How many times over the years has someone told me they try to live by the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments? They regard the practice of religion as unimportant. All that really matters is being kind and decent and just. So, a poet writes:

          “I have no need of any creeds

           They but confuse the mind.

 The only creed this old world needs

 Is that of being kind.”

It is that attitude which leads many today to ask the same question a student once asked Dr. Robert McCracken of the Riverside Church in New York. “What does religion matter as long as you are living a good life?”

There are some people who ask that question in an effort to justify themselves because they are told that good people ought to go to church. You know the type: “I’m not a church-going person, preacher, but I try to live by the Bible. I don’t kick my dog. I don’t beat my wife. I don’t fight with my neighbors. In fact, when you come right down to it, I lead a lot better life than those hypocrites who go to church every Sunday.”

There are others, though, who ask that question with genuine seriousness. They are among the most sensitive to the tragedy and hurt of the world. While they may have an “atheism of the top of the mind”, they do not have an “atheism of the bottom of the heart.” While they are beset by questions and doubts about religion they live at a level of life far higher than the vast majority. They never minimize the value of goodness, truth, and justice. They see the crude superstition of so much of religion. They recognize the complacency so widespread in the church. They are repelled by personal piety that is full of mean spirited prejudices. People like that are a living testimony to the truth that often those who are outside the church have a deeper sense of the love of God than those who are inside the church. Yet to reject Christianity because of its abuse is naive. We don’t shun doctors because some are quacks. We don’t avoid listening to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms because of “Rap music.” We don’t stop reading Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky because of silly bodice-ripping Romance novels!

Christianity at its best has a lot to say to the question “What does religion matter as long as you are kind and decent and just?” True faith points to a depth of life that ordinary goodness overlooks. It proclaims a quality of life that more decency misses. It provides an encouragement to the truly good life that goes beyond mere decency. True Christianity should not be dismissed without a serious hearing because some fail to practice it.

My teacher Perry LeFevre taught us that the Danish philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard summed up real Christian faith as “the profound humiliation of man, the boundless love of God, and an endless striving born of gratitude.” At first glance that sounds like sheer words. We understand them but do not feel them. We know their separate definitions but not their real meaning. “The profound humiliation of man” – “the boundless love of God” – “the endless striving born of gratitude.” Let’s try to find the truth behind these powerful phrases.

The Profound Humiliation of Man:

Real Christian faith begins at the point good, decent people ignore and seldom reach. Honest Christians know the tremendous gap at every moment between what “is” and what “ought to be.” It is the difference between knowing the truth and doing it. True Christians know what it means to miss the mark no matter how hard we try. “God knows,” wrote Poet Robert Burns,

“God knows, I’m not the thing I could be,

Nor am I even the thing I would be.” That is what Kierkegaard called “the profound humiliation of man.” Call it sin if you like.

Our problem is not a lack of knowledge of how to live the good life. For centuries philosophers, theologians, and preachers have been pointing out how we should live. For years psychologists, sociologists, theologians and biologists have told us what makes for healthy living and what makes for unhealthy living. We know how we should live. The problem is we don’t always do what we know we should.

We are only too well aware of the self-centeredness which corrodes even our best intentions. Only in rare instances are our motives and responses so spontaneous as to be free from distortion. The Pharisee of the familiar parable had performed all the demands of religion. In fact, in his mind he had gone far beyond what was expected. But his “goodness” – if you want to call it that– became a wedge to separate him from other people. “Thank you, God that I am not like other people…” He was so sure of his own goodness he had lost the capacity to see himself as he really was.

There are contradictions within each of us which prevent our being what we want to be and doing what we want to do. There is a part of us that keeps us from being as loving as we wish we could be all the time.

During the Second World War the activities of big business in the war interested conservative William Allen White, famed editor of the Emporia Gazette. After a visit to Washington in May 1943, he wrote:

“One cannot move about Washington without bumping into the fact that we are running two wars – a foreign war and a domestic war. The domestic war is in the various war boards. Here…every industry is interested in saving its own self. One is surprised to find men representing great commodity trusts or agreements or syndicates, which function on both sides of the battle front. For the most part these managerial magnates are decent, patriotic Americans. They have great talents. If you touch them in nine relations of life out of ten, they are kindly, courteous, Christian gentlemen.

