Self-Denial, Guns, and "My Rights"

Compared to most of my colleagues, I'm something of an oddity when it comes to sermon preparation. I try to stay a week or so ahead in preparing them. That means that I was working on a sermon from Mark 8:31-38 when I heard the news of yet another school shooting.

This passage in Mark occurs immediately following Peter's confession of Jesus as Messiah. Jesus then begins to teach his disciples that he will suffer, be rejected, and finally be killed, but be raised on third day. This is too much for Peter, who pulls Jesus aside to straighten him out. In return, Jesus calls Peter "Satan" in front of all the disciples. Then he calls in the crowds and teaches them.

Jesus' words are deservedly famous in Christian circles. "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it."

Self-denial is not all that popular in our culture. We're all about acquisition and freedom, and we bristle at the notion of any curbs on those freedoms or our ability as consumers to acquire whatever we want. Many Americans are drowning in credit card debt because they cannot even deny themselves those things they cannot afford.

Yet Jesus insists that being his followers requires denying ourselves, and it requires a cross, a willingness to take up voluntary burdens and suffering for the sake of others. Jesus' words are at totally at odds with the American ethos, which perhaps explains why American Christians are so often raving hypocrites.

Nowhere is the hypocrisy greater than on the issue of gun rights. For reasons I cannot fathom, many Christians have somehow linked their faith to a love of guns and an absolute right to defend themselves, Jesus' pacifist teachings be damned. But the insistence that protecting "my rights" are more important than the lives of young children runs completely counter to Jesus' absolute demand for self denial and cross bearing. This core teaching of Jesus demands that as his follower, I must be ready and willing to give up things dear to me, no matter how costly to me, for the sake others.

I am perfectly willing to concede that it is easy for me to call out this particular hypocrisy because I am not a gun owner (although I did grow up hunting and shooting). And no doubt I am prone to other hypocrisies that are harder for me to see because impact me personally in a way that gun rights do not. But Jesus does not provide for any sort of "Everyone is doing it" loophole. If we cannot give up things dear to us for the sake Jesus' message, if we cannot endure suffering that could be avoided, then we cannot call ourselves followers of Jesus. And I'm quite sure that this is what it means to say "I'm a Christian."

It is popular in some circles to speak of America as a "Christian nation," a dubious claim at any point in our history. But as long as our knee-jerk reaction to any event is to worry about "my rights" and "my privileges," Jesus certainly won't claim us as his followers.

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