Thursday Theology: Under-told Gospel: The Beef Goes On

Co-missioners, 

Today is the Feast of the Ascension. Our editor has called it his favorite day in the entire church year. This, he says, is because it authorizes us to hear, trust and relay the Gospel as a description of the reality the world woke up to all over again this very morning. Christ rules, to put it succinctly. The pretenders, however mighty and vicious, are just that: pretenders. He with the holes in his hands, feet, and side is alive and well and eternally positioned to keep on keeping the promises God sent him to underwrite.  

“Therefore we will not fear though the earth should erupt and the mountains tumble,” as the Psalmist says. 

Comes a perennial question: how are Christ’s preachers doing these days at making this known? For that we point you to the item below. Our editor unearthed it from his files recently. For its witness to the implications of our Lord’s Ascension see the final paragraph in particular. 

Peace and Joy, 
The Crossings Community 

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Under-told Gospel: The Beef Goes On 

by Jerome Burce 

Introduction 

I need to explain. Back in 2007 Mike Hoy, editor of the Crossings newsletter at the time, asked me for a contribution to his fall issue. For reasons I don’t recall, I used this invitation as an opportunity to vent about some things that Crossings-minded folks tend to notice in the life of the church. To make this a tad more palatable to polite and generous readers, I set this up as a conversation between one Martin A. Johnson (MAJ), the blunt senior pastor of a generic Lutheran church in American suburbia, and an unnamed editor of a publication called Local Church News (LCN).  

While putting this together—the result is still on our website—I dashed off a screed about the state of preaching as I perceived it in the ELCA of the time. This didn’t make the final submission to Mike. Might it even so be useful in 2025 when the evangelical content of what we hear from pulpits seems even more diminished? You be the judge.  

Meanwhile, a passing note to get us started: under-telling or mis-telling the Gospel has been a problem in the church since Day One. See Acts 1:6 for appointed preachers who just don’t get it—yet. Comes the necessary complaint—the beef, as American slang has it—that continues to surface from time to time. 

+  +  + 

Picking up with Pr. Johnson (MAJ) in mid-rant:

Hardly anyone these days, saying the word “gospel,” wants to take the time to spell the thing out the way St. Mark does, chapter one verse one: “The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” And even that’s a form of shorthand, a mere headline, prelude to sixteen chapters and a few thousand words about the fellow, a man for sure and much more by far, who turns God’s regime on its head, forgives sins, gets killed for it, and then is raised—by God!—to keep the new thing going through the Spirit-driven witness of his followers. “That,” says Mark, “is the good news I’m talking about.” But more and more we’ve stopped filling in the blanks. You can walk into most any church associated with my outfit and you’ll hear the word “Gospel,” doubtless many times repeated. Too often that’s all you’ll hear, as if the preacher has forgotten that gospel means good news and that “good news” has got to have a referent. Good news about what? About whom? Who’s it for, and if for me, then how is it good for me, or newsy, as in something I haven’t heard before?  

Editor, “Local Church News” (LCN):

So it’s mainly a matter of getting preachers to slow down, take less for granted, and spend more time telling the Jesus story. That doesn’t sound too hard to fix. 

MAJ:

It is if you don’t know what you’re telling the Jesus story for. Could be that nobody ever taught you, or, more to the point, nobody forced you to learn it. You know that Sunday School song about having Jesus “down in my heart”? Well, when it comes to preachers I don’t care so much about the heart. I want to know if they’ve got Jesus down in their bellies. That’s where the real action is, the belly, the gut. That’s where we sense things, where we finally comprehend them. It’s where, at the end of the day, we’re driven to act on them. If I’m on a call committee, I don’t want to know if the person we’re talking to has a heart for Jesus. The question is, does he, she, have a gut for Jesus, and the guts to say so, come to think of it. 

LCN: OK, you’re losing me. Explain. 

MAJ:

I mean, does this person get it as a preacher of Christ and a pastor of the Church? Does he, she, have the faintest clue as to what’s going on with Paul in First Corinthians 9:16—you know, “Necessity is laid on me. Woe to me if I don’t preach the Gospel,” the term Gospel having been defined back in 1:18, 23, and 24, as “the word of the cross,” “stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles” yet “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” Do they understand what this is about? Do they share Paul’s itch to look us in the eye and tell us that the crucified dead guy, raised by God to be our judge, is the best thing going for us and for all world on this very day, and no, it simply can’t be any better than we’ve got it in Jesus—and here’s why, they add; or rather, can they add it? Do they get Luther’s huge “Aha!” about the Gospel, how it’s God’s breathtaking alternative to the word that God spoke first, the one he still uses to keep things more or less on keel though it always turns on us and finally crushes us, we being born to thumb our noses at it? Do their guts react quickly to the common fallacy they’ll find most of us infected with, namely that God is safe, benevolent in a gooey sort of way, and easy to get along with, ergo who needs that crude and savage tale about the broken, bleeding Son of God? Having Jesus in their gut, will they have the guts to set us straight, bathe us all over again in the promise of Christ, and then, when we dismiss them for having failed what to most of us are the really important tests, like whether they keep a neat desk or are suitably attuned to the racket that teenagers call music, go their way with a joyful shaking of the dust from their feet? 

