Are our gospels too small? (Or, Why Cracker Barrel is not our home)

Are our gospels too small?

I’ve been thinking a lot these days about the notion of home. A couple of well-crafted sermons and a series of encounters with the idea over the summer have had me inquiring about home as a place of nurture and belonging. The flip side of that is when we feel like we don’t have a home or our home is being taken away, we get anxious and do whatever we can to preserve our notion of home.

The fierce reaction I see around me to bits of change makes me wonder what’s really motivating us deep down. Then it hits me: we feel like we are losing our home, and who wouldn’t fight to hold on to home?

Culturally, we are in a perpetual cycle of feeling like our home is being taken away from us. There are the ubiquitous and odd cultural touchpoints, like a restaurant chain changing its logo, or shifting social roles, but there’s also a distinct sense of losing home around the church, a place that many people associate with a sense of home. “I didn’t leave the church,” I’ve heard several friends say recently, “but I do feel like the church has left me.” I can’t help but hear that statement in terms of loss, and a sense of compassion wells up when I hear it.

For millions of people, the church has represented the place of cultural and moral stability; ‘The world may be shifting all around us, but we still have this.’ That’s probably why I’ve heard so many people use the term, ‘church home’ to describe their faith community. When even that feels like it shifts, then, no wonder we fight. For every time I’ve seen someone get irrationally upset at some change to the music or carpet or service times, I’ve tried to receive that with a touch of compassion. That person feels like they are losing a bit of home.

In our anxious search for home, then, we’ll do just about anything to regain what we crave: stability, belonging, inclusion. The trouble here, as anyone who has ever moved to a new place can verify, is that when we are longing for home, we’ll do just about anything we can to find the feeling of home. We’ll even sometimes be willing to set ourselves in a place that isn’t really home, just to regain the feeling of nurture and stability.

As a theologian, I can’t help but ponder what allows a people to ‘come home’ theologically. What makes it possible for a people who might be settling, grasping, or even fighting for false homes to find their nurture and rest in their true home: the gospel of Jesus Christ?

The people of God are at home in the good news of Jesus Christ. It’s not a set of national borders or cultural trappings that give the people of God a home; it is the reality of new creation, inaugurated in Christ’s death and resurrection. Simply, our home is the reality that Christ’s death and resurrection has opened for us, a reality where death and sin have been defeated. That, as we often say, is the Gospel.

The word ‘gospel’ simply means good news. It was a word that was common in the ancient world, especially when a bit of favorable information was delivered from a far-flung part of the kingdom you might live in. A military commander, for example, might win a faraway victory and send a gospel back to a major city, proclaiming that they’ve expanded the kingdom a bit more. Sometimes, those gospels had the impact of making the lives of the people who received them materially better in some small way. They may see a few more coins in their pocket or eventually be a bit more competitive in the market. The ‘home team’ won.

Those gospels, however, are much smaller and far less consequential than the Gospel, which is the good news of Christ’s victory over sin and death, eschatologically transforming the world in which we live and opening a space for believers to live now in the future that God is bringing to fullness. The Gospel of a world being transformed through the defeat of sin and death is what the biblical writers were delivering, along with this underlying caution: don’t settle for gospels that are too small!

I do get the sense that in our longing for home, we church folk are quick to settle for gospels that are too small. When we feel like we are losing all we’ve known as home, we’ll take a culture war victory here or there and pick up the fight on the next issue, as ultimately inconsequential as it may be (I’m looking at you, Cracker Barrel controversy!). We might settle for the feeling of moral certainty, even if the moral position isn’t entirely faithful to the new creation that began in Christ’s resurrection. If we were to be honest, though, we probably know this down deep, and we know that every little victory we might celebrate around a little gospel isn’t ever going to provide the sense of home our hearts long for.

And so, a hope-filled invitation: let’s come home to the Gospel. The good news we receive in Jesus probably isn’t going to prop up every cultural hallmark of our childhood, nor does it traffic in nostalgia as a virtue. It is new creation, and new creation has a way of disrupting old creation in redemptive ways, especially when we’ve mistaken some negligible piece of old creation for home.

But there is also this: we don’t have to fear the Gospel’s disruption, because the things it will displace were never our home to begin with. Christian faith is something like looking at the disruption Christ brings and saying, ‘I trust that. I’m going to give myself to this new thing that looks like death and resurrection.’

Coming home to the Gospel of Jesus Christ will be a different kind of homecoming, to be sure, because it calls us to put to death the hope of every false home that we might be raised to new life in the true home that is ever-expanding and yet unchanging, a new creation reality where the gates are scandalously open while the crucified and resurrected Christ is on the throne I the middle of it all (Rev. 21-22). That kind of Gospel is big enough to give our lives to.