Understanding the Time

    And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us behave decently, as in the daytime... [C]lothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ....

-Romans 13:11-14 (NIV)

Chicago is expecting guests this weekend. We’re hosting a NATO summit, and so we’re expecting several thousand dignitaries, including heads of state, government officials, and an international press corps.

    We’re also expecting an international corps of protesters calling attention to what they see as injustice and inequity, especially in the corporate world. With demonstrators expected to set up shop outside many of Chicago’s corporate offices, and fearing violent confrontations, some offices are encouraging their employees to stay home today and Monday. Others are suggesting that their workers dress casually on those days, and refrain from carrying bags with corporate logos on them, in order to help them “blend in” with the presumed protesters. Tenants in one Loop office building received a memo urging them to “look like a protester” when they arrive for work on the days of the Summit.

    “Blend in.” “Look like a protester.” Good advice, perhaps, in a situation where standing out might be uncomfortable. Shorts and a t-shirt aren’t proper dress for a traditional wedding, any more than a cocktail dress works for a beach party. Sometimes, not blending in might even make you a target.

    It’s all about understanding the times.

     Blending in is perhaps a good idea for a couple of days because, practically speaking, Tuesday will come and the NATO delegates and protesters alike will go home. Life will go back to normal, or what passes for it, and it will be business as usual. Deadlines. Meetings with clients and customers. You know - work stuff. And when life goes back to normal, well, you don’t want to look like a protester then. You want to be dressed for business.

   Sometimes understanding the time means that you have to choose to stand out. You know, for instance, that even if everyone else in your office building is wearing PJs to work, it’s still a bad idea. Pajamas are for bedtime. When the protesters are gone, not one bank in the Loop will want its employees wearing t-shirts, jeans, sandals, and Anonymous masks. At the the office, you have to dress for business. Whether anyone else is or not.

    It’s all about understanding the time.

    Sometimes the church forgets the importance of understanding the time. And when we do, we inevitably make bad fashion choices.

    When Paul told the church in Rome that their “salvation is nearer now than when we first believed,” he was reminding them of the time. “The night is nearly over,” he warned them. “The day is almost here.” He meant that Jesus was coming, that the world as they knew it, with all its values and priorities and rules for success, was winding down to its end. A new era was dawning, in which the kingdom of God would upset the current world order and put his creation right, bringing an end to injustice, evil, grief, and death. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection had been the first act of that new era, the lightening of the skies before the sunrise. The sunrise, Paul wrote, was just over the horizon.

    That’s what time it is.

    And with the night ending, and the day coming - well, the smart thing to do is get out of bed, put aside the PJ’s, and get dressed for the day.

    There are things you wear when you’re asleep that aren’t appropriate for your waking hours. Things done in the darkness that wouldn’t be done in the light. To understand the time is to understand what not to wear, what’s not appropriate for people who know that daylight is just over the horizon, waiting to break. We have to “take off” whatever belongs to the night and the darkness, acts and attitudes that betray a connection to the current age. If the current age was the last word, if we were expecting nothing else, then some or all of those things might be appropriate. As things stand, though, those of us who know differently need a wardrobe change.

    That’s why it’s a failure when the church adopts too closely the values of the world in which it exists. It compromises our witness to a dawning new age, kind of as you’d look at a person who was warning of the coming day while wearing a nightshirt and slippers. It just lacks credibility.

    Of course, understanding the time isn’t just about knowing what to take off. (Imagine how that would work in the office....) It’s also about knowing what to put on.

    Or, in our case, who to put on..

    We’re to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” In a sense, we do this at baptism. But, like a lot of following Jesus, it’s left to us to make real through our actions what we do symbolically through our rituals. So when Paul tells the Roman Christians, and us, to put on Christ, he’s talking about the kind of people we should try to be. In short, we’re to be people who look like him, who imitate his actions, copy his attitude, live by his priorities. One of the reasons we choose the clothes we choose, of course, is to make some sort of statement about who we are and what we want others to know about us.

    In putting on Christ, then, we’re saying something about who we are. We belong to him, and our identity is now wrapped up in his. In putting on Christ, we’re saying something about what we want the people who know us to understand about us.

