Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
June 15, 2008
Matthew 10:24-39
Yes, he preaches to more people in a week than I preach to in a year. His congregation got so large that it purchased and remodeled an arena that had been used by an NBA team, and that former arena is filled every Sunday! And yes, he has been on the New York Times best seller list more weeks than I can count. Heavens, I will never even make the Copperfield's best seller list. So I have to tread carefully here. Any criticism I make of him might come with just, oh, a whiff of envy (say it ain't so Gene)!
A friend of mine, I'm sure with only love in his heart, calls this preacher a practitioner of "cotton-candy theology." His popular book, Your Best Life Now, joins a long list of books that push what is called, "the prosperity gospel." His message is really quite simple - and that is perhaps part of it's power. If you become a Christian, your life will go much, much better. You don't have to live a "mediocre" life or go around with your head filled with "negative thoughts" about yourself or anybody else. Start believing that good things will come your way and they will. God wants you to succeed.
As many of you have already guessed, I'm talking about the dynamic, good-looking, ever-smiling Joel Osteen, pastor of the 30,000 member Lakewood Community Church in Houston. "Don't beat yourself up," he says. "Enough with the negative thoughts. Choose to be happy!" That's one of his favorite themes. One of his best sermons. Certainly not bad advice, especially if you're down in the dumps and need a bit of a boost. And clearly there is quite a market for it out there. He is saying what people want to hear, and maybe what people need to hear. He promises a life filled with material reward if we choose to be positive thinkers and upbeat achievers. In other words, the success he promises is pretty much success as defined by the dominant culture and conventional wisdom of today. It would seem that yes, money can buy happiness, or at least it can significantly increase your chances, God wants that for you. Which makes me wonder...while it is certainly a fine message, a popular message, a helpful message, is it a Christian message? In fact, is it a message that even needs Christ or a church, if all I really need to do to be happy and successful is simply change my attitude?
All right, I better back off a little, I'm getting close to sour grapes, I think. But you see, the problem is, that when Jesus spoke about the good life, of success, of fulfillment, his words seemed to fly in the face of conventional wisdom...still do! And so, what we define as happiness, success, fulfillment, is not necessarily how he defined these things...you want to find life, lose your life to find life...you want to be successful, be a servant to others...take up your cross and follow me. Now this is not Fortune 500 advice.
And then today's text. "For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one's foes will be members of one's own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." Now, where do these words fit in to a prosperity gospel? This is the path to happiness and success? Following these words will make my life, much better? It will make shopping at Christmas a lot easier that's for sure. But, I wonder how the happy folks at Lakewood Community Church would respond to these words? For that matter, I wonder how the happy folks at the Community Church of Sebastopol respond to these words? How can such news possibly be construed as good news, putting Christ - his words, his life, his mission - before our own family? Whatever Jesus is selling here, I'm not sure I'm ready to buy it. I want to say, "C'mon, enough with the negative stuff!"
United Methodist Bishop, William Willimon, tells about a time he was invited to preach at the school he had attended as a boy. Says Willimon, "It was one of those annual events that many schools have where we were supposed to remember the great pioneers who had founded the school, developed it, given it it's character. So that's what I preached about. But I pointed out that something very odd was going on. Each one of the men and women we were honoring had been innovators. They had been the ones who had dared to do things differently, to go in new directions despite the people who wanted to keep things the way they were. But we, by reading out a list of names in a solemn voice, by holding them up as our founding figures, were in danger of doing just the opposite, in danger of saying we wanted everything to stay the way it had always been."
Could that be a message for the church, a church that pretty much has accepted the values and definitions and standards of the world around us? Is that what Jesus did? Critiquing the church as more a servant of culture than a servant of Christ, Julian Hart writes, "Popular Christianity is rapidly approaching the state of perfect homogenization. It is religiousness rather than faith, it is geniality rather than love, it is wish rather than hope, it is opinion rather than truth." Sounds kind of like TV news, doesn't it.
I wonder if Jesus says the things he says about family relationships because he wants us to know that when he comes around things are changing, a new world is being born, and that the old standards, the old values, the old definitions just might no longer apply. He wants us to know he has come, not to bless our definitions of happiness and success, but rather to disrupt things, to turn things upside down, to show us a new and different way.
And so a Methodist pastor could go to his bishop, a bishop who had moved him to a smaller church with a smaller salary, and say, "Bishop, you don't have to apologize to me and my family for this move. Don't feel bad about it. I came into the ministry from a $100,000 a year job with the oil industry. There's nothing you can do that can hurt me as bad economically as Jesus did when he called me to go to seminary and be a preacher."
Tell me again, Joel, what was that definition of success?
Warning, name dropping coming: I was at a conference in Cleveland and sat right next to, Andrew Young, Mayor of Atlanta, United Nations Ambassador and UCC Minister. We were serving on a committee to raise money for the national church. He spoke of his daughter who, after college, announced that she was going to Western Africa, to a fairly dangerous area of Western Africa to teach children. "They haven't any school, Dad. I have help them." Young said he and his wife were just mortified, scared to death. What? But, he said, ”How could I stop her? This is what I've been preaching. This is all she's heard. Who would have ever thought that she was going to take Jesus seriously?” It reminds me of my own daughter. Gave up a good, high paying job in San Francisco to go to rural Louisiana and teach math to kids who had never seen a laptop computer. Other young people from this church have done the same. Jesus can disrupt things. Even those nice laid out plans we have for family, children.
Now I'm not trying to lay a guilt trip on anyone today, or to suggest that we are pretty inadequate Christians. I suppose often we are, but often we aren't. And I'm not saying that we should all go out and sell our homes - as if we could in this market - or give away our retirement funds. I don't see myself doing that. But, in these admittedly challenging and troubling words of Jesus, I hope, I hope you can hear a word of God's hope for us, God's dream that we really can be a new people, go a new way, that a new creation is possible. The way things are now is not how they always must be. Newness is possible, transformation is possible, disruption of the familiar routines is possible and even probable...if we are going to take this Jew from Nazareth seriously. Scary to be sure, but also immensely hopeful. In his book, Reaching for the Invisible God, Theologian, Philip Yancey, writes, "It is not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free not to take up the work. The work is God's work, the work of reclaiming and redeeming a planet badly damaged. For people of faith, that means bringing a touch of peace, justice, hope, healing, wherever our hands touch."
Alex Haley, the author of Roots, is talked about the filming of the TV series. And he remembered one scene, you may recall it. Kunta Kinte has recently come from Africa and what they did with slaves from Africa was immediately give them a new Christian name. He was to be given the name Toby. In this scene, the overseer had Kunta Kinte on the ground and demanded, "What's your name?" "Kunta Kinte." POW! "What's your name?" "Kunta Kinte." POW! "What's your name?" "Kunta Kinte." POW, POW! "What's your name?" "Toby." As the overseer walks away, other slaves gather around to help him. A slave named Fiddler puts his arm around him and says, "Your name not Toby, you are Kunta Kinte.” Alex Haley says that was never in the script. In that moment, the two actors, Lavar Burton and Louis Gossett, Jr., became the story.
And that, I think, is what Jesus is saying to us...dare to become part of the story - a new story. Don't just say you are disciples, dare to be disciples. Dare to face the difficult choices between Gospel priorities and worldly priorities. Will it make your life easier? Well, probably not. Will it guarantee success? Kind of depends on how you define success. But the needs of this world - and of your own lives - for the healing touch and good news of God's love are too great for you to turn away now. "I may disrupt you," he says, "you may find yourselves on unfamiliar territory, but know this, I will never leave you." Yes, dare, dare to become part of the story.