I’ve attended a meeting or two in my life in which the
presiding person’s agenda was hijacked by an issue, a person with his own
agenda, or what I will just politely call “forces of nature.” Depending on how
important I viewed the agenda to be, those kind of meetings can be
extraordinarily frustrating.
Occasionally, something similar happens in class. A
student’s question might derail the best plans for class on any given day. Such
moments can be good or bad – but the simple reality is that when agendas are
hijacked, they are most often ignored.
We have watched more than a few big corporations get
derailed for a while by a poorly stated comment on something not related to the
corporation’s business. The House committee on Benghazi – without any political
opinions expressed here! – has been derailed a bit by an ill-timed comment from
the want-to-be Speaker of the House, whose own goal was derailed by that same
comment.
Those kinds of realities have me wondering if sometimes the
church doesn’t let our culture hijack our agenda. William Willimon, in his
book, Pastor: The Theology and Practice
of Ordained Ministry, notes, “Modernity has conditioned us to think that we
are privileged to live at the very summit of human development, from which we
look down with condescension upon everyone who arrived here before us. The
Christian reading of Scripture is thus countercultural, provocative, strange .
. . A major task of pastors is to assist congregations in reading carefully in
order to align ourselves to a text, in order to submit and bend ourselves to
the complex redescription of reality that is Scripture.” (pp. 111, 112)
I love the phrase “the complex redescription of reality that
is Scripture.” That seems like Scripture has an agenda – and I’m wondering if
we don’t sometimes allow cultural issues to hijack that agenda in ways that
leave us sounding more like the world and less like the kingdom.
Let me explain.
According to The National Health Interview Survey by the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fewer than 3% of respondents
self-identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. In that same survey, 96.6% of
respondents self-identified as straight. This study was first done in 1957, but
the figures above are from the 2013 survey, for which 33,557 adults between the
age of 18 and 64 were interviewed, face-to-face, with follow-up telephone
questions.
There’s a side of me that wants to point out that if every
single gay, lesbian, or bisexual person in the United States got married, it
would be a very small percentage of our population – with little likelihood of
having a huge cultural impact. Except, that is, for the fact that the media, on
the one hand, and many Christian groups opposed to same-sex marriage, on the
other, have elevated the issue far above its “3% range.”
To be clear, if there were only one gay person in the entire
universe, I would hope that the church would find a way to be like Jesus to him
or her. So I am not being dismissive of gay people because they constitute a
smaller portion of the world’s population. I am, however, wondering if we
haven’t allowed our kingdom agenda to be hijacked.
Yet the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the poverty rate in
the United States is 14.8% in 2014 – that’s 46.7 million people. 21.1% of children
under the age of 18 live in poverty. Statistically speaking, the average local
church is much more likely to have people in poverty within their reach than
they are to have same-sex couples in their congregations who to get married.
In 2013, 1.57 million inmates sat behind bars in federal,
state, and county prisons and jails. In federal prisons, more than half of the
population sentenced to a year or longer is imprisoned for drug crimes. Some
studies suggest that the number is actually closer to 2.4 million, when people
who pass in and out of county jails for less than a year are factored into the
equation. Black men are six times more likely than white men to end up in
prison; Hispanic men are 2.4 times more likely. The Sentencing Project, the source of these numbers, says that 1 in 31
Americans are under U.S. corrections custody, either through parole, probation,
or incarceration. One in three of us has a criminal record.
Statistically speaking, the average local church has a much
greater opportunity to speak out about justice – and injustice – in this area,
and could do much more to help our culture move in the right direction, than we
will ever accomplish through concerns about same-sex marriage. Yet evangelical
Christians, at least, are more often interested in “three strikes” laws being
enforced than we are in justice.
Numbers about sex trafficking vary greatly, depending on the
source. The U.S. State Department, in 2005, estimated that somewhere between
600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international boundaries each
year. That same study said that up to 17,500 people were trafficked in the
United States. Other agencies report much higher numbers (UNICEF used the number
one million in 2000), and it seems that it is impossible to know reliably the
extent of this horrific mark on our world. Are we talking about this issue in
the same way we do same-sex marriage, homosexuality, and related topics?
Or what about creation care? Should kingdom people give this
issue to groups like Green Peace and the EPA, when our own Scriptures tell us
that God declared His creation to be “very good” (Genesis 1, 2)? We can’t
forget that Christ came “to reconcile all things to himself” – things on earth
or in heaven (Col. 1:20). Paul declares in Romans that creation itself longs
for the appearing of the children of God (Romans 8:18-25). Those most impacted
by a lack of creation care – polluted water, for example – are typically the
poor: the very people Jesus is referring
to when he says that when we give them a cup of water, it is as though we have
given it to him. (Matthew 25:31-46)
I can’t imagine that more innocent children will be impacted
by the decision of the Supreme Court to redefine marriage – as unbiblical as I
think their decision is – than will die today because of dirty water.
In their book Church
Refugees, Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope describe people they call “dones.”
They are “done” with church. It is an interesting study to read for any of us
who are interested in reclaiming our kingdom agenda. Here is one of their
interesting summary statements: “Our respondents didn’t necessarily disagree
with conservative church views of homosexuality, but they found the issue to be
relatively minor compared to the amount of division and distraction it created.”
(p. 105)
I want to be a person who learns how to discover and live in
“the complex redescription of reality that is Scripture.” I want to lead and
influence those around me to do the same thing. I know that this “complex
redescription of reality” includes being faithful to God’s word – even in those
areas like the whole same-sex marriage issue. But I don’t think it includes
letting that issue – or any issue for that matter – distract us from issues
that most often have greater potential to impact our communities than same-sex
marriage does.
The Bible, when faithfully read and studied, can make us
very uncomfortable. It creates a world different than the one we experience
daily. Yet it is the very world that the Bible creates that reminds us of Eden,
and those walks with God in the cool of the evening. It is that very world that
convinces us that heaven really can overlap earth, as N.T. Wright likes to say.
It is that world that reminds me daily of my own failures, while at the same
time reminding me that in Christ, I have become a new creation, welcome to live
in that new world.
The kingdom agenda seems to be that no matter who I am or
what I have done, there is an invitation to a new and better way of living. To
use Willimon’s language, that is “countercultural, provocative, strange.” We
can’t let any issue – including same-sex marriage – hijack that message. The
gospel is rooted in loving God and loving neighbor – and it’s a shame that
sometimes it isn’t believers who do the best in modeling that message.
