The Relevency of the Gospel

It’s not a secret that I’m a word guy. By my senior picture from high school, the yearbook has my “best known” quality listed as my “grandiloquence and lexophilia.” I’m okay with that designation. I like words (hence “lexophilia”). The longer or more arcane the word, more often than not, the more impressed I am when someone uses it correctly (hence “grandiloquence”). I have dictionary definitions committed to memory—sometimes multiple variants of the same lexeme (that’s the linguistic term for “word” for those who were wondering), and I commit a vast array of etymologies (another linguistic term, this time meaning “study of word origin”) to memory. I love to use words made up of several parts according to those parts’ original meanings, even if their not used quite like that today. Words are my thing, you might say.

grandiloquence - from the Latin grandis, "grand" or "great" and loqui, "to speak" or "to talk"

lexophilia - from the Greek λεξις, "word" from λεγειν, "to speak" and φιλια, "love" or "affection"

I say all this by way of introducing this post because I’ve been thinking about a hip topic in the church lately—relevancy. The term is thrown around a lot, but when I really think about what people are talking about, I’m unsure of what it is they mean. “What does it mean to be relevant?”—that’s the question I found myself asking over and over and over again. And then I ask myself an even more fundamental question—“What is relevance?”

Now, we hear in the church that the church is irrelevant to people’s lives. That the number of nones is on the rise. That people not born into faithful families they will more likely than not grow up and never have a Damascus Road conversion. That these sorry facts point to the decline of the faith. I could counter those claims by pointing to the massive crowds who congregated for World Youth Day with His Holiness in Rio de Janeiro. Or I could point to the return of young adults to traditional liturgical traditions—despite their oftentimes “liberal” social policies—as evidence that the death knell hasn’t quite yet sounded for the future of Christian ritualism. But those examples still don’t really answer the question about what relevance is. They tell us that someone thinks the church and its message is relevant, but what does that mean?

So I decided I could look at the word itself—relevant.

(Caution: the next paragraph might get linguistically technical, but bear with me.)

It’s an adjective that tells us about a noun. In our case, the church. This adjective comes from Latin and is made up of two parts—the prefix re- and the verbal form levant. This verbal form comes from the noun levis, which means “weight” or “burden.” The prefix re- on Latin words and their derivatives designate that something is done again or repeated many times. When the speakers of Latin made a verb levare out of levis, they used it to mean “raise.” When we attach the prefix re- to levare, we get a word that means to “raise again and again.” In the strictest linguistic sense then, "to be relevant" means that something keeps lifting again and again. In our case, we can say the church is lifting again and again.

This might not seem too helpful at first glance, but it holds breakthrough paramounce for us in understanding what it means for the church to be relevant. Let’s look at Scripture for a moment. Christ says

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” –Matthew 11:28-30

Christ promises us that in him, we will find rest from the burdens of our lives, from the things that weigh us down time and time again. Christ will lift the burden from us and take it on himself. We see that in the cross—Christ takes on the sins of the world to himself and becomes sin where he was not sin, and gives us his blamelessness where we deserved blame. Christ takes our burdens and makes them his own. When Christ was crucified, he suffered the burden of death so that we don’t need to fear death anymore because by his death, he destroyed death. He rose victorious on the third day proving to us, the world, and all those forces that defy God that life in its abundance is the original intent of this world’s creator and that nothing can stand in the way of that. We need not fear death because Christ promised us we will share in a resurrection just like his.

The message of Jesus Christ, the message the church proclaims, is nothing but a message of relevance—a message that shares the good news that Christ lifts from us the burdens of this world and frees us for life in peace.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished for his deception by being made to roll a boulder up a hill each day only to have it fall back down each night for eternity.

Not a peace that means we have no worries or concerns about the day-to-day cares of living, but a peace that transcends human words and expression—a peace that gives joy when it resides in us and makes us a new creation in Christ. The message of Jesus Christ is the proclamation that in Christ we no longer live in fear of irrelevance, in the sisyphean fear of endlessly pushing our burdens before with no rest in sight. Instead, the message of Christ is the proclamation that we are time and again freed from the burdens that weigh us down in this earthly life and elevated to a higher existence knowable only in Christ Jesus. That’s what it means for the message of Christ and his church to be relevant.