Monday, August 10, 2015

Resident Aliens: Being Christian in a Secular World



Preached on August 9, 2015
Scripture:  John 4:1-6

            Our world has shifted – Like a giant tectonic plate sliding Western on the Pacific rim of fire. 
For William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas, authors of the book Resident Aliens the first earthquake in this shift happened on a Sunday evening in 1963 in Greenville, South Carolina.  On that Sunday, in defiance of the state’s time honored blue laws which stated no businesses should be open on Sundays – maintaining the Christian Sabbath day - the Fox Theater opened.  The authors’ state:  “On that Sunday seven us – regular attenders of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Bumcombe Street Church – made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, then quietly slip out of the backdoor and join John Wayne at the Fox.”  On that night Greenville served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church.  There would be no more free passes for the church, no more free rides.  The Fox Theater went head to head with the church over who would provide the worldview for the young.  In 1963, the Fox Theater won the opening skirmish” (Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon.  Resident Aliens:  A provocative Christian Assessment of culture and ministry for people who know that something is wrong, Nashville:  Abington Press, 2014, 15-16). 
            The Supreme Court ruling in June providing the right of same-sex couples to marry represented the closing bell for our Christian majority culture – completing a new landscape in which we live. 
For over 1700 years we have lived under the umbrella of Christendom – a world where Christians held power.  This world – constructed by Emperor Constantine by making Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire - has collapsed.  It has been dying for decades. 
All the while, American Protestants – traditional Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians - have plodded wearily along as if nothing has been changing.  “Like an aging Southern mistress – living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city – our theologians and church leaders have acted as if we were still in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid” (Resident Aliens, 29).  Since I left seminary in 1997, stories of ministry in Post-modern America resembling that in the First Century Roman world have circulated.  Like many, I closed my eyes and hoped the prognosticators were wrong.  That day is here.  
            Let there be no doubt - We live in a secular world - Even in the religion soaked south.  No matter what indicators you use, polls, church attendance numbers, decrease in baptisms – it is obvious that the people in the United States who identify themselves as Christians has decreased sharply.  Pollsters call this decrease the rise of the nones – individuals who claim no religion – who mark “none” on their survey responses.  Families simply call this decrease our sons, daughters and grandkids.  Our Baptist children raised in our church nurseries, suckled on GA and RA’s, and toted in church buses around the south have examined the experience with faith they found in our churches and left wanting for more. 
           
Christian Response
The result is a world that feels normal – yet, when we look around everything has shifted.  And we are left with the choice for how we as followers of Jesus will live in this secular world.
            As I listen to preachers and news shows, watch my Facebook newsfeed and talk to friends – I notice three common, Christian responses to this new, secular world.
First – there is fear. We fear change and all that it entails.   And this world shattering shift is one of the greatest changes in any of our lifetimes.  When things change rapidly around us – fear leaps out of the hedges, grabs our throats and won’t let us go.  We begin to fear anything and anybody that is different – different points of view, different colors and kinds of people, different ways of doing things.  Fear has becomes the lens by which many of us view the world. 
Often, this fear materializes as the second Christian response to a secular world:  anger.  Anger is the most visible way Christians respond to our loss of the Christian majority influence in our culture.  We write or share angry posts on social media.  We listen to angry commentators on TV and radio.  And if we wait long enough in a Walmart line or at the barber shop or even venture to read a comments section on an online news article – we will witness anger spring to life. 
And then there is one more common Christian response to our secular world:  apathy.  Apathy is the ostrich with its head in the ground; it’s the grown adult with his eyes shut, hands on his ears, babbling to keep from hearing or seeing what is around him.  Apathy withdraws itself from the world – hoping to outlive or ignore the changes happening all around us.  Honestly, some of us have a better chance of outliving this shift – withdrawing into our homes – but for most of us – living in this new, secular world cannot be stopped. 

