NOTE: I am putting my weekly sermons on the church website. It will be on for two weeks (usually posted on Friday) and then placed in the Archives area by date. You can download in a matter of seconds.
Let me know what you think. The church Email is: slumc@direcway.com, Phone: 480.895.8766
Sunday, September 4, 2005
“Put on the Armour of Christ”
Scripture: Romans 13: 8-14
I developed this message prior to the Katrina disaster. I feel it is still timely. During the serving of the communion elements, I will address Katrina and Biblical reflections on this and other disasters. Please read Part I, and Part II, as I think they are both timely.
Laurie’s 16. An ex-cheerleader and honor student.
You wouldn’t expect her to do a stint in a closed psychiatric ward after overdosing on drugs — some of which she couldn’t even remember taking.
When questioned about her behavior, she said, “I don’t know. I just didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything or anybody. I didn’t care about my life. I didn’t care if I — if I died. I didn’t care if I woke up dead the next morning. Sometimes I wanted it. I was just like — you know how you can be alive but not really living? I was like a zombie.”
Terry, 12, summed it up this way after being sent to jail for the first of many times: “I was like, whatever. Take me to jail. I don’t give a s**t.”
“Whatever!”
Sounds harsh, right? When we hear this, our reaction might range from mild irritation, to anger or despair. How do you deal with someone who expresses such utter indifference and disdain?
Whatever! It’s an adolescent mantra that’s bonded to a snarling semantic: “Like, do what you want, it’s not like you’re going to listen to me anyway, or if you do, what are the chances you’ll understand what I’m saying? Whatever!”
It’s easy to blame, the choices are so vast: television, movies, music, schools, friends, marketing and other “cultural” stuff.
But when we do this we’re swimming in a pool of meaningless finger-pointing. We see the whatever culture as a matrix of bad choices, evil alternatives and disconnections. We see it as a market-driven, sex-crazed, skin-creamed, bottled-water culture that is not “living right.” And if all that is “true,” whom do we have to thank for all of this?
In his new book, The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence, Elliot Currie tells the story of Laurie, Terry and other teens who surprisingly come from middle-class families, and he offers an interesting and powerful argument. He suggests that we’re all to blame for the “whateverness” and care-lessness of the youth culture. Whatever you think of his thesis, he has the credentials. He’s an acclaimed sociologist, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his book Crime and Punishment in America, and when he’s not writing, he’s a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine.
His thesis is one that a lot of people would rather ignore: that “all is not well with the children of middle-class America.” He tells us what we might already suspect, that there are too many kids today who are not on the road to maturity, or the road to success, or the road to prosperity. They’re on the road to “whatever.” Thus the title of his book.
These children are the kids of parents who have bought into the “simplistic theories” of tough love, teen boot camps and what some call “half-baked measures” that “humiliate teens instead of according them respect and basic human dignity.”
Add to this four additional problems: the inversion of responsibility, the problem of contingent worth, the intolerance of transgression and the rejection of nurturance. No wonder so many kids consider themselves screw-ups and respond by shrugging and saying, “Whatever.”
Don’t stop listening.
The Inversion of Responsibility. In his research, Currie heard kids telling him that they were burdened with too much responsibility for their own lives. Parents argued that their children needed to learn to make “good choices,” and so kids were left to figure this out themselves. So a responsibility that one would think properly belonged to the parent, has now become the responsibility of the child.
The Problem of Contingent Worth. In a culture of contingent worth, it’s not enough for a child simply to “do well.” The child must “do better” than anyone else. Their value as an individual is determined by performance. For an adolescent, this means, for Currie — in the words of Kafka — that the “court is in continual session.”
The Intolerance of Transgression. Just as kids are subject to rigid standards of performance, they are also expected to function within a narrowed and closely defined set of moral boundaries and to do so without failure. Adolescence is a time when kids do stupid things. That’s why they have parents — to ease them through those missteps.
The Punitive Reflex and the Rejection of Nurturance. So, Currie continues, if a child believes he’s messed up, he’s failed to perform acceptably, his worth is contingent on his performance, a sense of care-lessness creeps into his attitude and behavior. Who cares? Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Nothing I do is going to be good enough.
Things are made even worse when parents go into a punitive mode rather than a nurturing mode. Often the response of parents and schools is to “send away” the offending child who is then without guidance and direction.
Now, let’s look at the Romans text before us and ask ourselves the question as to whether it is possible the church has functioned like the parents Currie describes and has produced “whatever” Christians.
