TO BE A HERO
Urban Ministry Conference

Friday, October 14, 1994
John M. Buchanan, Pesto ,
Pounth Vasedodudrr CRuneh, Chicora?
ugtinns> —Eplectaenea S:1I- 6:13
Far be it from me to question the choices of scripture to be

studied and employed as homiletical texts by this conference but
I need to confess that I was a little surprised when I received

“wmIny assignment. I don't know about you, but that tex "wives be
~ subject to your husbands,.. . slaves, obey your mastérs" is not
in my personal lectionary. I'm a little embarrassed by it.
~~know, I think, the standard hermeneutical analysi and I will,

in fact, return to it in time. But an awful lot Sf sadness and
tragedy in human history has been associated with these words and
so I have ignored and avoided them. c

The day of reckoning has come. But am taking the liberty
of extending the text to include verses 10-17. Immediately
“following the household code and the advise to slaves and slave
owners, the author has some strong words to say:
\ »put on the whole armor of God our struggle is «..
against the rulers,..the authorities,,..cosmic powers .

of this present darkness,..forces of aileanies A Céphectans 6: HI-1z]

Frankly, that sounds a little more like most of the urban
ministry I know anything about. And I would submit that it is
the heart of what this epistle is about.

Tom Long, who teaches preaching at Princeton, wrote a won-
derful lead editorial for the July edition of Theology Today,
with the irresistible title, "Beavis and Butthead Get Saved."

For some reason I don't think I have to explain to this group who

"Nv Beavis and Butthead are, stars of MTV's smash hit cartoon, featur-
ing two incredibly obnoxious adolescents who sit in front of the
television set talking dirty, making animal sounds and snickers,
critiquing and dismissing every sane, normal and decent person
they see or encounter with a crude epithet. Beavis and Butthead,
Long Py ku represent everything that can go wrong with adolescent
boys.

. Actually Tom Long was writing about the subject everyone who
“Mis anyone and quite a few who are not, has had something to say -=

the continuing numerical decline of the mainline church. We

know, thanks to the research of Wade Clark Roof, Donald Luidens,

Dean Hoge and Benton Johnson, that one of our main problems is

that "little Christians are simply not growing up to be big
Christians any more." Conventional wisdom is that once children
grow through the period of pre-critical naivete, when they pretty
much believe everything anybody who looks like an authority tells
them, and enter the critical, analytical and skeptical years of
\, SaGESScene and young adulthood they leave, walk out the front
door, and there isn't much the church can do except wait it outs
\ Bon't panic and don't push too hard. The hope is that they'll he
~ back, after marriage and thirty and babies,they'1ll come back
through the front door and volunteer to teach Sunday School. The
trouble is, not enough are doing that. Some are, to be sure.
But not enough to stem the tide of numerical loss.

Long questions our patience and passivity and has the audac-
ity to suggest that instead of serving pizza and offering to
stand with our young people as they struggle for their identity,
we ought to be laying before them and on them the challenge to be
different from the culture, to standout, to be counter-culture,
to be heroic.

We know, do we not, the reality of consumer thinking? We
know, because all the experts tell us it is true, that the way to
grow a business or a political party, or a church, is to identify
your target market, do research to discover what your market
wants, needs and is willing to buy and then give it to them. We

“know that the way to grow a church e way is to meet the

needs of your natural clientele: boutique religion, a little

~“4 something for everyones ~self-improvement, aerobics, wisek plenty
of parking and child care for all. We know, do we not, that our
commitment to consumer religiosity has produced the now infamous
"lay liberalism," broad but not deep, long on tolerance but short
on loyalty, "channel surfing across the religious spectrum of
American life, selecting those options that match their life
styles and meet their personal wants" is the way Tom Long puts
it.

The numerical decline of the mainline, the continuing de-
cline of the Presbyterian Church, about which there is a monumen-
tal amount of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth, is not the
topic of this conference, nor is it a problem urban ministers
ordinarily regard as their priority. But maybe, just maybe, we
know something. Maybe our problem is not that we ask too much of
people, but that we do not ask nearly enough. Maybe the resolu-
tion to the malaise is a matter urban ministers know a lot about

“J ~~- namely the summons to battle, the call to bravery and heroism.

