Benevolence

The Practice of the Practical Gospel

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Weeping angel sculptureTim Challies had a convicting analysis earlier this week concerning the shallowness of Evangelicalism. I think that more and more of us are fed up with the state of the American Church in general, and Tim puts a fine point on our flailing around:

The shallowness of evangelicalism leaves it largely inequipped to deal with the difficult issues. If we are to be a people that brings hope to the hopeless, purpose to the purposeless and joy to those who know only sorrow, we must be prepared to give answers that are biblically-based and Scripturally-satisfying. To do this we must wrestle with the difficult doctrines of sin, love, sorrow and suffering. We must be prepared not only to give an answer for the hope that lives within us, but for the suffering that causes us to draw upon that hope and to take our refuge in Christ Jesus, the One whose death gives us hope for now and for eternity.

Amen to that.

Yet I think that for the Church in America to really live out the Gospel it has to go one step further. While I agree that the Church must do a better job with our answers, I believe even more strongly that we must radically improve our praxis, the very practical living out of the faith that lies behind those answers.

While I may get dinged by some for suggesting this, if it were merely an issue of biblical answers, I could type up an appropriate set of Bible verses, add in a dash of exposition by a famous Christian of yesteryear, and simply hand out the right pages that would address the specific problem of this person or that. In this way, no one could ever claim that they didn't get answers to their pain.

However, if you'd just had your world ripped apart, is a package of answers wrapped neatly in a bow going to assuage your anguish or make you feel loved? Not likely.

If Christianity were just about answers, then it's reached its pinnacle because you can Google for answers and get a gazillion and a half Web sites—including this one—ready to dispense Christian truth at a moment's notice.

But we're not the Blog of Christ. We're the Body. That Body wasn't created to go into the hellholes of Earth and hand out a tract, but to be the very arms of Jesus around a broken person who needs a shoulder to cry on more than she needs someone armed with a relentless set of answers.

This isn't to say that Tim's wrong. No, he's absolutely right. The problem arises in that answers must be accompanied by someone who cares enough to go the second mile. Postmodern people expect that everyone will claim to have answers, but they're more willing to listen to those bearers of truth who demonstrate compassion first and answers second—and for good reason: the rightness of what we believe was never intended by God to exist in a vacuum barren of human interaction. We're the Body of Christ (and not merely the Answers of Christ) by His wisdom, and we gut the Gospel if we think we can casually drop an answer bomb on hurting people and walk away. Yet how many thousands of times a day, especially on Sunday, does that happen in our churches, workplaces, and homes?

No one supports apologetics more than I do. The Bible clearly states that each one of us should know that of which we speak. Still, the fact remains: one of the primary reasons the Western world doesn't take the Church seriously (and even the Western Church doesn't take itself seriously) is we thought we could trade godly, compassionate relationships for easily dispensed solutions.

Any regular reader of Cerulean Sanctum must get tired of me preaching this, but the whole truth is that the Gospel transforms fully only in vital community. Ignore community long enough and the power of the Gospel to change lives is diminished. Not because the Gospel failed, but because our practical expression of it in community failed. This is wholly our problem and not anything that's wrong with the Gospel.

How so? If we're not willing to sit for hours on end with the grieving congregant who just buried his fiancée days before their wedding, what then should we expect of him when it is our turn to mourn? Our lesson to him is that it is easier to quote a few appropriate passages of Scripture than it is to give the one thing we value more than anything else today: ourselves. Over time, people learn that only short, well-rehearsed scripts can be expected and not a knock on a door that reveals an empathetic face ready to listen rather than dispense answers. Pass enough of this anti-Christian interpersonal neglect around within a worshiping community and I can guarantee we can make Sunday (and the rest of the week for that matter) as empty of God's compassion as the darkest portions of hell.

Answers matter. But in the end those answers have a proscribed destination: people. Why then are we so willing to ignore people or give them only a minute of our time on our way to whatever we deem in the moment to be more important than they are?

We will never have a greater mission than to be Christ to the people we encounter daily. If we can't make room for them, then no matter how much of the Bible we memorize, nor how many answers we're equipped to provide, our ministry will bear no fruit.

The Purposefully Wayward Servant Syndrome

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An anonymous commenter on the post Love Sin / Hate Sin noted that some Christians, especially when dealing with life’s disappointments, use sin as a way of getting back at God. Call it “The Purposefully Wayward Servant Syndrome.” From what I’ve seen, it’s prevalent among all kinds of normally righteous-living Christians.

