I’m reading Larry Crabb’s book Real Church right now—I was given a copy by one of my fellow pastors here in town, and I expect we’ll be talking about it; I also expect I’ll be writing some about it, once I’ve finished it. I’ll have to, if I want to process it fully. For right now, I just want to post this quote from the book, which really struck me:
Grace has no felt power in our lives until it surprises the hell out of us.
Yeah, that’s the way of it, alright.
Ray Ortlund put up a wonderful post recently considering the question, “How come a stereotype of the church today is one of a ‘holier than thou’ mentality?” He offers some thoughts on the matter (which are well worth your time to read—it’s not a long post), then closes with this:
I know this. We Christians will see more repentance in our city when our city sees more repentance in us. And we can be honest about our failings, because it isn’t our performance that makes us okay. It’s Christ’s performance for us. That’s the gospel. It’s so freeing.
Amen. That’s the thing about the gospel: it sets us free from the need to be good enough, and thus from the need to convince others (and ourselves) that we already are good enough. You’ll never know how heavy a burden that is until you lay it down. I think that often, one of the biggest things that holds us back from repentance is the unwillingness to acknowledge to others that we are in fact sinners, because that would mean admitting that we aren’t good enough; it’s a wonderfully freeing thing to be able to lay that aside and just repent.
Jared Wilson, writing about an encounter between Craig Gross (of XXXChurch.com) and some colleagues, some of the Westboro Baptist Church crew (of “God Hates Fags” fame), and the American Idol tour (the WBC folks had come to protest Adam Lambert; Gross and his friends were counter-protesting), asks a penetrating question: “What Happens When You Love Haters?” On the evidence, the answer is, “Not what you’d expect.” Hate breeds more hate—but love can breed hate, too.
If you followed some of the Twitter brouhaha, you could see many Adam Lambert fans and supporters of gay rights causes cursing out Craig, telling him that God hated him, and saying plenty of things that make the Westboro crew sound downright genteel. They didn’t know he didn’t agree with the Westboro people; they just saw his proximity and saw him loving them. That was enough. They got confused and thought Craig was with Westboro.
Which says something really profound about a ministry of love. If you love everyone, no matter their brokenness and no matter their sin—prodigal or pharisaical—you’re gonna get slammed by both sides.
The Anchoress linked back the other day, in her Ted Kennedy retrospective, to a 2005 Peggy Noonan column (one of her best, I think) expressing her foreboding about America and its future:
I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it’s a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.” . . .
I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there’s no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we’re leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma’s house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding—the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn’t think so.
But this recounting doesn’t quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there’s a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.
Now, there’s a lot I could say about this. If I wanted to analyze Noonan, I could talk about this being the seed of her infatuation with Barack Obama that would bloom three years later—that his general and amorphous promise of “hope” and “change” offered her a psychologically irresistible escape hatch from her worry that “things are broken and tough history is coming.” Or I could look at it theologically and express my agreement with her, my belief that in fact, things are broken, and tough history is coming, that we have dark times looming ahead before the final return of Christ. Or I could consider her point from an historical perspective, with the reminder that many had a similar sense in the 1960s; one example would be Allan Drury, whose foreboding of the brokenness of American society caused the series of novels he began with Advise and Consent, a straightforward work of political wonkery, to evolve into something that can only be called political apocalyptic.
As it happens, though, I’m more interested in where Noonan went with this, with her analysis of the elite response to the situation she limns.
Our recent debate about elites has had to do with whether opposition to Harriet Miers is elitist, but I don’t think that’s our elites’ problem.
This is. Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it. . . .
That’s what I think is going on with our elites. There are two groups. One has made a separate peace, and one is trying to keep the boat afloat. I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don’t even express it to themselves, wonder if they’ll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.
I lack the advantages of Noonan’s insider position, but I think she’s right about what’s going on; at least, that’s certainly how things look from out here in the hinterlands. I do not think, however, that she’s right about elitism being a problem. I think elitism is a problem for our elites; I think we saw it to some degree in their response to Harriet Miers, and I think we see it in a much larger way in their response to Sarah Palin—and I don’t think you have to believe in the particular ability and fitness of either woman to see that. (In retrospect, I don’t think they were wrong about Miers; but that doesn’t mean they were right for the right reason.)
For those who have made their separate peace, whose unspoken motto is “I got mine, you get yours,” this elitism is rooted in the simple, very human but very juvenile desire not to share. They believe they’ve earned what they have, and they don’t want anyone pushing into their little club from outside. This is the attitude common to the worst of the aristocracy in every human civilization throughout history; we need not be surprised to find it in ours.
