Tuesday, September 30, 2008

War and Peace

In his Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, John Piper states that an "earnest prayer and challenge" of his for Christians is:

That you develop a wartime mentality and lifestyle; that you never forget that life is short, that billions of people hang in the balance of heaven and hell every day, that the love of money is spiritual suicide, that the goals of upward mobility are a poor and dangerous substitute for the goal of living for Christ with all your might and maximizing your joy in ministry to people's needs.

In Searching for God Knows What, Don Miller writes:

To be honest, I think most Christians [...] want to love people and obey God but feel they have to wage a culture war. But this isn't the case at all [...] in fact, even today, moralists who use war rhetoric will speak of right and wrong, and even some vague and angry God, but never Jesus [...] I can't say this clearly enough: If we are preaching a morality without Christ, and using war rhetoric to communicate a battle mentality, we are fighting on Satan's side.

I have juxtaposed these two excerpts slightly out of context, but I think it's really fascinating that the two Christian authors that my peers regard as their most influential take such opposite approaches to Christian ministry.

If we elect not to play the game of taking thoughts to unbalanced extremes, then I can see a lot of value in thinking both ways. We do serve a Lion and a Lamb.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Romans 6: Beauty Contests

Most people can quote Romans 6:23, and as a consequence of being able to quote it, I think most people use it as a distilled truth: that if you sin, your punishment is death; otherwise, you can accept God's free gift of eternal life in Jesus. I don't think that's an untruth, or even really a partial truth -- it's a fair understanding of what the verse is saying -- but the context of Romans 6 really paints that truth in wider swaths.

Romans 6 is a chapter about slavery and freedom. The highlights are that "as many of us were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death." And "if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ having been raised from the dead, dies no more." The chapter talks about Sin and Death as personified masters, claiming that "Death no longer has dominion over Him. For the death that He died, He died to sin once and for all, but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Paul then explains his allegory, saying he is merely speaking "in human terms" because of "the weakness" of our human condition. He talks about slavery and freedom -- that we were all slaves of sin, and were free in regard to righteousness, and that the wages of that slavery to sin was death, and how in the other plantation, our slavery to God bears the fruit of holiness and everlasting life.

I think being a slave to sin is like being trapped in a beauty contest. There's a pivotal scene in that Little-Indie-That-Could, Little Miss Sunshine, where a disillusioned fifteen-year-old reflects for a while, then says, "Fuck beauty contests. Life is one fucking beauty contest after another." And sometimes I think we feel like we're in a sort of moderate place where we're neither trapped by sin nor convicted by God, but there are a lot of times when we're in beauty contests, trying desperately to please, and feeling more strongly like slaves than anything else.

I like beer, but sometimes at parties, I'm just in a beauty contest. I feel self-conscious and appraised, and I minimize that by having a red plastic cup in my hand, which has to contain beer, even if I don't really feel like drinking it. I have to laugh at people's jokes, or when they quote a Will Ferrell or Adam Sandler movie for the fifteenth time that night. I have to keep drinking at a minimum steady rate because otherwise it's like walking during a marathon when everyone else is running past you and giving you the dubious eye. And I have to stay until the party's critical mass begins to leave, and no earlier and no later, or else people will notice me as the odd one out. Isn't it weird that people (college freshmen) go to parties partially to establish a cool reputation in the eyes of their peers and cope by becoming as inconspicuous and indistinguishable from other party-goers as possible?

Sometimes being a Christian among Christians can become a beauty contest. When your peers in your bible study talk at length about some new Christian book you haven't read, or promise rings for their long awaited future spouse (especially if your own track record isn't the purest), or how they and twelve other popular Christian girls are called to a Season of Celibacy (but maybe you aren't?), I think that it could be frustrating for you if you spend a lot of time grappling with sin. You'd probably wonder why your friends don't have to wrestle with their habits or blunders or mistakes or doubts. You'd feel like you were losing the beauty contest of the Kingdom of God, and you'd probably feel trapped, forever relegated to Christian mediocrity, an only partially-freed slave to sin. What if you were a Bible study leader or a pastor and addicted to, say, pornography?

My friends have described addiction to pornography as binding, gripping, and inexorable. Any closeness with God seems shattered by the jarring "reality" of a desperate, recurrent need to close the door, turn down the speakers, and double-click Internet Explorer. I think it wouldn't be too hard to feel like a slave to sin if you were grappling with an addiction to pornography.

Sometimes it feels like smooth sailing, that sin is something that can throw off your groove but not really get you down, like a parking ticket or late fee. But I think sometimes, especially when we find ourselves in beauty contests, we really understand Paul's metaphor of slavery and understand what he means as he explains,

"For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice, but what I hate, I do." (Romans 7:14-15)

I've read over this passage several times, but I never really thought about the significance of verse 17:

"But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me."

And again, in verse 20: "Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me."

He finishes, "O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God - through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

We were slaves to sin, so when we used to sin, well, it was what we did as a function of our slavery to sin. But now we are slaves of God, and when we sin, it's not a function of who we really are as much as it is us forgetting who we really are in Jesus. Now, we have been remade in the likeness of Jesus. Being remade in perfection and grace means that there is no more beauty contest for us because Jesus has fundamentally and irrevocably removed any trace of ugliness from us. Being remade in the likeness of Jesus also means there is no beauty contest because Jesus Himself was probably physically unattractive (Isaiah 53:2-3) and never bothered to try to make Himself look good to anyone while He was here.

I'm convinced that there's no place for competition within the Kingdom of God. And if that's the case, there's certainly no place for beauty contests.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Excerpt from Speaker for the Dead

I'd forgotten about this excerpt from Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead. Sorry, Orson, for the blatant copy-and-paste, but I figure you're the sort of writer who's more interested in sharing ideas. Not theologically watertight, but an interesting presentation nonetheless:


A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife’s adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a Speaker for the Dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I’m going to tell you.) The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands, “Is there anyone here,” he says to them, “who has not desired another man’s wife, another woman’s husband?”

They murmur and say, “We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.”

The rabbi says, “Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.” He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, “Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he’ll know I am his loyal servant.”

So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

Another rabbi, another city, He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, “Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.”

The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.

As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones.

“Nor am I without sin,” he says to the people. “But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.”

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Into the Wild at Heart

After some reflection, I think that going out into nature for a while is like God's version of Take Your Child to Work Day.

I took a road trip last summer that went through 33 days and 15 national parks, from Houston to Yosemite. I was expecting that with an experience like that, God probably had a whole curriculum of neat things He was going to teach me, and I was eager to let the epiphanies begin. Instead, I saw a bunch of mountains and deserts and forests and canyons. But what breathtaking, jagged mountains, and what immeasurable, bleak deserts, and what intricate, vibrant forests, and what dizzying, textured canyons. And through the whole summer, I think God was showing me two things: a) that when cooped up in a car with two other guys for over a month, I turn into a jerk, and I really needed to learn to compromise and loosen up, and b) to admire His workmanship. Which makes sense, right? We so often think of God as a teacher, or as a savior, or as something that fits our immediate, specific human needs that we forget that sometimes we are stepping into the studio of an Artist, who is pleased with His work, who "saw that it was good," and who wants us to be pleased with it too. And I was humbled that out of all this natural splendor and savage, untamed wilderness, man, in spite of all of our polluted sinfulness, is still God's favorite, the "apple of His eye." (Deut 32:10)

I think it's impossible to witness and experience God's creation and not commune on some fundamental level with God. Here's one reason to consider. I've recently come to the conclusion that for almost every person on Planet Earth, the worst thing in the world is to be alone. It's something that occurred to me moving to a new city with no friends or connections. No one wants to be alone. The common definition of spiritual death, the result of sin (Romans 6:23) is "eternal separation from God," and even though that phrase isn't directly biblical, Isaiah 59:2 posits that our sin makes us very alone, without God. Being alone, unloved, is the worst thing in the world.