     Putting on Christ, of course, demands a price. It will require that we stand out in a world in which many people live by other codes and understand the time very differently. It will mean sometimes being in uncomfortable situations, and will sometimes even make us targets. But that shouldn’t surprise us, should it? After all, Jesus was a target himself.

    So if you go down to the Loop this weekend, you might want to blend in. You might want to look like a protester. But may we never blend in as we live in our world and walk among its people. May we understand the time - that a new era is coming, is just over the horizon - and may we strip off the acts, attitudes, and values that reflect the era that’s ending. And may we put on Jesus, so that those around can see by what we say and do that we belong to him and to the age to come.

    Now if I could just figure out what color shirt goes best with my hand-lettered “Tax the Rich” sign....

Who Would Jesus "Unfriend"?

    “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

-Luke 19:9-10 (NIV)

So President Obama in an interview this week came out in support of gay marriage. 

Maybe you heard.

    It probably shouldn’t be all that surprising, really. Surveys indicate that a slight majority of Americans now favor giving homosexual couples the right to marry, and the President is, after all,  campaigning for re-election. I know some believers are outraged by his position, and by his quoting of Scripture to partially explain how he came to it. Obviously, this is an issue that awakens strong emotions. You know the arguments; the debate has to do with whether the government has more responsibility to legislate for biblical morality or to ensure equal rights for its citizens under law. I imagine you have your convictions about that, as do I. I don’t think so highly of myself that I imagine I can change your mind. Besides, I don’t think the debate is quite as simple as it seems to be to some on both sides.

    It’s not always easy for me, as a believer, to know how to respond to things like this. That’s not because I don’t know the relevant Bible texts, by the way, or because I don’t believe them. I do, on both counts. The struggle I have has to do with the fact that living as a believer is always about more than reading text on a page. You might recall that Jesus was continually frustrated with religious folks who couldn’t seem to get their noses out of the Good Book long enough to know and care about real people. Remember Zacchaeus? The “good” people were outraged that Jesus would join him at his table, but it wasn’t until he took his seat there that “salvation came to [his] house.”

    I thought of Zacchaeus this week as I scanned my Facebook page in the aftermath of President Obama’s interview with Robin Roberts: lots of talk about “abominations”. Lots of concern for the sanctity of marriage. Lots of Christians with strong opinions not afraid to share them. But something else, too: a short post by a college acquaintance hurt by five of his “friends” - believers, apparently - who had “unfriended” him.  This acquaintance is living in a long-term relationship with another man, and I guess those five former “friends” somehow equated removing him from their lists of friends with making a biblical stand against homosexuality. It certainly didn’t seem to be in response to anything he posted. I can’t speak to what those five people were thinking, of course, or to what’s in their hearts. But I admit I flashed on those folks in Jericho, shaking their heads and clucking over Jesus going to be the guest of a “sinner.”

    Jesus, of course, discovered the “son of Abraham” underneath the sinner. The son of Abraham that no one else in town had apparently ever taken the time to discover.

    Of course, Zacchaeus wasn’t gay, either. He just ripped people off. For some of us, greed is easier to forgive than homosexuality.

    In his book unChristian, David Kinnamon of the Barna Research Group documents the results of a survey his group conducted in which Americans aged 16-29 were asked what word or phrase they most associated with Christianity. A staggering 91% said the word “anti-homosexual” was what first came to mind. Not “Bible”. Not “helping the poor”. Not “love”. Not even “Jesus”. More than nine out of every ten respondents in that age group said “anti-homosexual.”

    I think that at least partially has something to do with that group’s general lack of first-hand experience with the church, coupled with the media’s portrayal of ignorant, hateful, intolerant Christians. One thing that statistic might suggest is that, one way or another, the church is losing a generation. Whatever we may think about homosexuality, whatever the Bible may say about it, the Great Commission does not have to do with going into all the world and making our opposition to homosexuality known to all people. When the church is known by 9/10 of the next generation of Americans more by what we’re against than what we’re for, then I don’t think it’s too pessimistic to think that it might be more than just a public relations problem.

