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.
____________________________________________________________________________
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]
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