A Church That Reads the Signs of the Times

Karl Barth supposedly said that preachers should preach with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Given the sorry state of the prophetic voice in the American Church today, perhaps that’s the wisest approach we can take given the circumstances.

Just last week, I read an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled “A Tax Revolt Is Quietly Brewing In Some States.” An excerpt:

On Election Day, Massachusetts will vote on whether to eliminate its state income tax. Advocates hope victory in a place long thought of as a free-spending liberal bastion will pave the way for similar initiatives in other states over the next few years. Critics insist a yes vote would lead to fiscal disaster.
While Americans are focusing on the presidential and congressional races, voters in Massachusetts and other states will decide the fate of dozens of state and local tax and spending issues.

The article goes on to note that several states face this type of citizen-inspired tax repudiation come November and beyond, not just Massachusetts. People are tired of cronyism, waste (studies peg wasted tax monies in Massachusetts at 41 percent of the state budget), and the fact that too many people are on the dole as employees of governmental agencies at all levels. In my state, Ohio, I saw a figure recently that claimed that 37 percent of employed workers in the state worked directly for a local, city, county, state, or federal government agency.

That’s utterly ridiculous. No wonder people are fed up. (Note: I am not against government. Obviously, we need certain government functions like our representative assemblies, military, and law enforcement. The issue here is one of scope and sprawl and the ability to justify the amount of money it takes to defend and fund that bloat. That’s what has so many people upset.)

But that’s not the point of this post. Can you tell what is? Church, can we read between the lines on this tax revolt issue?

If we can’t, we need to learn. We need to be smarter about these things. If our self-anointed prophets are unreliable, then we need to improve how we comprehend the signs of the times.

What happens when the government is forced to make cuts because of reduced revenues? Social services go bye-bye.

Here’s the $64,000 question: Who will pick up the slack when social services taste the business end of the axe blade?

Too many Christians glamorize the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s in this country. They look at those years as the golden age of Christianity in America, the age of Norman Rockwell paintings depicting families praying together, the age of Leave It to Beaver and good, solid, Christian values.

But that would be denial.

Because what happened during those glory days was a wholesale abandonment by the American Church of the social services it alone provided the least of these. Christians shirked their duties as they caved to Industrialism and consumerism, jettisoning their responsibility to care for the downtrodden, instead voting to let the government assume that role, a role government was never designed to handle. That, in turn, weakened our resolve as a nation and forced us to suck at a socialistic, governmental teat.

And now some people are sick of the results because it’s hurting them in the one thing they value more than anything else: their wallets.

This I ask: Anyone care to guess how many churches in Massachusetts, or any of those other tax revolt states, are prepared to handle social services when the government can no longer afford to maintain them?

Hmm.

What’s your church’s plan to care for the mentally disabled?

What’s your church’s plan to care for the senior citizens in your community?

What’s your church’s plan to deal with those families who don’t have enough food and must subsist on government handouts that are most likely going away?

What’s your church’s plan?

Our churches don’t have a plan, do they?

Consider this passage of Scripture:

Now in these days prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. And one of them named Agabus stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world (this took place in the days of Claudius). So the disciples determined, everyone according to his ability, to send relief to the brothers living in Judea. And they did so, sending it to the elders by the hand of Barnabas and Saul.
—Acts 11:27-30

Did the early Church sit idle, only to react too late, or were they proactive? When I hear people saying that the revelatory gifts aren’t for today, I ask how they expect to ever be proactive in times of distress. Has the kind of crisis we see here in Acts 11 ever stopped happening? Shouldn’t the Church always be ready to deal with this kind of thing, supernatural revelation or not?

It’s bad enough that we either despise prophecy or we gather false prophets around us, but isn’t it even worse that we get fair warning from secular sources and can’t even react to that? Just how dull are we?

Regular readers are surely tired of me beating these kinds of dead horse issues, but why is it that we are NEVER prepared?

For all those going on and on about an end-times revival, I say this: Here’s your chance. Because no one is more open to the Gospel than the person in dire need of a social service who then finds a born-again Christian ready and willing to help. Nothing verifies the Gospel in the minds of jaded people than to see the Church actually bringing its doing in line with its speaking.

