No More Messiahs: Fighting Your Own Battles

Scriptures: 1 Samuel 8:4-20 … Mark 3:20-22, 31-35

Dedicated to the Glory of God
in honor of all 2012 High School Graduates

At BPC: Claire Dudek and Reia Tong

Confirmed in the Faith: 2010

“No! We are determined to have a king over us!” So the Hebrew people cry in the 1 Samuel scripture today. “So that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.”

A king to govern us … to “go out before us” … to “fight our battles.”

Claire and Reia: Those days are numbered for you. Those days are numbered – where your parents and your grandparents and every adult in this place and beyond who loves and cherishes you will fight your battles for you. For, in spite of all the many nations with Premiers and Prime Ministers and Presidents who often think and act like royalty over us all, you two no longer need in your life any king-figure, or queen-figure, to intercede on your behalf whenever problems arise.

In commissioning you today, Claire and Reia – this church, your church, sending you forth from high school to college – I urge you to shed any Christ-like authority you may still place in any adult mentor in your life. For even Christ came as the Messiah – which is Hebrew for Christ, meaning “the Anointed One” – so that we who wish to live and think as adults need not have any Messiahs, any Anointed Ones, anymore. No more Messiahs. No one needing to be anointed to fight our battles for us as adults … anymore.

Though that has been the case up for you up to now. As it should.

When you were small, you – like so many of us – developed your own image of God projected out of your fantasy-filled experiences around adults: their examples, moods, actions. Soon after you reached grade school – through stories, drama, myth – you began to sort out the real from the make-believe. And yet the real was one-dimensional for you; of conceptual thinking you were yet capable. Scriptures took on literal meaning for you: for example, there was that literal giant named Goliath … and that literal shepherd named David … and that literal defeat of the big guy by the little guy, The moral of the story: The good wins, and the bad loses … with the clincher that good things can come in your small, childlike packages.

Then came adolescence. Move over, parents! While the king and queen were yet dethroned in your lives, they were and are being challenged from all sides – through a synthesis of your relationships, from school to social media and, for both of you, swimming. You began to develop individual perspectives, and yet the judgments of significant others still reigned supreme in your lives. Traditional authority still had its place, and all is right in the cosmos.¹

Yet now – today – you come before us, Reia and Claire, to be commissioned by God through us to leave home. Know your family and this church is always here for you: You are being commissioned today to leave your Bethesda home, in order to do two related things: to individuate, and to think for yourself.

By individuating, I mean you will be breaking off and away from groups that have fully defined you – most especially, your family. You will individuate from these groups – you will separate from these groups – you will take full responsibility and commitment for your lifestyle … your attitudes … and yes: your values, and your beliefs. No longer being defined by your role with, say, this church, you move from the need for the absolute (“Give us a king!”) to the critical thinking necessary to grapple with the relative in the world. You create your own worldview. You learn to fight your own battles.

You learn to individuate. You learn to think for yourself. Two ways I know that Brown University for you, Reia, and Smith College for you, Claire, stand strong in leading you to embrace.

And then, when you return home for visits – oh, my: What a disconnect you will find! For you have moved on, from a world focused on you where no child is left behind, to a world focused around you where all parents are left behind. And you will wonder, more than ever before: Why are my folks so clueless? Where are their ideals?

When you return home for visits, I imagine you will begin to relate to the Jesus in our scripture today. At the beginning of Mark’s tale, Jesus’ family goes out to restrain him among the crowd. And then, at the end of the story, his family is pictured on the outside, calling in to the crowd now nesting around him on the inside.

Get the picture? Away at college, your family has been displaced from center stage in your life. Try as they might, they can no longer restrain you. For college is a place, you will discover, where there are several charismatic professors – certainly – but where (hopefully) there are few Messiah-like figures like you had in your youth to tell you what you should or should not do. For college is a place, you will discover, where not only should you fight, but where you simply must fight, your own battles.

And deep within those college battles you will discover this painful, recurring question: What will I pursue – my ideals or my ambitions?

It would be a shame to ditch your ambitions – right? You each have the capacity of finding a fine career – as I sense each of you will. Who needs to struggle with God, when you can immerse yourself in doing well in your lives?

But then, you say to yourself: Why abandon my ideals? And so you find a closet for them – you wrap them well – you carefully store them. Meanwhile, you chase your ambition. You self-realize; you self-fulfill. You may meet the lover of your dreams, get hitched, perhaps have a family. And then, one day, you remember: the ideals! So you return to that closet, unwrap those ideals, turn to your children or nieces or nephews and say, “Here kids: Play with these!”²

And so the cycle of American life continues with you two. Or will it?

Will it with you, Claire and Reia? You alone must fight that battle. You alone must fight and resolve that battle of your ambition vis a vis – face to face – with your ideals. The battle between your chosen career … and your calling from God.

Knowing you are, in the end, not alone in this world: You alone must fight this career vs. calling battle. And as you fight that good fight – where your family is on the outside, and you are on the inside with the crowd gathered around you that you have made your own – where you are tempted to cry out, “Give me a king or a queen to make these tough decisions for me” – as you fight that good fight, remember this:

Maybe it’s not a battle to be so tenaciously fought, after all. Maybe – just maybe – you will discover that your career and God’s calling for you will be similar, or even the same. For maybe – just maybe – by listening to the Spirit’s gentle, quiet leading, you will discover that your ambition to do well in your lives may be the same as doing the most good you can in God’s world in a manner you most enjoy.

Your ambition and your ideals become one. With God’s leading. Not as a divinely-sent king. And not as an anointed, heavenly-hosted, crown-him-with-many-crowns Messiah to lord it over us all. All that misguided, misleading, misbegotten churchy holiness code nonsense.

For Jesus did not say, “Worship me,” Claire and Reia. Jesus did say, “Follow me.”

That’s all he asked. And that’s all he asks of you, still.

Reia, Claire: As you seek to do well in your lives by doing good in God’s world, may you gently be led by Jesus’ peaceful wisdom. The wisdom to fight your own battles with your own ambitions and your own ideals alongside him – in justice, and in love. 

Whoever has ears to hear … Let them hear.

¹The framework for and a few of these notes on faith development during childhood are derived from James W. Fowler’s Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (SF: Harper & Row, 1981), Part IV.

²These three paragraphs on the struggle between ambition and ideals are based on a framework composed by William Sloane Coffin in A Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 76-77.