But in the tenth relation, where it touches their own organization, they are stark mad, ruthless, unchecked by God or man, paranoiacs, in fact, as evil in their design as Hitler.” Some of us – I for one – think it is no different today in much of capitalism.

The humiliation in our inner life is matched by a similar humiliation in our outer life. Even when we act from the purest motives, even when we are as unselfish as we can be, even when we make the only constructive choice possible, even then there are tragic consequences. Perhaps another person is injured. Perhaps something in ourselves is destroyed. Some of the effects of our “right” decisions turn out to be wrong.

Abraham Lincoln was terribly shaken when he came upon the slave auction in his wife’s hometown of Lexington, Kentucky. Afterward he told her, “How easily I’ve said that slavery must not be abolished where it existed, that slaves are private property and the constitution guarantees that no man can be deprived of his property without due process of law. Are these creatures property, or are they human beings?” he demanded of himself as much as her. “Which comes first, life or law?”

The answer to such questions as which comes first, “life or law” shatters any easy formula of kindness, decency, and justice. The tragedy resulting from bad decisions touches everyone. A Christian can never approach the problems of life by simply saying “It’s enough to be a good person. It’s enough to live by the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.” As the hymn writer says, “we are a mixture strange of good and ill.” The honest ones among us know that.

II – The Boundless Love of God:

Christians, however, do not stop with a sense of human failure. We do not think of our lives with despair. We go on to know the boundless love of God. We believe that the gulf between the “is” and the “ought”, the tension between the actual and the ideal, and the conflict between self-criticism and self-affirmation can be reconciled. Our efforts to harmonize our selfish needs and moral imperatives, our efforts to resolve differences between ourselves and others, our efforts to live together in peace are not carried on in a universe indifferent to our struggles.

Herman Melville, like so many others, thought that God “leaves men to battle as best they can, unaided.” But Christians know no such stoic resignation. Our striving for the truly good life does not end in frustration. Our aspirations for overcoming our limitations are not illusions in an unfriendly universe. Our responses of justice and kindness and mercy are not feeble gestures in the face of an absent God. When the Apostle Paul tells us we are to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling,” he is not saying we have only our own power to rely on. We are able to do this because God is within us both to will and to work for God’s good pleasure. In our finest moments what we say and do is reinforced and carried forward by a power greater than our own. We do not create the good life, we experience true life! We do not manufacture values, we discover values! We do not create love, we respond to love! God is at work bringing out the finest in us that we may not even know exists.

As Christians we believe that God is with us in both our greatest successes and our deepest failures. Christianity is first and foremost an experience of “grace,” of empowering forgiveness. We have the unbelievable experience of discovering that God gives us the gift of a second chance even when we are not worthy of receiving it. God reaches out to those of us who know we are not what we should be. God comes to those of us who do not feel we can go to him. God speaks words of encouragement and acceptance to those of us who know our humiliation and failures.

III - An Endless Striving Born of Gratitude:

Once we know our “profound humiliation” on the one hand, and the “boundless love of God” on the other, there automatically follows an endless striving born of gratitude.

Life ceases to be a matter of calculating how much or how little we have to do. We stop considering whether we have fulfilled the expected requirements of mere morality. Life is no longer a question of “how little do I have to do”. Now we keep asking, “How much more am I able to do?”

We are told that if someone forces us to do something, we should do more than demanded. We pursue the perfection of love in every part of life.

Goodness born of gratitude is the power Christianity brings to human life. Christians are never content simply to be as good as the next person. Christians are never content simply to do what society defines as acceptable. Christians are never content simply to do the least that is reasonably expected.

We are called to a goodness that goes beyond any and all carefully defined considerations of what is ordinarily expected. We are told that if someone tries to hurt us we should pray for them. We are told if people reject us, we should accept them. We are told if we are hated, we should return love. Only an endless pursuit of perfection born of gratitude could ever inspire such an unselfish concern for others.

When we pursue Christian perfection people may say of us as an ancient pagan said of the early Church: “See those Christians, how they love one-another!” People may also say: “See those Christians, how they love all people!” Who knows, they may also ask how they can be part of a Christian congregation that does its best to practice that kind of love and acceptance. And wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing?! That would be a perfection that could change the world.