Dying to Self

The Wrong Toy in Your Happy Meal

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My son suffered the ultimate indignity last week—at least from the perspective of a six-year-old boy.

Because our Wednesdays are crazy, we take that day to eat out. I usually bring it home rather than pay for expensive containers of artificially colored and flavored, H2O-diluted high fructose corn syrup. We’ll drink water from our tap, thank you. (I’ve got a bottle of Karo handy if I need a late-night fix.)

The choices in my tiny ‘burg of 2,000 are actually pretty extensive since the Chinese place came to town, but I let my son choose this time. And we parents all know what that means: We’re goin’ to McDonalds.

My son has a McToy fetish bar none. He might play with said Happy Meal treasure for what amounts to nanoseconds, but he’s perpetually itching to see what the Golden Arches is dishing. Surprisingly, he still plays with a little Spyro the Dragon LCD-game he got at McDonalds two years ago, so sometimes Ronald gets it right.

But this time…nope, not this time.

I prolong the agony because I don’t want him rifling through dinner. So we took the plethora of hot bags home, and he pounced on the Happy Meal the second we walked through the door to see what bonanza lay inside.

Wait two seconds…

“Dad, we gotta go back!” he yelled, eyes rimmed with tears.

I fed him my practiced nonplussed expression.

He moaned louder. “But they gave me the girl toy!”

The girl toy. The dread fear of all sub-tween males. The %^$#* GIRL toy.

A man meets the woman of his dreams, marries her, and settles down to bliss. Soon, she’s pregnant. But an unusual illness turns out to be pancreatic cancer. She dies within two months, taking the baby with her.

A couple who’s struggled with infertility adopts an infant boy. Their delight turns to endless days of agony as the boy later manifests an incurable genetic disease so rare that no one tests for it. He’ll progressively become an invalid and die in his teen years. Meanwhile, their health insurance won’t cover the costly therapy needed to prolong his life by five or more years.

A young man starts a company with his best friend. They prosper. But the friend develops a gambling problem that knows no bottom. The man soon learns his friend has embezzled millions to cover his debts. Bankrupt, the company goes under and takes the young man and his family down with it.

Almost two decades ago, I sat on the front porch of a cabin at a Christian camp listening to a boy cry. I didn’t know him. He wasn’t one of the kids that called me “counselor.” But he was hurting, so I hunkered down next to him and listened.

I’d heard anecdotes of warring parents who dropped their kid at camp so they could spend that week shredding their marriage license, but this was the first one I’d encountered in the flesh. He’d received the “Mommy doesn’t love Daddy anymore” phone call just minutes before.

My parents stayed together, so I didn’t possess any firsthand broken home experience. I prayed silently (on the outside, while inside I cried out for wisdom) and listened as this poor kid bawled.

In the end, I told him that I couldn’t identify with what he was going through. I could tell him all sorts of things that might make him feel better for a minute, but I didn’t know what it was like to have parents split up. That was a horrible hurt no one should have to endure.

I charged him with this: One day, he’d be a camp counselor and he’d come across a boy whose parents said to hell with family, and he’d know exactly what to say because he’d experienced that torture, too.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that we need a Gospel that speaks to failure. Everywhere we turn today, we’re treated to a message that screams about seizing our best life now. But no one envisions a best life that includes suffering—now.

Among all the questions why, few of us take the time to ask if our pain is someone else’s gain. Even some stranger’s gain. Man of SorrowsWe consider the horror dumped on our laps and automatically assume that God’s forsaken us, or we’ve somehow forsaken Him. Yet we rarely wonder if the torment we’re enduring is meant to bless someone else.

Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to Asia, buried a wife and several children in Chinese soil, then went back to England a different man. Joel Osteen was recently voted the most important Evangelical in America. If Taylor were still alive today, and you had your choice between receiving counseling from either Osteen or him after a drunk driver plowed into your family’s car and killed your wife and kids, whom would you choose?

The Bible says this of Jesus:

He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
—Isaiah 53:3 ESV

Jesus’ contemporaries didn’t think He had anything to give them, did they? We know better. We go to Him with our hurt precisely because He was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. And His people, who likewise know sorrow and grief, can be the flesh-and-blood shoulder we need to cry on as we cry out to the heavenly Man of Sorrows.

