever benefit they might have had has been killed by the applause, I feel as though I had spoken altogether in vain, and I say to myself, “What is the good of all your labours, seeing that your hearers don’t want to reap any fruit out of all that you say?” And I have often thought of laying down a rule prohibiting all applause, and urging you to listen in silence.
 

Well said! 

To take another look at the way in which our language can limit our understanding of God’s activity and God’s call to discipleship, consider the way the word conversion is used.  Normally, we think of conversion as when a person gives up one set of beliefs or ideas for a new set of beliefs or ideas.  For example, “I used to believe that salmon was the best seafood ever, but ever since I tried mahi-mahi I converted.”  And when it comes to faith, it is not uncommon to think about a person having a conversion “experience.”  Some radical event has occurred that has brought about a change in what a person thinks.

So it often happens that persons connect “getting baptized” with the idea of conversion.  And not without reason, since baptism and conversion have a lot of connections.  But it is important for a healthy perspective about baptism to have a healthy perspective about conversion.  And to do that we might well begin with the practices of the early church.

A number of years ago, Michael Green wrote a wonderful book called Evangelism in the Early Church.   He notes three important dimensions to how the early church understand conversion—and why many pagan people would have been astonished at the really radical call that coming to be Christian actually is.

First, conversion requires belief—real belief.  That is to say, that a person believes so completely and thoroughly that she makes choices about her life based on the conviction that Jesus lives and that the Christian faith is actually the right way to live.  This was, for people of the ancient world, more than a little odd.  For first and second century pagans, you could worship any number of different gods and practice any number of rituals, but not really believe, much less act on the claims that those gods made.

Second, conversion requires a change in ethics.  Here again was a surprising move.  To become a Christian in the ancient world meant that your behavior changed.  You no longer sought after self-interests, but rather sought out the interests of others.  In today’s terms, to be in the Georgia Tech Booster’s Club does not require that you seek the well-being of the poor or extend hospitality to the stranger.  Nor do they ask whether you act with integrity in your business dealings.  However, becoming a Christian meant those things—and a whole lot more.

Third, and here comes the real rub, conversion requires accepting the exclusive claim that Jesus is Lord.  As Green writes: “Christians were expected to belong, body and soul, to Jesus, who was called their master. . . and was said to have redeemed them from alien ownership into his own.  Henceforward they were to acknowledge no other ‘Lord,’ be he emperor or pagan deity.  This all seemed very strange, for ancient religion was never exclusive.”   To belong exclusively, totally to one Lord and to the community of that one Lord made for a decidedly robust understanding of conversion.

Thus, with these three dimensions of conversion in front of us—belief that realigns life, an ethic that demands a new set of behaviors, and an exclusive belonging—we need to ask how conversion should be construed.  Is conversion something that can happen in a moment?  Or, is it possible, even in the many examples in the New Testament, that conversion is a process that engages a person’s intellect, emotion, experience, and very soul?