text: JOHN 21: 15-19

15 When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” 16 A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” 17 He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. 18 Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” 19 (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”†

BOUND TO BE LED

In this text, Jesus presents Peter with a real-world way to heal and atone for having denied Jesus three times. Three times Jesus asks him, “Do you love me?” and Peter stammers out his affirmation each time.   After each incident, Jesus charges Peter to “tend his sheep,” making Peter’s pastoral calling most clear. 

But is this calling to follow and serve Jesus just an appeal to our voluntary spirit? I think not, and this is made most clear in Jesus’ ominous pronouncement in verse 18: 

Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.

This is in part a prophecy of Peter’s martyrdom, but it also suggests that the calling to follow Jesus and serve Him is something more than a mere appeal to one’s voluntary spirit. In this verse is the pattern for all Christian discipleship and all Christian maturity. When we’re “young,” we do as we please—go where we like and do whatever we wish—that is volunteerism and the voluntary spirit. But when we, like Peter, “grow old,” Another will draw us and take us where we do not wish to go. It’s fairly terrifying, and I’m saying it’s not just about Peter but about you and me as well. 

This is Christian maturity: giving up our own will and being willing to be led by The Lord wherever He may lead us. 

FROM THE BUBBLE

Last week, we talked about living in the suburban bubble.  Suburbia is that safe place we create to live and raise our children in peace. We also acknowledged that it makes it easy for us to avoid facing so many of the world’s problems. In our suburban bubble, we don’t have to deal with Third World poverty and injustice, nor are we daily confronted by the onslaught of urban degeneracy. It is easy to keep so many of the world’s problems out of sight and out of mind. That is part of being “young”—going about as we like. In this way, the suburban bubble is designed to keep us young (in that sense) and prevent us from being drawn into a deeper following of Christ. In short, the suburbs all but designed to keep our Christianity shallow. 

I’ll say again that our first duty is to be supremely grateful to God that we are able to live safer lives above the poverty line and away from so much of the prevalent dangers. We should be giving thanks to God in every hour of every day for the life we get to live. 

Today, I’d like to add that mature Christian faith calls us out of our bubbles—our safe, comfort zones—in order that we grow deeper in faith, and and shape our witness in service as we trust in the Lord more completely.  

Authentic faith always calls us out of our comfort zones.

The life of the Christian should not look like every other life. The quality of our lives should not be indistinguishable from that of atheists or agnostics. The difference our lives should display is what we call our witness. Our witness is effective precisely to the degree that it looks unlike the lives of everyone else who is just “going about, doing whatever they like.”

AGNOSTIC LIFE

We spoke a few weeks about about atheism and agnosticism. The atheist/agnostic life has come to look very much like any other life—even the Christian life—especially in the suburbs. They, like we, want peace, security, good schools for their children, lower taxes, lower crime, and a sane society to live in. They want the bubble as much as—if not more—than we. 

The agnostic life seeks to maximize sweetness, beauty, and health while avoiding all of the hard obstacles—pain, suffering, and disease. For them, salvation means something like affluence—the empowerment to live as they like and to remain able to go where they like when they like. They just want to get through life with as few obstacles as possible—for themselves and for their children. 

But this is just like us, isn’t it? What is particularly Christian about our lives in comparison? What does our witness look like? What about our lives are distinctive and look anything different than suburban atheism? 

The fact that we can see little difference reveals that much of suburban Christianity is a form of functional agnosticism. By that I mean believe what you want, but if our core desires and longings are no different than our atheist neighbors, then we have no witness, no true distinctiveness. If our lives look exactly the same on the surface, what proof is there that in the depths there is any difference? 

American Christians, hunkered down in their comfort zones, do not resemble the early Christians anywhere near as much as they resemble ancient Epicureans. 

EPICUREAN AGE

Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who lived From 341 BC to 270 BC. He believed everything was made of minuscule solid particles floating around in a void. Even the gods, Epicurus believed, were made solely of matter. Epicurean philosophy is materialistic, discounting the gods and avoiding the reality of death. The good life is to do no harm, minimize pain and suffering, and otherwise try to enjoy oneself in the moderate pursuit of pleasure. Ethics derive from ideas serving the common good of the society. 

I mention it today because I suspect it is presently the dominant philosophy of the Western world, certainly of today’s America. Furthermore, what I’m calling suburban Christianity looks much more like Epicureanism than the Christianity of the first Christians. 

If “the pursuit of happiness” is regarded as a Christian value, then the Epicureans have nearly won. If Christians think Christianity is well served by this Epicurean code, then Christianity is gone. 

