Erasing the comfort zone

(This is the third excerpt from chapter 17 of my manuscript on the Sermon on the Mount; the first two excerpts are here and here.)

It’s not easy to accept Jesus’ declaration that the pure in heart are blessed, but it’s possible to assent intellectually without letting it interfere with our daily lives.  It’s far harder to heed John Owen’s dictum, “Be killing sin or it will be killing you,”[1] and declare war on our sin out of a desire to be pure in heart; but though that’s a major spiritual commitment, it’s still one we usually make with unconscious caveats.  We assume there are limits to how far we can be expected to go in order to put sin to death in our lives.  We assume God is reasonable—on our terms, by our definition—in his expectations.

Jesus shatters those assumptions, because his demands aren’t reasonable at all.  In fact, they’re barbarically unreasonable.  He commands us to do whatever we have to do to overcome sin in our lives, no matter how much we expect it to hurt or how much we have to give up.  If we try to tell him he’s asking too much of us, he looks us right in the eyes and says, “No, I’m not.”  There are no exceptions, no loopholes, no limits, and no statute of limitations to his command.Read more

A different understanding of divorce and adultery

(This is a second excerpt from chapter 17 of my manuscript on the Sermon on the Mount; the first excerpt is here.)

That the Pharisees confronting Jesus [in Matthew 19] don’t believe divorce to be sinful is clear from their belief that Moses commanded divorce.  Jesus shows them how far wrong they have gone, and how hard their hearts have become, by linking divorce to adultery.  He does the same in the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s instructive to put the two statements together.  Matthew 19:9 is straightforward:  “Anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.”[1]  The man is the guilty party from start to finish.  If he divorces his wife unjustly, God will not grant his divorce.  Any remarriage on his part is adulterous because it defies the will and purpose of God in creating marriage in the first place.  God will not simply accede to our pretensions to set his work aside for our own selfish purposes.Read more

Tossing a few things out there

The last while, obviously, has been a fallow period for me as blogging goes.  It hasn’t really been one for writing in general—among other things, I’ve been continuing to work on the Sermon on the Mount manuscript, which is now nineteen chapters in—but it means there are a lot of ideas rattling around in my brain that I haven’t taken the time or place to get down in print for exploration.  For the moment, then, I want to capture a few of them (as many as come to mind, anyway) to develop later.  These are undeveloped fragments—seeds of thought that have yet to yield a harvest.

  • Morality is fractal:  scale it up or scale it down, the patterns are the same.  For a great many people—all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time?—morality is whatever they figure they can get away with.  What’s the difference between someone cutting in the school pick-up line, or running a red light, or cheating the grocery store when using the self-checkout, on the one hand, and a politician lying to the media, or giving family members inside information and fake jobs, or trading favors with the rich and powerful?  Only one of scale.  It’s a difference of degree, not of kind.
  • Is racism systemic?  As someone trained in family systems theory, I have to say, “Of course it is,” because everything intra-human is systemic.  The real question is, if racism is systemic, what does that mean?  The one thing I can say with confidence is that it doesn’t mean what people assume it does.  In particular, it doesn’t mean the way to deal with racism is creating or changing a whole bunch of structures and rules.  That has its place, but while it would be overstating the point to say that structures don’t really matter . . . well, structures don’t really matter.  They’re important insofar as they amplify or restrict the functioning of human relational systems, but it’s those systems which truly matter.  Thinking about racism as actually systemic—as a thing which exists in relational systems as an expression and multiplier of the anxiety of those systems—is a lot harder than arguing about structures.  I don’t know where that thought leads, but I definitely want to follow it.
  • How can we in the church intentionally and intelligently do the work of discipleship and spiritual formation with various types of neurodivergent people?  I had an experience recently which opened my eyes to something I had somehow never seen:  my repeated failures at practicing some spiritual disciplines are at least in part because those spiritual disciplines were developed by and for neurotypical people.  My ADD brain responds to stimuli differently and has different feedback and reward systems than a neurotypical brain; someone on the autism spectrum, to take another example, operates in yet another way.  What would it look like to develop spiritual disciplines, or structures for spiritual formation, or tools for discipleship, for children of God with these and other types of neurodivergence?  What would it look like to take that seriously instead of assuming that what works for neurotypical folk ought to work just as well for us?