A great opportunity looms before us. Are we going to run with it now or will we once again wait until its too late?

Elusive Grace

Okay, so I admit it.

I’m the kind of guy who likes the one item on the restaurant menu that no one else orders.

I’m the kind of guy who when faced with a daily drive from point A to point B attempts to find a different route between those two points every time.

I’m the kind of guy who gave up on self-help books years ago because I never fit into any of the categories the author would use to illustrate solutions.

I’m pretty much always the odd man out. The contrarian. The iconoclast. The weirdo.

When people find out that I write speculative fiction and then discover that I’ve never read through The Lord of the Rings books because I found them dull, well my weirdness takes on new levels.

That said, I did enjoy the Rings movies. And again, being the weirdo, I definitely thought The Two Towers was the best of the three. My reasoning is that I found the most biblical imagery in the second film.

When Gandalf tells Aragorn to look up when things appear most desperate and expect to see him at a certain hour, I could not help but think of this passage:

And the mind of the king of Syria was greatly troubled because of this thing, and he called his servants and said to them, “Will you not show me who of us is for the king of Israel?” And one of his servants said, “None, my lord, O king; but Elisha, the prophet who is in Israel, tells the king of Israel the words that you speak in your bedroom.” And he said, “Go and see where he is, that I may send and seize him.” It was told him, “Behold, he is in Dothan.” So he sent there horses and chariots and a great army, and they came by night and surrounded the city. When the servant of the man of God rose early in the morning and went out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was all around the city. And the servant said, “Alas, my master! What shall we do?” He said, “Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” Then Elisha prayed and said, “O LORD, please open his eyes that he may see.” So the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.
—2 Kings 6:11-17

At the bleakest moment in the battle at Helm’s Deep, Aragorn, remembering Gandalf’s words, looks to the rim of the valley and sees it lined with a vast army headed by Gandalf.

At the bleakest moment, a sign of hope. The very presence of grace. Once doomed, now saved.

How many Westerns made their money by sending the cavalry over the hill to rescue the beleaguered heroes pinned down by the relentless tide of opposition? 'Cavalry Charge on the Southern Plains' by Frederick Remington The trumpet cry as the rescuers spurred on their chargers. The enemy routed.

Grace, all of it.

You would think, then, that in a country that bills itself as a Christian nation, in a land steeped in the last desperate stand before the cavalry arrives, that we would be drowning in grace as a people. You would think that our whole lives would be devoted to dispensing grace as often and to as many as we can.

You would think.

I spent most of the evening thinking about this disconnect. How is it that grace is so elusive in the United States? What is it about us that we can’t resist the spectacle of watching another human being go down in flames? How can it be that their ultimate fate means so little to us?

Most of you know that the foreclosure rate in this country is running about three times higher than normal. Where I live, the number of abandoned houses—those fled by their owners, no “For Sale” sign in the front yard, no realtor in sight—borders on the epidemic.

We as Christians may talk about grace, but if we want a painful example of how out of touch we are concerning grace, the very lifeblood of the Church, look no further than those families who lost their homes. How is it that those families seem to vanish into the ether, melting away to nothing like hoarfrost assaulted by hot breath? Where do they go?

It saddens me that I don’t know. All I do know is that they were in trouble and no one was there for them in the midst of it. All the potential in the world for Christians to step in and demonstrate grace, yet it never came to be. And now, as if sucked into that mysterious realm where singleton socks go, that family is gone. Sometimes they don’t even bother to shut the door behind them.

And we who are wise can pontificate about why they failed. We can talk about greed. We can talk about poor choices. We can talk about moral failures. We can blame it on the times, the media, the economy, the war, the peace, the current president, the next president—heck, we can talk for whole years at a time, but none of our talk reveals bare naked grace to the ones who need it most.

Is anyone besides me grieved by this? Is anyone else hounded by our lack of care, our inability to somehow take the grace we might have been shown in the past and minister it to someone in desperate need?

How is it that we hate failure in other people, yet we expect others to feel for us when we go down in flames?