Let’s be clear: authentic, mature Christianity runs directly opposite to Epicureanism. We believe that God is the center of all, the source of all and the end of all things is His glory alone. We believe the world is more than material; it is spiritual. We believe that unless death is answered by resurrection, then death is god. And we believe that the highest Christian virtue—agapé love—is that which sacrifices personal comfort and pleasure to benefit others.  Jesus puts it all succinctly in Matthew 16: 24-25: 

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 

Our role as Jesus’ followers is not to pursue our own happiness, security, and pleasures; our job is to get out of our comfort zones. 

GETTING OUT

The pathway to authentic faith can always be found somewhere outside of our comfort zones. What this looks like in practical terms is simply doing the stuff that needs to be that nobody else wants to do. We are called to be servants—which is slaves—of the Lord, which means our witness is communicated by the distinctive difference of our intentional, downward mobility. No work is beneath us, no form of service too low—we do what others are unwilling to do as a sign of our adoption in Christ. 

I know that sounds upside-down, but it is the upside-down life that points beyond itself and this world toward our loving Lord. But this isn’t all: not only should we embrace the forms of service that others shirk, but we do it with a smile. No slogging along long-faced, no “martyrs” in the simple sense of self-hatred or smug self-denial, but rather an eager embracing of our servanthood with joyful hearts and a warm, joyous disposition. 

We are servants of Christ, willing to be “bound and led where we do not wish to go.” This points the world to a reality beyond ourselves—beyond self-interest, self-security, and the pursuit of happiness that defines suburbanism, Christian or otherwise. 

Our maturity—our “growing older”—looks like our increasing capacity to be led where no one really wants to go. This is the path of the cross, the taking up of our cross, and to the world, it looks crazy. But that is also what makes it work. 

Unlike functional agnosticism—the life of avoiding obstacles and making our way through comforts and self-interest—Christian discipleship seeks out those obstacles and plows through them! Where is trouble? Where is suffering? Where can you and I make a difference? Those are the obstacles the world avoids that the followers of Jesus actively pursue. 

I can’t say how exciting it is for me to sit in on Serve Team meetings. A great mission group never asks for what is safe, easy, or economical—on the contrary, we find our hearts revved up by considering our calling to places no one else wants to go. Let other churches go where it is easy, but let us rather seek out a calling to places others fear to go. Saudi Arabia? Why not? Iraq? Iran? If we’re doing the Lord’s bidding, what could be more exciting? If He calls us, He will empower us. This is what we pray for. 

That is why we are out looking for trouble, storming the gates—even of Hell itself—with the glad confidence that God is ready to work miracles through us—yes, even us—as we present our hands to be tied and joyously long to be led. 

May we all come to that awareness that the Lord is near and that His eternity touches this present moment. 

†

 PSALM 14: 1-7 

1 Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.”

    They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds;

    there is no one who does good.

2 The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind

    to see if there are any who are wise,

    who seek after God.

3 They have all gone astray, they are all alike perverse;

    there is no one who does good,

    no, not one.

4 Have they no knowledge, all the evildoers

    who eat up my people as they eat bread,

    and do not call upon the Lord?

5 There they shall be in great terror,

    for God is with the company of the righteous.

6 You would confound the plans of the poor,

    but the Lord is their refuge.

7 O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion!

    When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people,

    Jacob will rejoice; Israel will be glad. †

Atheists Old & New

Atheists used to look like this:  

These three guys have done more damage to the modern world than any three other nations combined. Typically, their names were mentioned only with dark expressions, for as thoroughgoing atheists, the American public always regarded them with great suspicion. 

Today, atheism has grown respectable. The so-called New Atheists are best-selling authors on whirlwind speaking tours in universities, TED talks, and daytime talk shows. They are no longer overshadowed by the smoky cloud of incredulity for their spite of religious faith and all notions of the sacred. The tables have turned; atheists are now okay. 

Good news about the New Atheists: they’re not saying anything new. They have no new arguments or new evidences to add to the atheisms of the past. There are no new revelations(if you will) that have sealed their position and no new scientific advances that have made their claims any more credible than the atheism of the iron age. 

According to the Psalmist, all atheists are fools. To deny the reality of God is to be foolish. I still believe this, but foolish not in the sense of lacking intelligence or reason, but foolish for closing oneself off with the limitations of scientific knowledge alone. It seems atheists live in a closed system with known rules, and anything operating beyond these rules is to be discredited and/or disbelieved. 

