Acts
2:37-47
February 10, 2013
Now when they heard this, they were
cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what
should we do?’ Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and be baptized every one of you in
the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will
receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your
children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to
him.’ And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying,
‘Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.’ So those who welcomed his
message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the
breaking of bread and the prayers.
Awe came upon everyone, because many
wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were
together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and
goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they
spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their
food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all
the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being
saved.
It’s actually quite amazing that I’m standing here
preaching to you today, because I could not have imagined this in 1983. Back
then I believed that church was worthless, and that it actually got in the way
of being spiritually healthy. This was not the same as saying that I didn’t
care about God, or that I wasn’t spiritual. I was ahead of my time in declaring
myself “spiritual but not religious.” That doesn’t mean that I was right in declaring
myself to be “spiritual but not religious.” In fact, I was wrong.
I was a product of so much that I had surrounded myself
with in the late 1970s and early 80s. I had been delving into all sorts of
eastern religious ideas, and in what now would be considered New Age ideas.
Also, I was a product of my college major. I was a psychology major and was
immersed in the thinking of 80s psychologists. They generally believed that
church was for weak-minded people. A fair number of psychologists had declared
that religious participation was a sign of (at worst) mental illness, or (at
best) mental dysfunction. I thought the same way as them. I even clearly remember
a conversation I had with a friend, when I said, “Christianity only gets in our my way. It keeps us from discovering who
God really is.” In a lot of ways I was ahead of my time, because that’s the
view many people have today of church. That doesn’t mean they are any more
right than I was, but it is their perspective.
Over time I discovered that this view of spirituality is
really a highly American view, and it is one that, ironically, pulls us away
from God. What led me to eventually become a pastor was that I ended up in a
situation in which I had to deeply question my beliefs, and in the process I
discovered the deeper path that God leads us on.
You may or may not be all that interested in my
transformation, but hopefully you won’t mind my sharing it with you anyway. It
all began when I left my job in a psychiatric hospital in early 1983. I had
been working as a therapist with teens and children. It was right after a
particularly violent time in the hospital. There had been several mini-riots
among the teens, and I was in the middle of one of them. At a teen dance
several kids had gotten upset, one especially with me, and they started
fighting staff and each other. Chairs were thrown, tables were overturned, and
one kid punched me in the face. After grabbing him and holding him down, things
slowly calmed, but I was shaken. Was this really what I wanted to do with my
life?
At the same time, we had a number of teens with a
penchant for violence, including one who was caught with a small, hand-made
weapon intended to hurt me. He had taken apart a clothes hanger, and then bent
it so that when he made a fist, two jagged prongs would jut out between his
fingers. The idea was that when he hit me with it the hanger would do a lot of
damage to my face.
I became burned-out. I didn’t know if I wanted to do this
kind of work anymore, and I couldn’t understand why God would put me in such a
bad situation. I couldn’t understand why God would allow me to be the target of
violence when I cared so much about these kids, and was appreciated so much by
the other 98% of them. So I quit, moved back home, and looked for another job.
This was back in 1983, when the unemployment rate in the
Pittsburgh area was 12%. I felt isolated, embarrassed to be back home as an
adult, unable to find another job, and lonely. Again, I couldn’t understand why
God would allow me to go through this experience. It was in the midst of this
that I sensed I had been doing faith and spirituality on my own for too long. I
started going to church. In January of 1984 I decided to join the church.
My joining surprised the senior pastor of the church because
he knew me as a steadfast spiritual independent. He asked me to come to his
house to talk after church one day, so that we could discuss my joining. We sat
in his living room, and he asked me, “Why do you want to join the church now?
You’ve been so determined to go a different path up till now.” I opened my
mouth to respond with the very articulate answer I had worked out ahead of
time, anticipating his question, but I couldn’t get it out. I started to cry. I
started to sob. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t really speak. The best I
could do was to say, “I… can’t… do it… on… my… own… anymore.” I repeated that
over and over.
This was a significant event for me because it was my
admitting that my solo spiritual path was a failure. I was admitting that all
that independence I thought I had, all that spiritual self-reliance I thought I
had, was a failure. I needed others. I needed a church. What a defeat! What an
epiphany!
I was so impacted by my experience with the pastor,
both in my epiphany and in my joining the church, that it became the basis of
my Ph.D. dissertation 12 years later, which was titled, From Individualistic to Communal Spirituality.
Several months ago I spoke about the problem of forging a
solo spiritual path. I mentioned that the biggest problem people have when they
go their own path is that they adopt all sorts of spiritual wisdom and
practices from different religions, but then they never adopt the one thing
that is really common and essential to all of them, which is the communal part
of it. The fact is that there is no
spiritual tradition that emphasizes the individual over the communal. None.
