Mark 8:27-38
On my internship in Spooner, WI, which is a smaller town than Creston, there was a complex series of coincidences that put me in the unusual position of being able to impress a group of teenagers. Word spread around the high school that “Pastor Nate is cool.” I was feeling pretty good about this state of affairs, until my own children got word of what had happened.
They wasted no time in setting me straight. Cool? There are a lot of words we could use to describe you, Dad, but cool isn’t one of them. In so many words, they told me, very lovingly, that cool and me were not even in the same time zone. What was the matter with the kids up in Spooner, anyway, they wanted to know.
Of course, it’s a little deflating to the ego to hear talk like that. But pondering the Gospel lesson for today has shed a whole new light on this incident for me. I’m no longer sure who was giving me the compliment—the Spooner kids or my own family. Our reading is a jarring reminder that cool isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Up to this point in the story of Jesus’ life, the buzz around Galilee has been, “Jesus is cool! He heals people, he feeds people, he has this amazing power, he’s incredibly smart, he’s what everyone is talking about. He’s better than anyone on the planet. Jesus is cool.”
But at the start of today’s Gospel, Jesus startles the disciples by informing them that he’s not really into cool. In fact, he has come to do some very uncool things. He’s going to let people kick him around and beat him. People are going to make fun of him; he will be the butt of all kinds of jokes. He’s going to get himself killed in the most humiliating and painful way imaginable. In short, he’s going to be just about the most uncool guy on the planet.
Peter won’t stand for that. He likes being part of Jesus’ posse, swimmin’ with the cool crowd. It’s been a blast. Now Jesus seems to be ready to blow the whole thing. Peter is so upset that he gets up the nerve to take Jesus aside and chew him out. We can only imagine what he says. Something along the lines of: “Are you out of your mind? We’ve got it all going our way. We’ve captured lightning in a bottle. Keep doing what you’re doing and we’ll take this country by storm.”
Jesus answers, “What you are after is not what God is after. You are obsessed with plans that have nothing to do with God.”
That’s a good description of cool. Being cool really has nothing to do with God. Cool is concerned with being popular. It has as its only priority being thought of as better than other people. It is 100% about image and 0% about who you really are. When you really get right down to it, the desire to be cool is basically the desire to be worshipped by the world.
In our reading, Jesus calls the crowd together and says, “If your goal is to be worshipped by the world, you’re following the wrong person. The direction I am heading has nothing to do with being cool or popular. It has to do with taking up a cross and carrying it.”
It’s an interesting image Jesus uses here, “taking up your cross.” Most of us use that image the wrong way; we confuse it with Paul’s thorn in the flesh statement. We talk about some annoying relative, or some unlucky circumstance, some painful illness, or some personal defect as “our cross to bear.”
When Jesus talks about bearing a cross, though, he is not talking about stoically playing the bad cards you are dealt; he is not talking about putting up with some burden that is forced on you. Taking up the cross is an act that Jesus chose to do for the sake of others. Taking up the cross means voluntarily doing something for the sake of others.
In other words, Jesus is saying, “The way of life that I’m showing you has nothing to with being cool or popular. It has everything to do with doing what is right.”
He goes on to explain that coolness is an empty goal. For if you go through life trying to build an image of yourself that others will worship, even if you succeed, what have you accomplished? You are not God and so the whole thing is a phony exercise. All you did was set yourself up as a rival to God. Not only is that a competition that you will never win, but by being God’s rival you set yourself against God. You miss out on being with God, on being God’s child. You miss out on life the way it is supposed to be.
In verse 38, Jesus strikes right at the heart of cool, and this is the verse that really smacked me between the eyes:
“If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory.”
In modern terms, he is really asking this question: “Are you too cool for me? Are you ashamed of me because I do such uncool things? Do you try to distance yourself from me because I ask you to do uncool things? Does it bother you that being a disciple of mine just isn’t the cool thing to do?”
I find myself accused by those words. You know, a lot of what we have been doing in youth ministry over the past decades, and I’ve been right in there in the front of the pack, has been trying to convince kids that Jesus is one cool dude. That the church is cool.
There’s a good reason why we have tried this. Let’s face it, cool is one of the driving forces of modern western culture. Once something is the cool thing to do, people will do it, whether it makes sense or not. It makes sense to want to harness that force in service of God.
When our daughter was in high school we let her attend the youth group at the Baptist church. Nothing was happening at our church; none of the kids were interested in coming. But the Baptist church was different. When enough people are doing something, it becomes the cool thing to do. The Baptists were the first church in town to reach critical mass. They had attracted enough high schoolers to their program that suddenly it became the in place for teens to go. All the high school kids with any connection at all to any church wanted to go to Wednesday night RIOT at the Baptist church. Parents didn’t have to make them go; kids were begging to go, and there would be more than 100 kids on any given week.
We never regretted the decision to let her attend. Some good things came out of the experience. And what Christian parent wouldn’t want a church group that their kids are begging to attend? And so we spend a lot of thought on how do we achieve that critical mass. Basically, we’ve been all asking, how do we make our church the cool place for young people to be?