Gospel Response
            Fear, anger and apathy are the common Christian responses our secular world – yet, they are not the biblical response.  In our humanness, we exhibit fear, anger and apathy – yet, the Gospel communicates a clearly different Christian response to the secular world. 
            The teachings and actions of Jesus – the author and perfector of our faith – invite us to a new way living in a secular world.  The authors Willimon and Hauerwas building off of 1 Peter 2 name for this new existence for us.  Simply, they invite us to be Resident Aliens in a secular world.  Peter writes:  “Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul. Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge.”  As resident Aliens – we reside in the world.  We are citizens of the United States, the state of Georgia and Habersham County.  Yet – while we are residents of this place – as followers of Jesus we are not of this world – we are aliens and exiles – citizens of another kingdom demands to be our first priority.  As long as we live on earth – we will never feel like true locals. 
            Learning to live as resident aliens in a community that feels so familiar and yet so different requires us to listen more intently to and follow Jesus. 
            Look again at John 4:3:  3”Jesus left Judea and started back to Galilee.4 But he had to go through Samaria. 5 So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar.” 
            Traditionally, religious Jews like Jesus never went through Samaria.  To get from Judea in the south to Galilee and the North – religious Jews went around the region called Samaria which sits in the geographical center of Palestine.    Imagine for a moment that Georgians hated Tennesseans besides just on one Saturday in the fall.  We hated them to such an extent – we never wanted to step foot in Tennessee – so to go North to Kentucky we always traveled through Virginia or Arkansas – it was out of the way, but never saw a Tennessean. 
            In this passage – the opening verses of the passage on the Samaritan woman at the well – Jesus makes the radical decision to go through Samaria and stop in the Samaritan village Sychar. 
            “In Jesus’s day Samaritans lived just down the road – just over the state line - from their cousins the Jews.  Despite having much in common – language and religious practices especially – the two groups could not get along.  They were hostile to each other.  Like estranged family members, the nursed grudges.  To the Jews, the Samaritans were heretics” (Phillip Yancey, Vanishing Grace:  Whatever Happened to the Good News? Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014, 25).  John reports later in this passage that Jews did not associate with Samaritans – they didn’t talk to them, didn’t share things with them, and would rather see them die than help them in any way.  For the Jews of the time – there was no racial slur worse than being called – “A Samaritan.”  You – Tennessean!
            In John 4 Jesus intentionally goes to Samaria to teach us a lesson about how to live in this world. 
            Tim Stafford in an article in Christianity Today said that often times Christians compare life in our secular world with the Jewish exile to Babylon in the 6th century BC – we stuck in a culture that trumpets values hostile to our faith.  Actually, Stafford argues – living in the modern secular world of the West is less like living in Babylon and more like living in a modern Samaria.  “The problem,” Stafford says, “is not that our religion in America is strange to those who are secularist – the problem is that our religion in familiar.  Like Samaritans and Jews, Christians and NonChristians in America have a partly shared worldview (based on Western Traditions including the bible) and a shared point of origin … We are familiar with what each other believes.  We’ve suspicious of one another.  So we start off with a grudge” (Vanishing Grace, 25).
            If living in Secular America is the similar to living in modern Samaria then we need to pay attention to what Jesus says about Samaria.
            Not only does Jesus intentionally go to Samaria in John 4 – to the woman he meets there she is the first to acknowledges Jesus as Messiah. 
            In Luke 10, Jesus tells one of his most remembered and powerful parables to his Jewish followers.  In this story, a man gets beaten, robbed and left on the side of the road to die.  Two Jewish religious leaders pass him by.  Yet, it is a business man who stops to help.  Do you remember where he was from?  Yes – Samaria.  Jesus chooses to make the Samaritan good, the hero of the story.  What does this say to us about how we respond to our secular world? 
            In another passage in Acts 1:8 – Jesus gives his final word on Samaria.  Jesus says – “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  We’ve quoted and preached on this powerful com-missioning passage all of our lives.  Have we ever realized – Jesus is sending us as missionary to our secular world – which causes us so much fear, anger and apathy?  The story of Jonah feels comes to mind, doesn’t it? 
            We don’t need to assume this world shifting assignment came easily to the first disciples.  In Acts - Phillip begins preaching in Samaria and the Holy Spirit breaks out.  The church in Jerusalem questions it and really doesn’t want to believe it.  So they send their leaders – Peter and John to witness it. They return testifying to God’s amazing grace.
            As Resident Aliens in modern Samaria, Jesus invites us to lay down our fear, anger and apathy at the foot of the cross.  Instead – Jesus invites us to see the time in which we live as the most amazing, incredible and exciting opportunities for living and proclaiming the Gospel.  Willimon and Hauerwas make this powerful claim:  “The demise of our Christian culture as a prop for the church is not a death to lament.  It is an opportunity to celebrate … American Christians are at last free to be faithful in ways that make being a Christian today an exciting adventure” (Resident Aliens, 18). 
            This is how we live as Christians in a secular world – with a spirit of excitement anticipating the moments God breaks out in the world in new and fresh ways. 
            Moving from fear, anger, and apathy to joy, celebration and excitement does not come easily.  Living as a Christian in this secular world invites us to make three intentional responses.

