So I've been listening to this class from Itunes U taught by Tim Keller and the late Ed Clowney about preaching. Their main beef: most stuff on Sunday mornings is all about moralism. It's all about trying harder, will-power religion, which has nothing to do with Jesus or the gospel.
So their corrective for this is to take all our good moral teaching and run it through the lens of Jesus, his perfect life, his death and resurrection. This is what takes our good moral concerns and anchors them in something much greater.
So take, for example, my posts from the past couple of days. In one, I'm talking about Christian and creation care, in the other I'm talking about over-working. Both of them are convictions about what Christians ought to do without any reference to what Christ has already done and how that frees us to live differently.
So let's "Keller-ize" one of these: Christians and creation care. Let's run the (I think) good points through the central truth of Jesus and how his life, death and resurrection color and shape how Christians need to live today in relation to caring for God's earth:
Christians should care about the environment because we know and love the one who made it. If we don't, we sin against God, just as someone who took my Jeep and ran it into a telephone poll on purpose would be sinning against me.
But here's the problem: most of us just don't care about the environment--at least not that much. All but a very few of us will make choices out of convenience and/or job security and/or fashion and/or, and/or, and/or rather than make hard decisions to live caring for God's world as we should.
But there is one man who did handle the Father's creation perfectly. He was tempted to manipulate creation to meet his own needs in making stones into bread. He resisted. He enjoyed the harvest without raping the earth. He ate and drank but did so in moderation. He fed those who were hungry.
He walked on water and calmed storms--he had dominion over all the earth but he handled that power with humility, restraint, and acted only in order to bless others rather than to serve himself.
He re-ordered disordered cells, healed broken bodies, and ultimately he overcame the grossest disordering of all things in the overcoming of his own death.
This is Jesus. He is the only one to relate to his Father's creation without malice, selfishness, exploitation, self-righteousness, pride, or wrong-headed self-abasement that misses out on the fullness of the blessings of creation.
And our work is to relate to the Father's world in Christ, through Christ, by his power, in his same Spirit, with his heart as he gives it to us. We do not act out of our own strength. We look to him and ask him for his strength, his heart, his passion and his energy to love the Earth the Father has made with the heart of the Son who knew it and loved it perfectly when he was here.
That's Christ-centered Creation Care, Tim Keller style--with a little Alex Kirk thrown in for good measure.
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