Worshiping at the cult of celebrity: You and Me and Taylor Swift

Acts 13.1-3, 14.8-18

Worshiping the wrong thing is a longstanding human tradition. Whether it was the Israelites worshiping a calf made of gold, Lystrian people worshiping Paul and Barnabas for their healing as we read today, or the modern hero worship of celebrities, athletes, and the like that we all participate in we love to worship people. We’re always making these people into symbols—unreachable, perfect symbols.

Just think about celebrities. How long will we be fascinated with a person? Only as long as they’re dating a Kardashian, or only as long as they are attractive, or only as long as they can dunk a basketball, or until Twitter stops caring about them. Then it’s over. Maybe we reminisce about how awesome so-and-so used to be, but mostly we move on to the next thing. This doesn’t trouble us, and why should it? These people are only characters. We don’t know them. We wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if we met them. And, on the one hand, this is nothing new—there have always been celebrities, natioinal heroes, religious leaders, etc.—but, on the other hand, there are more people idolized today for many different reasons than at any other time in history. Everybody has their niche person to idolize.

Celebrities are today what religious healers were once upon a time. People loved them for their healing works and for the blessings they reigned upon them; then they shunned them whenever they tried to point to something greater than themselves. They shunned them all the more when they had the audacity to suggest they were not God. People have always wanted to worship people; not God.

We do this for really natural reasons, because worshiping people allows us to keep believing deep within us that we are God ourselves. If we can idolize a person, then we are only one step away from being that person who others will idolize. This is tricky territory, because it’s definitely OK to look up to positive role models. It’s OK to want to be a great person, like so-and-so. But if we raise up a person on too high a podium we tend to forget they are a human being, and then we are shocked when they fail to live up to the impossible standards we have created. When that happens our great heroes become villains because we can’t deal with our own disappointment at their humanity.

God shows no partiality, but we confuse law and Gospel

Acts 10:1-17,34-35

God is not partial. God shows no partiality. God does not favor people based on their skin color or ethnicity, by anything considered “unclean” or called “profane.” God doesn’t care about any of that. I feel like I need to say that in twenty-seven different ways. But, still, I think we all have an idea that that lack of partiality ends somewhere. On the surface, God showing no favoritism seems straightforward, but we also talk all the time about God favoring those who love him, God favoring Christians, God blessing America, and so on and so on.

I’m going to read the last money quote one more time: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.”

            Why is it always the case that the Bible explains one thing by introducing several new questions?

            I mean, Peter understands that God shows absolutely no partiality—God does not have a single bias in the world—EXCEPT he favors those who fear him and do what is right, which is kind of frustrating, because Peter’s dream reminds us that we don’t always know what is right. God finds people who follow the law acceptable, no matter their nation, which is wonderful, EXCEPT that it then makes us question what really matters. Certainly Peter can’t be certain, because on the one hand he’s given this vision where various not-kosher animals are dangled in front of him and he’s told to just go ahead and eat that eagle and that snake and that pig and everything else that God had been telling his Hebrew children not to eat throughout history, then on the other hand he tells us that God expects us only to follow the law.

            Geez, Peter, which is it, and how are we to know?

The five verbs of the Great Commission

Matthew 28:16-20

            After the resurrection of Jesus, Matthew’s Gospel is wonderful in its simplicity. You may be familiar with different post-resurrection stories: John has a bit about Jesus meeting the disciples by the lakeshore, Luke has the walk to Emmaus, Mark ends things dramatically with a cliffhanger, but Matthew’s ending is not as dramatic as Mark’s or with as much narrative as Luke or John. In Matthew, there is only a single scene after the resurrection—just a few verses—where the disciples meet Jesus on a mountain top and he gives them a simple command. “Go, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”

            Sometimes we make our life of faith way too complicated. The Great Commission is simple, elegant, challenging, and engaging for people of every generation. We are called to go out. This means we are not to be a church in one place and hope people stumble upon us. And we are called to go out to all nations, not some people who look like us, and not just the kind of people we approve of. Then we are called to make disciples of them. Then we baptize, teach, and remember God’s promise to us. That’s it. That’s all we do. God does the rest.

            Matthew offers no special programs, no evangelism tricks, and nothing in particular about how we are to be church apart from these commands, let alone the specifics of how divine things work. We are simply called to tell others about Jesus, to make them into disciples, to baptize, and to help them understand what all of that means: to help all of us to become followers of Christ.

