A Fourth Church Sermon by John A. Cairns

July 8, 2001 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

When Familiar Is Not Enough

John A. Cairns
Dean, Academy for Faith and Life,
Fourth Presbyterian Church

2 Kings 5:1–14
Galatians 6:1–10

Farther back than I can remember, I was a regular church attender. I’m sure you understand what I mean. Many of you could probably make a similar statement. My parents met in the Presbyterian church where they grew up. So I then became part of the third generation along with my sister and two cousins, joining two grandmothers, two parents, two aunts and an uncle in that congregation. Every Sunday was a bit of a family reunion. My father sang in the choir. My mother sat with friends she had grown up with. And I sat with my grandmother, who was always well supplied with Life Savers—and who was so proud to have her grandchildren sitting beside her that she tolerated most of our childish antsiness. To say that church was a comfortable place for me to be would have been an understatement. It was like a second home.

It was like a second home not only because there were a lot of family members around, but also because we were there a lot!—absorbing whatever the church had to offer. I learned the standard assortment of Bible stories, but I learned so much more. I learned how to sing hymns and look up passages of Scripture. I learned what my grandmother called “Sunday manners.” I learned the language of the church. I was the definition of what it meant to be “raised in the church.”

In the middle of the 1800s, there was a prominent Christian educator who viewed an upbringing like mine to be the ideal. His name was Horace Bushnell, and his theory of the way the church should design its educational efforts was that “the child should grow up as a Christian and never know himself to be otherwise.” There was a high level of receptivity in certain parts of the church for what Dr. Bushnell had to say, because he was writing in a time of widespread revivalist fervor, which made many churchgoers uncomfortable. Throughout the country, tent meetings and fire and brimstone preachers were calling people to repent. Conversions were plentiful, but Horace Bushnell did not believe that they should be the norm. “Raise the child to be a Christian and to never know himself to be otherwise.” It was a philosophy that brought great comfort to parents and a great sense of purpose to the church. Get your child into a churchgoing pattern. Develop a strong teaching program—and stand back. Let the process, the setting, the surrounding fellowship of the church do its thing. Heredity and environment (the family and the church) working together to produce—even to ensure—the next generation of Christians. That was how my experience—and that of millions of others—was shaped. Had I been asked at age twelve if I was a Christian, my reply would have been a quick and certain “yes.” It was the faith that had surrounded me since birth.

Of course it was never that simple or straightforward. The attendance was never perfect; the teaching was never faultless; the community was never fully faithful. So there was always some question, some concern, about the end result—about whether acculturation was enough; whether familiarity could lead us to faith. And, of course, there was the matter of the evangelists popping up here and there, introducing our sins and shortcomings into the equation and focusing on a time of decision—a moment at which repentance and conversion took over and with dramatic suddenness the person became a follower of Jesus Christ.

For Bushnell, for the evangelist, and for each of us, the issue is raised by the asking of that most basic of questions: “Are you a Christian?” Can a person properly claim the title on the basis of having logged years in the church, having spent quality time in the circle of those who taught and practiced the Christian faith? Can you properly stake your claim on the basis of what you have learned and absorbed in the midst of a believing community? Was Horace Bushnell right? Or is something more required? People of the church have always wrestled with that question.

Last month, when I was in Louisville for the annual meeting of the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s General Assembly, there were signs on the buses and on billboards around town announcing the forthcoming Billy Graham crusade. Four days after the Presbyterians left town, Billy Graham was coming in! This was to be the first public appearance for the eighty-two-year-old preacher since last November, and one of only two he had scheduled for this year. Weakened by his battle with Parkinson’s disease, Graham was nevertheless coming to Louisville for four days to preach to the thousands who would fill the university’s football field, coming to persuade people to do what they needed to do in order to be truly Christian: to repent and believe. The billboards set the stage: “Waiting for a word from God? This could be it,” they said.

Newspapers covered the crusade; the Chicago Tribune reported on its front page that while Graham’s tone has grown warmer over the years, his message is still the same: “Receive Christ. Don’t delay. You could die tonight.” Preaching to audiences that were composed largely of church members and using the story of King Solomon, Graham said, “Solomon was a man of tremendous knowledge, but you can’t come to God with your mind along.” Then, as he has always done, he asked people to publicly commit or recommit themselves by walking to the front of the stadium and proclaiming their love of Christ. “Christ wants you to acknowledge you’ve sinned against him and let him come into your heart,” he said in a soft but strong voice. And then the choir sang and the people came forward by the hundreds.

Is that what it takes? Are we going to fall short of full-fledged Christianity if we put our stock in Horace Bushnell? Is something missing? How are we to think about Billy Graham’s invitation? How do you and I secure our faith?

