In his intriguing commentary on the current state of Christianity, Gabe Lyons, in The Next Christians, makes this statement: “I call them restorers because they envision the world as it was meant to be and they work toward that vision.” (Kindle, locations 672-90)
When the Bible is read holistically, as opposed to the very-segmented way it is often read, the idea that God created us to live in community – loving Him and loving one another – rises to the surface as one of the fundamental truths the Bible reveals. After all, it was God Himself who declared, as He observed Adam in the garden all alone, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” (Genesis 2:18) The rest of the Bible’s story might easily be described as God’s pursuit of that ideal for His creatures. No wonder Jesus would declare that if we can work out a way to love God and love our neighbor – we have figured out what God intended for us at creation.
The kinds of Christians Lyons describes as restorers, have learned that truth. They see the brokenness in the world – both in creation and creatures – and believe that God is calling His people to help mend that brokenness at every level and in every way possible.
Such an attitude reminds me of another saying of Jesus. It comes from the Sermon on the Mount – Matthew 5:16. “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works, and give glory to your Father in heaven.” Could it be that our most powerful witness, our most effective way of influencing the world for Christ is in our work of “mending that brokenness at every level and in every way possible?”
If I break something of little value, there is no real motivation to mend it. If I break something that really doesn’t belong to anyone, there is no real motivation to mend it. But, when I break something that does have value, or does clearly belong to someone, then I automatically think I should fix whatever it is that I have broken.
Restorers seem to get that. They recognize that the creation and His creatures have great value. They understand that “the earth is the Lord’s . . .” and know that it truly belongs to someone. It might motivate us all to become better “menders” of the brokenness around us if we reminded ourselves occasionally of the great value of this creation and that, when all is said and done, it really does belong to God.
It is in that understanding of Scripture, read holistically and purposefully, that we can begin to see the world as it was meant to be. When we begin to see that – we have all the motivation we need to find ourselves mending broken things and broken people.
29 June 2011
15 June 2011
Back at You
Never one to shy away from those in-your-face moments, Jesus seems unwilling to let those who come to Him with questions get away with their own silliness. A great example is found in the opening verses of Matthew 15 where Jesus is asked a question about His followers. “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders?” (15:2, NRSV)
One might expect that Jesus would launch immediately into a discussion of the difference between tradition and Scripture, but before He ever gets to that idea, He returns a question for a question. He says to them, “Why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?” (15:3)
The fact that their question has to do with “your disciples,” that is, they don’t say, “Why do you break the tradition of the elders?” probably suggests that at the heart of their question is the accusation against Jesus that He is teaching His disciples to break these traditions. The question probably isn’t just a complaint about an occasional lapse of judgment where tradition is ignored, but a more systemic approach to tradition that says it is unimportant.
Rather than defending His disciples, which is perhaps what the Pharisees wanted, Jesus turns the question on them. Using the same verb for “to break,” (which is found only in this text and Acts 1:25 in the entire New Testament) Jesus answers them by asking, “Why do you break the commandment of God in order to keep your ancient traditions?”
This is “back at you” at its best! They are now backed into a corner of sorts – where they will need to explain how they could possibly view human tradition at a higher level of authority than the commandment of God. It is interesting that Jesus says “commandment” in the singular, not plural. Perhaps their idolatry of tradition has trumped the entire message from God.
It isn’t too difficult to find a kind of convicting spirit in this text. Convicting not just of the Pharisees who asked the question, but convicting of us as we look at our own lives. Where are we guilty of letting tradition get in the way of obeying God? It is so easy to confuse “tradition” and “doctrine” that we probably don’t even think about it in the ways that we should.
This is close to the point of the story of the Good Samaritan. Remember that in answering the “who is your neighbor?” question, Jesus has two very religious people avoid doing what godly people should have done. This is pretty much in the name of their traditions over the commandment to love your neighbor.
