October 14, 2012 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

God’s Post-Christendom Kingdom

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 72:1−7
Mark 10:17–31

“Children, it’s difficult to enter God’s kingdom!”

Mark 10:24 (CEB)

Jesus selected twelve and trained them in a new way of life. He sent them to teach everyone this way of life. Some would believe and become practitioners and teachers of this new way of life, too. Even if only a few would practice this new way, many would benefit. Oppressed people would be free. Poor people would be liberated from poverty. Minorities would be treated with respect. Sinners would be loved, not resented. Industrialists would realize that God cares for sparrows and wildflowers—so their industries should respect, not rape, the environment. The homeless would be invited in for a hot meal. The kingdom of God would come—not everywhere at once, not suddenly, but gradually, like a seed growing in a field, like yeast spreading in a lump of bread dough, like light spreading across the sky at dawn.

Brian D. McLaren
A Generous Orthodoxy

“Children, it’s difficult to enter God’s kingdom!” Wow, what a great passage to preach about on a Baptism Sunday. Parents, years from now you can share with your children how they just barely made it in this morning.

Truth be told, most preachers don’t like to preach on this text at any time. “It will be very hard for the wealthy to enter God’s kingdom!” is not exactly the most popular text for North American Christians—especially in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago; especially in the middle of our annual stewardship appeal; especially just five weeks before we dedicate an impressive new building that many of us dug deep into our pockets to support.

Like the Obama campaign nervously watching gaffe-prone Joe Biden debate this past Thursday, I’m sure that Marty Sherrod, our Director of Resource Development and Communications, is sitting in the back of the Sanctuary praying that my foot doesn’t somehow make its way up to my mouth at some point during this sermon.

So let’s just get it all out there: you don’t want to hear me preach about this and I don’t particularly want to preach it. We can all thank the Revised Common Lectionary, the reading cycle from which we typically draw our worship texts, for this uncomfortable situation we find ourselves in. Ironically, I generally don’t like the lectionary precisely because it skips over a lot of difficult passages of scripture that we should be wrestling with in worship. I suppose this Sunday is yet more proof that God has a wicked sense of humor.

All throat clearing aside, I actually really appreciate this gospel story precisely because it makes me uncomfortable. It forces me to confront elements of my nature that I’d just as soon ignore. I consistently find myself identifying with the rich man of this story and wondering what God might be calling me to let go of in order to fully enter God’s kingdom.

Like many people, I hope that God isn’t actually calling me to give away all of my money and possessions. I hope that Jesus’ demanding request was a unique situation and not a universal expectation.

Centuries of Christians not giving away everything is pretty clear evidence that my hopes—perhaps your hopes too—are not unique. Already in the second century, just a few generations after Jesus uttered these confounding words, Clement of Alexandria insisted that with self-control and moderation the rich can walk with God. In the fourth century, the great preacher John Chrysostom argued that there is an art to using wealth for God’s purposes, thereby suggesting that the rich have a place and a calling in God’s kingdom, a unique opportunity to use their wealth for noble—even sacred—purposes (see William Placher, Mark — Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, p. 146).

This has been, I think, the interpretive strategy of most Christians throughout the ages. We can see the logic of this perspective. We know it from our own experience. We make generous gifts to fund a much-needed building expansion for a church doing its best to make a difference in its community. We make sacrificial contributions to that same congregation as it lives out its calling to be a light in the city. We make all sorts of philanthropic and charitable gifts that really do improve the lives of others.

When the Gratz Center is filled with students and tutors, young people learning skills to succeed in today’s world, children finding sanctuary, support, and love—we’ll know that our giving has not been in vain. When we see our children and youth ministries grow even more robust, as rising generations learn about our particular way of following Christ and living in the world, a way that quite frankly doesn’t get a lot of press in the world today—we’ll know that we’ve used our wealth for God’s good purposes. When we are finally able to host groups of youth and adults from around the country who come to our city to participate in God’s mission here—we’ll know that our investment has been worthwhile.

