God's
passion— |
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Like a lot of teenagers, I had trouble “buying into” my church, but I never had trouble buying into God. Church people were nice, but God was “awesome,” just as the song said. God was radical, ridiculous, and risky, at least if Jesus were any indication.
By those standards, it began to look like God wasn’t spending a lot of time in church. I knew the “nice” Jesus fairly well, the one who kept company with children and sheep. But there was another side of Jesus, the passionate side, that dumped the temple offerings on the floor and sat with all the wrong people in the cafeteria and called me to lay down my life for my friends.
Years later, in seminary, I read Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God, which legitimized the passionate intuitions I had felt as a teenager. Passion, according to Moltmann, is about love that is willing to suffer on behalf of another. For me, this was the gospel in a nutshell. I finally asked myself (or was it God?): “Why am I here? What does the church need more than anything else?” The answer, as I heard it, was passion.
Passion comes from the Greek pathos, which means “to suffer” in the archaic sense of being completely and willingly vulnerable to another. This passion is the stuff legends are made of: Mufasa and Simba in Lion King, Sam and Frodo in The Lord of the Rings.
Passion is not primarily about suffering but about love—the love God gives and longs to have returned. Christian passion transcends sentimentality by insisting that true love reflects the image of God. It consists of choosing to act on behalf of one’s beloved. This, after all, is how God loves us— with a love so profound that nothing, not even death, can dissuade God from pursuing us. Passion suffers, because true love inspires willing sacrifice.
Some Christians focus entirely on suffering as the key to God’s passion (such as in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ), but I think that misses the point entirely. The story of Christ’s Passion begins in a manger, and issues in a life so gracefull and so radical that only crucifixion can save the social order—and even then, God trumps it all with the resurrection. To tell the suffering part of the story without the rest is to leave out the best parts.
Which passion?
Of course, passion can be co-opted by evil as well as won by God. Just look at the suicide bombings and terrorist “martyrdoms” around the world. Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela won passionate followers, but so did Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, and Saddam Hussein.
We blame passion for all sorts of things, but the problem isn’t passion, it’s sin. Human passion in the absence of humility is dangerous, because it fails to acknowledge the potential for being coopted. Only one passion is utterly trustworthy because only one passion is free from sin, and that is the passion of God that led to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So the idea is not to hone our human passions so we feel “passionate” about God and neighbor all the time, but to participate in Jesus’ passion instead, and let Jesus incorporate us into the passionate life of God.
Many churches are facing a crisis of passion, a crisis that guts Christian theology of its very core, and therefore distorts Christian practice as well. When we lose track of God’s suffering love as the focal point of our faith, the church has no basis for challenging our culture’s ideology of selffulfillment with the more adequate gospel of selfgiving love. Discipleship starts looking like good citizenship, civic responsibility, benign “niceness,” rather than the kind of love that could result in laying down one’s life for one’s friends.
We have learned to be suspicious of passion— after all, it begets terrorists as well as prophets— and we invest a lot of social energy in “keeping a lid” on passion. Society depends on encouraging some passions and eradicating others, and the church often participates in this. We’re all for Christian love, as long as we don’t have to change. We want an active church, as long as it doesn’t ask too much. We want hype and enthusiasm as long as we don’t really have to lay down our lives for anyone. We didn’t bargain on being martyrs. Yet martyr, in Greek, simply means “witness,” and enthusiasm means “God in us”—which is very different from hype. Like passion, it implies being overtaken by another, allowing God to inhabit us and work through us.
Whether we ever discover the true source of passion largely depends on whether the church bears witness to a love more true than the loves available in popular culture. And that, of course, depends on whether the church practices the passion we preach.
Passionate youth
Nobody wants to be in love more than a teenager. Teenagers are “hardwired to connect,” as recent neurological studies have concluded; they are seeking a love worth dying for, and they are seeking someone who loves them this much in return. Passion impels them to keep searching for true love until they find it. Passion, therefore, is a crucial point of connection between adolescents and the church. If they see in the church the fidelity, transcendence, and intimacy that bespeak a worthy passion, they have reason to seek God’s passion instead of their own.
We become disciples by practicing discipleship, not by learning about it in the church basement. We become passionate Christians by enacting Christ’s Passion in the world.
What that means to me is that we have misplaced our emphasis in youth ministry. If we take passion seriously, then youth ministry can no longer be equated with youth programs, and youth curriculum can no longer be considered Sunday school leaflets. The curriculum of the faith (and it was the only curriculum we had for most of our 2000-year history) is the practice of Christian life. We become disciples by practicing discipleship, not by learning about it in the church basement. We become passionate Christians by enacting Christ’s Passion in the world.
Worship is a microcosm of Christian life. Worship is where we see God do for us what God would have us do for the world. It is the primary curriculum we have for the life of faith. Consequently, I think kindling passionate faith— with adolescents and with the rest of us—begins in worship.
Passionate worship does not reduce to a matter of style; passionate worship is as likely in a cathedral as in a youth camp, as long as the One we worship there is the God of passion, the God who asks something of us—in fact, who asks everything of us. What matters is not how we worship, but that God’s self-giving love is proclaimed, enacted, and experienced, both personally and communally.
I’m somewhat shameless about “plundering the Egyptians,” as Augustine put it, when it comes to using resources from culture in worship. I think culture, pagan as it is, nonetheless has a lot of resources that God can use to soften the heart, and that lead us to that vulnerable place before Christ. So I think passionate worship can borrow from the passionate resources of culture, and reinvest them with theological meaning.
If worship is about “getting passionate as a worshipper,” we’re in trouble, because the referent is our passion instead of Jesus’. If it’s about having “passionate music,” we’re in trouble again, because the object of passion then is the music, not God. But if we focus on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have a chance. Worship starts there, and then we respond by humbly acknowledging our co-opted human passions, placing them at the foot of the cross, and offering ourselves to God and neighbor. You can’t manipulate God’s passion. You can only receive it in awe, and respond accordingly.
Kenda Creasy Dean teaches at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey
and directs their Tennent School of Christian Education.