I have to wonder a bit, about my own life – that’s the only one for which I can answer. How often do I miss out on opportunities to love God and love neighbor because I’m keeping tradition that has little or nothing to do with either of the great commandments. Not unlike the Pharisees, we can easily slip into our self-assigned roles as judge and jury and be condemning of those who aren’t quite so impressed with our “tradition” and appear, from our vantage point, to be unworthy of the name, Christian.
Of course, there is a sense in which the idea of tradition has an important place in our lives. But, whatever that place is, and especially when by tradition we tend to mean traditional, it cannot be allowed to get in the way of obeying God!
One might expect that Jesus would launch immediately into a discussion of the difference between tradition and Scripture, but before He ever gets to that idea, He returns a question for a question. He says to them, “Why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?” (15:3)
The fact that their question has to do with “your disciples,” that is, they don’t say, “Why do you break the tradition of the elders?” probably suggests that at the heart of their question is the accusation against Jesus that He is teaching His disciples to break these traditions. The question probably isn’t just a complaint about an occasional lapse of judgment where tradition is ignored, but a more systemic approach to tradition that says it is unimportant.
Rather than defending His disciples, which is perhaps what the Pharisees wanted, Jesus turns the question on them. Using the same verb for “to break,” (which is found only in this text and Acts 1:25 in the entire New Testament) Jesus answers them by asking, “Why do you break the commandment of God in order to keep your ancient traditions?”
This is “back at you” at its best! They are now backed into a corner of sorts – where they will need to explain how they could possibly view human tradition at a higher level of authority than the commandment of God. It is interesting that Jesus says “commandment” in the singular, not plural. Perhaps their idolatry of tradition has trumped the entire message from God.
It isn’t too difficult to find a kind of convicting spirit in this text. Convicting not just of the Pharisees who asked the question, but convicting of us as we look at our own lives. Where are we guilty of letting tradition get in the way of obeying God? It is so easy to confuse “tradition” and “doctrine” that we probably don’t even think about it in the ways that we should.
This is close to the point of the story of the Good Samaritan. Remember that in answering the “who is your neighbor?” question, Jesus has two very religious people avoid doing what godly people should have done. This is pretty much in the name of their traditions over the commandment to love your neighbor.
I have to wonder a bit, about my own life – that’s the only one for which I can answer. How often do I miss out on opportunities to love God and love neighbor because I’m keeping tradition that has little or nothing to do with either of the great commandments. Not unlike the Pharisees, we can easily slip into our self-assigned roles as judge and jury and be condemning of those who aren’t quite so impressed with our “tradition” and appear, from our vantage point, to be unworthy of the name, Christian.
Of course, there is a sense in which the idea of tradition has an important place in our lives. But, whatever that place is, and especially when by tradition we tend to mean traditional, it cannot be allowed to get in the way of obeying God!
08 June 2011
Somebody Has to Say Something
I tend to listen to way too much talk radio driving to and from work, church, and other places. I actually changed the radio in my car so I could use my iPod to listen to either music of choice – The Cotton Patch Gospel music comes to mind – or Tim Keller podcasts or audio books. My talk radio tastes range from news programming (Scott Slade on WSB in the mornings) to the want-to-be sports guys on 680 the Fan (especially Braves programming) to an occasional Neal Boortz (at least he knows and admits that he is primarily an entertainer).
Because the best traffic information in Atlanta tends to be on “WSB AM 750 and now 95.5 FM,” I sometimes am forced by circumstances to listen to Sean Hannity in the late afternoon drive time routine. A little of that goes a long way! It isn’t so much about politics as it is the hypocrisy that always noses itself in when arrogant and under-educated people have an unchallenged platform. Even when the political opinions he expresses are similar to mine, he does so in such bombastic, rude, and quite frankly, un-Christian fashion, that I think “I’ll vote the other way!”
