Front Burner Issues

A few weeks ago I picked up a book off my shelf that I had forgotten I had. Written by Leroy Barber, New Neighbor is a collection of essays about life in the kingdom that spurs one to think more seriously about what it means to be a kingdom outpost on behalf of the gospel.

One essay in particular seemed especially pertinent to the current discussion in our culture about justice, peace, and all the other issues that have been elevated to the front burner of the stove on which our public consciousness simmers.

The title of the essay is “Where is the church?” and here are a few of the more thoughtful lines.

“The church has lost its place in the heart of the neighborhood and not many people seem to care. What used to be the center of the community is now an afterthought to most people, if a thought at all.” Or what about this one: “All my great ideas and intellect can’t hide this heart polluted by mean thoughts, rotten attitudes and misplaced pride. If not held accountable, this heart will think and do any number of unpleasant things. Jesus gives life for my garbage. His innocent blood was shed for me and all the guilty.”

The essay concludes with this idea: “The church is to follow the example of Christ: the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. Jesus didn’t retreat from the hostile world around Him. He moved into our neighborhood.”

Who among us hasn’t memorized John 3:16 at some point in life? For me, it was the “verse of the week” at the public elementary school I attended the first week of second grade. I realize that we don’t do that in public school much anymore, but still suspect that if there is a verse in the Bible our cultural seems to know about, it is this one.

Yet I memorized it decades ago and have repeated it hundreds of times, but it took a long time for me to notice the phrase “the world.” It is so easy to hear that verse and think “the world” means people like me. Yet, for John, the phrase “the world” generally means the whole universe; and in more narrowly defined confines, “the world” as in those not on God’s side. Apparently the essayist noted above is thinking like Jesus thought when he says, “Jesus didn’t retreat from the hostile world around Him. He moved into our neighborhood.”

People like Gabe Lyons and David Kinnamon have demonstrated the truth of what so many of us feel to be true – the church has little voice in our culture. Relegated to the status of irrelevant, few of the movers and shakers in our culture are prone to ask the church about important social issues – whether it is abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriages, justice, and peace. It is challenging to transform the world with the gospel when the world has viewed us as irrelevant.

Yet “for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son . . .” As kingdom people called to do kingdom things in our lives in kingdom outposts all over the world, the gospel continues to call us to transform the world. 

Somehow we have to figure out how to change our status from “afterthought if thought about at all” to “center of the community.” Perhaps the first step to accomplishing that will be to move the “front burner” outside the church kitchen and on to a neighborhood street corner where the sweet aroma of peace in Christ can infiltrate the neighborhood in a life-changing manner.

On Church and State

Having refused to join the myriad bloggers opining on recent Supreme Court decisions, I can’t help but notice a bit of fatalism on the part of some because of those decisions. In a few weeks my wife and I will have been married for 40 years. Two things about that reality stand out to me. One, we didn’t make it 40 years because the State of Florida gave us a license approving of our marriage; and two, nothing the Supreme Court said about marriage will change one thing about our marriage. 

We’ve stayed married for a number of reasons, among them the fact that we love each other despite ourselves;  and we gave our word to God, our families, and a whole bunch of friends who were at our wedding that we would stay married “until death do us part.” We were taught about those two values by our individual Christian families and by the two churches we grew up in as young people. We both had parents who apparently learned the same lessons. I can’t recall a single thing the states of Florida and South Carolina, or the federal government of the United States did or is doing to make that happen.

One of my “summer projects” has been to re-read Eric Metaxas’ wonderful biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer titled Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. I read it shortly after it was published and described it to several friends as “the most convicting book I’ve ever read, other than the Bible!” It deserves another reading. Actually, this time I’m listening via audible.com, and listening is, in some ways, even more powerful than reading.

