Gracaholism (or Worxaphopbia)

My dissertation lock-down ended yesterday morning when I gave my three copies of my dissertation to the guy behind the Kinkos/FedEx counter. Hopefully things will go well on Monday (the day of my proposal hearing). Now to the post for today:

All ministers know the feeling that rises like flood waters through the body as they stand in the foyer after a sermon and are approached by someone who wants to do an autopsy on their theology. We can hear it in their voices, trembling with adrenaline. We can see it in their body language, restrained and aggressive all at the same time (that is where the sensory party ends, I cannot smell, taste, or touch this phenomenon).

On Sunday a visitor to Grandview approached me with the above signs. I did what I always try to do. I put on a dumb smile and made solid eye contact.

"I'm from the north, so I guess I can get away with this. I'm just going to come right out and ask."

"Great," says the slightly too accommodating minister, "ask away."

"What do you teach about salvation? Do you add works to it?" Her lips tightened around the question mark, somehow squeezing it into an exclamation. This statement was only wearing the cloak of a question.

"We try to teach what Scripture says," replied the minister. "In Scripture when people respond to the Gospel they tend to believe, repent, confess, be baptized, and receive the Holy Spirit. We try to encourage all of those things."

"When do you teach that the Holy Spirit comes? Do you teach that the Holy Spirit comes the second the person believes?"

"The problem with being too definite about the exact moment of the arrival of the Holy Spirit is that in Scripture the Holy Spirit seems to arrive at different times for different people, sometimes after baptism, sometimes before. That's why we just try to encourage people to do all of things scripture calls us to do."

We talked a little more after that, but the conversation was really over. I failed her test. The interchange made me sad. To think that a nice, dedicated Christian person had just sat through an entire worship service worried about whether or not baptism is a work in my theology--well, it's a waste of energy. We were worshiping God, which is one of our highest callings in life, but she wasn't able to worship fully with us because of the question of baptism.

There is a wing of the Church that has gotten into peoples' heads and made them jittery as police scanners over this question. My own wing of the church has been guilty in the past of getting the same jitters on the other side of the issue, so we have our own culpability here. I would understand their fears if there was anything about baptism that could be considered a work.

When we look at the verbs that describe conversion, we see active and passive verbs. Believe, confess, and repent are all active verbs (e.g. something a person does). The other command? Be baptized. It's a passive verb. Nobody in Scripture (including Jesus) baptizes himself. Nobody. It's not a work, it's a thing done to us. It's part of the grace, mercy, and action of God.

Is the problem with the modern Church that we require too many works? Is this the scourge of the American church? In a country where churches offer every service under the sun and require nothing of the people showing up to worship, is this the issue that will divide us? Works?

I wanted to hug the woman in the foyer. I wanted to tell her it's okay. I wanted to tell her that if she believed baptism was a work I could still worship with her. I wanted to tell her that God wants her camp and my camp to be joined together in community.

Instead, she smiled a tense smile, thanked me, and left.