Trees

     A man had a fig tree growing in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it but did not find any. So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, “For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven’t found any. Cut it down!  Why should it use up the soil?”

     “Sir,” the man replied, “leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.”

-Luke 13:6-9 (NIV)

The church I’m a part of is on a tree-lined street on the northwest side of Chicago. I like the trees a lot. In the summer they create a nice canopy over the street. They give us some shade when the sun’s hot. In the winter they’re often covered with snow. I don’t love them in the fall, but I sort of put up with that because of how nice they are the rest of the year.

     We lost two trees this morning though.

     They hadn’t looked so good for a few years. The topmost branches didn’t leaf out. Occasionally smaller limbs would fall off, and you could see the rot and decay. They looked less and less beautiful and had even become a safety hazard. I knew it was coming.

     So this morning, some big trucks from the city showed up. “Emerald Ash Borer,” they said: a pest that spreads to other trees. They had a cherry-picker and a wood-chipper and some guys with chainsaws, and they started in on those trees. First they lopped off the smaller branches, then the larger. Then they started cutting chunks off the trunk. Eventually they worked their way back down to ground level, where they took a huge saw to the trunk. In a matter of a couple of hours, all that was left of those two trees that have grown there for at least the length of my life were two large stumps and some sawdust. Another truck will show up in a few days or weeks with a stump grinder, and even they’ll be gone. 

     I took a minute to count the rings on one of the stumps. They got a little faint toward the middle, but I got over 100. Even if that tree put on two rings a year, it’s still been there a while. Two hours and a few chainsaws and ropes seems like kind of an unceremonious end for such an unchanging part of the neighborhood. People came and went all around it, but there it sat for at least half a century, providing oxygen and shade and a home for birds and squirrels. I sort of felt like we should have had some kind of tree funeral for those trees. Tell them thanks for serving us well.

     Three years is a pretty short amount of time in comparison to our lost trees, but the vineyard owner in Jesus’ parable wasn’t willing to give his fig tree much longer than that. Three years was long enough, in his mind. Long enough that he should have been eating figs from it already. One fruitless season is just a bad year for figs. Two…well, maybe we didn’t fertilize well enough. But three means there’s something wrong with the tree. It’s a bad tree that isn’t ever going to produce much. And vineyard owners are unsentimental about trees: “Cut it down. Why should it use up the soil?”

     I hope I’m not just a waste of soil, at least not most of the time. Because it’s pretty obvious from Jesus’ parable that we don’t get points for just hanging around. We have differing strengths, opportunities, and resources to be sure, but don’t imagine that God has us in our homes, in our offices, in our neighborhoods, in our churches to just be part of the scenery. Faith gives us a new outlook on a lot of things, not the least of which is the idea that we’re planted wherever we’re planted for reasons other than our own comfort or prosperity or happiness. We’re where we are because the Lord wants us there, and he wants us there so that we can produce fruit for him. What you produce and what I produce may not look much alike, and you shouldn’t be judged on the basis of what anyone else produces. But you aren’t there just to take up space. You aren’t there to keep the blessings and nourishment of God all to yourself. You’re to take in the bitterness and hatred and darkness around you and breathe out grace and love and light into the air. You’re to care for the poor and sick, to look out for the marginalized, to speak for those whose voices aren’t heard. You’re to model repentance and faith and ethical living. You’re to produce the fruit of the gospel of Christ so that people can “taste and see that the Lord is good.”

     Churches and families and companies and schools and agencies and individuals can easily lose sight of the fact that they’re supposed to be bearing fruit. We slip easily into self-preservation mode. We start to think the resources around us are there to just be sucked up, to benefit us. We stop feeling the responsibility to help, serve, teach, work, love, touch, give. When that happens there’s no fruit visible. There’s nothing to indicate any kind of real life. Nothing in which anyone can find any real hope, any evidence that God is at work.

     When that happens, we stop doing good and start doing damage.

     Worse, that attitude can spread. It can infect those who we should be inspiring to bear fruit. Instead, they see nothing on our branches and conclude that they have no purpose beyond themselves either.