In describing Hitler’s attempt to take over the German church, Metaxas describes Bonhoeffer’s refusal to succumb to the manipulation that Hitler and his minions used to convince some otherwise pretty bright people that the Christian gospel and Nazi heresy were compatible. How in the world could that possibly happen? Here’s what Metaxas says, “For many Germans, their national identity had become so melted together with whatever Lutheran Christian faith they had that it was impossible to see either clearly. After four hundred years of taking for granted that all Germans were Lutheran Christians, no one really knew what Christianity was anymore.” (page 174)

I think that is the very thing that has a nagging presence in my mind when I hear all the talk about the United States as a Christian nation, and especially the fatalism I hear about some decision made by the Supreme Court. Is it possible that our own assumptions about Christian-nation ideas mean that we are confused about what Christianity is all about?

I am fairly confident that there is a “civic Jesus” that many, if not most Americans like. The civic Jesus is one that we create, and it just depends on one’s cultural setting as to how this civic Jesus works. For some, the civic Jesus is, himself, in a mood of fatalism right now because of the Supreme Court’s decision. For others, the civic Jesus is euphoric that the Supreme Court finally got it right. For some, he is a Tea Party voting Republican; and for others, a far-too-the-left voting Democrat. In some contexts he is all about “follow me and be prosperous,” while for others he is only concerned about poverty.

This is what happens when we confuse national ideals and the Christian gospel. The biblical Jesus certainly wasn’t an anarchist who wanted to overthrow Rome, but I’ve yet to come across the gospel story where He seems overly distraught that the fruitfulness of His mission to renew and restore creation was somehow attached to whether or not the Roman government made Christian decisions. I think one could demonstrate that the Emperor’s view of human sexuality in general and marriage in particular would make the challenges of our culture and time appear to be tame.  But then He knew what the gospel was all about!

I’m not confused, by the way, about the blessing of having been born in the United States. Neither am I non-patriotic in the appropriate sense of that word – patriotic, not a nationalist. I always vote and I pay my taxes. I stand for the national anthem and am offended when bad etiquette means men don’t take their hats off. I’m also not confused about what Scripture says about marriage – it is one man and one woman committed to one another for life. 

I’ll stick with Paul on this one when he declared to believers living in the seat of power for the Roman Emperor, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” (Romans 1:16, NRSV) I can’t help but think about the fact that he wrote those words to believers who lived in the shadow of the Emperor himself, who tended to think he was “the power” of all powers.  Paul apparently believed that gospel, not government, was our hope.

It all makes me wonder what would happen if we who truly believe the gospel could set aside the civic Jesus and, with Paul determine that we too would “preach Christ, and Him crucified.”  And, getting back to the Bonhoeffer issue, it makes me wonder if sometimes we haven’t confused what it means to be an American and what it means to be a Christian to the point that “no one really knew what Christianity was anymore.”

Funerals and Things

The more I read the gospels and listen carefully to Jesus, the more I begin to understand His mission. Obviously that is a bit of a no-brainer kind of conclusion, but I’m amazed at the clarity of Jesus, once I learn to read Him for who He is and not what my culture (both church and non-church) has often said about Him.

One of the words that seem to leap out at me these days is “intense.” Jesus was an intense man of God, who is utterly determined to humbly obey the mission given to Him by the Father. That intensity of purpose sometimes means that He pushed the envelope rather strongly at times.

A great example of that is the comment He makes to a would-be follower in Matthew 8:21, 22. “Another disciple said to him, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus told him, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.’” (NIV)  This one has stumped biblical studies scholars over the centuries at a variety of place. Is the man’s father already dead, and Jesus is saying “don’t even go to the funeral?” Or is the man’s father elderly, and the man is saying “It will be a while, I have to wait until my father is dead and buried?”

Either way, Jesus is pushing pretty radically. Jewish expectations were for sons, especially if this man is the eldest son, to take care of aging fathers and bury them properly. Jesus is saying, if taken at face value, “Don’t worry about that stuff.”

Then,  is the first “dead” describing a person physically dead or spiritually dead? Most things I’ve read suggest that it is spiritually dead, as in, “let the spiritually dead take care of the physically dead people.” Some have even suggested that Jesus is saying something like “let the burier of the dead take care of burying the dead.” 