Every major religion emphasizes that to be truly spiritual requires community. This
individualistic spirituality is an American tradition, but it is foreign to
Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, shamanistic tribal religions, and
Christianity. All of them stress that to grow closer to God, or whatever they
understand God to be, we have to grow closer to each other. The main reason they
emphasize this is that they all understand that a connection with the Holy
means connection with each other.
Our
associate pastor, Connie Frierson, talked about this two years ago in a really
good sermon. Well,… all of her sermons are good. Anyway, she mentioned a
groundbreaking book from 1985, Habits of
the Heart, that studied American individualism. The book was written by a
sociologist, Robert Bellah, and his team of researchers. They looked both at
American society today, and throughout our history, and noted that Americans
have always prized individualism, self-reliance, and independence. He noted
that during the latter part of the 20th century a new kind of
religion was forming, which he called Sheilaism.
He coined the term after interviewing a woman named Sheila Larson, who told
him that “I believe in God. I’m not a
religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith
has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism.
Just my own little voice… It’s
just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself.” Bellah and his researchers noticed that Americans
were creating their own religion based on their own beliefs, and that Sheila
wasn’t alone. The problem is that, from every religion’s perspective, this path
doesn’t quite lead effectively to God.
We live in an individualistic culture, and our
individualism actually does us a lot of harm. It’s led to a lack of commitment
in relationships, marriages, parenting, workplaces, and so many other areas of
life. It also leads to divisiveness because each of us believes our own truth
is THE TRUTH. We aren’t always that open to other people’s perspectives on
truth. I believe it also leads to high rates of depression. Worldwide studies
have shown that the U.S., along with France, have the highest rates of
depression in the world. We are also the two most individualistic countries.
Between 19% and 21% in both countries report suffering from depression. The
lowest rates of depression tend to come from lower income countries that
emphasize community much more than we do. We have more money, possessions,
opportunities than anywhere else, but we are also more depressed.
Our individualistic approach also harms us in terms of
our commitments, our ability to work together, and our susceptibility to depression.
Still, what’s wrong with individualism when it comes to spirituality? Let me
make two suggestions.
First, an
individualistic spirituality ends up making each of us a false spiritual expert,
meaning we end up deciding who God is and what God wants, ignoring what the
deep spiritual traditions teach. Simply put, we create God, spirituality, and
religion in our own image. I’ve learned something from my dog, which is that
given a choice she would never eat anything healthy, do what is good for her, or
engage in totally healthy activities. She has to be trained to do so. If it was
up to her, she would eat chocolate all day, which is poisonous for dogs, go to
the farm field next door and eat cow manure, walk in the middle of the road,
and poop in the house. She is very Aurora-focused. We tend to be similar when
we create our own religions. We wouldn’t necessarily include others, we would
make the path easy on ourselves, and we wouldn’t require a whole lot. And we
would consume only those things that taste good spiritually, even if they made
us spiritually sick. We would create religion according to our own desires,
meaning that we would probably move further away from God than we thought we
were, yet all the while we’d be thinking we were moving closer to God. In
effect, when we choose an individualistic path, we end up creating God and
religion in our own image, including in it all of our own faults and foibles.
A church community overcomes this tendency by giving us a
tradition to follow that is God-focused, not self-focused. It pushes us by
training us to do spiritual things alone and TOGETHER that draw us closer to
God.
Second, spiritual
individualism leads us to create God-substitutes. We tend to glorify things
that appeal to us, or make us feel better, but that don’t necessarily lead to
God. You can see this all throughout our culture. We worship sports, wealth,
sex, exercise, drugs and alcohol, and anything that gives us a rush or a sense
of power and imperviousness. It’s not that most of these things are bad in and
of themselves. We just glorify them to a point at which one, two, or all of
them become obsessions.
What a church community does, when we are willing to work
to be part of it, is that it pushes us to move beyond selfishness, self-focus,
and self-reliance. It moves us more into God’s love by pushing us to connect
with people we normally might ignore. I had a revelation early on in my
ministry at Calvin Presbyterian Church. I was sitting in a session meeting and
a thought popped up in my head. I looked around and thought, “These are the coolest people on earth.
They’re working so well together and caring so much about each other. They are
just so cool! And they are NOT the kind of people I would normally hang out
with.” My epiphany was that churches create communities where we interact
with, care about, and work with people we would never bother to get to know on
our own.
Think about your own experience in church. Are the people
you’ve come to care about the people you would have done stuff with, or even
become friends with, on your own? Are they people you would have cherished or
even valued on your own? That’s the power of church community. It connects us
with God’s vision of life, which is that we are to love each other without condition,
no matter how different we all might be. That’s what it’s done for me. I now
have relationships with people I might never have ever met, or done anything
with otherwise.
When you’re part of a church, you’re part of something
special that opens you to each other, to God, and to life in a way that
transcends what you can do on your own. And here’s the best part: you’re doing
it right now!
Amen.