Or consider the phenomenon of megachurches. The same critical mass concept is at work there. Statistics show that as soon as a church in an area of growing population achieves a critical mass, then suddenly it becomes the place to attend church. I’m not implying that’s the only reason people choose to attend a megachurch; there are certainly many other reasons. But the fact is that once a church hits a critical mass, it becomes cool to go to be a member there. Attendance explodes. Who wouldn’t want that for their church?
I want young people to be active at Salem. I would like to see our congregation grow. Convincing people that we are the cool place to be in Creston sounds like a sure-fire winning strategy.
Until we run smack into verses like today’s Gospel that remind us that Jesus had no interest in being cool, and in fact, cannot really do much with people whose goal is to be cool.
Let’s be clear about what I’m saying. A church should be fun, alive, energetic, exciting, sometimes hilarious. A church should rock. It should also be quiet, peaceful, reverent, serious, thought-provoking. It should be kind, loving, accepting, understanding. But one thing it should never be is cool.
Because being cool really has nothing to do with God. Cool is concerned with being popular. It has as its only priority being thought of as better than other people. It is 100% about image and 0% about who you really are. When you really get right down to it, the desire to be cool is basically the desire to be worshipped by the world. And when we head down that path, we are headed for destruction.
I know only too well from personal experience how destructive cool can be. When I was in elementary school I had some good friends. Scarcely a day would go by that I wasn’t playing with one or the other or several. Those were good times. But around the end of 6th grade I lost my friends.
I never saw it coming. I was late in recognizing how important it was to be cool, to be with the in crowd. In junior high, being cool meant everything. It was far more important than friendship. I didn’t catch the cool wave, and once you get behind in the cool scene it’s hard to catch up.
I hated lunch period. In a school of 1200 kids, it’s hard to sit there day after day, eating lunch all by yourself.
The culture of cool has nothing to do with God. It diminishes life in so many ways.
In virtually every human culture throughout the world and all of history, people enjoy singing, especially children. But in our culture, so many kids are afraid to sing, or too proud to sing. For some reason, they think that singing isn’t cool. You can’t really blame them; that’s the culture in which they have been raised.
And it’s not just the young people. For many of us older folks, our faith is one of the most important things in our lives. And yet, we don’t want to talk about it with anyone. We say the Bible is an important book to us, yet our worship team leaders have a hard time getting people to read the lessons. We desperately want to pass along the faith to our children and yet it isn’t cool to talk about it with them. It’s not cool to offer a prayer. That’s why we have a pastor, so we don’t have to do it.
Again, I point the finger at myself as much as anyone. I rarely volunteered a prayer in any public setting until I became a pastor and suddenly I had to because it was part of the job description.
The antidote to the destructive cool culture is not to be uncool, geeky. It’s to be yourself, who God made you to be. Ask school teachers which kids are the most fun to be around, the ones who brighten other peoples’ day just by walking into a room, and they’ll tell you that it’s the one who have the rare gift of being comfortable with who they are. The ones who know where the boundaries are and respect them, but who won’t stop being who they are just because of what others think.
Cool is destructive because it is a shield that keeps people from seeing who we are. In some ways it’s fitting the dark glasses are a symbol of coolness in society, when they are worn for image and not for eye protection. They prevent others from seeing into our eyes, the windows of our souls. They keep us from connecting with other people, and that’s the way “cool” likes it. Cool is all about self. But when we don’t connect ourselves with other people, we die.
I learned an important lesson about that in Spooner. I had a good relationship with this one class, but if it were based only on some concept of me being cool, it would have been a shallow thing. As my own kids knew full well, I never could have kept that up; the relationship would have died.
What cemented that relationship was an awkward moment, when I was at my most uncool, when the spirit led me to do something that caught me by surprise. One of our classes was held the night before I was to preside at my first funeral. I was nervous about that funeral.
Against my better judgment, I told them so. I know, the pastor is supposed to be the one with all the answers, the one who’s fearless, never has a doubt, the one who’s in control. But I wasn’t any of those things, and I was honest and told them I was stewing about this funeral. I didn’t mind messing up in a regular service; that’s no big deal. But this was an important event for this family. I didn’t want to mess it up for them; I wanted to help. But I wasn’t sure I really know what I was doing.
So I asked them if they would say a prayer for me.
In the days that followed, many of them asked how the funeral went, and let me know that they had done what I asked. I had done something uncool. They had responded with something that wasn’t cool, they had said a prayer, and in doing so we had formed a bond.
That’s the kind of thing that cements a relationship, and that’s what Jesus ministry was all about. It has nothing to do with being cool. Cool has as its only priority being thought of as better than other people. It is 100% about image and 0% about who you really are. When you really get right down to it, the desire to be cool is basically the desire to be worshipped by the world.
If Jesus walked in a school lunchroom today, he wouldn’t go sit at the cool table. He would sit with the kid who’s all by himself, who has nobody else.
There are so many people in this world who are eating alone in the crowded lunchrooms of life. People who would give anything for a little respect, for a word of encouragement, for someone to accept them for who they are.
It’s fun to be popular, to be worshipped by the world. But we’re not called to sit with the cool crowd. We are called to grow in faith so that we are comfortable being the person God made us to be. So that we can follow Jesus and sit among those who do not belong and welcoming them into a place where all are welcome in the kingdom of God.