TEXT: Luke 12: 8-12 nRSV
MINING THE TEXT
The role of a preacher has been compared to that of a miner—one who goes down into the mines each week to reemerge with gems and nuggets to enrich the community. As your pastor, it is my role to go down into the mines of Scripture each week and bring up some gold, if and when I can. I am truly grateful for the opportunity to serve you and The Lord in this way.
I confess, this past week has been a tough one in the mines. When I survey a chapter seeking to find the sermon text, I am always struck by something new. It may be something hard and disturbing, or a phrase I never before noticed, but for me, the thing I need to explore more deeply usually becomes the text I deliver to you on Sunday mornings.
This week has been a difficult one in the mines. It’s been a hard week and I have been extremely heavy-hearted—in tears, even—over the terrors of the unforgivable sin: blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.
UNFORGIVABLE
In the gospels of Mark and Matthew, this warning takes place in response to the Pharisees, who proclaim that Jesus casts out demons not by the finger of God but by the power of Satan. These Jewish leaders should have been the ones to recognize Jesus’ messianic ministry and character. They’d been waiting and praying for it for centuries. Now here it was blossoming right before them and they refuse to believe their eyes. While they certainly believed only God could perform such miraculous signs they couldn’t bring themselves to believe that this Jesus—who was so unorthodox in his methods—could possibly be from the same God that produced them, their traditions, and their Jewish authorities. Instead, they proclaimed to the crowds that his power to heal was from Satan. They called God Satan. This may be the blasphemy that is unforgivable, but it may be other things as well. To understand, we might briefly survey the interpretations through church history over what constitutes the unforgivable sin.
Luke’s readers were living in an early church which was persecuted—largely by synagogues—for Jesus’ name. Disciples were taken to trial and charged. It may well be that for them, the unforgivable sin was understood to be denying Christ—throwing him under the bus to save their own skins. This is certainly an offense to Christ and to his Church.
Heresies arose immediately, and many of these distortions of the apostolic gospel were called denigrations of the Holy Spirit. The Church split them out or split away from them in time.
Once the Church become the centralized power of the Holy Roman Empire, Church leaders wielded Peter’s keys of the kingdom at will, determining who did and who did not receive God’s forgiveness. To deny the Church’s authority was blasphemous and unforgivable.
With the Reformation came new interpretations. Martin Luther saw the unforgivable sin as rejecting grace by clinging to the law. He quotes Ephesians:
You who want to be justified by the law have cut yourselves off from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. —Ephesians 5:4
John Calvin made it clear that only those who had received the power and presence of the Holy Spirit were capable of the unforgivable sin. Unbelievers were actually immune:
Shall any unbeliever curse God? It is as if a blind man were dashing against a wall. But no man curses the Spirit who is not enlightened by him.
For Calvin, and many since, blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is apostasy: the willful defection from and/or renunciation of faith in Christ. Apostates are those who had the faith but abandoned it.
POPULAR APOSTASY
From the Woodstock generation onward, America has witnessed the steady decline of church-going in general and the meteoric rise of people becoming “nones” (not nuns)—those who now claim no religious affiliation whatsoever.
In my research this week, down in the mines, I found my way into the lower circles of Hell—the internet—and discovered some deeply disturbing trends.
Have you heard of The Blasphemy Challenge? On YouTube, disaffected ex-Christians and otherwise anti-Christians post videos of themselves “denying the Holy Spirit.” It’s heart-rending! One after another, young, beautiful people calmly face the camera and pronounce their disbelief in all things Christian by going right to the unforgivable sin. “I hereby deny the Holy Spirit—see you in Hell!”
To be clear, they are not blaspheming the Holy Spirit though they intend to. They are textbook examples of Calvin’s blind men dashing against a wall. They cannot blaspheme the Light because they’ve never yet been enlightened.
Singer Tori Amos was know for wearing a t-shirt at her concerts with the moniker Recovering Christian, as though faith was something to grow out of or evolve beyond.
Darker still, down in the seventh circle of Hell, I found The Clergy Project. This is an organization of thousands of clergy—ministers, pastors, and teachers—who have lost their faith. They do not believe in God, Christ, or anything resembling faith. In fact, if you believe even a little bit of it, you are not allowed to be a member. Some of these people with names like Dan Barker and Bart Campolo speak across the country for their new “enlightened” perspective, rejoicing in their liberation from superstitious thinking.
I wrote to the president of the Clergy Project, quoting author and pastor Frederick Buechner, who says:
Whether your faith is that there is a God or is not a God, if you don’t doubt it from time to time, what you call faith is something less than faith.
I am struck by how fundamentalistically-sure they are that there is no God, and wondered whether or not they sometimes doubt their atheism? His reply is not hopeful. Among other things, he says:
The Clergy Project now has nearly one thousand participants from every state in the US and nearly fifty countries around the world. We are former pastors, priests, nuns, monks, rabbis, imams, assorted pagans and even a Native American medicine woman. No longer holding supernatural beliefs of any kind is a prerequisite to joining our online support community… Our participants are free to return to their former superstitious ways at any time but of course they would then be ineligible to remain as Clergy Project participants. A Clergy Project participant who desires to return to religion is an extremely rare exception, and again, he or she would be free and even required to depart from our support community.
For the life of me I can’t imagine what these people have given up Christ for.
HOPE FROM HELL
But do not despair. I know many of you have family—children, grandchildren, siblings—who were rightly raised. You took them to church, they were baptized, went to camp, participated in the youth group, and then sometime during college decided that it was all less than true. I can only imagine how heavily that ways on so many of your hearts!
Yet there is good news. Theologian Karl Rahner reminds us that there is no true apostasy in the world anymore because the whole world has been irretrievably affected by Christ and Christendom. Those shunning Christ are like adolescents. Teenagers are still dependent upon their parents and become resentful of that dependency so they express it through rebellion. Remember, rebellion is often just another form of dependence. They are still in orbit around Christ though they fight it.
As for those who have embraced so-called secular humanism or “pure science” as their functional faith, I would quote the Apostle Paul:
If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. —1 Corinthians15:19
The world at times may seem to be increasingly hostile toward Christianity, but remember that this is the way it has always been—even from the first century. As for your and my family and friends who were believers and have abandoned the faith, are we to say that they are now unredeemable because they’ve abandoned Christ? No, we are not to say that, because we do not know. We can and ought to pray for them and to meet them as gentle, loving witnesses, but they are not ours to save, they are the Lord’s.
The good news is that God holds many in his hands who wriggle and doubt. Our hope remains in a very big God who sees what we do not and knows what we never shall know. Again, the Apostle Paul:
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. —Romans 8: 38-39
I am convinced that God has many in his hands whose salvation you and I cannot perceive—nor do we need to. His hands have reached down even into the depths of the seventh circle of Hell to retrieve from the fire the unbelieving, the undeserving, and the ungrateful. We are right simply to entrust them all to his care, even as we hope ourselves for that same salvation in Jesus’ name.
Fear not, He’s got us. †