This article: http://www.newsweek.com/id/165599/page/1 is exactly what I was talking about in my last post. What does is say that we as evangelicals are seen as one of the groups most likely to inject fear into politics?
Scripture clearly tells us to be people that don’t give into fear. This stuff really just makes me sad.
I am frustrated by the way I have seen many Christians approach politics.
Two of our core virtues as Christians are grace and humility. We ought to adopt a posture of humility, and a graceful and gracious attitude. Why do these seem to go out the window when we start talking about politics?
I have seen too many Christians communicate their political viewpoints with a sense of arrogance and condescension. I have heard Christians on both sides of the political spectrum make fun of, belittle and insult people who hold an opposing viewpoint. I’ve heard people who I know are devoted followers of Jesus say ugly things about both candidates.
What kind of witnesses are we when we forward e-mails that lie about and slander a candidate? When we make fun of liberals or conservatives?
I’m glad people feel passionately about this election. We should be engaged in politics. But NEITHER side completely encompasses the values of God’s Kingdom and I think BOTH sides have some issues right. I’m all for debate and dialogue — but let’s accurately reflect Jesus in the conversation.
A little bit of humilty and grace, please.
This morning I came across this article on cnn.com: Iraq: Businessman killed as attacks on Christians continue.
Unfortunately, there have been dozens of similar articles published over the course of the past several years that we have been at war in Iraq.
I think stories like this one should raise some serious questions for followers of Jesus. The war in Iraq has dramatically worsened the situation of our Christian brothers and sisters who live in that country. I remember back in 2003 having a conversation with an Iraqi friend that I made while I was in Egypt. He said that Christians enjoyed a great deal of freedom under the regime of Saddam Hussein, and that our decision to go to war in Iraq has been very difficult for many Iraqi Christians.
I have to say — I believe Saddam Hussein was an evil man. There is no question about that. And I am glad that he is no longer in power. However, I worry about how many American Christians have viewed the war in Iraq.
I believe that our Biblical mandate is to place our allegiance to the Kingdom of God and to our fellow brothers and sisters in the body of Christ above our allegiance to any other group, including our country. I fear that many Christians have unquestioningly supported a war that is causing our brothers and sisters an unthinkable way of suffering and persecution.
There is no easy answer or solution here. It’s a difficult and complex situation. But I would urge all of us to ask some hard questions. How are our actions affecting our brothers and sisters? How can we stand side by side with them, love them and support them? Where have we been guilty of placing country before Kingdom and allowing those two things to become dangerously intertwined? And I would urge all of us to take some time to stop, reflect, pray, and allow our hearts to break for them.
The other day, I was listening to a segment on NPR about how people cope with the feeling of being out of control. Not surprisingly, humans have a pretty low tolerance for a lack of control – it’s very unpleasant for us, and we will try almost anything to regain the sense that we’re in control.
Recently, I’ve been reflecting on how little control we actually have in our lives. This isn’t to say that we don’t have ANY control of our circumstances, because we do have some. We can control a little, we can influence more, but a large portion of our circumstances is beyond our capability to control. Recently, I’ve been reminded of this in some difficult ways:
I couldn’t control when my dad had a significant health scare this summer, and I can’t control if he will make healthy lifestyle changes.
I couldn’t control my health on the way to Africa when I got the flu, and couldn’t control it when I got sick while I was there.
I couldn’t control the poisonous spider that bit me in the middle of the night in my sleep.
I can’t control the economy and how that affects my fundraising.
I can’t control how the men and women I work with on a daily basis respond to me or how they respond to God.
There are a ton of very significant things in my life that I can’t control. That’s just how it is. I like to believe that I have control, it would be much easier and much more comfortable that way. Most of us live like this; we live our lives believing that we are in control. This is an illusion.
