Sermon: Failing the Cowboy Test

Luke 23:33-43

Failing the Cowboy Test

James Sledge                                                               November 24, 2019

I was sitting on the couch watching television the other night. More accurately, I was looking for something to watch. I pulled up the channel guide and scrolled through it, but nothing really grabbed me. As I got to the very end, I saw a listing that read simply, “Cheyenne.”

I used to watch a show called Cheyenne when I was a little boy, and so I clicked on it to see if it was that. Sure enough, there, in beautiful black and white, was Clint Walker starring as Cheyenne Bodie.

Now I suspect that many of you have never heard of either Cheyenne Bodie or the actor who played him, but the show was a huge success when it aired from the mid-1950s to early 60s. According to Wikipedia, it was the first hour-long Western and the first hour-long dramatic series of any sort to last more than a single season.
Cheyenne was a large and muscular, but a gentle fellow, at least until someone needed justice. Then he was more than willing to use his brawn, or his gun, to set things right.

Cowboy heroes were all over the television when I was a boy, both in afternoon reruns and in primetime. There were many variations in the slew of Westerns that filled the airways, but in most all of them, the dramatic climax of the show came when good defeated evil in a fist fight or a gunfight. Good put evil in its place, and, for a moment at least, things were right with the world again.

My and many others’ notions of heroism and bravery and masculinity were shaped by Cheyenne and the Lone Ranger and Marshall Dillon and Roy Rogers and on and on and on. These heroes weren’t afraid to fight for what they believed in, even when the odds were against them. A real hero, a real man, might not want to fight, but he was more than ready to do so in order to defend himself or others.

I wonder if this isn’t one reason that so many of us Christians struggle with following Jesus. He asks us to live in ways that are contrary to accepted notions of strength, of bravery, of masculinity, of might and right. He tells us not to fight back. He tells us to love our enemy. He says not to seek restitution when someone takes something from us.

Jesus fails miserably at the cowboy test, the superhero test. Yes, he does best his opponents in verbal repartee on a regular basis, but when push comes to shove, he refuses to fight back. When he is arrested, he goes meekly. When people give false testimony at his trial, he makes no attempt to defend himself. When he is convicted for being a political threat to the empire, he raises no objection. No wonder that when the risen Jesus comes along a pair of his disciples on the afternoon of that first Easter, they say of him, “But we had hoped that he was the one…” They had hoped, but clearly he was not. If he had been, he would not have gone down without a fight. If he had been, it wouldn’t have ended like this.

Of course meeting the risen Jesus meant these disciples had to rethink his “failure” and to embrace entirely different notions of power and strength. And at first, the Jesus movement did try to look like Jesus. It lived on the margins, embracing those society often cast aside. It renounced violence, even when its leaders were arrested and executed.

One of the movement’s most prominent missionaries, the Apostle Paul, went so far as to say, “…but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power and the wisdom of God.” Paul once wrote of Jesus answering him in prayer and saying, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”

A couple of centuries later however, the Roman emperor Constantine decided to make Christianity the official religion of the empire. But acting like Jesus simply won’t do for empires. Empires can’t use citizens who won’t fight back, who love their enemies, who refuse to exploit the weak. And so Christianity gradually became all about what happens to you when you die, about something else somewhere else.

I’ve shared this quote before from Father Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and quiet revolutionary, but it seems apropos here. “Christianity is a lifestyle—a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established “religion” (and all that goes with that) and avoided actually changing lives. One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain in most of Christian history and still believe that Jesus is ‘personal Lord and Savior.’ The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.”

I wonder if it really is possible to make Christianity a lifestyle again. We’re so used to it being a religion, a belief system. I also wonder if our failure to embrace it as a lifestyle, to show people a better way to live, isn’t one of the reasons so many have given up on the Church in our day. I think that the spiritual hunger in our world is looking for something that makes a difference now, not just in some sweet by and by.

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Today is the final Sunday in the Christian year. Next week, a new year begins as we enter Advent, but today we celebrate the year’s end with a day designated Reign of Christ. We mark the culmination of the year by remembering that Jesus is the ruler of all, of our lives and of history itself. And the gospel reading appointed for this day takes us back to Good Friday, where Jesus hangs on the cross.

Wouldn’t it be better to hear of Jesus returning triumphant to vindicate his followers, to meet a taking-names-and-kicking-butt Jesus who finally straightens the world out for good? But instead, we meet Jesus crucified. Instead we are invited to identify either with the man on his right, or the one on his left.

For one of these men, Jesus has failed the Messiah test miserably, and so he mocks Jesus for his inability to save himself or others. But for some, inexplicable reason, the other man entrusts himself to this, dying-on-a-cross Messiah. “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.”

Can we recognize our Messiah, our Lord, our leader, the one whose way we would seek to imitate, there on the cross? Can we say, this is the one we trust; this is the one who knows the way of true life?

(Sing) “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.”