Who's In Charge?

While Jesus walked among humans, it is a bit ironic that the most powerful human ever to trod the dusty roads of planet Earth, seemed utterly disinterested in what we humans perceive as power, authority – in general, being “in charge.” His daily behavior shouts that reality at every turn, and He simply refuses to answer loaded questions from His critics about such matters. 

Just before His ascension, in what Matthew portrays as His final words to the disciples, He reminds them that now that He ascends back to heaven – “all authority has been given to me, in heaven and on earth.” Precisely Paul’s model in Philippians 2:5-11 where we are reminded that “He emptied himself of equality with God . . . took on the form of a servant because He was made in human likeness . . . and ultimately was given a name that is above every name.” 

Not only did Jesus tell us that leadership in the kingdom had nothing to do with “power and authority,”   He actually modeled what He taught in ways that are more impressive than any human could hope to achieve. What a novel idea.  Jesus doesn’t ask anything of us that He hasn’t already done. “Even the Son of Man came to wait on tables, not to be waited on at tables.” 

It’s an odd thing when you think about it, that so many people who claim to follow Jesus are so in to achieving power and authority over others. Despite the fact that while on earth Jesus was more interested in serving than ruling, and that as the resurrected Jesus who ascends into heaven, all power was given to Him, we still find ourselves playing the all-too-common power game.

Believers insist on having power over what our culture says is right or wrong, Rather than serving unwed mothers, we prefer to march in protests about abortion laws.  Rather than serving those who no doubt experience great loneliness as celibate gay people, we are determined to prohibit gay marriages. We want to tell people what books to read, what movies to watch, and dozens of other ways to gain power over them.  I’m not sure how the Christian gospel got reduced to a “gain power over people” approach to transforming the world, but it troubles me that it has.

The same sort of ironic reality exists in how some Christians see the role of women, whether it be in the church, in the family, or in the workplace. From limiting the role women can play in ways that would stun Paul himself, there seems to be a lot of male-oriented power playing going on in lots of places called church. How odd that men who are quick to quote “wives submit yourselves to your husbands,” forget that the very verse where the verb “submit” actually occurs (Ephesians 5:21) is used to say that Spirit-filled people “submit to one another out of reverence for the Lord.” The logic of insisting that Paul is being a literalist at the beginning of the Ephesian and Colossian household codes when he talks about wives and husbands, but is simply dealing with what can’t be addressed at the moment because of culture with the master/slave comments at the end of the codes has passed by me.

It can even be more complicated in the workplace, where we establish value based on function more than anything else. The debate about “equal pay for equal work” is but one example. What about promotions? And we can’t forget the even more ironic reality of how women sometimes behave when they are promoted – especially in how they view other women. Our cultural idea that function determines value is so strong that even people who have sometimes been victimized by that fact, turn right around and create more victims. It isn’t an accident that sometimes women in the workplace are quick to say they would rather work for a man than a woman!

“Who’s in charge?” will always be the wrong question. I understand the importance of leading, but today’s AJC will have more than a story or two about “who’s in charge?” and how it went wrong. Leadership is not so much about power and authority as it is about transforming situations – from the simplest decision about who takes out the garbage to the complicated geo-political realities that are on the front burner of our world’s conscious. The issue is not that we don’t need leaders – but rather about what kind of leaders do we need to transform the world. 

I would find it miserable to work in a place where there were no leaders. I don’t do well with confusion and chaos. But I would prefer that people see me as a leader because of who I am and not because I’m in charge. That’s the difference in how the world see things as compared with how the gospel sees things. Real leaders – at least if Jesus is going to be the paradigm – are much less likely to ever need to exert their authority, but lead by the example of who they are. 

Among the many things I like about Jesus is the fact that He never asks of me what He hasn’t already done. If I want to change the world – whether I’m male or female; American or Kenyan; boss or janitor – I would do well to follow His example.

Why?

In his latest book, Phillip Yancey chose as the title, The Question that Never Goes Away. That question – Why? – is one that haunts most of us at times in life, especially those times when evil has raised its ugly head in shocking ways. I remember a sermon Frank Harrington preached while he was the preacher at Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta where he said something like “you can hardly have Easter in the south without some awful destruction caused by a tornado.” The inevitable question of “why would God allow a tornado to disrupt our celebration of Christ’s resurrection?” was the issue that sermon was addressing – and not unlike the issues Yancey focuses on in The Question that Never Goes Away.

