This Week's Sermon: "Spiritual Tourism"

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Who has known the Lord’s mind?
    Or who has been his mentor?
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Or who has given him a gift
    and has been paid back by him?
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All things are from him and through him and for him.
    May the glory be to him forever. Amen. (Common English Bible)

iCamp 2019

I would like to thank all of you for inviting me to speak and preach to you this weekend. I am grateful for the invitation and hope you have enjoyed this time together as much as I have. I especially would like to thank Pastor Ron Greene for extending the invitation, and my--our--regional minister, Pastor Sandy Messick, for beginning the process that called me back to the Pacific Northwest eight years ago.

A few months before graduating with my Doctor of Ministry from Seattle University, my classmates from my very last class and I spent one Saturday morning meditating at the Koyasan temple in the heart of Seattle. It was a genuinely moving experience for me—at not just in the vaguely orientalist, Tom Cruise Last Samurai way. I knew that I was a spiritual tourist, there for a single day, but all the other temple-goers that day paid me no mind—they acted as though I was supposed to be there, even though I imagine from my behavior and body language that I was unfamiliar with the very same surroundings that they had an immersive knowledge of.

I had seen this same sort of thing elsewhere—like when Carrie and I visited the Wong Tai Sin temple in Hong Kong’s Kowloon area during our honeymoon, and I got to witness literally hundreds, if not thousands, of pilgrims offer incense and prayers. My presence was affably tolerated, as though this western Christian was somehow expected to be hanging around at a Taoist temple.

But where this delicate dance of experience quickly goes awry is when additional expectations are had by the westerner, and these unmet, unspoken expectations quickly degenerate into what is perceived to be a bad experience, followed by a scathing online review.

The holy man at Seattle’s Koyasan temple told me, in a post-meditation chat with my classmates, about a sister Koyasan temple that existed in Japan that was a big tourism draw for travelers from across the world, and that these cultural and linguistic differences could make for…interesting experiences. Lo and behold, this Koyasan temple in Japan had a TripAdvisor page, and only a few months after my visit to the Seattle temple, the TripAdvisor page of the Koyasan temple in Japan went viral when people began to discovered the monks’ responses to negative reviews. Here are a few of my favorites (I promise these are all 100% real):

In response to a review complaining about the large number of people staying there: “You are a part of that.”

In response to a review saying that it felt more like a hotel rather than a “genuine temple experience:” “I don’t have any idea what you were expecting…However, this IS a genuine temple. Not a hotel. We cannot take responsibility for your unrealistic expectations.”

In response to a review saying that the meals were strange and unlike any food that person had ever tasted: “Yeah, it’s Japanese monastic cuisine, you uneducated f***.”

And, yes, these are genuinely funny, until you remember that these reviews tend to come from a place of expecting that you, and your preferences, be centered—that you are the default, that the world revolves around you, and that religious experience is more about your preferences than God’s.

That can sound…a little like church, can’t it? How often do we go to church not as pilgrims, but as tourists? Not as wayfarers on a journey but as clients with expectations—sometimes unspoken, sometimes not—of being catered to? And how does this tendency create a church of tourists that have just happened to stick around?

Because for a generation that values experiences above material possessions, that is the sort of spiritual experience that millennials have voted against with our feet. For all the ink that has been spilled about us as a me-first generation—and we surely do engage in copious amounts of navel-gazing—the continued insistence on the church in the United States to be spiritual tourists rather than spiritual pilgrims has been, I think, a real growing edge for the American church.

In some ways, it has long been thus. Tell me what your idealized version of yourself is, and I’ll tell you what characteristics you are apt to attribute to God—which is, by the by, a trap I have to check myself from falling into just as much.

But Paul will always hasten to tell us that God is so much bigger than that—that God’s riches, wisdom, and knowledge are so deep, and are as hard to track as God’s paths!

Our paths, in contrast, are generally pretty easy to track. Masters of stealth, the church is emphatically not. Nor, particularly, were the white settlers who emigrated along the Oregon Trail to settings like this, leaving deep wagon wheel ruts, overhunted bison, and devastated indigenous populations in their wake.

Theirs’ is an example of how it matters not only where you’re going—in this case, to historically indigenous lands—but how you get there, and what you do once you arrive. After all, it was not just that these global tourists elected to visit the Koyasan temple in Japan, it was with certain expectations. It was how they traveled, not only where. They traveled expecting to be catered to. And that is not how we should be traveling on our own faith journeys.

We may well know where we want to end up at the end of those journeys—with Saint Peter ushering us into Paradise and informing us that margarita fountain is on the left—but how we get there matters for getting there at all. If we travel our own paths without humility for the Lord’s paths, we are going to be traveling even further from what God would have us do, not closer.

I imagine that could easily be the conundrum congregations—and American Christianity writ large—find themselves in today. If we place what we want ahead of what God wants (or worse, act like what we want is always what God wants), we must not be surprised at having veered from a course that would have handed down a more vibrant and vital church to future generations.

And after seeing, and hearing so many of the ways in which the institutional church shuns younger generations and even eats its own young, I know in my bones why so many millennials have decided that the church is irredeemable. We have come of age in a time where some of the deepest and worst sins of the church have come to light, from an array of sex abuse scandals to financial improprieties that amount to highway robbery of families to anti-LGBTQ practices that literally kill people. And the sustained white Christian support for a battery of xenophobic and racist actions out of this presidency has been completely discrediting on its face to so many young people who have lived our entire lives with the modern version of the Religious Right.

So we know the bad. We see it, and in our current news and social media environment, are saturated with it. We may well have directly and personally experienced it. Very likely, we know someone who has, perhaps someone very close to us. And were we to value those relationships highly, as well we ought, you must be able to see how and why millennials are prioritizing those relationships over any relationship with a potentially irredeemable church.

But the good news is that humanity, and the church, is not irredeemable. We never have been. We never will be. If that were so, God would have never become flesh to live as us, die as us, and resurrect to live as us once more. And just that fact alone is enough! Paul says here in Romans 11 that if one part of a batch of dough is holy, it is all holy. If the roots are holy, he says, so too will the branches be holy. The root of our church is Jesus of Nazareth, who will forever remain holy.

And at the risk of extending the root metaphor too far, consider that when you imagine a tree, what you see are the trunk, branches, and leaves. Not necessarily the roots.

This is the American church. What people often see in us, or when they imagine us, is not our rootedness in Jesus, but in what we have tried to grow on top of Him and in His name—a tree trunk of prejudice, branches of scandal that emanate from that trunk, leaves of exclusion and homogeneity, and fruit that our more diverse younger generations increasingly find sour to the taste.

But not all of us in these younger generations. Where the church is needed, perhaps most desperately, is undoing the damage already done in radicalizing a generation of young, mostly white, men—young men like the ones whose violent hatred was on full display this past weekend in my hometown metro area of Portland.

Seeing the mostly young, mostly white men of the alt-right descend upon Portland, I am reminded now of what Sandy spoke to you of yesterday: of Jesus asking the man at Bethsaida, "Do you want to be healed?" As much as we talk about whether the church really wants to be healed, we must ask if many in my own generation even want to be healed of these demonic prejudices and bigotries that have spread like wildfire among our white men.

Ideally, the church would be in a position to speak to this. We, after all, claim as the Messiah a man with extensive experience in healing, and a lengthy resume of successful exorcisms. We should be able to respond to these young ones coming up with loud voices and even louder destructiveness, "Do you want to be healed?" They may well not, for such healing would mean a process they may be too scared to undergo. But we in the church who know that Jesus was able to say no to earthly power when tempted with it by Satan should be able to show these young men not to sell their own souls for the sake of similarly sinful power.

But we haven't. We could. But we have not yet.

This radicalization is a poison that must be extracted as rapidly as possible; literal poisoning represented one of the many perils in the Oregon Trail games, and many a player saw their pixelated selves perish from poisonous snakebites. Only this is no video game with a convenient reset button. This is our life, our one shot at right relationship—in this particular plane of existence, anyways—and church, we are blowing it on trying to resurrect the Leave it to Beaver church of the mid-twentieth century. But I have news for you, and it is in fact the Good News: the only living entity that we know to have resurrected of their own volition is Jesus of Nazareth, and it is through Him that we resurrect—not through a narrow memory of the church that is too small for what’s at stake.

For the church, if we choose to live out our calling as we must, also holds some of the antidote for those among us who have been snakebitten by the satanic poisons of white supremacy and bigotry. The radical nature of God as revealed in Jesus demands the ongoing exorcism of our own prejudices and iniquities. In doing so, the church can show radicalized youth how it is done—how the shedding of old prejudices can be done, and the jettisoning of ill-gotten privileges may be attempted.

And, in the process, perhaps we all in the church can reevaluate how, as individuals, try to be the collective church, and try to be a little less touristy with our spirituality, and a little more Jesus-y. May we set aside our inner tourist, expecting that a holy place, be it a Koyasan temple or our own local congregation, would cater to our own selfishness, and instead embrace belonging to a holy community that consists not only of its present membership, but its future membership as well.

May we be then, not a church of the future, but a church for the future—future pilgrims, future wayfarers, and, yes, future tourists who may yet see the light, who may yet reach the mountaintop and, by the grace of God, come away transformed.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson, D.Min.

Lincoln, Montana

August 25, 2019