Sermon from May 27, 2001
The hardest task in teaching people to be disciples of Jesus Christ is getting us to think like Christians about life. The Bible calls that change of thinking "the renewing of our minds," (Rom. 12:1). I would like to be even more precise. The hardest task in teaching people to be disciples of Jesus Christ is getting us to believe like Christians about life. The Bible calls that change of beliefs "the renewing of our minds." Our skepticism about matters of Christian belief makes that task hard. Let me delineate the sources of our skepticism.

If I say in a public way, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the only way to God," critics will say I am being narrow-minded and dogmatic. If in a public way any person makes any clear, religious statement that is strongly disputed, especially by the media, he runs the risk of being called narrow-minded and dogmatic. No one likes to be called those names, because they suggest that narrow-minded, dogmatic people not only do not consider all the facts, they are afraid to consider all the facts. They not only do not know the whole story, they do not want to know the whole story.

As a result, a curious thing happens. Great numbers of people, including many Christian people, no longer view clear, religious statments as proposals about the nature of reality. Instead, they come to view them as nothing more than symptoms of an unbalanced mind. Not wanting to be thought of as people with unbalanced minds, they do not make such statements in public. They reserve them for clergy (who are paid to make such statements in church) and for private opinion.

Then, another curious thing happens. The skepticism we have about clear, religious statements made in public carries over into church settings. People greet the statements made by pastors with skepticism, if not only with the suspicion that only people with unbalanced minds would make those statements even in church.

These clear, religious statements are never demonstrated to be untrue. They are not even respectfully debated by competent people in a public forum. To do that would be to admit that religious proposals about the nature of reality might turn out to be true. The editorial policy and high-tech resources of the mass media, the omnipresent offerings of the entertainment industry, and the academic culture of American higher education simply will not admit them into the public discussion, except to ridicule them.

As a result, people become understandably shy about expressing religious beliefs. They may also draw the further conclusion that beliefs do not say anything about reality; they only express the private emotions of individuals. Thus, a congregation of skeptics hears a staff of lunatics talk about private emotions that have no bearing on real life. And you wondered why I said the hardest task in teaching people to be disciples of Jesus Christ is getting them to believe like Christians about life.

But here is the real complication about the skepticism of liberal, democratic culture. It does not mean that beliefs no longer matter. It only means they have gone underground. What I mean is this. The person who mocks any clear, religious statement made in public, and who never makes such a statement actually lives his life on the basis of a multitude of deeply-held, often contradictory beliefs, many of which he doesn't even know he has. Even when he is aware of some of them, he may have nowhere to go to have them responsibly evaluated. He has already ruled out the ancient, hard-won wisdom of the church as a narrow-minded, dogmatic product of unbalanced minds.

Society can tolerate a chaos of mutually exclusive beliefs, as long as the economy does well and there is no military, political or personal crisis that brings that chaos out into the open. Should that happen, the reality of our hidden, contradictory beliefs can play out in the public arena in terrible ways. Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City serves as a small example of what that might be like.

I believe that most of us would like to see our nation characterized by a "vibrant, public, moral culture," (Witness to Hope, 847). That would provide a powerful safeguard to our political liberties. My proposal is that the Church is the key to achieving such a culture. Not the Church as a power broker in politics but the Church as a servant of humanity and as a model of the kind of vibrant, moral culture that would speak to the nation's conscience. If the Church is to challenge secular, democratic culture's vision of what it means to be human and what it means to be free, then we have to be a community marked by clear, shared, Christlike values. Mark 9:43-50 reveals such values.

Let's put these verses in their proper context. In Mark 8:31-10:53 Mark develops this theme of a suffering Messiah by repeating a threefold pattern three times in these two chapters. Here is the pattern.

Jesus' prediction of His suffering and death is always the first part of the pattern. The second part is always some inappropriate, uncomprehending response on the part of His disciples. The third part of the pattern is always Jesus' reply to the disciples' response, in which He challenges, encourages, and teaches them to grasp more clearly what it means to be followers of a suffering Messiah.

The key to this third part of the pattern comes in Mark 8:35. Jesus laid down there the radical principle of what it means to be followers of a suffering Messiah. "Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it." In that statement He completely inverts the values of ordinary life. Throughout chapters nine and ten, Jesus applies that inversion of values to specific areas of human experience.

Conventional ways of thinking hit a wall when Jesus said He was a Messiah, who was doomed to die. All His replies to His disciples' inappropriate, uncomprehending responses to that prediction say in effect, "Now that I have your attention, let me remake your mind by showing you how the kingdom of God really works." Every inversion of values He makes offers a bracing alternative to our conventional ways of thinking.

Perhaps you have already sensed that in what we have read together thus far. It will only become more intense as we move through the rest of chapters nine and ten. Don't blow Him off. You may try to blunt the force of what Jesus says by thinking He is just exaggerating to make a point. I don't doubt that He uses exaggerated language, but in each case the point He makes summons us to a renewal of our minds in order to bring about a renewal of human life. Let's take a look at verses 43-50.

The first six verses offer three variations on the same theme. Here is what they say. "If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where 'their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.' The first variation has to do with hands, the second with feet, and the third with eyes. These are the three physical instruments of voluntary human action. It is worth a moment's reflection on how Jesus' statement offers a vision of what it means to be human and what it means to be free that differs from that of secular, democratic culture.

