What is a Christian, anyway? Really?

Over a 150 years ago he wrote it about something that, thank God, doesn’t even exist anymore, at least in this country.  But gosh his words shook me.   He painted an awful picture, one I couldn’t deny.   What he was writing had to be true.  No other explanation existed. 

In the 1840s, a man wrote and then published a book destined to be an American classic.  He called it; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Am American Slave written by well, Frederick Douglass.    And what he writes of his awful suffering as a slave deeply troubles me.   How could it not?   But that’s not what shook me.   What shook me is this.  All but one of Frederick’s owners, men and women who brutalized him and others, these people who regularly terrorized, even murdered defenseless human beings, they all proclaimed themselves to be Christians.  And the one owner who treated him the least cruelly.  That guy wasn’t a Christian at all.

How could that be?   Douglass, a devout Christian himself, comes to only one conclusion.  He puts it this way at the end of his book.   He writes:

What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest, possible difference--so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. 

And trust me, it doesn’t get any better from there.  Douglass talks of slave-holding pastors who did horrifying things to vulnerable human beings Monday through Saturday, and then preached to their congregations on Sunday.   And do you know what shakes me about that?  These folks really thought they were Christians.   They honestly believed that.   But they weren’t, not at all.   Frederick Douglass was right. 

Here’s the truth.  You can get deeply involved in a church, even become a leader, a pastor even, and never become a Christian.  You think you are.  In fact, you may be sure you are.  But that doesn’t change the fact.  You’re not.  You don’t really get the gospel at all.  And that’s as true now as it was when Douglass wrote those words.   How can that be?   More crucially, how do you know, you’ve gotten it, really gotten the message?   In these words, God points the way.   Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 

Galatians 1:1-5

How do you know you’ve got it?   How do you know you’ve truly experienced what Jesus came to bring?   What is it that makes a Christian after all?    In these brief words, God tells you.  What makes you a Christian has absolutely nothing to do with what you do.   It has everything to do with what you believe. 

In fact, this whole idea of doing messes up everything.  Ok, it’s not so much the doing as what people think the doing means. 

Let’s say you are married.   And you develop an attraction to a nice-looking co-worker.  One thing leads to another.   You end up having an affair.   It goes on for a while, until your spouse finds out.   Once that happens, it only gets worse.  The marriage crashes and burns: divorce, custody battles, the whole ugly mess.   Now once that happens.  What do you think about yourself? 

Let’s say, you think like this.  What an awful person I am, selfish, destructive, hurtful to others. And you know what.  You would be exactly right.  But you’re having an affair and blowing up your marriage didn’t make that true.  Sure, all that ugliness inside of you showed up in how you messed up your marriage.  But the ugliness existed before that.  It existed in you from the beginning.   Don’t feel too bad.   You’re not alone.   The same ugliness exists in everyone.    Nobody gets a pass.

But here’s the problem.   Let’s say you are married.  And you never cheat on your spouse.   You stay totally faithful over decades and decades of marriage.   So, what do you think then?   Would you think?   What an awful person I am, selfish, destructive, hurtful to others.   If you’d think to yourself, no, that couldn’t be me, you would be wrong.   It is you.  It is you because it is everybody.  Nobody gets a pass.   Your “not cheating on your spouse” doesn’t change that at all.  But if you think it does change things, you’ve got a big problem. 

Now, why would that be a big problem?  Well, first, let’s get honest.   Nobody keeps accurate scorecards.   You go through your life, always grading yourself on a curve.  But you don’t grade anybody else that way.   You see someone texting on the road, and you think, “Sheesh how reckless of them.  They’re going to kill someone.”  But then you are driving and a text pops up.  And as you reply, you think.  “Well, this is too important.  I have to reply now or I’m not like those other drivers, I can text safely.”   It’s why Dave Barry, the columnist for the Miami Herald  wrote these wise words.   “The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion or ethnic background, is that we all believe we are above-average drivers.”

Everybody grades themselves on a curve.  But all this grading on a curve points to the deeper problem.   It means you think it’s about the grades.   Somehow there exists out there a cosmic passing grade.  And all you need to do is get it.    

Decades ago, I was having dinner with an old friend in New York.   We had grown up in the same church.   Now, he had become a successful magazine editor.   And he was flying pretty high, cushy expense account, the right parties, the right people.  But still he worried if he was right.  He said to me.  “Kennedy, I think I am just staying good enough so that I will be ok with God in the end.”   And I said to him, “Kelly, it doesn’t work that way, not at all.”    But he thought it did.  

And because people think that way, the whole world gets messed up.  Those slave-owners that brutalized Frederick Douglass and countless others, they had a cosmic grading system.  And somehow that system rationalized all sorts of cruelty. It even deceived them into even thinking they were doing something good.  After all the Nazi’s had a cosmic grading system too.  But the systems don’t have to be that evil to be destructive.  People create all sorts of cosmic grading systems.   If I am successful financially, then I am good.  Or if I have power or fame or popularity, I’m good.  If I’m a good spouse or parent or worker or whatever, I’m good.  I could go on.  You have countless versions of these cosmic passing grades.  But none of them, none of them are right.   And none of them brings you or this world peace, but instead the opposite.

Still, they are right in this.  There is a cosmic passing grade.   But don’t worry about it.  You’ve already failed.   Everybody has.

And in just a few words in the opening of this letter, Paul is pointing both to that painful reality, and to its solution.  In fact, in just five of Paul’s words of greeting here, he gives you that solution.   He writes.  Grace to you and peace.   Paul is saying.  You want peace. You’ve got to experience grace.   But what the heck is grace?

Basically, grace simply means someone rescues you.   If you’re drowning in the ocean, and the lifeguard sees you.   Does she evaluate first whether she thinks you’re worthy of rescue?  No.   You could be a drunken, reckless idiot drowning in the waves.   She’ll still go after you.  But for her to rescue you, you do have to be willing to be rescued.  You need to admit.  Only her intervention will save you from death.   You can do nothing.  She has to do everything.      

That’s exactly what Jesus did.  Jesus became the cosmic lifeguard that “rescues us from this present evil age” as Paul puts it.   And in that rescue, he died to save you.   What did Jesus save you from?  He was saving you from the delusion you could save yourself, that you could make the passing grade.    That’s the heart of this present evil age, that delusion.   But for Jesus to rescue you, you have to admit you need to be rescued.   You have to admit you are drowning, that your deadly doing is killing you.  

And for that rescue to happen, you need to believe two things.  First, your doing can do nothing.  And nothing you do will change that.   But then you must believe that God loves you as you are with all the awfulness, all the selfishness, all the brokenness your doing tries to hide.  In fact, God loves you so profoundly that in Jesus God gave up everything to rescue you. 

And as Jesus enables you to believe in that love in the deepest part of who you are, it does change what you do.   But it begins with believing.  It begins with knowing deeply who you are, a beloved and broken child of God, a child for which God gave everything to bring home.   And when you know that, really know that, then you know the gospel.  And that knowing frees you to live more freely then you ever thought possible. It frees you from judgment and self-righteousness because you know how messed up you and everyone is.  And it frees you from anxiety and insecurity because you know how utterly valued and loved you are even in your brokenness.   And as you experience that freedom more and more, you realize how beautiful, how wondrous, how utterly life-changing this good news is.