Re-Claiming Religion from the Extremist. Luke 10:25-37

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1 Re-Claiming Religion from the Extremist Luke 10:25-37 On November 27, 2015, a mass shooting occurred at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, resulting in the deaths of three people and injuries to nine. A police officer and two civilians were killed; five police officers and four civilians were injured. After a standoff that lasted five hours, police SWAT teams crashed armored vehicles into the lobby, and the attacker surrendered. Robert Dear, the killer, says he is a Christian. Further, he says he was inspired by previous abortion clinic attackers and the promise of being met at the gates of heaven by aborted fetuses who would thank him. So he kills adult people to save baby people, don t waste your time looking for logic. He also thought President Obama was the anti-christ. When people here this story, the people sitting at Starbucks this morning or heading to the lake they don t think about all of the good Christianity does. No, they shake their head and say, I m glad I m not in that mess. This is why we need to reclaim our faith. Then you have the San Bernardino shooting. Two people who become extremist for another religion, Islam. And the way they live out their faith is by denying others the right to live as well. In the name of God, they take life. So they kill people for the glory of God. Again it does not make much sense to me. The world is a violent place and religion is headlining the concert. It is time to reclaim religion and in our case Christianity from the extremist of hate. Those who have hijacked our beloved faith for their social and political agenda. 1 P age

2 While there are plenty of examples of violence in the name of Christianity, there are other destructive, if not violent ways that faith is used to oppress. In the name of God, there are plenty of people who use religion for the subordination of women. In the name of God, they take 50% of God s children and treat them as less valued. While no one to my knowledge promotes pornography or prostitution in the name of God, there are people who have settled legal accusations of sexual harassment in recent months who have portrayed themselves as Christians, to the point of writing books about Jesus. In the name of God, there is racism, the intolerance of the LGBT community is done in the name of God, Islamophobia is promoted in God s name, and even Anti-Semitism is endorsed by appealing to it as following God. Why would God ever turn his back on any of his creation? The violence and hate in God s name are greeted with silence. We in the church speak of the trinity, stewardship, prayer, and righteousness and think we are doing our job, while the world is on fire. When the world is on fire, water is the only subject that matters; we can talk about the theories of atonement and Calvinism at a later date, now we need to put out the fire. The water on this fire will be to stand up to the extremist and say you are not going to use hate, fear, violence, racism or anti-semitism to define my faith in God. In addition to the violence, there is another reason we need to reclaim religion. We have failed the people with ROUTINE-ISM. In some ways, the Christianity we have maintained is everything but the one thing it needs to be. We have made it a performance, a carefully scripted routine, but it lacks SOUL. 2 P age

3 I still enjoy doing weddings. Imagine with me your wedding or your child s wedding. The joy, the laughter, the expense----no don t think about that. Consider the sacredness of it, the freshness of the love, the honesty of the commitment, the emotions that united on that glorious day. Now contrast that feeling and experience, with the 8th Anniversary. You know, not a big anniversary, but the one where you remembered the date, you just forgot the reservations. The one where you celebrate after a day at the hospital where you smelled things no one should smell and see things you wish you could un-see. The one where you pray the children are in bed when you get home from dinner because you are tired of reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The great sacredness of fresh love has been replaced by the staleness of routine. This is what we have done to Christianity. Our lifeless routine turns people off as much as the violence done in God s name. Synagogue and church alike lament where have the people gone. The routine is that we hold on to beliefs that are no longer practiced. We stand and sit and bow our heads because we are told to do it, not because we understand why we do it. Between the violence that misrepresents God and the routineism which makes God positively boring, the local body of believers appears to outsiders as about as useful as a rotary phone. To re-claim religion is to be willing to reform it. To reclaim Christianity, we will need to renew it. Before we proceed consider the word RE-NEW. [renew]. New means different from old. New means fresh or current. So to renew is to take something older and 3 P age

4 productive and re-issue it, re-do it. It is to accept that moving forward as the Corpus Christi requires continue periodic updating. The phone has been renewed. In fact, it is renewed about every year. Christianity seems to be re-formed about every 500 years, and this year is the 500th anniversary of this reformation, began by Martin Luther. So it s about time for renewal in the house of God. Any renewal begins with introspection. What is the heart of the matter? Where have we gotten off the path? While I am ok with re-claim, and I am better with renew, but I am excited by the prospect of re-inventing our faith. I bet you wished I would have stopped at renew. Re-invent sounds dangerous. Like changing worship from Sunday to Tuesday or going from baptizing by immersion to sky diving. But that s not the half of it, reinventing will require more work. Renew sounds like a long prayer and a deeper commitment, something the church has been doing since-----the 1950 s. Re-inventing sounds like putting chicken and waffles in a taco shell. We all know how to make a taco----shell, meat, cheese, lettuce if your lucky tomato. But someone reinvented the taco---go to a taco shop now, and you will see that a taco is likely to be bbq with slaw in a shell (picture of this taco), or beer batter cod, tartar sauce and cabbage in a shell. Re-inventing the taco meant stripping the taco down to its essence. The taco is not the filling the taco is the shell, anything can go in the shell, as long as you have a shell you have a taco. Boom taco re-invented. 4 P age

