What Does a Christian Look Like?

Acts 2:42-47; 1 Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10

April 13, 2008, Fourth Sunday of Easter

In 2005 Christine Smith and Melinda Denton wrote a book entitled Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Dan Clendenin, a Christian essayist writes about this book:

These sociologists document that teenagers overwhelmingly admire their parents as the single greatest influence in their lives, and gladly imitate their religious beliefs. Further, their study showed that teenagers actually like church. The conventional wisdom of teenage alienation from parents and hostility toward religion is an entrenched but erroneous stereotype, they argue.

Now for the bad news. When Smith and Denton asked these teenagers to describe the particulars of their religious faith, they were "incredibly inarticulate" about even the most basic tenets of their beliefs and practices. Rather, the vast majority of kids were abysmally ignorant of the religion they espoused. Here, for example, is the response of a 15-year-old who attends church four or five times a week, when asked to articulate her faith:

[Pause] I don't really know how to answer that. ['Are there any beliefs at all that are important to you? Really generally.'] [Pause] I don't know. ['Take your time if you want.'] I think that you should just, if you're gonna do something wrong then you should always ask for forgiveness and he's gonna forgive you no matter what, cause he gave up his only Son to take all the sins for you, so...

This from their scientific survey of 3,290 teenagers (ages 13-17) and parents, and 267 personal interviews, conducted across four years (2001–2005). Smith and Denton conclude that most "Christian" kids really operate with a vague sort of Moral Therapeutic Deism: be nice, don't do bad, for a remote deity wants you to be happy and feel good about yourself. In other words, says Smith, "we can say here that we have come with some confidence to believe that a significant part of 'Christianity' in the U.S. is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition."

Epidemic teenage ignorance is not an isolated phenomenon. I suspect that kids reflect the religious ignorance of adults. In a recent church membership class, for example, during the question and answer time a person asked my pastor why our church did not recite the creeds. Before he could answer, across the room another person interjected: "I love that question; but what's a creed?" Or again, a friend of mine who was educated at elite universities surprised me when he said that he had never even read the Gospels. Finally, twenty-five years ago when I started seminary, schools were so shocked at the Biblical illiteracy of entering seminarians that they instituted required course work and tests to try to insure eventual, basic proficiency.

Now I happen to believe that our C.E. program does a pretty good job of educating our youth. But this begs the question “What do we need to know to be Christian?” “What do we need to be to be a Christian?” “What is the life of a Christian like?”

Our passages from Acts and 1 Peter give us some answers to these questions. Acts, in the words of Amy Hunter, an Episcopal lay associate for spiritual formation, “paints a picture of the Christian community behaving as if it were the beginning of a love affair. In terms of the human they expressed the highest forms of togetherness and generosity, and in terms of the divine they experienced wondrous signs. But then there’s I Peter. Here, the flock isn’t experiencing devotion and wonders and signs, but pain and injustice. I’m willing to see it as a good dose of reality.”

The picture here is a loving community that resides in the midst of the real world. Last week I talked about being clear that people needed to be a part of the Church of Jesus Christ. This week all three readings focus us on how we can help people to find the gate. In this story that Jesus tells us today, even scholars have problems dissecting its meaning for people today. It is very complex. But it is clear that Jesus is the shepherd and he is the gate. Let’s focus on the gat e part of it.

We all like the story that Jesus told about the shepherd leaving the 99 sheep and looking for the one lost sheep. We like a God, or Son of God, that will come looking for us when we get lost. But today we are told there is a gate that we and all people have to find. And Jesus was also mentioning that there were many people in the Church of His time that were not helping people find the gate, but were leading people astray. It helps to know the context of this passage from John today. It comes immediately on the heels of Jesus curing the man who had been born blind. After Jesus heals him he is hauled several times before the Pharisees who end up casting the man out and denouncing Jesus as a heretic. Then our passage today is recorded. The leaders of the Jewish faith are the ones climbing over the fence.

Now Jesus depicts himself as the gate, this reflects his wonderful words in John 14 where he says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” It is also interesting to note that the early followers of Christ were called People of the Way. But when Jesus is not around to be the gate, the gate is not closed, but the gate becomes the followers of Jesus. We become the gate to the sheepfold. How do we do that?

Again we go back to Acts and 1 Peter to begin with. Acts speaks of a community who share everything. Clendenin writes:

It began to dawn on those first disciples, and it should dawn on all of us who stand on their shoulders, that "apostolic devotion" to Jesus entailed a commitment to a holistic way of living and thinking, what today we might call faith and practice, or in fancier parlance the development of a distinctively and comprehensive Christian world view.

Rather than an easy-believe-ism characterized by murky religious generalizations, Luke describes believers who gave themselves to plumbing the depths of Christian teaching. Whereas today our American culture encourages avarice, envies accumulation, and celebrates greed, he pictures early Christians who divested themselves of their wealth for the sake of generous compassion toward the needy.

This is how we erect the sign that says “Enter Here!” We need to create a distinctive Christian Identity: one that not only shares and helps, but that is also, in the words of 1 Peter, willing to enter into pain and suffering for others. Now I need to remind you that 1 Peter could be construed as encouraging people to become doormats and let others walk all over them. But again we must read everything outside of the gospels in light of gospels. Jesus did not allow himself to become a doormat. He refused to do violence to others. This past week we remembered the death of Martin Luther King Jr. who lived his life of non-violent strength. He was shouted at by the likes of Malcolm X and others who believed that the non-violent way was not going to get the black people enough rights or freedoms. But in the end the way of Dr. King won the day – to a certain degree.

There is a lot in the world and in the Church today that is not of Christ, and a lot of people are seeing that and saying, why bother? We need to give people reasons for seeking out the gate. We cannot let those who would destroy the church over human-created differences be the only picture that people see of the Church, and I believe that is part of our problem. People hear of the church being non-inclusive, of being racist on the news and they say that is why I don’t belong to a church.

We need to let people see the images of people like Yvonne and Lynne and past honorees who give of themselves and work to help others have a little easier time

in their lives. As many members of Christ’s church segregate themselves into ideological camps, as our world and our nation suffer from isolationism we must lead people to the true sheepfold of God by showing them the gate. That is the only way we can ever hope to create the community we hear about in Acts. The only way we can do this is by showing that we are different.

Amen

© 2008 Rev. Dr. Thomas T. Peters