Spoiler Alert: Faith is Fairly Unspectacular

Isaiah 58:1-9a

I Corinthians 2:1-12

How many of you watched the Superbowl last Sunday?  It was an exciting comeback win for the Chiefs and the first Superbowl in fifty years for Kansas City.  Obviously, our condolences go out to the 49’ers fans in our midst.

 

Now let’s be honest.  How many of you watch the Superbowl as much for the commercials and the half-time show as for the game itself?  There were some funny commercials.  And that half-time show featuring J-Lo and Shakira certainly got people’s interest!  I saw on social media that some people were bothered by the scantily clad dancers.  Others simply remarked that J-Lo seems to be in pretty decent shape for a fifty year old woman.

Ratings were up about 1% for this year’s Superbowl.  About 102 million people watched the game.  The ratings went up during half-time, when 103 million people tuned in.  Fox sold out national ad spots for the game back in November, with 30-second ads going for $5 million.

I was at a synod gathering for pastors in Kansas City on Wednesday.  I didn’t go to the parade though I’m sure it would have been fun.  It was very cold.  And my biggest fear is being cold, in a big crowd, with nowhere to go to the bathroom.  But it was fun to watch on TV. 

The Superbowl is an annual American spectacle.  It’s an athletic event, yes.  But it’s also part of our entertainment culture.  Being part of this entertainment culture probably makes it a little harder for us to live together as people of faith.  That’s not a judgment about entertainment.  (In fact, I look forward to watching the Academy Awards Show tonight).  It’s just an invitation for us to reflect today on some of the ways that our habits of being spectacularly entertained can make the life of faith seem . . . less than dazzling.  I suppose we even have to admit that some people have lost interest in the good news of Jesus Christ because it isn’t spectacular enough; it isn’t sufficiently entertaining.

Our readings invite us to explore a tension we will experience in the life of faith.  They invite us to recognize a conflict at the heart of any attempt to live together as God’s people.  And here’s the rub: our worship and our faith will always sit at an odd angle with other parts of our lives.  There will frequently be an ill-fit between our faith and the rest of our lives.  So let’s look for a minute at why that might be the case.

The reading from Isaiah appears to address a crisis in Israel’s life that involved a compartmentalization of religion.  They were observing holy days on the worship calendar by fasting.  That is, they were fully engaged in the rhythms of faith.  They were diligent in their commitment to the gathered worship of the community.  And they couldn’t understand why God seemed aloof and unresponsive to their prayers.

The word of judgment from God is harsh.  On the very days that you fast, you exploit your workers.  You take time off to worship, but your employees are given no such freedom.  You keep them working around the clock in backbreaking work for wages artificially lowered so you can increase your profits.  (Apparently, the way we earn our living is an important part of our faith.)  

The judgment continues.  When you observe a fast day by worship, the day ends with quarreling and strife.  You go to church, but later that day you end up punching someone in a fight.  You sing the songs and pray the prayers, and yet those rhythms don’t manage to shift anything in your emotional life.  You haven’t made any progress on your issues with jealousy, envy, anger, and competitiveness.  You can’t keep your worship life quarantined from your economic life.  You can’t keep your prayer life safely barricaded from your emotional life and your way of relating to others.

Now don’t miss the point here.  God isn’t criticizing us for practicing our faith.  God demands that all the different parts of our lives be brought into the light of who we as God’s beloved people.  God demands that we begin the hard work of dismantling all the walls we’ve built between our faith and our work, between our faith and our hearts, between our faith and our relationships, between our faith and our desires, between our faith and our politics, between our faith and our attitudes.

Don’t make it harder than it needs to be, God says.  The kind of fast day I want is a day where you spend your time fighting injustice and helping the poor gain freedom from the greed and exploitation they face.  The kind of religious observance I want involves the work of providing food to the hungry and shelter to those down on their luck.  Share your clothes with those who need clothing and care for people who need help, whether they are family members or strangers.