But, friends, we can’t let ourselves off the hook too easily. We can’t simply write off the piercing words of Jesus that we’ve heard this morning. We must always examine our motives, our assumptions, our values. We must always wonder if we’re hearing God’s voice or our own. We must be careful not to justify unjust behavior with rationalizations and clever reasoning.

For me—and I truly am only speaking for myself here—I struggle with the incredible gaps in wealth between our nation and many places throughout the world. I know that the money I spent on dinner for two last night would feed a pastoral colleague of mine and his family in Cuba for months. I know that the materials and resources I use for ministry here are unthinkable in his context, yet we both bear witness to the same kingdom of God.

I think, too, about the wealth gaps in our own nation. As my wife and I stretch our budget to provide a comfortable home and excellent education for our children, I know that children in many of our city’s neighborhoods don’t have that same opportunity. As I walk with colleagues or church members down this street to eat a $10 or $15 lunch, I tell numerous people along the way that I can’t give them any spare change, reassuring myself that I give much of my time, talents, and resources to this congregation, which does provide legitimate help. But I also know that the help we provide is never enough, that the needs of the world far outweigh what we give. After all, the same guy who said that it’s hard for the wealthy to enter God’s kingdom also said that the poor will always be with us.

I don’t know if selling all of my possession and giving the money to the poor would solve these problems. Frankly, I doubt that it would. I’m not even sure that a whole bunch of us doing that would really change things in the long run. But I just can’t turn a deaf ear to the radical nature of what Jesus was trying to do in the world.

The gospel of Jesus—the message he lived and died for—is unsettling. It must be, because it’s about the transformation of the world as we know it. “Now is the time,” says Jesus. “Here comes God’s kingdom. Change your hearts and lives and trust this good news” (Mark 1:15 CEB).

God’s kingdom—that place Jesus tells us is so hard to enter—is more than a metaphor. It’s more than an idealized paradise we go to when we die. It is a reality emerging all around us, right here and right now. It is the transformation of the world as it is into the world as God envisions it to be. It is the upending of everything we know to be true, everything of which we are sure and confident. The first will be last and the last will be first. The rich will be poor and the poor will be rich.

Unsettling stuff indeed.

I still don’t know if Jesus really wants me to let it all go, to give it all away. Preachers shouldn’t say such things, but I don’t know what God wants you to do about this. I suspect that each of us can only answer that question for ourselves. This is one reason why this story is so frightening to me.

Like Clement and Chrysostom and countless other Christians, I don’t tend to read this story as a universal command to liquidate and redistribute the entirety of our wealth. Rather, I have always imagined that attachment to material possessions was the particular weakness of the man in this story. Like many other spiritual sages, from Buddha to Yoda, Jesus counseled this man to let go of that which he held on to more than anything else. Dying to self, denying the desires of our egos, means opening ourselves to a bigger reality, to a greater sense of the interconnected world in which we live. Jesus called this God’s kingdom.

For the man in the story, what stood between him and God’s kingdom was his attachment to things. In the analysis of the narrator of Fight Club, that late-twentieth-century masterpiece of spiritual fiction, the things he owned wound up owning him. And when the time came for Jesus to invite him to let it all go and follow him to God’s kingdom, he couldn’t do it. He turned around and walked away. He missed his opportunity to experience a reality beyond his wildest imagination.

For me, there is no figure in the entire Bible more tragic than this man. For me, there is no story in the entire Bible more frightening than this one, because I don’t want to be that man. I don’t want to be the person who misses out on God’s kingdom because I can’t let go.

I don’t know when I’ll face such a moment. Perhaps I already have; perhaps I’ve already missed it. I don’t know what it is that God wants me to let go—though I can surely think of lots of possibilities.

I certainly don’t know what it is for you. Like the man in this story, we each face this moment on our own. Like the man in this story, we may think we have it all figured out. We may think we’ve done everything God wants us to do. And just at that moment, perhaps even at our own instigation, God will show up to unsettle us. God will show up to tell us that everything we’ve done won’t cut it anymore, everything we thought we knew is woefully insufficient. God will ask us to leave those things behind and follow Jesus into God’s kingdom. And we’ll have a choice to make.

