As I was asked to preach here – I had a strange realization – I realized I really enjoy being part of a church – having an on-going relationship an ongoing conversation.  I like preaching to people I know.  Not because it is comfortable, I think a good sermon should stretch you – so my sermons can be uncomfortable on a regular basis.

The reason I think it is strange is because here I am supposed to say something meaningful to a bunch of people I don’t know. Don’t take it personal, but I don’t know you – I don’t know your passions, your struggles, your joys and your gifts.  I know that your congregation is passionate about peace and justice, about welcome, and about Jesus – but that is about it.

And precisely because I believe that a good sermon stretches us, it was a bit strange preparing to speak to you all.  It is like a personal trainer designing a work out for someone they haven’t every worked with before.  How am I gonna stretch you all?

The title of my sermon today is “What is a Christian?”  It may seem like a big question – and it is.  It is meant to be a large, foundational question.  I know I won’t be able to completely answer this question in the next 20 minutes or so, but I do want to do some work, thinking about what it means to be a Christian.  Often times, when we talk in mixed groups of Christians – the answer to this question is assumed.  Whether in Sunday School, from the pulpit, or even when we are talking to someone who is new to the faith.

Different understandings of foundational questions like this – often explain why one group of Christians can’t talk with another one.  They both agree on many things, but this fundamental disagreement makes it almost impossible for them to hear each other.

Often, we don’t think about this question.  We just assume the answer to this question, because on some level it is so fundamental, and basic. Someone may have given us “THE ANSWER” to this question and told us just to accept it and move on.  But, I am not very good at just accepting anything.  I love to ask questions.  For me, in my faith, asking questions is essential.

I think that one of the worst things that the church has done is to dismiss questions. When people come to us with honest questions – often the church hasn’t taken time to earnestly think about these questions – instead we have just knocked them down.  I bet there are a few of you who have experienced this.  You come into Sunday School – maybe you were a child, or a youth, or even as an adult and said:  “I just don’t understand the Trinity.” someone said – “it is three Gods in one God, and that is just how it is. Don’t you have faith?”

Many thoughtful people have left the church because of this.  Either their question was dismissed with “if you loved Jesus you would just accept it”, or the answer given was found lacking.  For me this is why I was away from the church for so long.  The answers I was given didn’t make any sense.  That is part of why I am exploring this question with you right now – because finding non-standard answers to this question was essential to my faith journey, in fact, I wouldn’t be a Christian today, if I hadn’t found a different way to answer this question than the standard answer.  And the thing is, I didn’t find answers in spiritual books, or from TV preachers, I found them in the Bible.

One thing you should know about me, is that I am very passionate about discipleship.  To me discipleship is the essence of what it means to be a Christian.  In my opinion, without discipleship, Christianity is just a bunch of self righteous people living the same as the rest of the world, taking time now and again to complain about how bad everyone else is, and this happens in every church, we just all have different rulers with which to measure the other.

When I started seeking God, and learning about Jesus – I would read the Bible and get fired up.  The words of the prophets, like Isaiah’s that we heard would get me excited about God. I would read Jesus sharing his beatitudes and the woes – and It was clear to me that Jesus was up to something different, something subversive, something that would turn the world upside down if we took him seriously.

I would read the stories about Jesus and see him eating dinners with tax collectors and prostitutes, defending the life of an adulterous woman, but then I would read the paper, or turn on the tv and see people who called themselves Christians spending their time boycotting companies because they hired gay people.  I would see them picketing outside of movies that questioned or challenged their beliefs, I saw them spending millions of dollars to make their churches more luxurious than any movie theaters, while people die every day because they don’t have access to clean water.

But my love for Jesus was still growing.  I was falling madly in love with this man, the Messiah who came to help us understand the heart of God.  Who lived and died the same as any one of us, but came with Grace and Peace like we had never seen.  He showed us what God’s love looked like.  The creator of the universe came to show us his true power.  And God’s power was not in the guns or the bombs, God’s power didn’t look like tanks or drones, but the true power of God was demonstrated on the cross.  God flexed his almighty, universe creating arm, and we saw the Cross.

