Text: Mark 6:1-13
Beloved
in Christ, Jesus was so loved wherever He went. Everybody appreciated that He
was trying to bring life and fellowship with God to them. Everybody in every
village left their homes to greet Him when He came to town. Everybody welcomed
His disciples when He sent them ahead to prepare the way for Him. It was easy
to be a Christian during our Lord’s earthly ministry because everybody believed
in Him and was eager to follow Him at all costs. Not.
Yes,
none of those statements above are true. Christianity was not popular when
Christ Himself walked visibly in our midst. Christianity wasn’t even popular
with the people who knew Christ best and should have been His most eager
disciples. In fact, they badmouthed Him and refused to let Him do any miracles
in their midst. They would rather suffer than acknowledge Jesus to be someone
who could help them. They did their best to insult Him. They called Him “the
son of Mary.” Now we Christians know that He was literally the son of
Mary and had been conceived by the Holy Spirit in an extraordinary way so that
He had no earthly father. But that is not what the crowd was getting at when
they called Him “the son of Mary,” for He had been adopted by
Joseph, who had raised Him as his own son. The crowd was implying that Jesus
was a bastard and His mom was a loose woman—and thus He did not deserve to be
heard in the least.
If
that is how people treated our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who could do miracles
that neither you nor I can do, how do you think people will treat His followers,
including us? The Christian church has never had an easy time, and those who
think that that is the case don’t know history. Yes, there have been times when
the Christian church has had great influence on society. But such power has
always been a two-edged sword, for then power-hungry people have gravitated
toward the church and tried to take control of it so that they can wield power.
That has meant that sincere Christians who tried to follow our Lord Jesus
Christ have had a difficult time doing so, as bishops cared little for the
flock of God and strove for political power. Real Christians suffered during
those eras.
 |
| Jean Leon Gerrome Ferris, The Mayflower Compact In public domain in the United States |
But
often if you really look in history, you find that the Christian church has not
been as powerful or influential as both its critics and admirers like to claim.
For example, we know about the Pilgrims coming to this country in order to
practice their religion freely. What we omit to say is that the Pilgrims were a
minority on the Mayflower; moreover, most colonies (such as New York,
Virginia, and the Carolinas) were not founded for religious reasons but for
commercial reasons. Since then the strength of Christianity has waxed and
waned. Right after independence we largely adopted the harsh secularism of our
then French allies. Indeed, in 1800 only one in six Americans belonged to a
church, and hardly a single Christian could be found in the elite universities
of our country. Now today there is a growing secularism in our land, but it is
nowhere as strong as it was in the early days of our republic. That is because
the nineteenth century saw a strong renewal of the Christian church in our
country. We’ve teetered back and forth since then, but have never become as
anti-Christian as we were in our early days.
So
from both biblical history and church history we see that Christianity has not
always been accepted by everybody or even the majority of people. Accordingly,
it has always been difficult to be a Christian. In fact, you should expect that
to be the case. Don’t assume that the world’s values will line up with yours.
Don’t assume that whatever way of thinking is popular is automatically
Christian. Being a disciple of our Lord Jesus Christ will always mean going
against the grain. The world does not want to take God’s commandments
seriously. The world doesn’t want to hear about a Savior saving it from God’s
judgment. So don’t expect it to pat you on the back now.
Well,
how do we live in such an environment? Here consider the two things that Christ
did. “He went about among the villages teaching.” And “He
called the twelve and began to send them out two by two.” In other
words, He continued His earthly ministry and brought in more people to do the
work. It didn’t stop Him from doing His work and neither should it stop us.
Just because some people didn’t want to hear Him and didn’t want His help, it
didn’t follow that nobody wanted to hear His message. God’s kingdom was still
advancing—maybe not in one town, but perhaps in the next.
