January 15, 2012

Human Relations Day

• Mark 1:21-28
• Human Relations Day special offering

Message series: Good News according to Mark

Sunday’s message: A new teaching with authority!

I’m going to do something Sunday I don’t normally do. There was a USA Today article in the January 8 Democrat that I just need to say something about. So I’m going to use the story from Mark that is in the schedule, but I’m going to use it to talk about the newspaper article. Normally I’d let the bible story itself guide what I have to say.

Everyone needs to read the article, which can be found here.

  

Here are some excerpt to whet your interest:

"The real dirty little secret of religiosity in America is that there are so many people for whom spiritual interest, thinking about ultimate questions, is minimal," says Mark Silk, professor of religion and public life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.

For the So What set, Christmas just glides by, a day of good cheer and nothing more. That leaves clergy and religion experts dismayed. They fear for souls' salvation and for the common threads of faith snapping in society. Others see no such dire consequences to a more openly secular America as people not only fess up to being faithless but also admit they're skipping out on spiritual, the cool default word of the decade, as well.

Only now are they turning up in the statistical stream. Researchers have begun asking the kind of nuanced questions that reveal just how big the So What set might be:

• 44% told the 2011 Baylor University Religion Survey they spend no time seeking "eternal wisdom," and 19% said, "It's useless to search for meaning."  
• 46% told a 2011 survey by Nashville based evangelical research agency LifeWay Research they never wonder whether they will go to heaven.  
• 28% told LifeWay, "It's not a major priority in my life to find my deeper purpose." And 18% scoffed at the idea that God has a purpose or plan for everyone.  
• 6.3% of Americans turned up on Pew Forum's 2007 Religious Landscape Survey as totally secular - unconnected to God or a higher power or any religious identity and willing to say religion is not important in their lives.

Hemant Mehta, who blogs as The Friendly Atheist, calls them the "apatheists."

Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., calls them honest…

"We live in a society today where it is acceptable now to say that they have no spiritual curiosity. At almost any other time in history, that would have been unacceptable," Budde says.

She finds this "very sad, because the whole purpose of faith is to be a source of guidance, strength and perspective in difficult times. To be human is to have a sense of purpose, an awareness that our life is an utterly unique expression of creation and we want to live it with meaning, grace and beauty."

Nah, [Ben] Helton says.

Helton, a high school band teacher in Chicago, goes to the Roman Catholic Church of his youth only to hear his mother sing in the choir.

His mind led him away. The more Helton read evolutionary psychology and neuropsychology, he says, the more it seemed to him that "we might as well be cars. That, to me, makes more sense than believing what you can't see."

In Mark’s story the bystanders say, “What's this? A new teaching with authority!” The So What crowd present a challenge to us because they accept almost no external authority. Nothing in this story would be of interest to them. Not the synagogue or other religious gathering. Not the evil spirit or demons. Not Jesus or God. Not the distinction between clean and unclean. And certainly not the authority of the “legal experts”, who would have been the Bible scholars of the day. None of it.

Can you see why I think I need to say something?

None of this is really brand-new to anyone who is active in churches and in the surrounding community. But the extent of it is a bit surprising, and the article claims that the So What cohort has increased to significant size.

And they’re our neighbors, so as Christians we have a responsibility to them which we are to exercise as good neighbors without being judgmental. They won’t even want to talk to us about church or religion or even Jesus; they’re just not interested.

Read the article prayerfully. And come Sunday for a word from me about how we should respond.