This is not new news. We’ve probably heard this before, and believe that it’s true, but we still choose to live in the illusion. I know I give serious lip service to God. I tell Him that I know He is Lord and in control, but I still choose to live the lie that I am in control. And my desire for control ends up fills me with fear and anxiety and robs me of the life God wants for me.
What if we actually lived in a way that acknowledged that we didn’t have control? What if we recognized that our only security could be found in God? How would we live differently? What if we stopped giving God lip service and started actually living our lives as though He were in control?
How can we ditch the illusion?
Many of you know, I recently moved into a place where we have a pretty significant urban garden. All summer long, we’ve been enjoying the literal fruits of our labor. Today we had our largest harvest yet.
Tomatoes, Peppers, Cantaloupe, Corn
The Church has always had to deal with heresies, theological doctrines that are at odds with the orthodox teachings of Christianity.
One of the earliest heresies was called Gnosticism. The title comes from the Greek root word gnosis, which means simply “knowledge.” There were many varieties of Gnosticism, but the basic idea was that Jesus passed along secret teachings to his disciples and they key to salvation was simply to know these secret teachings. People could achieve salvation simply because they knew something that others didn’t.
I think the church is still filled with Gnostics, and we don’t even realize it.
For so many of us, salvation has been reduced to praying a prayer and believing that Jesus was the Son of God and rose from the dead. If you pray the prayer and believe the right things, you’re in.
We may not admit it, but we don’t think that Jesus actually meant much of what he said. His point was to set the bar so high that we could never do it. So why bother? We recognize that we fall short, so we don’t try. And being a Christian becomes all about intellectually assenting to the correct doctrine.
You can achieve salvation by knowing the right things. This subtle but dangerous brand to Gnosticism has seeped into the church. A lot Christians today have impeccably orthodox doctrine, but seem to shy away from the difficult demands of being a committed disciple of Jesus. We may follow Jesus with our heads, but not with our hands and feet.
We have become heretics.
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Romans 12:2
The past several weeks, I’ve been teaching a Sunday School class on the topic of Postmodernism. The basic premise of the class is that we are in the midst of a huge cultural earthquake. A new culture is emerging and the Church has a responsibility to preach the Gospel in a manner that is relevant to the emerging culture.
We’ve spent a lot of time in class talking about the difference between “modern” culture and “postmodern” culture, and it has given me the opportunity to reflect on how the Church has and is operating in these cultural contexts.
Modern culture has been characterized by an emphasis on individualism, logic and rationality. Truth is objective and can be discovered through logic and science.
The emerging postmodern culture is trending towards a focus on community. The culture has begun to reject the idea of objective truth, or that truth can be arrived at via logic and science.
In the midst of this cultural shift, some interesting things are happening within the body of Christ. There is an “emerging church” movement – a lot of people are looking at the way that the Church has functioned in the past several hundred years and are realizing that something is not quite right.
There are many ways that the church has conformed to modern culture. The gospel has become all about individual salvation. We have sought to break down the Gospel and the narrative of scripture into a logical argument. For many, faith has become about believing the right things so they can go to heaven.
People are beginning to realize that there is more. We worship a communal God who wants us to live in community with others. We are rediscovering that the Gospel is not only an individualistic ticket to heaven, but God’s plan to restore his creation. We are beginning to rediscover the incredible beauty of the story that God tells in scripture in a more holistic sense.
But I think that there is danger. The sin of the church has been to conform to modern culture. We face the same danger today of trying to be the postmodern Church instead of simply the church. It is our responsibility to repent of our mistakes in the past, and not make the same mistakes in the future.
There is no modern Church or postmodern Church, modern Gospel or postmodern Gospel. There is simply the church: the timeless Body of Christ on earth and the Gospel: the good news of Jesus Christ. Let us be a church that preaches the timeless Gospel of Jesus Christ in a postmodern world.
I really tried not to care.
I figured that it was too controversial. And it wasn’t nearly sexy enough. I didn’t really want anything to do with it. But God is funny like that.
Immigration.