            Nowadays we have flipped the Great Commission upside down and we do it more or less backwards. We don’t go, make disciples, baptize, teach, and remember. Instead, we remember first. We look back on what was, putting a premium on understanding where we come from and often reaching back into that past for an imagined golden age when everything was perfect. Then we teach. We share our history. We study the Bible. We read the catechism. Then we baptize. Sure, we often do baptism before these things but we tend to believe that baptism is a step on the road to discipleship and not the other way around. Only after those things do we focus on making disciples; once we have figured out what it means to be faithful; once we’ve checked the boxes required for membership. Then, finally, we go… if we have time. But most of our energy is spent on the other tasks at hand. We only go if we have the energy to do so. Most of the time we expect others to come to us.

Wake up! An Easter sermon for a sleepy church.

Matthew 28:1-10

For months now we’ve been reading through Jesus’ parables: stories about resurrection out of death and stories about God seeking out the least and entering into the most hopeless, most deathly places. We’ve dwelled on the mystery of God-incarnate and come through Holy Week from a procession with people waving palms, to a Last Supper, to death on a cross, and we’ve found ourselves here on Easter Sunday (just as we do every year) as if this is the most natural thing in the world. But it’s not. It’s bizarre. God came down to earth to save it by doing the least weakest-looking thing in the world: By dying.

            This backwards God we have in Jesus makes being a Christian challenging, because we live in a world that works one way almost all the time while holding to a faith that promises that, in the end, everything will be flipped upside-down. As we go about our daily business, we like to hang out with people who are trustworthy and charming and attractive; Jesus liked to hang out with sinners, and people who did unsavory work, and the deranged. We value our freedom and liberty, we like being non-conformists; Jesus preached submission and conformity to the way of the cross, which is about as unattractive as conformity gets. We like family and friends; Jesus said to leave them behind without a second thought. We like being alive; Jesus said that to take up our crosses and die.

            All of what Jesus said is crazy if not for Easter morning. Without resurrection, all the parables are meaningless and all the healings are temporary; without Easter morning Jesus is, as so many claim, just another prophet—and a pretty poor one at that. Today is the day most important to our faith, because it is on the resurrection that everything else hinges. All our beliefs about salvation, our understandings of brokenness and sinfulness, and our hope for new life after death—all of it is predicated on an empty tomb.

            And the crazy part of it is this: You can’t prove it. That’s maybe not the thing you’d expect to hear on Easter morning, I know. You might expect me to say that it’s true because the Bible tells me so, but the truth is that you’re either going to believe that or you won’t. You’re going to take it on faith or you’re not. There is an ever-growing portion of the population who wants me to produce a proof, to argue for the invisible with the visible, to use miracles and after-death narratives of people who were mostly dead but not quite as evidence of the divine, or to wait on the History Channel to explain what really happened. If these folks want to believe in Jesus at all it is because they want to hear that Jesus blesses his followers by healing the sick, sparing the endangered, feeding the hungry, and finding the lost remote control that disappeared into thin air somewhere between the couch cushions. We don’t have a God who does those things as “proof.” Yes, God might heal the sick, God might work through an addict to bring about new life, and God may even do that for you, but that is no proof of anything other than cosmic chance. The only event that stands alone as a testimony to this God we understand to have entered into human form is the resurrection. All else is commentary.

Not a transaction but a promise

Scripture: Matthew 27:1-61

“He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, ‘I am God’s Son’” (vs. 42-43).

            God doesn’t want to deliver his only son from death. Of all the crazy, counter-intuitive things that we believe as Christians this has to be near the top. We say “God is good all the time” and then we talk about a God who does not act to save his son from death when he has the ability and even the reason to do so. This is not Abraham on Mt. Moriah raising his knife over the bound Isaac; this time God does not intervene. This is an actual sacrifice; not a test; and our theological justifications for it overshadow the true terror of it. Did Christ have to die? Yes, sure, we can say that from the comfort of our place in history, but in the moment could any of us honestly believe it?

