Sermon for Sunday, January 15, 2006
CAN YOU SHOW ME A TRUE CHRISTIAN? byRev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz |
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Scripture:
8 He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17 "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. I was humbled and inspired this week when I saw the responses to a congregational e-mail we sent about today’s sermon. I asked you to send me your examples of people who have been good examples of Christian faith and those who have been bad examples in your opinion. I was overwhelmed with the thoughtfulness and the number of responses; I got back 70 e-mails from people—the most of this sort I have ever received, and you told me about persons who have been role models of Christian life. There was an e-mail about a grandmother who showed generosity, compassion, forgiveness, and humility. There was another about a teacher friend who is always concerned about her colleagues and respectful of each person. Others named some people in our congregation whose courage and generosity and unselfishness have been an inspiration to you. Others told about a state official in another state at whose funeral persons from the janitor to high-ranking legislators thought this person was their best friend. One family told about church members in another congregation who surrounded that family with love and compassion after the death of a child. One of you told about how a pastor in a small community opposed the racism he saw after a black basketball coach was hired and the pastor stood up for justice and acceptance of all persons just a few years ago. When you named the characteristics that have impressed and inspired you in people trying to imitate Christ, you named compassion, non-judgmental acceptance and love, a spirit of giving and serving others and a lack of fear in the face of illness and death. You were very articulate and expressive in these e-mails and I was inspired by that and by the fact that the e-mails spent more time on identifying positive role models than the negative models. We all have plenty of negative examples, people whose actions have not shown that they really belong to Christ. You named some TV evangelists who seem to specialize in judgment and condemnation. You talked about persons who claim to be Christian but who lack integrity and who had been unscrupulous or unfair in business dealings. You named close-mindedness as something you have been troubled by in so called religious people. The most common failing you stated that you are concerned about in people who take Christ’s name on themselves is hypocrisy—people who say one thing and act a different way; or people whose words and actions do not match up. It is a common concern and it is one that I get upset by as well. It is the failing that turned my own father away from the Methodist church I grew up in. There was a time in his life when he owned, with another Greek immigrant, a store that sold beer and wine; most of his career was spent running restaurants and small cafes, but there was this period of a couple of years selling spirits. When he would go to the men’s Bible class at our Methodist church in the 1950’s he would be criticized by the other men in the class for selling beer and wine, and then the same people who were critical of his job would come in during the week and buy from him. He rightly was put off by their hypocrisy and phoniness and never had much affection for that congregation or that men’s Bible class. Hypocrisy was a big barrier for people who e-mailed me and what is more important, hypocrisy was a big concern for Jesus as well. He had more to say about that than about many other things that TV evangelists seem to be obsessed by! Jesus looked at the religion around him and saw self-righteousness and hypocrisy. That is why his harshest words were reserved for religious folks, especially if they were just going through the motions and were involved only for the sake of appearances. When I hear people tell me that they have real trouble with organized religion I tell them that Jesus did also; in fact he had the most conflicts for three years with the leaders of “organized religion”. I think Jesus would understand the kind of response that Dr. Marcus Borg gets in his undergraduate religion classes at Oregon State University. He asks the students in his classes who did not grow up in a church to use some words to describe Christians. He says in his book “The Heart Of Christianity” [which we started a new small group study of this week] that the five words most often used to describe Christians are “literalistic, anti-intellectual, self-righteous, judgmental, and bigoted.” Can you think about why people who have not been involved in church would see Christians that way? I can. If all we see of so called Christians is what we see in the media, we would think that Christians are against science and evolution, that we are obsessed with sex, and that we believe that we have the only real truth and that everyone else is going right to hell. That is a popular version of religion. It is not a United Methodist expression of faith but is a common conception of religion. It is the kind of religion that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had the most trouble with when he asked his fellow Christians in the 1960’s to look at scripture and then to join him in opposing bigotry and racism and found himself so disappointed even by Methodist Bishops in the south who thought he was wrong or moving too quickly. That hypocritical religion is what turned off Mohandas Gandhi in his spiritual quest when he was reading