It may be helpful here to define our terms. Atheism is not a religion, though it may lead to certain ideologies. An atheist is simply a non-theist. They do not disbelieve in God; they simply do not—perhaps cannot—believe.  Atheism, as popularly understood, includes agnosticism. Agnostics “do not know” about God, and may claim that God might be real, but cannot be known. The differences between atheist and agnostic are mostly hair-splitting. Most atheists don’t claim to disprove God’s existence—and that isn’t their job—but they say that based upon what they see, know, and understand, there is no God as others think. 

“I don’t believe in God”

I suspect that most atheists were made, not born that way. My atheist friends, without exception, have stories of growing up in faith communities or religious families which so force-fed them Christian truths that they embraced atheism like prisoners liberated from cages.  Like many other atheists in the western world, they felt they outgrew Christianity (or Judaism) and left it behind with Santa Claus and the awful and embarrassing things they wore in high school. Many—too many—carry this tone too far, speaking of their former faithfulness as an artifact of childhood or adolescence, and now that they have abandoned belief, they are “free,” “enlightened,” “woke,” or otherwise justified in acting smug toward people who love Jesus. 

Even so, there is common ground to be found. All of us who believe have the same thoughts as atheists, by which I mean we all can think like atheists, if we try. We all have what can be call atheist thoughts. Acknowledging these raises our awareness of common ground with them and may help our dialogues. 

Most atheists do not reject God (as I see it) because they have not seen God. They will admit as much. The “God” they reject is rarely, if ever, the same as our Lord God whom we love.  They reject God’s representatives—the Church, evangelists, and well-meaning Christian friends or parents—moreso than God Himself. 

They also quick to reject false versions of God—the “old man in the sky” with a long white beard, or the vindictive judge flinging thunderbolt—and they are right to do so! So are we—we, too, ought to be vigilant and quick in rejecting false versions of God. 

Atheists reject all caricatures of God—strawman versions inflating negative characteristics and otherwise dumbing-down every theological definition in favor of and easy to criticize caricature. We too reject such caricatures. 

Sometimes, atheists have no negative opinions about God, but they feel deep antipathy towards Christians and abhor the idea of conforming to the herd. They feel that saying no to the Christian throng makes them strong, or stout, or individualistic—all in a sense that increases their sense of esteem and/or personal empowerment. 

All of these—by themselves or in combination—play a role in the atheist worldview. They may claim a lack of evidence for God’s existence, but seeing evidence is not the same as faith. And those who deny belief in God will certainly believe in something.  There is no avoiding it; we are hardwired for belief of some kind. Without God, something else takes the place of God, be it the self, the natural world, the State, or some other preferred abstraction. 

Much of our 21st century culture has abandoned traditional faith. things stand in the place of faith in America today? It’s not so much pagan gods as it is the artifacts of our progress: arts & entertainment, politics, a deep trust in the scientific method, technology, or following the Dodgers. Again, where faith is not real, a substitute must be found. 

THREE CULTURES

Sociologist Philip Rieff has articulated three world cultures based upon society’s relationship with the sacred. 

The First Culture is Paganism. In the history of humankind, there was a time when all was pagan. By pagan, we mean that humanity’s sense of the sacred was driven by the concern for one’s fate. Fate ruled, and the stories and myths developed as a way for people to come to terms with their fate. The gods were fungible; they could be invented and reinvented at will. The gods were invoked as a way to encounter and overcome fate. If one god didn’t work, you made another and tried again. 

The pagan moral code was built upon taboos. A taboo was a property of the gods. You respect this or fear that because it belongs to one of the gods. Pagans (unlike modern neo-paganism) were very religious and the sense of the sacred overshadowed all of life. They lived and ordered their societies by a constant awareness of the sacred. 

The Second Culture is Judeo-Christian. We know this culture very well, don’t we? Paganism came to its practical end with the Second Culture. The difference is that in the Second Culture, God self-reveals to humankind. God comes to Abram—not vice versa—and reveals Himself as the one, true God No more gods: no images, no names, and no attempts to control or remake God in one’s own image. We Christians believe that this process of God’s self-revelation culminated in the Incarnation of Christ. Jesus was and is the decisive and sufficient self-revelation of the one, true God. 

The center of the Second Culture is faith. Faith is our response to God’s self-revelation. The Lord is God and we live under God, subject to His Word and will. The universe is His Creation and we live in response to His grace by serving His Lordship. 

To come to faith means nothing more than acknowledging that Jesus is Lord, which is actually a lot. This remains the biblical worldview, and it is presently under attack by the Third Culture. 

The Third Culture is based upon fiction. Rieff says the central motivation of the Third Culture is simply anti-Second Culture. There is no new truth or revelation to stand upon—just the rejection of the Second Culture truths and values. 