There’s not a person reading this now who is not excruciatingly close to losing it all. Do we realize how readily our carefully crafted lifestyles can go to pieces in a matter of weeks? One bad investment. One miscalculation at work. One illness. Poof, and its all gone.

It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how healthy, how wealthy, how prepared, or how risk averse. When that time comes, it comes. You’ll need that grace. You’ll need someone to love you no matter how shattered you might be, someone who can minister the grace of Jesus Christ to you.

Now what if there’s no one there?

We all have to be the cavalry at some point in life. We all have to ride into the flaming arrows, the poison darts, the thick haze of flying lead. Because there’s no way anyone’s going to be our cavalry when we need it if we were never there for them.

Dropping Our Stones

One of the goals I have for Cerulean Sanctum is to carve out a godly middle ground on the issues that face the American Church while at the same time never backing down from what needs to be said. Despite the fact that I work hard to find a more godly response to those issues, I’ve had a few people label me an angry young man.

We Americans have always held the angry young man in esteem, especially when that angry young man dispenses his brand of angry young man justice on despicable villains. On the other hand, there’s something about being an angry old man that unnerves us. We have an equation worked out in our heads that looks something like this:

Young + Angry = Hero

Old + Angry = Crank

Watch this play out in public and you soon learn that you’re given a pass till about age 35, then you start sliding into crankhood. That age didn’t escape the notice of the founders of this country, either. No one can occupy the highest office in the land until 35.

I believe the founders understood a deep truth that plays out in the eighth chapter of John:

The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once more he bent down and wrote on the ground. But when they heard it, they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”
—John 8:3-11

My revelation in understanding this passage came when I understood the second half of this snippet:

…they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones…

To me, that’s one of the greatest strings of 11 words ever committed to print.

Do we understand the profundity of John’s Spirit-inspired words here?

When you’re an angry young man, your blood boils at the thought of a good stoning. Finding the perfect rock, heavy, jagged even. You feel the adrenaline enliven your muscles, engorging them with blood. The smell of sweat. Loud roars from angry men shouting for justice. The adultress’s vile perfume stinging your nose. The thought that you can get in the first throw. Wham! A head shot! That perfect throw that smashes her skull and caves in her head. Your throw. Your death strike against sin.

Can you see it? Can you taste how bad you want it to play out in life as it does in your mind’s eye?

But when you’re an older man, it should be different.

Should be.

You look around and see an old friend standing off to the side, his grip on his stone not so tight. The light had been dim, but you thought you saw him come out of her place a month ago, though you told yourself otherwise. He casts a downturned glance your way because you know, and he knows, too. And what of your own struggles? Who knows about your private sin, your little dalliance from years ago, and how you thanked God every day that you weren’t found out? Though in the end, who can hide anything from God? It should be you in that circle with that woman, shouldn’t it? In fact, it could be every man standing around that woman, stone in hand. All of you, ready to have your teeth shattered, your bones broken. Every last one of you. Buried under a pile of well-deserved stones. Because you had it coming as much as that woman before you now.

One of the greatest self-deceptions the devil throws at us is that our sin is somehow not as bad as their sin, no matter who “they” might be. I wonder how many of us who should know better still cling to that angry young man we should’ve put to death a long, long time ago as part of our maturity in Christ. As much as we talk about grace, too few of us actually dispense it. There is nothing sadder under the sun than an old man, stone still in hand, ready to throw it at whomever he classifies as deserving of it’s granite sting.

It amazes and saddens me that so many Christians out there who should know better can’t drop their stone. They’ve got to hurl it at all cost. And they do so because they have no concept of grace or of their own sin. They live an unexamined life that focuses on everyone else’s failures and none of their own.

Tim Keller and David Powlison wrote eloquently on one way in which we can learn to drop the stone. I would encourage everyone to read it here, bloggers especially.

The old adage goes “There’s no fool like an old fool.” God help us if Christian maturity doesn’t lead us beyond the angry young man stage and into the wisdom of dropping our stones.

Cerulean Sanctum

Looking for the 1st century Church in 21st century America

Mercy

Elusive Grace

Dropping Our Stones