about Jesus in the Bible and was so impressed with the teachings of Jesus but could not reconcile what he read about Jesus in the Bible with the bigotry he saw in the church people who rejected him solely because of his skin color. Gandhi might have become a Christian if he had seen more Christlike behavior from church members. Instead what he experienced was rejection and prejudice and racism, so he turned away from the church but remained devoted to the non-violent teachings of Christ. I have to wonder how many others have been turned away from a spiritual life or from identifying with Christ because they have seen people who are so called Christians failing to live as our morning’s scripture says, failing to show their faith in action, failing to treat others the way they want to be treated, failing to match their actions with their words. Perhaps that is a reason why the region we live in is one of the most “unchurched” areas of America. About 45% of the people who live in the south metro area of Denver have no involvement in a faith community. There might be many reasons for that but I wonder if one reason is because they have seen too many bad examples of what faith produces in people or they have not seen enough positive examples of people living by an authentic commitment to the teachings of Christ. I wonder what would happen if they were able to see in more people some examples of integrity, compassion, devotion to justice and respect for every person—not just those people who are like me? I wonder, if there were more church folks who lived by a non-judgmental spirit or who took risks because of their loyalty to Christ and his teachings, would that make any difference? Let me tell you a few stories that might make a difference in how we think about what it means to be loyal to Christ and to live by his teachings and see if this can give us direction. Victoria Ruvolo was just named by the web site Beliefnet as their most inspiring person of the year—one who has put her faith into action. In November 2004 Ms. Ruvolo was driving home from work. A group of adolescents who had stolen a credit card was on a joy ride with some of the things they had bought with the stolen card. They thought it would be amusing to throw a frozen turkey into the moving traffic. The turkey they threw smashed Victoria Ruvolo’s windshield shattering her face and nearly killing her. She spent a month in a medically induced coma, she had extensive cosmetic surgery to reconstruct her face, and when she was released, she was still dependent on a tracheotomy tube to breathe. Many of us would be bent on revenge and on getting back at the perpetrators who did this. When Ms. Ruvolo met the teenage culprit she was able to console him as he wept and expressed remorse for what he did. And at his trial in October 2005 she asked the judge for leniency for the 19 year old. She believed he deserved some punishment, but not the 25-year prison sentence he could have received had she not intervened. She said, “What good would vengeance do? God has given me a second chance and I should pass that on.” The teenager got a six month jail sentence and at the sentencing, Ms. Ruvolo said to the young man, “I truly hope that by demonstrating compassion and leniency I have encouraged you to seek an honorable life. If my generosity will help you mature into a responsible, honest man whose graciousness is a source of pride to your loves ones and your community, then I will be truly gratified, and my suffering will not have been in vain…Ryan, prove me right.” Victoria Ruvolo said in her interview with the Beliefnet writer, “I want to see Ryan grow up and become a good part of society. I always thought you treat people the way you want to be treated. Kindness and giving is the best way—you get so much more out of life when you give. That writer says about her example of compassion and grace, “If she could forgive Ryan for what he did, can’t we forgive our friends or enemies for wrongs much less heinous?….we can look at Victoria Ruvolo and we all feel ennobled, empowered and grateful.” One of the other candidates for Beliefnet’s person of the year was West Point graduate Captain Ian Fishback who reported the prisoner abuse and torture in Iraq. He faced a difficult career decision: if he went public, he risked the rejection of his fellow soldiers and the end of his military career. But he said that he had taken an oath to uphold the constitution and that he swore that oath before God and so he had no real choice but to speak out against the abuses. One of his champions has been a supporter of the war and supporter of Captain Fishback’s decision, Senator John McCain who said that Captain Fishback put the country’s interests above his own ambitions. Let me tell you a couple of other stories of people who put their faith in action and therefore might be sources of inspiration for us. The new Johnny Cash movie was one that we enjoyed seeing over the holidays and I was then inspired to read more about this American folk hero. The film does not give enough credit to the importance of Cash’s Christian faith and about how his faith helped him get through one crisis after another and about how his faith caused him to identify with people who are vulnerable and on the margins. He says in the quote on your bulletin that the greatest fulfillment in life comes from doing and giving to others and at his funeral many people told about how his generosity had pulled them through many hard times. He continued to be tempted by drug abuse and other demons and says he had to deal with the beast in himself, the dark side of every human heart every day, but his