Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, March 4, 2018
John 2:13-22

Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in a continuing education webinar on Generation Z, which is the generation after my generation, the Millenials. Yep, I’m getting old. The oldest Generation Z-ers are entering the workplace. This generation is born between 2000 and 2015, so Norah, you’re going to be on the tail end or one of the older of the next generation which I hear they’re calling “the Alpha Generation.” What struck me most about what researchers are learning about Generation Z is that they are very performance and success-driven. In fact, when asked a question about what was most important in their lives, Generation Z-ers ranked priorities in the following order: their professional or career ambitions and achievements first, gender and sexual orientation second, hobbies and activities they’re involved in third. Family in order of importance was fifth, religion sixth. All living generations before this generation prioritize family and religion higher, as you might imagine. And researchers hypothesize that one of the reasons this generation values professional success and career security so much is that we live in a pretty unstable world with the financial crisis of 2008 affecting this generation’s early years. With weakened ties to any religion, there is a greater emphasis on outward markers of value, like academic, professional, or extra-curricular achievements in sports, music, and so on.
As I was participating in this webinar, I couldn’t help but think about Norah, who we baptized today, and my own kids, and others here in our church who are growing up in a culture that will continue to place more and more value on outward success above all human beings’ inherent worth and value to God despite what they do or don’t do. It is easy for us as Christians to get stuck valuing outward success based on people’s achievements like anyone else today. When we teach our children the Ten Commandments, for example, it’s easy to present them as rules to live by “or else,” rather than as a gift of God showing us how to live in a life-giving way for all humanity’s good. “If you live your life as a relatively good person,” I have heard Christians say, “you’ll be all right with God and go to heaven.” But that is NOT what we believe as Lutheran Christians. We believe that none of us, on our own, can perfectly live by these commandments we strive to follow. We rely heavily on the grace and forgiveness of God, NOT on our own achievements, ultimately.
I think this is why Jesus gets so angry in the temple with the money changers and marketers. The more money you could pay, the better sacrifices you could make to God in the temple. The more you could come to the temple to worship, the better your life might be, the better standing you would have with God, it was commonly thought. Jesus vehemently preached against any earthly success being a requirement to earn God’s favor. God doesn’t love you more or forgive you more easily because you have more money, more time, or follow the rules better. To emphasize his point, Jesus shifts the thinking about where believers could go to worship and serve God. For the Judeans of this time, you worshipped and served God best in the temple. Worshipping at home or in the local synagogue was OK, but many Jews made an annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem to the temple for Passover. Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” and John tells us Jesus is talking about the temple of his body, not a building. Jesus asserted the foundation of our faith in God rests on him, not on a particular place or building. For Christians still today, the church is not a building, or an hour of worship of week on Sunday. The church is the body of Christ. This means that we can worship God anywhere – wherever two or three believers are gathered, there is the body of Christ. This means that we can be Jesus to others out in the world, not just here at this church building at a specific time. Jesus’ message to those who would listen in the temple is VERY relevant to our lives today in a culture that similarly values outward markers of success – good grades, a well-paying job, gold medals, first place. All of our feeble attempts to value some human beings higher than others based on earthly values, Jesus drives out of the temple, out of the church. Jesus places that all on the cross and calls us to die to those values so that we might know our ultimate value that can never change – that we are children of God worth dying for, worth saving because of God’s great love for us, not because of anything else.
This is the gift the Christian church has to say with new generations who have all kinds of friends on social media but say they are lonely, depressed, and isolated. This is the gift we have to share when we go out to be the body of Christ in the world, that we live by a different value system that honestly doesn’t care about wealth, medals, rankings, or promotions. If you’re a straight A student or a high school dropout, you’re still a child of God. This is our gift to Norah today when we all said together, “we welcome you into the body of Christ and into the mission we share.” You, we all, along with Norah, have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.” Forever. Nothing can change that. Our call as churchgoing Christians is NOT to get more people to come to the church or to sustain a building or a bunch of programs. Our primarily calling is to invite people to know deeply the love that God has for them that cannot change, and then help them respond to that love.
Yesterday, our Bethel council met in retreat to discern a way forward for the “relaunch” of our church as we’re calling it. Our core mission remains the same, that we are blessed to serve God and share our faith with all. Our foundation lies on Jesus, the body of Christ. The building blocks of faith, then, to help people know that they are loved and valued beyond price by God the Creator of us all, is based on those promises we made for Norah and for all other people who have been baptized at this font: to help people worship God, learn about God and grow in faith, to serve others in Jesus’ name, and to share our faith. That is what we are focusing our ministry on even more closely, not so that we can be “more successful” Christians from a worldly point of view, but so that we can more powerfully proclaim the message God is calling us to share for a world that is increasingly more forgetful of their God-given inherent worth and value. May we experience that abiding, unconditional love of God more deeply as we build on the body of Christ, our foundation. Amen