We could probably take Jesus in a kind of hyper-literalism here and miss the point. Jesus Himself gives John instructions about taking care of His mother in John 19:25ff. I can’t find any other place where He expects of us what He isn’t willing to do Himself. This verse surely isn’t suggesting that Jesus is some kind of hard-hearted tyrant who doesn’t even care about the death of one’s father.

But, if the point Jesus is trying to make is that following Him means absolute allegiance, then He could not have picked a better way to make that point. Few relationships would have been more intense in that day than a son to his father, yet even that relationship cannot stand in the way of our allegiance to Him.

In Luke’s parallel account of these words, he adds the phrase, “go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9:60) Jesus is not calling for allegiance for the mere sake of allegiance. He wants those who follow Him to clearly get what is at stake – and that has to do with proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom. 

  

So, this really ranks among the more intense things Jesus ever said. And it demands a kind of allegiance that is sometimes hard to offer. I’ve never been disappointed by offering Him that as best I can!

It's My Party

In 1963, an American singer named Lesley Gore reached the top of the charts with her song, It’s My Party. The song tells the all-too familiar story of the breakup of “puppy love.” The heart of the lyrics declares, “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to . . . You would cry too if it happened to you.” What happened was  that a 16 year old girl was having a birthday, her boyfriend disappears for a while and when he shows back up, another girl, Judy, is wearing his ring. 

I’m not sure why, but that song has been floating around in my head for a while, but not quite in the same context of the song. Every time I start humming the tune and thinking about the words, I wonder whether or not Jesus might sing those words, with a tear or two running down His cheeks.

After all, it is His party. Gathering around Jesus, meeting in His name, is what the party is all about. He died a pretty violent death so that, in mysterious ways, people like me could come to the party. The party is such a transforming experience, that Paul insists the party really is “the body of Christ.” And that phrase is far more than a clever little metaphor Paul invented.

As a summary for his own approach to what it means to be at the party that belongs to Jesus, Paul declares, “we preach Christ, and Him crucified.” He would not market the gospel of Jesus to the signs mentality of the Jews, nor the worldview demands of the Greeks. We preach Jesus. Period. (1 Cor. 1:18-25)

Oddly, it seems that it is sometimes difficult to let it be Jesus’ party. We don’t quite say that so directly, but it is such a simple step from “Jesus. Period” to “Jesus. And . . .” With a kind of decontextualizing of a phrase or two out of the Bible, often a very radical way of proof texting is  born where it never is “Jesus. Period” and always is “Jesus and my pet issues.”

I continue to be intrigued when I think about Paul’s letters to the believers in Galatia and those in Corinth. The Galatians seems to have life figured out pretty well. We would certainly see them as “doctrinally conservative” and notice that apparently the moral issues in their fellowships weren’t serious. They would be prime candidates for the old Moral Majority and the Right to Life way of following Jesus. They did have a theological challenge when it comes to the relationship of faith and works, but all-in-all, they look like “our kind of people.”

But you don’t even have to read carefully to realize that the believers in Corinth have moral, sociological, theological, and just about any other kind of problem you can think about. From the “I’m more spiritual than you are because of who baptized me” to what seems to be confusion about the resurrection of Jesus – and lots of points between – they are struggling.

Yet, in Galatians, Paul uniquely omits his typical opening thanksgiving statement, and on two occasions, calls them “foolish.” But 1 Corinthians we find what could be Paul’s most eloquent thanksgiving opening for his epistles, and he regularly calls them “brothers and sisters.” 

The Galatians were saying, to speculate a bit, “It’s Jesus and . . .” The Corinthians might have been saying, “It’s Jesus, help us figure that out together.”  Despite what appear to be some personal conflicts between Paul and some of the Corinthians, he seems much more comfortable with the Corinthians than he does the Galatians. But honesty compels me to admit that it is so much more comfortable to be around the “Jesus and . . .” from Galatia than it is the guy at Corinth living such an immoral life, or the people in Corinth confused about meat sacrificed to idols, etc.

Just recently, a friend told me that he always thinks he has to “defend” his desire to be forgiving and welcoming to sinners. The spirit of Galatia lives on, while the struggles of Corinth get ignored, because we are afraid of “the spirit of Galatia” and its criticism. 

