Humility

Speaking the Truth…in LOVE!

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Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ…
—Ephesians 4:15 ESV

It’s one thing to speak truth. Any dimestore prophet standing on a streetcorner in an urban jungle can speak truth. That deranged guy shoving his poetry—only $2.00—in your face as you walk down the sidewalk can spout truth. Speaking the truth in loveA club-tie-wearing teacher commanding the front of a pasty-white classroom in an exclusive private school in Chevy Chase, Maryland, can instill truth. That young Hispanic lieutenant who saw the military as his way out of the barrio can yell truth at his soldiers.

You, me, our children—any of us can spew, whisper, and scream truth.

But only Christians speak truth in love. Because we know Love.

Which is why there’s no excuse for Christians to speak unlovingly to anyone. We do not speak fear, because in love, there is no fear.

God ordains that love be the envelope that holds His treasured words when we speak truth to others. When we preach, our message is love and our delivery is, too.

And when we confront error, it is not in anger, but in love. We rebuke lovingly, humbly, and gently:

Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted.
—Galatians 6:1 ESV

Lest you too be tempted. Because we are dust.

The mature understand this. The immature rail and accuse, showing no love, no humility. No image of Christ, into whom we are to grow.

Paul again:

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.
—Galatians 5:13-15 ESV

How easily we fall into biting and devouring. Even now ministries composed of misguided people gnash and consume in an attempt to one-up each other in their mastery of what they believe to be truth. And it brings disgrace upon the name of Christ. Because there is no love in it at all. One side may very well be correct in their understanding, while the other succumbs to mistaken notions. However, everyone is at fault when love gets trampled underfoot, because love is the ultimate expression of what it means to walk in Christian maturity:

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
—2 Peter 1:3-8 ESV

The culmination of a God-pleasing lifestyle? Love. All those other godly traits serve as the bedrock upon which love rests.

I knew a man unlike any I’ve met. Gifts of the Spirit flowed out of him like water. But more than the power by which he ministered in Christ’s name, he loved. No person he encountered proved unworthy of his love. He gave love to everyone, no matter how small or important. And because his love flowed so readily into other people’s love-starved lives, when he spoke truth, people listened. He’d earned the right to be heard because he led with love. Even when he corrected others, they listened and obeyed because he’d already won their respect and admiration because he loved before all else.

When someone speaks hard-to-bear truth to you, would you rather they lead with love or lead with accusations?

I believe one of the most under-lived truths of the Scriptures today comes from an all too familiar Scripture:

And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.
—Luke 6:31 ESV

When we must hear truth, how do we wish it delivered? If we say, “With love,” do we speak truth to others the same way? Or do we bludgeon sinners and opponents, only to expect they use kid gloves with us?

It feels miserable to be on the receiving end of a tirade, doesn’t it? Tongue-lashings hurt, but they’re simple to yell, aren’t they? Any loudmouth can shout truth in our faces.

But to deliver a message in love isn’t easy. It demands we actually care in tangible ways for the people we speak truth to. It costs us something. It asks for genuine relationship. It means reaching out as one human to another.

And the greater truth of speaking the truth in love is the only person fully qualified to speak truth to another person is the one who fulfills this Scripture:

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends.
—John 15:13 ESV

If we’re not prepared to die for the people we speak truth to, then we should let others less infatuated with their own lives speak it instead.

Humbling. Speaking the truth comes with a price. When we fail to love before we speak truth, we come under the condemnation of the Golden Rule. We have not loved, therefore we should not expect love in return:

For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.
—Matthew 7:2 ESV

Angry accusations beget angry replies. Biting. Devouring. And our anger burns hotter.

Here is truth:

We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
—1 John 4:19-21 ESV

Nothing we do in the name of Christ comes apart from Him. Without Him we can do nothing. So when we minister out of any spirit other than love, we minister out of the flesh. The words we then speak scorch like strange fire, not the sweet, life-giving warmth of the Spirit. We Christians cannot say we love God if we do not love our brothers and sisters. Loving them means speaking truth. And the only way to speak truth is in love.

It’s costly. It’s demanding. It takes work. It asks the Spirit to blast away our easy, fleshly responses. Yet it speaks life, the very Spirit of our Lord.

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} 

The F-World

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As a musician (I'm a drummer and guitarist), I've got an ear for challenging or snappy music. As a writer, I've got an appreciation for witty or deep lyrics. It should be no surprise then that most contemporary music bores me to tears. It lacks charm, and most of it suffers from a dearth of both musicality and lyrical excellence. Doesn't matter what the genre is.

If I have any musical weakness, I'm overly fond of jangly, "sunshine" pop with monster hooks that'll have you singing along all day.  That Rickenbacker 12-string sound brings a smile to my face. Think bands like The Association, The Zombies, The Byrds, and—of course—The Monkees. Think AM radio's golden age. That style of music largely passed into lore. No one writes music like that anymore. Worse, no recent band has the cleverness to pull it off consistently.

I don't buy a whole lot of music like I once did. The last CD I purchased was Derek Webb's She Must and Shall Go Free, which has a sort of folk and roots rock feel. Good music, stunning lyrics.

The other day, I followed a link looking for some trivial fact and it led to a site that played a random selection of "baroque pop," contemporary sunshine pop music that has the feel of the real thing. The song was by Belle & Sebastian, a band I'd not heard before. Not only was the song "Another Sunny Day" absolutely right on sound-wise, but the lyrics abounded in perfect touches.

So I did something I've rarely done: I downloaded the song from iTunes. Played it over and over at full volume. For about a half hour I was immensely pleased by the find.

Only one problem…

When you get to be my age, lyrics run past you and you don't get them with the same precision you did as a teenager. I caught that first stanza, but a couple jumbled ones followed. The British accents didn't help. So being the kind of person who cannot gain full satisfaction from something without knowing every trivial detail about it, I summoned the lyrics from one of a bazillion lyrics sites.

Awesome lyrics, clever and witty. And I'm reading and…oh.

The effenheimer. The F-bomb. Right there. Third stanza. And not in any grammatical usage that I've ever encountered before.

Ugh.

How I'd missed it the first hundred times I played the song, I can't say. After seeing it there in the lyrics, it was if the singer now shouted the word right in my ears, helped along by the background chorus who repeats it with the same emphasis.

Dang. The Monkees wouldn't have talked like that. And where was the "Explicit Lyrics" tag at iTunes? Nowhere to be found. I guess in the bizarre context used in the song, someone deemed it "Non-explicit."

That's what Apple gets for cozying up to Bono. What's an F-word between friends, right?

Because I write for a living, I'm attuned to the issue of censorship. I think I can also make a case that the F-word has legitimate uses. Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-Prize-winning photoI just don't want to hear it in my sunshine pop.

In fact, I don't want to live in a fallen world. I don't want to hear the "old familiar suggestion" coming out of the mouth of a twelve-year old girl. I don't want to hear about fathers decapitating their toddlers. I want to close my ears and scream at the top of my lungs to drown out the news telling me that the sex slave trade is alive and well  in the world, mostly populated by teenagers and tweens.

But we live in a fallen world—the F-World, for want of a more clever ID. Everything around us reeks of sin, as if some quark-sized evil implanted itself in every atom in existence.

Yet consider how easily we Christians believe two lies:

  1. We can play with that evil and not have it consume us from within.
  2. We can keep that evil at bay and never have to confront it. 

I see far too many Christians making excuses for the sins they justify in their own lives. We might even come up with clever renderings of particular Scriptures to cover our shame, but in the end, it's only amplified.

Or we'll scoff at some contemporary leader we don't like who goes down in flames, while we pat our man on the back. Then we're shocked—SHOCKED—when our man's feet prove to be clay.

So many of us navigate the F-World poorly. We mindlessly jump from church to church, forever running from whatever it is that we despise in its operation, unable to come to grips with the truth that the Church must live in the F-World until Christ returns. Or we do the opposite and embrace every piece of garbage the F-World throws at us as if its manna from heaven. Both are foolish. Both come to ruination.

I hear Christians talking all the time about the F-World. Why then do we seem to be more at the mercy of the F-World than at the mercy seat of Christ? For all our theology on a fallen world, we lurch from extreme to extreme in the ways we deal with it. One day we're burning all our hard rock albums because they're evil, and the next day we're buying them all back off eBay because to the pure all things are pure. 

It's bad enough that our incoherent message on how to deal with the F-World confuses the lost, but it confuses Christians even more. I've been a Christian for thirty years and I can honestly say that I don't think I've met another Christian who understands the tension of living in the F-World to the point that he or she deals with it as Christ did. Finding that narrow path must be far more difficult than we believe.

Bunkers or Excess. In the F-World, neither one makes sense. 

{Image: Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-Prize-winning photo of a vulture stalking a starving Sudanese child. Shortly after winning the prize, Carter committed suicide.}