It's at the heart of New Testament faith, a primal courage.
You can see it in Jesus and sometimes in his friends: you can
see it in the life of the New Testament church in places like
Corinth and Rome and Ephesus. At the center of New Testament
- Christianity is courage to see the truth and tell the truth:
“Ny courage to challenge conventional ~wisdom; courage to contend

with and sometimes oppose the authorities; courage to live a new
life which sometimes meant dying.

And so the text I have long ignored. What we hear at first
is an unfortunate confirmation of patriarchy and centuries of
male domination and oppression of women by men. But, in fact,

“~ the text begins with a radical egalitarianism-- "Be subject to
one another out of reverence for Christ." That's a radical,
revolutionary statement in a culture where there is no situation
in which a man is subject to a woman, where lines of class and
rank and privilege are carefully drawn; where a holiness code
determines who associates with, eats with, talks with, sleeps

New with whomgee « "Be subject to one another."

~ And "slaves,® be subject to your masters." Did you hear the
_™ first hint of edalitarianism, so subtle it is easy to miss.;

“~~ "Masters, 4 do good to your slaves-- both of you have the same
masters“%in heaven, with whom there is no partiality." It's like
the author pulls a small but critical stone out of a huge wall.
It's only a matter of time till the whole structure of slavery
collapses.

And between the time admonitions, another about children:

"obey your parents"% but also "fathers, do not provoke your
children." They are the nobodies, non persons. In that culture,
children had no rights, no value. John Dominic Crossan says
Jesus was nowhere more revolutionary than he was when he called
children to him and held them and said they were what the Kingdom
of God looks like. "A Glorious Kingdom of Nuisances and No-
bodies," Crossan calls it.

And so while the passage seems to uphold and affirm patriar-
chy and the hierarchy of age and privilege and power, and even
slavery, it is in actuality, the announcement of a new reality, a
new being, a new Kingdom which exists within the kingdom of this
world, a way of living and moving and having being which knows no
rank and privilege based on gender or race or age; a state in
which each one is affirmed as a child of God, and none are ex-
cluded.

To live in that Kingdom, to be its agents and ambassadors,
»to act in relationship to other human beings as if that Kingdom
were a reality is no simple thing. In fact, it is hard work,
sometimes dangerous work.

"iss \5e strong«e. . put on the whole armor of God. Our struggle
is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rul-
ers, the authorities, the cosmic powers of this present darkness,

™ the spiritual forms of mth, FA VL ire wrote, te the eroele ap

| ~—Be@illiees-I'11 leave the authorship question to %tke Bob Brawley
et al and proceed with my assumption that if it wasn't him, it

Se

was someone who knew how he thought. Paul knew that the stakes
are high: that the empire is powerful, that entrenched customs
“~.jand culture do not easily abide criticism, challenge, change.
He had learned in Ephesus that economic systems, political sys-
tems, systems based on privilege and rank and wealth, do not
often voluntarily produce justice or compassion, and in fact can
turn quickly violent. Paul knew about the power of death, the
threat of death which is the ultimate weapon of the authorities.
— He knew that to be faithful to Jesus Christw® in the world WA.
would require strength and determination and heroic courage.

Urban realities are sometimes appropriately described as
"cosmic powers of this present darkness." Now, do not misunder-
stand. I love the city. I want to live nowhere else. But
sometimes, the very urban systems which make my life so pleasant,
are very different realities for other urbanites.

At the end of this past summer, Chicagoans lived through an
urban nightmare. An eleven-year-old boy, carrying a handgun,
wounds two children and kills another, fourteen-year-old Shavon
Dean. A few days later this eleven-year-old, Robert Sandifer, is
hunted down and executed. This is happening in Chicago, not
Rwanda, not China, not Nazi Germany. And what to me is more of a

“moral nightmare than the fact that it happened , that we have
accommodated it.

I don't know what to do about it but I know that we are
guilty of a terrible sin if somehow we develop the capacity to
shake our head, sigh, take a deep breath, feel grateful that it
happens down on the South Side and install another deadbolt on
our door and move on. I know that an eleven-year-old boy with a
handgun is a violation of everything we believe about creation,
about humankind, about what life in community means.

Maybe the mayor should ask the whole city to take a month
and have a discussion about what to do about it. Actually I think
_ “we _do_ know what to do about it, Everybody who thinks —
““ chas part of the answer. Robert Sandifer's tragedy began when he
was born to a fifteen-year-old single mother. We know the
_ chances for wholeness and health in that situation are slim.
“~ Robert was abused as a baby, in trouble in school, with police,...
“NV so hardened that he thought that being in a courteappointed
Se home was "doin time." The truth is that from the day of
“NN

his birth, Robert was told ® by his parents, care-givers, the
systemathat didn't know how to cope with himyethat he didn't
matter, that he was worth little if anything, that he was a
nuisance and nobody, a disposable object. And he simply lived
that out --in eleven short years.

