Somebody Save Me: Youth and the Quest for a Passionate Church

Dean, Kenda Creasy

I was glad. I was glad when they said to me let us go to the house of the Lord! Or as Eugene Peterson puts it, “when they said Let’s go to the house of God, my heart leaped for joy!” and this morning that is exactly my sentiment as we come together we have been preparing and planning and praying for this event for a long time and it is just a joy for us to welcome you. Welcome to the Passionate Faith Bible Youth and Culture conference here at Seattle Pacific University put on by the Centre for Biblical and Theological Education. Let me extend as well a special welcome to any students, faculty or staff that are here and President Eaton. All of you we extend a warm welcome. So glad that you can join us and we anticipate a moving of God’s spirit as we come together to hear from him this morning. We have a few, just words and then we are going to move right into worship. I want to invite Dr. Les Steele to come and give you a welcome on behalf of Seattle Pacific University. Dr. Steel is our Vice President for Academic Affairs and following him we will move right into worship led by Taylor Neal and the Gospel Ensemble. We are so glad you are here and God is here with us.

Thank You Celeste and good morning to all of you and welcome to Seattle Pacific University. That is official now since it was my role on the agenda. This is a great conference. This is one of the first fruits of a larger conference of the centre of Biblical and Theological Education. This is one of the great things that is happening on our campus that grows out of our already interesting academic work around youth and culture and Bible and scripture and theology. And it expands that work. A few years ago we had Chris Smith on campus who kind of opened our eyes to issues of Biblical illiteracy, theological illiteracy. And this is really a centre that grows out of that funded by the generation of the Murdock Foundation and we just look forward to great things both in terms of these types of conferences but also in terms of the resources you will find on the web and amongst our faculty and staff. So welcome on behalf of the university. I trust that it is an educative and wonderful time for you as well as a time as a time of wonderful worship this morning. Thanks for being here.

Good morning, my name is Doug Strong, I am the dean of the School of Theology here at SPU and again I welcome you, especially our students, faculty and many guests who are with us today. It is an honor for us to be able to be here and especially for me to be able to introduce to you Kenda Creasy Dean. Kenda and I go way back. We have had the privilege of knowing each other I would say my blessing for getting to know her for a long time. And what we found in these year is that we both have a crazy sense of humor that we seem to have this uncanny way of being Wesleyans way fairs among Presbyterians. And also this similar concern conviction that

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions there seems to be a disconnect between what we have experienced in God and what we hope for of the church and yet what somehow unfortunately doesn’t seem to be experienced in many of the places where we have seen the church inactive. And so what I of course we could talk a lot about Kenda’s credentials but what is most important for me about her is the way in which as she says in her book, she wants to see and for all of us to have the quest for a passionate church. My guess is that is a common quest. It is one that draws us to be here today. It is one that compels us to go into ministry to all the world. And so it is true that Kenda is professor of Youth and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary that she is probably the leading voice on theology and youth ministry today in this country. More importantly than that is her desire for God to be present with us and to help to shape us into the kinds of people that would make better disciples of Jesus Christ for the sake of the reign of God. It is in that spirit that I am very pleased and excited to welcome to our campus Kendra Creasy Dean.

Well thank you, this is a blast to be here and part of the reason it is a blast is because there are so many people from all these different corners of my own world that have somehow converged in Seattle. I understand that is a common experience for people who come to Seattle. They somehow never leave. Anyway, it is great to be here and thanks especially to the marvelous working Celeste who is the absolute most organized person I have ever worked with in my entire life to get this together so thank you. I know we are setting up the theme this morning for what is happening the rest of the day. So pray with me.

Gracious God, rid me of myself and help me get out of your way. In Christ’s name we pray.

If I were going to ask the first story that comes to mind for most American young people, a story about somebody getting saved. What might you name? Some of you might name Twilight, the way Edward is always rushing in to save Bella and of course the soundtrack leads with the song called hurry up and save me. Somebody might say Heroes. If you watch that show you know that the first season’s theme was Save the Cheerleader, Save the World. Nobody really knows what that means but by the time the third season had rolled around and it had morphed into Save Ourselves, save the World. Some of you might name Gossip Girl or Sex and Money Equals salvation sometimes. And sure enough the music video for the show feature for the show features the Crows song Sometimes Salvation. Some of you might even mention Glee where the theme every single week is how we get saved with a little help from our friends so that we Don’t Stop Believing. But probably most of you would name the mega salvation myth in American culture which has withstood almost 900 comic books, six movies, ten TV series, 18 animated shorts and yes, a Broadway musical: Superman. Now if you have watched Smallville sometime in the last nine years you know that the theme song is anybody know? Somebody Save Me. And I just happen to just look up the season finale is coming up next week. You know what the name of that finale is? Salvation. Smallville of course is about Clark Kent’s growing up

