A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

June 12, 2005 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Mugging Religion

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 100
Matthew 9:35–10:8

“These twelve Jesus sent out.”

Matthew 10:5 (NRSV)

Only in our doing can we grasp you.
Only with our hands can we illumine you.
The mind is but a visitor:
it thinks us out of our world. . . .

When I go toward you
It is with my whole life.

Rilke
Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

I was reading an interesting essay recently by an American called Thomas Lynch. You may have come across Lynch: he wrote a well-received book called The Undertaking some years ago about his job as a funeral director in Michigan. Thomas Lynch is an Irish-American, and he inherited a house in the town of Kilkee in County Clare in the Republic of Ireland, a house that had been owned by a distant cousin of his with whom he had reconnected in the 1970s. Her name was Nora, and when Nora died, she left the house to her American cousin, Thomas. He writes about how when he first arrived in Ireland—the first member of his family for four generations to get back to the old country, as they call it—he connected with Nora.

He was amazed by Nora’s accent and her use of language—her poetic phraseology, how she used pithy little wisdom sayings. He said it was kind of like the cadence of liturgy at times. She used to say one thing that he uses as the title for his essay. She used to say, “Oh, it’s the same but different.” The same but different, he reflects, could describe the house in Ireland: it’s the same house that was there from 1860, but it’s different. It’s got new additions and extensions. The village is the same as it was for hundreds of years by the bay and beside the hills, but it’s different. It’s got plumbed water now and electricity, and the people have computers and cell phones. And the people themselves—the same as the people that worked the land for those many years, but different now, commuting and working in high-tech industry in Ireland.

I got quite into this idea—I love Thomas Lynch’s reflections—and I started doing it myself. I found myself happily at Wrigley Field yesterday reflecting that things were the same as the day before but different. They were the same because the Cubs beat the world champs 7–6; it was different because on Friday it was 14–6. So it was the same but different. I was reflecting on how we experience something commonly; we experience the same thing, but we have different responses to it. Some of my colleagues on staff—some of the administrative staff whose offices are over on Chestnut Street—have been complaining these last few days because we have a new neighbor. We have a bagpiper who has started to play across the road at the Water Tower Place, right on the corner opposite the church offices. So all day my colleagues are hearing what they describe as the drone of the bagpipes. Now I hear the same thing, but I think it’s beautiful. It reminds me of home. It’s the same, but a different response. I love it. (I will now do full disclosure that one of the more recent purchases in the MacLeod household is bagpipe clock that plays a little snippet of a Scottish tune on the hour. If it’s “Amazing Grace,” it must be 8:00. I’m quite happy with having my piper friend.)

And in the midst of these somewhat random reflections, I realized that there’s maybe some deeper truth as we gather here and hear scripture together and reflect on our faith and the interaction of life and faith. There are some trends in modern-day religious life that we might describe as being the same but different—the rise of spirituality as a discipline within itself, for example. It’s very interesting. In the United Kingdom last week, a new show started on television, one of these “reality shows,” I believe they’re called (not that I’ve ever seen any of them). This is one in which a real-life person is invited to get involved in spirituality shopping. This is what happens: Michaela Newton Wright has a rewarding job in advertising and lots of friends, but something is missing in her life. She’s given the chance to sample four spiritual practices from different religions to see if they fill the absence in her life. In a brilliant critique on the assumptions behind this show, the British theologian and Anglican priest Giles Fraser excoriated the trend towards amorphous spirituality. He wrote in the Guardian newspaper,

Spirituality has become the acceptable face of religion. It offers a language for the divine that dispenses with all the off-putting paraphernalia of priests and church. And it’s not about believing in anything too specific other than in some nebulous sense of otherness or presence. It offers God without dogma. Spirituality is just the sort of religion suitable for one of Michaela’s dinner parties with her “lots of friends.” It takes the exotic and esoteric aspects of religion and subtracts having to believe the impossible, having to sit next to difficult people on a Sunday morning, and having to make any sort of commitment that might have long time implications for her wallet or lifestyle. Yes, spirituality is religion that has been mugged by capitalism.

Religion that has been mugged by capitalism.

I wanted to cast the net closer to home, as it were, because I’m going to suggest this morning that we Christians who seek to follow Christ need to be careful and watch out for the muggers of our faith, those who would rob our faith of meaning. The text from Matthew that we read this morning is a rich and complex text that I suspect leaves us with lots of questions. Why does Jesus send the disciples just to the house of Israel? The scholars among you may know that the names of the disciples are slightly different in each of the Gospels, so there are some questions on that. But at the heart of the text, there’s this beautiful image that’s given of Jesus as he stands among the crowds who’ve gathered and finds that they are like sheep without a shepherd. They’re just wandering hopelessly, and the scripture says, “He had compassion for them.” A powerful picture of Jesus as a teacher, a preacher, a healer, as one who is full of compassion.

