Grace

To the Pure, All Things Are Pure

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To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.
—Titus 1:15

I was reading through Titus last night and this well-known passage struck me in a way I had never considered before. Convicting and challenging, the words of Paul revealed a great truth.

In 43 years on this third rock from the sun, one of the worst personal qualities I’ve developed is cynicism. PigpenAlways considered to be an idealist as a younger man, I was branded a hopeless optimist. I remember working at a Christian summer camp and having one of the girls on staff ask me why I was happy all the time. I was stunned that she even asked such a question. Wasn’t a sunny disposition the fruit of God’s Spirit living within us?

But over the years, disappointments and the profound corruption of mankind set in. You read the newspapers, watch the TV news shows, and the relentless depravity of it all sets you adrift on a lonely raft in a sea of bad news. Time has a way of turning idealists into despairing optimists, then into world-weary pessimists. Sooner or later, everything (and everyone) gets tainted one way or another.

You see the signs soon enough. Your snide remarks interrupt TV shows, movies, ordinary conversations, even church, a litany of snarky asides that would put Mystery Science Theater 3000 to shame. You comment on everything. Maybe you even start blogging.

A child’s birthday party becomes an opportunity to pontificate on the creepiness of clowns or the corporate calculation that gave us Chuck E. Cheese and his rodent ticket redemption center packed with two cent toys manufactured in Togo. Your husband announces he’s going shopping for you and your first thought is, Does he know of any stores besides Home Depot? Or when the football star scores a touchdown, you ponder just how many pounds of steroids he has in his system. You hope one day to see the perfectly coiffed pastor’s wife with her hair looking like a rat’s nest—just once.

The football game, birthday party, shopping trip, even someone we like—doesn’t it feel good on occasion to feel superior? To long for that bit of dirt that taints to our advantage?

I hate being cynical. It may make for clever writing, but cynicism and sarcasm only exist to take what is pure and slop it up. In its worst guise, it skips the cleverness altogether and goes right for crassness and sleaze. Your neighbor who talks family values every chance she gets is probably hiding her affair with the mailman. The nice, helpful single guy at church who just turned thirty is most certainly gay or a pedophile—there’s got to be something wrong with him. Can’t we all think of a million situations?

But to the pure, all things are pure. The birthday party is a wonderful expression of togetherness and love for a child. The football game is a time to enjoy life with friends. The husband’s offer is a response of tenderness. The pastor’s wife with the nice hair is one of God’s favorite people. That second thought never slips through the neurons. The pure enjoy life free of subtitles and running commentary.

New Year’s resolutions fall prey to snark about as well as anything, but for 2006 I know that my resolution is to allow the pure to stay pure, to develop a countercultural mind that steers clear of tainting what is pure. I don’t need to feel superior all the time or to impress my own deviance onto people and situations that never asked for my clever wit.

It’s all too easy to descend, isn’t it?

Before year’s end, I’m going to write about developing the mind of Christ for 2006. Letting the pure be pure is just one step in that direction. Stay tuned.

A Look Back at “Judgmental Christians…”

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My final post of 2004 was “‘Judgmental Christians’ and The Way of Christ for 2005,” wherein I wondered if we Christians were more defined by our judging the lost than by our service of others in the name of the Lord. While I believe it is one thing to cling to Truth, it is quite another to cling to Truth AND serve others in love. A helping handWhen we only do the first part well, being labeled “judgmental” is rightly applied; we function as the holder of the lifebuoy, but refuse to throw it to the unworthy.

As they say at other blogs, read the whole thing.

I believe that 2005 saw no improvement to what I blogged about in the post above. We are still highly judgmental. We continue to judge the lost, people who lack the moral compass Christ provides. Frankly, that’s a waste. It’s like working at an orange grove in Florida and wondering why the trees there don’t yield cherries.

Because of this, I believe that the Godblogosphere recognized that judging the lost was a waste of online time. I don’t know if we bloggers took our judging the lost completely offline or not, but I noticed that online the rants diminished. I still see plenty of non-blogged Christian handwringing over what the heathens are doing. Lots of press releases from Christian organizations talking about the next new perversity to rise in the ranks of the perverted, but still no real service in love to those same people—at least none of the kind that Jesus exhibited in His earthly ministry to prostitutes, cheats, liars, crooks, and sinners of all flavors. We talk about Jesus Our Model, but we still don’t really serve or love like He did.

What happened in the Godblogosphere this year, however, was a reconcentrating of our judgmental ire on each other, not only on other Christians in general, but other Christian bloggers specifically. While I’m amused at the timing of many of the wars that broke out after I stepped out of my blogging shoes for a few days (only to return to chaos in the Godblogosphere), I was consistently disheartened by the level of attacks and the sheer unwillingness of opponents to listen and seriously ponder what each side was saying. Sometimes, we don’t even hear the acid in our own words even as we’re running a litmus test on what the other side just uttered.