     You know that there are two human characters in the parable of the tree. One is the vineyard owner, who isn’t wrong. He has every right to say, “Cut it down. It’s just wasting dirt.” Maybe that vineyard owner doesn’t exactly represent God, but in his words you hear God’s righteous judgment on a person, a church, an organization that doesn’t use the blessings, resources, and opportunities he gives to bear fruit where they’re planted. We can’t complain that God demands too much of us. We can’t claim we don’t know that we answer to him for our failure to produce what he wants from us. We can’t gripe that his verdict is too harsh.

     But in that other character, the caretaker, we hear God’s grace. He hates to see the tree go. He believes it can still be fruitful. “Let me work on it,” he says. “Let me put even more care and nourishment into it. It can still be what it ought to be. It can still bear the fruit you intend for it to bear. Just give it a little more time to grow.”

     In those words of grace is the gospel: that Jesus came to help us grow into what God wants us to be, not cut us off at the ground. Jesus cultivates and fertilizes with his teaching, his example, with ultimately his own body and blood and with the pouring out of the Holy Spirit. He knows you can be fruitful because he’ll live in you and energize you. You need only trust his word and do what he tells you.

     Fruitfulness isn’t just working harder, any more than those trees we lost could have been saved if they’d just put their minds to it. Fruitfulness is finding your identity and purpose in Jesus, and then going where he tells you and doing what he asks. 

     He’s not ready to cut you off yet. Not yet (though that day will come). Come closer to him. Reorganize your life so that he’s the root of it. Cultivate the habit of living in him through prayer, through hearing his words and following his teaching, through service. Become part of a church that will help you bear fruit, and ask them to.

     Bear fruit. Stay tall and green and strong, and produce whatever it is that the Lord has made you and equipped you to produce.

     Your street needs the shade, beauty, and oxygen of the gospel of Jesus. 

Ignoble

    For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ.

    But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.

-2 Corinthians 4:6-7 (NIV)

You’ve heard, of course, of the Nobel prizes, given each year for outstanding achievement in various fields. But you may not have heard of the Ig Nobel Awards, given by a publication called, improbably enough, the Annals of Improbable Research. Like the better-known Nobels, they honor outstanding achievement. But they take a slightly different tack. They honor the best of the year's research that cannot or should not be repeated. (Ignoble...get it?)

    At this year's awards at Harvard University, “Iggys” were given in physics to two researchers using fluid dynamics to answer the question, “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?” Four researchers won the Iggy in Peace by demonstrating that regular playing of a didgeridoo is an effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea and snoring. Two economics researchers apparently were able to demonstrate that contact with a crocodile affects a person’s willingness to gamble. A British doctor won for Anatomy by attempting to answer the question, “Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?”

    Oh, but there’s more. A South Korean researcher won the Fluid Dynamics Iggy by studying what happens when a person walks backward carrying a cup of coffee. (I wonder why the cat study didn’t qualify for this category.)  It took five French and British doctors to win the Medicine prize by using advanced brain-scanning technology to measure the extent to which some people are disgusted by cheese. (Which must make them outcasts in France…) The Iggy in Cognition was taken by four researchers who determined that many identical twins can’t tell themselves apart visually.

    But perhaps the Iggy that will make the most immediate difference in the world comes in the field of Obstetrics, won by four Spanish researchers who determined that the best way for a developing human fetus to hear music is...well...not by placing a speaker against the mother’s belly. They’re even marketing a product: a speaker designed to pair with a cell phone and to be used in the alternative way.

    Ignoble? Well, maybe. Unless you suddenly find yourself needing to know whether you’re more likely to spill your liquid cat by walking backward or forward. Or you need to play some music for the little bun you have in the oven. Somebody has to study the “ignoble” stuff, right?

    Judging from the Bible, God seems to be a big fan of the ignoble. A champion of the common. Lord of the lowborn.

    It's a redneck shepherd boy, after all, who stands up to Goliath – and with a sling, not armor and sword. (Though, in that particular instance, it seemed to be kind of a situation of bringing a knife to a gunfight.) Moses parted the sea with a staff. A donkey chastised Balaam.