We were looking at this at our congregation’s Wednesday Noonday Bible Study this week and had a great conversation. One of the things that the group picked up on was that the actions of the disciples when Jesus commissions them parallels the actions of Jesus, that Jesus, who proclaimed and healed and cured and taught, is mirrored by what the disciples do. And so the picture of discipleship here is that to seek to follow Christ is not a philosophical state of being, It’s not primarily a mind thing. It’s about action, about doing things. Jesus commissions the disciples, and these are the words that Jesus uses in sending them out: “Proclaim, cure, raise, cleanse, cast out.” What this means, then, is that discipleship—following Jesus—is something that happens in relational terms. It happens within the context of community. It happens when we’re engaged in the lives of others, with their hopes and their dreams, with their needs and opportunities and fears. It means that we are in relationship. That’s the model of the faith of discipleship and the gospels that we have in Matthew. And I would contrast that with those who want to mug Christian faith with the kind of radical individualism that seems so beloved of many of the self-help and positive-thinking preachers and churches—the so-called megachurches—where, in their view, self-advancement seems to be the blessing of discipleship. My colleague Carol Allen passed me a fascinating article from Business Week about the business practices of some of these megachurches. The journalist interviewed some people, one of whom is a member of Willow Creek, not far from us here, in Barrington, Illinois, one of the largest of the megachurches. This young man was quoted as saying, “When I walk out of a service I feel completely relieved of any stress I walked in with.” That’s not there in Matthew’s Gospel! Where is it in the Gospel picture of discipleship?

The danger is that when we look to our relationship with God as being one that makes us comfortable, that’s Christian faith being mugged. And I believe that our faith is in danger of being mugged when at the center of it is our own personal gain, whether that be power or esteem or money or honor or cool. And I believe that there’s a danger of it being mugged when religion becomes nationalistic and jingoistic. When, for example, the people believe that the U.S. is different from other nations and on a special mission, a calling, a destiny, a city on the hill—that’s a dangerous place to go with your faith. In a recent book called God Is Not, the writer, Michael Baxter, challenges this face-on. He writes, “Americans who worship an American God worship a false God and have been insufficiently formed by true worship.” Baxter talks about the Pledge of Allegiance and says that to talk about one nation under God should actually be an issue not for secularists but for faithful people whose “overruling loyalty should be to one church under God.”

As I was reading these things, I kept coming back to Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, in his classic book The Cost of Discipleship, wrote about the tension here, the opposite between what he calls cheap grace and what is costly discipleship. Bonhoeffer writes this: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring penitence, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace,” says Bonhoeffer,” is grace without discipleship.” And costly grace is “the gospel which must be sought after again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which one must knock.” Bonhoeffer says, “Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a person their life and it is grace because it gives a person the only true life.” As many of you know, of course, that became literally true when Bonhoeffer was murdered by the Nazis at the end of the Second World War.

Bonhoeffer talked about how Luther’s idea of grace was robbed—was mugged, we might say—by some of those who followed Luther. When Luther spoke of grace, it always implied a corollary that it cost him his own life, the life that was now, for the first time, subjected to the absolute obedience of Christ. The followers took this doctrine and repeated it, but they left this bit out: the obligation of discipleship. And that’s one of the ways we can protect ourselves from being mugged in our faith, I think—to recognize that for the great Christian thinkers and writers and practitioners, faith is hard. Following Jesus is hard. There’s a cost. John Donne, one of the great metaphysical poets, in his “Holy Sonnets” uses extraordinary imagery to describe how he sees and experiences his relationship with God, and in one of them, he describes God almost as a wrestler: “Batter my heart, Three-personed God”

If you ever have a chance to go to London, try and get a visit to Westminster Abbey. It’s a great church, a church I love very much from my time spent in London. Outside the great entrance to Westminster Abbey there are new statues that have been placed on plinths around the door. They’re statues of the twentieth-century martyrs. Martin Luther King is there. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. And there’s a small statue of a small man in priestly robes, and underneath it is the name Oscar Romero. Oscar Romero was a priest, a quiet, shy, orthodox man in El Salvador who was elevated to the position of archbishop partly because during the ’70s and ’80s he was a safe pair of hands. Romero, when he was elevated to archbishop, took himself out to places he’d never been before, to parishes that he’d never visited. He’d realized that the people of El Salvador’s flock were being exploited, that the poor were being made poorer, that people were losing land. Romero became radicalized and realized that his Christian calling called him to challenge what was happening, to live out that call, to challenge what was happening in his society and to stand up for the poorest. Romero was shot in March twenty-five years ago as he said mass in his cathedral. Now there is someone who protected himself and his faith from being mugged.

How do we do it? Look at the greats in the Christian faith; remember our own baptism. Baptism, which defines the authentic relationship with God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit, is an amazing thing. These little children about to be baptized don’t know what’s happening, and we say you’re a child of God sealed by the Spirit and you belong to Jesus Christ forever, and we affirm that every time we remember our own baptisms, that we love because God loved us first; that we remember Jesus’ commission; that we can proclaim that God’s love, the kingdom, is a present reality; that we can find the broken places and bring cures and bring healing and peace; that we can confront death and affirm that life is stronger and cleanse those whom the powerful claim are dirty and cast out the demons of hopelessness, of selfishness, and lack of opportunity in our society. For as our hymn has it, “Open wide our hands in sharing as we heed Christ’s ageless call—healing, teaching and proclaiming, serving you by loving all.” Amen.