One of the big “Why?” events in our recent past was the shooting that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. Near the end of Yancey’s book, he notes, “Though evil and death still reign on this soiled and violent planet, the event commemorated around the world shortly after the Sandy Hook shootings represents our best, true hope. Jesus entered this world in desperate, calamitous times in order to show a way to the other side.” (page 142)

Sitting here in my comfortable office, surrounded by all kinds of resources, not the least of which would be people who care about me and about whom I care, I can understand exactly what Yancey means and see how what he says reflects the message of Scripture. But that hardly means I will never experience moments where “Why?” is the only question I care about. Because of my “present realities” I am confident that when “Why?” is the question of the day, my faith in the promise of God, revealed in its fullest sense in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, will sustain me. 

In Romans 11:13, Paul reminds us that “we know the age in which we live, it is now the hour for us to arise from our slumber.” The age he has in mind of course is the age of the kingly reign of Christ – it has already begun. The hour suggests the very moment in which his first readers are living. And guess what, they too have multiple reasons to ask “Why?” I’ve come to think that a reasonable understanding  of Paul’s over-arching “age” and his focus on “hour”  suggests that hour means “the tension point” in which we live. Howard Marshall appropriately describes “age” as “the in-between-the-times-time.” That is, we live between what God has already accomplished in Jesus and what has not yet happened for eternity. In these “tension points” that describe our lives, “Why?” will be a regular question.

But rather than getting stuck in the unanswerable question of the day, Yancey suggests that these moments give incredible opportunity for followers of Jesus to respond in kingdom –like ways. Not in the sense that God caused the awful things so we would have something to do, but in the sense that until the not yet is reality, such moments will happen – and our response is to be Jesus to the world.

One of the stories he tells revolves around the horrific tsunami that hit Japan in 2011. Just reading Yancey’s description of the aftermath is shocking. While touring the destruction sometime afterward, Yancey talked with some relief workers with Samaritan’s Purse. “They were living in cramped communal housing and working long hours without pay. ‘We don’t proselytize,’ one told me. ‘We don’t need to – the people know why we’re here. We’re simply followers of Jesus trying to live out his commands. Just before handing owners the key to their new home, we ask if we can pray a blessing on the house. So far no one has turned us down.’” (pages 64, 65)

I remember hearing two of my heroes in the faith talk about a similar experience in a different part of the world, a place where the gospel has yet to make much of an impact. I won’t mention their names because of where they serve. But I can say what they said, “It almost makes you want to pray for another tsunami, because in those kinds of moments, followers of Jesus have untold opportunity to model what it means to be a Christian.” They were adamant that they weren’t asking us to pray for a tsunami, but very clear that when such moments happen, Christians have untold opportunities to model the life of Jesus of Nazareth in ways that are amazing.

Little wonder that Jesus reminded His disciples, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35, NRSV)

What I do wonder about is how we managed to allow the gospel to be viewed by so many in our own culture as about little more than a list of the sins we can’t do when the One who is the gospel has called us to live as He did.

"Stemming the Tide" v. "Changing the World"

Every spring when melting snow and spring rains cause rivers to flood, there is that inevitable news story about people rushing to place sandbags around houses, stores, barns, and the like – in hopes of “stemming the tide” so to speak of the flooding rivers. Sometimes that works as a temporary solution, but the one thing you know without question is that at some point in the future, the same routine will need to happen again.

In some places, engineers and other very smart people who understand river basins and how they operate, build dams and reservoirs that change how the rivers work – almost always succeeding at preventing the repeated flooding that sandbags can only temporarily address. Changing the nature of the river basin seems to work better than merely “stemming the tide” of one particular incident of flooding. At least that is true if your goal is to prevent the havoc created by flooding rivers.

For longer than I can remember, one of my life principles has been something like this: “rules monitor behavior; principles transform life.” The problem for us humans is that we can learn to obey the rules without ever being transformed into the people God made us to be. At some level, this is the very issue at hand when it comes to understanding law v. gospel. Had “rules” worked in transforming humans, would it have been necessary for Jesus to come and live among us, dying as the ultimate sacrifice for our inability to keep the rules? Is this what John has in mind when he declares, “For the Law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1:17)

In Galatians 2:21 Paul suggests that “if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.” (His words, not mine!) Somehow even though I have no real idea of what happens when this life is over, I am pretty confident that when I arrive at the proverbial pearly gates, I shouldn’t say either that “I’m here, but don’t need Jesus to get in” or “I hope it is ok that I spent my whole life monitoring behavior instead of transforming lives.”