1.      Ask the right theological questions. 
Life in modern Samaria requires us to learn to think theologically.  We cannot just say we believe what our parents believe.  We can’t just spout a list of essential beliefs.  Theologians in the 20th century were concerned about apologetics – trying desperately to get a secular world to make intellectual sense of our Christian narrative.  Jesus didn’t try to convince people to think differently.  Jesus taught so that people would live differently – be different (Resident Aliens, 24).  This is the key reason I am certain that our BELIEVE experience starting on September 13 will begin revival in our church.  The purpose of this experience will not be to brainwash our church to believe a certain set of principles.  This experience invites us to move our theological beliefs from our head to our hearts so that we live differently.  When we trust what we say we believe - we will thrive in modern Samaria. 
           
2. Develop spiritual disciplines. 
This summer, I have reflected on how I can best lead you – my church – to thrive in this new Samaria? I keep coming back to the practices of the early first century Christians.  What spiritual practices did they do that gave them power I in a secular world?  What kind of prayer life was necessary to thrive in ancient Jerusalem with your neighbors and relatives trying to kill you?  What kind of worship was required in Corinth to break through the glitz of the Roman Empire?  If we are going to thrive in the 21st Century – we must invest our time and energies reproducing these practices in our lives.  In our Believe experience we will ask – how can we act like Jesus?

3. Our final biblical response to a secular world is simply this:  Offer water to a thirsty world. 
While we may feel threatened or fearful or angry or apathetic – remember – the world around us is desperately thirsty.  Phillip Yancy in his book – Vanishing Grace, which I will be teaching on Wednesdays this fall – says this about our lives in modern Samaria:  We must become dispenser of grace - “utilizing the weapons of grace which means treating even our enemies with love and respect” (Vanishing Grace, 26).  When the Pharisees called Jesus “A Samaritan and demon possessed – he did not protest the racial slur.  Instead – he went through Samaria, made a Samaritan a hero in a parable and sent his apostles to preach the good news IN Samaria TO Samaritans. 
            Our secular world is thirsty.  And Jesus is the Living Water.  Henri Nouwen invites us to start living in secular America – modern Samaria – with a prayer on our lips.  It is simply this: 
“God, help me to see others not as enemies or as ungodly but rather as thirsty people.  And give me courage and compassion to offer your Living Water, which alone quenches deep thirst” (Vanishing Grace, 26).
            What if, instead of getting fearful and rushing to judgement or getting angry and bristling with self- defense or being apathetic and hiding our heads in the sand we simply prayed each morning:  Lord:  let me see your world as thirsty people, and teach me how to best offer your living water to those around me.         
What difference would this prayer make in your life?  What difference would this prayer make in your attitude?  What difference would this prayer make in our church, in your home, in your workplace, and even in our nation?         
            As we ask the right theological questions and develop spiritual disciplines and offer water to our thirsty world – God’s world will open up to us in new ways.
Yes, we will still be resident aliens.  So - Let us rejoice for now the fun really starts!  Thanks be to God.   Amen. 






4 comments:

  1. Thank you Eric. Instead of feeling defeated, hopeless, and alien-- your words inspire me to imagine how Jesus would see this secular world and reach out with love even more because of it.

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    1. Thanks, Nan! Good to hear from you. These are exciting days when we see the Spirit of God at work.

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  2. Outstanding blog post! One of the best I've ever read on what our response should be to the secular tidal wave. Thanks so much!

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    1. Thanks, John. With all you read and write on social media - this statement means a lot to me.

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