LCN:

Well at least we know who your ideal pastors are. I’m guessing you’re not too confident that you’d find many like them. 

MAJ:

No, I’m not. We do hearts in my outfit. We’re not too much into guts anymore. We adore the Jesus who loves the little children. We dodge the Jesus who talks turkey to Pharisees, bawls out his disciples, takes a whip to moneychangers, and says chilling things about bringing swords, not peace. This is the dark, tough Jesus, and there’s lots of him scattered around in the four Gospels. And lots of us have forgotten what to make of him, assuming we ever learned it in the first place. But that’s what we get for talking too much in shorthand, gospel this and gospel that, without taking the time to spell it out. 

LCN: You really think that your preachers do that? 

MAJ:

My goodness, I know they do, and at all levels, from top to bottom. I’ve had the chance from time to time to hear the preachers that others call “the best.” Invariably what I’ll get from them is a marvel of rhetoric that lauds “the Gospel” from beginning to end and exhorts us to embrace its “mission.” But you know how it is with an oratorical master. He’ll spin his web of dancing words, and only later, when the spell wears off, do you start to think about what you really heard. And what I’ve noticed—what I keep noticing, far too often—is that when the thinking starts there’s nothing much there to think about. Nothing newsy to chew on, nothing Good, capital “G,” to smile about as one reflects on it, nothing at all that was anchored in the death and resurrection of the Son of God for all our sakes, a little matter that the fellow seems never to have mentioned. He didn’t get around it. Perhaps he thought he didn’t need to. For all I know he supposed he was doing us a favor by refusing to trot out the “old stuff” that smart Christian people like us have long since learned and don’t need to hear about anymore.  

LCN: But isn’t that a fair assumption? There is such a thing as beating a dead horse, isn’t there? 

MAJ:

Not if the horse isn’t dead. Not if the preacher, looking at me, fails to notice how I’m sitting there—I always am—with horsey old Adam clinging to my neck and neighing in my ear, conjuring up a phony god because he’s scared to death of the real God. As he should be. As he’s got to be, and me right along with him unless Jesus is in the picture with those holes in his hands and feet and side, the promise of what I’m in for once Adam is dead. 

LCN: And what’s that? 

MAJ:

The forgiveness of sins. The resurrection of the body. The life everlasting. None of which old Adam believes in at all. If  he says he does, he’s faking it. And our preachers keep buying his bluff. So they quit trying to kill him or at the very least to shut him up with the kind of words that the dark, tough Jesus used on him over and over again. I think, for example, of that one story we’re hearing this fall, Luke 16, the one about the rich man and Lazarus. I’m a rich guy, comparatively speaking. You are too. In that story as it stands there isn’t the faintest scrap of hope for either of us. Why is that? So that the rich old Adam in us—the equally rich old Eve, for that matter—will be stripped of any pretension they ever had of wiggling their own way across the great chasm between them and God’s eternal comfort; so that you and I, aching to hope, will be forced to locate this comfort not in the story but in the Storyteller. Let’s remember who Jesus is—the Really Really Really Rich Guy who for our sake became poor, as in rich man and Lazarus in one and the same person; who for our sake both kept and confounded the Law of God that his story reflects; who for our sake bridged the chasm between rich and poor, death and life, hell and heaven; who these days promises rich guys and beggars alike that they’ll be dancing jigs forever with St. Michael and all the angels. “Trust me on this,” he says from his incontestable perch at the Father’s right hand.

Now that’s Gospel. Good news in the strict sense. Good as in marvelous to hear. Newsy as in something your average rich American Christian doesn’t ordinarily hear and wouldn’t dare to think. And yes, it’s the Gospel of Jesus Christ because his death, his resurrection, is the centerpiece of the telling. And that’s what preachers are meant to be preaching. That’s what Christ sent them into the world to yammer on about without ceasing, and with as much imagination as the Holy Spirit sees fit to afford them. “You (pl.) will be my witnesses…to the ends of the earth.” This of course includes whatever end of the earth the Spirit has dropped you (sg.) into. 

That’s what real preaching is about. Grant this gift to all your saints, Lord Christ!
Amen.

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Thursday Theology: that the benefits of Christ be put to use
A publication of the Crossings Community