Most of us will never field-dress an elk. Most of us will never watch a man bleed out on a Roman cross. Steve McFadden’s sermon “Don’t Be Soft” argues that our distance from those realities has made us exactly the kind of Christians the gospel never intended: soft, sheltered, and dangerously ignorant of what it cost to put food on the table and life in our lungs. The sermon’s whole argument is a single, repeated plea — don’t be soft.
The Meat Behind the Meal
Steve opened with the kind of detail you rarely hear from a pulpit. He walked us through what actually happens when an elk is taken: the kill, the field-dressing, the cut through the sternum, the reach up past the elbows to the esophagus, the cut and the pull, the two gallons of clotting blood in the rib cage, the four to six hundred pounds of dead weight hauled back to camp, the hide peeled down, the meat separated from bone, the ice chests, the freezer bags. The point was not to entertain. It was to jar us awake to the price of an elk steak.
“For you to not understand what it took for you to do that, honestly, is disrespectful to the animal. It’s disrespectful to the animal.”
— Steve McFadden
That word — disrespectful — does the heavy lifting in the first movement of the sermon. We have softened the language of hunting to the point where we no longer know what we are doing or what it costs. We don’t kill an animal; we “harvest” it. We don’t gut it; we “field dress” it. We don’t butcher it; we “process” it. The vocabulary is a kind of anesthesia, and Steve says it has spread far beyond the hunting community. Urban America, he argued, has become soft, sheltered, and ignorant — and the church has not been immune.
Reading the Crucifixion Accounts
After establishing the principle with the elk, Steve moved to the matter that actually saves us. He read the gospel accounts of the crucifixion — the Synoptic parallels and John’s version — and noted how thin they are on physical detail. “All we read on that is that they crucified him. There’s no details given. Not at all.” He then read aloud a medical article written by a physician attempting to reconstruct, blow by blow, what crucifixion did to a human body. He described the hemorrhaging sweat in Gethsemane, the blindfolding and blows at the Sanhedrin, the leather thongs tipped with lead balls, the skin of the back hanging in long ribbons, the crown of thorns pressed into the scalp, the 110-pound patibulum gouging into already-lacerated shoulders, the nails driven between the small bones of the wrists (not the palms, the physician insisted), the slow suffocation as the pectoral muscles gave out, the pericardium filling with serum and compressing the heart, the final cry of thirst, and the soldier’s lance thrust upward into the chest from which “immediately there came out blood and water.”
“Not the usual crucifixion death by suffocation, but from heart failure due to the shock and constriction of the heart by fluid in the pericardium.”
— Luke 19:34 (as quoted by the physician’s article)
Steve’s question to the room afterward was the same one he had asked after the elk: why would you tell us this? His answer was the same. I care enough about you. I do not want you to be soft. I do not want you to be sheltered. I do not want you to be ignorant. To enjoy the life we possess in Christ and not understand or remember what had to take place for us to have that life, he said, “honestly is disrespectful to Jesus.”
Why Communion Is Not Optional
This is the hinge of the sermon. Steve pushed past the descriptive and landed on the practice. “This is why we do communion to remember this.” He confessed plainly that he himself is often guilty of going through the motions — the swig of juice, the cracker, the shrug. Then he asked the room to wonder what our Christian lives would look like if we had actually witnessed the crucifixion firsthand. The twelve disciples studied what happened to them afterwards. We are meant to do the same. Communion, in Steve’s hands, is not a quaint ritual; it is a deliberate rehearsal of the cost.
“I Died Because of You”
The pivot from confession to comfort came through an unlikely door: the Mission Impossible movie Dead Reckoning. Steve had watched the series during his recent knee rehab, and one scene stopped him. A woman on the team is about to die; another woman sacrifices herself to save her; the survivor says, “She died because of me.” Someone answers, “No, you’re alive because of her.”
Steve turned that exchange directly on the room. Jesus could tell us, “I died because of you.” His theology, he said, probably wouldn’t let him leave it there — he would more likely say “I died for you.” But he could say “I died because of you.” And he wouldn’t stop there. He would add, “But you’re alive because of me. I died because of you, but you’re alive because of me.” What was done on the cross was the beginning. Now go live the life you have been given the freedom to live — with purpose, with fulfillment, with joy, with the freedom to serve him with eternal heavenly rewards.
“Not that I have already obtained this or am perfect, but press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus made me his own. Brothers, do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.”
— Philippians 3:12-13
Steve called this his new favorite verse — a confession of unfinished business, not arrival. He is not big on “life verses,” but Philippians 3:12-13 spoke to him. Forget what lies behind. Strain forward to what lies ahead. That word strain, he said, is real. We all relate to that. We are all going this way.
So What?
Steve did not pretend that walking out of the service would resolve the long lists of struggles we carry. He is not so naive. Tomorrow is Monday, and most of us will not magically love our jobs. We will still wrestle with sin, with temptation, with addictions, with self-esteem. But his closing question was not “Have you arrived?” It was: Are you willing to let Christ move you? Are you willing to let Christ move your life in that direction, to be more like Christ? Are you willing to at least move in that direction?
The cross was not the end. It was the door. Steve McFadden preached a sermon that refused to let us hide from either the cost of an elk steak or the cost of our salvation — and then turned us loose to live, by the grace of the one who paid for both.
Scripture References
- John 17:17 — “Your word is truth” (the prayer that opened the service)
- Luke 23:26 — Simon of Cyrene compelled to carry the cross
- Luke 23:33 — “the place of the skull” — Golgotha
- Luke 22:44 — The bloody sweat in Gethsemane
- Psalm 22:1 — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
- Psalm 22:14 — “I am poured out like water… my heart is like wax”
- Psalm 22:15 — “My strength is dried up like potsherds… my tongue cleaves to my jaw”
- John 19:34 — “Immediately there came out blood and water”
- Philippians 3:12-13 — Press on; forget what lies behind; strain forward
- Galatians 5:1 — “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Steve’s closing benediction verse)