Sermons for the Month
Hog Heaven
DATE: June 4, 2000
SERVICE: Easter VII
TEXT: John 17:6-19“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN Want to slip into something comfortable? Something with a tight, draft-free fit? Something zippered and black? Then try this: Slip on a full weight, dry-milled leather jacket with zippered storage compartments. Slap on your leather chaps with the brass-finished zippers, snap-down cuffs and belted waist. Strap on your Shorty "Ultralight" helmet, pull on your leather gauntlets and your ready for your new Harley 2000 Fat Boy! Ride a Fat Boy, they tell me, and you immediately feel the difference from other bikes. No more low-speed vibration that you get from Evo-powered Softails when idling. Shift into first gear and you feel the mechanism glide into place. Ease out the clutch and power on the throttle and not only is the vibration gone but there is something new ... power. Perfect for freeways at speeds below 75, although a rubber-mount is still better for high-speed, long-distance cruising. Let's review. You got your 2000 Fat Boy with the Twin Cam 88B motor vibrating between your legs. You got your passenger behind you with her arms cinched around your waist. You got a hundred miles of open highway ahead of you. The wind in your face and bugs in your teeth. And what do you have? The perfect Harley Couple on a road trip. Harley Davidson hasn't always had this kind of success or appeal. Harleys were once upon a time the only cycle of choice for rebels and outlaw bikers. The company decided about a couple of decades ago to distance itself from this antiestablishment image. But later, as Japanese imports flooded the market, Harley Davidson stumbled, close to bankruptcy. It was well into the 1980s before the company leadership decided to once again embrace the hard-core biker group that was showing incredibly faithful brand loyalty. To ward off the invasion of the Japanese imports, Harley made a final, desperate bid for survival by focusing on its legendary connection with rebelliousness, sheer vitality and off-the-wall hunger for the elemental life. The strategy worked. Harley saved itself by embracing its outlaw image. Hog riders and cycle lovers want to see themselves as being part of another world, and no matter the role they play 9-to-5 - as lawyers, accountants or business leaders - they feel unashamed and unabashed as they strap on their leathers and rumble off on their "Milwaukee monsters" to Sturgis, South Dakota. Last year's bike rally in the Black Hills, called "Sturgis 1999," drew a pretty good crowd, but not a great one. The total count was only about a quarter of a million people including a couple members from Faith and one or two of my non-member friends. Bottom line? At the soul of the Harley is a rumble and a roar, an attitude that is positively otherworldly. To be a true rider, you've got to put your hope in hog heaven above everything else. There's an analogy for us here, whether we're bike buffs or not. Jesus, in his great prayer in John 17, hopes his disciples will be willing to be of another world, to strap on the leathers of a counterculture spiritual life. However, herein lies the problem. Although we believers are called to a radical Christianity, many of our brothers and sisters in Christ have settled for a pastel Churchianity that has lost sight of its original vision. They've become more like a gaggle of weekend riders than the gang of love warriors Jesus refers to in his prayer for us in this morning's appointed text. "I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one." Our primary identity, brothers and sisters is that of an outlaw - outside the laws of this world, that is, and inside God's grace. Now, if truth be told, there are two groups of Harley riders--the dedicated riders of the open air who ride under the influence of testosterone with their braided ponytails and fringed leathers and the new breed of week-end bikers who have discovered that while they were bred to be businesspeople, they were born to be wild. You can usually tell them from the real thing because: . Their leathers still have creases ... . They buy bikes as investments ... . Their Harley shirts have collars ... . They don't ride in the rain ... . They stop 30 miles from Sturgis to unload their bikes so they can ride in ... . Their saddlebags have a special pocket for their cell phones ... Paul talks elsewhere in his letters that we Christians are to put on our own version of leathers: jackets, chaps, gloves and other protective pieces - a rebel getup that the apostle he described as "the whole armor of God": A belt of truth around the waist, a breastplate of righteousness, a shield of faith and a helmet of salvation (Ephesians 6:10-17). This outfit, Jesus says, is to be no week-end suit of clothes. We as Christians are to wear this suit of armor, every day. The early history of the church is nothing if not a gallery of outlaw Christians who were dedicated and dressed for the long haul: Paul, Peter, James and John, Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin, Cyprian, Tertullian, Anthony, Athanasius and Augustine. These are not cappuccino Christians. Fortunately, their breed still exists. The church has Chuck Colson who works in our prisons; Mark Yaconelli who, with a Lilly Foundation grant, is introducing teens to the Lectio Divina and the Ignatian Awareness Examen at Sleepy Hollow Presbyterian Church in San Anselmo, California; Bart Campolo, an evangelist with a buzz cut and combat boots working with the homeless and fatherless in the crack-sophisticated ghettos of Philadelphia who is a favorite speaker at Lutheran Youth Gatherings; John Dilulio, a Princeton professor who has created a new project to help teens escape the cycle of poverty, crime and drug abuse; Eugene Rivers and his Azusa Christian Community in the inner city of Boston. We dedicated Christians have got to hang tough, and be Real Riders - not just the "wannabees" so disdained by die-hard hogsters. Jesus knows that this is not always easy, especially when he is not physically present to guide us or when evil threatens to throw us off course. The challenge is always to remember who we are, whose we are, and what we are about: citizens of another world, a breed apart, disciples of Christ who are called to share the good news of Jesus with everyone; to transform followers into disciples with a faith that works in real life; to joyfully go and share his love in the world. In the end, it's a challenge to be an outlaw: to refuse to go with the flow of injustice, poverty, callousness, to live outside the law of human expectations, and instead live inside the grace of God. Harley Davidson got it right when it discovered that hog riders are tapped into another reality, one that fills them with joy as they slip on their jackets and rumble off to Sturgis. We, too, are part of another world that fills us with joy: the counterculture kingdom of God that leads not to Sturgis but to eternal life. AMEN