    And when God wants to send his Son into the world, he comes as a helpless baby, with a feeding trough in a stable in a backwater town as his crib. His message speaks to the common people and often alienates the VIPs. And when he rescues the people he loves, it isn't by raising an army or taking a throne. It's by giving his life as a despised and rejected criminal.

    Seems that God can use regular people who seem to have little to commend them to do amazing things. A peasant couple in Nazareth receive an angelic visitation and, nine months later, a baby boy who is God With Us. Uneducated fishermen, an ethically questionable tax collector, a revolutionary, and assorted women make up his closest followers. But those followers go on to proclaim the good news and demonstrate the power of God's kingdom to officials, rulers, and kings all over the world.

     What makes ordinary people able to do extraordinary things? What transforms unremarkable circumstances into remarkable acts of God? What gives nobility to what the world considers ignoble?

“When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and took note that these men had been with Jesus.” (Acts 4:13)

    Paul calls himself and his co-workers “jars of clay;” pots so literally earthy and common that archaeologists today find thousands of shards of them scattered over every dig from Asia to the Middle East to Africa to Europe. Clay jars were to Paul what plastic and styrofoam containers are to us: functional and unremarkable.

    But God had hidden a treasure inside Paul and his clay-jar colleagues. He had shown them his face through Jesus, revealed to them who he is. His light shone in their hearts, and so they carried around in themselves the gospel of Jesus. They were weak, fragile, yes, even ignoble. They could be cracked, broken, and even destroyed. No one would look at them and be impressed or awestruck. But because they were clay jars, God did remarkable things through them.

    You might have expected that I'd say “in spite of the fact that they were clay jars,” or something like that. But Paul doesn't say that. Paul reminds us that the ordinary-ness of the messengers witnesses to the extraordinary-ness of the message. In using the ignoble, Paul points out, God demonstrates incontrovertibly that the power of the gospel is in him. It's not in the persuasiveness or faith or piety or courage of the container. It's in the glory and power and grace of God as poured out in Jesus Christ.

    I wouldn't be surprised if you were a pretty ordinary person living a pretty ordinary life. Oh, I'm sure you have your moments, but I imagine that a fair amount of the time you worry about your weaknesses and stress over your shortcomings. I'm guessing that you see yourself as pretty average, and your life as unremarkable at best and mundane at worst. And I'm pretty sure that, given the choice, you'd say that you consider yourself more ignoble than noble.

    Congratulations. You're in good company. People like you are just the kind of people God loves to use to do his work in the world. Really, when an ordinary person confounds the world's values and assumptions by showing extraordinary faith or courage, or sacrificing to show love to someone else, or speaking unexpected words of good news at just the right time, then God is glorified. It's clear that he's at work in that ordinary life.

    Stay with Jesus. Stay close to him, follow him, do what he does, and listen to what he says. His Spirit lives in you, and the treasure of the gospel glitters through the cracks that every clay jar has in it. He'll do remarkable things with you, but that's his business, and he'll do it in his own time and in his own ways. As you take care of your family, or do your job, or shop for groceries, or go to school, or serve in your community, or worship in your church, he'll do his work. Your business is staying close, doing the things he did and speaking the words he spoke.

    People will still notice.

    And God will be glorified.

"Me Too"

    Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. 

-Galatians 6:2 (NIV)

In the wake of news that a powerful movie producer used his position to sexually harass, abuse, and assault actresses and other women in the film business — news which surprised absolutely no one — a hashtag movement is sweeping across Twitter: #MeToo. It’s a way of encouraging women in and out of Hollywood to tell their own stories of sexual abuse in the hopes that by shedding light on what they suffered, they will expose abusers and take away the power they have to keep their victims silent. It’s one of those uses of the internet that has real potential to create positive change in the world. The more women who step forward, the more they demonstrate that they’ve done nothing wrong and have nothing to be ashamed of. The more victims feel emboldened to come out of the shadows. The more abusers will have to answer for their crimes.

     So far, the hashtag has been used over 500,000 times.

     This kind of crime, perhaps more than any, is one that thrives on secrecy, fear, and shame. Victims have stayed quiet because they aren’t sure how telling the truth about what was done to them will be received by friends, colleagues at work, even family, and even church. Will they even be believed?

     Vali Forrister was a student in 1989 at the university my son attends now when she was kidnapped and raped in a Nashville alley by a paroled sex offender. It took her nearly fifteen years to be able to tell her story; she was simply afraid that she would be blamed, that people would wonder what she was wearing at the time, whether in some way or another she was “asking for it.” For ten years — ten years — on the anniversary of that day, the anniversary she never wanted, she would get in her car and drive down that alley alone. Just to keep it, I suppose, from having power over her. Think about that. She would rather face it every year by herself than tell a friend, a family member, someone at church. She was more afraid of their response than she was of that alley.

     Now, I imagine no one intentionally gave Vali the impression that she couldn’t speak up. I imagine no one told her that they would judge her if something like that happened to her. Somehow she did get that impression, though, and that should give us pause. What is it that makes victims of sexual assault so afraid to speak about their experience, when speaking about it is often one of the things that help them heal most? 

     And, more importantly, what can we do to create space where victims can find love, care, hope, and healing?

     The internet didn’t really create “Me Too,” of course. The main teaching of the church — the Gospel — is that God said “Me Too.” “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” says one formulation of it. Another is in the words of Jesus himself: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” The belief upon which Christians for centuries have placed their hope is the crazy idea that God loves us so much that in Jesus he identified with us to the point of becoming one of us and carrying our burdens. God, as Christians understand him, doesn’t stand at a distance and demand our service, penitence, and worship before we can come near. Instead, he comes near to us, just as we are and where we are, and takes our suffering upon himself.

     In other words, he comes to us saying “Me Too.” 

     And so we are expected to do the same for others.

     “As I have loved you, so you must love one another,” he says to those who would follow him. Paul tells one of the churches to which he writes that they should “have the mind of Christ” by “in humility valu(ing) others above yourselves.” John thinks that we know what love is by seeing Jesus lay down his life for us, and that we should do the same for those around us. He thinks that we don’t love so much by saying it as we do by showing it in our actions. 

     In other words, we receive God’s “Me Too” love for us in Jesus by turning and saying “Me Too” to those around us. By “carrying each other’s burdens,” we fulfill the law that Jesus said is above any other: to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

     Reading Vali’s story brings tears to eyes, literally. Not just what was done to her by her assailant, as horrible as that was, but also the years she suffered silently and alone because there was no one — not friends, family, and not church — who she trusted to carry this burden with her. And there should have been. There should have been. She grew up in church. She went to a Christian university. And when it counted most, there was no one to bear her burdens? There was no one to say, “Me Too”?

     But we can make sure our churches are “Me Too” churches. For one thing, we can talk about sexual sin instead of keeping quiet. Sexual abuse thrives in the silence and darkness: let’s not give it either. If there are those in our pews or our pulpits who take advantage of their position to abuse and assault those who can’t fight back, let’s make sure to call them what they are and give their victims a voice. And for those in our pews who are victims of sexual sin, let’s be sure we’re known as communities where that sin is called out.

     We can give women who have suffered a chance to speak out about their suffering. We can let it be known explicitly that they won’t be shamed or blamed, that their character won’t be called into question, and that their sorrow and pain and anger will be met with love, sympathy, and safety. Many women have had to heal alone, but they shouldn’t have to. We can let them know that they will be believed if they tell their stories; that we won’t excuse such sin as a “misunderstanding” or a “he said, she said.”

     Sometimes, though, what we say and the impression we give can be two different things, and so we’ll need to be very careful that what we say implicitly reinforces our explicit “Me Too.” How, for instance, do church leaders use power: to control, or to serve? One says when women tell their stories, they will be loved and believed and cared for. The other says that they might not find so friendly a hearing.

     We can say “Me Too” as well by considering, as men, how we might unintentionally reinforce stereotypes and assumptions upon which sins like harassment, assault, and rape thrive. How might the gender stereotypes in our churches create a dynamic in which women have less of a voice? How might our misinterpretation of Scripture provide the cover an abuser is looking for to justify his crimes? We can, and should, guard ourselves: much of the media, and virtually all pornography, can desensitize us to the suffering of those who have been victims of sexual sin.

     We say “Me Too” in our churches by going out of our way to show, as our Lord did, that the suffering of those who have been hurt is our suffering too. We do it by identifying with victims as Christ identified with us; by being willing to see and hear their pain and carrying in our own hearts, returning love, grace, and hope for healing.

     “Me Too.” The love of Jesus is carried in those words.

Light in the Lord

    For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light  (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. 

-Ephesians 5:8-13 (NIV)

We’re number one.

     Defending World Series Champs? Yep, but that’s not what I mean. Best pizza city in the nation? Debatable, but quite possibly. But that’s not what I’m talking about. First in medical research? Great museums? Best architecture? You could make a case for Chicago being number one in any of those areas. But, unfortunately, none of those are rankings that came out this week. The list I’m talking about is one that no city wants to be on, much less top. But there we are, right at number one.

     According to Orkin Pest Control's annual list, Chicago is the rattiest city in the United States.

     Somehow we’re rattier than New York (#2 on the list), where garbage bags sit piled on sidewalks. Somehow we have more rats that Washington D.C. (#3) — but only if you don’t count the ones making policy. Judging by the number of rodent treatments the company performed last year, Chicago is rattier than LA (#4), Philadelphia (#7), Detroit (#9), Boston (#12), and Cleveland (#15). 

     It’s apparently not for lack of trying to eradicate them. As long as I’ve been here there have been signs in alleys telling residents to make sure to keep their garbage bin lids closed. (Though something chews holes through the lids.) This past summer, Streets and San started a pilot program using contraceptive bait in addition to the usual poison. (Yes, we’re encouraging our rats to have safe sex.) And a few years ago, the city released 60 coyotes with radio tracking collars into the city with the idea that they’d find the rats delicious. (Probably the occasional Yorkshire terrier, too.) We call them, I kid you not, urban coyotes. Sounds to me like it’s going to take more than 60. And I’m not sure coyotes running wild through the city is all that preferable to rats. 

      To read about our rat problem, you’d think Chicagoans must be knee-deep in them. Here’s the thing, though: I’ve lived in Chicago for about a quarter of a century and in all that time I’ve seen, like, five rats. Tops.

     There’s a reason for that, and you don’t have to be a rodent expert to figure it out. The rats prefer it that way. They’d rather not be seen. They don’t care if you know about them, and in fact being known is exactly how they get killed. Rats can only thrive — get food and grow and reproduce (unless they’ve nibbled on Chicago’s contraceptive rat bait) — when they live in darkness and secrecy. And so they’ve learned really well how to stay hidden in a city of three million people. They seek out the dark places. They live in the disused places. The places no human beings want to go are paradise to them. 

     A lot of what human beings put their minds and hands to do thrives in places like that, also.

     For years, decades, a movie producer sexually harasses and assaults hopeful young actresses. This is someone who everyone in Hollywood knows. His habits are an open secret, something movie people warn each other about in whispers. But only in whispers. He’s too powerful, too rich, and has too much influence on the careers and lives of the people who might otherwise report him. So his victims receive his gifts and money and the roles he gives them, and try to forget. The bystanders — some powerful enough to actually do something about it — pretend that they don’t see anything, don’t know anything, that it was all consensual. Darkness is pulled tight around the acts, and they thrive. 

     Until one person pulls back the curtain and the light rushes in.

     If God’s people won’t do that, who should we expect will? If God’s people won’t function as the element of our society that exposes evil to the light, why aren’t we surprised that others won’t?

     That’s part of being "the light of the world,” Paul seems to suggest. It’s one thing to say we should “live as children of the light,” uninfluenced by the darkness. Children of light is who we are — not because of ourselves, but because of Jesus. Goodness, righteousness, truth — these things should characterize us. Our lives should be marked by a love for what’s good, a commitment to righteousness in our personal lives and in our relationships with others, and an obligation to tell the truth.

     We haven’t always been good at this. Sometimes, we have to admit, the church has lived in darkness. Other times we have been complicit in allowing what’s done in the darkness to go unchallenged by refusing to shine the light of Christ on some particular shadows. We have to repent of those times and ask the Lord to help us be better.

     Then there are the times when we’ve been content to live in a bubble that we’ve created for ourselves:  Good people, living good lives, but isolated from the world around us. We gather in our ghettoes of light and moan about the darkness around us and promise to have nothing to do with it, but convince ourselves that the Gospel doesn’t make the darkness “out there” our problem.

     But not only should we have nothing to do with the darkness — we should expose it. That’s what light does to shadow, of course. It dissipates it. It isn’t about self-righteously and hypocritically sitting in judgment on everyone who sees one social issue or the other differently from us. That we’ve done at times. We’ve become known for it, in fact. Many in our world still today associate the church with this kind of narrow moralizing that we’ve been guilty of cudgeling “sinners” with. It doesn’t roll back the darkness because it isn’t the light of Christ. It’s the garish neon of our smugness and pride and fear. It isn’t living as children of light; it just makes those in darkness dart further into the shadows.

     The light of Christ warms as well as illuminates. It defends the weak by exposing those who take advantage of them. It offers hope to people resigned to living in the cold shadows of poverty, disease, death, grief, and tyranny. It shows people who thought they were alone that the darkness they were living in just made them think so. It offers dawn to those who are living in the constant night of addiction, bitterness, and guilt. It illuminates people who have been lost in sin and turns them into light, too.

     Aaron Courtney knows something about that. At a protest outside a white supremacist rally at the University of Florida this week, Courtney, a black man, came face to face with a man in a swastika t-shirt in the crowd. Courtney yelled over the screaming, “Why don’t you like me, dog?” When the man wouldn’t answer Courtney’s repeated question, Courtney finally said, “Give me a hug.” After a moment, he wrapped his arms around Courtney. “Why don’t you like me?” Courtney asked again. 

     “I don’t know,” was the answer.

      Light. I don’t know what difference Courtney’s hug made in that guy’s life. But it made one. “I heard God whisper in my ear, ‘you changed his life,’” was Courtney’s take.

     Of course he did. That’s what light does. 

One of Us

“Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”

     “Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, for whoever is not against us is for us. Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not lose their reward.“

-Mark 9:38-41 (NIV)

The last day of October this year is something a little more than just Halloween. It marks a significant event in the history of Christianity. On October 31, 1517, a German priest had had it up to here with what he regarded as the blatant corruption and abuse of spiritual authority that was clustered around many of the practices of the church in his era. He was particularly (but not exclusively) incensed over the sale of indulgences to fund the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

     Indulgences actually had a more solid theological foundation than is often assumed, but they were popularly regarded as a way to purchase freedom from the consequences of sin, whether for self or loved ones. While indulgences were more often given in return for prayer or good deeds, in 1517 the basilica needed some work, and so the good deed most prized by the church was the giving of money. And so priests were sent from village to village “selling” indulgences. When this particular priest heard that there was to be an indulgence sale in his village of Wartburg, he decided to make public a few criticisms of the church he had so far kept more or less to himself. Ninety-five of them, in fact. He nailed them to the door of the Castle Church, and when they were printed and published a few months later Martin Luther found himself at the center of a firestorm that remade the religious landscape of Europe and eventually the world. Luther’s 95 Theses launched what would become known as the Protestant Reformation.

     Many of the denominations that make up the Christian world today connect in one way or another to Luther’s criticisms of the church. Predictably, of course, many who agreed that reformation was needed disagreed as to the specifics. Many of those reformation efforts would later go through reformations of their own. Still, that date almost 500 years ago has marked our world indelibly. Especially for those of us who wear the name of Jesus.

     I noticed an article recently on this topic that I think sort of missed the point. The author (who I’m sure has good intentions) points out that all this occurred 500 years ago, and so he concludes “there is no Protestant denomination which is older than 500 years, certainly none that reaches back to the time of Christ and the apostles.” The author goes on to argue that “denominationalism is not in harmony with the teaching of the Scriptures” and that “the disciples were not encouraged to wear the names of men in religion.” OK, fair enough, as far as it goes. He talks about the “worthy things” Luther accomplished, like making the Bible accessible and undermining the power that was possessed and often misused by the church hierarchy. 

     “Yet,” the author writes, “he did not go far enough.” He lays at Luther’s feet the formation of “denominationalism with its multiplicity of creeds, names, and organizations. None of this conformed to the ‘one body’ revealed in the New Testament.”

     It is easy to see the splinter in brother Martin’s eye and fail to see the beam in our own.

     This all reminds me of the time Jesus’ followers “caught” someone casting out demons in Jesus' name. “Don’t worry,” they told Jesus later when recounting the story. “We shut him down since he wasn’t one of us.”

     That’s so easy, so alluring. It’s maybe the path of least resistance to fall into Watchdog Mode and think the Lord needs us to monitor who’s “one of us” and who isn’t. In pointing out this tendency in my brother’s article, I don’t want to pretend that I’m immune to it. There's something rewarding about it. It provides clarity. It locates “correct” comfortably close to where I’m sitting. It makes what’s familiar and easy for me into the norm for all believers, everywhere, at all times.

     The disciples didn’t exactly have it all together, did they? We’re like them in that. We have 500 years of hindsight that Luther didn’t enjoy, and yet we want to sit in judgment on his efforts? “Nice try, Martin. Really, you had some good ideas there. Too bad you didn’t carry them through.” Well, look: Luther stood up to Popes. His faith didn’t wither under the pain of excommunication. When the church could bring dire consequences to bear, he didn’t blink. Through his work and suffering, the Spirit brought fresh air and new life into the church. How dare we dismiss him with a wave of our hands and a patronizing “A for effort”? How dare we pretend that we’re somehow superior to him?

     The author of this article would say that the fellowship of Christians of which he and I are members is different. Instead of just reforming the church, we’ve restored the church of the New Testament. If that sounds like a matter of semantics to you, that’s because it is. The spiritual forebears at the headwaters of “my” tribe stood on the shoulders of Martin Luther and others like him — even if we don’t always acknowledge that. Yes, our intent is just to be the church of the New Testament; Luther's intent was the same. Don’t put on him the frailties of those who came later. And don't pretend we aren’t subject to those same frailties. And don’t for a moment imagine that any of us have the authority or responsibility to evaluate Luther’s work. To his own Master he will stand or fall.

     I know it goes against our impulses to nail down and control everything, but let’s just allow Jesus’ word to his disciples to be enough for us: “Don’t stop him.” Don’t consider anyone doing great things in the name of Jesus to be an antagonist who must be prevented from serving the Lord until they have “our" imprimatur. There’s a time to discuss theology and debate best practice, but that time is not when we see someone honoring the name of Jesus. When we see that, we need to welcome a friend and acknowledge his ministry. To do so is not necessarily to embrace everything that friend believes or practices. It’s simply to take seriously what Jesus himself said: there’s no “us” to safeguard. If we truly believe in the “one body” of the New Testament, then we should also believe that it’s loved by Christ, that he gave himself up for it, and that he is cleansing it through water and the word. And more, that through his sacrifice he will present that body to himself radiant, unstained, and blameless.

     If we believe in that one body, we believe it’s his, and so we’ll let him evaluate who’s a part of it and who isn’t. And we’ll bend over backward to safeguard its unity.

     No one needs to be one of us. Not if they’re already one of his.  

     One day, when the new creation is all that exists, maybe I’ll get a chance to argue with Martin Luther about baptism or something, though I suspect by then I won’t want to. If I do, my guess is he’ll be there. 

     Even if he wasn’t one of us.