    You wonder if God isn’t about ready to start again with a new generation of people: people who might be able to see clearly enough to follow Jesus, people who really believe that salvation comes to human beings when he sits at their tables.

    People who remember that, for the most, he sits down at tables only when his church does. And if we can’t, or won’t, then how do we think people are supposed to get to know him?

    Of course the Bible has something to say about sexual morality. (Though, by the way, many believers find it harder to live by what the Bible says about sex than we like to admit.) It’s a morality that resists the easy availability of pornography and online affairs. It speaks against adultery, lust, and domestic violence, as well as homosexuality. It affirms sexuality within marriage. It proclaims that God has made us sexual creatures, and it also proclaims that we aren’t at the mercy of our urges, that there’s more to us than our sexuality. Most of all, it’s a morality that is firmly rooted in Jesus. It’s precisely because we’re the body of Christ that we value sexually sober and ethical lives. It’s because there is new creation in him that we’re able to say “no” to sexual immorality at all.

    To be known more for what we’re against than for being the presence of Jesus in the world is to let go of the power of the gospel. It’s to embrace a form of godliness, while denying its power.

    Jesus didn’t “unfriend” people when he saw them living in ways that their Creator didn’t intend. He didn’t walk away from them. He walked toward them, embraced them, called them away from isolation, invited himself to their homes, and brought salvation with him.

    How is it that doing the same sometimes seems so hard for us?

    People like my college acquaintance aren’t looking for us to approve of them or legitimize their existence. They’re looking for what anyone else is looking for: to be treated with respect, to find a place where they fit in, to love and be loved. They’re also looking for God, whether they know it or not, and in the gospel we have been given the good news that in Christ he’s been looking for them, too.

    Our work is not to shun them, or to shame them, or to fix them. It’s to sit at their table, proclaim that gospel in their hearing, live it in their sight.

    That’s what we should be known for.

    Because that’s what our Lord was known for.

Knowledge

He said, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you,  but to others I speak in parables, so that,

“ ‘though seeing, they may not see;

though hearing, they may not understand.’   

-Luke 8:10 (NIV)

If you’re having trouble thinking clearly, don’t worry. It’s probably just your faith getting in the way of your thinking.

    Or so suggests a study published last week the Journal of Science.

    The study, authored by University of British Columbia social psychologist Will Gervais, assumes a theory of human thinking in which the brain processes information using two systems. The first relies on mental shortcuts by using intuitive responses — gut instinct, if you will — to quickly arrive at a conclusion. The other employs reason to arrive at a conclusion. While both systems are useful and can run in parallel, analytic thinking,  when called upon, can override intuition. Since other studies suggest that religious beliefs are rooted in this intuitive processing, Gervais wondered if thinking analytically would undermine religious belief as it overrides intuitive thought?

    In short, Gervais sought to measure to what degree rational thought might undermine faith.

    His methodology would take more space than I have to describe. (This story describes it in some detail, if you’re interested.) It seems like a fairly comprehensive study, however. And the conclusion Gervais and his colleagues came to?

    Well, what they discovered was that people who tend to think more analytically score lower on questions like “In my life I feel the presence of the Divine” or “I just don’t understand religion.” Of course, you might rightly wonder how those people might have scored if the “faith” questions were worded a little more, well, analytically. Someone who’s a really analytic thinker, after all - even an analytic thinker with great faith - might not be all that eloquent in describing whether or not they can feel God’s presence.

    For his part, Gervais doesn’t seem inclined to say that analytic thinking and faith are incompatible; in fact, he says the study is intended to explore the cognitive origins of belief and disbelief with academic rigor. He wants, as he puts it, “to understand religion and why our species has the capacity for religion.”

    What strikes me, though, is that the whole study begs the question of what knowledge and understanding really are.

    Most of us have been heavily influenced by Enlightenment and modernist definitions of knowledge. Knowledge is information: information uncovered, tested rigorously in a lab, and applied practically. Knowledge involves analytical thinking, which is to be strictly held in opposition to intuition. Certain knowledge involves repeatable, observable results in a lab, which is why the presence of the God Particle is considered science and the presence of the Holy Spirit is not, despite there being roughly the same number of sightings of each on record.