Again, I don’t know what that moment will look like for you or for me. But I do want to suggest what this moment might look like for all of us together, for the church as a whole. And I’m not just talking about Fourth Church, but all of mainline Protestant Christianity.

We are constantly moving through a period of church history known as post-Christendom. “Christendom” is a shorthand way of describing the triumphal reign of Christianity in Western culture from the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire up through the twentieth century. During this time in the Western world, Christianity was the most influential shaper of culture. European empires were essentially Christian empires. But in recent decades, Christianity has been in a steady decline in the West. Anyone familiar with empty state churches in Europe knows what this looks like.

Here in the United States, though, we have never had official state churches, Christianity always maintained a powerful influence in our culture. But this cultural influence is waning quickly. Sunday morning is no longer sacred time in American culture; Sunday morning soccer games have become emblematic of the many different ways that families and individuals are drawn away by competing cultural institutions.

Most mainline Protestants seem to be taking this in stride. It is demonstrably the case that in churches like ours, youth participation steadily declines after confirmation and becomes practically nonexistent during college and young adulthood. We assume that youth will eventually find their way back to church, just like many of us did. But recent studies have shown that this is no longer the case. The fastest growing religious category in our society represents those who choose “no religion” on surveys, what some are referring to as the “nones” (Amy Sullivan, “The Rise of the Nones,” Time, 12 March 2012).

Just this week, a study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public life announced that one in five Americans claim to have no religious affiliation, a 25 percent increase over the past five years. This alone may not be all that remarkable, but consider this: “There is much less of a stigma attached” to not being religious, says John Green, a senior research adviser at Pew. “Part of what is fueling this growth is that a lot of people who were never very religious now feel comfortable saying that they don’t have an affiliation” (Dan Merica, “Survey: One in Five Americans Has No Religion,” CNN.com, 9 October 2012).

It used to be assumed or taken for granted that people attended established churches like this one. It was the norm. It’s what good people did. Not attending was the exception and in many cases was stigmatized in our culture. But this is no longer the case. There is absolutely no expectation that you will attend church, that you will bring your children to be baptized, and there are countless alternatives vying for your attention and commitments, some of them quite noble. Simply being here is an intentional choice on your part, often made with considerable sacrifice, and religious leaders can no longer take that for granted.

So the “come to Jesus” moment mainline Protestant Christianity faces is this: in this post-Christendom context, God is surely calling us to be church in some radically different ways. What we have relied on for decades, if not centuries, is no longer working. Yet we are slow to admit it. Like the man clinging to his possessions and wealth, theologian Douglas John Hall notes that the church clings to what we have always done. We act as if nothing has changed. We are in denial that new directions are necessary, and we are reluctant to let go of the status quo (Douglas John Hall, The End of Christendom and the Future of Christianity).

Yet Jesus is asking us to do just that. Let go of what we know. Let go of what worked in the past, because it may not be sustainable moving forward. Like the man in the story, we’ve done everything we thought God wanted us to do. We’ve checked all the boxes. But now God calls us to take the radical, unsettling step of leaving all that behind and following Jesus into God’s kingdom.

Friends, Fourth Church is poised to be a leader in this new movement, an unprecedented opportunity to use the wealth of resources we have been blessed with. We have more than 100 years of stability and growth to build on. We have this stunning sanctuary and a brand new building, which are admittedly remnants of our Christendom past but which also have the potential to be leveraged into something bold and new. We have a dynamic community of faith passionate about the gospel. Soon we will call a new pastor to lead us into the future.

But most of all, we have a vision. We have Christ’s vision of God’s kingdom, a world stunningly different from the world we see today. God’s kingdom is emerging all around us. Jesus is calling us to leave the past behind and follow him with faith and courage into the future.

Entering God’s kingdom is indeed very hard. After 2,000 years, the church is still trying to get it right. And left to our own devices, we’d surely fail. “It’s impossible with human beings,” says Jesus, “but not with God. All things are possible for God.”

Amen.