While my life principle noted above has a variety of application points in life, for me, its primary point of application has been to my own journey of faith. In that context, perhaps I should say “the principle transforms life.” Because when it comes to the kind of faith described in Scripture, the one principle that matters is Jesus. Period. 

Of course in order for Jesus to be the principle upon which my life is transformed, I have to know who He is. As Paul suggested to the Philippians, “have this mind in you which also was in Christ Jesus.” (2:5) That has to the best definition to be found when it comes to defining what a disciple of Christ looks like. If I am going to truly follow Christ, I must know how His mind worked and strive to make my own mind work the same way.

It is possible, isn’t it, for me, as a male in our culture to obey all the church rules and end up with the appropriately modest approach to dress, have the right kind of haircut, resist alcohol, tobacco, and illegal substances, avoid tattoos and earrings, not allow my wife to have an abortion, never be tempted to homosexual activity, or look at porn – and not be a transformed person?

When our approach to the very challenging world in which we live is reduced to such approaches, we are programming ourselves to fail. Many reading the previous paragraph will protest – noting that isn’t how we do business as kingdom ambassadors. For that I express gratitude and great thanksgiving. But the simple reality is, assuming people like Dave Kinnamon and Gabe Lyons are accurate in their surveys of how the church is perceived in our culture, that is often how we are viewed. (unChristian, You Lost Me, The Next Christians)

There certainly is a place in life for “stemming the tide.” But as Jesus said to the disciples in Acts 1:8, our mission is to be His witnesses – to the ends of the earth. Most of us are smart enough to learn to get around the rules. But Jesus, well that’s another story – I can’t figure out how to get around Him.

Sandbagging will never change the world. 

Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don't

Al Roker, astute management expert that he is, along with Mika Brzezinski, whose primary claim to fame is that she is her rather brilliant father’s daughter, have taken aim at Governor Deal and Mayor Reed in pointing out the utter failure of local governments to respond appropriately to the most recent snow event here in the deep south. If, as representative of the media, those two are no more competent commentators on far more important issues surrounding us than this one, then all I can say is “God help us.”

I have no interest in defending either the governor or the mayor. They are big boys and made the volitional choice to be in the hot seats of their respective governments. I’m actually not all that big a fan of government, too many of us who are followers of Jesus are more than willing to let government do the work God has called us to do – on issues of far greater significance than the snow storm. If I understand Paul correctly, as he wrote to believers in Rome, believers do best when they stay under the radar of government, not when they go to bed with the governing authorities. (Romans 13:1-7, oddly enough a text I have, for some time, planned to preach about at Grace: A Community of Faith, this Sunday morning.)

I’m not dismissive of the horrible experiences thousands of people had trying to get home Tuesday or of the school kids who were stuck on school busses or forced to spend the night in school buildings, separated from parents. I spent more than a few hours greatly concerned about my two daughters and my son-in-law who were trying to get home in less than good situations. My brother-in-law ended up spending the night away from home because he simply couldn’t get there. Eventually it seems that those trying situations were resolved in good ways – but I can’t imagine the turmoil of worrying about loved ones stuck on gridlocked highways on a night when the temperature was in the teens.

But, a moment of honesty might make us a little reluctant to be so quick to cast blame on others, without at least a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror!

Independent to a fault. Our southern DNA seems to make us dislike government in general, and the more regional it gets, the less we trust it. Two of the major counties impacted by this snow storm have experienced a rash of “new cities” being created, because they are convinced the larger, county governments don’t have their best interests at heart. Georgia has 159 counties, the largest number of counties in the United States except for Texas. More than a few preachers in Atlanta preach to larger audiences than the population of some of these counties. In some ways, the worst mistake a local politician can make is to act as though he or she is cooperating with the Mayor of Atlanta. I doubt that Roker or Brzenzinski  know the slightest thing about local governments in the metro-Atlanta region.

Keep my taxes low. More than a few of us tend to vote for the politician who will promise at least not to raise our taxes, if not make an out-right commitment to lower them. Of course every local government could purchase the necessary equipment to respond to the once-every-three-or-four-years snow event. But who wants to pay more in taxes to purchase said equipment? And, getting back to our DNA issues, who among us would trust them to spend the money appropriately even if we agreed to be taxed to pay for it?

