Sermon on the Book of Jude
The scripture referenced is the Book of Jude.
The book of Jude has always interested me. It's short—only twenty-five verses. That fits well with my short attention span. It's mysterious, too: just who are these "angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home," and what about the oft-mentioned reference to the apocryphal Book of Enoch in verse fourteen?
It's a dramatic book, no longer than it is: in verse seven, Jude reminds us of the fire from heaven at Sodom and Gomorrah; and verse eleven, the Israelite fricassee of Korah's rebellion. Its metaphors are beautiful and frightening:
12 These men are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm—shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead.
It's a work of literary brilliance in its own right.
These are some of the reasons I personally am interested in the book of Jude. But if there's one thing I've learned about myself as I've matured, it's that what interests me is, quite often, of little to no interest to everyone else. As much as I'd like to, we won't talk about the Nephilim of Genesis six. Or the Book of Enoch. Or the poetic metaphors. I think the book of Jude has several important themes that are as relevant today as they were two millennia ago. Be on your guard—and pray. Be merciful, but be careful. Be proactive. Contend for the faith—and do it with confidence.
I.
Jude was writing to The Church:
1 Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James, To those who have been called, who are loved by God the Father and kept by Jesus Christ.
He wasn't writing to a church, like Paul did to the Colossians or the Ephesians. Jude was writing to The Church. To all believers. To us.
I think this distinction, though it may seem relatively minor, is important. When Paul was writing to those churches in Colosse and Ephesus he was writing to specific people with specific problems in mind; rebuking some, encouraging others. We just listen in to those conversations, extract the important lessons that have timeless relevance, and apply them to our own lives when the situations warrant. It's actually more complicated than that, I know; but we don't have time this morning to go down that garden path.
But the book of Jude is a little different. Jude dips into the far past and the far future. He makes mysterious references to things we know almost nothing about. He warns us—The Church—that "certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you."
Not to be Johnny Raincloud or anything, but in fact, they have.
II.
Postmodernism is more than just a philosophy. It's a strange sort of all-encompassing worldview. One could argue that it's a religion in and of itself. Unfortunately, we wouldn't have time in a month of Sundays to give sufficient time to the subject to understand what postmodernism is and, to be fair, what it is not. It's doubly frustrating because the nature of postmodernism itself involves shirking labels and definitions. For some, it's a philosophy that takes the place of religion. For others, it's a framework around which to interpret art and literature. Still others describe aspects of American culture as postmodern because they've heard someone else use the term and may not even know themselves what the word means. It's been said that postmodernism's crowing achievement was the sexual revolution of the 1960's. I think that's a fair statement. That also tells you all you need to know about postmodernism as a movement.
Whether we like it or not, secular culture has been, since World War II, a postmodern one. On the reverse, and also whether we like it or not, until the 1980's the Protestant church has not been postmodern. Since the 1980's, though, several outspoken proponents of adopting postmodern thought into the Protestant church have come and gone. Today, this movement is called the Emergent (which is actually a brand name, like Kleenex) or emerging church. If you've never heard of it, then some of this will be new to you. If you have heard of it, then I only ask that you suspend judgement of my status as a heretic until after I'm done stepping on everyone's toes.
We read, in verses eighteen and nineteen of Jude, that even the apostles of Jesus foretold of "scoffers" who, in "the last times…will follow their own ungodly desires," who "follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit." If we look out into secular society, do we not see scoffers? Men and women following their own desires? We could each probably think of three or four examples right off the top of our head.
Forget about them.
Jude wasn't talking about them. Those out there. He was talking about those kinds of people in the church.
III.
Any of you who know me are aware of my fascination with old things: antiques; vintage suits (the suit I'm wearing now is very early 1950's); old books; silent movies; vintage music like Glen Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Al Jolson; I like it when we sing the old hymns. Despite all this, and despite the fact that I do, in fact, think religious tradition has more to offer than we sometimes give it credit for, this sermon is not about how we shouldn't change as a church, but how we must.
I'm not going to heap undue criticism on the entire emerging church movement. There are others that do it much more eloquently than I do. If you have access to it, you can get a lot of great information from the internet and make up your own mind. That's all I've done. There isn't some secret stash of information somewhere that only psuedo-intellectuals that know the password are granted access to. I get my information from the same place a lot of you do: from Google.