Your tragedy carries meaning for someone else. God never intends for us to squander pain. Be wise in knowing how to use yours to the benefit of another grieving soul.

My son? On his own he decided the best way to deal with the wrong toy in his Happy Meal was to give it to a girl who might appreciate it. He told me that this would ease the disappointment.

Out of the mouths of babes.

Snow, Wheat, Chaff

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Sunday, we got our first heavy snow this winter. Usually, we have one under our belt by the start of December, but this year it took until two-thirds through January. I blame Al Gore.

As one of the worship musicians at our church, I'm compelled to make the Sunday worship. I called the worship leader and was told we were on. No time for sandbagging the pickup bed. Slip on the parka and go. Since I go in early for practice and the rest of the family comes later, I knew I'd be the only Edelen there. My wife's next car will be AWD to match my 4×4. Every car should be AWD, if you ask me.

I now live in one of those areas that mystified me as a kid tuned to school closings on the radio. "Man, those Western Brown School District kids are ALWAYS getting off, even when it's like a half-inch of snow!" was the familiar lament. I had no idea where Western Brown, Felicity Franklin or Betel Tate schools were located, but I envied the heck out of them for getting off school if a mere handful of flakes conglomerated. Now I live in one of those areas and I better understand. Twisty country roads infrequented by salt trucks and snowplows tell you all you need to know.

Five minutes from church, the snow turned to sleet. I wanted nothing more than to turn around and go back home. I can handle about two feet of snow in my 4×4 pickup, but ice remains the great equalizer. It makes everyone look stupid. Wheat

So the worship team all showed. We wondered as we looked out the church windows if it would only be us. The pastor walked in, his shoulders slumped, and he wore a sanguine, confused look. To call off the meeting or not. The ice came down. The clock hands spun.

Meet.

All told, maybe sixty out of our three hundred regular attenders showed. Twenty percent. The normal buzz that stirs right as the service started wasn't there. You could hear the echoes in the sanctuary. We were here, but it all seemed perfunctory.

From my vantage point behind the drums center stage, I couldn't help but ask if I was seeing a vision of the American Church circa 2025, when the glory days of Evangelicalism surrendered to tough times for Christians. I noted the faces in the pews and did a mental check of the 20/80 rule. Yep, the 20 percent of the church that did 80 percent of the work took up their regular positions in the pews. The faithful.

Who's left when the tough times come, when it's life-threatening to label oneself a Christian? What will your typical American megachurch look like when the penalties come down and meeting isn't as easy as it once was? Will that enormous building feel like an empty warehouse? Had it been an empty warehouse for a decade already?

Maybe we'd all flee to house churches by then, leaving behind the vast complexes that held the Starbucks and Lifeway shops, mute testament against presumption. Perhaps we checked out of Christianity altogether. It simply got too hard. We'd have to give up so much. Everything we worked for years for. Renounce and keep.

Or stay true to Christ and kiss the earthly goodbye. Make the choice. Now.

But this morning, snow explained the thinning. Stole some of the vibrancy, too, I think. If persecution, and not weather, faced us, I wondered if we'd be excited. The underground Chinese Church gets cited for its powerful testimony amid persecution. Could that be us, too, in the same circumstance, our faces beaming? If the sword replaced snow?

You've got to wonder who would fall away, who would betray the remnant, and who would instead die by the sword, the name of Jesus on their lips. The martyrs. Wheat.

It's so easy to be chaff.

21st Century American Evangelicalism: The Ne Plus Ultra of Christianity?

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Out of Ur posed an intriguing question a few weeks ago. I intended on writing about it, but time got away from me. Since then, that post, "Have We Become Crypto-Christians?," has taken on a life of its own in the Godblogosphere. I've encountered it at a dozen or more sites.

The setup of the post follows the rise of Christianity in 16th century Japan and its subsequent brutal extermination by warlords. To survive, the handful of Christians who remained hid their faith and practice within Japanese culture so well that when Japan re-opened to the West in the late 19th century, that tiny remnant still remained. However, the centuries of dalliance with the culture had so metamorphosed the faith of those Japanese Christians that missionaries barely recognized it for what it was. This Crypto-Christianity, as it was called, bore little resemblance to orthodox Christianity.

It's a good story. Makes for an obvious warning, too.

But there's a problem.

Any scientist worth his PhD will tell you that an experiment is only as good as its control. Without a control in place, results can't be measured accurately.