More than anything else, it seems that 2005 was characterized by witch hunts and finger pointing. I can’t believe how many times I blogged on this issue, but a few posts come to mind:

I hate to sound like a Christian version of Rodney King, but “can’t we all just get along?” And if the rift is so wide that getting along isn’t possible, can’t we at least treat each other humanely? Let the secular bloggers resort to vitriol. Our default mode is supposed to be love, not acid-throwing. It is possible to disagree without beating each other over the heads with a baseball bat. The teams in an NHL battle may check someone into the boards with enough fury to crack Plexiglases, but the two teams still shake hands at the end.

For 2006, it is my wish that all of us Godbloggers consent to the following when dealing with those whose views differ from ours: Love, lisitle=

Christmas…Resurrection

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We may all have heard the statistics:

  • More heart attacks occur in December than any other month
  • More people are treated for depression in December than any other month

What is it about this time of year that people are so stressed, so sad?

I’ll admit that Christmastime has not been the same for me since my parents died. My father died at Christmastime five years ago, and Mom was clearly terminal, living with us, but in many ways already gone. Charlie Brown's ChristmasThe following Christmas in 2001 drove home the fact , now that they were both gone, that they had borne a far greater role in the joy of the season for me than I had understood. You are always a child at Christmastime as long as you’ve got a surviving parent, but take that away and now it’s up to you to be the one who maintains the Christmas spirit. Now it’s for your children more than for you. It’s a role we never think about accepting until it is thrust upon us and there is no one else to turn to.

Big families make up for some of that loss, but Christmas is a bit sad for me now because I see that my own little family is probably going to stay little. The dynamic of having brothers and sisters at Christmastime will be lost on my son, something I never thought would be the case when my wife and I got married, but that is how things are, quite apart from our best intentions. Just the three of us creates a certain vulnerability at Christmastime that is hard to explain. I had my brothers around growing up, but my son will probably just have us.

Today, I was going to bake cookies, but my son may have chickenpox and my wife is very sick. Illness at Christmastime is the worst time for being under the weather. I remembered a couple Christmases growing up when one of my family was sick, but that was rare. However, in the last few years someone has always been sick at Christmas, usually me. When we were excited about hosting my wife’s family for Christmas a couple years ago, the real flu hit just about everyone and the whole enterprise shriveled up because no one was in the mood to do anything. The whole house should have been quarantined. Lots of planning and effort, but not much realization.

Whatever planning I had this year didn’t materialize. We can’t go see my brother across town for Christmas because he and his wife are expecting a child any day now and chickenpox and ready-to-birth moms are an absolute no-no. I had great plans for my wife and I to wrap presents together this year and relax, but she is in bed sick, and with my meager present-wrapping skills, I labored for six hours over what amounted to a little more than a dozen presents. Doing things alone at Christmas is not how it should be.

That meager stack of presents isn’t how it should be, either. I grew up with a Christmas tradition that said that Dec. 25th was the day that you got everything you were going to get for the year. All the toys came then. Most of the clothes came then. As a result, Christmases were huge at our house. Despite having a large family room, between the genuine tree and the tsunami of gifts pouring out from under it, there was hardly room to walk. I loved to shop for people, too, being one of those people who got more excited by what he gave then by what he received. I always tried to think of marvelous gifts to give, and more often than not, those gifts were spectacular and exactly the right thing to for each person.

Today, though, financial considerations have cut back our Christmases to the point that whatever boost I got from giving has been dampened by the realization that few of the things I’d like to give are within our reach anymore. If there’s a tree, it swallows whatever may be under it. And every year we are asked to cut back even more. Two out of the last five Christmases found us without an income, vulnerable at the one time of the year when plenty is assumed. Those were hard. I’m not sure I ever really got over them, either. You wonder what the next Christmas holds, a bit more fearful than the Christmas before.

None of this is how it should be. It’s not how I remember Christmas.

For four hundred years, the world lay waiting. There was no word from the Lord. The pagans swept in, and with them came darkness. Medes, Persians, Babylonians, Romans—one horde after another asserted control over the people of God.

Then came the light, the promise, the hope.

Christmas is a sad time for many who remember that it was good once, but doesn’t seem that way anymore. They are the ones who cry out, “Maranatha!” Christmas reminds us of all that should be right with the world, but the world isn’t always right. And as time goes on, it seems a little less right every year. It is our groaning, awaiting something better, the second Advent.

Nostalgia can bring paralysis. When I see people paralyzed by Christmastime, I know how they got that way. If you had a great childhood and things aren’t so great now, Christmas is missing that spark of life. An emptiness resides where the expectation once lived, nagging and frustrating.

But it’s not about Christmas, is it? It’s about an empty tomb. Christians were never the Christmas people, those concentrated on the First Advent. No, we are the resurrection people, born to die, then to live again. And at this point in time, as we move farther away from our own birth and closer to the time of our own death, we live in that stasis between the two, caught between opposing worlds, to die to the one and be raised into the other.

No one said it would be easy walking out that dying. When I look at Christmas 2005, I see a lot of little deaths. In the midst of that sadness, though, is the hope of the world to come.

If you’re sad this Christmas, let someone else know. It’s not something you struggle with alone—millions of others have a heavy heart as the shortest days of the year roll around. Don’t bear that by yourself.

…but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
—Romans 8:23b-25 ESV