The gospel lesson for this past Sunday began, “Large crowds were traveling with him.” Interesting text for Labor Day Weekend. It’s the last weekend of the summer. People are at the State Fair, out on the lake, up in the mountains, visiting with out-of-town family, doing whatever they need to do to ring the last drops out of the summer vacation season. Those of us who come to church likely hear a bit of an echo in a mostly empty sanctuary. And we read about large crowds following Jesus.
But this is not reason to lament poor worship attendance or berate those who choose not to be in church. To the contrary, Jesus didn’t like big crowds. He was always suspicious of them. He consistently lobbed his most difficult teachings into large crowds of people, causing the people to disperse with a mixture of anger and confusion. In this week’s text from Luke 14:25-33, he tells a large crowd, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciples...None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” When confronted with a large crowd in John 6, Jesus shocked his hearers with this gruesome pronouncement: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Soon afterward, many “turned back and no longer went about with him,” complaining, “the teaching is difficult.”
Jesus’ told his first recorded parable to a “very large crowd,” so large that he had to get in a boat and address the people from the water. The parable, the one about the sower who scattered seed on different kinds of soil, was a not-so-cryptic shot at all the groupies who were gathering around him. Three out of four you, Jesus said, don’t get it. Most of you will either not hear my message, will rejoice in it for a little while but then forget it, or will accept it only as long as it doesn’t interfere with your material pleasures. Only a few of you will actually let my word take root and bear fruit in your lives.
Jesus did not rejoice when he saw great crowds. Sometimes, he slipped away from them to be in prayer. Sometimes, he lamented their spiritual condition (“harassed and helpless”) and sometimes, he angrily confronted them because he knew they had gathered for the wrong reasons.
How ironic, then, that so much of what we call Christianity today is concerned with creating large crowds by using careful strategies. (This has been the case since the early 1800’s, when frontier preachers sought to recreate the Great Awakening of the colonial period by employing new methods for enticing people to revival meetings.) These days, when religious leaders stand before great crowds, they do not lament. They are not suspicious of peoples’ motives. They certainly will not say anything to offend the great mass of people assembled. Instead, they rejoice at the great thing God is doing before them. Have they read the gospels?
The intoxication with numbers is hardly a peculiarity of revival-oriented traditions. Mainline denominations celebrate the churches exhibiting the fastest growth, pay deference to the congregations with the largest memberships, and, even if they deny this is the case, judge a pastor’s success at least in part by the size of her or his church’s worship attendance. The way pastors have been conditioned to talk about our churches reveals what is truly important to us. More than one colleague in ministry, trying to learn more about my congregation, has asked me, “So how many are you worshiping on Sunday morning?” Unbelievable. We don’t even recognize how denomination-speak perverts our worship into an idolatry of numbers.
Don’t get me wrong. I look forward to my congregation returning to full strength in the next few weeks. I yearn for my congregation to reach people who need to know the blessing of a faith community; who desperately need to know God’s love and the challenge of God’s word. I am grateful for the energy that comes from a sanctuary filed with expectant, worshipful people.
I am also mindful that the great crowd at the first Christian Pentecost in Acts 2 represented a genuine transformation by the Holy Spirit. Even then, however, the crowd was dispersed. People were sent home in smaller groups. And since we know that no Christian sanctuaries were built until at least 200 years later, we can assume that Christian gatherings in those early years were small enough to meet in homes. No value was placed on the ability to gather thousands for one event. That’s what empires did to manipulate emotions, foment hatred, and win allegiance. (The roar of the crowd at the Roman Coliseum, where lions mauled Christians to death for the entertainment of the people, was repulsive to the early church.) The risen Christ did not convert people through external stimulation but through inner transformation; not through the contagious energy of a crowd but through personal relationships.
Nothing has changed. Christ is still changing hearts the same way today. There is no inherent connection between Christianity and massive crowds. Instead, the tradition that bears Christ’s name is dedicated to the hard, sometimes slow and painstaking work of building strong faith communities where people celebrate the presence of the risen Lord and learn how to live as people of God.
Copyright 2010 by J. Mark Lawson
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