What we discover is that Paul cautions against the very attitudes described in The Road to Whatever. What he says demonstrates that the church’s role is not to produce “whatever” Christians, but “whenever” Christians. Let’s look at the rubrics again one at a time:
The Inversion of Responsibility. At first glance it might appear that Paul is laying down a boatload of moral and religious obligations here.
But we know that this is not true. Paul is very clear, in Galatians, for example, that the keeping of the “law” is beyond our scope. Moral perfection, even with the most scrupulous attention to the details of the law, is not going to happen.
But Christ has kept the law for us. Our responsibility is not to be perfect — that is, without flaw — but rather to be faithful in one thing: loving one another. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (13:8). Whenever we act in love, and with love, toward those around us, we effectively fulfill the intention of the law. “The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet’; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law” (13:9-10).
Whenever Christians do not look at the needy, the less fortunate, or their own family members or their sisters and brothers in Christ and say, “Whatever.” They have made themselves available. They say, “Whenever.”
The Problem of Contingent Worth. Whenever Christians understand that, apart from Jesus Christ, there’s no point in talking about worth or value. Whenever Christians understand that whenever they minister to others, or the “neighbor” (13:10), they are reaching out to a person of worth, and they themselves are people of worth because they know that their worth is embedded in God’s deep and profound love for them.
The Intolerance of Transgression. Moreover, Paul doesn’t raise the expectation that there is no room for failure. Instead, he urges “whenever” Christians to “wake from sleep” (13:11). Mistakes will be made. But there is so much work to be done, so much service that needs to be rendered. It’s not the task of the church to be beating its members over the head about being perfect, but rather to understand the urgency of the hour: “For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near” (13:11-12).
Whenever Christians understand that as people of worth, they minister to people of worth, and that they do so as imperfect but willing instruments of the love of God. And that such ministry and service must be rendered now, while the opportunities are still before us!
The Punitive Reflex and the Rejection of Nurturance. Make no mistake, we should not live “in reveling and drunkenness, [nor] in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy” (13:13). But to talk about punishment misses the point. Instead, we should “lay aside” these things, and “put on the armor of light” (13:12). We should “live honorably as in the day” (13:13). And finally, we should “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (13:14).
This is how the ChristBody is encouraged, built up, trained and made effective. Honorable living, and by clothing ourselves, as it were, with “the Lord Jesus Christ.”
These are good words for us to remember in a culture of whatever. At a time when we’re so politically and religiously and culturally divided, it is tempting to expect everyone to match or live up to our own peculiar or specific expectations. If we continue this line of reasoning we’ll produce a generation of “whatever” Christians who feel that they can’t measure up, so why try? We’ll generate a culture of nonbelievers who look at the church as irrelevant and unreal.
It’s time for the church to be populated by Whenever, not Whatever, Christians. The text before us clearly articulates the difference between the two:
Christians have clothed themselves in Jesus Christ.
This text calls us to be “whenever Christians,” who seize the moment to act as Jesus Christ himself did who, when he saw the teeming masses said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:28-29 NIV). Responsibility to todays children, along with the recovery efforts from Katrina's damage, must be an ongoing effort . We must not join the throngs of persons in the political milliea, who will point fingers, blaming the other side, and not sharing the blame. We must respond as Christians, lovers of God’s children, even in the midst of a natural disaster that will be tainted even further, with the political name blaming.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~``````~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. If God is all-loving and all-powerful, why does he allow such devastating events to occur?
2. Does God deliberately make them occur?
3. Does the fact that some areas sustain severe damage from a natural disaster while other areas are untouched by it imply that those in the affected areas are somehow more deserving of trouble than those in the unaffected areas?
4. Are people who settle in risky areas, such as on land below sea level or along earthquake fault-lines, asking for trouble? Even if we all were willingly to live only in geographically "safe" places, do such places exist in enough quantity to contain us all?
5. What should our faith-response to natural disasters be? (TAKE A MOMENT AND ANSWER THIS QUESTION SILENTLY)
Confronting the News with Scripture
The Bible, while not directly answering the big questions, offers us several passages that help us think about them. Here are some pertinent ones:
Psalm 107:25
"For he commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea." (For context, read 107:23-32.) The psalmist no doubt spoke for the dominant view in ancient Israel when he wrote that God can command the winds and waves. The psalmist added that God also "made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed." In another psalm, God is pictured as speaking through a storm (see Psalm 29) and in many places, the Old Testament views storms as instruments of God (for example, see Isaiah 28:2 and Nahum 1:3). What's more, the Bible includes examples of where, when it suited God's purposes, God used the weather as a tool to accomplish his will (for example, see Exodus 9:22-26 and Jonah 1:4). In the New Testament, Jesus' ability to still the storm was one of the clues that helped his followers begin to understand that he was no mere mortal (see Luke 8:22-25.)
The belief that God can control the weather always raises a theological question when faced with weather-related disasters. If God can hush the waves, then why didn't he do it when so many lives were at stake? Why didn't he do it in the case of Katrina? In fact, theologians have a word for the problem: theodicy. Specifically, theodicy is the attempt to defend the goodness of God despite the existence of evil. Great thinkers have labored long and hard to come up with a fully satisfactory explanation, and so far, none have succeeded. Yet the strong affirmation behind the belief that God is Lord even over the weather is that no matter what happens to us, we are ultimately in the hands of God.
Question: What word of hope might you speak to someone who has survived Katrina's destruction but lost everything else in the storm? (AGAIN, TAKE A MOMENT TO REFLECT ON THIS QUESTION)
Acts 27:24
"Do not be afraid, Paul; you must stand before the emperor; and indeed, God has granted safety to all those who are sailing with you." (For context, read 27:1-44.) This verse comes from the account of the wrecking of a ship carrying the apostle Paul and other prisoners to Italy. The wreck occurred during a "northeaster" (v. 14). One notable change in this account from the story of Jonah's flight from God (Jonah 1), is that Paul, though very much a man of deep Christian faith, does not attribute the storm to God. Rather, God's action is identified as one of salvation, of saving Paul and his companions from the storm. Furthermore, the story gives another perspective. Acts 28 tells of Paul's stay on an island where the shipwreck survivors landed, and while there, Paul was able to heal many people in the power of Christ (28:9). Thus, God used the circumstances caused by the storm for good to be accomplished.
Questions: What good might arise from the circumstances caused by Hurricane Katrina? Does it outweigh the harm caused? Can the resulting good and harm even be compared? (PONDER THIS QUESTION FOR A MOMENT)
Luke 13:4
"Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them -- do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?" (For context, read 13:1-5.) This rhetorical remark from Jesus helps us at least with the question of whether disaster victims are somehow more deserving of trouble than others. In the context of Luke 13, some people told Jesus about some Galileans who were slaughtered by order of the Roman prefect Pilate while they were in the process of offering sacrifices. Jesus responded with a rhetorical question: "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans?" Then he added another example, asking about 18 people who were killed when a tower collapsed on them. Were they somehow worse offenders than others?
Clearly the answer Jesus wanted his hearers to come to was "No." His object here, however, was not to challenge the common belief in his day that trouble came to people who most deserved it, but rather to make the point that the coming judgment of God was inescapable and that all would face it. Still, his comments show that Jesus did not buy the notion that disaster sought out the worst sinners. Jesus further showed his conviction that incidents of weather or accident were not routinely used by God for reward or punishment when, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that God "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous" (Matthew 5:45).
Isaiah 53:3
"He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity ..." (For context, read 52:13-53:12.) This verse is from an Old Testament passage that describes a suffering servant of God. The church, looking back on this passage, has understood it as a description of the Messiah and as a prophecy fulfilled in Jesus (see Acts 8:26-35). The view of Jesus as a suffering savior also gives us a helpful image of God as one who suffers along with his created ones. Thus, no matter what questions we have about God's control of weather, we also have a God who suffers with us.
But there is something further. The Incarnation of God in Jesus is not just God's way of identifying with us, for he sent Jesus as the Great Physician, who heals by sharing the pain. Or as Isaiah described the Messiah, "He was a man of suffering ... [who has] borne our infirmities and carried our diseases."
Questions: Does the image of a God who suffers with us help you in any way when you are confronting pain, loss or catastrophe? Why or why not?
. Hebrews 13:16
"Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God." (For context, read 13:7-19.) This is one of several practical applications of the Christian faith urged by the author of Hebrews as he comes to the close of his book. It is a brief statement but one with profound implications in situations where others are in need
Question: What are our obligations as Christians toward those who are the surviving victims of Hurricane Katrina? List as many obligations as you can think of.
Closing Prayer
O God, please strengthen and uphold all those who are working to save lives, restore order and bring aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Come with comfort to those who have lost loved ones. Show us how we should help. In Jesus' name. Amen.
``````````````````````````````````
Source:
Currie, Elliot. The Road to Whatever: Middle Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence. New York. Metropolitan Books, 2005.