For centuries, the idea that life sprang from non-living matter (spontaneous generation) ruled science. Put a piece of bread in a container and miraculously fungi would arise from within it. Where did the fungi come from? They spontaneously generated from the bread.

Obviously, any science devoted to studying biological systems would be hampered by this erroneous notion. That it took until the middle of the 19th century to finally lay it to rest showed the intractability of disproving it. Only through a well-conceived experiment (by a young Louis Pasteur) and a proper control could valid conclusions be drawn. Heat a flask with an ingenious S-shaped trap in its neck (to let in air, but trap external airborne microbes) and compare it against a flask without the trap. The first remained sterile, while the other allowed airborne microbes to settle, giving rise to life.

The problem with the Crypto-Christianity post and its troubling question of altered Christianity is the same that bedeviled scientists searching to disprove spontaneous generation: no proper control existed.

When missionaries returned to Japan in the late 19th century, were they the control? Was their Christianity the pure unadulterated form practiced by the first century Church?

Hardly. 

While this does not mean they had no ability to say that Crypto-Christians of Japan practiced an aberrant form of Christianity, their ability to judge was severely limited by their own conceit that they alone were practicing the pure Faith.

We Americans suffer from this delusion that we are the pinnacle of any particular cultural expression seen as worthwhile. Elliot Erwitt's "Felix, Gladys, and Rover" - 1974It's the very backbone of the concept of "The Ugly American." And we show few signs of abandoning this delusion.

Because the Church in America is made up of Americans steeped in this mentality, Christians here act is if we're the control for all of Christianity worldwide. Nowhere is this conceit more grounded than in Evangelicalism. For Evangelicals go to great lengths to assert their superiority over the rest of the American Christendom, creating a king-of-the-hill bravado. Needless to say, this not only bothers other Christian sects worldwide, but even other Evangelicals outside of America.

So we consider ourselves the control portion of the experiment. Any results we gain from any experiment in the Faith must be measured against us.

Does that bother anyone else? I'm livid over it, frankly, because it's so inherently self-centered. Not only this, but the tendency is to denigrate the Christians who came before us, as if they were practicing a kind of Preschool of the Faith. They were the devolved Australopithecines and us the fully realized Homo Sapiens. As such, they have nothing to teach us.

Oversimplification? Stay with me.

Let's consider Protestantism, especially those sects within it that trace their founding to the Reformation. When we encounter doctrinal discussions within those sects, it's as if a vast amnesia occurred between the time the Apostle John drew his last breath and Martin Luther pounded his 95 Theses to the cathedral door. Sure, a few councils dealt with Pelagianism and Sebellianism and a few other -isms, but for the most part, the Roman Catholic Church ruled for a thousand years, and we all know NOTHING of any theological worth happened in that millennium.

Mark Lauterbach recently posted excellent insights into this theological blindness. He decided to break the artificial barrier of the Reformation by reading many of the earlier Church fathers. In particular, he notes that Athanasius teaches using metanarrative and avoids the individualism we inherently lay over the Gospel message. Mark ends his post with a warning from C.S. Lewis to avoid reading these great men of God through any of our contemporary lenses lest we warp their teaching to fit our own.

Which is what we do all too easily.

In the end, the battle here resembles the one between the Chihuahua and the Great Dane over who is the real Canis lupus familiaris. When seen from the outside, neither looks much like the original dog they descended from.

Yet we American Evangelicals have these blinders on prevent us from considering that perhaps we are not the ne plus ultra of Christian expression. If we actually encountered a real first century Church practicing within our midst, I would say that many of us would consider it deviant. Not so? Look how easily some of us attack other Evangelicals who contend they're trying to get back to that first century ideal.

Have we become Crypto-Christians? I'd say that long slide toward some level of cryptic faith started just a few years after  Pentecost. The question of what is normative is a difficult one because culture intrudes so easily, especially in practice. Just witness the extremes of practice within orthodox Christianity today and ask why they deviate so wildly.

In the end, the question is a red herring. We American Evangelicals already are and probably have been Crypto-Christians for a very long time. Yet somehow, we continue to think of ourselves as the standard by which all Christianity is measured, both past and future.

Is that a Chihuahua I hear yapping?

{Image: Elliott Erwitt's classic Felix, Gladys, and Rover, 1974}