In David Baldacci’s new novel Wish You Well, one of the characters, a young man from the Virginia mountains named Diamond Skinner, makes his companions wait as he jumps out of the farm wagon and rushes down to the riverside to join the circle of folks who are being baptized. A short time later, Diamond rejoins his friends, dripping wet. They gently try to discern if he had had some dramatic faith experience that prompted this decision to be immersed. “Shoot,” Diamond answers, “that’s my ninth time dunked.” When told he was only supposed to do it once, he came back quickly: “Well it ain’t hurt to keep doing it. I plan to work me up to a hunnerd. Figger I be a lock for heaven then” (p. 174-75). What is the measure of our faith? How do we assess where we stand? How do we answer the question, “Are you a Christian?” On what basis do we make our reply?

In our Scripture for the morning, we are introduced to a man named Naaman. He is an Aramean military commander. The Arameans are considered by the Hebrew people to be pagans. There is currently no love lost between the two peoples, because the Arameans have recently defeated the Israelites, taking some of their people captive. One of these captives is working as a servant in Naaman’s home. Now Naaman, in spite of his military prowess, suffers from leprosy and can find no cure or relief.

One day his servant girl remarks that if he were living among the Israelites he could go to the prophet and be cured of his disease. Naaman seizes upon the idea and immediately shares this tidbit with the king. The two men decide that Naaman should make the journey, so the king writes letters of introduction and Naaman gathers a small fortune in gold and silver to take as payment. And off he goes. After first throwing the king of Israel into a panic, because Naaman assumed the king would be the one to control such healing powers, Naaman is directed to the prophet Elisha. When the Aramean retinue arrives at Elisha’s door, the prophet sends a servant out to meet his prestigious guest and to tell him that if he wishes to be cured of his leprosy, he should wash in the Jordan River seven times.

This response infuriates Naaman and comes close to sparking an international incident. Naaman was prepared to enter into some kind of unfamiliar religious ritual or carefully constructed Israelite experience that would be necessary for him to be cured. But he had certain preconceptions about what that might involve. He was looking for something dramatic or emotional that would mark him, convert him, change him in a profound way. He thought perhaps the prophet would chant or cast a spell or make him cower with guilt. But in fact Elisha does none of that. Elisha doesn’t even come out of his house to greet his guest. Naaman deals only with a servant who passes on what are regarded as an insulting set of instructions.

“Why should I wash in the Jordan? It is shallow and dirty. We have much better rivers in Damascus. Do you think I am a barbarian who has never bathed in a river? I know how to wash in the river! If washing in a river is what it takes, I’ll go back and wash in one of our rivers—rivers I know well, not this puny thing you call a river!”

Do you see what is happening here? The prophet Elisha is not offering a spectacle or ceremony, not creating some high drama or an emotional moment. In fact, this whole story seems to point us toward a very low-key kind of religious experience. But at the same time Elisha is not suggesting that Naaman simply put his faith in the familiar, in the rivers of Damascus that he has known all his life. What seems to be important here is neither the ritual nor the river. What it all comes down to is the decision—in this case, the decision to get into the water of the Jordan. Naaman was challenged to be obedient to God as God had spoken through the prophet Elisha. It was that obedience that presented the challenge—the crossroad decision—for Naaman, and you may remember that it took extensive persuasion from those who accompanied him to get him to decide to wash in the Jordan.

Many of us stand regularly where Naaman stood. On the one hand, we find ourselves almost yearning for some spectacular and dramatic religious experience that will mark us for all time, that will bring us to tears or fill us with ecstasy. We know people who have had that kind of experience and seem to us to be changed as a result, so sure of themselves and their faith. Even though that has never been part of our life, we may find ourselves hoping that in spite of the fact this is a Presbyterian church, something will touch us on an emotional level today and we will be changed!

On the other hand, we like coming here because it is familiar; because the Word that is preached and the way of living that is espoused are predictably challenging. The road ahead is clear—and safe. This is what we have learned; this is what we know.

But Elisha injects another element. It is one Horace Bushnell never mentioned and Billy Graham seldom forgets. At some point, each of us needs to make a decision: a decision to be obedient to belong to God, a decision to follow Jesus Christ, to live life his way, even if that means moving outside our comfort zone and immersing ourselves in the muddy, shallow Jordan Rivers of our world. It doesn’t require high drama or deep emotion. The date and time need not be indelibly implanted in your mind or made part of my every conversation. But you and I need to do more than hang around, more than simply settle into this Christian context and absorb its aura. We need to commit—to make a conscious choice. Simply being able to picture a river—or to define the term—is not the same as getting into the water. Christianity is not a spectator sport.

“Are you a Christian?” can be a disarming question with lots of agenda hidden behind those words. But if, out of growing familiarity or the motivation of an emotional moment, you have decided to stop watching from the sidelines—consciously decided to link your life to Jesus Christ, specifically decided to be committed to him—then that question is no longer threatening or intimidating. The answer is a simple “yes.”

Amen.