You want protection and relief from your struggles.  You want meaningful work, peaceful relationships, and a life filled with joy.  But you’re not going to get what you want until you get back to the basics of caring for others.  The light will shine for you NOT when you reach for the impressive or the spectacular.  The light will shine for you in the small acts of faithfulness that will very rarely even be noticed by others.

The apostle Paul makes the same point in a different way.  Paul is writing to a congregation at odds with one another.  After at first welcoming the good news of God’s love, the congregation has now separated into several factions, each aligned with a different leader.  And so Paul is dealing with a worshiping community in conflict.  Each group sees itself as the most central and important group, judging other groups of people less worthy of belonging to the congregation.  This way of mapping who’s important and who’s powerful and who’s in charge is a complete abandonment of the good news.

Paul points to his own preaching.  I wasn’t powerful and impressive when I was with you, says Paul.  I wasn’t charismatic and entertaining.  My sermons could be too long, and a little dry, with not enough jokes.  When I preached, I really only had one thing to say.  And I said it again and again, trying to convince you to welcome the good news into your lives.  And that good news is that God’s glory is most clearly revealed in the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus.  This is a story of violence, disappointment, loss, and pain.  And yet you all keep turning away from this story line to something different, something more comfortable and entertaining, less demanding and difficult.

When Jesus lived among us, the rich and the powerful didn’t get it.  The established, the insiders, the politicians, and those with wealth dismissed him as unimpressive and unimportant.  And when push came to shove, they sided against him and manufactured an unjust trial and executed him in a shameful way that expressed their hatred of anyone who challenged their privileges and advantages.  The rulers of every age are hell-bent on maintaining their power, influence, comfort, and success at all costs.  Those values won’t work in the life of the church. 

Things work differently here.  Look around you.  Every single person here has been called here by God’s Spirit.  There aren’t any circles of insiders and outsiders.  There aren’t any stratifications between the important and the less important.  No one gets to pull rank on anyone else (including the pastor!).  We’re in this together.  And whenever we fail to respect and love one another, we contradict the way God’s Spirit is gathering very different people into a new kind of community.  When we see ourselves and our gifts in inflated, exaggerated ways, we deny the gifts and personalities of others in the community.  God’s Spirit has drawn them here too. 

Hopefully, conversion comes to us more than once in the course of our lives.  Hopefully, there are seasons of conversion in different seasons of our lives as God’s Spirit keeps inviting us to growth and maturity.  Those conversions often take the form of movement from smallness and pettiness into a life that’s larger, simpler, and more caring.  Usually those conversion moments for us will be a letting go of the secret demand that God come and fix our problems; and a recognition that God’s Spirit has been given to us to fuel a life of service and sharing.  We keep getting sidetracked into a vision of a God outside of us who will magically come and remedy our problems.  But the Spirit keeps calling us to a vision in which we ourselves are carriers of the Spirit in the world, friends with God, and participants in Christ’s ongoing work to heal the world in love.

When we are toddlers, we have so many needs that we can't possibly fulfill on our own.  And so we entrust ourselves to parents and caregivers, impossibly large persons who seem almost magic as they provide for us.  This tendency to expect others to appear with solutions to life's dilemmas is perfectly appropriate when we are young.  It causes problems if we fail to grow beyond it.

Many people relate to God like a big parent, expecting this authority figure to show up in a crisis, to fix what's broken, to be the magic savior that solves life's problems.  And when we relate (usually on an unconscious level) to God like this, we also relate to churches, church leaders, and pastors like this too.

And so, disappointment and disillusionment eventually settle in.  Sometimes, this is the occasion for people to begin drifting from a life of worship, a life of belonging to a congregation.  Don't get me wrong.  There are legitimate reasons to leave a church.  But sometimes people leave just because this life of faith, lived with others, is pretty hard.  Pretty unspectacular.

That people drift away, lose interest, and find other things to do doesn't surprise me as a pastor.  What surprises me is how many people show up and care for each other and do the work of embodying the good news of God's love.  It's pretty spectacular, really.