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions years. First as a teenager, more recently as a young adult who is learning about who he is and who he belongs to and what on earth he is doing on this planet. It is a quest that the church calls vocation. And like all adolescence, Clark has to come with terms with changes that he can’t seem to top. He doesn’t quite understand, changes in his body that he can’t seem to stop. Watch this clip from the first season. It is the first time where Clark’s parents have seen save anybody. You might recognized those of you who aren’t regulars will recognize Clark’s fathers one of the Dukes of Hazard. Watch.

Ok. Well there is a scene were this happens, ok? Who are we? Who do we belong to and what on earth are we doing on this planet? Now in Christian tradition our call from God and our salvation in Jesus Christ, are inextricably linked. Superheroes have come a long way since the Superman myth was introduced by two Jewish teenagers for their school newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio in the 1930’s. but the Superman myth reminds you that salvation and location go together. Kal-El the name of Clark Kent when he is back on planet Krypton means “voice of God” in Hebrew. But when young people do not hear the connection between vocation and salvation made to the church. Pop culture is very happy to offer them alternative saviors instead. Now to be clear despite all the Jesus imagery in Smallville and other Superman stories; Superman is based on Moses as some of you know, not on the story of Jesus. So we have to be careful here because Superman is not or Jesus is not, superman is not God is a cape or something. To be saved is a phrase that we abuse so much. Margret Brown Taylor says that too much education will make you jumpy just even using it. But you can’t talk about either teenagers or about Christian location without talking about salvation. And as we will see, the church doesn’t give teenagers a story about God’s salvation, they will gladly find a salvation story someplace else. Of course Superman does have a problem right? And that is what Kryptonite. Yep. And Superman like less supermen and women has a weakness. This is where the superman story becomes our story too because all of us have Kryptonite in our lives. So the things that sap our strength, drain us of our energy in our compromise our confidence that will knock over even on our best days and this is where Jesus trumps Superman. Because you see in Christian tradition, Kryptonite serves a purpose. Because in Christian tradition it is vulnerability that is the root to salvation, not strength. The power of God is shown through God’s weakness. Human vulnerability, death on a cross. And God uses human weakness so that there can be no doubt that redemption comes from God and not from us. Yet most Americans are more familiar with the story of salvation in Superman, namely where salvation is the result of strength, they end with the story of salvation in the Bible where salvation is the result of weakness, God’s weakness on the cross. So naturally most young people expect God to be like Superman than like Jesus Christ. Well, that after all was the position of Israel right? The scandal of Jesus was that he didn’t overcome Israel’s enemies with force. He undercut them with love. Well this is not the savior that Israel bargained for. Young people can identify with that. So let’s call this the Smallville effect. When the salvation stories available to young people outside the church seem

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions more compelling than the salvation story of the church? Now just because they are not looking for Jesus in church does not mean that young people are not looking for salvation. In fact teenagers are on the brink of losing and finding themselves all at once. They are in shifting sand all the time. They are looking for salvation everywhere. Someway to rescue them from their failures, to redeem their shortcoming to rescue them from being nobodies, no give them clarity about who they are and who they belong to and what on earth they are doing on this planet. They are looking for something or somebody who will save them and it is not a blind search because for young people salvation looks like something very specific. In fact it looks like a person. And not just any person, but somebody who loves them, someone who loves them passionately, someone whose love is literally to die for. Salvation comes in the form of true love, passionate love, love that is worth sacrifice, love that is worth suffering for. And as any Twilight fan will tell you, anything less just isn’t true love. Of course, this is the Church’s story. We call it the Passion of Christ because it is a story of true love worthy of sacrifice. This is the way God loves us and this is the way God calls us to love in return and intuitively young people know I their bones that only true love will save them. And they are right. They just don’t understand what true love is. Despite all the sex involved this is profoundly religious move. Because they are right of course. The Christian teaches us precisely that, that true love, passion does save them, a specific passion, the passion of Christ but is passion nonetheless. In the Christian story, God’s true love, the self giving passion of God in Jesus Christ has three dimensions.

