This is a special Sunday. We are celebrating Mothers' Day, the second Sunday in May. We are celebrating Pentecost Sunday, fifty days after Easter. And we have publicly welcomed two new members into the Church.
I am always aware of what Mothers' Day can mean. For many people it is a happy occasion, a time to celebrate having a loving mother who is alive or to remember affectionately a loving mother who is no longer living. For many women it is a time to celebrate the pleasure and privilege of being a mother. If that is how today is for you, I greet you and affirm your joy.
Mothers' Day is difficult for some people, in fact, for a lot of people—for mothers who have lost children to death or alienation; for people who have recently experienced the death of their mother; for women who very much wanted to be mothers but did not have the opportunity, and for people whose mother was unable or unwilling to be a loving parent. To all such people I express my hope for the eventual healing of your pain.
I want to focus this morning on the other two causes for celebration—on Pentecost and on the public welcome of two new church members. If you have some experience in the Church, you have noticed that I didn't read the traditional Pentecost Sunday text from the second chapter of the Book of Acts, where the Spirit comes among the followers of Jesus sounding like a mighty wind and looking like dancing tongues of fire. Instead, I have read the fourth Gospel's account of the coming of the Spirit into the life of the early church. In the fourth Gospel it is the risen Jesus who breathes on the men and women who had assembled in a room on the evening of the first Easter. It is an appropriate reading for Pentecost Sunday, which in the fourth Gospel is the same as Easter Sunday.
Against that background I raise the question "What is a Christian?" There is more background for my asking What is a Christian. Two weeks ago I was in Paris. It was a beautiful Sunday—warm and sunny. I went to church in the evening (for those of you who keep score about such things). I enjoyed a leisurely morning, taking my time showering and getting dressed and heading out to a café for coffee and a croissant. I sat outside and noticed a group of four young people at the next table. I overheard their conversation and discovered they were American. I ordered in French, so they had no idea I could understand what they were saying, which was very interesting. They probably wouldn't have cared anyway. They were very much into their own conversation, into their own world.
Two of the four had spent some time on a work project somewhere in Africa, and the other two were on their way to be part of the project. The two experienced participants were telling the newcomers about the young people they would meet at the project. "They're all pretty cool," one of them said. And then he continued. "There's a guy named Chris," he said. "He's really cool, a genuinely nice guy. He's a Christian. He takes being a Christian very seriously."
One of the newcomers said, "I'll look forward to talking with him. I don't know many people my age who self-identify as Christian." I was fascinated. Young people in their mid-twenties who saw a Christian as something rare, not part of the circle they moved in! When I was in my twenties, the New York Times reported on most Monday mornings what the Avenue preachers had said in their sermons the day before. Being a Christian was not an oddity.
More background information. Sojourners, a socially progressive periodical, recently highlighted a report by two pollsters about how Millennials, the emerging generation, view Christianity. Sojourners says "the results weren't good. An overwhelming majority of young people view Christians as hypocritical, too judgmental, too focused on the afterlife, and too political in the worst sense of the word."
"But other studies show that when you ask people what they think about Jesus, you get answers like compassionate, loving, caring, hung out with sinners and poor people, for peace." Sojourners said "We have a serious image problem. People think we should stand for the same things as Jesus did. So it's time to change the image."
My response is, It's not time to change the image. It's time to change the Church, time to change what the Church is—time to change the way large segments of the Christian Church present what it means to be a Christian. I continue to meet spiritually sensitive men and women who have been badly burned by judgmental churches and legalistic pastors. They are running away from institutional religion where they have been burdened with guilt and paralyzed by shame. It is with such people in mind that I offer my take on what it means to be a Christian.
For me Christians are primarily people who have come to believe the gospel truth that God is a God of love. It's not so much a matter of giving intellectual assent to such a doctrine. It's more a matter of opening oneself up to the possibility that God is love and living into that truth so that it becomes foundational for life. Living into the truth that God is love usually takes time and often grows out of experiencing unconditional love in a faith community where love is not only talked about but is practiced in a real way.
That is the exact opposite of being in a faith community where people are judged according to their race, gender, sexual orientation, or moral rectitude as defined by an outdated list of rules and regulations. It is the exact opposite of being in a faith community where people are expected to be able to say precisely when and where they had a conversion experience. For me, I don't care whether a person can give a time and date for being born again, but I care very much whether a person trusts that God loves her or him and is willing to let that love be the defining reality of her or his life.
When Jesus breathed on his followers gathered in a room with locked doors on that first Easter evening, he was giving them the Spirit he had promised them, the Spirit that overcomes fear, the Spirit that takes away guilt, the Spirit that energizes people for meaningful service—the Spirit that emanates from God's awesome love. Jesus told his followers the Spirit would remind them of his teachings as they became the Church. One of his clearest teachings was that God's love was flowing through him into the life of anyone open to receiving God's love.
Christians, then, are people rooted and grounded in love, God's love that affirms them as they are and invites them to live joyfully and responsibly, caring for the world, for other people and for themselves, not out of fear of punishment, but out of gratitude for the love they have received from God. Christians are people who are willing to believe Jesus when they hear him say, "Peace be with you."
Beyond that, Christians are people who understand themselves as being sent, that is to say, they know they have a mission. Their mission is not to talk about their faith all the time, although they may find opportunities to speak simply and honestly about what their faith means to them. And the mission of Christians is not to see that the slots on church committees are filled or that the church's organizational needs are taken care of. Healthy Christians will do some of that, but they will understand that their mission takes place outside the church more than inside the church.
When Jesus sent those first disciples out into the world, he was asking them to continue his work of making known God's love, his work of calling the world to reflect its creator's love by caring for the earth, by confronting injustice, and by working for an equitable distribution of creation's abundance. He was inviting them to enjoy and handle caringly their physicality and their sexuality. He was encouraging them to enter into satisfying relationships with other people, to understand and celebrate differences of culture, race, and heritage.
There's a lot more I could say about What is a Christian. And there's a lot I could say about What isn't a Christian. But for today it's enough to say that a Christian is someone who knows about and experiences God's unconditional love. A Christian doesn't just take that love for herself or himself, but passes it on, in word and in deed, and finds joy in doing so—just as I and many others find joy in preaching about it. As those young people in Paris might say, being a Christian can be a pretty cool thing. It is for me. I hope it is for you.
Thanks be to God.