Standing Up For Jesus

Preached on Sunday, August 27th, 2017
at First Church in Sterling, MA
by Rev. Robin Bartlett
Sermons are better seen.
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I have a simple message this morning:
It matters what we say about Jesus. It matters what we teach the children.

If we don’t teach them what we believe about God, someone else will. As Aristotle reminds us, nature abhors a vacuum. Someone will fill it if we don’t. 

Plenty of us are uncomfortable teaching our kids about God. We aren’t sure how to explain such an unexplainable topic. We aren’t sure what WE believe about God. We aren’t sure we can explain what we believe in kid-friendly terms. We want our kids to be able to decide for themselves. Some of us are still angry and reeling from childhood religious trauma, and don’t want to inflict that on others.

When my mom was three years old, her sister tragically died of meningitis. Kate was only six years old when she died. Her mother, my grandmother, Margot, was understandably never the same after that. 

My mom wasn’t either. She became an only child. She prayed the Lord’s Prayer every night before bed for years after Kate died, and her prayer to God was for a little brother or a little sister. My grandmother got pregnant three times, and three times she miscarried. After the third time, my mother stopped praying the Lord’s Prayer altogether. She raised me an atheist and didn’t teach me to pray because she didn’t want me to suffer the same crushing disappointment she did in a God who doesn’t listen, or worse, a God who doesn’t care.

It matters what we teach the children. It matters what we say about Jesus.

My dad wasn’t scarred in the same way as my mom by God…he just stopped believing in college. He always used to say to me that he “believed in science.” As a kid, I always thought you had to pick one or the other: God or science. Like my dad, I chose science. But science doesn’t love, or forgive, or ask you to follow.

It matters what we say about Jesus. It matters what we teach the children.

I tried to pray occasionally as a child, but I never knew who or what to address my prayers to. I needed a moral compass with a human face. Evolution is magical, but devoid of heroes, as the poem says. 

Despite my mother’s desire to keep me spiritually safe and my father’s desire for intellectual integrity, I needed some sort of human way of connecting with that which is ultimate and transcendent. You can’t teach disbelief to a child, only wonderful stories.

It matters what we teach the children. It matters what we say about Jesus.

Who do you say that I am? Jesus asks this question of his disciples in our scripture text from Matthew. “You are the Messiah,” Simon Peter answers, “Son of the Living God.”

Who do you say that I am? We, too, need to answer this question because it matters who we say Jesus is. We need to occasionally stand up for Jesus.

I know. Jesus can stand up for himself. But we need to stand up for Jesus not for his sake, but for ours’.

Right now, most of the people I see standing up for Jesus don’t have his best interests in mind. 

Look, I know it can be uncomfortable and complicated to say you’re a Christian right now, or to say that you go to church. People start looking at you sideways and making assumptions about what that means. I’ve heard so many stories about that lately from you that I’m thinking about making you all t-shirts that say “First Church in Sterling: not that kind of church.” (When people ask me what I do for a living on a plane or in a bar, I tell them that I run a small non-profit.)

But our kids are about to start school on Tuesday. Before they do, let’s stand up for Jesus before someone else does. Before someone on the playground says that Jesus deems gay and trans people an abomination. Before someone in their classroom tells them that Jesus judges people worthy or unworthy based on sin. Before someone in their classroom tells them that women should be silent in church, or that God favors and blesses the rich. Before a parent tells them there’s a war on Christmas just because the Jewish and Muslim kids want to feel included in the classroom, too. Before someone on the bus tells them they are going to hell. Before they see Westboro Baptist picket signs announcing who God “hates” on TV.

It matters what we say about Jesus. It matters what we teach the children.

“Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks.

We need to answer that question for our kids, unequivocally, with the word “Love.”

Because nature abhors a vacuum. And that vacuum is being filled with the weak and the vulnerable.

Brian McLaren, who was among the clergy in Charlottesville three weeks ago, writes in Time Magazine:
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“After returning home from the Charlottesville protest, I came across an interview with Christian Piccolini, a former white supremacist. As a teenager, Piccolini was recruited and radicalized by an extremist group. “There are so many marginalized young people, so many disenfranchised young people today with not a lot to believe in, with not a lot of hope, so they tend to search for very simple black-and-white answers,” he explained. Savvy extremists ready to dispense those easy answers have no shortage of potential recruits, easily accessible through the Internet.

Piccoloni’s words seem equally relevant in Afghanistan or Syria, Virginia, Ohio or Arizona….
Terrorism has many faces, and no lack of vulnerable young people, and easy ways to recruit.
….The draw is “not necessarily because of the ideology. I think that the ideology is simply a vehicle to be violent,” Piccolini explains. “I believe that people become radicalized, or extremist, because they're searching for three very fundamental human needs: identity, community and a sense of purpose.”

McLaren talks about an interview he read with Richard Spencer, an acclaimed white supremacist who counted Charlottesville as a religious experience. Spencer gushed about the torch-lit neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in religious terms: "I love the torches. It's spectacular; it's theatrical and mystical and magical and religious, even."
McLaren writes that “White nationalism isn’t simply an extremist political ideology. It is an alt-religious movement that provides its adherents with its own twisted version of what all religions supply to adherents: identity, a personal sense of who I am; community, a social sense of where I belong; and purpose, a spiritual sense of why my life matters. If faith communities don’t provide these healthy, life-giving human needs, then death-dealing alt-religions will fill the gap.”
It matters what we say about Jesus. It matters what we teach the children.

So when Jesus asks: “Who do you say that I am?” Our answer must supply a personal sense of who we are, a community: a social sense of where we belong, and a purpose: a spiritual sense of why our lives matter. We need to answer this question as a community; as a church. We need to answer this question, and then provide opportunities to live the answer. Death-dealing alt-religions will fill the gap if we don’t.

So if Jesus asks me, “Robin, Who do you say that I am?”

I think I’d say this:

Jesus,
You are love. You are born of God, who loves all people on all of the earth, even me. You were sent to show us what God’s love is like because love is a slippery word that means so many things. Your love surprised us when it came in the form of healing, forgiveness, grace, truth, challenge, freedom, unity, miracle, and plenty of chances to begin again. 

Jesus, you are king. Of your upside down kingdom, the last are first, the lost are found, the least are favored. We know we are acting in your name every time we get up the courage to do something right, especially when we are afraid, or when what’s right is hard to do. 

Jesus, you are a teacher. You teach us that we belong to each other. You give us this sacred place to show up to every week so that we might be known by the name Beloved. So that we might be blessed to use our gifts together in service to our community and the world.

Jesus, one more thing. You are truth. Your Love involves turning over tables and chasing people with a whip sometimes. There is injustice and hypocrisy and greed happening in the world every day, and your response is righteous anger, which is a form of Love. This is the kind of Love that that resists hate, that brings the marginalized into the center, that defies fascist governments like the one that killed you. You came to loose the chains of injustice, on earth as it is in heaven. We came for that, too. You taught us that we can do hard things.

I hope the children will know you the way I know you, as a nemesis and friend. Because, Lord, the earth needs a nemesis and friend like you right now.

Thank you, Jesus: our love, our king, our teacher, our truth, our friend.

Amen.