First, Jesus teaches us that voluntary human action can go bad and just how bad it can go. That's what He means when He says, "If your hand causes you to sin ...." He calls bad human action sin. We almost never hear that word outside a Christian context. I suspect that is the case, because sin is a word that not only tells us something about man but also about man in relationship to God. It has dropped out of public discourse, because in our common consciousness that word carries unmistakable overtones about God, and we prefer to dismiss God from public discourse.

Jesus is making a statement about the nature of reality. Human behavior has meaning, not only because of what other people think about it but also because of what God thinks about it. The violence of Jesus' exaggerated language suggests what God thinks about it. "If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off .... If your foot causes you to sin, cut it off .... And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out." The disgust we feel at the prospect of self-amputation suggests the disgust with which human sin is observed from heaven. The weather gets heavier.

In the second place, Jesus teaches us that God will hold us accountable for untreated sin. That is what He means when He says, "It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out." Three times "gentle Jesus, meek and mild" speaks bluntly about hell, another indication of the disgust with which human sin is observed from heaven. Whatever it means to be love on two feet, it does not mean that He was unwilling to call human beings to account in the most ultimate way imaginable.

Once again, Jesus is making a statement abou the nature of reality. There is no place to hide from our Creator. Human behavior that goes bad has consequences – here (we already knew that) and hereafter (secular democratic culture has been trying for ever so long to say it isn't so). Suddenly, human life rediscovers its depths – at once more meaningful and more precarious. It is more meaningful, because we now know it exists in the tension of eternal consequences. It is more precarious, because not all those consequences are pleasant.

I said just now that God will hold us accountable for untreated sin. Jesus teaches us that human behavior gone bad can be interdicted. That's what He means what He says, "cut it off ... pluck it out." It is right here that we are prone to blunt the force of what Jesus says by thinking He is just exaggerating to make a point. No doubt, He used exaggerated language. He did not expect us to be a congregation of one-eyed amputees. The force of His language teaches us that in a world that is accountable to God for its behavior, it is appropriate to take draconian measures, if need be, to put a stop to our sins.

Here is a mild example of what that might mean. My wife and I subscribe to the Basic and Extended Basic TV services offered by Comcast CableVision. No movie channels and no box to special order movies. I like to surf the channels. As I did so, I discovered a lot of unedifying content, usually in the form of erotic or violent material or material that I find dreadfully boring. The erotic and violent material became troublesome to my conscience, so I erased the offending channels from memory. As a result, when I surf, the remote skips over those channels. Could I go back and punch in the number of one of those channels? Of course. The interesting thing is that I never do. Erasing the memory gave me the strength I needed to eliminate a source of temptation from my experience.

Am I so weak that I ned them to be eliminated? Apparently so. Sometimes, as Joesph in Genesis reminds us, the best course of action is to run. To hear Jesus tell it, when the choice is to fish or cut bait, sometimes the godly course of action is cut bait. Is it hard? At times, yes it is. That is why verse 49 says, "Everyone will be salted with fire." Enduring some hardness for the sake of Christ is part of what it means to be followers of a suffering Messiah. Verse 50 introduces us to another part of what that means by means of a play on words.

Jesus says, Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with each other." Salt makes food taste good, so followers of Christ should make life taste good to the people around them. Salt preserves certain foods from spoiling, so followers of Christ should help preserve the good things of this world from going bad. We are more likely to do both if we maintain the unity of the Spirit in a bond of peace (Eph. 4:3).

You realize that Jesus Christ puts us in tension with our secular, democratic culture. On principle our culture refuses to view clear, religious statements as proposals about the nature of reality. Instead, it comes to view them and to encourage us to view them as nothing more than symptoms of an unbalanced mind. That is how it would view what I have said here today, should someone attempt to introduce this into the mainstream of our cultural conversation.

I believe that what Jesus said about God and sin and accountability gives humanity a handle on the nature of reality. I believe that our culture's refusal to give His words a sympathetic, public hearing undermines human integrity and places human beings at risk with each other and with God. I hope you believe so too. But if we say we believe that, then we need to be clear about what it means to say, "I believe."

Lesslie Newbigin served forty years as a missionary in India. In retirement in the '90s he published a challenging little book called The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. In it he had this to say about the nature of true belief.

"When I say 'I believe,' I am not merely describing an inward feeling or experience: I am affirming what I believe to be true, and therefore what is true for everyone. The test of my commitment to this belief will be that I am ready to publish it, to share it with others, and to invite their judgment and – if necessary – their correction. If I refrain from this exercise, if I try to keep my belief a private matter, it is not belief in the truth," (Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 22).

If the Church is to challenge secular, democratic culture's vision of what it means to be human and what it means to be free, then we have to be a community marked by clear, shared, Christlike values. We must also believe that our values are true for everyone, and then, as Newbigin puts it, we must be "ready to publish it, to share it with others, and to invite their judgment and – if necessary – their correction." If we are convinced that our faith offers insight into the nature of reality, then we must engage in on-going, public dialogue with people who disagree with us. That will not be easy.

To many people influenced by mainstream American media we "conservative religious believers are parochial: hicks, country bumpkins, yahoos, rednecks, the great unwashed," (Timothy Burns, First Things, May 2001, 27). Many people view us evangelical Christians as hate-mongers. We are not, but our voice is not heard ditinctly to argue the contrary. But let us be ready for the day when our voice is heard. Let us be a congregation of the faithful that hears a staff of shepherds speak with emotion about the nature of reality.