But even that isn’t the most egregious part of his routine. Have you noticed, if you dare admit you’ve listened, that he tends to refer to the current White House occupant as “the anointed one.” I admit that I’m not the smartest theological mind in the world, but I’m fairly confident that the phrase “the anointed one” is a reasonably good translation of the Hebrew word Messiah and the Greek word Christ. One would be hard pressed to find more sacred names for Jews and Christians than Messiah and Christ. Yet Hannity, who constantly reminds his listeners that he is a Christian and espouses what he would define as Christian values and even occasionally sits as an interpreter of Christian Scripture – routinely and callously uses the sacred name of Jesus of Nazareth as an epithet for a president he doesn’t like. That his audience – at least if the callers are indicative and the political demographics are reliable – is made up of conservative Christian listeners and he gets away almost daily profanely using the name of our Christ just makes no sense at all.
But that’s not all. A frequent line he uses – especially when he assumes the role of "the great answer giver of all time" – comes straight out of the mouth of Jesus. “Let not your heart be troubled.” Those are words, I’m sure you know, that Jesus used on the Thursday night before His crucifixion while in the upper room with His disciples. How many Christian funerals have we attended where those words were quoted as offering comfort to grieving loved ones? At what must have been the most difficult moment yet in His life and ministry, Jesus offered words of comfort to the twelve men gathered with Him that night, a night in which He instituted the Lord’s Supper. Yet Hannity flippantly throws out “Let not your heart be troubled” whenever he seems to think that his answer solves the world’s or our nation’s political conflicts.
How ironic that as he uses “the anointed one” as a pejorative title for the President of the United States, he himself capriciously uses the words of the One who proclaimed that He and He alone was Christ.
The obvious fact that Christians are Hannity’s biggest fans and allow such violation of the third command (You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. Exodus 20:7, NIV) probably speaks more prophetically to those of us who call ourselves Christians than it does to Hannity. It at least means that we have valued political opinion over the Kingdom of God. I know we don’t intend to say that, but I just don’t know how else to see it.
Perhaps I can start a movement – Christians who don’t tolerate violating God’s name – even when it that means disagreeing with our political favorites!
Then there's Glen Beck . . .
Because the best traffic information in Atlanta tends to be on “WSB AM 750 and now 95.5 FM,” I sometimes am forced by circumstances to listen to Sean Hannity in the late afternoon drive time routine. A little of that goes a long way! It isn’t so much about politics as it is the hypocrisy that always noses itself in when arrogant and under-educated people have an unchallenged platform. Even when the political opinions he expresses are similar to mine, he does so in such bombastic, rude, and quite frankly, un-Christian fashion, that I think “I’ll vote the other way!”
But even that isn’t the most egregious part of his routine. Have you noticed, if you dare admit you’ve listened, that he tends to refer to the current White House occupant as “the anointed one.” I admit that I’m not the smartest theological mind in the world, but I’m fairly confident that the phrase “the anointed one” is a reasonably good translation of the Hebrew word Messiah and the Greek word Christ. One would be hard pressed to find more sacred names for Jews and Christians than Messiah and Christ. Yet Hannity, who constantly reminds his listeners that he is a Christian and espouses what he would define as Christian values and even occasionally sits as an interpreter of Christian Scripture – routinely and callously uses the sacred name of Jesus of Nazareth as an epithet for a president he doesn’t like. That his audience – at least if the callers are indicative and the political demographics are reliable – is made up of conservative Christian listeners and he gets away almost daily profanely using the name of our Christ just makes no sense at all.
But that’s not all. A frequent line he uses – especially when he assumes the role of "the great answer giver of all time" – comes straight out of the mouth of Jesus. “Let not your heart be troubled.” Those are words, I’m sure you know, that Jesus used on the Thursday night before His crucifixion while in the upper room with His disciples. How many Christian funerals have we attended where those words were quoted as offering comfort to grieving loved ones? At what must have been the most difficult moment yet in His life and ministry, Jesus offered words of comfort to the twelve men gathered with Him that night, a night in which He instituted the Lord’s Supper. Yet Hannity flippantly throws out “Let not your heart be troubled” whenever he seems to think that his answer solves the world’s or our nation’s political conflicts.
How ironic that as he uses “the anointed one” as a pejorative title for the President of the United States, he himself capriciously uses the words of the One who proclaimed that He and He alone was Christ.
