becoming a third millennium christian - 5 theses

1) The third millennium Christian will need to spend less time obsessing over other worlds and more time stewarding this one.

It’s a cliché but a good one to say that the primary existential question for many is no longer Is there life after death? but Is there life before death?

Luckily, Jesus’ death to life story has always been about more than what happens after you die. In the Gospel of John the words for “abundant life” and “eternal life” are used interchangeably. In the other three gospels, the “kingdom of God” is something that can come over people not after they die but in the middle of their lives—for  the privileged, at the moment that they discover a new way of being in the world (think of the tax collector Zaccheus giving away half of his wealth to the poor and those he had defrauded) and, for the underprivileged, at the moment where their debts are canceled and their socially ostracizing conditions are healed.

What I call the “otherworldliness” of medieval Christianity and most of Protestantism up through modern ‘Murica was a concern that the church relegated itself to in order to prove itself unthreatening to the political order of the empire (that the church should’ve had to work so hard to prove this should say something about the volatile message still sitting in its attic, even if buried under some old stoles). In exchange for spaying and neutering its message so as not to disturb the “natural order,” the church was given a prominent symbolic status even if, functionally, it served as nothing more than funeral director to the society.

If the primary existential question that people are asking in our technologized, hyper-convenient, alienated culture concerns whether there is life before death, a church that waves its hand around in the air and assures people of the “transcendence of their soul” (which is not an authentically Christian idea but is more like the secular religion of the western world both inside the church and out) will continue to have nothing new to say.

A church, on the other hand, that can promise not only life but purposeful, abundant life in the “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18) bringing “good news to the poor” and proclaiming “release to the captives…recovery of sight to the blind,” and letting “the oppressed go free” (Lk. 4:18-19) may be able to not only promise a future life with Christ but draw people into the life of Christ right now.

2) The third millennium Christian will need to see opportunity in the decline of Christendom (the marriage of the church with the power and influence of the state) rather than lamenting it.

Any atheist can see the incongruity between a wealthy, politically connected, socially influential church and the homeless, disestablished vagabond whom it claims to worship (why so many within the protestant and Roman Catholic establishments of the western world can’t see this is beyond me).

That’s not to say that Christians should spend their energy arbitrarily eschewing social convention and political influence—that could be childish cynicism just as easily as faithfulness—but power and status, when we happen upon them, should be worn like a hair shirt with a deep suspicion that we might have done something very unlike the head of our church who was crucified as a political and religious troublemaker. 

If we truly are seeing the end of the church’s long dalliance with power and prestige, it should be seen as a reason to hope, not a loss. For the first time in 17 centuries, since it was named the ‘official’ religion of the ‘official’ people of the world, Christianity has the chance to authentically live up to its calling to side with the lost, the left out, and the forgotten about. This is good news not only for the church but the world. A world drunk on power and status can only be redeemed from the outside.

3) The third millennium Christian will need to stop claiming to have a monopoly on the truth but needs only claim a relationship with the Truth-teller.

In the past when being a Christian meant forcing one's own intellect to accept certain pseudo-scientific doctrines about God and world, those questions about how to relate to people of other faiths or no faith were very tricky. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that Jesus were a person and not a set of beliefs (I know, wild, right?). Suddenly, those questions become a cinch. I can't claim any special ownership of Jesus, the person, anymore than I can claim “Meredith is my friend, therefore she must not be yours.” 

And to be sure, it's no easier for this Jewish mashiach (“messiah”) to relate to someone weaned on the mostly pagan and Greek philosophical mess of mythologies and metaphysics that parade around as “Christian” than it is for him to relate to a first century pagan or a new age Buddhist. Only our naiveté about our own ideological origins ever allowed us to think otherwise—e.g. that believing certain things about the age of the Earth or displaying a collection of cherubic angels on the mantle somehow activated our status as God’s official people.  

I can easily get from “I believe such and such about God, and you don’t” to “therefore, you’re wrong.” But there’s no way to get from “God has a relationship with me” to “therefore you’re wrong.”  

4) The third millennium Christian will need to do less explaining and more loving.

Does this one need to be explained?

5) The third millennium Christian needs to give up Christianity’s present indifference to the well-being of the planet.

This relates to number 1. Why would a church that’s only interested in teleporting transcendent souls to another world have any concern for this one? Somehow, most of contemporary Christianity missed the part about how God "so loved" this world, called it “very good” and entrusted it to us as benevolent caretakers. But, in fairness, where might they have gotten that memo? Oh, right. I guess maybe where it says so on—um, hi—THE VERY FIRST PAGE OF THE BOOK THAT WE’RE ALWAYS BEATING OVER OTHER PEOPLE’S HEADS AND QUOTING IN CONGRESS.

