The Good Life Sermon 8--"What Can This Relationship Do for Me?"

On Sunday, January 4th I taught the eighth message in my series called The Good Life: Redeeming Suburbia through Counter-cultural Living, in which I am contrasting the message of suburbia about living the good life with the message of Jesus about living the good life. We talked about the seventh myth of suburban living, "What Can This Relationship Do for Me?"

In short, we treat people as a means to an end. We don't have friends--we have contacts. We maintain relationships with people because of the things they can do for us.

In contrast, John 4 recounts the story of Jesus' interaction with the Samaritan woman at the well. The Samaritan woman couldn't do anything for Jesus. He was a Jew and she was a Samaritan woman. By all social mores, he shouldn't have even talked to her. Further, the woman was probably the talk of the town as she had been divorced five times and she was living with a sixth guy to whom she wasn't married. The whole conversation would have been a little scandalous.

But Jesus was always a little scandalous. He didn't care about the kind of social standing a person had. He didn't use people to climb the social ladder. He treated people like people. In the same way, we should treat people like people, not like a means to an end. Maybe we all need a few more friends and a few less contacts.

You can listen to this sermon, others in The Good Life series, or any recent sermons by me or Gary Albert here.

The Good Life Sermon 7--"My Church Is the Problem"

On December 28th, I taught the seventh lesson in The Good Life series. We looked at David Goetz's sixth myth of suburbia--"My Church Is The Problem."

In suburbia, we treat churches like consumers. If we want some pizza, we go to the local pizzeria. If we want a haircut, we go to the local hairstylist or barbershop. If we need our car fixed, we go to the local auto mechanic. If we need some Jesus, we go to the local church. If we don't like the haircut we get at one barbershop, we go to a different one. If the local auto mechanic is too expensive, we go to a different one. If we don't like the Jesus we're getting at First Baptist, we go to Second Baptist.

Is that the role that church should play in our lives? When we aren't connecting to God very well, is our church the problem?

We looked at Jesus' interaction with Simon Peter. In The Gospel of John, Peter is contrasted with Judas. Judas denied Christ; Peter denied Christ. While Judas went off and hung himself, Peter took responsibility for his spiritual life and came back to Jesus. Like Peter, we need to take responsibility for our spiritual lives.

Most of the time, when we are not "being fed" at church, we're the problem, not the church. If we want to live the good life, we need to start taking responsibility for our own spiritual lives.

You can download this sermon, the other sermons in The Good Life series, and all the most recent sermons by me and Gary Albert here.

The Good Life Sermon Number 6

Last Sunday I taught the sixth message in a ten-week series called The Good Life: Redeeming Suburbia through Counter-cultural Living. Every week we contrast a myth of suburbia about living the good life (taken from David Goetz's book, Death by Suburb) with a message of Jesus about living the good life (taken from the Gospel of John).

This past week we looked at the myth, "I Need to Make a Difference with My Life." We talked about how we all have this feeling that God wants us to do something great with our lives. Does He? Maybe He just wants us to be faithful. We looked at Jesus' interaction with Pontius Pilate, the hidden righteousness, and the importance of doing good, even when no one is looking.

You can listen to this, or any of my other sermons here.

The Good Life Myth #3: I Want My Neighbor's Life

The latest message in my sermon series called The Good Life: Redeeming Suburbia through Counter-cultural Living is up on Believers Fellowship's sermon audio page.

In the series, I have been comparing the myths of suburbia about living the good life with the message of Jesus as presented in the Gospel of John. This week's suburban myth was "I want my neighbor's life." Suburbia tells us that the secret to happiness is owning the things that our neighbors own. This leads us to a life of rampant consumerism. In contrast, John the Baptist lived by the mottos, "A man can only receive what is given to him from heaven" and "He must become greater, I must become less." We looked at how these mottos challenged the suburban lifestyle of consumerism.

The Suburban Christian: Finding Spiritual Vitality in the Land of Plenty by Albert Hsu

In The Suburban Christian, Albert Hsu has written a great little book on the dynamics of living in suburbia and how the church should respond. The book is insightful, easy to understand, and practical, while avoiding finger wagging and soapboxing.

After briefly explaining the origins of suburbia, Hsu describes some of the major sociological forces of living in a suburb. To Hsu, these forces are commuting, consumerism, branding, and isolation. These chapters were extremely helpful.

About commuting, Hsu writes:

"Think of what happens to us when we live, work, and worship in different communities. If we live in suburb A but work half an hour away in suburb B and commute twenty minutes in the opposite direction to a church in suburb C, we find our sense of identity fragmented. We are dis-integrated, and our loyalties and connections are diffused into three different geographical areas. We especially feel tension and dissonance when driving from one area to another, say from a church function in one community to a school event in another. There is little overlap between our disparate worlds." (Albert Hsu, The Suburban Christian: Finding Spiritual Vitality in the Land of Plenty [Downers Grove: IVP, 2006], 67.)

Because of the loss of community due to commuter culture, Hsu argues that suburbanites find their community through consumerism and branding. He writes:

"Branding is about status and identity. It signals something to the outside world if the logo on your car is a Mercedes-Benz or a Lexus instead of a Chevrolet or a Kia. Or if you wear clothes from Ann Taylor rather than Kmart, drink Starbucks coffee rather than Folgers, or buy groceries at Whole Foods Market rather than Safeway." (102)

According to Hsu, the suburban church should both cater to and challenge suburbanites. On the one hand, the church needs to be "missional" in the sense that it needs to recognize the particular needs, wants, and values of suburbia and proclaim its message in that context. For instance, suburbanites long for a "third place" (a place to socialize outside of home and work). Churches can easily function as a third place, as congregations such as Willow Creek in Chicago have proven. On the other hand, the suburban church needs to be careful not to encourage consumerism and isolationism through its ministry methods. The suburban church needs to encourage its members to think beyond themselves and beyond their immediate surroundings.