            But this idea of God, the Father, looking down upon his son, dying on the cross, is one we must forever rid from our conscience, because it’s nowhere near that simple. As Christians we believe something stranger; we believe that God himself came down in human form, 100% human and 100% divine, and it is God that was raised up on that cross as surely as it was Jesus Christ in the flesh. That’s strange, but it also frees us from asking absurd questions of this story. It means that this wasn’t divine child abuse, but instead it was God’s own self-sacrifice in his divinity and his humanity. And when Jesus cries out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he reminds us just how deeply human he has become.

            For the last couple millennia, people have debated passionately about why Jesus had to die. There are nearly as many atonement theories as there are Christians to think them up, many as plausible as the next. Many also raise some serious concerns. All of us need to step and back and understand that we’re not going to be able to wrap our heads around this one. We can’t make Jesus’s death into a transaction because it will always lose its absurdity, its imminence, and its importance when we do so. The act of the crucifixion is a singular moment for us to ponder, reminding us that some things are so sacred that we will only ever make them more banal by trying to get behind the curtain.

            Most importantly, we cheapen the act itself when we obsess with the mechanics of it. Suddenly, it’s not enough that God loved us so much that he died for us; now our salvation needs to be a mathematical equation with no remainder. It must be tidy and neat. It must be a transaction between God and the devil, or between God and us. But Good Friday isn’t tidy; it’s not neat. And it’s a humungous reminder that God works with the big picture. Yes, God can intervene; yes, miracles are real and wonderful and mysterious and we should be open to them, but, more than that, we have a God who is concerned with the cosmos, and if God is willing to enter into human form and die on a cross, then we had better understand that there is nothing so terrible that we go through where God hasn’t been, and, conversely, there are no guarantees that we won’t walk that path to Golgotha in our own way, at our own time.

            The authorities were looking for a reason, wanting a proof, and jeering Jesus when he fails to provide one for them to their expectations. Why wouldn’t he? Immediately we jump to atonement theories, about God needing to pay our debt, etc, etc. But all of that obscures the immanence of it: God died on the cross because God is a God of the big picture, and because suffering and sin and death came into the world with Adam and Eve we now are in need of a bigger resolution than mere healing, bigger even than bringing somebody back from the dead. Jesus raised Lazarus, but Lazarus died again eventually. We need something else; something that defeats death.

            Today is Good Friday, because today the last enemy is defeated; today death has lost its sting. That’s what the chief priests failed to see: the big picture. So do we. All the time. We’re short-term gain people. But we have a God who is wider, bigger, and more willing to suffer than we are. Thanks be to God for that, because it gives all of our suffering meaning. It doesn’t mean we won’t; it doesn’t mean things will work out in the end—at least not if by “in the end” we mean that our lives will be healthy, wealthy, and long. No, we will die. We might even die young. The small picture of our lives is variable, tenuous, and fragile. But God on the cross promises something else: Salvation, which is always wide, always seeking out the lost, encompassing more than we would expect, bigger and better than we can imagine.

Eating as religious exercise

Scripture: Matthew 26:17-30

There is just about nothing that human beings obsess over more than our food. We love food. We love bad-for-you food; and we love good-for-you food. Some of us obsess over food coated in sugar or packed with grease and fat; others of us obsess over calories and carbs. Many people just eat without much thought. We all eat, and our opinions about food are in many ways more engrained than our opinions about politics or religion, especially if we are people who grow that food. For the person who eats all the time, the person who struggles to eat anything, and everybody in-between, food has a tremendous hold on us.

            The act of taking in that food—eating—is also a deeply religious exercise. That’s something that has been more or less forgotten in a wider, cultural sense, as food has become easy to come by. Up here we might not have McDonald’s down the street, but getting food for most of us is pretty easy. It requires opening up a pantry, remembering to stop at the store, planning a trip to Grand Forks, or, for the more industrious amongst us, it means putting together a hunting or fishing trip or picking from a garden. I say eating is a religious exercise because it is a universal human activity that reminds us of our dependence. None of us make food on our own. We are dependent on the soil and the weather, and animals and plants whose lives we take to sustain our own. Even when we carefully monitor these factors we cannot control them.

Eating is religious because we are part of the food chain, even if we usually don’t think about it that way. And, most importantly of all, all eating is religious because it begs us to show a measure of devotion to a world that we did not create and will far outlast us. We are not set apart from creation; we are part of it; and we enter into it most deeply every time we sit down at the table or grab something from the grocery aisle.