Why Do We Do What We Do?

Image Credit: Edward Hicks – Peaceable Kingdom

Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year C
25 May 2025

Acts 16:9-15
Psalm 67
Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
John 14:23-29 or John 5:1-9

 

I grew up in the church. While I resisted (don’t ask me why) memorizing Bible verses, which was common in those days, I was certainly exposed to the scriptures. That the Sermon on the Mount was expression of a life lived by the grace of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit was never a question for me. Add to this that I grew up during the Cold War in the country that started WW II and that would be the first to be obliterated if a nuclear war ensued. It’s not a surprise I am a pacifist. Of course, the argument against pacifism is that there is real evil in the world and that being armed can hold it in check or maybe even defeat it. And so pacifism is generally taken to be either as a noble conviction or as one that is irresponsible, but not as one to carry much weight in the way that would determine our politics.

I had my car in for service last week. I dropped it off early and on the ride from the shop to the church the driver and I talked about the weather, which quickly turned into climate change denial. No, he said, the earth is just going through cycles, therefore, there isn’t really anything we can do. The point of such a statement, despite all evidence to the contrary, is to relieve my conscience and allow me to carry on as I do now. I mean, who wants to be in a state of panic?
I pose this rhetorical question to suggest that we all live in denial of one kind of another, regardless of whether we are climate change deniers or accept the science.

The question both of these situations raise for me is about why we do the things that we do. Do we do things in order to get results, and if we cannot obtain results, do we change our strategy and our method, or do we abandon our goals (10 years ago a conservative friend told me he thought that it was too late for us to stop climate change), or do we carry on because we do things for entirely different reasons?

In 2019 the novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote a piece entitled, “What If We Stopped Pretending?” It was a piece that was not received well by all. But while he, like my friend, is of the conviction that it is too late for us to stop the world from heating by 2ºC, he suggests there are all kinds of things we can and should do. He argues that we should still work to prevent heating above 2ºC and that we should conserve finite resources – using less of everything is good for the planet, giant electric SUVs are not. And he wrote (in 2019) that we should prepare for the kind of natural disasters that will come along with the warming of our planet, as well as mass migrations of climate refugees. In other words, while his critics do not want him to state that we have already lost the battle to prevent global warming to 2ºC, he is not arguing for fatalism but for us to engage for the sake of a common future. His argument is that it is the denial of the crisis that keeps us from meaningful engagement. To say that we can limit global warming to 1.5ºC would be the lullaby that goes along with that.

Allow me to return to the question of pacifism, not because I want to turn you into pacifists but to continue to ask why we do what we do. Regarding pacifism the theologian Stanley Hauerwas says that “Christian nonviolence is not a strategy to rid the world of violence, but (…) the way Christians must live in a world of violence. (…) Christians are not nonviolent because we believe our nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but (…) because faithful followers of Christ in a world of war cannot imagine being anything else than nonviolent.”¹
In other words, Christian pacifists are not pacifists because they think it will solve the world’s problems but because rather than inflict violence, Jesus absorbed violence. Christian pacifism is an imitation of Christ.

Our second reading has taken us to the concluding chapters of the Book of Revelation. Even people who otherwise may keep their distance to this Biblical book can embrace the promises of a new heaven and a new earth, of God making God’s home among us, of nations being brought together, for Eden to be restored, for the leaves of the tree to bring healing for the nations, and the absence of pain, suffering and death.

But the thing is, John proclaims a new world and for many Christians this new world has been reduced to the sweet by and by. Eugene Peterson, the pastor and theologian who gave us The Message Bible translation and who taught at Regent College, complained that the promised new heaven and new earth often get reduced to heaven.² And if the new heaven and the new earth are reduced to heaven alone, then does all of this not simply turn into opiate for the masses, into salvation postponed?

So there are those who are content to wait for God to fulfill God’s promises in God’s time. But how much does that render those who wait as passive? Is this not what Samuel Becket described in Waiting for Godot? And considering the question of why we do what we do, this group really doesn’t do anything.

And then there are those who are tired of waiting, who do not want to be passive. And they may have cast off their expectation of God coming to the rescue, and so they get to work, in the name of God, but expecting in some form to do what God has not done. Here the question of why we do what we do is grounded in the belief that God is too slow, and that the Kingdom of God cannot come unless we help bring it about.

And as the passivity of just waiting for heaven makes those who are called to be disciples into spectators, so the expectation that we must do what God has not done, makes us take ourselves more seriously than we take God.

So how do we resolve this dilemma? How can avoid the trap of postponement and subsequent apathy in light of overwhelming problems, and how can we avoid the temptation to become saviours ourselves?
Why do we do what we do?

Brian Blount is an African American Theologian. He reads the Book of Revelation from an African American perspective. And he gives us an illustration of what that looks like in African American preaching.

Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel? My Lord will deliver you, too! Can I get a witness?
The same God who locked Satan out of heaven is going to lock him up in hell. Can I get a witness?
God conquered Satan for you? Who are you going to conquer for God? Can I get a Witness?

This style of preaching expects a response, a joining in the confession and in the mission, it expects the listeners to become witnesses for Christ. Blount says that the Book of Revelation follows this same pattern in its proclamation of the Lordship of Jesus.

Jesus is Lord! Jesus is Lord! Jesus is Lord!

Blount explains that from the assertion of the Lordship of Jesus, religious, ethical, and (very) political expectations follow.³ Why do we do the things we do? Because Jesus is Lord!

From where we are today we forget that the New Testament was written from the perspective of opposition to the principalities and powers. (Ephesians 6) And so even while the churches John was writing to were not experiencing the kind of systematic persecution the previous generation had experienced under Nero, John still asks the Church to engage in a life of resistance. John demanded that they refuse any opportunity, no matter how inconsequential, to acknowledge Roman imperial or pagan lordship. He demanded that they publicly and somewhat antagonistically witness to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.⁴

Why do we do the things that we do?
Because we have not given up believing that God is at work in the world, we are neither passive, nor do we believe that the reign of God can only come through us. We do what we do to proclaim the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

How we can resist the idols that demand our loyalty over loyalty to Jesus?
The idol that the market, or science will save us. The idol of consumerism. The idol of that nothing can change, that nothing must change. The idol of entitlement. The idol of power. The idol that everything is a commodity. The idol that only the individual counts and that people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The idol that nothing in our history needs redeeming. The idol that tells us we are powerless anyway.

To recall what Stanley Hauerwas said about pacifism, we are “not nonviolent because we believe our nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but rather because faithful followers of Christ in a world of war cannot imagine being anything else than nonviolent.”

We do not love the things that God loves over all else because we think that we could redeem the world, but because as faithful followers of Jesus we cannot imagine anything else, for Jesus has made us his witnesses, and the world needs our witness. We do the things that we do to witness to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Amen.⁵