Joy

A Delightful Inheritance

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In 1981, at the Baccalaureate presentation a few days before graduation, a packed house of about 2,000 filled my high school auditorium. Superlative students received scholarships and kudos, offered up prayers of thanks, gave speeches, and filled the evening with hope. Only one award remained—the one honoring the student most involved in school activities.

My folks and I sat together, and as the award recipient's list of clubs and groups grew, I sat on the edge of my seat.

"National Honor Society, Science Club, Math Club, Photography Club, Chess Club, French Club, French National Honor Society…"

I knew most of the folks in those groups and started narrowing down the list of contenders. More clubs and groups rattled by. I said to my mom, "The person getting this is never home." She nodded.

When the Student Body President started in on the astonishing number of band-related functions—Orchestra, Pep Band, Concert Band, Marching Band, Chorale, Stage Band, Theater Orchestra—I had to admit I had no idea who this nut could be who was so massively involved in the school.

Then she read my name.

I fell out of my chair and somehow landed on my feet, rubbery legs guiding me from my spot way in the back of the auditorium to the stage. People were standing and cheering. Shock and disbelief on my part. Harrington Mann's "Angel Plucking Tulips"I'll probably never again get that feeling of being a celebrity.

And not once during the reciting of that list had I realized I was that highly involved person.

Last Monday, I attended the memorial service of a friend who spent the best years of his life giving his time and talents to others. When we pulled into the massive church, the parking lot bulged with cars. A human line streamed down the stairs into the church's auditorium. I suspect more than 1,300 people came to remember one man.

Upon witnessing the crowd, I failed to hold back the tears. Our friend was so well loved. During the service, a mic was handed around and people shared their stories of how our friend had touched others with his faith in Christ and his overt generosity, always giving away, always meeting a need. I think everyone there could have shared a special moment in which they'd been the recipient of this man's large heart. His past and present students spoke and when asked to rise, it seemed like the room was filled with people standing.

What a good, godly man. A man who never took the spotlight, but who gave and gave until it was time to go home. When a soloist sang Ray Boltz's classic "Thank You", there in that crowd I considered that never before had that song been so fitting a tribute.

One day, out on the boat from which he taught kids to water ski, he shared with me a Scripture he said was his life verse. A new believer at that time, his excitement at finding this verse was electric and his joy palpable: 

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.
—Psalms 16:6 NIV

When the discouragements of life press down on you, know this: you have a delightful inheritance. One day, you'll be standing among the saints in the presence of God and one of his angels will read through a list of godly acts rendered to others over the course of a full and blessed lifetime.

And then he'll call your name.

Was that you who helped the old lady get to her car without slipping on the ice? Or who taught the third grade Sunday School class? Did you sit and weep with a neighbor whose child died far too young? Did you prepare the communion elements alone in the church kitchen? Or pray through the church directory every day?

Thank you. Bless you for giving to the Lord. Surely you have a delightful inheritance.

And when you turn around to face that multitude in glory, we'll all be cheering.

{Image: Harrington Mann's Angel Plucking Tulips 1894}

The Superspiritual

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Saint Dan of PhotoshopolisA number of people I know have had recent encounters with strange persons who appear to be on the increase in the ranks of Christians in America. There’s no known genus and species name for these unusual creatures, so most people are forced to refer to them by their collective name, The Superspiritual.

I’m sure at least a few folks out there have crossed paths with this particular beast. For those unacquainted with The Superspiritual, a few of their traits stand out:

  1. They have a tendency to get up before the sun and have incredibly long quiet times that rival those of the great saints of old. In fact, the saints of old were pansies compared to these folks.
  2. They’ve memorized large swaths of the Bible—and in multiple translations. Ask them to quote a specific passage—they’re dying to share it with you.
  3. They have an answer to every possible theological question anyone might have. The best of them will offer multiple perspectives given by a chosen set of favorite authors. Always a very narrow selection of authors. Come to think of it, those authors always agree with each other on everything, so there isn’t much variation of perspective when you get right down to it.
  4. Their library of Christian books, if sold on eBay, could feed a hundred AIDS orphans in Africa for a decade, though it is doubtful they’d ever part with those books. Go ahead, try to snatch one out of their hands. (Fast reflexes, eh?)
  5. If they own a business, that business will be founded on, run by, and ever beholden to “Christian principles.” Those principles appear to include making as much money as possible by any means available.
  6. If you’re a heathen—meaning you’re not as spiritual as they are—you’re held at arm’s length until you ARE as spiritual as they are.  (Good luck! Typically it’s taken decades for them to reach their own peculiar nirvana.)
  7. “Christian practice” is defined as going to church on Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, Wednesdays nights, and at least a small group or two on a free night. Oh, and there’s a number of church boards to sit on, too. Christian practice is critical for enhancing one’s standing in order to maximize #5 above.
  8. They talk, talk, talk about family values, and you can’t help but think they’ve got the insular family thing down to a T, seeing that no one else associates with them. Just don’t bring up their middle child in conversation.
  9. They do an outstanding job of  telling you what the Bible says we should be against, but stumble a bit when pressed on what the Bible says we should be for.
  10. They have a way of making anyone who stands near them feel oddly guilty.

