“Not one of us” (9:49).  I am not interested in hindering others, but I am interested in strengthening the church: healthy, vital, vibrant, whole.  The church is strengthened when we keep returning to the Bible and to the teaching that has been carefully, thoughtfully, prayerfully, communally worked out in attentive cooperation with the Holy Spirit over centuries, in full awareness of the human proclivity to error, self-will, and sin.  There is much in Scripture that it is appropriate to interpret symbolically, metaphorically—like poetry; the earliest Christians certainly did so.  There is much in Scripture that it is appropriate to interpret literally, and the earliest Christians also did so.  We need the Spirit to guide us in all interpretation, beloved, and the Spirit will never lead us to any interpretation that flatly contradicts what Scripture tells us regarding what we are to believe, how we are to treat one another, relate to one another and to God.  Interpretations that run flat contrary to God’s revealed Word, I put it to you, are coming from another spirit.

There are many Christians who do not agree with my theology or with how I read Scripture.  Some used to worship here.  I do not demand that they or anyone agree with absolutely everything in order to count as a Christian in my estimation, as if my estimation counted for anything.  What matters is God’s estimation, and it is His saving, instructing Word insofar as I understand it, that I try to share with you from this pulpit each Sunday.  I bump along up here the best I can.  I want to bring God’s best, for you, give God’s best, to you.  I cannot tell you what I do not believe is true.  Pray for me, just as I pray for you.

I trust that Catholics and Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters in Christ have a life-giving relationship with Jesus Christ, just as Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Baptists.  Here in America, most at some point choose the denomination or, more typically, the congregation with whom they worship; God has chosen every believer for life in Christ.  We make the way cluttered or less so by how we conduct ourselves: the self-discipline and discernment we exercise, daily.  The Holy Spirit continues to clear the way, clear the clutter, counsel our conduct and call us to this self-government, daily.

So, the question, as always, is the question we’re forced to confront in culture.  Who or what drives culture?  And how shall the church respond to the culture in which we find ourselves?  Rejection, accommodation (which is compromise), and assimilation seem to be the three options.

We Presbyterians, middle way Christians, as the old sales literature describes us, along with every other “mainline” denomination, tend to regard the fundamentalist Christians as the rejecters and the vaguely spiritual folks, like Unitarians, as the assimilationists.  We’d rather not go either of those ways.  Rejection looks too much like willfully ignorant parochialism, a refusal to accept what seem like facts: the teachings, the doctrines of modern science are one good example of what I mean.  We aren’t likely flat out to reject these, though we know that, one hundred years from now, a lot of what we are being told is just reality will be shown to be woefully incomplete and inadequate, just as what we thought we knew one hundred years back.  Science by its very nature is and must be always unsettled.  And what seems to be so urgently urgent, today, will not seem so important, one hundred years from now.

So, we reject rejection.  Assimilation, the other end in response to culture, looks like no faith we know, a faith so generalized, so diffuse and vague, that all that people cleaving that way seem left with is a set of necessarily empty terms, nice sounding terms with no actual meaning: hope, faith, and love, for example.  What is hope?  Scripture tells us.  What is faith?  Scripture tells us.  What is love?  Scripture shows us, abundantly and comprehensively.  But the assimilationists will have none of it, if what Scripture says, if the plain sense of Scripture, in any way contradicts the teachings, the doctrines, of contemporary culture—you know, the most advanced, most enlightened, most compassionate thought of the day.  When we’re told by the assimilationists that “It’s all true, somehow,” what they are saying is that we never really need to decide.  “It’s true if it’s true for you” is no part of Christ’s teaching.  The cross demands that each of us decide.  I can’t decide for you.  You don’t decide for me.  The cross is a crucial crisis, calling for a decision: it means something life-altering or it is meaningless.

The way of rejection, no.  The way of assimilation, no.  So, we’re left with compromise, accommodation.  This works alright when culture isn’t in too much tumult, but we see the very real limitations and shortcomings of the way of accommodation when culture is in a time of sharp, hard turbulence, as in our own time.  And while it isn’t wise to compromise on matters of faith, we know that human society cannot function without compromise; no relationship between one person and another will ever flourish, where there is no effort to work together on some middle ground.  How to find compromise without making horrible concessions?  How to build unity while cleaving to the core?  We first must know what the core is, and remind ourselves, regularly.

Every generation has its conflicts, but I’m just foolish enough to suggest that this generation is seeing a much harder, much sharper conflict than almost any generation in our nation’s history.  Compromise is intended to maintain peace in the church, peace and unity.  Scripture does tell us in several places about the blessedness of these blessings.  But peace and unity are only two legs of the stool, and a two-legged stool isn’t much good.  The third leg is the problem leg, the one that we can never quite get right, the one that ought to make the whole stand, level and stable: purity.  What is purity?  I take it to mean belief in and submission to God’s Word.  Ah, we hate that word, submission!  Anyone here want to be known out there as submissive?  What’s the opposite?