What to do? Could we not make it an urban priority to
prevent fifteen-year-olds from having babies? . . . and if that
fails, make it our next priority to see that fifteen-year-olds

“~' with babies have the resources to nurture them to health? ag and

abused?

if sed?’ ant make it a priority to see that the baby
place t

is not

. and if that fails, find a way to put that baby ina
at is safe instead of returning babies to abusive parents

in the name of someone's notion of "family"? What to do? Could
we not make certain that a four-year-old is in preschool, ina
safe and clean building, and when he is six, that his school is

as good as this marvelous society can provide? Can we

not build

schools with as much pride as the United Center, Chicago's won-

derful new sports arena? And when he is eight that he

has places

to go and things to do. What to do? Can we not take the gun out

of a little boy's hand and out of his neighborhood and

out of our

life & so that when he gets angry, as little boys do, he learns

to push and shove, but not shoot and kill?

The systems which make urban children victims, which protect
the right of a few to our own lethal weapons while children
continue to die, the systems which build in an unemployment
factor as an inflationary hedge, the systems which encourage
wealth to move out and away to green lawns and public school
campuses and life isolated from everything that makes every day a
struggle for survival in Cabrini-Green must, in the name of God,

~be challenged and changed 4 and the victims must be empowered and

organized and, -& yes *+| sometimes bandaged and fed and
clothed and held and loved.

housed and

God bless you for doing that. God give you the armor, the
strength, the patience and the love. And, one thing more~- God

give you the hearty the courage.

That itself is a counter-culture idea.

The real danger with Beavis and Butthead, Tom Long says, is
not what we think. Adult response to the television program is
universally negative, because people are afraid American young
people will start to imitate them. Long thinks this won't hap-
pen: the real danger is that Beavis and Butthead are cynics,
they attack the heroic. Whenever anyone in their environment

stands out, takes a risk, ventures off the beaten path,

offers a gesture of wisdom or generosity or even dares
differently from the code, they are dismissed with the

or even
to dress
pair's

favorite vulgarism. What is left is a deadly cynicism: nothing
“~~ will get better, nothing-- no one --has value, life is a bad

joke.

At the heart of the Christian faith and life is a
heroism. It is a message that sounds strangely out of
is a gospel that is the opposite of the world's values
da. And it is directed to your heart and mind, to the
inside where we live and have our being, where we keep
and aspirations and hopes, where we want to become all
become and all God wants us to be.

call to
place. It
and agen-
place deep
our dreams
we can

At its best the church of Jesus Christ has remembered that
and expressed it in its corporate life but mostly in the individ-
ual lives of its people: ordinary men and women who, in follow-
ing Jesus Christ, became heroes.

—“— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest
who stepped out of line at Auschwitz and took the place of a

““M husband and father,. condemned to die in the starvation bunker...
and the others known only to you, who have been strong and coura-
geous for you, who have taught you to be a faithful disciple by
being faithful for you and to you; the ones whose life you bear
within you because they gave it to you.

_ Ernest Becker wrote:

Ofect. gar eile the word 'heroic' makes us blush because it
seems too big, too romantic, too triumphalistic,
the truth is that to strive to be a hero, to have
one's life rise above the mediocre, really to
count for something extraordinary, to outshine
death, to be capable of the highest generosity, to
self-sacrifice, is what we most deeply want and
need." [T.T. p. 201]

™ The Gospel of Jesus Christ is good news of God's love for
all. It is the announcement that there is a new reality present
in the life of the world. It is the Kingdom of that same Jesus
Christ and in it there is justice and kindness, compassion and
forgiveness and healing.

- SS aa the Coane} summons to be part of that Kingdon, the
company of all those who know about it and live in it: summons
to live as if each child of God is precious, worth the best we
can provide and produce: summons to challenge every power that
resists and denies the reality of that Kingdom.

The Gospel is God's call to you and me to be all we can =®
~~! for the Kingdoms ace EO live out our lives as part of God's great
—jJ commonwealth. '

J "FF So , dearly beloved, “be strong in the Lord and in
the strength of God's power. Put on the whole
armor of God."