I know there are more things I’ve been pondering that I need to get out of my head where I can look them over and interact with them; whether I add them to this post or put up another one later, it’s time to start putting them down as I think of them so I can get to work.

 

Photo source unknown.  License:  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.

Seeing the darkness

Brother, if any man thinks ill of you, do not be angry with him; for you are worse than he thinks you to be. If he charges you falsely on some point, yet be satisfied, for if he knew you better he might change the accusation, and you would be no gainer by the correction. If you have your moral portrait painted, and it is ugly, be satisfied; for it only needs a few blacker touches, and it would be still nearer the truth.

—Charles Haddon Spurgeon

If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of both knowledge and wisdom, Spurgeon’s insight is the beginning of the fear of the Lord.  This is in part because it’s the beginning of self-realism, and thus clears the decks for true knowledge of ourselves, and thus for true knowledge of God.  Read more

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice . . .

. . . in practice, however, there is.

Things that should work, don’t.  Things that shouldn’t go wrong, do.  Other people act in ways that make absolutely no sense to us (though if we looked more closely at our own sin and saw it more clearly, their actions would make more sense to us, at any rate; but of course, we don’t want to).  The unlikely happens, spoiling our plans, and always (it seems) at the irredeemable moment.  The world outside our head proves to be a chaotic system filled with influences of which we know nothing, far more complex—and, consequently, far less tractable—than the world as we construct it inside our head.

This is one reason for the temptation Courtney Martin has dubbed “the reductive seduction of other people’s problems.”Read more

Meditation on forgiveness

Does it seem to you that Western culture is growing increasingly merciless and unforgiving?  Maybe it doesn’t.  Maybe you think the opposite is true, given the rate at which behaviors traditionally understood as wrong are being normalized—but that has nothing to do with mercy or forgiveness.  Actually, that trend underscores my point; given the increasingly pharisaical tenor of Western society, true toleration of behavior is disappearing into polarization, leaving only approval and anathematization as options.  The drive for societal affirmation of such behaviors as same-gender sexual activity isn’t driven by the intolerance of Christians.  Yes, there are plenty of intolerant Christians out there, but on the whole, the American church at least is far more prone to conflict avoidance.  We strive to avoid offending anyone because offending people reduces both attendance and giving, and we’re all about seeing those numbers going up.  When it comes to sin, we might still believe it’s sin, but our usual policy is, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”  The same cannot be said of the culture at large.  That’s why the first rule of watching videos on YouTube is, “Don’t read the comments.”  It’s also why this comic from Randall Munroe continues to resonate so powerfully:

Our culture is very good at forgiving things it doesn’t think need to be forgiven—and increasingly good at denouncing orthodox Christians as unloving and unforgiving for insisting that such things do need to be forgiven.  When it comes to beliefs or actions which the elites who shape Western culture find unacceptable, however, there is little or no capacity for forgiveness.  This is a result of the ongoing re-paganization of the West.  The idea that forgiveness is a good thing was a Christian intrusion into the culture, and is fading as the cultural influence of the church fades.  As Tim Keller points out,

The first thing about [Christians that offended pagan cultures] was that the Christians were marked by the ability to forgive.  Almost all ancient cultures were shame-and-honor cultures.  A shame-and-honor culture meant that if someone wronged you, you paid them back.  Your honor was at stake.  You have to save your honor.  That’s what mattered.  And most of the people in the shame-and-honor cultures believed that that’s what kept society together.  Society was kept together by fear. . . .

Christians came along and said, “No, no, you forgive.  Someone wrongs you, you forgive.  Seventy times seven.”  This was nuts to a shame-and-honor culture.  Nuts.  We know that the Northern European pagan cultures that were being won to faith through the monks coming up during the fifth/sixth/seventh/eighth/ninth century . . . were shame-and-honor cultures, and one of the things they used to say in resistance to the Christian gospel was that “If Christians come in here and everybody starts forgiving everybody else, society will just fall apart, because what keeps society together is fear.”  And so the idea that you forgave your enemies and you turned the other cheek was crazy.