5 What is our taco shell? Christianity is about a living breathing relationship with our God. Jesus pointed us to the loving father. This is the shell, the taco; it is a relationship with God in Christ, that expresses itself in love for our neighbors as well as our God. Everything else can be re-invented. My modest proposal is that for us in the Christian church to be RE-INVENTED we need to confront the twins of hate in God s name and ROUTINISM. This is my modest proposal. WAKEFULNESS I am told the more information we digest, the more suffering we are confronted with, the more likely we are to shut down and stop trying. Counselors refer to it as psychic numbing. I can believe it. But we are the hands, feet, and heart of Christ we cannot look away. Wakefulness is a state of mind to say loving my neighbor means paying attention is my neighbor alone, sick, addicted, poor, struggling; there was a man on the road to Jericho, and it started with seeing, there was a sick man who needed to be lifted in a pool, and it started with seeing, there was a disabled man who needed his health restored, and it started with cutting a hole in the roof. Wakefulness is nothing more than saying I will not turn away. My role is to make you uncomfortable if I m not making you squirm, then buy a bigger screen and broadcast Joel Osteen into the sanctuary. To wake people up and to pull us all into the anguish, is what Christian churches should do. We will no longer turn away. It is time to see what we don t want to see and do what we do not want to do. When a Christian sees this, it is time to do. Apathy ends now. 5 P age

6 When we see a person abused for being black, we stand up. When we see a child abused we react. When we see someone ridiculed for living their faith we stand beside them. We don t have an army, we can t drop bombs, but we can say you can t treat people that way, We can wake up and see that ALL people are God s children and the least we can do is act like a child of God and treat the broken, ridiculed, and oppressed among us like our sisters and brothers, because they are. HOPE This want is easy. We live in a day when pessimism is at an all time high. To live out hope is to be defiant. It is to rise above the despair. Hope takes back control. Hope is our Christian response to dejection. Paul wrote at the conclusion of Romans that Hope would fill us with joy and peace. Hope is not the peas and carrots; hope is the meat. Hope is what our world desperately needs, and they turn to Christianity and what do we give them? We give them all things we need for the good life, the good American life. Have Self-Esteem like David. Marriage by the Book Overcoming your Goliath Lead like a Moses It s not that any of this is wrong or destructive, but it s like going to your doctor for a sore throat, and he tells you your investments would be safer if they were more diversified. When you leave, you ve had good advice, but you still have a sore throat. 6 P age

7 People need hope. That s what we offer. We provide them with purpose and direction. We let people know that tomorrow matters because God loves them and that as an act of rebellion against the pessimist, cynics, and the chicken littles, you have hope. You give money to the poor---that s a sign of hope. You plant a tree---that s a sign of hope. You stop singing the gloom, despair, and agony on me chorus---now that s Christian hope. The final element in the re-invention of the church is INTER-CONNECTEDNESS I am my brother s keeper; he s my brother. We are connected. You and me, the stranger and you, the stranger and me. [show soccer ball from Alaska from japan] This soccer ball was found on the shore of Alaska. That s not too strange. The finder post a picture of it on Facebook. In Japan the owner sees the picture and recognizes it as the soccer ball, he lost during the Tsunami. Now that s weird. That s how inter-connected we are. There is a message that is preached 24/7 it is the message of radical individualism. Don t confuse this with a traditional message of self-reliance. Radical individualism is about my independence from you and you from me. I know this is untrue because the founder of our faith taught us to love one another pray for one another forgive one another. This word another is the other----and apparently you and I are connected to each other by God. When someone goes through sorrow and pain, someone they love dies. We are not foolish enough to believe that their pain and our pain are equal, it is not. They will suffer greatly. When we offer our words of encouragement or our asparagus 7 P age

8 casserole, or we shuttle their extended family from the airport for the funeral we are saying you are not alone. This is what everyone needs to feel and know. The person checking our groceries, the man going through the divorce coaching our son's team, the gay couple laughed at in the restaurant, the Christian teenager who prays before a test and is shunned by others, all of them need to know the Church of Jesus Christ is connected to THEM. They are the one another. They may not be connected to us---but we are connected to them. Justice cannot be served until those unaffected are as outraged as those who are. Those affected by abuse, fear, loneliness, and illness are outraged and broken. The unaffected which may include us, we may not be affected by drug addiction, racism, divorce, abuse, or illness but until we are as outraged as those affected by it we will continue to be considered as irrelevant. The church that matters in the future will be one that believes God loves the addict as much as the choir member. The church of tomorrow will worry more about justice and racism than styles of worship. The Good Samaritan is never called good in scripture. This is the handle some translator of the scripture chooses to provide a headline for this section. Good is a fine word, but with how he treated this man, and how he reacted to this injustice he could be called The AWAKE Samaritan. The way he cared for this abused man he could be called the HOPE giving Samaritan. The way he took the burden on himself he could be called the INTER-CONNECTED Samaritan or how about the OUTRAGED SAMARITAN. The abuse did not happen to him, the financial crisis did not happen to him, the unemployment did not happen to him, the poverty did not happen to him, the medical crisis did not happen to him, the islamophobia did 8 P age

9 not happen to him, the rape did not happen to him, the sexual misconduct did not happen to him, but he was affected by it. The re-inventing of our faith will mean a little less talk and a lot more action. The reinventing of the Christianity will require us to become the OUTRAGED GOOD SAMARITAN. 9 P age