The obvious fact that Christians are Hannity’s biggest fans and allow such violation of the third command (You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. Exodus 20:7, NIV) probably speaks more prophetically to those of us who call ourselves Christians than it does to Hannity. It at least means that we have valued political opinion over the Kingdom of God. I know we don’t intend to say that, but I just don’t know how else to see it.
Perhaps I can start a movement – Christians who don’t tolerate violating God’s name – even when it that means disagreeing with our political favorites!
Then there's Glen Beck . . .
01 June 2011
The Newness of Our Gospel
Abraham Lincoln, in his annual message to Congress in 1862, said “As our case is new, we must think anew, and act anew.” Those words were said in the midst of a nation struggling with identity. At some level, that is what the nation would eventually look like.
When I think about “church” in our culture, it seems to be that at every turn, churches are “struggling with identity” and trying to determine what it “will eventually look like.” There is no doubt that because our world changes so rapidly, we have to find a new way to make our case to those outsiders we seek to bring inside. We must learn to think differently about how that best happens and our response to that thinking will have to be “new.”
Jesus addressed issues like this when He declared, “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins.” (Mark 3:21-22, NIV) It makes me wonder if Lincoln might have read a little of Mark before writing his speech! “Our case is new, we must think anew, and act anew.”
The challenge of “new” never goes away. Human culture is never very stationary, though often in the subculture of individual congregations, culture gets very stationary. Leonard Sweet, a professor at Drew University, would argue that, in the case of the church educating ministry leaders, we easily get stationary and don’t think “anew.” An op-ed piece in the 27 April 2011 New York Times, written by a religion professor at Columbia University, says “Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market.” In other words – no one is thinking “anew.”
Gabe Lyons, in The Next Christians, boldly suggests that the future of the witness of the church in our world will demand the kind of thinking that focuses on “how things ought to be” and not “how things are.” In other words, if we keep putting the “fermenting gospel of Jesus” into the old forms and models, it inevitably will “burst the old skins and both will be wasted.”
I wish I were smart enough to be able to know exactly what “thinking anew and acting anew” looks like. If I were, I’d be writing these devotionals from a remote island beach setting, living on my book royalties! But I am smart enough to know this: if we keep failing to realize that we live in a very “anew world” and keep failing to realize that the gospel we believe is “ever anew,” then we will never change and transform the world.
May God help us to realize, as even Lincoln did, “Our case is new, we must think anew, and act anew.”
When I think about “church” in our culture, it seems to be that at every turn, churches are “struggling with identity” and trying to determine what it “will eventually look like.” There is no doubt that because our world changes so rapidly, we have to find a new way to make our case to those outsiders we seek to bring inside. We must learn to think differently about how that best happens and our response to that thinking will have to be “new.”
Jesus addressed issues like this when He declared, “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins.” (Mark 3:21-22, NIV) It makes me wonder if Lincoln might have read a little of Mark before writing his speech! “Our case is new, we must think anew, and act anew.”
The challenge of “new” never goes away. Human culture is never very stationary, though often in the subculture of individual congregations, culture gets very stationary. Leonard Sweet, a professor at Drew University, would argue that, in the case of the church educating ministry leaders, we easily get stationary and don’t think “anew.” An op-ed piece in the 27 April 2011 New York Times, written by a religion professor at Columbia University, says “Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market.” In other words – no one is thinking “anew.”
Gabe Lyons, in The Next Christians, boldly suggests that the future of the witness of the church in our world will demand the kind of thinking that focuses on “how things ought to be” and not “how things are.” In other words, if we keep putting the “fermenting gospel of Jesus” into the old forms and models, it inevitably will “burst the old skins and both will be wasted.”
I wish I were smart enough to be able to know exactly what “thinking anew and acting anew” looks like. If I were, I’d be writing these devotionals from a remote island beach setting, living on my book royalties! But I am smart enough to know this: if we keep failing to realize that we live in a very “anew world” and keep failing to realize that the gospel we believe is “ever anew,” then we will never change and transform the world.
May God help us to realize, as even Lincoln did, “Our case is new, we must think anew, and act anew.”
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