That said, it’s the elitism of the second group that’s more dangerous, for a reason very similar to what I called last week “the leaven of the Pharisees.” It’s their elitism that Noonan herself expresses, that is the root of her disdain for Gov. Palin, with her assertion that “Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us.” The unspoken corollary to this is that it’s only our elites who are supposed to do that, and how dare anybody else try to horn in? It’s a big job, and at some level they’re worried (most of them, anyway; I have the sense our president doesn’t share this humility) that they aren’t going to pull it off—but by jingo, it’s their job, and they aren’t going to share it.
Why? Because they know that whether they’re up to the task or not, they’re the best possible people to be doing it, and certainly nobody else could possibly be. They have all the proof they need for that complacent certainty in the fact that they are the ones who are rich and educated and accomplished and famous, and nobody else is; their worldly accolades are all the evidence they could require of their own superiority to the rest of the world.
The only problem with this attitude is, it’s pure and utter bunk. The science-fiction novelist Elizabeth Moon explains this well in her book Against the Odds, where she has one of her characters observe,
Any system which does not give ample opportunity for talent to displace unearned rank will, in the end, come to grief. . . .
My point is that every time society has given it a chance, it’s been shown that talent exists in previously despised populations. . . . Over and over again, it’s been shown that an ordinary sampling of the population, including those considered inferior or hopeless, contains men and women of rare intelligence, wit, and ability. Just as ponds turn over their water yearly, revitalizing the pond’s life, so a good stirring of the human pot brings new blood to the top, and we’re all the better for it.
The reason for the elite opposition to Gov. Palin is that she’s from “an ordinary sampling of the population”—not from an elite family, not from an elite school, not from an elite profession, but a journalism major from the University of Idaho (her fourth college, no less) who lived in a small town on the edge of civilization who actually worked (and killed things!) with her hands. She’s an ordinary barbarian like most of us in this country. As such, they refuse to believe that she could possibly be a woman of “rare intelligence, wit, and ability”; the very idea creates severe cognitive dissonance for them.
This prejudice—for it’s nothing less than that; in its extreme forms, we may fairly call it bigotry—is highly unfortunate, because it only worsens the difficulty of getting the trolley back on the rails. For one thing, it aggravates the distrust that already exists between us ordinary barbarians and the elites of this country; this makes us less likely to follow them when they have a bad idea, to be sure, but it also makes us less likely to follow them when they’re right. It makes our politics more reactive and more divided, which inevitably makes them less productive.
And for another, whether our elites want to admit it or not, they’re simply wrong in their belief that they and only they have the talent, skills, perspective and character to right the trolley. There are many ordinary barbarians in this country—on the right and on the left, both—who would have a great deal to contribute to the leading of this nation, if they only got the chance. Gov. Palin is in many ways their avatar, someone who has already created that chance for herself and demonstrated prodigious talent as a leader and politician, and who I hope will create opportunities for others to follow suit.
What America really needs (one thing, at least) is for others to rise up and follow her into leadership roles in this country, to turn over the water in the pond and bring “new blood to the top”—new blood with new ideas, new experiences, and a new perspective on our nation and its problems. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see that happening on any major scale as long as the elites resist—and they will continue to resist, both out of their sense of their own superiority and out of their desire not to share their baubles. The latter is probably the easier to overcome; the former is harder, because it can be very, very difficult to admit that we need help, and especially to admit that we need help from those we’ve been accustomed to regarding as less capable than ourselves. As long as our elites can continue to see the rest of us that way, they’re not going to be willing to make that admission.
Which means that the only way to improve our situation is a grassroots revolution; the levers of power and of media influence may be in the hands of our elites, but the levers of the ballot box are still, ultimately, in ours. If we, the people want to force a path for ordinary barbarians into the halls of the elites, we have the ability to do so, if we will band together and use it. But in the meantime, we need to support the ones we have—with Sarah Palin at the head of the list.
Now, if your political convictions are simply too different from Gov. Palin’s for you to support her, then so be it; those matter, no question. In that event, though, I’d encourage you to look for ordinary barbarians who do agree with you, whom you can support. I firmly believe that the domination of our politics by one class of our society is, in its own way, as serious a political issue as any we face; and it’s one which we need to address, and soon, if we want to keep the trolley from going clean off the rails. Our elites aren’t up to the task by themselves, whether they’re willing to admit the fact or not; they need our help, and we need to provide it. Wanted or otherwise.
(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)
This is fun. My thanks to Chris Forbes for posting it.
Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.
—1 Corinthians 9:24-27 (ESV)
I had a Sunday-school teacher one time who talked about Paul describing the life of faith as a race; and at some point during that class, he declared, “And Paul says, don’t run in order to win.” I argued with him (opinionated? Me? Whatever gave you that idea?), but he wouldn’t listen to me, and he wouldn’t look it up—he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, changed the subject, and went on with the class.
Now, there are some mistakes I understand, but that one made no sense to me. I’m sure differences in temperament played in to this, since I can be a pretty competitive sort, but why would you want the Scripture to say, “Run, but don’t try to win?” If you aren’t trying as hard as you can to win, why are you bothering to run? Especially when you consider that in the life of faith, if we win, that doesn’t mean that everyone else loses—we can all win together, and in fact, the better each of us runs our own race, the more help we are to all those around us as they run theirs.
I suspect Paul saw things much the same way, since he clearly likes athletic metaphors. I imagine, from this and other aspects of his writings, that he had a pretty strong competitive streak; sure, he was a saint, and a brilliant man, and God used him powerfully to do amazing things in and for the body of Christ, but he can’t have been easy to live with. As well, he clearly had considerable respect for how hard the athletes of his time worked and how completely they focused themselves in order to give themselves the best chance possible to win the prize at the Games; it’s understandable why he saw them as a model for the Christian life.
The amazing thing, as he notes here, is that the prize for which those athletes competed was nothing more than a laurel wreath! Given a week or two, their prize would be no more. If they could work as hard as they did, if they could dedicate themselves as completely as they did, to win a prize they wouldn’t even be able to keep, shouldn’t we as Christians be at least as focused on the prize of eternal life which God has set before us? Shouldn’t we be running to win, rather than dawdling along by the side of the road, wandering off to explore the thistles?
Paul certainly thinks we should. Run the good race, he tells us; run well, run hard, run with all you have—run to win. Run to win, and stay focused on the prize before you; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called—it’s already yours, but you need to grab hold and live into it. Don’t let anything else sidetrack you or slow you down, but let everything you do be focused on running as well as you possibly can, to the glory of God and the accomplishment of his purposes.
(Adapted from “Run to Win”)
According to Paul Mah on TechRepublic, they don’t mix. If I understand him correctly, the problem is that sites like Facebook leak personal information through their ad networks, and also through third-party apps (the games and quizzes that proliferate). Combined with the use of tracking cookies, the results of this could be quite far-reaching:
The implications are sobering and call for a reexamination of how we interact with the Web. Since tracking cookies have been in use for years, it is entirely possible that aggregator sites with historical records could theoretically link our social networking profiles with all our past accesses in its database.
Which, again assuming I’m tracking him correctly, would result in the sort of thing we saw in the movie Minority Report, with full profiles of our activities, associations, interests, and (of course) purchases available online to anyone who cared to pay for them. Something to think about.
I guess this video has been bouncing around a bit, and has generated some opprobrium for the officer featured here. For my part, I’m troubled by the fact that this officer appears to be forcing this protestor to take down his sign with no justification but the threat of force—this is not how we want our police to behave—but in all honesty, I can’t say I like the protestor’s attitude much, either. I do, however, appreciate Alan W.’s reflections on this:
God has been doing a number on me with how many times what I want, believe, think and feel are simply reflections of the fall in Genesis 3 and trying to be “like God.” . . .
I feel for Officer Cheeks much as I do about Joe the plumber. They are folks caught up in the moment and demonstrated the fact that they are humans. And Americans will make them pay the price for that too.
Here are two prophetic words for the Body of Christ. Treat people with GRACE and of course Matthew 7. I have a second word for the People of God, don’t be a butt about things. If we don’t like something fine but don’t confuse what we like with what God likes.
Well put.
My thanks to Jared Wilson for posting this. I love the Chieftains (and like the Corrs quite well too, for that matter), and this was just a lovely thing to see.