True forgiveness is renouncing the right to demand (or enact) judgment.  Read more

Forgiveness, repentance, and the Gordian knot

A while back, I commented on Dr. Stackhouse’s first post on repentance and forgiveness, which was the beginning of his reflections on Advent this year; I meant to go back when he posted the second part and comment on that too, but other things distracted me, and I’m just now getting back to it. As with the first part, it’s an excellent piece, one which directs our attention to the key truth in understanding repentance and forgiveness: our sins aren’t just between us human beings, they’re between us and God. The Psalmist even goes so far as to say to God, “Against you and you only have I sinned” (Psalm 51:4).

This means that when we sin against someone else, or when they sin against us, we aren’t inextricably bound to them by that action; we aren’t enslaved by their refusal to repent, or by their refusal to forgive us if we repent. God is the one against whom the offense was ultimately committed, and he gives us the opportunity to free ourselves from it. We are free to forgive the one who hurt us even if they do not repent, because it’s not up to us to bring about their repentance (or their judgment)—that’s in God’s hands; and we are free to repent and receive forgiveness even if those on this earth whom we’ve hurt will not forgive, because God can and will forgive us, if we truly confess our sins to him and repent. (As Dr. Stackhouse notes, “the Bible says surprisingly little about repenting to each other, and a lot about repenting to God.”)

One of the ways in which our sin enslaves us is by binding us together in Gordian knots of guilt and pain and suffering and shame, knots we often cannot seem to undo no matter how hard we try, even though we were the ones who tied them. In Christ, however, God calls us to repent of our sins and be forgiven, and to forgive one another, and thus to cut that Gordian knot, and find freedom. In so doing, as the Rev. Casey Jones says, we can leave behind this world’s way of life and enter into the life of the kingdom of God here and now. This is good news; this is gospel.

(Note: subscription required for that last article; but the first month’s subscription to Presbyweb is free.)

The Christian discipline of forgiveness

I’ve been thinking, periodically, about the whole question of repentance and forgiveness ever since Hap’s post a couple months ago on the Emerging Women blog; and so I was interested, in dropping in on Dr. Stackhouse’s blog this morning, to see that he began his reflections on Advent this year with that very theme. It’s supposed to be the first post in a two-part series; the second part isn’t up yet, but there’s more than enough to think about already. I particularly appreciated this section:

Repenting and forgiving are not pretending the past didn’t happen and that what seemed evil is somehow okay. Repentance and forgiveness name what was wrong as wrong. If it weren’t wrong, it wouldn’t need repenting of and forgiving! Repentance and forgiveness also do not pretend the future will be sunny and that there will be no repetition of wrong. You may have noticed that people generally don’t become perfect after a single round of repentance and forgiveness. Jesus tells us to forgive the same person seven times in a single day to make hyperbolically clear that a single episode of repentance and forgiveness may not be the end of it.

and this one:

To forgive the offender is to give a great gift. It cuts the offender free from the Jacob Marley-like shackles of past sins. It gives the offender a fresh start. It does not “re-member” the past sins by repeatedly bringing them up again and fastening them afresh to the present person. It leaves the past in the past, and lets people go ahead into the future. But “forgive and forget” is bad advice, and on two counts. First, one can’t do it. Second, one shouldn’t. Refusing to pretend as if the past didn’t happen instead helps us act realistically to maximize shalom for everyone involved.

I like that—remembering as “re-membering,” taking the the wrongs others have done us in the past and giving them new bodies (as it were) in the present, giving them new life to cause hurt all over again. Thus Dr. Stackhouse concludes,

So let us repent and let us forgive, and neither forget nor re-member. In that paradox is the path of a hopeful, healthful future.

That’s the idea in a nutshell, except that I don’t think it’s a paradox, really, just a middle way: the way of acknowledging the past but not living there, letting it be the past and not the present.