Some years ago, a woman I worked with came to see me. She was worried about her son and wanted my advice. I said I’d be happy to listen and I would certainly help if I could.
She explained that her son had made a school friend who invited him to a church youth group. On Friday night, a few dozen teenagers would gather in the hall of a local church for games and junk food and bible study. But she was worried. Her son had started to take it all very seriously. He was reading the bible and praying. He was initiating long conversations with her about moral issues.
Worst of all, he had told her that he did not want to drink alcohol until he turned 18.
My colleague was afraid that her son had joined a cult, and she wanted to know if I could research this church and let her know if she should be worried, and, if necessary, help her to extricate her son from their nefarious clutches.
She told me the name of the church, which I knew to be a pretty mainstream Christian church in the area. A tad on the conservative side, but certainly not a cult.
But I am a professional. So I probed a little, in case I was missing something. She explained to me that her son had been convinced by the youth group leaders that he should not engage in sinful activities, and that he should try to keep track of the ways he was failing, say sorry, and pray for strength to change. They had also suggested that he be baptised.
Truly shocking stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.
In the long conversation that followed, I tried to equip my co-worker with some language and guidance about how to both support and challenge her son as he explored his identity. I’d like to think I helped, but who knows?
Afterwards, it struck me just how shocked and anxious this Mother had been. Her son was not doing drugs. He was not out ‘roaming the streets’ or vandalising property. He was playing duck duck goose and discussing the new testament with other fully-clothed teenagers. But this family was in to the third generation of a tenuous involvement with organised religion. There was no shared understanding of what it was to be a person of faith in general, let alone a slightly conservative Christian. A little bit of religious enthusiasm was seen as dangerous or a bit scary.
You might have had a similar experience. You casually mention something about church or prayer, and people start to ply you with questions like you had been on the moon mission. As a mildly famous priest, I now have stock answers for people who genuinely haven’t the slightest clue what I believe, or, more commonly, wonder what exactly I do all day?
But the silly thing about this treatment of actively religious people as exotic creatures, is that the safe, sensibly middle-class religion that most Christians in Australia practice is not even remotely outlandish. By and large, churchy folk in this country are conventional, law-abiding folk who can pass for normal in most circles. Although we might be a curiosity, we are not generally perceived as marginal or an aberration. We’re seen as more or less ordinary, with a light sprinkling of religious weirdness, along the same lines as people who play folk music or dress up as medieval jousters.
Can you imagine if we publicly talked about our faith in the way that St Paul does in the letter to the Romans? ‘You should totally join my church. Our leader was executed, and we want to die just like he did, except not actually die, but sort of metaphorically die, and then come back to life as a totally new person. You’ll love it. Also you will need to take a bath in public. Also, you will need to renounce the government. And you will become a target for violent abuse. And you’ll need to put all your money into the common pot so we can feed the poor and widows. Also we eat flesh and drink blood – but not in a weird way. Anyway, you’d love it’.
To say that the fledgling church in Rome, right at the heart of the Empire, was counter-cultural is something of an understatement. To join, you literally died to your old life and literally embraced a new life. Your relationship to money changed. Your relationship to your family and the Empire changed. Your relationship to evil and selfishness changed. It was a constant sacrifice and struggle, not helped by the fact that the other members of the church were just as flawed as you.
You can imagine the Mothers as their children signed up for this new cult (cults being relatively common in Rome at the time). Why don’t they do something normal, like pour out wine onto the ground in front of a statue of Zeus, or join a procession to the altar of Venus, or at least put out black beans at midnight to placate the dark spirits? That’s a nice normal religion, not this strange ‘Way’ and their odd foreign criminal hero.
So I wonder. Does our faith sufficiently impact our lives that others perceive the old self left behind and a renewed, reborn person emerging? Does our commitment to Jesus look like we are newly, freshly alive – full of hope and possibility. Do you and I still need to let the old self be crucified, so that the new, redeemed humanity well up inside us, and overflow into the world that God loves?
The Lord Be With You