Countercultural Christians
Dartmouth College Chapel
May 8, 2008
By the time I headed off to college in the late summer of – late one summer, I had learned several things over the course of nearly two decades of Sunday school. First, I’d learned that Jesus wanted me for a sunbeam to shine for him each day. The second thing I’d learned was that the highest expression of what it meant to be a Christian was to dedicate oneself to something called “fulltime Christian service.”
There were, in fact, as nearly as I could tell, three kinds of Christians. The first category barely qualified for the term; they were the “C and E” crowd who only showed up in church on Christmas and Easter and maybe Mother’s Day. These were people who dressed in tailored suits and for whom phrases like “make mine a double” tripped easily off their tongues. The second category consisted of the faithful Christians, those who could always be counted on to show up at church whenever the doors were unlocked: Sunday morning, Sunday evening, Wednesday night prayer meeting. These people were the salt of the earth.
But the highest aspiration for any believer was to be engaged in “fulltime Christian service.” And if the missionary slide shows I endured throughout my childhood were any indication, “fulltime Christian service” was best undertaken in parts of the world teeming with poisonous snakes and exotic diseases.
I wasn’t sure then, nor am I entirely sure today, what “fulltime Christian service” means. Is there a time clock involved? Time-and-a-half on weekends? What about vacations?
I’d like to challenge you to a life of “fulltime Christian service.” And if you opt for the venomous vipers and the dangerous diseases, that’s fine. More power to you.
But my understanding of “fulltime Christian service” is rather different. My vision of “fulltime Christian service” is someone with both a lively mind and a gentle spirit. It is someone who seeks to integrate her faith into all of life, who understands what St. Francis of Assisi meant when he said, “Preach the gospel always and everywhere; if necessary, use words.”
But “fulltime Christian service” also means being countercultural, heeding St. Paul’s admonition to be “in the world but not of the world.” That, I suspect, was easier for my generation of believers than it is for yours. Beginning in the years following the Scopes Trial of 1925, many Christians, evangelicals in particular, constructed their own universe of churches and denominations, Bible camps, Bible institutes and colleges, mission societies and publishing houses as a refuge from a larger world that they found both corrupt and corrupting. This evangelical subculture developed its own jargon and mores, its own music and celebrities, which were defined in opposition to the larger, prevailing society.
Along about 1980, however, this evangelical subculture ceased being a counterculture. Evangelicals, intoxicated by the possibilities of political influence and pecuniary gain, let down their guard and became, in the now-outmoded language of my generation, “worldly.” Rather than defining themselves against the prevailing culture of consumption and political power, evangelicals reached to claim their share of the pie. Sadly, the suspicion of affluence that marked my generation has virtually disappeared. I heard a lot of sermons about camels and the eyes of needles when I was growing up; I haven’t heard one in decades.
A countercultural Christian, someone dedicated to “fulltime Christian service,” will take seriously the words of Jesus regarding camels and needles and care for those Jesus called “the least of these.” “Fulltime Christian service” calls into question the consumerism that drives our economy.
Countercultural may also mean rejecting the society’s emphasis on professional success, at least as defined by the culture. My path to “fulltime Christian service” had been pretty well mapped out for me: college, seminary, and then a career in the ministry. But something wonderful happened after I graduated from college, a marvelous and transformative act of grace: I got lost. As John Lennon once remarked, “Life is what happens when you’re making plans.”
I wandered off to graduate school, and my straight trajectory toward “fulltime Christian service” was derailed. But I wouldn’t trade my journey, despite its pitfalls and switchbacks, for anything. My understanding of the faith, my teaching, and even my preaching are more nuanced and textured and human and passionate because of the detours I took along the way, footpaths that trailed off into the raspberry bushes or to some spectacular vista. There’s nothing wrong with taking your time rather than racing toward your destination, because you may well find that your destination changes somewhere along the journey. Take your time. Smell the flowers, climb a few mountains. To paraphrase J. R. R. Tolkein, another wise British man: Not everyone who wanders is lost. And don’t forget to watch a lot of baseball – for baseball, as we all know, is God’s game, the only game sanctioned in the Bible (the very first three words in the Book of Genesis).
Finally, a countercultural Christian engaged in “fulltime Christian service” means the continued pursuit of the life of the mind. Turn off the benumbing blather of television and read a book – or a newspaper. Your liberal-arts education doesn’t conclude with college. Relish the delights of a well-crafted novel or a rousing symphony or a thought-provoking play or a lively discussion in the op-ed pages of the New York Times.
But in your pursuit of the life of the mind, never neglect the even greater glories of the life of faith, for that is the ultimate expression of countercultural Christianity. Intellectual snobbery is unsightly and unseemly. By now in your educational development, you should be well familiar with all of the intellectual arguments that seek to belittle faith and diminish religion: the Freudian search for a father figure, the mythological expressions of a primitive people, social constructions of a beleaguered group.
Congratulations – and don’t buy a word of it. Faith is a precious commodity, and the ability to acknowledge Jesus as Lord in this life is the greatest of all gifts. I decided long ago that I refused to allow the canons of Enlightenment rationalism be the final arbiter of truth. I elect to live in an enchanted universe where there are forces at play that I can’t begin to understand, much less explain.
I wouldn’t live anywhere else.
I can think of nothing more countercultural in a society still enamored of the Enlightenment than to embrace faith. Not that we have no doubts, for if doubts were banished, what need would we have for faith? But faith in the face of doubt. My favorite passage from the New Testament is the anguished cry from the father of a young boy. “I believe,” he tells Jesus, “help my unbelief.” So continue your pursuit of the life of the mind. But never neglect the challenges and the delights of the life of faith.
As I understand the story, toward the end of his life Karl Barth was traveling on an airplane when the person in the next seat asked him to summarize his life’s work. Barth, the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, had spent his entire career writing volume after volume, filling shelf after shelf, in an attempt to understand and interpret the timeless truths of Christianity. I imagine the venerable theologian gazing out the plane widow and perhaps scratching the stubble on his chin before turning back to his traveling companion with his response: “Jesus loves me, this I know / For the Bible tells me so.”
This surpassingly intelligent man’s entire understanding of the faith could be summarized in a children’s ditty: “Jesus loves me, this I know / For the Bible tells me so.”
And come to think of it, that’s something else I learned in Sunday school.
– Randall Balmer