Here I am, falling in love with God, then I see Christians talking about how important it is to  protect our property and our lives – had they not heard Jesus tell a man that if he wanted to be faithful, he should sell all he had and give it to the poor?  I just didn’t get it, people who professed to follow Jesus, didn’t look anything like the Jesus in this book.  They condemned everyone elses actions, but they couldn’t take criticism.  They constantly complain about persecution, even though Jesus tells us to rejoice when we are persecuted.  They were more concerned with their own comfort and righteousness than they were for the hungry.  They were more willing to drop bombs on their enemies, than they were to pray for them.

They weren’t any different than the world that they condemned, they just cursed less.

It is sort of like falling in love with someone, and then meeting their crazy family.  Wow – you are amazing, I LOVE YOU, but these people are nuts!  That is how I still often feel amongst Christians.

When I came to Stahl, four years ago, I was a very naive pastor (I may feel the same way in another four years…).  In my mind, the way I thought about my job as a pastor, I had this idea that the church could avoid some of these fundamental questions about what it means to be a Christian, or what is the function of the church, or what is the Good News we are preaching…I thought, that if I would simply talk about discipleship – focus on service and justice and love and compassion, and generosity.  Jesus spends so much time talking about all of these things, I thought that if I just lift up this scripture  – we could all agree on it and start working on service and compassion and all that other stuff that is discipleship….

But at some point I realized that, just as Jesus tells us at the end of the Sermon on the Mount – in Matthew 7 – the foundation matters.  We fit all our beliefs into the foundation.  So our understanding of what it means to be Christian matters.  That becomes our mold or model for our faith journey.  It is like a shape sorting toy, like the image on the hand out in your bulletin.  If you have a square hole and a circle hole in front of you, and then someone gives you a triangle or a star – you are going to assume it isn’t related to this toy.  You may appreciate the triangle, say that it is beautiful, but you are going to set it to the side, and keep looking for circles and squares, because that is what really matters.  It may be the same material and form, it may be made by the same company as the circles and squares, but there just isn’t room for it. It doesn’t fit.  So no matter how many scriptures you hear from Jesus saying the same thing, you are going to think they aren’t important to the foundation of the story.

For many years we have defined a Christian as someone who has accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior.  Once you admit that you are a sinner, and accept Jesus into your heart –  you are a Christian.  It would be great if you showed up at church, put some money in the offering plate and stopped cursing so much – but now that you have said those magic words – you are a Christian.

I had a church friend in Minneapolis, he was in a take out restaurant ordering food, when a man came in handing out tracts and asked him if he was a Christian.  My friend hesitantly said yes to this guy, but soon for whatever reason, he was being asked to pray a prayer and accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior.  My friend prayed the prayer, because he loves Jesus doesn’t have any problem with prayer – but it all seemed weird and sneaky and manipulative.  It also seemed very shallow, as the man left without any further invitation to a renewed life in Christ.  This man way trying to be faithful, but I think he missed the point.

If the foundation of Christianity is “accepting Jesus” – if that is what it is all about – well then there isn’t really space for discipleship.  There really isn’t a need to worry about service or justice or generosity or compassion.  The only reason we would worry about the prisoner, or the hungry or the naked or the orphan or the widow is if they hadn’t accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior.  If the only slots we have are squares and circles, that is all we are going to see.

When we talk about Christianity this way – it becomes a destination.  When we say that the only action we must take to be christian is to “accept” the love of God – then Christianity is not a call to  discipleship, it isn’t even a call to true repentance.  Christianity becomes a sort of country club that we have gained access to.  With this foundation – prayer is only about asking God to make us wealthy and comfortable and happy.  Worship isn’t about coming together to be transformed, it is just a time with friends listening to music and words that make us feel warm and fuzzy inside.

We are so worried about people becoming “Christian”, that we lose track of all of Jesus’ words. We don’t have space for discipleship, because it might chase people away. We don’t want to tell people to buy a cheaper car and give the money to the poor, we can’t worry about telling people to stop shopping at places where the prices are low, but injustice is high.

We do all kinds of Biblical gymnastics so that we don’t have to change our lives all that much.  We get to continue to live our lives, focused on our jobs and our families.  As long as we don’t smoke or drink too much and don’t do drugs we don’t really have to repent of anything substantial we accept Jesus.

But that isn’t the Jesus in the Bible.  Those aren’t the words of Jesus.