There is no real truth, just the truths we choose for ourselves—the truths we make up—which is why fiction is the central motif. 

Truth is an invention, reality is an invention, therefore you can’t say what is truth for me, and I get to determine what is truth for myself. 

As such, humanity is divided up into a carnival of sub-communities, each committed to their own, self-made fictions and vying for empowerment and influence.  This Third Culture spirit sees no difference between Christianity and paganism—they would say both are just made up as coping mechanisms—with neither having any legitimate truth claims. Third Culture superiority is based upon the debasement of the sacred. That’s right, the Third Culture has no sacred whatsoever, just competing, relative sacreds (fictions). 

In the Third Culture, all faith and religion is like a great nerd battle between Star Wars fans and Trekkies. 

For the Third Culture, God is dead. They disbelieve in God’s self-revelation and consider it the past, obsolete fiction of Jews and Christians. The only true god is Death, and death animates the arts, the sciences, and the popular consensus as the only absolute truth. 

Without any notion of sacred (not even Death is sacred, though it comes close to functioning that way), there is no central morality. There is no absolute value or truth to stand at the core of society, which means the Third Culture—without God and without a unifying sense of the sacred—is based on chaos and will inevitably tend towards Chaos.

While atheism was condemned by pagans, Jews, and Christians alike, atheism fits very well into the Third Culture.  Again, thank you so very much to Nietzche, Freud, and Marx. 

The disturbing thing is that this Third Culture—gaining ground every year and ultimately intent upon eclipsing the culture of faith—offers no new foundations. Its foundation is an anti-foundation. It exists only by opposition to the past with nothing to offer in its place but atheism and chaos. 

Our Christian witness IN AND TO the culture of death

Given that this is a growing worldview, we should ask how is it Christians are to behave and shape our witness in the decades ahead. 

Now this entire Storming the Gates series has had a central theme—a punchline—that I have not explicitly named. The center addresses our witness to Christ in the midst of tension, turmoil, and division.  We’ve seen how harmful it is to dumb-down issues to the merely-political level, and we have acknowledged again and again that is better to be useful than right.  Our role in the world and God’s Kingdom is to endlessly display a reflection of the character of Christ and witness to His grace and goodness. 

Our Christian response to the world, in all the cases we have explored, is the same. Behind every hot topic of this series, the core characteristic of our response is Kindness. It is kindness that ought to shape our attitude in the midst of every trial and tension. Kindness characterizes the best face for our witness, and we ought to take more care to be kind than to justify ourselves in being right. 

Complete the following sentence: 

I’d rather be right than __________.

We’d all rather be right than wrong, but put some other words in there and see if it still seems wise. Would you rather be right than faithful? Rather be right than loving? Would you rather be right than kind? 

Maybe not on paper, but in the way we live do we put being right ahead of kindness, faithfulness, or love? Only at our own peril. 

Come on—all of you in your marriages and families know that being right is not always the best course of action. It is often better to be wrong and have peace than to insist upon your own justifiable opinion. It works the same way in the world and for our Christian witness to the burgeoning Third Culture. 

Christians: Be Kind. 

Let us remember as we meet atheists and atheism that faith is a gift, not necessarily a choice of will or reason. 

My heart breaks for my atheist friends. I see the Lord—I know the Lord!—and I see my atheist friends as people wearing blindfolds. I want so badly to yank that blindfold off, but I can’t; it doesn’t work that way. Neither can they remove the blindfold themselves. You and I can take no credit whatsoever for our faith—we did not choose to believe, but somehow, in the mystery of the Spirit’s work, we had our blindfolds removed by God. We didn’t get it, then we did. No credit to us. 

Similarly, we can’t reason an atheist’s way out of their blindfolds. Faith is a gift, and we must say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I!”  We can share Jesus with them as God wants us to do, and God may use us in their process toward faith, but we cannot talk them into faith. We can pray for them: “God, please give my friend the gift of faith!” and we should pray this, but we ought not to think of their un-blindfolding as a work we can achieve by either reason or good intentions. 

We are utterly dependent upon God’s Holy Spirit in witnessing to the good news of Jesus.  God does the un-blindfolding, God gives the gift of faith. And for that reason, we can’t be too hard on people who do not believe. They can’t help it. They don’t know they’re wearing a blindfold and do not know they are blind. They think we are crazy and will continue to think so until God should show them what Light is. 

Love opens ears. May we be a help in having ears opened. In the meantime, let us pray, let us witness tactfully and do so with great kindness, great love, and great hope in the Spirit’s work and timing.  †