Sound familiar now? Certainly you’ve met one of these folks.

As to #2 above, their memorization skills are indeed impressive, but The Superspiritual seem to have mentally misplaced a few verses. Consider the following verses that routinely get overlooked:

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

For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
—James 2:13 ESV

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
—Matthew 22:37-40 ESV

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 4:20-21 ESV

My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “You sit here in a good place,” while you say to the poor man, “You stand over there,” or, “Sit down at my feet,” have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?”
—James 2:1-4 ESV

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!
—James 2:14-19 ESV

All joking aside, I’m growing tired of hearing stories about people afflicted with the disease of Superspirituality. And it  truly is a disease because it infects impressionable people who come under the tutelage of those already diseased.

  • What explains the Christian businessman who fires employees to cut costs rather than examine the careless way in which he doles out company money to ministries in order to get on their privileged donor list?
  • Or an upper-middle-class church that splits over outreach to a Hispanic neighborhood because the people they sought to evangelize in that neighborhood had the nerve to actually start showing up in the church on Sunday?
  • Or a radio ministry that promises a helpful book that can aid those who are struggling with long-term unemployment and its resulting financial ruin, but when calling in it’s a mandatory $30 “love gift” for the book—which Amazon sells for $8.99?
  • Or the Christian company that requests a prospective employee twice fly out for a job interview, only to later fail to reimburse the prospect for the plane flights or even bother to give her a follow-up phone call about the job?
  • Or the Christian organization that exists solely to help people with one specific kind of problem, but who gets a client in further trouble by failing to file critical paperwork because they were too busy preparing for a big evangelistic outreach they sponsor?

Don’t those just rip your heart out? What should be done with folks who have every appearance of being paragons of Christian virtue, yet they purposefully ignore the most basic aspects of the faith?

What would happen to us as a Church in this country if we spent the next year doing nothing that even vaguely resembled Superspirituality, instead simply doing unto others as we would have them do unto us? How hard is it to ask ourselves whether or not we like to be treated as badly by other Christians as we sometimes treat others?

I don’t think The Superspiritual ever ask themselves that kind of question.

A number of years ago, a friend, noting the sheer number of trivial things I know about highly useless topics, congratulated me on having filled my mind with so many facts. My response to him? I’d trade it all to be able to know the Bible inside and out.

Today, I realize that this response was Superspiritual. In reflecting about this issue of Superspirituality, it occurs to me that the less Superspiritual answer—and the one closer to the heart of Jesus—is this: that I be able to put into practice the amount of Bible I already know, rather than simply marinating my brain with it.

I mentioned this in a post last week, but what is the point in correctly learning and handling the Scriptures?

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.
—2 Timothy 3:16-17 ESV

The end goal is good works. Good works are always others-centric. If we’re not putting into practice the things we already know, investing ourselves in the lives of our brothers and sisters in Christ, in the lives of the poor and needy, and in the lives of the lost, then all that Bible knowledge we’ve crammed into our craniums has no outlet. It puffs up our heads and leaves no room for our hearts.

The lost around us will argue our facts and figures, but they find it hard to argue when they’ve had a serious illness strike their household and we show up on their front porch with a homemade dinner. They used to refer to such selfless benevolence as “the milk of human kindness.” Trust me, folks; that’s “meat,” not “milk.”

James says this:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
—James 1:27 ESV

And we already know that all the prophets were reiterating the same message of God: God desires that men love Him and love their neighbor as themselves.

Superspirituality is all too easy to catch, but there’s a way to avoid its disease. If we surrender ourselves lovingly to God and give of ourselves to our neighbors, there’s not a lot of us left over for that awful virus to infect.