Having spent nearly all of my adult life studying Scripture, studying theology, reading and reading all sorts of related things, and preaching sermons and teaching college students in the U.S. and abroad, I have at least a minimally competent understanding of “doctrine.” And I can talk reasonably intelligently about biblical morals and values. 

But in the end, the priority is Jesus. Period. The civic Jesus of right-wing political values is not always the Jesus of Scripture. Yet in so many contexts, unless you and I talk about the hot moral issues of our day, like homosexuality, abortion, genetic research, to name a few, in exactly the same way – you might not think I’m Christian. And unless we talk about biblical doctrines in exactly the same way, you might not think I’m Christian. And the spirit of Galatia lives!

If Jesus were to come down for a private visit this afternoon, I hope and pray He wouldn’t start the conversation with “It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to . . . You would cry too if it happened to you.”

The End of the Earth and The End of the Ages

In Matthew’s account of the final words of Jesus before He ascended, followers of Jesus are commissioned to be disciple makers and teachers “to the end of the age.” When Luke talks about this event in the opening pages of Acts, we are to be His witnesses “to the end of the earth.”

Matthew’s expression “end of age” appears five times in his account of Jesus’ life (13:39, 13:40, 13:49; 24:3; and 28:20) and seems to suggest something like “the consummation of the age of the kingdom of God on earth.”  The phrase is used only one other time in the New Testament – in Hebrews 9:26 – where the author of Hebrews uses it to describe the “once and for all” sacrifice of Christ in taking away sin.

Luke’s expression, “to the end of the earth” appears to describe whatever part of the world that lays beyond “Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria.” Most of the book of Acts tells the beginning of how the gospel would impact “the end of the earth.” There are some exciting stories of what happens when the Jesus story is told in a variety of cultural contexts.

When you start thinking about all of this together, it makes you think that until, in God’s sense of time, “the consummation of the age” and “the end of the earth” somehow cross paths, the mission to disciple, to teach, and to bear witness to the Jesus story remains in place. To say that more bluntly, what Jesus began when, in the words of Hebrews 9, He came once and for all to deal with the problem of sin, continues to be the basis of our disciple making, our teaching, and our witness to the world. 

Despite the proclivity of the television preachers to know more about when “the end of the age” and the “end of the earth” will actually cross paths than Jesus did (see Mark 13:32,32), our mission continues. Living “in between” the time of His coming to rescue the world from the power of sin and death and His glorious reappearing at the end of the age and the ends of the earth, we have been “transferred into the kingdom of His beloved Son.” (Colossians 1:13) Surely that rescue and transfer was not for us to just sit around and keep a secret.

 The work we have been blessed to participate in by God remains unfinished. Until we reach the end of the earth and until God decides that it is time for the consummation of the Kingdom, we have a mission. It is a mission that is characterized by disciple making, by teaching, and by bearing witness. It is an invitation to be a part of what God is doing through the body of Christ, even to this day. When Paul reminded the Corinthian believers that “we are ambassadors for Christ” he did so with the reminder that “God is making His appeal through us.” (2 Corinthians 5:20)

The “embassy” is still open, and our task as ambassadors is still unfinished!  In August, 2000, I was in Albania, teaching a group of believers on behalf of Seminary of the Nations. A friend I made in Albania was driving me around, showing me his country. We drove by the United States embassy, and as he told me what the building was, I couldn’t help but notice that it was boarded up. When I inquired about that, he replied, “It’s not safe for Americans to be here right now!” That was a bit of a sobering moment, but I like living on the edge a bit.

It makes me wonder if sometimes it doesn’t appear that, out of fear of our surroundings, the church has “boarded up the embassy” and called the “ambassadors” home. Corralled up in our little safe havens, we dare not venture too far beyond the safety of the wrought iron fence and require the right ID card at the gate.

Until “the end of the earth” and “the end of the ages” cross paths, the embassy needs to be open – our mission is yet unfinished.  God’s appeal can’t be heard through boarded up embassies.