I'm not going to criticize the emerging church as a whole because some of the things they're concerned about are the things I worry about too. They are tightly focused on (some would use the term "preoccupied with") building up a tight-knit community of believers around the church. Their attitude is that the church, in order to remain relevant to postmodern culture, has to adapt itself to its audience.
Here's the thing: I agree.
But The Church is not The Gospel. The church is made up of people. People who hurt. People who fail. People who sin. The Gospel of Christ is the plan for reconciling those hurting, failing, sinners (us) to himself. The Church is our best foot forward in living out our faith. The Church itself is not salvation. One is not reconciled to Christ by joining a church. One is reconciled to Christ only through Christ himself.
If it were simply a matter of altering the church to better fit the needs of the changing society it serves, we would probably still argue about it, but we might call each other fewer (and less vitriolic) names. But many in the Emergent church movement are actively adapting postmodern philosophy into the Gospel. In an obvious attempt to appear less "fire and brimstone," some in the emerging church are trying to reinterpret the Gospel to focus less on Jesus Christ and more on the trappings of religion. There's a word for that: it's called "apostasy". Apostasy is the denial or renunciation of a theological or political belief. Those Jude warns us about from verse four to verse nineteen are apostates within the church.
Those in the postmodern church who want to deny the unbending necessity of reconciliation to Christ through Christ are apostates and Jude tells us that for them, "blackest darkness has been reserved forever." They are twice dead. Dead once because they are the fruit tree in autumn which bears no fruit and dead a second time because they are uprooted and cast off. As Jude says, "They are godless men, who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord." It's not that they've lost their salvation. They simply never had it to lose.
The crisis of the postmodern church is one of confidence—or, more accurately, the lack thereof. Lacking confidence that the message of the Gospel can reach people in a postmodern culture, these apostates attempt to market a more palatable version that "takes the edge off." Enticed away from the true Gospel by the metaphysical philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Neitzche, some in the postmodern church go too far in their attempt to be "relevant."
IV.
But you, dear friends, build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit. Keep yourselves in God's love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life. Be merciful to those who doubt; snatch others from the fire and save them; to others show mercy, mixed with fear—hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh. Vs. 20-23
While some elements of the postmodern church have gone to extremes, their apostasy doesn't grant us license to write off the entire movement as irrelevant. (How's that for irony?) The closing verses of Jude, above all, exhort us to be merciful, but careful.
Merciful, careful, and proactive: "snatch[ing] others from the fire and [saving] them." What if we poked our noses into someone else's business in the depths of their depression and snatched them up out of it before they had a chance to destroy themselves or someone else? What if we snatched someone from a life of drug abuse before they had a chance to destroy their life by a long prison sentence? What if we snatched someone from the temptations of pornography before it destroyed their marriage or their faith?
22 Be merciful to those who doubt.
College-aged men and women are deserting the church in droves. After leaving the church of their youth, they are so assailed by anti-Christian philosophy and sweet-sounding sophistry that their doubts overwhelm them. Last week I read about a study that was conducted on behalf of a church-connected campus ministry. They were trying to find out what those elusive 18-24 year-olds expected in a worship service. Would you believe it was less singing and more preaching? They weren't nearly as interested in dynamic worship or fraternity knock-offs or Halo 3 tournaments as they were in expository teaching.
This shouldn't be all that surprising. They've grown up being inundated by slick marketing and saavy thought peddlers. Everyone is trying to sell them something; from the credit card companies to the deodorant makers to the church down the street.
They're not looking for aesthetics but authenticity.
V.
I honestly don't know what the future might bring for our congregation. Pastor Tom left us a legacy of selfless, Christ-centered service and strong biblical preaching to build on. But we can't help but change. Postmodernism will cause our young people to doubt their faith. Secular society will continue to chew people up and spit them out. We in the church will still struggle with our own sinful natures.
I think we're doing a lot of things right in this church. But we can't rest solely on the successes of the past. We need to keep checking ourselves to make sure we're meeting the needs of those already in our congregation as well as keeping ourselves flexible enough to meet new demands that will surely come tripping up those steep steps out front. We need to strive to be relevant to as many people as possible so that, like Paul, by all possible means we might win a few.
The Gospel of Christ doesn't need our help to make it relevant.
But the church might.
