How
much of our faith/walk is about what we feel?
How often is it about the experience of the moment? How often is our
faith about how we, in general, experience the world? If sentimentalism is the
attempt to experience the emotion for the sake of the feeling or the emotion,
how much of our faith has become religious sentimentalism?
We
are in danger at times of reducing our faith to sentimentalism revolving around
an experience that we have in a religious context. Carried to an extreme the experience can become
an idol. This idol of experience, at
least at its first manifestation, appears to be orthodox. But experience requires ever increasing
novelty to remain an experience. If the
measure of the life of faith is the experience the pursuit of experience can
and often will come at the expense of orthodox faith. The ‘high’ becomes so important that minor
compromises are made and they pile up on each other till they obscure any view
of the Lord.
It
may be that by the time we realize that experience has become an idol we have
passed the tipping point. If the life of
our church is built on experience and if we took away that narcotic we would lose
our members. We would have empty
buildings with large budgets and no patrons to fund the cycle. We feel we cannot cut off the flow of
experience. Additionally, to attract new
patrons we have to take the experience to the level beyond every other church
in town. Caught on a hamster wheel we
race and race and race hoping the next “WOW” will be enough. At some point we realize that we are caught in
an endless cycle of chasing an experience.
Please
don’t think I am targeting anyone specific expression of the Christian
faith. We are all susceptible to this
infection. It can manifest in highly
traditional churches where every sermon has to be a hotter, louder, and more
fist-pounding version of an old fashioned, hell-fire and brimstone, revivalist
message. It comes in liturgical churches
where the pomp and procession replace relationship and there needs to be ever
larger clouds of incense. It comes to
preachers when we desire the accolades of people and sermons become a TED talk
to enlighten and inspire. Experience can
even whisper to us if we are boring and dull and convince us that in the plain
drabness of our faith suffering for Jesus is something we need to feel. Anytime we anticipate a feeling as the
measure of our faith we are in danger.
Interestingly,
the greatest experience in the Bible appears to have been almost a bi-product
of something else. It looks as if it may
have been anticipated but was not the objective. In Luke 9:28, we read that Jesus went up the
mountain to pray. To pray is an aorist middle deponent infinitive. Without getting too much in to Greek grammar
the middle voice (according to Dana & Mantley): “is the use of the verb
which describes the subject as participating in the result of the action.” In this case, Jesus was going up the mountain
to pray.
It
would be a mistake to say that the transfiguration was nothing but a bi-product
of Jesus’ time with the Father. But it
is entirely correct to say that if Jesus had not gone to be with the Father the
transfiguration would never have happened.
The greatest “experience” in the Bible record was not the result of
pursuing an experience. Rather it
happened because Jesus was meeting with the Father.
All
the stuff is in and of itself neutral, neither negative nor positive, but it
can never replace the passionate pursuit of the Father. Experience if it aids is a blessing, but if
it distracts us from our Lord or becomes a substitute it is a curse that will
disappoint.
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