Do you have to be a Christian to be a good person? That’s a pretty common question, and the answer most people give is No. Many of us know at least one exceptional human being who is kind, generous to a fault, sweet natured, and evidently disposed by temperament to be exactly the kind of person that Jesus would keep on speed dial for a best friend if he were still here in the flesh. Just a sweetheart. Right? There are folks who ARE genuinely wonderful who do not believe in God at all, and yet go around being wonderful anyway because it’s the right thing to do, may they be blessed despite their lack of belief.
It can be a little different for the rest of us, even though we follow Jesus. I hope that you have the temperament to be loving and generous and sweet-natured all the time out of inclination and habit, but I can attest that not all of us were given those gifts. Some of us have to work at it. Following Jesus means that we have to deliberately choose to be kind, loving and generous when we feel crabby, tired, and out of sorts, by deciding to put our hearts where we believe Jesus would put his. It’s the work of a lifetime, this business of putting our hearts where we believe Jesus would put his, and it’s not for the weak or cowardly.
Some days I do better work than others. Maybe you can relate. 😊
Maybe that’s what makes all those stories about the death of the church credible – there are people who don’t need to be Christian to be good. I don’t know if you’ve noticed – you may not track all things churchy as I do – but there’s a whole genre of reporting that follows church statistics, and is positively gleeful over the drop in church attendance and the closings that have happened in the last decade. There is a similar glut of articles claiming to know why church attendance has fallen, whose fault it is, and what we’re all supposed to do about it. Those articles are VERY clear, it’s somebody’s fault! The church is too judgmental and too mean, AND also too accepting and too wishy-washy on sin. We’re too political and our politics are the wrong flavor, AND we’re self-absorbed navel gazers that don’t care what happens to the country. Church is boring, AND church is also just about entertainment, AND the preacher only says what people want to hear anyway.
A minister could get whiplash trying to adopt all that good advice.
The truth is, it doesn’t really matter whose fault it is. For the most part, our kids and grandkids aren’t interested in the kind of church we gave them growing up. I don’t think anybody did anything wrong, but the culture changed in ways that made them think the church they inherited is irrelevant.
Just prior to today’s gospel reading, Jesus and the disciples were teaching in the vicinity of Caesarea Philippi, when Jesus asked the disciples who people thought He was. Peter blurted out that Jesus was the Messiah, and Jesus told the disciples not to tell anyone, as often He did in the gospel of Mark. Then in our reading, Jesus began to teach about his suffering, death, and resurrection. And again Peter, the first in a very long line of church growth consultants, took Jesus aside to explain to him that was a mistake. People come to church to be reassured and comforted – you can’t talk to them about crosses, for goodness’ sake! Jesus gave Peter the worst scolding ever recorded. Get thee behind me, Satan. Of course, Jesus was resisting the temptation to be influential by telling people what they wanted to hear, but it must have blistered Peter’s ears to hear it. 2000 years later we still remember that admonition, and I bet St. Peter still remembers it too.
The problem is one that Christians have struggled with for 20 centuries. We like the Sermon on the Mount, the beatitudes, the healing miracles, the changing water into wine. Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild. It’s warm and fuzzy and reassuring. What we DON’T like is that cross. Jesus says that to be his follower, I have to take up my cross. There’s no weaseling out of it, no way to compromise – if I’m not carrying my cross I’m not following. It’s as simple as that.
But that is no way to increase church membership! We are supposed to tell people how much better they’ll feel, how much happier they’ll be, how blessings will fall from the heavens. Following Jesus today is advertised as Disneyland and no boring housekeeping and Snickers bars for breakfast, isn’t it? The prosperity gospel makes at least the preachers who espouse it rich – the jury is still out on the congregations. And for what it’s worth, it’s true sometimes. But sometimes the blessings will come looking an awful lot like a cross.