I’m going to need to take out another prescription if I try too hard to understand how things have gotten this backward.

Every time a “Gawwud fearin’” Christian walks up to the podium in The House or takes the microphone on a radio talk show and gleefully preaches indifference to the Earth, they are not only severing their precious remaining strands of credibility for generations that can no longer afford to be flippant about the ecological challenges we now face, they are defying the very first responsibility with which their own self-claimed God charged the very first human in their own story!  If people have to fly out to a TED convention to hear someone preach that this world is worth saving because they know they won’t get that message in their local church, then “it would have been better [for their local church] to have never been born.”

If, on the other hand, ‘Murican Christianity should rouse itself to rethink the challenges of our time and suddenly take an interest in embodying God's kingdom in this present age—but, lets say, conservatively, they were only interested in the well-being of people, not the rest of creation—I’m fine with that as a concession. Should they happen to know anyone who lives on the Earth, then we’ll still be on the same team.

a challenge to millennials from a millennial

Here are some common perceptions about Millenials, their money, and their relationship to the church, followed by what I believe to be the kernel of truth in each and then a challenge to other Millenials who are trying to live faithfully in uncertain times.

1. The church is guilty until proven innocent.

Truth - Every thinking adult 18-118 can recite several scandals and atrocities that have chained themselves to the public image of the church. But where older generations might be able to juxtapose a positive image of their childhood church or a pastor that they remember well, Millenials generally aren’t. Or if they’re lucky enough to at least have that (as I do), it is regularly humiliated by the majority opinion of their peer group.

Challenge – As a generation, we pride ourselves on our ability to keep a conscious check on our biases. But how many of us are paying attention to all the clergy collars anywhere there is a peace protest or a rally for equality? How many of us are thinking of Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, Desmond Tutu, or Martin Luther King Jr. when we level our critiques at the church? I’m not saying we have to turn a blind eye to the church when it screws up as our grandparents might have been guilty of doing from time to time. Just be fair. And at least recognize the good with the bad.

               

The Church is not a Millenial’s primary clan

Truth - President Obama was wise to promote his health care law on “Between Two Ferns” with Zach Galifianakis not because it shares any deep resonance with his overall message but because the sardonic irony of its presentation is code for a deeper cultural awareness. The intended message was clear: “You can trust me. I’m one of you.” It's an understatement to say that the church lacks that kind of social cachet. A church meeting in some hipster bar or coffee coop might be short term draw for a few, but it's no Regina Spektor.

Challenge - If you want to follow Jesus but need a community more rooted than “pub theology” and not backward like fundamentalist Christianity, and you don’t believe that your down-to-earth neighborhood church gets you, your worldview, or your cultural mindset; then change it. Millenials are certainly too enlightened to be ageist, no? So give Hazel and Ethel a chance. As a pastor of multiple generations, you’d be amazed how many Hazel and Ethel’s I’ve met who, it turns out, were way ahead of me and the words I had to preach when, previously, I might have written them off as too old to accept what I had to say. Repeatedly, I’ve been all hopped up on my “radical Gospel” only to discover Hazels who are on the no fly list for protesting The School of the Americas in the eighties and Ethels who have spent decades teaching elementary school for almost no compensation in Mali and Columbia. Lesson learned: I’m not that radical. But I can be, if I get some skin in the game and maybe even humble myself to learn from these people.

Millenials don’t want to pay a mortgage and electrical bills for a church when they could be giving directly to a cause that they care about

Truth - Fair enough.

Challenge -  This is not an either/or, and most of us give so little to the “causes” that we say we care about, it would be laughable to claim that it is. Beyond that, how many Millenials realize that Lutheran Services in America is the single biggest charitable organization in America in terms of revenue? Last fall, at the drop of a hat, about 70 people from my congregation raised $45,000 to bring 29 families out of extreme poverty in the central plateau of Haiti. A crowd-funding campaign would have required ten or twenty times as many participants to generate that kind of investment. Why was this possible? Because we had also been paying electric bills and a mortgage so that we could gather week after week as a community, hear stories, and develop a common vision around a God whose heart is always first and foremost with the poor and who suffers no either/or-s when it comes to their sake.    

Millenials have no money

Truth - Millenials have no money, mostly (there is no poverty-by-association).

Challenge - Giving money away faithfully doesn’t require a steady income and sure handle on the future. In fact, the word faithfully implies just the opposite. And no one is asking you to compete with the empty nesters in the fourth pew whose house is paid off, and their one child got a full ride to Yale, and now they’re left with nothing but disposable income. A leap of faith for you might be $5 more per week out of your scarcity where another $100 to them is nothing. The church is the only money handling institution in our society whose president and CEO (forgive the language, Jesus) actually gets more excited about the $5 than the $100 (Mark 12:41-44). So don't worry about trying to impress anyone.