The fruit of submission to God’s Word?  Peace, unity, and purity.  Each requires the other to be fully itself.  Middle Way denominations such as our own always feel wobbly and spineless to the Rejecters and too rigidly doctrinaire to the Assimilationists.  We’re tasteless pudding to the one and hardtack to the other!  And, looking at the entire range, accommodation is necessarily always nearer to assimilation than to rejection: this is the ever-present danger in the church: the quick slide from accommodation to assimilation, wherein what we worship is not God as He reveals Himself through His Holy Word but a convenient god of our own fashioning, to call us to the best ethics of the current mindset while at the same time fully blessing whatever we crave anyway.  The “best” thinking usually manages to do this.  We don’t naturally need much convincing.

There is no happy compromise.  If we must err, and I’m afraid that, in this world, “err” the church must, it is better, on the whole, to err on the side of rejection of current culture, keeping current culture out of church.  Rejection is not for the sake of rejecting or being contrary.  What we reject we reject for the sake, and only for the sake, of the peace, unity, and purity of the church—submission to all God’s Word; God’s Word is the only way to life.  But the work of obedience—this is what it amounts to—takes constant labor, and there are casualties and hard feelings along the way: an awful cost.  We might just be able to keep current culture out of church, though, honestly, we’ll always be infected.  The real challenge is keeping Christians clear of the corrosive potency of contemporary culture.  Regarding what we see, do, say, want, out there, there’s got to be some consistency, some commitment.  It ought to be from the inside out, but tends to be from the outside in.  Just read the Old Testament and tell me if you don’t find it’s so, too.  The ways of the world around us draw us in and we become sure that those ways are right, after all, and the traditional ways and teachings of the church not right.

And Jesus tells John, “whoever is not against you is for you” (9:50).  How does Jesus know?  Well, what was this person whom John was so eager to stop, what was this person doing, according to John’s own report?  Casting out demons in Jesus’ name.  Now, yes, this means the person was using the name of Jesus because it is a powerful name.  Was he misusing it?  What is Jesus’ name?  Salvation.  What is the name Jesus Christ?  The Promised Salvation of God.  To employ the promised salvation of God is to believe it is powerful, but will Jesus allow his name to be used for just anything?  Will he allow his name to be used for anything contrary to his teaching, contrary to his purpose?  And we say, but people do all the time!  Remember five years ago?: “Jesus would wear a mask.”  Beloved, oh, how manipulative can we get?  Very!  Jesus would get the shot, as many as he’s told whenever he’s told, forever.  “It’s the right thing to do.”  Period.  No questions, because why would anyone in his or her right mind ever question it?  No matter how you feel about the matter—and we can and do disagree about it, and I can live with that—no matter how you feel about it, let’s at least agree not to weaponize Jesus over it.  Let’s fight these things out based upon evidence, not the tectonics of anxiety, political-bureaucratic manipulation, or pseudo-theological browbeating.

People use the name of Jesus contrary to his teaching, his way, all the time.  Because they were going to think this way, anyway, because this is where culture is, and culture is their guiding light.  And what is culture?  Man writ large.  This is the accommodationist dilemma: the church is always being blackmailed by those in the clutches of culture: if you don’t teach this, I’ll leave, or, if you teach that, I’ll leave, and Lord knows we can’t bear the thought that a single person would ever leave or want to, or would leave because sin is throttling their clouded minds and benighted souls.  I’m not a sinner!  My thinking is fine!  It’s all of you!  And we wring our hands and look at our balance sheet, “Oh, don’t go!  We’ll do anything!  We’ll teach what you want; can we at least call it the Lord’s teaching, though?”  Well, I guess that’s alright—but don’t cross me again!  “Oh, we won’t, we promise!”

Sigh.  Jesus’ name.  Yes, it is badly misused, on all sides.  But no blessing comes when the name of Jesus is used for what is not in the name of Jesus.  What does it mean to do something in Jesus’ name?  To do it in his character, to do as Jesus would do.  Who is Jesus?  Jesus is God, God with us, the Word Incarnate.  When you and I do what is in the character of Jesus (a character Scripture portrays for us quite clearly), blessing follows and God is there.  To do something in Jesus’ name is to believe that there is power in the name, in the character, that Jesus is the fount of healing, cleansing, holiness.  Healing, cleansing, and holiness will never be found in sin, what Scripture plainly calls sin.  What is sin?  Brokenness, a broken relationship with God, a distorted relationship, willfully distorted, purposefully distorted to serve one’s own bent view, one’s own wishes about what is real, true, and good.  Sin is untruth.  Sin is dissociation from reality.  There is no healing, no cleansing, no holiness, there.  Sin is the cancer that masquerades as the great health.

Now, the way I can go on sometimes, you may doubt I sincerely believe this, but I will always be the first to tell you that I do not have all truth.  What I do say I have is Jesus, and I do say I have the Spirit by the grace of Christ.  The Spirit will lead me and all of us into all truth, because this is what Jesus tells us, promises us.  What Jesus tells us is true and trustworthy.  Jesus does not lie; God’s Word does not lie, because God is incapable of lying: untruth is not according to the nature of God.

John and the others might be behaving in a territorial, proprietary way, as if they had exclusive rights to the power of Jesus, the holiness of Jesus, but we know it isn’t so, and I think, so did they.  But they are jealously, zealously vigilant that the power granted through Jesus, in the name of Jesus, be used at the right time in the right way for the right reasons.  They are zealous for the Word of God.  Let us be, likewise.