Most of us would rather not have to even think about a cross, much less take one up. It’s just too hard, and there are already plenty of hard things in life without looking for any more. As I get older, I have come to realize that EVERYONE GETS CROSSES, no matter who they follow or how they live. Everyone gets crosses. But how we carry them, and whether we permit God to help – that much is up to us.
Did you ever see the movie Spartacus, with Kirk Douglas? Spartacus was a real person and he lived and died around 70 BC. When his army of around 100,000 rebellious slaves was finally beaten (they weren’t an easy defeat) and Spartacus died in battle too, 6000 slaves were crucified. At once. They stretched all the way from Rome to the city of Capua, a distance of 117 miles. Jesus probably knew about Spartacus. That was the POINT of crucifying 6000 enemies along 100 miles of road. The cross meant power. The Romans were practicing state-sponsored terror, and it went a long way toward keeping groups from rebelling against Roman authority.
Peter wanted Jesus to keep teaching and preaching and to keep the crowds following close behind. He wanted to see the world changed by Jesus’s message, and he believed that the best way to make that happen was by popular vote. He didn’t want all that talk of torture and death to scare people off, and he KNEW that it would; everybody else could remember the slave rebellion by Spartacus too. Crucifixions weren’t especially rare. But Jesus was bringing a new kind of covenant – one that brought believers to stand within the covenant between God and humanity. ALL that Christ achieved on the cross is available to believers BECAUSE of the covenant.
The cross isn’t just about how Jesus died, or even that He was resurrected. The cross is important because of how Jesus lived. He gathered up women and children and slaves and traitors and losers and even the unhinged, and told them they were loved because they were God’s children. Then He dared anybody else to say different. And He meant it so completely that He died for them all. For US all.
You are loved beyond your wildest imagination. So am I. And so are a lot of people who have never been told they are loved.
So if we are here because of this radical covenant, that we believe is so important that it changed human history, and it changed our personal history (at least I believe it changed MY personal history) how do we make that visible to other people, and invite them into the story so that it can change their history and bring them resurrection?
-First of all, keep doing a lot of the things you do already. We keep praying, and doing our own personal devotions. We keep showing up for services and the choir keeps making beautiful music and the altar guild keeps setting up for liturgy. We study and read and learn together.
-Second, We keep taking care of each other. I’ve only been here a month, but my heart is touched by how much people in this congregation love each other and take care of each other. That’s a very good thing, and I hope we can keep building on that and bringing new people in.
-We keep doing outreach ministry, and we do our best to find more ways to do outreach. Not just send money, although sending money is a good thing, but risk being out there, doing things in the community, in Jesus’s name and for his sake.
-Most important We invite other people in to do all those things with us, and we love them through mistakes, misunderstandings, losses, victories, and slumps. Irrespective of color, or age, or gender identity, or income, or ethnic background. This is the church, and everybody that comes in that wants to be family is family, as long as they agree everyone else is family too.
Finally, we keep our hearts open for the new things we’re going to be called to do. Pray for it. Think about it. Because again – the church we gave to our children and grandchildren isn’t helping them.
Here’s what seems to have happened: People believe in Jesus but they don’t believe in the church, because they don’t think church makes a positive difference in anyone’s life. We have to – very deliberately - love people both inside and outside these walls, because Jesus loves them.
And a disbelieving world no longer believes THAT. People expect the church to condemn, exclude, or threaten them with hell - but not love them. It may not be the Episcopal Church’s fault, or St. Patrick’s fault, but that’s how it is.
We’ll have to find new ways to show the world that church DOES make a difference, so that others want to help us make a difference. We have to love all kind of people just because Jesus loves them, and we have to be open and public and fierce about it.
The Episcopal Church is in decline, and no one knows how or when it will turn around, but it will be OK. Our job is following Jesus, not propping up the church. GK Chesterton wrote
“Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it has a God who knows the way out of the grave.”
You can be a good person and not be a Christian, but you really can’t be a Christian and not at least TRY to be a good person, a person that makes a difference in this world by the way you love others in His name.
In life, through death, beyond resurrection.
Amen