    Jesus, of course, didn’t enjoy the benefits of living in a post-Enlightenment world. Maybe that’s why he spoke of knowledge in way more similar to how we’d speak of revelation: as something that can be given by God, and that can’t be had for the price of exploration or study or experimentation or even deep analytic thinking. This kind of knowledge comes as a gift of God, maybe at the level of what we’d call intuition these days.

    Paul goes so far as to say, in the words of Isaiah, that the Holy Spirit reveals things to believers that “no eye has seen... no ear has heard...no human mind has conceived”  — the things God has prepared for those who love him. He goes on to say:

“The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for, ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’

    “But we have the mind of Christ.”

    None of this is to minimize or dismiss what we call knowledge today. The scientific method has given us many blessings. The stakes of medicine, manufacturing, food production, and such for our world are too high to depend on unverified research and gut feelings. Education is a positive thing, and believers have nothing to fear from becoming educated people. (Though academics and academic institutions should never be allowed to create a hegemony of the educated over the uneducated.) The Bible, in affirming a knowledge from God, given by him, about him and his world and his kingdom, isn’t resisting what we call “science.” It’s just pointing out that results that are repeatable and observable in a lab don’t necessarily comprise the sum total of what we human beings need to know. And that the kind of knowledge that is valued by our world can even become destructive when it isn’t held in conjunction with - and even placed under judgment by - the kind of knowledge God gives us through his Spirit, in response to faith.

    So if this comes across as anti-education, or hostile toward science, then I haven’t communicated what I intended to communicate at all. Historically, of course, the church has gotten in the way of  much of the work of science. But it’s also true that much of the work of science in history has been done by people of faith, seeking to fill in the gaps of the knowledge that God hasn’t revealed to us about his world. They didn’t view science and faith as incompatible, or fundamentally at odds, but as two sides of the way God reveals himself to us.

    So as we seek to know, to understand, to learn, through science and through the work of other human beings, let’s don’t neglect to seek the knowledge that God wants to give us. His lab is this world, his experiments the events of our lives, his catalyst the Holy Spirit. While we use the rational minds that our Creator has blessed us with, let’s be sure not to allow our spiritual minds to atrophy through disuse. In Christ, we are new people, being “renewed in knowledge in the image of our Creator.” And so we should live like the new people we are, as the knowledge God gives in Christ reshapes us, redeems us, and renews us.

    In short, maybe we need to be less worried about our faith undermining our ability to think rationally.

    Maybe the deeper concern is that our irrational belief that rational thinking is the only path to knowledge will undermine our faith, render us unable to see or hear what God would show us and tell us through Jesus. And so leave us poorer, with less understanding.

Good and Evil

Now the serpent  was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’? ”

    The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ ”

    “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,  knowing good and evil.”

-Genesis 3:1-5

Last year’s massacre on the island of Utoya, in Norway, took the lives of 69 young people at a summer camp organized by the youth division of the Norwegian Labor Party. Anders Breivik, a right-wing extremist who opposes immigration and seems to have a hatred of Islam in particular, was arrested for the murders and is being tried this week. He does not deny that he committed the murders, but claims that they were necessary to the preservation of what he calls a “Christian Europe.”

    He said at his trial this week that the killings were “based on goodness, not evil.”

    Breivik’s belief that his acts were in some way “good” apparently motivated Christina Patterson, of the UK newspaper The Independent, to write an opinion piece entitled “The First Step to Mass Murder Is a Belief in Good and Evil.” Patterson quotes Breivik’s “manifesto,” compares him to other white supremacists and terrorists, and points out how the kind of violence that Breivik committed always arises out of hatred, not for others, but for self.

    But then she goes on:

What all of these people have in common, apart from their hate, is a view of the world that divides it into good and evil. They like things to be simple. They want to live in homogeneous cultures where one view, which happens to be their own, prevails. When cultures change, as they all will with globalisation, they stamp their feet, and want to bend the world to their will. They can't bear their own feelings of failure, and want to feel strong.

    In short, Patterson claims, Breivik killed 69 people because he believed in good and evil.

    Strange, to look at something like the massacre of that many promising young lives and think that the problem is too strong a belief in good and evil.

    No, Patterson had it right when she talked about hate as a cause. Fear of change. Feelings of failure and shame, and a convenient scapegoat to take the blame. He wanted his world to never change, wanted it always to conform to his perception of reality.

    That was the first temptation, wasn’t it, the one the snake used to seal the deal? “You’ll be like God, knowing good and evil.” That was all it took, and suddenly the fruit of that one tree looked better than everything else in that garden combined. “Go ahead and eat, and you won’t need God. You’ll be able to determine what’s good and what’s evil, what’s right and wrong, all by yourself.”

    People have been wanting this privilege for themselves since Day One. It’s how a student justifies cheating on a test, why a husband leaves his wife for another woman, how a pro-life activist decides to kill a doctor who performs abortions, why a suicide bomber detonates his vest in the middle of a crowded market. At bottom, the reason is the same: I’d like to be able to define good and evil so that I can define it in ways that best suit my worldview, my prejudices, my wants and needs.

     Whenever I get to I decide what is good and evil, it will remarkably come out suiting me best. I’ll define it in ways that are most convenient to me, that absolve me of responsibility for my own life, that provide suitable scapegoats for my failures.

    What’s gone wrong when someone like Anders Breivik raises a gun is not that he believes in good and evil. It’s that he believes in his version of good and evil. What went wrong on the island of Utoya that day was that Anders Breivik believed the serpent’s lie that he could “be like God, knowing good and evil.”

    Good and evil, though, is something that has to come from outside of us, independent of our own prejudices, preferences, and desires. If good and evil doesn’t sometimes sit in judgment on our own values and actions, we might rightly suspect that we have them mixed up somehow. Anders Breivik apparently never allowed that suspicion to enter his mind. He was so sure that he was right, that his actions were good, he apparently never imagined that he could be wrong. He still hasn’t - he’s still convinced that what he did is “based on goodness, not evil.”

    For human beings to separate out what we wish to be good, what we prefer to be good, what we want  to be good and what our passions tell us is good from what is actually, good - well, it requires divine intervention. It requires more that we sit in judgement over our own hearts instead of other people. It requires faith in God, submission to his Spirit, and a trust that he will lead us and teach us what is good.  It requires God, made flesh, living among us and showing us what a good life really looks like.

    Good, in a nutshell, is following him: Doing what he did, loving what he loved, hating what he hated, and offering an empty outstretched hand to the point of a nail to right the world’s wrongs. Instead of a fist holding a gun.

    Jesus shows me that whenever I turn against people in anger and hate, I’ve lost sight of right and wrong. However morally upright I may feel that I am, however certain I may that I’m in the right and others are in the wrong, to turn on people is to do evil. Loving people is a fundamental good. Only loving God ranks higher, and he loves people.

    Deciding that belief in right and wrong is the problem doesn’t help. If Anders Breivik’s atrocities teach us anything, it should be we human beings aren’t up to the task of determining good from evil. It should remind us that the human heart can justify anything, slap the label of “good” or “evil” in anything. It should call us back to faith in the God who from the beginning has promised to tell us good from evil, right from wrong.

    It should help us to listen to him, and to imagine that he might even use people who disagree with us to help us all see good from evil a little more clearly.

Sharing the Music

What you heard from me,  keep  as the pattern  of sound teaching,  with faith and love in Christ Jesus. Guard  the good deposit that was entrusted to you—guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us....

    [T]he things you have heard me say  in the presence of many witnesses  entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.

-2 Timothy 1:13-14, 2:2 (NIV)

    Every father hopes for something to share with his children: some experience, some common interest, some hobby. You want something that you can talk to your kids about, something that you enjoy doing together. I think from both the dad and kid side of the equation, you want to know that your relationship doesn’t always have to be parent-child. You want the chance, especially as kids grow into teenagers and adults, to have a friendship as well.

    For Josh and me, one of the places where our relationship turns into friendship is music.

    Specifically, Bruce Springsteen’s music. I’ve been a fan for a lot of years, and Josh became a fan after I shared it with him.

    So imagine our excitement - mine, especially - when we heard the announcement this week that he’s coming to play at Wrigley Field in September.

    Springsteen’s legendary live shows are a big reason that I became a fan. (I saw him play for three and half hours once.) I don’t necessarily expect that this show will be a marathon - the guy has his AARP card now, after all - but I’m looking forward to sharing with my son what is, in this era of Auto-Tuned and lip-synced “live” shows, for my money one of the best live music experiences out there.

    I would enjoy seeing Springsteen with my wife (though she hasn’t quite developed an appreciation for The Boss). I’d enjoy seeing him with friends, or even alone. But it means more somehow, that I’m going to see him with a young man who’s seeing him live for the first time, and that I can share that with him.

    I hope, though, that music isn’t the only thing we’ve shared.

    None of us would argue, probably, that Christianity isn’t intended to be shared. In fact, the “good news” at the heart of our faith is passed down from one person to another, one generation to the next. That’s how it continues to speak to us, continues to have relevance in a changing world, continues to breathe hope onto the dying embers of human hearts. The faith exists because it’s been passed down. The “pattern of healthy teaching,” as Paul puts it, is what we’ve heard. It’s nothing we create, or make up, or develop through focus groups and measuring trends. It’s what we’ve heard, which means that it comes from outside of us. It is to be heard, and guarded, and then passed on.

    Jesus wrote nothing, isn’t that interesting? Nothing that’s lasted, anyway. But others were there, and they listened and they saw, and eventually they got around to telling what they heard and saw and reflecting on what it meant. And eventually those recollections got written down, and then copied, and copied some more, and shared in the church. And still, today, people all over the world reflect on what they’ve received, and hear it read, and then go try to live it. And share it again.

    Sometimes, though, we get mixed up. Sometimes we get confused as to what it is that we’re supposed to be sharing.

    What if I had tried to pass along to Josh my interpretation of Springsteen’s music, without letting him hear much of the actual music? What if, instead of listening to him while we drove, I spent the time telling him why Darkness on the Edge of Town was superior to Wrecking Ball? What if I had spent the time lecturing about why vinyl is superior to digital downloads? Oh, he might conceivably kind of enjoy my interpretation. Maybe, if I was compelling enough, it might even move him like Springsteen’s music. But it wouldn’t be the same thing. And it would be really, really hard to dance to.

    Sometimes churches and church leaders, in the name of trying to guard what they’ve received and making sure it gets communicated faithfully and understood properly, have done something much like that to the gospel. We’ve made it hard for people to hear the music over our analysis and interpretation. We’ve forgotten that hearing the gospel is much more akin to listening to a great song played live than attending a lecture about a recording of that song. It’s intended to be heard with the same faculties, I’m convinced, that make it possible for us to enjoy good music. The gospel teaches us, of course, but not only by instructing our minds. (Maybe not even primarily that way.) It teaches us by touching our hearts - reaching down to the core of who we are - and moving us. It moves us to repentance. It moves us to hope. It moves us to action.

    Maybe people in our world are having trouble hearing the gospel right now because we’ve forgotten that and aren’t communicating what we think we are. They don’t want to hear the analysis. They might not always want to hear the music, either - but the Bible says that’s where the power of God for salvation is. And so that’s what they need to hear.

    And maybe that’s why we believers don’t seem to be doing much sharing of the gospel these days. Maybe it’s because we know intuitively that something’s off, that what we’re communicating isn’t necessarily the gospel that once turned the world upside down. Maybe the first thing some of us need to do to become more effective, enthusiastic sharers of what we’ve heard is to go back and hear again. But this time, not muffled by some church leader’s understanding of what the music is saying. This time, the music itself - what the apostles heard from Jesus and passed down to us - loud and live, until our ears are ringing and our hearts are pounding and our feet are moving.

   We won’t mind at all sharing that, I think. In fact, it’ll come as naturally as sharing a favorite song with someone we love.

    And our world will be able to hear the song of the ages. And some will even dance.