faith was a source of direction and strength and forgiveness and a way of helping him identify with the poorest and the lost. On one occasion when he was invited to sing at President Nixon’s White House he was asked to sing a song called “Welfare Cadillac” and he refused to sing it because he felt it denigrated and made fun of poor people. We heard about Victoria Ruvolo and her refusal to live by vengeance and her commitment to practice compassion and forgiveness. We see that same Christian spirit in the example of Dr. King whose birthday we celebrate this weekend. We have seen more and more writings the past few years about the influence of Dr. King’s leadership in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement in America and the latest resource, volume three of Taylor Branch’s extensive biography is just out this week. Taylor Branch is very honest about King’s moral flaws as well about his courageous commitment to justice and fairness and he tells again and again in all three volumes about how deeply rooted King was in the non-violent teachings of Jesus. He said that if we are committed to a philosophy of an eye for an eye, then that philosophy will just leave all of us blind. He said that he could not bring himself to hate people who were committed to racism and bigotry because that hate would cause him to be like them. He asked for the church to become a headlight in the movement for justice for all persons instead of being the taillight we often have been. And he risked his life many times before it was finally taken from him so that people in our land would not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character. And the words from the Bible in our call to worship today are ones that he used often to summarize the cause of freedom and equality in our country and they are the same words that are on the only other American memorial monument designed by architect Maya Lin who designed the Viet Nam war memorial. Do you know where Maya Lin’s other design is with those words from the prophet Amos? It is the Civil Rights memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. One more story of someone who is putting their Christian faith in action and doing that with some risk. Bono, the lead singer of the U2 band was on the cover of two national magazines recently for his commitment to compassion and justice for victims of AIDS and for poor people across the world. He was on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine and featured in a long article there, and then, the next month, he was named one of Time Magazine’s Persons of the Year for his same passion for justice. Something else happened to me as I did some research for this sermon and as I heard from some of you. I found people who were living by many religious values of unselfishness and integrity and generosity and justice but who might not identify themselves as religious people. I read about the death a few days ago of Hugh Thompson who was a helicopter pilot in Viet Nam and who was a hero of the My Lai massacre because when he came upon that tragic massacre of unarmed civilians he put his helicopter on the ground between the American troops and the innocent Viet Namese civilians and ordered his gunners to fire on any American who slaughtered civilians. Because of his courage and commitment to principle even in war, army regulations have changed so soldiers can be accountable if they obey an illegal order and he was invited every year to come and speak at West Point about ethics. There are others who show us the values of Christ but may or not identify themselves that way: there was a very complimentary piece last Sunday about Bronco quarterback Jake Plummer and his generosity and his humility and his down home values. He does not, according to the article live lavishly and took time over Christmas to shop for gifts for people in need. There is young Mikey Friedman who is a survivor of cancer as a teenager who, when the Make a Wish Foundation wanted to give him money for his fondest wish, used that money to buy interactive games for other children who are cancer patients and who derived great joy from personally delivering those gifts to each child in the hospital. Mikey is Jewish and is living by the same Biblical teachings of generosity and fairness that you and I strive to live by. Don’t some of those stories give us hope and direction? Let me end with the prescription for what we can do now, and I will use a story to illustrate. A mom was making pancakes one morning for her two sons who were 6 and 4. The skillet she was using was small and would make one pancake at a time, and while the first pancake was cooking, the boys were discussing which of them should get the first pancake. The mom said, “Boys, if Jesus were sitting here, he would say, ‘Let my brother have the first pancake. I can wait.’” At that the 6 year old said to his brother, “OK Ryan, you be Jesus.” Maybe that is the directive we can hear also: when you leave here, you be Jesus. In fact, it is inevitable. People who know that we have some connection to a church will be looking for that. They will be looking for the difference that our Christian faith makes in our lives. We will be the only Bible many people will read. They will form their opinions about the truth of Christ, the authenticity of God based on the behaviors they see in us. What will they see? Will they see compassion, respect for each person, unconditional love, integrity, generosity, humility, the heart of a servant? Or will they see something else? Dear God help our faith in you not just be words and talk but let us show our faith in deeds of love and service. Amen. |