It was my sophomore year of college. I went on an immersion trip to Tijuana with USD’s campus ministry. We did a lot of the things you would expect to do on a service trip to TJ: serve at a community center, hang out with kids in a poor neighborhood, work at a soup kitchen, that kind of thing. But one night we did something a little unexpected for me. We went to Casa del Migrante, a shelter for those who were either preparing to cross the border into the US or who had been recently deported. We listened to men and women tell stories about living in terrible poverty and their desire to be able to provide for their families. We took a tour of the border and learned about how our border policy forced people to cross in the desert, where they are much more likely to die.
I tried not to care. It’s too controversial. After all – could I champion a justice cause like sweatshop labor or sex trafficking? Couldn’t I just not have to deal with immigration? But it kept coming up, and God changed my heart.
I don’t pretend to know all the answers when it comes to policy issues and politics. I actually don’t think I know any of the answers. But there are a lot of things I do know:
The rhetoric that accompanies the immigration debate is based in fear. These people are going to take our jobs, ruin our economy and undermine the fabric of our society. They are drug dealers and terrorists. We should be afraid and build a fence.
God says “Be not afraid.”
In scripture, God seems to be especially concerned about how His people treat foreigners who live in their land. He tells the Israelites dozens of times to care for foreigners.
In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus challenges the idea that our neighbor is only our fellow countryman.
Is an illegal alien my neighbor? What would I do if I found myself living in grinding poverty, my family starving?
Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry. My anger will be aroused, and I will kill you with the sword; your wives will become widows and your children fatherless.
Exodus 22:22-25
Some of you know that I recently got a tattoo on the inside of my wrist. The tattoo is in Hebrew script and reads Yahweh Shalom — “the LORD is Peace.” I thought about getting this for a long time, and there are a lot of reasons I decided to get this specific tattoo.
I chose Yahweh because it’s always been powerful for me to know that God actually has a name according to ancient Hebrew tradition. No one really knows how YHWH is pronounced, let alone what it means. Although scholars think it means something along the lines of “I am,” “He who exists,” or “He who causes to come into existence.” I can’t fully express why, but the name is powerful and meaningful for me — much more than the other generic Hebrew words for God.
Shalom means peace. But it carries much more meaning than when we usually talk about peace. Shalom isn’t simply the absence of conflict. The word connotes wholeness, healing, and the presence of God. Shalom is the way that God intended things to be and God is actively restoring the world to a state of Shalom. As a Christian, I believe Jesus is Shalom embodied and personified.
These words speak powerfully to me. They remind me who God is, that God has transformed me and continues to bring me wholeness and healing. When I see the tattoo it is a reminder to me of who God is, what he has done in my life, and that he has called me to work with Him to bring His Shalom to all of creation.
I also hoped that a tattoo on a visible part of my body would spur conversations with people — that I would be able to share about who God is and have an opportunity to tell my story to more people. A little to my surprise, that is exactly what just happened. I sat down on my computer to do some work in our coffee shop on campus and within 5 minutes two students came up to me, asked me about the tattoo and I got to have a good conversation with them about spirituality.
It wasn’t anything earth-shattering. But I am glad to know that God uses tattoos, and I’m excited to have an opportunity to share my faith with more people.
Well, I have failed at this many times.
I’ve realized that it’s mostly because of what strikes me as the inherent pride in setting up and writing one of these. I am assuming that I have something to say and that it would benefit your life to hear it. That is too much pressure for me — until this point I have liked and respected you too much to subject you to my thoughts, but no more. My promise to you is that I will update this at least once a week, if not more. I swear.
And what will I be writing about? Well, the short answer is that I don’t know. I took this writing workshop at a conference I was at recently and they told us that we needed to have a concrete audience and a well-defined subject matter. I have neither. So, this is an experiment. In advance, I apologize for anything that is a waste of time. And for those golden insights that I am going to have that will change your life? You’re welcome.
So, here we go again. Enjoy.
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