Tough Issues: Is Opting Out An Option?

Rev. Cynthia Anderson, February 3, 2008
Text: Romans 12:1-6; Luke 9:57-62

Have any of you planned a dinner or event lately and asked people to RSVP? How did that go? Or, how many of you have tried to get volunteers for a church or community organization? How did that work? I see by the looks among us that we understand that getting people to commit to anything these days is tough work. We Americans have always been known for our rugged individualism, but now that characteristic has become so pronounced that in increasing numbers we are opting out of community life. As Harvard professor Robert Putnam so picturesquely puts it, we are “bowling alone.”¹ In the last few years, Putnam has studied Americans’ patterns of engagement in civic and religious organizations and concluded that we are disengaging at growing rates. We opt out of commitments and relationships of all kinds. We don’t join a bowling league anymore, we don’t want the commitment, the interaction or the inconvenience of dealing with so many people. If we want to bowl, we prefer to go and bowl a few games with no strings attached. Now while trends in our bowling practices don’t seem all that serious, Putnam uses the example to show us how deeply this pattern is entrenching itself in our society. And, he argues, it has deep and troubling consequences for our future and for our life together.

Increasingly we are cocooning, we are pulling back from both small and large scale interactions with other people. We are incredibly wary about commitments – some of us are almost phobic about them – we have diminishing patience with the long, slow and complicated process of building relationships with people, we increasingly see others as a means to an end, attaching a utilitarian value to them according to their usefulness to us. Yet, at the same time, many of us report problems with loneliness, increasing depression rates, a sense of being disconnected and adrift, searching for meaning and purpose that seem always to elude us, and our communities are more and more fragmented.

Now, we need to guard against offering overly simplistic reasons for or solutions to this trend. There are a relentless push of factors and pressures that drive us to opt out – to bowl alone. Economic developments have relocated many of us – we are far from the communities in which we grew up and our work places transfer us so often that we don’t have time to put down roots and become part of a community. And, whether we move around or not, we live in an increasingly global society in which we are bombarded with information and saturated with images from all over the world. We are on overload and many of us just feel downright invaded. We are bombarded with things in our immediate surroundings. We are constantly plugged in – cell phones, pagers, e-mail beeps. And we’re afraid to turn them off because people have come to expect that we will be available to their requests and demands 24/7. No wonder we find ourselves wanting to opt out. We live in the middle of incredible tensions – we are bombarded with images and emotions and information from every direction and because we don’t know how or feel we can’t set boundaries around those, we swing over to a withdrawal from anything we can. We opt out because engagement in communal life feels overwhelming and slightly insane. These are tough issues and there are no simple solutions. They are real in our everyday lives. But we cannot opt out, we must confront the issues because they have real consequences for us and for our families, our communities and our world, and perhaps most of all for our life as followers of Jesus Christ in the community he has called us to be part of.

For those of us who are Christians, it is an issue we cannot evade. Jesus doesn’t allow us to evade commitment or deep engagement in the community of people he calls to be his body in the world. So, we first need to see that Jesus calls for wholehearted commitment. In our gospel lesson, we hear several would-be disciples approach Jesus on the road to Jerusalem. They each express a genuine desire to follow him, and even make rash promises to do so – but things come up. When it’s time to really put their feet on the line, there are so many things that interfere. They want to delay, to defer until things are less hectic, until their lives calm down. Now we need to be careful with these verses, because Jesus is using exaggerated language that can sound harsh if we don’t see the point he is making. Jesus’ key point here is about the depth of our commitment to him. Jesus is on his way to the cross -- because God’s commitment to save us from sin and death is wholehearted and holds nothing back. And in these verses Jesus tell us if we are going to follow him, our commitment is to be wholehearted as well – his claim on our lives must come first. And he sees that we can so easily become distracted by other things. Even good and legitimate responsibilities can become twisted in our culture – they can become ways to stall and to opt out rather than being an integral part of our wholehearted commitment to follow Jesus. But throughout the gospels, Jesus consistently calls us to see the real priorities in life – relationship with God and others. Everything else fits in around that – not the reverse. And opting out is not an option. He invites us to make a real commitment to the new life he offers – and that life is lived in community.

But we also need to see why Jesus wants a wholehearted commitment from us – it is to give us life, real life and real relationship with God and one another. Jesus wants us to put aside the busyness, the avoidance, the culture’s demands so we can receive the new life he offers. And we need to see the nuance of distinction here between overwhelming busyness and wholehearted commitment. It’s only all too easy to become consumed by busyness that masquerades as commitment – both outside and inside the church. We need to see the difference between exhausted busyness and authentic life-giving commitment. And one of the tell-tale signs is that busyness leaves us weary and overwhelmed, with a desire to pull back and disengage. Authentic commitment on the other hand, pulls us deeper into relationship with God and one another, it energizes and revitalizes us. As Jesus reminds his disciples, at the heart of the gospel is a paradox – those who seek to save their own lives lose them and those who lose their lives for the gospel’s sake, find their lives – because we’re freed by Christ to do so. We don’t find our life by withdrawing into a self-centered preoccupation that protects our turf and tunes out anything that doesn’t serve our interests. We don’t find our life by hedging our commitments to God and others. We find our life by opening ourselves up, by placing God in the center of our lives and making a wholehearted commitment to engage with one another and to be engaged in Jesus’ mission in the world.

So Jesus does call us to wholehearted commitment. But we also need to really hear the good news here -- he doesn’t just expect us to do that by ourselves. We never have to do it alone. Jesus himself makes our commitment to him possible and helps us sustain it. He himself makes our commitment to him possible because he has first committed himself to us – utterly and completely – even to death on a cross. And all through the gospels, he feeds, teaches, heals, sustains and empowers those who follow and places us in a community of fellow travelers who share our journey.

As we engage in a culture that pushes us toward disengagement, we’re invited to see that it is the resurrected Jesus who makes it possible for us to be engaged, really and truly engaged -- with God and one another. And Jesus places us in community so we can be with others on the same journey, to share our struggles and our gifts with one another, to strengthen one another so that we might indeed live fully and so we can invite others to follow Jesus. We cannot do this alone. And when we engage, when we make that commitment to God and one another, we find that we catch glimpses that newness of life Paul talks about. We can offer our lives as a celebration, as an act of worship to God in the everyday ordinariness of it all, in the middle of the pushes and pulls from a confused and lost culture. Paul reminds us that when we offer ourselves wholeheartedly, we come to see our lives – every daily aspect of our lives – as consecrated and holy – offered to God and one another for the building of Christ’s community and service to the world. Not as one more commitment wrung from us out of guilt or obligation or fear. But as a joyous response to all that we have been given. As we become more committed to the way of life Jesus makes possible for us, it becomes easier to see and to say no to those demands and lures of our culture that lead us to overextend ourselves, to disengage from one another and that leave us feeling empty and depleted.

It is our precisely our commitment -- to Christ and one another -- that frees us to be engaged and to make commitments out of love rather than out of fear. We are given the gift of seeing our ordinary, daily lives as holy places, offered to God in thanksgiving and offered to others in love and service, while Christ empowers and sustains our living. The more we offer in this spirit, the more we find we have to offer, the more abundantly God’s life and energy pour through us, the more we reach out toward one another, working together to invite others to become part of this community, this body of Christ, redeemed and offered in love to the world. Thanks be to God. Amen.

¹ See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone.