"'Spiritual But Not Religious' Is Not Enough" by Rev. Jillian Hankamer, August 24, 2025

2 Peter 3:1-13 & Matthew 16: 13-20

“Spiritual but not religious” is Not Enough: Self-made religion

I. Phrase “I’m spiritual but not religious” makes me crazy

            -Hear it often when people find out I’m a minister

-Lillian Daniels, “When I meet a teacher, I don’t feel the need to tell him I always hated math. When I meet a chef, I don’t need to tell her I can’t cook. When I meet a clown, I don’t need to tell him that I think clowns are scary…But everybody loves to tell a minister what’s wrong with the church, that bears no relation to the one I’m proud to serve.”^[1]

-Daniels wrote entire book titled, When “Spiritual But Not Religious” Is Not Enough”

                        -basis of this second 3-week summer series

-Might ruffle some feathers, so let me explain:

                        -take no issue with sincere atheists or agnostics

                        -only sympathy with those whose church trauma keeps them out

                        -not talking about people for whom church just isn’t part of their lives

-What I take issue with is people like man from Daniel’s book, who found himself sleeping in on Sunday mornings, “reading The New York Times, or putting on his running shoes and taking off through the woods.”^[2] As the man said, “I worship nature. I see myself in the trees and in the butterflies. I am one with the great outdoors. I find God there. And I realized that I am deeply spiritual but no longer religious.”^[3]

-take issue with people who “construct a more convenient religion of their own making.”^[4]

-take issue with people who get more out of The New York Times than a sermon

                                    -Either aren’t listening or need a better preacher

-take issue with people who see God and nature and think that’s original

-if you believe in any kind of higher power and aren’t routinely awed by creation, you aren’t paying attention

-As Daniel says, “...it’s always the trees during a long hike, a long run, a walk on the beach. And don’t forget the sunset. These people always want to tell you that God is in the sunset…Like people who attend church wouldn’t know that…God in nature? Really? It’s all over the Bible that we hear every Sunday, but these folks always seem to think they invented it.”^[5]

II. Self-made religion

            -Has little depth and can’t stand up to pressure

-Find God in trees and sunsets, but what about “in the face of cancer? Cancer is nature too. Do you worship that as well?”^[6]

-Find God in the goodness of other people, but what happens when those good people make choices you disagree with or that hurt you?

-Find God in your children when they’re kind and sweet, but about in the face of temper-tantrums, behavioral issues you don’t understand, and general feeling that you have no idea what you’re doing?

            -Don’t use “s” word much around here because of baggage

                        -remember sin is simply missing the mark

-can see that “most self-developed Sunday morning ritual has little room for sin.”^[7]

                        -Or suffering

                        -or natural disasters

-In this sort of worldview, “what’s missing…is the perspective that you might get in a Christian community”^[8]

-perspective that can take you from simply feeling lucky or being thankful that suffering and bad things aren’t happening to you and push you “to actually doing something about it.”^[9]

-Daniel compares “self-made religion of gratitude” to someone ordering deep-fried appetizers, but no entree. Person “may not feel hungry for dinner now, but that snack will not sustain him for anything like real exertion. It tastes good, but it’s just not enough.”^[10]

-When we witness pain and response is only feeling lucky, we’ve fallen far short of Jesus’ example

                        -God wants many things from us, including gratitude, but not feeling lucky

-When we witness pain and suffering, “God wants us to get angry and want to do something about it.”^[11]

-”The civil rights movement didn’t happen because people felt lucky. The hungry don’t get fed, the homeless don’t get sheltered, and the world doesn’t change because people are doing okay feeling lucky. We need more.”^[12]

-Heard in 2 Peter reading that as people of faith, “We’ll be looking the other way, ready for the promised new heavens and the promised new earth, all landscaped with righteousness.” 

            -means that we expect more

            -means we look forward

                        -to a new world

                        -a better world

-”and because we follow Jesus, we better expect to be involved in making [change] happen, alongside other people.”^[13]

III. Self-centeredness of self-made religion

-Perhaps what bothers me most about “spiritual but not religious” people’s self-made religion is how self-serving and self-centered it is

-Focus is what makes me feel fulfilled, happy, at peace

            -time and place for that

            -but church calls us to community

                        -to think of others

                        -work with others

                        -serve others

                        -worship with others

                        -not about just what makes me happy, but what is best for all

-And ask JK said yesterday, church is about being challenged not just feeling good

-In church we hear stories like the one from Matthew

            -Jesus tells Peter he’s the rock on which church will be built

                        -ordinary, messy, imperfect Peter will be church’s foundation

-means in part, that in the church there’s room for all of us ordinary, messy, imperfect people

-Or as Daniel says, “we’re stuck with each other.”^[14]

-And to be fair, church has done terrible things. Church people can be shockingly cruel. Because church is made up of those ordinary, messy, imperfect people.

-But it isn’t a free-for-all. We get a say in what we’re stuck with as a community

-Northminster isn’t church that tolerates homophobia, will never have American flag in sanctuary, obviously supportive of women in ministry, values music

-But what those who aren’t involved with church often fail to understand is the being stuck-togetherness of churches

-”If we could just kick out all the sinners, we might have a shot at following Jesus.”^[15]

            -Not how a good church works

-And being stuck with one another means “we don’t get the space to come up with our own human-invented God. Because when you are stuck with one another, the last thing you would do is invent a God based on humanity.”^[16]

-As Daniel says, “In church, in community, humanity is just way too close to look good. It’s as close as the guy singing out of tune right next to you…as close as the baby screaming, and as close as the mother who doesn’t realize it’s driving everyone crazy. It’s as close as that same mother who crawled out an inch from the heavy shell of postpartum depression to get herself here today and wonders if there’s a place for her. It’s as close as the woman sitting next to her, who grieves that she will never give birth to a child and eyes that baby with envy. It’s as close as the preacher who didn’t prepare enough and as close as the listener who is so thirst for a word, she leans forward for absolutely anything. It’s as close as a teenager who walked here to church alone, seeking something more than gratitude, something more than newspapers and coffee, but instead finds a complicated worship service where everyone seems to know when to stand and when to sit and when to sing except for him, but even so gets caught up in the beauty of something bigger than his ower invention.”^[17]

IV. God Invented Us

-Self-made religions also tend to forget it’s unnecessary to invent God because invented us

-Text tells us we’re created in God’s image

 -And just as we don’t need to  try and be God, we don’t need to make up God or the church

-do need to improve the church, make apologies for the hurt the church has done, continue to learn and grow as a church, be more intentional about what church means, perhaps even reform the church, but we don’t have to create something that’s existed for millennia

-From Daniel, ”There’s a community of folks who, over thousands of years, have followed a man who was not lucky, who, in the scheme of luck, was decidedly unlucky. But in the scheme of the church he was willing to die alongside the unlucky, to be raised from the dead, and to point out in the action that there is much more to life than you could possibly come up with. And as for the resurrection, try doing that yourself.”^[18]

-Resurrection reminds us - some things we can’t do for ourselves

            -most advanced medicine can’t revive the dead

            -best cooks can’t feed 5K with two fish, five loaves

            -most eloquent preachers aren’t topping Beatitudes

            -God is God and we are not

-People of faith have gathered around this idea for thousands of years and have “worked together and fueded together and just goofed up together [because] we’re still trying to be the body of Christ; utterly human and realistic enough to know we need a savior who is divine.”^[19]

V. Conclusion

            -Point of this series:

-not to complain about people who don’t come to church

-or even to tell you that I think everyone should be involved in a church community where they feel served and can serve others - even though I do

-It’s to tell you that despite the challenges and heartbreaks, destructive behavior, and manipulation I’ve seen and you’ve seen, I love the church

            -this church in particular but also the “C”hurch

-because when we do it well, not perfect, but well,  church is the best of us       

-where we go when we’re hurting

-people who pick us up when life falls apart

-where we’re challenged and pushed to grow

-where we raise our babies and the people who help us raise them

-who we scootch over to make room for at the supper table - be it a potluck or Communion

-hands that prepare meals when we’re sick and who we call in emergencies

-when we die it’s the people who mourn our loss but celebrate our life

-As Lillian Daniel concludes the first chapter of her book, “...every day, somewhere, some tender, fallible, unlucky, lasagna-making…community of faith” comes together. And “I want to say thank to all those people. Thank you for being faithful to one another, for welcoming the stranger, and for worshipping the God who invented you and not the other way around.”^[20]

^[1] Lillian Daniel, When “Spiritual But Religious” is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church, Jericho Books, 2013, pg. 3.

^[2] Ibid, pg. 5.

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Ibid, pgs. 5-6.

^[6] Ibid, pg. 6.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Ibid, pg. 8.

^[9] Ibid.

^[10] Ibid, pg. 9.

^[11] Ibid.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Ibid, pg. 10.

^[14] Ibid.

^[15] Ibid, 12-13.

^[16] Ibid, pg. 13.

^[17] Ibid, pgs. 13-14.

^[18] Ibid, pg. 14.

^[19] Ibid.

^[20] Ibid, pg. 17.