Jesus says: If anyone comes to me and does not hate [their] father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters…such a person cannot be my disciple

Jesus says:  Woe to you who are rich…

Woe to you who are well fed…

Woe to you who laugh…

Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you…

But when we are popular and have money and food and joy in our lives – we say we are blessed.  We get to keep all our worldly values.  If being a Christian just means accepting Jesus into our hearts, the challenging words of Jesus make no sense.  The have no place, they simply don’t fit.

Church becomes a country club where the people who know the handshake hang out.  But that isn’t what church is supposed to be.  The Church in Acts is a place where radical disciples are gathered, trained, encouraged and sent out to make God’s justice flow down like a river.  If this is all just about accepting Jesus into your heart, then church is just a place where we pat each other on the back and complain about how evil everyone else is.

But Jesus calls us to repentance.  US.  Not others.  US.  This is about the plan in our own eye and not the speck in the others.  This is about discipleship that transforms us, into the hands and feet and voice of Jesus in all places.

There is only one place in Scripture where Jesus talks about separating faithful people from unfaithful, and he doesn’t say a word about accepting him into your heart.

When take a step back and look at the foundation of our faith – and are able to walk away from this shoddy foundation that tells us that once we accept Jesus we are a Christian – once we really sit down and read the scripture – read about Jesus – we start to see what it means to follow Jesus.  We start to learn what it means to be a Christian:

It is about service

it is about generosity

it is about justice

it is about compassion

it is about sacrifice.

I hope these words are stretching you.  I hope these words are helping you to think about what it means for you to be a disciple.  I also hope that I am not tearing any ACLs.  No sprained ligaments from over stretching… but that in my words the Spirit is opening up places where you can walk a bit closer to Jesus.

I want to take a minute and think about the Pharisees listening to Jesus.

Sometimes we paint the pharisees as idiots.  We make them one dimensional villains.  But I think vilifying the Pharisees is a very bad thing to do for our own spiritual growth.  They were human beings, trying to be faithful to God.  They were being faithful to the story of God that they had been given.  They were reading scripture for years – they could quote more scripture than you or I. They went to church all the time.  But they missed the point.  They fundamentally didn’t understand what being faithful to God meant.  And if these intelligent humans beings trying to follow God could miss the point, so could we.

The crazier part is that Jesus wasn’t saying anything new. Isaiah said it centuries earlier.  But they had their shape sorter out when Isaiah was speaking, and they had it out when Jesus was speaking too.  They knew that being faithful to God was all about purity, and worship and ritual sacrifices.  They had their squares and their circles.  When Isaiah said “Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight;  stop doing wrong.” they probably thought, we better stop bringing God lousy sacrifices.  We really need to bring the best animals of our herds, and we better tighten up those washing rituals.

They were too caught up trying to fit God’s story into the square hole, they didn’t even hear the words of God that Isaiah brought them:
Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.

Isaiah makes plain what pleases God.  Isaiah, just like Hosea and Micah and Jeremiah and Jesus and Paul, make it clear that faithfulness is justice and mercy.  Faithfulness is standing up for those who can’t stand for themselves.  Faithfulness is about making the Kingdom of God present now.

But when we already have God figured out – God can’t ever do something new – and God can’t ever have a different set of priorities than we do.

Our God is awesome and is worthy. Our God deserves to be worshipped. But does our God need our worship?  Does our God need our money?

No.

Does the prisoner whose family has given up on him need a visitor? Do the hungry need food? Do the oppressed need a voice?

It is like bringing your wife flowers every day, but never lifting a finger to help around the house.  Are flowers beautiful?  Do they let her know how important she is to you?  Yes.  But there are diapers that need changing, dishes that need washed and laundry that needs folded.

I was only able to become a Christian by throwing out this fundamental understanding of what it means to be a Christian. Going back to the Bible and realizing that it says nothing about accepting Jesus into my heart – but it says volumes about costly discipleship.  About getting the log out of my own eye, about loving the unlovable, about giving up my comfort and privilege so that others don’t have to suffer – that is what following Jesus means for me.  Once I saw that, I knew my love for God was real, and no one, not even the crazy family, which was now my family, could keep me away from Jesus.

Pray with me….