What is a Christian?

Romans12:9-21

In my years as a campus minister I read a lot about what young adults think about the church, and most of it is not cheery. One of the books I read is called Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity. The first sentence of the first chapter is, “Christianity has an image problem.” Did you know that? You probably already knew that.

It gives us much grief that most of the ugly stuff that comes out of the church is what gets the most public attention. We sometimes complain that we don’t get credit for the good things we do – and there are a lot of good things we do. It feels frustrating when we realize that the world is painting us all with the same broad brush whenever some church leader with a microphone makes some appalling statement, like “the hurricane happened because God is angry with the gays,” or whatever happens to be the hot button issue of the day.

The church has a reputation for being all about judging others. The church has a reputation for making pronouncements that seem to promote a worldview where there are insiders and outsiders, those who are God’s beloved and those who are displeasing to God. I have been guilty of voicing such opinions myself.

The church has a reputation for talking one way and acting another – of saying, “All are welcome,” and then making people who are different feel very unwelcome; of saying “Jesus is the reason for the season” and then cancelling church on Christmas because the members would rather stay home and open presents. Behind every accusation of hypocrisy is the possibility of a long and helpful conversation, but those conversations rarely happen. Most of the time, the initial impression does all the talking.

It is a fact that greatly distresses us. The word that is most closely associated with Christian in our culture is – hypocrite.

Christians are often called hypocrites because we preach love but often act in unloving ways. Christians are sometimes called hypocrites because we preach generosity but often act in ungenerous ways. We know these things are true, and we feel discouraged, or perhaps angry, that our shortcomings earn us the label hypocrite. Sometimes we might behave as hypocrites, but much of the time we are just fragile and flawed human beings like everyone else.

The truth of the matter is that it is not easy to be a Christian. In fact, Jesus told us that – not in so many words, but he surely hinted as much when he said things like “take up your cross and follow me,” and “the gate is narrow and the road is hard.” Following Jesus, being a Christian, is a hard thing to do.

And so, even if we are trying every day to do the right thing, we might still be called hypocrite because we will never get it exactly right. We will always fall short. I think the bigger problem might be that we are so rarely willing to admit it.

It is a funny thing – the church is very hard on those who fail – including ourselves, maybe especially ourselves. I have been thinking about this for the last few years, ever since I went to a church conference and heard about a project called Failure Lab.

It was started by a couple of guys, Jordan and Jonathan, who had an interest in destigmatizing failure. They noticed that the typical inspirational story starts out describing a failure, and then goes on to say how that failure led to some great success and changed the person’s life. This is great. But how does it help you if you have never yet felt the success part? What if you have only experienced the failure?

Jordan and Jonathan wanted to see how it would work to just put the failure out there all by itself. So that’s what they did. At every Failure Lab event, someone gets on stage to tell a story of personal failure. They are not permitted to whitewash it, assign blame, or tack a “moral of the story” on the end. They just put it out there and walk away.

The audience then is given some time to reflect on it. They are invited to share what the story means to them – they can tweet their comments, in 140 characters or less. Audience members might see some moral of the story and tweet it; they might see some value in it and tweet it. But the main value in Failure Lab is not the tweets, it is the act of taking your failure and just laying it out in the open. Folks who have done it say it is liberating. You have taken ownership of your experience, told your story, and lived to fight another day.

It’s not only the storyteller who benefits. When you are sitting in the audience, and you hear someone else telling their story of failure, it might feel awkward – but you know you are not alone. The fear of failure begins to melt away and you begin to feel the confidence that no failure can destroy you, no failure will take away your hope.

The church needs Failure Lab. We need to develop the confidence to tell the stories of our failures – our sinfulness, our shortcomings, the times we miss the mark and fall short of the love we profess to believe. We need the courage to stand up and say to ourselves, to God, and perhaps one other person, just how we have been crushed by our own weaknesses.

Why does it matter? You might ask. it’s a good question.

A young man I knew during campus ministry days once told me about his evangelizing experiences. He and another student went door to door in the dorms to invite others to join them for Bible study. It wasn’t at all uncommon for them to get a response like, “You Christians are such hypocrites! You say one thing and do another.” But what was unusual was the way these two young men tried to respond to it. They’d say, “yes, you are right. We say one thing and do another. We don’t live up to our hopes and expectations. We sin and fall short of the glory of God. We know that. We’re just trying to do better. And we want to invite you to join us in studying the scriptures and trying to do better.”