You ready? First is fidelity. This is a term we are borrowing from Eric Erickson. But is based on the Latin word fedae, which means what? Faith right, the fidelity of sound is the faithfulness of sound to the original. So Erikson calls fidelity, this a quote, “the strength of having something to die for, having something to be faithful to.” And the strength of being faithful is something you must develop as an adolescent according to Erickson. So teenagers experience fidelity as somebody who will be there for me. This is who God loves us.

So a passionate church loves teenagers steadfastly with fidelity. Second, God’s passion also looks like transcendence. The strength of belonging to something bigger than we are, something that pulls us beyond ourselves into this larger and more coherent hole. Teenagers experience transcendence as being moved and if the rock concert moves me and worship doesn’t, the rock concert wins. So this is how God loves us, by moving towards us in Jesus Christ and by moving us towards him. So a church that loves young people passionately finds room for them to experience God on the move. Finally God’s passion looks like communion. The life for life intimacy that comes from knowing and from being deeply known by another. Intimacy is the experience of having somebody who knows what it is like to be me. Right? It is not necessarily sexual, though that is what young people often confuse with intimacy when this is the only kind we show them. But we are intimate in the sense that whether it is physical or

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions social or spiritual, this other person gets me. They know me from the inside. In the Bible to know means an intimate relational kind of knowing, not a cognitive kind of knowing. Being known in the Biblical sense, Psalm 139, oh God you have searched me and you have known me in my rising up and my lying down. You discern my thoughts from far away. You get me. This is how God loves us. So a passionate church gets teenagers.

What does this look like in Christian community? A community like your congregation maybe like Seattle Pacific University. Well you have got a church that looks sort of like this. And I will talk though it briefly but if this were a workshop we will spend some time trying to figure out where your church practices this passionate kind of approach to young people well and where you might need some help. So think about that as we go through it. I mean, we have got fidelity for example; the distorted form of fidelity is if it stays, it must be true but it means the adolescent desire for steadfastness as teenagers long for somebody to be there for me. You can be there for a teenager if you are in a gang or through baptism. It meets their developmental need for acceptance. Divine passion is also revealed as transcendence, the distorted way to think about this is if it feels good it must be God. It meets the desire for ecstasy and adolescents want to be moved. They can be moved through drugs. Think about the language we use for drugs. We take drugs to get high. LSD gives you a trip. You see the transcendence? The moving? The being moved? Worship however is supposed to move us as well and it means that the developmental need for feeling part of something great.

Communion. The distorted way to think about that is if it is sex it must be love. It means the desire for intimacy and the longing for someone to know me, they can know me through sex or maybe they can know me through prayer and it meets the developmental need for belonging. So you see teenagers are right. Passion does save us but there is a problem because no product can love s enough to save us. No person can love us enough to save us and no church can love us enough to save us. Only one has only been passionate enough, transcendent enough or know us well enough to save us and that is God in Jesus Christ. Yet because the church has ironically been largely been silent on the subject of passion for the last 500 years, conferences like this notwithstanding, we have allowed popular culture to define passion in our stead. Take for example Tracy’s attraction to Evie in the movie Thirteen. Yet another salvation story brought to us by Netflix. Now has anyone seen this movie? Ok, this is a very raw movie. It will offend you. When I first got the movie I had it laying around the house because I intended to preview it for my classes and I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet. Unannounced to me, my fifteen year old Brannon had taken it and of course watched it and he and his dad went on a walk and Brannon said to his dad, “I don’t think Mom should be watching stuff like this.” So Thirteen explores the dark side of salvation. It is co-written by a teenager, the brunette here who plays Evie the bad girl in the movie. And it kind of collapses all the problems of adolescence into two teenagers but it is still eerily realistic. So if Superman kind of romanticizes

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions sacrificial love in a community like Smallville, Thirteen portrays the disintegration that happens when teenagers don’t have a community that practices passion.

So here is the set up. Tracy Fields abandoned by her divorced parents. Her dad is absent, fidelity has been seriously compromised in this family but it is a loving family but it is not a community that practices passion on behalf of one another to everybody’s determent. So enter Evie who is the hottest girl in school and she decides to show Tracey what fidelity, transcendence and intimacy can look like. So Tracey intuiting that this is a salvation narrative gladly turns to Evie as her savior. And on the outside, the salvation myth looks complete. Right? Evie is there for Tracey in ways her parents are not and in so doing gives her a distorting kind of fidelity. She shows Tracey a means to ecstasy through drugs and alcohol in which they can get high, transcendence. She introduces Tracey to a new kind of intimacy, through sex, or communion. And without a theological framework, there is no way to test the adequacy of Tracy’s chosen savior except to live through it, if you can live through it and see if anybody gets saved in the end.