You and everyone you know at your church has been praying for three months about the transfer you put in at your company, a move that will take you to the branch location closest to where your elderly parents now live in sunny Miami. Not only will you now be in a position to assist your folks as they near the end of their lives, but you’ll be able to work from the beach, plus get a more powerful title and more pay. You pack the family up, move into the fabulous new home that you found in just three days, and spend an entire two weeks in Miami before the news comes down that corporate is closing the Miami branch and moving it to Duluth, just south of the Arctic Circle. And since there’s already a branch in place at Duluth, you’ll lose your title and your new pay increase. And you’ll be answering to the moron who is so well known in your company that every branch office not only knows the guy, but has their own set of regional jokes decrying his ineptitude. Welcome to hell.

Why, God? Why?

In keeping with Purposefully Wayward Servant Syndrome, now seems like the perfect opportunity to show God how you feel about all this by doing something really stupid. You fully admit that you’re not in control of issues like this, He is, but you can at least express what little control you have by raising a fist to the sky.

That upraised fist takes on many forms. Anger, obviously, but also frustration, depression, and a whole host on unpleasant emotions. But rarely is it just an emotion—some kind of action accompanies those feelings and that action nine times out of ten is rooted in whatever sin we judge appropriate enough to trot out before God to show Him just how we feel about His sovereignty in situations like this.

Shoplifting? Drunken rampage? Cheating on our spouse? Punching one of our kids? Binging and purging? Buying one of every porn mag on the rack at the local convenience store we would ordinarily avoid because it sells entire racks of porn? What’s the worst thing we can do to show God just how displeased we are at the way He runs the universe?

We know it’s wrong, but for one brief second it satisfies us to think that we still have some modicum of control over our lives. We’re also smart enough to know that God hates when we sin even more than we hate feeling like we moved out in faith and only later fell off the end of the world.

We have a cautionary model in all this:

Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, till he should see what would become of the city. Now the LORD God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?” And he said, “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.”
—Jonah 4:5-9 ESV

Jonah under the vineNot a righteous anger. Definitely an upraised fist. And while I don’t want to add to the narrative, I have no problem envisioning Jonah raising a ruckus out there in the desert, probably hurling some sand, and making enough of a spectacle of himself that a few passersby asked, “What’s up with the prophet?” He may have not gone to the depths that some of us do, but he complained enough to let God know that he wasn’t a humble servant who believed “Thy will be done.”

The Book of Jonah ends with a cliffhanger:

And the LORD said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”
—Jonah 4:10-11 ESV

Unfortunately for those of us who live for closure, Jonah’s response is lost to history. You’d think the correction he’d received earlier in the belly of the fish would have been enough to tame the “I’m not getting my way!” tantrums, but Jonah was a tough nut to crack.

I’d be deceiving you all if I didn’t say that I’m well acquainted with Purposefully Wayward Servant Syndrome. There have been far too many times in recent years where we stepped off the cliff in faith after much agonizing prayer only to be dashed on the rocks of despair below. I’ve done my share of finding ways that I can make myself more miserable and in the process profess my little statement of displeasure to a holy God who’s not impressed by my unrighteous escapades.

Honestly, I think this is where the Church has dropped the ball as God’s agents of hope and reconciliation. Like Job’s advice-giving friends, too often we go to the our church congregations and tell them we’ve been broken on the rocks and the first thing we get is a heaping helping of Romans 8:28, a pat on the back, and an “Everyone’s got problems, don’t they?” talk that only goes to enhance the desire to try out that Purposefully Wayward Servant Syndrome experience—at least once.

Wouldn’t those times be so much better if we knew that at least one person in our church would go a second mile with us?

More years ago than I wish to admit, I sat on the front porch of a sweaty, smells-of-unwashed-boys cabin during summer camp. As a counselor, I hadn’t done much real counseling, but now I had a boy crying his eyes out who wasn’t even in my cabin, who had just been told that his parents were divorcing. Not having come from a household wrecked by divorce, what could I say? All I could tell that weeping boy was one day God might have him sitting where I was sitting now, and unlike me, he’d know exactly what to say to some weeping boy who’d been handed the same awful news.

I don’t know what happened to that boy in the long run, but there on the porch he dried his eyes, looked me square in the face, and said, “I’ll know what to say because I’ve been there.” Then we prayed together.

If you’ve been plagued by Purposefully Wayward Servant Syndrome in your life, perhaps the Lord is asking you to sit down beside the very people who are now going through the same misery you once suffered. Your experience can show them they don’t have to eat the bitter herbs that you greedily gulped down in response to feeling abandoned at your point of greatest need, when the world was caving in and God seemed shut up behind six foot thick celestial doors of brass.