(Isaiah 6:1-5; 1 Timothy 6:11-16, 20-21)
As I think I’ve said before, it’s funny the things that stick in your head. I remember a Sunday school class sometime during junior high school, taught by the father of a friend of mine, in which he was telling us about Paul describing the life of faith as a race; and then he declared, “And Paul says, don’t run in order to win.” I argued with him, because that’s simply not true; Paul says quite emphatically, “Run in such a way that you may win.” If you want to look it up for yourself, it’s 1 Corinthians 9:24. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t listen to me, and he wouldn’t look it up—he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, changed the subject, and went on with the class, and I perforce shut up; but I didn’t pay much attention after that. Instead, I was off in my own little world; and if Mr. Mouw noticed, he didn’t feel the need to say anything about it.
Partly, I’m sure, my ego was hurt; but more than that, I was taken aback, and I needed to take time to think about it. For one thing, I was surprised that my teacher had gotten that wrong, and even more surprised that he hadn’t even checked, when I challenged him, to see if he’d made a mistake. More importantly, though, the mistake made no sense to me. I’m sure differences in temperament played in to this, since I can be a pretty competitive sort, but why would you want the Scripture to say, “Run, but don’t try to win?” If you aren’t trying as hard as you can to win, why are you bothering to run? Especially when you consider that in the life of faith, if we win, that doesn’t mean that everyone else loses—we can all win together, and in fact, the better each of us runs our own race, the more help we are to all those around us as they run theirs.
Now, as you may have noticed, Paul likes athletic metaphors. I suspect, from this and other aspects of his writings, that he probably had a pretty strong competitive streak; sure, he was a saint, and a brilliant man, and God used him powerfully to do amazing things in and for the body of Christ, but he can’t have been easy to live with. Besides that, though, I think when he looked at the athletes of his day, he had considerable respect for how hard they worked and how completely they focused themselves in order to give themselves the best chance possible to win the prize at the Games—and as he notes in 1 Corinthians, that prize was nothing more than a laurel wreath! Given a week or two, their prize would be no more. If they could work as hard as they did, if they could dedicate themselves as completely as they did, to win a prize they wouldn’t even be able to keep, shouldn’t we as Christians be at least as focused on the prize of eternal life which God has set before us? Shouldn’t we be running to win, rather than dawdling along by the side of the road, wandering off to explore the thistles?
Certainly Paul thinks so, and so he encourages Timothy here. That’s not clear in the NIV, which reads “fight the good fight” in verse 12—but while that is what Paul said back in chapter 1, where he was encouraging Timothy to go head-to-head with the false teachers in Ephesus and not back down, that’s not actually what he says here. Rather than the military metaphor he used earlier, this is the language of athletic competition which he uses in so many other places. Run the good race, Paul tells Timothy; run well, run hard, run with all you have—run to win. Run to win, and stay focused on the prize before you; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called, which is already yours but which you need to grab hold of and live into. Don’t let anything else sidetrack you or slow you down, but let everything you do be focused on running as well as you possibly can, to the glory of God and the accomplishment of his purposes.
What that looks like, Paul lays out in verse 11. First he tells Timothy, “Flee from all this”; reject not only the false teaching going around Ephesus, but reject the motives driving the false teachers. Reject their desire for gain, reject their desire to serve themselves and feed their own desires, and pursue a different way. It’s interesting how Paul lays that way out. First, he says, pursue righteousness and godliness. These represent the two dimensions of the Christian life, the vertical and the horizontal—our relationship with God and our relationships with those around us. This is the global statement: rather than living for yourself, focus on being right with God and being right with others. Live your life in such a way as to please God—make that your top priority; and part of the way you do that is to do right by the people you meet in this world. This, of course, looks back in part to some of the things we’ve talked about in the past few weeks, such as taking care of the powerless and the needy, and keeping our relationships pure.
Next, Paul tells Timothy to pursue faith and love. These aren’t virtues exactly, but something deeper—they’re the foundations of the Christian life. This is a strong contrast with the false teachers. Clearly, they weren’t living by faith in God, they were putting their trust in money, and in all the other things in which the world puts its trust. That’s easy to do, since we can see these things and know exactly what we have; we can see our money, we can look at our bank account and know precisely what’s in it, and we can figure out just what we can afford to do. We can’t see God, nor do we have any way to know for sure how or when he will provide for us—or even, some might say, if he will provide for us. To live by faith in God isn’t easy for us, because it seems much riskier than putting our faith in things we can see and touch and hold and count. And yet, this is what Paul says Timothy needs to do, and what we need to do—to set aside the worldly-mindedness of the false teachers and put faith in God. Otherwise, whatever our other virtues, we aren’t living a Christian life in any meaningful sense.