Have a blessed week! And please show the love of Christ to someone this day who might not otherwise experience it.

{Image: Major apologies to the artist who crafted the icon of Saint Columba}

Unshackling the American Church: Treasuring the Creator’s Handiwork

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Forest brookIt took me a minute to figure out the plastic emblem on the car I saw this afternoon. Where one would normally see an “ICHTHUS” or “DARWIN” sat an iconic piece of vehicular propaganda altogether different. Emblazoned with an “FSM” in its center, it looked vaguely crab-like. And then it hit me: Flying Spaghetti Monster .

If you’re not familiar with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it’s the creation of anti-Intelligent-Design folks who say that the Designer advocated by ID supporters could just as well be a Flying Spaghetti Monster and not the God of the Bible.  While some of us may bristle at the notion that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the world we now live in, that particular form of idolatry isn’t far from what many ardent Christians believe—if their reaction to the created world is any indication.

I worked in Christian Camping ministry for a number of years in various roles. My first job was as a counselor. I’ll never forget that first cabin of sixth-grade boys from the Cleveland area. They embarrassed a girl I was crazy about who also worked there, but I shrugged that one off. But when they removed a bird’s nest (cardinals, if I remember correctly) from my cabin’s porch rafters and smashed the newborn birds underfoot, “livid” could not describe my emotional state. As an avid birder with a long life list and several years of teaching outdoor education to children, I revealed the full wrath of Dan and scared those boys so much that afterwards they pretty much flinched whenever I looked at ’em the wrong way.

Boys who nonchalantly kill birds God gave us to enjoy in plumage and song grow into men who cavalierly bulldoze the prairies to put in another WalMart. (“Because we all have to have more cheap stuff.”) Sadly for us, those boys of summers long past may have grown to become the pillars of our churches today. What else explains the rampant disregard so many Christians have for the world God created ?

It’s beyond my ken, frankly. I don’t understand why I’ve chalked up at least a dozen instances in the last three years of occupants of  Jesus-bumper-stickered cars plastered with every form of Christomemorabilia tossing garbage out their windows on the highway near my home. I don’t get how an Evangelical politician whose plank is “God, Guns, and Good Government” can be touting care of the natural world one day and advocating strip mining the next.

No matter how you slice that kind of throwaway mentality, it comes down to one thing: self-centeredness.

The narcissist who tosses his full load of McDonald’s leftovers out his car window thinks nothing of others. And it’s not just the ignored people whose properties become the final resting place of his trash. It’s the God he supposedly serves, too. The first command of God to man is to steward the Creation. Depositing trash all over that Creation spits in the face of the Creator by questioning God’s calling of that Creation “good.” Choosing to despoil Creation says, “God may have called it ‘good,’ but since when is He the arbiter of what is good? Aren’t I the master of my surroundings?”

The litterbug is an easy target, though.

The person who believes that the natural world exists only to satisfy our cravings, on the other hand, is a more subtle monster. I see him all the time in church settings. He’ll fully acknowledge that God is the Creator but then turns God into a figurative Flying Spaghetti Monster by insisting that the created has no purpose other than its economic value to us. In other words, the value of God’s created world is found not in any intrinsic value God bestowed upon it, but only what it can give us monetarily.

The value of the meadow lies only in the oil underneath it. The value of the walnut tree is only in its expensive wood. A chicken’s value is only in the eating. A dog’s value is only in protecting the household valuables. A great horned owl’s value is…well, does it have any monetary value? What does owl taste like? (For a satirical look at the end result of this kind of thinking, consider this classic.)

When we consider only what something can do for us, ignoring any other value that God might give it, that’s called utilitarianism. The meaning for a Christian is “Jesus Christ is Lord.” The meaning for a utilitarian is “The ends justifies the means.” Look how often Christians, particularly those in positions of authority, function out of utilitarian thinking and not a godly worldview that sees meaning at a deeper level. The inherently self-centered worldview of utilitarianism is at extreme odds with a truly Christian worldview that believes that created things have worth beyond their economic value because God invested them with worth and meaning.

The end result of utilitarianism is euthanasia of the unnecessary elderly, the aborting of useless unborn children, the wholesale pillaging of natural resources just because they’re there, and a coarsening of all societal constructs and culture that do not provide immediate, personal gratification.

Does anyone else find it strange that Christians protest euthanasia, abortion, and the coarsening of our nation, but bring up caring for the natural world and it’s “Hey, is that going take money out of my wallet?”

