Narrow, But Not Straight (Sermon on the Mount, 6 of 6)

Sermon, 9/5/10 (Sermon on the Mount, 6 of 6). “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it.” (Mt. 7:13) Jesus speaks with more than a little irony here …

Scripture              Matthew 7:13-29

Narrow, But Not Straight

Recently, I walked into a barber shop. It’s the warm, friendly kind that really should have the old blood-and-bandages pole out front, hearkening to the days when cutters of hair were also cutters of skin.

I walked in to receive a haircut – I haven’t enough hair any more to “style” – and a first-ever beard trim (Amy said I was beginning to look “scroungy”). 

Pleasantries were exchanged with the barber, he asked me what I did for a living -- I hesitantly replied, knowing where that could lead -- and he began rummaging patiently around my scalp with his scissors and dialogue both. Halfway through, he pulled away from the chair, looked me dead in the eye, and asked me if I as a pastor believed in the necessity of new birth, or being born anew. What came to be popularly known nearly two generations ago, largely via the conversion of Watergate convict Chuck Colson, as being born again.

Taking his question very broadly, I replied, Yes, yes: I believed all need to experience new birth in their lives.

“Ah!” he exclaimed – quite relieved. “A lot of preachers don’t believe this.”

And then there’s the matter of Hell, he continued. Furrowing his brow, he said to me: “How can you be a Christian and not believe in hell? Jesus spoke often of hell." He then proceeded to tell m the story of a customer – apparently a Hindu – who could not understand the importance of this concept of hell for Christianity. “You have to believe in Jesus,” he continued, “or else” – he opened his hands -- "you go to hell!” He then laughed: “I wish it wasn’t true … but that’s what the Bible says!”

Moving swiftly down the current of time and theological perspectives …

While a pastor for eleven years at Northside Presbyterian Church in Ann Arbor, talk often turned to renaming the congregation something more fetching and farsighted – and something less common and mundane.

There were several establishments on that side of town named Northside – including another church, less than a mile away. Perched as we were on one of the highest points of town – the peak of Broadway Road – I ventured on a couple of occasions that, if our diversity-minded and post-denominational-oriented church really wanted to change its name, perhaps we should call it “The Church of the Broad Way”, with Presbyterian in parentheses.

Now, a congregation named “Church of the Broad Way” at first blush does not seem to jive with Jesus’ words to us today. “Enter through the narrow gate”, he says, “for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction.” But if Jesus is advocating a narrow gate here, and a harder road besides, how broad can be the way he – and we – have to offer?

A complete reading of the remaining verses of the Sermon on the Mount today suggests that Jesus is speaking with more than a touch of irony here. And that irony is this: Jesus seems to be speaking of taking the narrow, less-traveled gate of relational breadth and depth in this world rather than the wide gate and easy road of creedal narrowness. Relational breadth and depth expressed in our scriptures today as metaphors for living one’s faith: Sprouting good fruit, gathering grapes and figs, and building houses on rock as opposed to, as our missionary member Gail Hutchison has noted, new and expensive Outer Banks condos built on sand (and, fortunately, missed by Hurricane Earl!) Metaphors based not on belief – the way of the ideologue – but on action – the way of the disciple. Imagery flowering and foundational both … versus descriptors – such as thorns, thistles, bad trees – which are fickle and prickly by nature. And, as the Presbyterian poet and prophet Kathleen Norris puts it, God’s judgment is made – if we must go there – not on what we’ve believed but on how we have loved.¹

For Matthew’s Jesus throughout, the contrast is clear between believing and acting. Forget the flattery, he says; the one who does the will of God is lifted up, but not all who confess me as “Lord, Lord” will be so exalted. And his concluding words for this entire three-chapter Sermon on the Mount teaching collection leave no doubt to the listener: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise (one) who built (a) house on rock … And everyone who does not act on them will be like a foolish (one) who built (a) house on sand.” Hearing and doing are not to be separated; in fact, the Greek word for “do” or “make” appears nine times in this one 16-verse passage.

Jesus the Jew understands the heart of the matter as this: What we do in response to God and to others, not what we believe about God and others – in short, our ethical way of living, not our dogmatic approach to life – swings open that narrow gate of new life and new vistas. But what a narrow gate it must seem – traveling, most of us, not a straight path, but a winding one through that gate. What a narrow gate it must seem, to discover and rediscover in our lives time and again the God who unlocks that gate by our actions.

Members of Alcoholics Anonymous describe that winding road through the narrow gate quite well in an oft-heard saying. “AA did not open up the gates of heaven to let me in,” the saying goes, “it opened up the gates of hell to let me out.” And – judging from the fact that less than 10 percent of alcoholics to this day die clean and sober – what a narrow gate out of hell that remains!

But it’s there – and it’s available. For committed AA folk, who know that, through practicing – never mastering – their spiritual program, their compulsion has been lifted by a God they had not known, through actions they have taken through a gate they thought damning. Like Christians, they know they are never quite “in”; their road, and ours, remains tortuous and never-ending. But led out they’ve become, through two means of our faith, as well: the breadth and depth of relationships they have established (God and others), and actions they have taken to mend the crooked pathways and broken journeys of their lives.

I have listened and learned from many persons in my life of their stories of birth and rebirth that often quite unfortunately lead these same persons to an obsession with hell. I often wonder whatever happened to their stories of hell that must have led them – originally, I trust – to an embrace of their rebirth?

For any of us, frankly, we could become obsessed with hell, as well -- lived out through our calcified views of life. We could become stuck at a moment of rebirth and not become a way of rebirth. A way that winds and wends, gets lost and becomes found, and in the end becomes strong in the broken places.

Might living in this bending, flexible, gracious way – “to bow and to bend we will not be ashamed”, as the old spiritual puts it – be the most blessed way for a Christian to travel? Might this humble, winding, questioning way be the only way we can each pass through a narrow gate, as opposed to the wider gate: more popular, more triumphal, more … convenient?

It is, indeed, that narrow gate with which we must contend – and passing through it is what concerns Jesus today. One he knew and he knows we cannot pass through straight-on – as if we were somehow the God we seek to serve.

“Tell all the truth,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, “but tell it slant.”  And when we tell it that way – and, more importantly, when we live it that way: Perhaps, just perhaps, a Church of the Broad Way – a kingdom of God –beckons ahead of us, and around us, for us all!

Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.

¹Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (NYC: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 315.

Benediction …

We who seek to be faithful to God find that the narrow gate less traveled through swings wide to our God and to the world beyond.

Sisters and brothers, let us be the Church of the Broad Way. Let us swing wide that narrow gate of relational breadth and depth rather than enter through the wider, more popular gate of creedal narrowness …

And let us go out into the world in peace, to love and serve our servant Lord.