I
think this helps us to understand how to be a Christian today. You’ve noticed
that our bulletin always has the banner stating that we exist to “make strong
disciples amid a skeptical world.” We are not starry-eyed people who think that
being a Christian and being a good American will always line up. We are not so
naïve to think that society’s values and beliefs will line up with our
Christian faith. And so we don’t close up shop just because we discover that
our faith doesn’t please everyone or even that it doesn’t please the majority
of people. We are called to be God’s holy people, to embrace the salvation
Christ offers, to live a godly life in gratitude for that salvation, and to
share the good news about Jesus as we have opportunity to do so. And we are
called to do that “in season and out of season,” whether it lines
up with the way most people think or not.
And
so, like Jesus, we continue to proclaim God’s law and gospel and we ordain new
men to do the same. The apostles were sent out without much support. They had
to rely on the good will of the people who hosted them. In fact, our Lord told
them not to take more than a staff for their journey. They wouldn’t have a spare
tunic, as any well-to-do traveler would have had. They weren’t even to take
bread or spending money along, but rely completely on their hosts to provide
them with what they needed. Today pastors still rely on their congregations for
their support. We don’t rely upon the government to give us our salary or to
give us special authority.
When
I was in seminary many years ago, I remember talking with a pastor from the
Church of Norway who was doing graduate studies at our seminary. The Church of
Norway is nominally Lutheran, but any pastor there who takes the Lutheran faith
seriously soon finds himself in hot water. And this pastor had endured quite a
bit for being a faithful Christian pastor in a place where the church had given
in to its very hedonistic and secular society. I remember asking him why he
didn’t organize an independent Lutheran church there, something that others
have done more recently. His reply was interesting: “Wherever I go in my
village, I do so as an official of the king.” (He meant King Olav V, who was
Norway’s king back then, not our Lord Jesus Christ.) But in the end how did
that help? He had the same standing as the village postmaster—one more
bureaucrat to be ignored. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t
help him advance the gospel.
So
let us not look for the state or society at large to prop us up. As much as we
love our country and as much as we pray for its leaders, we know that our hope
and salvation do not lie there. Instead, we are going to have to take more
seriously the notion that being a Christian is a counter-cultural undertaking.
Let
me flesh that out just a bit. Christians have a different understanding of the
law than does the average American. The average American says, “Is it legal?
Then it’s okay to do it. Is it popular or at least approved by most people?
Then by all means do it.” Christians have a different take. We understand that
God’s law is much more encompassing than the laws of our country. At its best, those
laws establish some rules to minimize chaos in society. We know those laws can’t
keep society completely well behaved, since there aren’t enough police officers
around to enforce perfect behavior, but the laws keep injustices to a minimum.
But sometimes our laws don’t even do that. They punish the innocent and let the
guilty go free. They set up a society that is at variance from what God would
like. So be it. Let the world be the world. You be a faithful Christian.
That
means we don’t just look at some of the Ten Commandments, but all of them. It
also means that we don’t just think of them in minimalistic ways. In other
words, we should think that there is more to the commandment “You shall
not commit adultery” than simply “Don’t cheat on your spouse.” Instead,
we understand that every thought, word, or deed that goes against God’s
intention of being chaste is wrong. Similarly, when we hear, “You shall
not steal,” we know God is forbidding the little ways we take what is
not ours, such as by wasting time while on the clock and everything else
totally approved of in our culture.
We
will have to assume that our country is lackadaisical about morality and that
we are called to a higher standard. But there’s more. We Christians are
animated not by the law, but by the good news about Jesus Christ, our Savior.
He is the Son of God who has taken on our human nature and rescued us from
death and hell. He is the one who gives us hope, who heals us, who drives the
demons away, and in short restores us. We take God’s law so seriously only because
we take this message of good news even more seriously. Now many of our
compatriots don’t like the gospel because it undercuts the notion that we are
our own saviors, one of the basic premises of the American Dream. But for us
who have found our salvation in Christ, we know that there is nothing more precious
than to find out that God has done for us what we never could. It isn’t just a
piece of good news, but the very message by which we live.
Therefore,
beloved in Christ, let’s not worry whether the world appreciate us or not.
Let’s be Christians—strong Christians—amid a skeptical world. In Jesus’ name.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment