Part of my unrest is that the major tropes of my youth with regard to the accumulation of years have failed. Or perhaps I should say that I failed to fulfill them.

By the time you are 50, you are supposed to be in the prime of your career. You are a leader in your community. Your savings account is overflowing. You have power. Your words matter to people and they listen to you because you are a success.

At least that is what I grew up believing because that’s what we were all taught to believe.

Problem is, I haven’t achieved any of those. My careers (yes, multiple) have all been derailed at one point or another by uncontrollable economic factors, so this elusive “prime” I keep hearing about seems to be some mysterious other’s to enjoy. I’m not rich, so I have no power, since the money = power equation only grows stronger the larger the number of years on the calendar. Politics seems to be the only avenue to leadership anymore, and no party will have me. And since achievements in those preceding traits are the sole signal for success in our society today (with the possible exception of scandal, so there’s at least that still open), I’ll never be a worldly success.

They say that youth is wasted on the young, and I understand this more and more. Supposedly, the counterbalance is wisdom, but no one cares about wisdom. In an age of knowledge, where Google can give you answers to nearly any question you have, and it’s all within reach of a ubiquitous cell phone, what is wisdom? The Internet is filled with dime store philosophers, and most days anymore, I feel like just another of their horde. Name a topic and there’s a pundit for it.

So if none of this works, what is left for the guy who has managed to get to 50 years without making a total wreck of life?

I was taught to always refer to adults with “Mr.,”Mrs.,” or “Miss” preceding their surname. Even when I was in my 20s and 30s, my parents’ peers were still “Mr. Kreider” or “Mrs. Frey,” not “Joe” or “Phyllis.”

This gave those neighborhood stalwarts some ethereal cachet that made them different from me. Better. Smarter. More worthy of respect.

Just the other day, I was out with my son, and we ran into the daughter of a friend. She’s 19-21, if my faulty memory serves, and she called out to me by saying, “Hello, Mr. Edelen.”

I found it almost startling to hear “Mr. Edelen.” Perhaps I am now an adult, part of that elusive set of peerage that reserved such titular prefixes for the friends of my deceased parents.

If anything, that callout got me thinking more deeply about respect.

If none of the other standards for adulthood drilled into me in my youth can be assumed, surely respect can. Yet despite being called Mr. Edelen by one well-raised young lady, I think that more of us can identify with Rodney Dangerfield.

Getting to 50 without screwing up one’s life no longer merits the special favor of respect. Perhaps it never should have in the first place. We keep hearing that respect must be earned, and if anything, that’s still the prevailing thought.

Yet if our societal beliefs on respect are to be grasped, no one is earning respect.

The presidency used to be a position of respect. I don’t know if that was forever shot down by the presence of presidential protein on an intern’s dress, but since that event, neither of our last two presidents have garnered any respect. Even from Christians, respect may be talked about with regard to the POTUS, and we can blabber with the best of ‘em about Founding Fathers and the greatness of America, but the words we say about our president don’t encompass respect.

In fact, even in the Church today, I can’t think of anyone who gets any respect. The world at large has a built-in reflex for questioning authority, and that seems to have slid down the gutter into the American Church.

Don’t believe me? Consider the following.

An elder from your church pulls you aside some Sunday and says, “I notice your giving has been down this year. What can we do about that?”

For many of us, the first thought is, Take a long walk off a short pier, buddy.

Even if we substitute pastor for elder in that scene, nothing improves. Doesn’t matter who the person is, we don’t want anyone telling us we’re doing it wrong.

But, Dan, the giving thing is a naturally divisive issue, you may say. And I know you don’t ascribe to a New Testament tithe, anyway. OK, then have the elder or pastor suggest that you’re not spending enough of your time in service to either the church or the community. Or that a church leader noticed a sin in your life you may need to address. Or that you might think you’re a gifted teacher, but that class you really want to teach is not what the church needs from you now. Or that you’re not as gifted in teaching as you think you are, and that perhaps your gift is driving the church bus.

How quickly the thought becomes, So which other churches can I visit next Sunday?

We can talk all we want about respect, but no one seems to get any anymore. We are so selfish and believe ourselves so wise, that no one can speak into our lives with any authority and have us instantly consider his or her words worthwhile simply because who he or she is demands respect.

We don’t honor offices or the people who inhabit them. Titles now mean nothing. We have become like cliffs of granite, immovable, unswayable, and suitable only for jumping off for those who would suggest we move or sway.

Sure, plenty of Christian leaders have abused their authority. Sure, some people may not be worthy of respect.

But is anyone?

I maybe a poor example of human being and perhaps an even lousier Christian. Maybe respect should not be afforded me simply because I’ve hung around nearly 50 years.

Yet what else is there? If we can’t respect those people who are still standing after 50 years or more, especially within the Church, what hope do we have to ever move anything—including the Church—forward? Instead, we may be dooming ourselves to a downward spiral of selfishness that keeps crying out for others to respect us, even as we fail to respect anyone else.

This feed is from Cerulean Sanctum (http://ceruleansanctum.com), a blog by Dan Edelen that covers issues facing the American Church.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and Why No One Can Get (or Give) Any

In it, people discovered the fullness of Jesus Christ.

People gathered together daily, ate their meals together, and shared the Lord’s Supper in an atmosphere of joy and celebration.

People gave, and without man-made limitations. They gave everything they owned, everything they were, and every spiritual gift they had received from the Lord, because they loved each other, so no one among them lacked for anything.

People saw themselves as equal partners in the Faith, but each with unique gifts, so that no one would contemplate surviving completely in Jesus without the others. And no one among them lorded anything over any other, but each was was seen as an essential part of the whole.

People acknowledged that the only hierarchy among them was that some had been in Jesus longer than others, so those had grown deeper and had more to contribute, with those more mature ones afforded the honor they deserved. Jesus alone was the head, and all others were fellow members of the Body, each one a saint, priest, and fellow sojourner.

People brought  their spiritual gifts to each assembling together, with each person encouraged to share what the Spirit was doing in and through him or her, as the Spirit of God Himself directed.

People were in Jesus, who was in the Father and the Holy Spirit as well, all experiencing the fullness of true fellowship and intimacy.

And among the people love ruled, with each person lifted up by the other,  joined in unity in the Lord. And that love was so compelling that nothing in the world could compare, not even a little.

I had a dream, and it seemed so strange, like nothing I had experienced before.

And I wanted it to be true, and real, and present right now.

But it seems like just a dream.

This feed is from Cerulean Sanctum (http://ceruleansanctum.com), a blog by Dan Edelen that covers issues facing the American Church.

I Had a Dream

Their mantra goes like this: “Yes, the early Church did ___________, but the Book of Acts is descriptive, not prescriptive. Just because we see ___________ described in Acts doesn’t mean we have to make it a practice for us today.”

Really?

I tend to hear from those same people how God is not the author of confusion, but honestly, their position on this battle is one of the most confusing, illogical, anti-intellectual streams of thought that exists in contemporary theology and Bible exegesis.

Consider this:

1. The unconverted did not do ___________.

2. The Holy Spirit comes into the lives of the unconverted and converts them.

3. The converted now do ___________.

I don’t know about you, but if someone goes from NOT doing something to doing it after the Holy Spirit has changed him or her, it would seem to me that ___________ is near and dear to the heart of God.

How, then, is it irrational to think that we should be doing ___________ today? Yet that is what the descriptive-prescriptive battler wants to make into an issue.

Here are two classic examples of descriptive actions in Acts that these folks can’t abide for us to emulate:

And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.
—Acts 2:44-45

And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts…
—Acts 2:46

Christians who wage war on the descriptions above do so because they can’t stand to consider the implications of meeting together daily in each other’s homes for meals and fellowship, while also giving up their hard-earned stuff so that a brother or sister can have a need met. Where I come from, there is a description for that: hardheartedness.

Doesn’t it seem obvious that a group of people who once did neither of those things suddenly started doing them once they were touched by the Spirit of God? Doesn’t that have any implications for us?

John Piper recently lamented how some Christians seem more pumped up about the latest film in theaters than they do about Jesus. Given the circles I run in, you can substitute electronic gadget for film in theaters, but you get the point. Jesus doesn’t seem to excite people as much as the inconsequential does, even when those people are Christians.

I would contend that the unholy mindset that seeks to diminish the implications of the descriptive portions of the New Testament is partially responsible for the situation Piper decries. Wielded as a club, that mentality beats down the very heart of what Acts is saying to us about what is good, pure, noble, and true. Acts depicts what is normative in the Christian life, and the reason it is so (and should be) is because the Holy Spirit of God is at the heart of the changes we see in the lives of people who once didn’t give a damn about the guy next door, then suddenly they’re meeting in that guy’s house and sharing Jesus together daily. And when they’re doing so, the world’s junk seems far less attractive and Jesus a whole lot more.

Instead, most of us sit passively in church for at most 90 minutes one day a week, listening to a select few people telling us how we’re doing life wrong, and here are some Bible verse pills to make it all better, and you better down them right now or else.  But folks, that dead way of living is the fruit of taking the vitality of Acts and wringing the life out of it because we’ve listened far too long to the voices that tell us, “Well, ___________ is descriptive and not prescriptive.”

It’s the sour grapes we now eat and explains why we love Jack and Jill more than Jesus.

(If you truly want to be grieved by this descriptive-prescriptive fruit, see “God-Connections in Church Are Rare, Study Says.”)

This feed is from Cerulean Sanctum (http://ceruleansanctum.com), a blog by Dan Edelen that covers issues facing the American Church.

Ending the Descriptive-Prescriptive Battle Once and For All