To be a Christian is to be a sinner, because in our human state we can hardly avoid it. But it goes further than that – to be a Christian is to know you are a sinner and confess your sin. To be a Christian is to have your sights set on something higher – these words from Paul in this chapter of Romans will do quite well – and to seek, with the help of God, to keep your eyes on the prize. To be a Christian is to strive every day to know the difference between good and evil and to respond to either one – good or evil – with love. To be a Christian is to try always to practice compassion, forgiveness, humility, and – just maybe – to be honest with one another about how hard it is.

To be a Christian is not to be perfect, but to know how imperfect you are. To be a Christian is to try hard not to hold other people’s imperfections against them. To be a Christian is to love and welcome other sorely imperfect people into the fellowship of sinners who are all in training to become saints.

Jesus chose to associate with sinners – imperfect, flawed people. He sat at their tables to share their food, and he invited them – and us – to sit at his table as well. He extended this love to us, and simply asks us to keep paying it forward. We come to his table knowing we are flawed and forgiven, knowing we are being offered spiritual food that strengthens us in love.

We come to Christ’s table for communion with him – but not only that. We come for communion with one another. Being a Christian is hard. No one can do it alone. We need each other.

New Life

Romans 12:1-8

When our family moved from Iowa to Pennsylvania, I gave up a career. I worked as a Research Associate at a big testing firm. I had a good salary and great benefits. But we decided this move was the best thing for our family, so we went. When we first got to Pennsylvania I was a stay-at-home mom of three kids – soon to be four. This was something I had to figure out how to do, as I had never done it before.

I joined the women’s coffee group at our church – I joined a number of things people invited me to because they said the magic words: there’s child care. On my first morning, all the women were talking about their craft projects. I learned from listening to them that they had a lot of talents – sewing, knitting, woodworking, and much more.” I was amazed at all the things they were doing. I finally said, “Gosh, I don’t do anything!” They just looked at me for a moment, then rushed to reassure me. “I’m sure there are things you’re good at.” They didn’t know me, so they didn’t know what those things could possibly be. But they had confidence that there was something I could do.

It wasn’t crafts. So it took a little time for us to figure out just what gifts God had given me for the good of Christ’s church.

Paul is turning a page onto a new subject in this 12^th chapter of the letter to the Romans. Having resolved for himself and, he surely hopes, for the church as well, that God has not rejected God’s chosen people. That, in reality, God uses all of us somehow for God’s purposes – plans which extend well beyond our ability to see. And now, he begins exploring a new question: how is God intending to use you? And me? And everyone in Christ’s church?

He urges his readers to present their bodies as a living sacrifice – that is, a sacrifice of the old self, former life, for the sake of something new. He asks them to be renewed and transformed by the grace of God.  We give up the old for the sake of the new life in Christ and as his body in the world. The problem is we don’t like to give things up.

When most of us hear the word sacrifice we think, “not me” or “you go first.”  We hope that someone else is going to be doing the sacrificing because there is nothing we wish to sacrifice.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that there is nothing I would like to give up. There are things I might be willing to give up – I have some old junk in the garage I would be happy to have hauled away. But that’s not sacrifice, is it?

There are some bad habits that I would be glad to get rid of. If I could figure out an easy way to do it, I would let them go in a heartbeat. But that’s not sacrifice, is it?

To sacrifice something implies that this “something” is good and valuable. It is inherent in the definition of sacrifice that the thing being sacrificed is loved and wanted.

Now who wants to do that?

The question of how we value things, people, places, and times affects how we regard the notion of sacrifice. If a sacrifice is the giving up of something good for the sake of something better, we need to look carefully at the value we place on everything. When I became a stay at home mother and left my career behind, I wasn’t sure how to value things. And I couldn’t figure out what value I had in the world I was now living in. No one had any use for my skills in running statistical analyses on test data, even though these skills had previously been highly valued and well-compensated.

You see, there are different systems of values – Paul might say there are the values of the world, or the flesh, and then there are the values of the Spirit. It isn’t always easy to figure out where the line of distinction is, because the church exists in the world and participates in the systems of the world

The world values money, but doesn’t ministry take a lot of money too? Clearly, we need money to pay for buildings, utilities, supplies, and salaries.

The world values power, but doesn’t the church use power too? There are some people in the church who have more power than others, by design.

The values of the world infect and affect the church. The theologian Richard Niebuhr wrote a whole book about how we understand Christ, and ourselves as Christian, in relation to culture, the values of the world in which we live. It has been said we are in it but not of it, which comes, perhaps, from Jesus’ words in the Gospel of John. And Paul says here in Romans that we are to be not conformed to the world, but to allow our lives to be transformed by the power of the Spirit into something new.

It is not an easy thing to walk this path, to have one foot in this world and one foot in the other, in a manner of speaking. It calls for continual adjustment as we seek to stay on the path.

There is an interesting film that gets to this very matter: how we value things in this world and the nature of sacrifice.

Babette’s Feast is a Danish film made in 1987. There are numerous reasons why you would not have seen this film. It is very dreary looking – dark and colorless. It is in Danish, so you have to deal with subtitles. Nobody you know is in it, so it has no box office appeal. There is no reason you would have seen it except that someone may have told you it is an absolutely extraordinary film.

The story takes place in an isolated village in Denmark in the 19^th century. It is inhabited by a rigid sect of Christians who try to practice an almost complete separation from those things that are valued by worldly standards. They shun all pleasures of the flesh – in their food, their dress, their furnishings, and all their activities.

Babette comes to them from Paris as a sort of political refugee. They cannot turn her away because it would not be virtuous to do so. But they don’t know what to do with her – she doesn’t fit in to their community. She offers to cook for them, to earn her keep. This is a gift she is happy to share with them.

She has to learn how to accommodate their bland tastes – because good-tasting food is a worldly pleasure of which they do not partake. She lives with them and cooks for them for fourteen years, and suddenly one day Babette receives some extraordinary news.

Since she left Paris, a friend who stayed behind has renewed a lottery ticket for her every year. This year, Babette has won the lottery.

She tells the community that she wants to celebrate by making them a real French dinner. She makes arrangements for all the necessary supplies to be sent from Paris, and as these items begin to arrive, the members of the community grow more and more worried: exotic birds, strange vegetables, crates of wine. This is going to be extravagant, they see. They don’t want to refuse Babette’s offer, but they are very uncomfortable being the recipients of such an excessive, sensual pleasure.

They decide among themselves that this is a temptation being put to them and they will respond to it by refusing to enjoy it. They will eat it because they have to but, with God as their witness, they will not enjoy it.

On the day of the feast they sit down and partake of one course after another. The rich food and excellent wines are forced into their mouths in small measure. They speak little and try to think about other things.

However, there is one guest at the table, Lorens, a visitor who is not a part of this community. He isn’t aware of their plan, so he does what any normal person would do. He exclaims over the wonders of each taste, praising the talents of the chef. He reminisces about a meal he enjoyed many years earlier at a famous café in Paris. Each sip of the wine makes Lorens more voluble in his praise, more sentimental in his remembrances.

At the same time, the others at the table can’t help but mellow a bit as they too have been drinking the wine. Gradually, as they sit at table together and share course after course of this splendid feast, words are spoken that have been withheld for years. Old wrongs are forgiven, love that has become stale is renewed, there is redemption and a general renewal of the human spirit at this table. They had feared that this sensory pleasure would awaken a wickedness in them. Instead it has awakened their hearts to love.

Babette, it turns out, was the chef at this famous Paris café Lorens remembered so fondly. Later that night, someone speaks to Babette about how much she must be looking forward to returning to her life in Paris, now that she has won the lottery. But Babette tells them she spent all of her winnings on this meal for them.

You see, the people of this community have been somewhat confused about what is valued. They thought that if they turned their back on all pleasures they would become a more Christlike people. As it turns out, in denying themselves so many things they had also denied themselves a great deal of love and forgiveness. Transformation had taken place at that dinner table.

They thought that Babette, and others like her, put value on the wrong things. Her life in Paris had been about creating earthly pleasures for people to enjoy, and no higher purpose than that, something they thought to be sinful. How shocked they were to discover that she had put all her worldly treasure into creating just such a feast for them to enjoy. Babette valued the wondrous things that could be done with the gifts of the earth, food and wine. And, perhaps without even knowing it, in this little village her gifts had been put to a higher purpose. Her life had been transformed by the gifts she had received in this simple community who gave her shelter.

What are we to say about such things? Perhaps only what Paul says: God gives us all the gifts God chooses for us, for the purposes of God alone. And God takes the offerings of each one of us as they are presented, doing amazing things beyond our expectations. In the giving and the receiving we are, and the world is, transformed.

Photo Credit: from the film, "Babette's Feast."