Sunday, January 18, 2015

Sermon: Preparing to Join the Adventure

Luke 4:1-30; 5:1-11
Preparing to Join the Adventure
James Sledge                                                                           January 18, 2015

The day before the new Congress was sworn in, I saw a headline on the Washington Post website with a sub-title below it that read, “And that makes it among the most diverse in history.” That sounded odd compared to the main headline saying, “The new Congress is 80 percent white, 80 percent male, and 92 percent Christian.”
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by those numbers, or by the fact that represent a fairly significant trend toward more women and more non-whites. During my teenage years, the percentage of women was between two and four percent. The percentage of non-whites was even lower.
One part of the headline did not really surprise me, the 92 percent Christian part. If you ask Americans, a vast majority of them will say they are Christian. Church attendance may be dropping in our country, but the number of folks who self-identify as Christian is still close to 80 percent. That’s not so high as in Congress, but it’s much closer to being representative than the numbers of males and whites.
It would seem that we actually are a “Christian nation,” although that raises the question of just what people mean by the label Christian. I assume a fair number of you here this morning would identify as Christian, so what does being a Christian mean to you?
I’ve been intrigued by that question for a long time, and so I’ve asked quite a lot of people over the last 20 years or so what they mean by it. I’ve also asked a companion question about what church congregations understand membership to mean. What do they expect from people who join their congregation? Seems to me that the expectations for members would have something in common with what it means to be a Christian.
It will probably come as no surprise that the answers I’ve received about being a Christian are all over the map. Belief usually comes up, sometimes of a very precise nature but usually a more vague sort. Some will talk about morality, some about community; some about helping people in need. “Going to church” or worship comes up with some regularity, but not as much as you might think.
The answers to what it means to be a church member are a little different. People seem to struggle more with this one, perhaps because it implies expectations for others. That may be why the answers have less variety and tend to be minimalist. For many Presbyterians and other Mainline Protestants, the typical answer is something along the lines of “Believe in God/Jesus, show up occasionally, and be nice.” It’s not that people can’t offer more things that members ought to do: support the church financially, participate in its mission, study the Bible, and so on. They’re just not willing to set those as real expectations. We live in an individualistic culture where faith is a personal thing. And so being a member is like being  Christian. People decide for themselves what it means.

It turns out that the Book of Order, one half of our denomination’s constitution, has a list of member responsibilities. From time to time I’ve had the opportunity to share this list with a class or group, and people are usually surprised at what a detailed and explicit list it is. But that’s nothing compared to the reaction you get from session members – the elders on our governing council – when you tell them that one of their jobs is “reviewing the roll of active members at least annually and counseling with those who have neglected the responsibilities of membership.”[1] Of course this is typically followed by a huge sigh of relief when they learn that church sessions almost never do this.
It is interesting to contrast modern notions of being Christian and church membership with what we find in the biblical story of Jesus. Our gospel readings today view this from a couple of angles. We hear the  story of Jesus calling people to follow him, to leave former lives behind and become part of the new thing that Jesus is doing.
But prior to that we  hear of the preparation required for Jesus to undertake his ministry. Jesus is tempted by the devil in the wilderness, wrestling with what sort of Messiah he will be. If these are in any way real temptations, then clearly Jesus had to resist  being the sort of Messiah many wanted. He had to struggle with a self-identity of a Messiah who would not overpower or overwhelm but invite people to become part of something that looked nothing like the world and its ways of power and wisdom and success.
I’ve preached frequently over the years on this identity crisis side of Jesus’ temptations, but I don’t know that I’d ever thought very much about his “forty days” in the wilderness. Forty days is something of a stock, biblical phrase meaning “a very long time,” and so maybe I’ve not paid it much attention. But as Brian McLaren points out in his book, forty days not only connects Jesus’ story to the biblical story of Israel and Moses in the wilderness, a forty year sojourn that shaped them in to a covenant people. It also reminds us of the long and intense period of spiritual work and discipline that Jesus needed in order to be ready to live into his calling.
The intense spiritual preparation Jesus needs, along with the rejection he encounters from his own neighbors, provides backdrop and context for the calling of his first followers. And so following Jesus not only means leaving behind the old life in order to learn a new one. It presumes that this new life requires rigorous spiritual preparation and formation. And it expects that this new life will encounter significant resistance, even from good, religious folks, even from friends and neighbors. 
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The newspaper article said that 92 percent of those in Congress are Christian. I wonder how many understand “Christian” to mean the sort of discipleship seen in the biblical story.
When people join a Presbyterian church, or when they bring a child for baptism, we ask them this question, “Will you be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his Word and showing his love?” I wonder how many people think about what disciple means when they answer.
But, I’m not so sure that people often choose to identify as Christians but not live as disciples because it looks too hard or difficult. I think the bigger issue is truly encountering the good news, truly encountering Jesus.  After all, those first disciples didn’t know much about how hard it would be when they first met Jesus. All they knew was how life changing it was to meet him, how different and wonderful and alive it made them feel to be with him. And so how could they not go with him and learn what it meant to be his disciple.
Or as Brian McLaren puts it, “To be alive in the adventure of Jesus is to hear that challenging good news of today, and to receive that thrilling invitation to follow him… and to take the first intrepid step on the road as a disciple.”[2]


[1] Book of Order, G-3.201c
[2] McLaren, Brian D. (2014-06-10). We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation (p. 94). FaithWords. Kindle Edition.

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