Think about the following verse in light of our stripping of the natural world of any value except the monetary:

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils.
—1 Timothy 6:10a ESV

By nature utilitarians are consumers, not producers. We Christians decry utilitarianism, but the fact that so many of us are sitting in church asking “What’s in it for us?” exposes the utilitarian underbelly in modern Christianity, especially in churches that identify with man-centered, “Gospel-lite” Church Growth Movement principles.

Oddly enough, though, many of the strong opponents of the Church Growth Movement are ridiculously utilitarian when it comes to Creation. They may quote truckloads of Scriptures that include references to the created, but they too take a utilitarian approach by opposing anyone who questions whether we should conserve the natural or not. To even think about environmental issues is to take too much time away from spreading the Gospel. This kind of foolish one-dimensional thinking leads those folks into maddening inconsistencies, though. They certainly find time to take a shower several times a week, but to give two seconds to choose recycling over tossing something in the garbage can is too much to ask—as if it’s somehow okay to be clean on the outside while the world around us becomes a dump.

You’ll also find that same blasé attitude in Christians who say it’s all going to burn in the end, so let’s roast ivory-billed woodpeckers over campfires made from old-growth forests. Again, we see a utilitarian approach that finds no inherent meaning in anything God made.

Earlier in this series, I noted that Satan opposes God by seeking to destroy meaning. If the typical Christian’s belief on Creation care is any indication, he’s done a superior job.

Yet what do the wise say about Creation?

Solomon, who petitioned God for wisdom and had it granted, says this:

My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh that lies between my breasts. My beloved is to me a cluster of henna blossoms in the vineyards of Engedi. Behold, you are beautiful, my love; behold, you are beautiful; your eyes are doves. Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved, truly delightful. Our couch is green; the beams of our house are cedar; our rafters are pine.
—Song of Solomon 1:13-17 ESV

Song of Solomon is replete with images from the bounty of nature. Read it sometime. (And not just for the erotic parts.)

The wise king continues:

Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest.
—Proverbs 6:6-8 ESV

Consider anything from an ant? The only thing good about ants is the fun one gets from frying them with a magnifying glass, right?

If not Solomon, then how about Agur:

Four things on earth are small, but they are exceedingly wise: the ants are a people not strong, yet they provide their food in the summer; the rock badgers are a people not mighty, yet they make their homes in the cliffs; the locusts have no king, yet all of them march in rank; the lizard you can take in your hands, yet it is in kings’ palaces. Three things are stately in their tread; four are stately in their stride: the lion, which is mightiest among beasts and does not turn back before any; the strutting rooster, the he-goat, and a king whose army is with him.
—Proverbs 30:24-31 ESV

No, there’s no inherent value in that lizard. Ever eat a lizard? Tastes like chicken way past its expiration date.

Or David:

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babes and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
—Psalms 8:1-9 ESV

Certainly, Dan, you’re not implying that there’s a revelation in Creation that speaks to the majesty of God, or to Man’s place in the universe! Stars just twinkle; they can’t enhance our 401k. And we went to moon! Nothing but rocks there.

And what of the parables of the Lord Himself, who spoke of the mustard seed, the pearl of great price, the sower who sowed the good seed, the lilies of the field who are clothed in God’s raiment, or the wheat and tares? What of God’s final discourse with Job, wherein He silences the most righteous man on the planet by regaling him with the natural wonders He created?

We do God a disservice by refusing to wonder in light of all He’s put around us. We castigate those out of Romans 1 who ignore God’s revelation of Himself by what He’s made, yet we eagerly join those same fools by carelessly stripping the Creation of wonder and mystery. A supposed Christian who—without wondering— can pass by a downy woodpecker hunting for insects in a dead tree is the same person who can later pass by his fellow man and not care one wit about him. In the soul of that passerby, a deadness dwells, a necrotic region God never intended His people to possess.

As for me, I never desire to see anything dead in the hearts of people who call themselves Christians. It’s time we become people in tune with God’s view of meaning by delighting in and treasuring the good world He gave us. Otherwise, we are no better than those who believe in a Flying Spaghetti Monster or a Darwinian universe ultimately bereft of all meaning.

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Previous posts on this topic:

Warring Evangelicals Make Iron Eyes Cody Cry

Out in the Country

Creation in the Heart of the Christian

It’s Not Easy Being Green

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Other posts in the “Unshackling the American Church” series: