Pentecost 12 (17A) Trinity Seattle August 31, 2014 Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c; Matthew 16:21-28 In 2005 the Lilly Endowment funded a research project titled, National Study of Youth and Religion. The team of sociologists who did the study wrote a book titled, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. I have to say that I haven t read the book, but I have read about it in several articles over the past few years. In this book they coined a rather high-falutin term for what they observed to be the predominant form of religious and spiritual life of America s youth something they called moralistic therapeutic deism. The authors found that, in general, teenagers believed in several moral statutes not exclusive to any of the major world religions. It is this combination of beliefs that they label Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (or MTD): 1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth. 2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. 3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. 4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem. 5. Good people go to heaven when they die. There s nothing uniquely Christian about these beliefs (hence the designation deism ), and it must be said that these beliefs are not unique to younger people. These attitudes manifest themselves in people of all ages, as when someone says about having decided on a new church they attend, it fits me perfectly! It s so comfortable! They don t make any demands on you! They focus on what s good and not on making you feel guilty! And on and on. Now I know what people mean when they say things like this, and it s true none of us wants to be beaten over the head with negativity when they go to church, and indeed people rightly flee from churches that tell them that God hates gays, or that you got cancer or lost a child because of some sin in your life, or that heaven is going to be 1
populated only with people who believe just like we do We could go on, and yes, I would run, too. But we have to wonder what the point is if, finally, we all just come to feel good about ourselves, to be affirmed and comforted, to leave with a nice feeling, to be entertained by the beautiful music and perfectly executed liturgy that it s all for my edification and has to fit with who I already am. This attitude was pointed out in an article I read yesterday by a priest who recalls the experience of visiting another church with his young family on a summer vacation Sunday. They hadn t made it to the designed family service, but they were confident that their two young children were sufficiently acclimated to being present in worship that they would be just fine. The younger of the two got a little restless at one point during the sermon, so the father took the child to the narthex where he could comfort her but still be part of the service. The ushers asked awkwardly if he d like to go to the nursery, but he declined. But, the writer says, then the shock came. As the service finished, a neatly composed woman approached my wife and said, It was very inconsiderate for you to bring your children in here. They don t get anything out of it, and you ve ruined worship for 200 adults. His wife looked at her in disbelief and said, Are you kidding? No, you are incredibly rude, the woman said. Their initial reaction was one of surprise, but being accustomed to churches and how we live in community with each other, they knew it could have happened anywhere. This woman wasn t speaking for anyone but herself and they shouldn t judge the whole church by what one grumpy person had said or done. But, he says, then it occurred to me that the woman s comment to my wife revealed a deeper problem with church culture that we have to [seriously examine and do something about. Her] complaint exposed the deepest roots of a Moralistic Therapeutic Deism that is choking the life out of the Christian faith. The notion that she and others were there to get something out of worship is odd and so out of step with the biblical idea of the cost of discipleship, and what it is we do when we make worship together. 2
A child s noise, he continued, cannot ruin worship of Almighty God, because it is not about them or anyone else in the first place. It s about God. The people s sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving happened that Sunday morning regardless of distractions. Jesus was present. God was glorified. The intersection of heaven and earth had been revealed. If children s voices are not our particular pet peeve, then maybe it s the hymn selection, the length of the sermon, or the kneeler that has not been fixed. Too much incense, or not enough. Maybe the old guy behind us is coughing the whole time. Maybe someone is in our favorite seat We can all imagine what would ruin worship for us on a given Sunday. From this perspective, it is not enough for [us simply to say] that children are welcome in church let alone disabled people or those who do not look or act a certain way. It is not a question of being nicer, [or] more welcoming... We all need to ask ourselves a more fundamental question: Do we come to church primarily to participate in the work of God among and through his people, or to soothe and excite our individual souls? In the best-case scenario, we experience both, but we must never lose sight of our primary objective. It s not about how we feel. 1 We see Peter in today s gospel undergoing an attitude adjustment. He thought this business about following Jesus was going to be something big for him and the other disciples. The big shots among them had been jockeying for power, sure that when Jesus came into his kingdom, they were slated for the best cabinet posts. It was all about them. But then Jesus begins putting a new lens on the whole enterprise. He said that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. WHAT?! Peter exclaims when he takes him aside. You re talking like a crazy man now. Jesus rebukes him: Get behind me Satan! You re looking at things through a purely human point of view, Peter, not from the perspective of God s kingdom. It s not about you. It s not about me. It s not about us. There s something bigger than all of us happening here. In fact, Peter and all of you for that matter -- "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 will find it. 1 http://www.livingchurch.org/jump-stream 3
Anyone who wants to be my disciple must 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 will find it. With these words Jesus offered a fundamental reorientation to life. Life in God s kingdom is attained not by the promotion or the feeding of the self, or even its protection, but by the willing offering of ourselves for the other as the means to life. It s the anti-type to Narcissus, the character in Greek mythology whose obsessive fixation on his own reflected image led to his death. When Jesus asks the disciples, including us, to follow him, it is to the way of the cross that he invites us yes, the cross, to willingly take up our cross and following him, which is a shocking assault on our self-protective and self-promoting assumptions about what will bring us life. Christians have become too comfortable with the idea that Jesus has already done it all for us. But the reality is that he s asking us to put flesh and blood on the line, too. He s asking us to follow him in a costly way of discipleship, because he knows that it is the way to life. Our worship is not of an anonymous and non-descript deity who hovers above all, but of a God who is thoroughly immersed in our humanity, took on flesh and blood, lived, died, and then overcame even death. It s the God who told Moses he wanted him to leave his comfy, pastoral life, and put some skin in the game by going to Pharaoh and demanding he let his people go. It s the God we encounter each week in the bread and wine/body and blood of our crucified and risen Lord. St. Paul understood this when he said to a young, self-obsessed church in Rome, I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (Romans 12.1) I remember back to when I was becoming an Episcopalian in my late twenties, coming from a very Protestant, Pentecostal background. I remember seeing people cross themselves in church at various times, and my own first awkward attempts to mimic them. I was both attracted and repelled by something so, well, Catholic as all that. But leaving my intellectual baggage aside I went with it, learning to appreciate the power of ritual actions. And in this one I discovered something much deeper than a rote gesture to be done at certain times and in certain ways during prayer or in the liturgy. It became for me a tactile reminder that in my baptism, the pattern of Christ s life has been imprinted on my own life that in baptism I have signed on to live by this great contradiction whereby the 4
offering of myself, body, soul and spirit to God, for the sake of God s new reality is truly the way to life. I fall woefully short of that much if not most of the time. And so I need to be reminded that it s about the cross as the way of life. Suzanne Gutherie says, I want the mystery of the cross to shape me into the kind of human being so transfigured by the cross within me, I know how to live, even when I am not conscious. 2 We re accustomed to thinking of the cross that we bear in life as some difficult challenge that life has handed us -- a disability, or a family circumstance, or an illness or whatever. But I like what Bishop Barbara Harris says about that. She says that "A cross is a burden that you voluntarily pick up on behalf of another for the love of Jesus Christ. It is not a burden that is put on you or that you cannot voluntarily put down at any time." We can perhaps forgive America s adolescents for the sometimes naïve attitude that God just wants people to be good and nice and fair and that the goal of life is to be happy and feel good about ourselves. But Jesus is calling us to something infinitely greater, something infinitely more profound, something richer and deeper than our narcissistic culture would offer us. It is the way of the cross, the way of self-giving love, placing us at the intersection of the human and the divine, with Jesus, making us one with him. And it is the way of life, both now and for eternity. 2 http://edgeofenclosure.org/proper17a.html 5