Millenials are anxious about the future

Truth – Delayed careers, student loan debt, housing crash; the whole bit.

Challenge - It’s commonplace in our society for us to entrust our future to our money. The theological term for that to which you entrust your future well-being is “god.” The word for a god that is not the right God is "idol." This nation may have spent centuries going to church on Sunday and writing "In God we trust" on its coinage (kind of ironic, no?), but when it came down to our anxiety about the real business of surviving, Christ has never seriously competed with your run-of-the-mill financial planner for the position of high priest. But money is a particularly unforgiving god whose mercy never overrules his cold, calculating logic. He will repossess your stuff and evict you cold and naked the second you anger him. So Jesus’ challenge to people with money anxieties was both counter-intuitive and elegantly logical, get rid of it. Putting money into the plate is an act of defiance against that copper god. In some sense, we’re literally getting rid of him in hopes of discovering a God who is far more gracious.

holy week and the importance of kicking fig trees

Humans come up with all kinds of gods. The details vary but the basic character tends to be the same. The gods always tend to be big, and attractive, and glorious, and powerful, and for all those reasons they tend to zap and destroy whoever is not all those things so their own divine reputations won’t be sullied by association.

 I have some familiarity with a lot of those gods. I even have a degree in gods and god-things. But in all my studies, I’ve only ever come across one god who doesn’t just do big, amazing things but silly, minor things as well. With so much predictable similarity between all the gods that humans have come up with, it’s striking that there would only be one who anyone has ever claimed might take a break from forming the eons to eat an apricot or banter with the guys at the drugstore. Throughout human history we’ve conceived of many gods that were more grand, more attractive, more clearly in control, but I’m astray to find another who might have to replace the wheel bearings on a cart or observe the thirty minute rule between lunch and swimming.

There’s a story in the Gospels of Jesus getting mad and kicking a fig tree. A fig tree! Isn’t it great? In seminary, the arbitrariness of this story used to drive me batty as I struggled fruitlessly to wrestle some cosmic meaning out of it. Anymore, I love it specifically because it’s so arbitrary. Think about it. Everyone knows that gods are big and cosmic and sovereign. They have been ever since elders first sat around campfires and told stories about them. Many of those gods are vengeful and have a short fuse, but when they get angry, they do things like blast enemy armies with lightning bolts and rattle the pillars of the earth. They don’t take it out on fig trees. I love it. The whole episode is so stupid!

When some keen observer of the world’s normal patterns writes the next bestselling exposé on how the stories about Jesus in the gospels are a bit implausible, I bet she'll leave out the part about the fig tree. They never mention that story. A god who turns water into wine and makes blind men see is a bit suspect. But what do you do with a god who does some venting on an angiosperm?

Christians in our culture always want to fight back when they’re called fools for believing this stuff. Why do they always fight back? Do we ever listen to ourselves? Our claim is that the Alpha and Omega of  the quantum energy, and exploding quasars, and dark matter of the cosmos one time threw a tantrum on the nearest flora. And it’s not like the author of Mark even apologized for him. There’s no verse that goes on to say, “Later, as he was checking to see if his foot was broken, he regretted how unsanctified this action must have looked at a time when a young god should be coming into his own.” Instead, he just casually wrote down that the second person of the trinity and agent behind all history kicked a fig tree like it was a journal entry on a particularly slow day. When people call Christians fools for believing this stuff, I believe the proper response is to raise one’s right hand and say, “Guilty.”

Now, if you’re reading this and you’re willing to allow that I’m foolish enough to worship such a person, it may not be clear yet why I’d find something as weirdly specific as this little dendro-assault to be important.

As I write, my late brother-in-law weighs heavy on my mind. He would have been 25 today. We lost him in 2012 after a long struggle with bi-polar disorder. He was a natural around a stove and a pretty gifted drummer. When I was dating my wife, and he still wasn’t sure about me, we were able to connect over the fact that we both loved every album ever made by Canadian trio, “Rush.” It’s amazing how even the seemingly insignificant little quirks of the people we love become the most cherished memories of a grieving parent or sibling.

I’ve been introduced to many different kinds of gods who do and care about many magnificent things. But at no point in my life have I even heard of another god who takes notice of the most minute factoids of our personalities and the fleeting details of our stories. Most gods have bigger fish to fry.