I just finished the book Into the Wild, which is about a 23-year old guy who graduated from Emory and treks off into the wilderness by himself to find himself, the "dominant primordial beast," as Jack London articulates it. But people who trek off into the wilderness by themselves - and I think I know because I have a bit of this bug in me too - go off not to be alone but to struggle, to experience, to master and to be broken by the savage power of God's creation and His unbridled power and beauty, without the distraction of other people or cheap bangles. Any story of man versus nature is not a story of solitude, but at heart a story of man coming to terms with God's creation, majesty, and mystery.

If being alone is the worst thing in the world, and I think it often is, then being out in nature, standing tip-toe on a mountaintop, stretching to venture as close to the Creator as we dare risk, is the opposite of being alone. How can you say otherwise, when you've just come back from perusing the Artist's studio?

Also, Job 38.

Friday, September 5, 2008

Come and See

Every time I re-read John 1, I come across something new.

Again, the next day, John stood with two of his disciples. And looking at Jesus as He walked, he said, "Behold the Lamb of God!" The two disciples heard him speak, and they followed Jesus. Then Jesus turned, and seeing them following, said to them, "What do you seek?" They said to Him, "Rabbi, where are You staying?" He said to them, "Come and see."

Philip found Nathaniel and said to him, "We have found him of whom Moses in the law, and also the prophets, wrote - Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." And Nathaniel said to him, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Philip said to him, "Come and see."

What a surprising and powerful response to the questions of the curious -- "Come and see." I've spent so much time puzzling over how a Christian is supposed to present the gospel of Jesus, and everything it entails, to someone who wants to hear. It's for this reason that we memorize handy formulas like the Four Laws, or keep fresh on Apologetics, or mull over ways to make conversations more natural. It's because we so often tend to think of the gospel as a fundamental set of ideas that, logically presented, have to be agreed with. When my friends have approached me and asked, "What is a Christian?" or "Why do you believe what you believe?" or "Who is Jesus?" I've always been clumsier, more tongue-tied, less ready with a compact summary of absolutely everything than I thought would've reflected someone who was supposed to be "ready in season and out" to "preach the Word." (2 Tim) I basically always feel like I've lost ground for the Kingdom of God if I don't provide a satisfactory answer on the spot.

But here someone asks a question to Jesus. And yes, it's a simple question of where He's spending the night. But Jesus could've said, I'm staying at My mom's, or an inn, or with John the Baptist. He could've simply answered the question. That's probably what I would've done. Instead, he gave an invitation. And I feel that if we're to truly understand what it is to share our faith, we need to be giving out more invitations and fewer answers.

What if Jesus had simply answered questions? What if He had never invited the disciples along for the ride and the chance to get to know Him? The gospels show, time and time again, instances where the disciples just didn't get it. Having spent years with Jesus, watching Him preach and minister and teach and heal and love, they still asked stupid questions like "Who will be the greatest among us?" If the disciples couldn't get it right after years of spending every moment with Jesus, how can we expect any of us to get it right with instant responses to singular questions? But walk a while with me. Let me show you a Christian community with individual lives redeemed by God, redeemed to God. Let me introduce you to worship and prayer and the joy we can take in fellowship with God. Let me tell you about my Friend and Savior and King. I don't think I can explain it sufficiently at all in five minutes, and I'm sorry to the people with whom I thought I could.

The catch is that we can't say "Come and see" if we don't believe that the power and grace of God have transformed our lives, if we don't believe that the Holy Spirit bears real fruit and real holiness, if we're too afraid to show our junk and our brokenness to others, or if we don't really buy that through Jesus, our sins are forgiven and ourselves reconciled with God. It's much safer for us to give an answer and not an invitation.

Where would Nathaniel have been if someone had not said, "Come and see"? Probably still under the fig tree, wondering what he missed.