Along with that, Paul tells Timothy to pursue love. Now, the world would agree with that one, but it would mean something very different by it; there are a lot of folks out there who will tell you they’re living their lives for love, when what they’re really pursuing is romance, or lust, or someone to make them feel better about themselves. What Paul’s talking about is something very different—it’s the self-giving love of God, the love which gives of itself for the good of others. The love of God isn’t about getting for ourselves, unlike so many of our human imitations, it’s about giving ourselves away; and so, where the false teachers were all about the profit they could make off the church, Timothy’s call is to give himself away, to lay down his life, for his brothers and sisters in Christ, for the people of God—for the church. To which we may imagine Timothy protesting, “But Paul, look how badly they’ve treated me—they don’t deserve it!”; and in return, we might well imagine Paul saying, “Look how badly they treated Jesus—at least they haven’t crucified you yet. He loves us anyway; you love them anyway.”
In line with this, Paul says, “pursue gentleness.” It can be easy to justify being hard on people by calling it “tough love”; certainly there are times when there’s a need for firmness, and certainly that will usually provoke squawks of opposition. But even when the time comes to lay down the law, as it certainly had for Timothy, it must be done with gentleness, taking care to give no unnecessary hurt. There was no doubt a part of him that would have liked to punish the false teachers who had made his life so difficult—to make them pay for the trouble they had caused. As Paul reminded him, however, there was no place for that in his call to ministry. Whatever he did, he must do with gentleness, seeking only to restore those who had wandered away from Jesus, not to claim even the smallest measure of vengeance for himself.
The other item on Paul’s list is endurance. This is a mixed metaphor, since I’m not sure how you can pursue endurance, but the point is clear: Timothy is not to be one of those who goes a little way and then gives up. This is a critical part of running to win, because it’s not enough to set the pace—you have to be able to keep it up. The best illustration of this I can think of comes from the life of the great Oregon long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine. Growing up in the Northwest, I heard a lot about Pre; and part of his story was the Munich Summer Olympics. He was always an aggressive runner, and running the 5000 meters at the ’72 games, he shot out of the gate, setting a pace that would have won him not only the gold, but a world record, if he could have sustained it. Unfortunately, he couldn’t, and in the last 150 meters, having led the whole race to that point, he was passed first by Lasse Viren . . . then by Mohamed Gamoudi . . . and then, 15 meters from the finish line, by Ian Stewart. He led most of the way, but he finished fourth. Winning the race isn’t just about doing well for a while, it’s about sustaining the effort, doing well all the way to the end.
This is the key, because it’s not enough to pursue righteousness and godliness for a while, then take a break and chase your own desires for a bit; it’s not good enough to pursue faith and love for a while, then slide back into the materialism and self-absorption of the world for a spell. It’s not good enough to be gentle until things get hard, then give it up. If we’re going to run the good race of faith, if we’re going to run in such a way as to win the prize, we need to be like the Energizer bunny—we need to keep going, and going, and going. What’s more, we need to realize that God doesn’t just call us to run when it’s easy, he calls us to keep running even, and especially, when it’s hardest.
Of course, we can’t do this alone; that’s why athletes always train with partners, and why they have trainers. To grow in endurance, we have to push ourselves beyond our own idea of how far we can go—and we can’t do that alone; we need people to urge and encourage us to keep going, to keep pushing, to go further. I learned this during my last year in Colorado, taking a couple classes from a veteran personal trainer who had semi-retired to Grand Lake and opened a little fitness business to keep herself busy. There were a couple times I keeled over right there in class, but by the time I had to stop I had a much, much better sense of what I could actually do than I had ever had before. Without her example and direction, and without the desire to keep up with her and the others in the class—there’s that competition thing again; running to win is a very different thing when you’re doing it in a group—I never would have done that. I never would have pushed myself, again and again, beyond what I thought my limits were, and so I never would have discovered that I was wrong.
We see the reason this is so important in verse 20, where Paul writes, “Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you.” What has been entrusted to him? The gospel, and the responsibility to lead the church to live it out. Remember what I’ve said all the way through this series—the heartbeat of this letter, which we hear over and over again, is that we have been given the mission to bring the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ to all people in all the world, and everything we do must be to that purpose. The race we run isn’t something we run by ourselves, and it’s not just about us as individuals winning our own prizes; it’s about all of us running together, encouraging each other on, helping each other out, and it’s about the people we attract to run with us. If we stop running for a while, we aren’t the only ones affected—everyone around us is, too. Run to win, not just for your own sake, but for everyone else’s.