About forty years ago — maybe a little more than that — Os Guinness wrote a book called The Gravedigger File. If you do not know that name, it is a name you should know.
The book is fiction, and the conceit is this: somewhere there is an underground network of people whose entire assignment is to bring down the church in the Western world. Their strategy is not persecution. It is not argument. It is subtler than either, and far more effective. The plan is simply to convince Christians that their faith is privately engaging but culturally irrelevant.
Privately engaging. Culturally and socially irrelevant.
His argument is that the Christian faith essentially created the Western world, and that Christians have now stood politely by while the Western world dismantles it. They are digging their own graves.
So let me put it plainly. Is that what has happened to us? Have we let our faith become a private hobby with no public consequence? Because if so, that is not the faith Jesus handed us.
You are
You are the salt of the earth... You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.
Now, this next part is a little geeky, but stay with me. Those verbs are in the indicative mood, and that matters more than it sounds like it should. Jesus is not issuing a command — go out and try harder at being salt. He is making a statement of fact. This is what you already are. Now be who you are.
Salt, in that world, before anybody had refrigeration, was how you kept food from spoiling, and food was precious. So Christians are agents of preservation. We fight the decay of the world and conserve what is good in it. But salt also seasons. It makes things taste better. We are not called to be the people who only ever say no, who are against this and disapprove of that. Every party needs a pooper — let's invite the Christians. We do not have to be those people.
Then light. Nobody lights a lamp and puts it under a basket. And notice how this worked in Jesus' own life: when the Pharisees came after him, it was rarely for what he failed to do. It was for what he did. He ate with tax collectors, who were no more popular then than they are now. He kept company with lepers and prostitutes. He healed on the Sabbath. He forgave sins. He seemed to genuinely like the wrong sort of people. How tacky. It was the boat-rocking they could not forgive.
Often when I pronounce the benediction, the last thing I say to you is: live the life. Take what we do in this room into your house, your worksite, your classroom, your social media, and onto the road when you drive in Miami. Not an easy thing to do. Be who you are.
What one life did
There are people who will tell you out loud that the world would be better off without Christianity — better off without religion of any kind. John Lennon set that to music. No heaven, no hell, no countries, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. It sounds lovely. He later admitted it was more or less the Communist Manifesto put to a melody, and he was born in London in 1941, while a regime that answered to nothing above it was dropping bombs on his city. We do not have to imagine a world like that. The last century built several, and anybody who has cracked a history book knows how they ended.
So let me turn the question around. If Jesus of Nazareth had never risen, how would today be different?
Start with the calendar: we tell time by his birth. And there would be no Red Cross. It began in 1859, when a devout Swiss Christian named Jean-Henri Dunant, traveling to Italy on business, came across the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino — forty thousand men killed or badly wounded in a single day. He stopped and said: as a Christian, I have to do something about this. That is why the largest relief agency in the world wears a cross.
Slavery ended in the British Empire because committed Christians worked at it for decades — John Newton, who gave us Amazing Grace, John Wesley, William Wilberforce — and it was largely Christians who led the abolitionists here, against what I would call our national birth defect. Their argument never changed: these are people made in God's image, and they must not be owned.
Modern science grew up in northern Europe after the Reformation, and that is no accident. Older and cleverer civilizations never got there, because they lacked the conviction that makes science make sense — that a personal God set the cosmos running on orderly laws and made us in his image, so that we could go find them. Modern education came from the same soil: the reformers wanted ordinary people able to read the Bible in their own language, so the first real public schools came out of Geneva under John Calvin, who insisted that education not be reserved for princes and the rich. Every Ivy League school but one was founded to train ministers of the gospel. It is still in their charters. They have forgotten. We have not.
And the arts, because our God creates and his image bearers cannot help doing the same. Handel's Messiah. Bach's St. Matthew Passion. Michelangelo's ceiling. Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is an extended allegory of the gospel — and so, and I am not kidding, is Harry Potter. Give me five minutes and I will show you.
The hinge
Let me end with Napoleon Bonaparte, who was no friend of the established church. Late in life he wrote that he knew men, and Jesus Christ was no mere man. He and Alexander and Caesar and Charlemagne founded empires, and every one rested on sheer force. Jesus founded his on love. What amazed Napoleon was that his own ambitions had vanished into thin air while a Judean peasant went on stretching his hands across the centuries, holding the destinies of nations.
He came. He lived, he died, he rose. That changed the world, and it changed my life, and that is why I am standing here. If it has never changed yours, today would be a very good day to go and meet him.
And then, church — live the life.