Hsu's book is informative and at times profound. He offers practical advice without being too preachy. And yet, one gets the feeling that perhaps suburbanites need someone preachy--a modern-day John the Baptist who will cry out "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?" Then again, prophets like that have a tendency to get beheaded.

It seems like there is a growing consensus among American Christians that something is wrong with suburban middle-class Christianity. I guess the remaining question is, "How wrong is it?" Do we need a gentle nudge like the ones offered by David Goetz in Death by Suburb and Albert Hsu in The Suburban Christian or a kick in the rear like Brian McLaren in Everything Must Change or Tony Compalo in everything he has written? I don't know, but my suspicion is the latter.

The Good Life 3

I gave my third lesson in the series called The Good Life: Redeeming Suburbia through Counter-cultural Living last Sunday. The sermon audio is here. This week's myth of suburbia was "I am what I do and what I own." We looked at Jesus' interaction with the woman caught in adultery in John 8 and we talked about our identity in Christ.

The Good Life Myth #1

My latest sermon is available online here.

I am working through a series called The Good Life in which I contrast the good life according to suburbia with the good life according to Jesus. I am drawing a lot of the information about suburbia from David Goetz's book, Death by Suburb. The first myth that we discussed is, "I am in control of my life."

The Good Life Has Begun

On Sunday I officially started The Good Life series. I am excited about it.


In John 20:30–31, John says that he wrote his gospel so that the readers might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and that by believing they might have life in his name. In others words, the purpose of John is to bring life. And to John, life is not just life--it's eternal life, life with God, life in the Spirit. In other words, it's the good life.


In the series, we will be looking at the Gospel of John and contrasting Jesus' message of the good life with suburbia's message of the good life. To John, living the good life is about "staying faithful to Christ, even when it costs you something." So, we are going to look at what "staying faithful to Christ" means in the suburbs. It's going to be all about living counter-culturally.


You can hear the first message here.

"The Death of Ivan Ilych" by Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy is one of my new favorite authors.

Fyodor Dostoevsky has long been my favorite author. I have read all of his major novels (Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Adolescent), and a good chunk of his short stories. People who see me reading Dostoevsky always ask me what I think about Tolstoy. Until recently, I had never read anything by him and was unable to give an answer. I've heard good things, so I decided to pick up a Tolstoy book. I thought it might be nice to start with something short instead of wading into War and Peace or Anna Karenina, so I picked up a copy of Barnes and Noble's The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Short Stories. I have to say--I am hooked.

Tolstoy is great. Every bit as great as Dostoevsky, but in a different way. They two seem nothing alike, and yet they both seem to have mastered the psychology of why people do what they do.

"The Death of Ivan Ilych" is about just that--the death of a guy named Ivan Ilych. What makes the book great is the responses to death by everyone in the story--especially Ivan's response.

The plot of the book is simple. Ivan falls and hurts his back, and the injury proves worse than he first thought. Doctors are baffled about why his pain isn't going away, and it isn't long before everyone realizes that he is going to die. However, no one wants to talk about it and they continue to act as if he is going to recover. Ivan is terrified by death, so his friends' and family's hypocrisy infuriates him. He starts to hate them for pretending he is okay. The sicker he gets, the angrier and more hurtful he gets.

When Ivan is about to die, he encounters Gerasim, a peasant who waits on him and who isn't afraid to talk about death and its inevitability. Ivan starts to envy Gerasim, both for his youth and vitality, and also for his simple life and his boldness in the face of death. All of this starts Ivan reflecting on his life and whether or not he had lived right.

At the end of the story, Ivan has kind of an epiphany that relieves him of his pain and suffering. I had to read this part over and over because it wasn't clear what he realized. I did some research, and it looks like there are several opinions about what happened to Ivan. Perhaps this is the genious of the story--the reader is left to decide for himself or herself what Ivan realized.

There are some clear allusions to the New Testament when Ivan dies, and this impacts the way I read the story. Ivan's cries, "What death? Where is it?" and "Death is over. It is no more" seem to me like clear allusions to 1 Corinthians 15:54–55. Also, the spectator's comment, "It is no more" seem like an allusion to Christ's words on the cross, "It is finished." (Tolstoy had converted to Christianity shortly before writing this story.)

I think that Ivan realized that the society in which he lived idolized the wrong things. Ivan's epiphany was that he "felt sorry" for his wife and his son. I think he felt sorry for them because they were locked into Russian high society's way of thinking. Ivan realized that Gerasim's life was the good life--the life he should have lived. Gerasim lived for others--he happily served Ivan in the last days of his life, and he responded kindly to abuse. I think that Ivan's epiphany was that he realized that the selflessness of the peasants was a better life than the hypocrisy of the aristocracy.

Tolstoy's story was a needed reminder to me that I need to live "the good life." It is so easy to get caught up in the American dream that just one more promotion, or one more award, or one more digit in my salary is going to make me happy. In the end, Ivan realized that it was in his youth when he enjoyed his family that he was the happiest. It's tempting to want to work myself into the grave, wanting to do something "great" for the kingdom of God. In the end, its the little things that we do for the people in our immediate community that are the most meaningful.