Not in my back yard. Anyone living in the metro-Atlanta area knows we have transportation issues. But we continue to prefer long, often jammed up, commutes over  mass transit. MARTA can only take you so far and that “so far” is often “so far” from where we live, that only a small percentage of those who work in the City of Atlanta use it. Without better coverage by mass transit, there is no way the governor or the mayor can hope to stagger times for releasing people in a way that prevents the massive gridlock that we all saw happen Tuesday. My son-in-law made it from the Lenox area to College Park in a fairly timely fashion on the train – but it was hours before he made it home from the train station. Having been in major cities in both the US and abroad where mass transit is seen as a key transportation issue, I can’t help but think how differently events like Tuesday’s snow storm would themselves out if we weren’t so afraid that mass transit would allow the “wrong kind of people” to get to where we live. 

No win moments. It is pretty easy to place great blame on local school systems that chose to have students come to class on Tuesday. I’ve seen a lot of that on Facebook the past few days. Some of those same people who are now critical, were equally critical a few weeks ago when school systems cancelled and there was no snow – only very, very cold temperatures for southern heating systems to address. It is inconvenient for parents who work when school is not in session. We don’t want the systems shutting down, but when something like Tuesday happens, and it becomes inconvenient for parents for a different reason – we say the same things about the “idiots” who make those decisions. Honestly, in the “sue-happy” world we live in, I have a hard time imagining why anyone would want to be a school official who has to make these kinds of decisions. 

Of course my more snow-tested friends who live in other parts of the nation are correct when they observe that we southerners don’t know a lot about driving in the snow. How would we?  But if they will quit laughing at us long enough to observe the reality of Tuesday, it really wasn’t about driving skills. Most people sat in gridlock for hours at the time. Why? Because an event like Tuesday crashed our inadequate transportation grid. If you want to make fun of us, make fun of us for being so  utterly independent that we can’t allow elected officials to sit down and come up with a reasonable transportation solution – that includes extending  the rail system beyond Fulton and DeKalb – in ways that would actually come far closer to preventing the nightmare of Tuesday from happening again than any staggered release plan can have any hope to do. If that isn’t a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” reality, I’m not sure I would recognize one.

Old Time Religion

The sign out front says “Old time religion taught here daily.” Past experience with that same church sign reminds me that for them “old time” is somewhere around AD 1611 because that same sign once said, “KJV Only Read Here.” But then when I observe students in their academy outside playing soft ball – I think “old time” must mean mid-to-late 1800s, because one would think that “Little House on the Prairie” was being filmed on their playground because the students are dressed in ways that remind me the Engels’ kids!

That’s the problem with “old time” – it depends upon whose definition of “old time” one adopts. For the folks with the church sign – “old time” seems to refer to what is perceived to be a much simpler age where we perceive it would have been easier to be a Christian because women’s skirts were ankle length and men’s shirts were long-sleeved.

That’s a pretty easy target – but certainly not the only opportunity for reflection on our life and witness as Christians. For some people I know, “old time” is purely and simply mid-1960s worship styles and for others it’s The Book of Common Prayer. Others would cite third and fourth century church fathers. As I passed by a packed church building one Saturday morning, my guess was that for them, “old time” is rooted in Leviticus.

That’s the problem with imposing “time lines” on a timeless God and the Christian gospel which is to be proclaimed until “the ends of the ages” and “unto the ends of the earth.” Even for those of us who wish somehow to “restore the ancient order of things” – there is still the great question of what that “ancient order” must look like some twenty centuries later. For a Facebook page I occasionally look at that is populated with “independent Christian Church ministers,” “old time” appears to be that moment in the past when the Restoration Movement actually “restored the church.”

It is the temptation to regulate the Christian gospel in ways that make us feel comfortable that often gets us into the dangerous territory of distorting the gospel. In part, that seems to be the reasoning behind the writing of Colossians. “If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the universe, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world? Why do you submit to regulations, ‘Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch?’ All these regulations refer to things that perish with use; they are simply human commands and teachings. These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.” (Colossians 2:20-23, NRSV)

Whatever my “old time” preferences might be, the moment I allow them to become normative approach to life for others I stand in conflict with this text! Learning how to appreciate our preferences without making them prescriptive for other believers may be among the hardest things we Christians are called to do. But we at least ought to try.