Now without the church’s story of passion, without the story of a love that is worth dying for, we forget that the passion we are seeking is God’s passion and not our own. The point of the cross certainly isn’t enthusiasm. It is not even suffering. The point of the cross is love, God’s love, true love. God loved us enough to suffer for us, to become human for us, to become weak for us in order to save us from ourselves. History shows us that passion is stronger than any army. Psychology tells us that love changes us more surly than force and you know from your own experiences that a baby will bring you to your knees faster than an order to kneel. It is Kryptonite love because any young person will tell you that true love is worth dying for. Passion means loving someone so much that you would willingly suffer for them. It is love so rare that it is the stuff of legend right? It is Jack and Rose in Titanic that maybe Bella and Edward in Twilight. It is Mufasa and Simba in the Lion King. It is Sam and Frodo in Lord of the Rings. This is the kind of love God promises us. And it is the love that every young person and if we are honest, everyone of us is hardwired to seek. It is a love that is literally to die for. And we long for someone to love us this much as well. If the church offers anything less than this, we are frauds. So when young people dismiss Christianity. We need to listen closely because under either-whatever-ism is a plea. That plea goes something like this: Please, please tell me what you say is true. Please tell me someone love me this much. Tell me someone loves me so much that they won’t go away and they won’t let me down and they won’t let me go. Even if the ship sinks of the library explodes or the towers fall or the markets collapse, tell me someone loves me this much. Because if Jesus isn’t worth dying for, then he is not worth living for either. So in the movie Thirteen, what Tracey wants in all this passion is salvation, someone who thinks her life is so full of purpose that they will not let her go no matter what and in the end of course. Evie can’t give that to her. Betrayal becomes the Kryptonite of their relationship. So what

Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions happens is Evie gets busted, she rats of Tracey and then she plays innocent while Tracey gets the fall and utterly alone, Tracey descends into hell. But salvation is yet to come. Only passion can help her, a love that is so profound that in spite of everything, it stands ready to die for her. And in this case, this love, this love that comes to us in Jesus Christ is unwittingly portrayed to her by her mother, played by Holly Hunter. The scene that you are about to see first of all there is kind of a false start but I had a little trouble capturing it, so just hang in there. It will happen. But I think it is probably the purest expression of fidelity I have ever seen on screen but I need to warn you that the language is such that has probably never been heard in this sanctuary before. In some ways it is kind of too bad we are setting up a theme for the conference in a sanctuary here but true love, passion involves suffering as well.

Notice three things before we close. First, the gift of the adult is the gift of noticing the young person’s desire for salvation even though Tracey denies it. Second, the adult didn’t fix it, only God could do that. She only kissed it. She could only do one thing for Tracey at this point and the church in many cases can only do one thing for young people at this point and that is to hang on and not let go. And quite unwillingly in the process. Tracey’s mom become Jesus “Lo I am with you always til the end of the age.” Third, without a theological framework for passion which is a way that points beyond the fallible fidelity of humans towards the fidelity of Christ right? Tracey is going to left to transfer her savior figure from Evie to her mother. And her mother of course is also going to eventually disappoint her. Only God’s love is true love. Only God’s love is to die for. How do we know because only God died for us. The church has the uber story of passion. It is love that is true because it reflects Christ fidelity and transcendence and intimacy. Those three dimensions of passion that won’t go away and won’t let us go and won’t let us down. You see what finally reconciles mother and daughter in Thirteen wasn’t strength but weakness. Holly Hunter confronted her short comings as a mother, Tracey is confronting her sins as a daughter, both of them confronting their vocation of how to be human with one another. You see Kryptonite serves a purpose. It reveals our sin. It makes us weak so that we can stand honestly before God who knows who we are and who we belong to and why we are put on this planet. When we are this vulnerable before God, God moves in to take over. Karl Barth is said to have claimed that the most important phrase in Christian theology is “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so” and if we keep going we get to the part where “they are weak but he is strong. It is a song about Kryptonite.

So we are going to close with Karl Barth’s theological mantra and as we stand and sing, “give thanks for the Kryptonite in your life because wherever you are week is where God’ strength comes through.”

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