Only one who might kick a fig tree in a temporary lapse of composure can I imagine might also cherish the memory of how one kid in a small Midwestern town liked to sauté his asparagus or learn the drum fills to “2112.” Not just the limitless expanses of the cosmos, not just the fathomless folding and unfolding of eternity, but these tiniest character traits, so quickly forgotten in the moment, but so infinitely precious in hindsight—these are the oddball little components of life that this oddball god has deemed worthy of the divine time. The God of Jesus Christ doesn’t overlook, in the name of “the big picture” or  “not losing sight of the forest for the trees,” the funny little passions and one-of-a-kind idiosyncrasies of real people that lived and longed and laughed and loved.  The God of Jesus Christ has decided that those are the things that really matter, the things worth participating in, the things that make people irreplaceable, the things that are worthy of redemption and saving.

That’s what we celebrate during Holy Week.  

how to prove that you're a Christian, be joyful.

Poor Maude.

Maude knows a lot about how to be a Christian. She goes to church on Sundays and says her prayers at night. She doesn't swear. She'll have a glass of wine on appropriate holidays but never looses her sensibilities. She knows that a proper Christmas tree is to be put up on the first Sunday following Thanksgiving. Not before. Not after. It is to be decorated in tasteful measures of white and gold. None of those abominable football ornaments and cartoon characters.  Red is the proper color for Reformation Sunday. Purple for Lent. An appropriate set of paraments should be garnished in modest silvers and whites with an occasional blue for a Noah or Jonah scene but nothing so gaudy as a rainbow. She is forever baffled why her kids and their families never come to visit. When they finally are in town for a certain holiday, though, she can be overheard picking them apart either because the daughter should have never married that man in the first place or the grandson is forever wrinkling his good pants.

Maude knows a lot about being a Christian. But she is missing one of the most important things that actually reveals one to be a Christian. You can't squeeze an ounce of the joy out of the poor woman. And where joy is lost, so too the primary foundation for Christlike compassion, forgiveness, humility, and so on (hope and joy are interchangeable here).

The words that we translate as “joy,” or "gladness," or "rejoicing" occur dozens of times in the book of Acts’ account of the early church. They punctuate nearly every story and sermon throughout. We have accounts of first century politicians and military commanders who were regularly frustrated that they could torture, mock, and unleash wild animals on the early Christians, but they never could seem to snuff out their palpable sense of joy.

When most people in our culture think of what a Christian is, does joy come to mind? I'm leaning toward no. I try not to hold it against Maude that she has missed the memo on joy. Who can tell of all the neurotic influences who first convinced her that there was a proper way to be a Christian and that it probably wasn’t any fun? But it is worth telling her tale as a parable of warning.  What we most have to look out for as Christians is not immorality, it’s not assimilation into the culture, it’s not getting lax with our Bible study habits. It’s joylessness. All else that could ever reflect anything like the empty tomb will finally have some kind of joy as it’s foundation. 

We have to get this figured out. When people think of Christians, do they think of Saint Francis delighting in sunshine as he names brother fox and sister Chickadee? Do they think of Bonhoeffer winning over the loyalty of his imprisoners with his kind eyes and sincere prayers? Do they think of the uncontrollable laughter of Desmond Tutu even before the fall of Apartheid? Or do they think of Maude? 

You may be thinking, So what, then, if I don’t feel joyful? I can’t force myself to feel a certain way. Does that mean I’m not a Christian?

Luckily, joy is not an emotion to be confused with mirthfulness, and it's not the same as trying to stay  "upbeat" or "positive." In fact, joy can even hold in it a great deal of pain and sorrow.  And ignoring the world’s sorrows for what they are isn’t joy; it’s nihilism. That kind of denial is like saying, "We just won't acknowledge how bad things look because we don't actually believe that they could ever be any better."

Most importantly, you can actually practice joy and get better at it.

For a Christian, even in times of distress, joy is a disposition toward the world that says, In spite of the fight I'm having with my wife, she is fundamentally worth my staying in the fight; In spite of the violence in my neighborhood, my neighbors are fundamentally worth my working to improve it; In spite of the immense pain that happens in this world, this world is a good one, and I won't abandon it. Joy is the disposition to give this world the benefit of the doubt because however prodigal it can go, it is still God's world. This is why the otherworld obsessiveness of modern Christianity is so disturbing, it's exactly opposite the concern of authentic Christianity.  

It's telling that Mother Teresa lived most of her adult life in the depths of depression, and yet, when you look at her life’s work, it’s difficult to deny that she was one of the most joy-filled people ever. Not happy. Joy-filled.

That is, her actions betrayed a deep sense of loyalty to this world and hope that it is worth saving. That it can be saved. She could have easily folded under the weight of her emotional state and the immensity of need in Calcutta, asking, Why care? Why heal? Why go on?

But in defiance of pragmatism, her joy won out. Every bandage, every bathing, every tear was a living testament to the empty tomb. A testament that things do not, in fact, have to be the way that they are. A testament that one day they will not be.

That is the joy that we await on Easter Sunday.