I don’t want to add to Jonah, but I’ve got to believe that we would not have seen so much frustration in the life of that Wayward Servant if others stood with him. Sometimes the mere presence of another is the tempering factor that limits the depths of stupidity that some of us so easily fall into.

Be the Church. Be Christ to the grieving. No platitudes or generic memorized spiels that are easily dispensed to the hurting before you flit off to your next scheduled appointment, but real, bloody, messy care in the midst of someone else’s ruin.

You know how desperately it’s needed because you’ve been there, too.

Trying to Get By

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This evening I was struck again by a thought that comes my way about once a month. It’s not a provocative thought. It may not be worthy of a post. But I think there’s some truth in it that we needHomeless to consider before we set the barrels of our collective Gatling guns on “blazing” mode.

Most people are just trying to get by.

It’s easy to paint great swaths of humanity with a specific color of sin that’s apparent to us. I know I do it with relative ease. As Christians, it’s almost second nature for us to scrutinize some group of people and candidly tell others exactly what that group’s besetting sin is. We’ve got it down to an art form.

Americans get painted with plenty of those wide brushes, especially by other Americans. We’re greedy, materialistic, the-world-revolves-around-us kind of people. We’re loud, stage-hogging, patriotic zealots who drive insensitive gas-chugging vehicles. And we’re fat, too. See how easy those labels come? How many of the seven deadly sins did I just name? I lost track.

I like to watch people. As a writer, people are my domain. Restaurants are an essential place for this. Just last week I witnessed a family that consisted of a young dad and mom that had three girls and a boy. The dad was dressed in a mechanic’s uniform, while mom wore one of those unfortunate summer outfits that heightens the very things she wished no one noticed about her. The three girls had nine months of spacing between each of them, bam, bam, bam.

But then there was the boy. He was probably fourteen, at least eight years older than the next-oldest child. You could almost envision mom and dad as sixteen-year olds finding out they had a male heir on the way. Years of struggle put off any chance of having more children, but when times got modestly better for a season they came one after another. The boy looked just like his dad and has a shared destiny, knowing how those things go. The girls mirrored mom, each unique from the other, yet all their mother’s daughters.

I watched how they interacted. Obviously drained, the parents poked at their food and exchanged few words, parenting relegated to the older boy in that moment. The girls were all bright smiles. Still, you could tell they were just getting by.

No one wakes up in the morning and contemplates how they’ll be materialistic. The CEO of the company wants to get his kids into the best school possible—and so does the company’s janitor. The brazenly loaded patron of the arts shops at Wal-Mart, intent on a good value, just like the starving artist. The dad looking for a birthday present for his son wants to get something that will put a big smile on the little chip’s face, not thinking he could feed ten Sudanese kids for a year with the amount of cash he’s going to drop. Meanwhile, mom isn’t considering how the birthday party’s wake will result in sixty pounds of trash. And a worn set of young parents of four kids is deliberating whatever blow tomorrow will bring, worry carving gouges in their faces.

You can say what you will about any of these people. All of them are trying to get by using whatever means seems best. All them will die some day. Some are destined for glory and some destined for the second death.

I aspire to great things, but when it comes down to it, I’m just trying to get by, too. My eternal hope is that I’m always plugged into the Lord and that nothing I do is outside His perfect will for my life. I also know that I fail miserably in that regard as I suspect that most people, Christian or not, do. Life is hard whether you’re surrendered or not.

When [Jesus] went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. And he began to teach them many things.
—Mark 6:34 ESV

Some people feel compassion for dumb animals, but not for their fellow man. Those folks confound me—and not in a good way. I hope that my view is like the Lord’s. People are just trying to get by, but what confusion attends them!

If it’s hard for the righteous to live daily in the world, how much harder is it for the lost? Is it just me or are we tougher on them in the midst of their clouded existence than we are on ourselves, we who know the Truth and yet still have a difficult time of life? Despite the fact that we’ve already been taught many things, most of us do a terrible job of incorporating that teaching into our day to day reality. What should we expect of those who have no such teaching?

This is not a post about excuses. No one has an excuse before God. If our stories were all that important, then salvation would be like the old TV show, “Queen for a Day,” wherein the biggest sob story wins a pedicure and the washer and dryer set.

Yet grace is still present. Are we dispensing it? Are we making it any easier for people, both lost and found, to make it to the finish line? Are we helping the persevering saints become more than conquerers or have we forgotten them in our own attempts to muddle through? And what about those additional burdens that we so easily load on the backs of people already struggling? Do only the strong survive?

God, help us.