Meme Reversi

Posted on 30 October 200718 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | 1 Comment

So I’ve been on the road a lot the last couple weeks, and haven’t had the time to hammer out a response to the challenge my wife tossed me after I tagged her; but I’ve been thinking about it. The problem isn’t that I don’t have areas of my life to work on—like anyone else, I surely do. The problem, rather, is to answer this key question: where is my walk lagging my talk? Where is the greatest gap between the belief I hold and the belief I live? I do try to be a doer of the world, but where am I falling shortest?

After a fair bit of reflection, I think the key for me is becoming more of an agent of grace. As I’ve written before, I’m coming increasingly to the conclusion that we in the American church really don’t want grace, because we want to believe we deserve the credit for our salvation; which causes two problems. One, of course, is the badly distorted view of ourselves and our salvation which this produces. The other is that if we don’t really appreciate the grace we’ve received, then we won’t extend that grace to others, a point illustrated in the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:23-35). As that parable shows, if we have received grace, we’re expected to give others grace in turn; and I can’t claim to be very good at doing that. As a pastor, there are almost always people in the church who beat you up and tear you down—people who, in some cases, are profoundly non-Christlike in some of their behaviors—and it can be a real struggle to show them grace. It has been for me, at least, to remember that when they don’t deserve it, that’s why it’s called grace. And as a father, when I’m physically and emotionally spent, it can be hard to show my children grace, even when they don’t mean any harm.

This, then, is what I will strive to do: to bite back the sharp words, to divert the quick flare of anger- and exhaustion-fueled irritation, and instead to show grace. If I try to do this merely by force of will, however, trying to catch myself at the last minute, I know I’ll fail; as I’ve been reminded this week in reading Dr. Andrew Purves’ excellent book The Crucifixion of Ministry, it’s only because we’re united with Christ by his Spirit that there’s any hope for anything we do. (He’s talking specifically about ministry, but the application is broader than that.) If I’m going to become truly an agent of grace, then, I need to start by drawing near to Jesus, and especially by drawing near to give praise and thanks for the grace he has shown me—to practice appreciating the grace of God. I need to start by making more time for prayer and worship, and by consciously directing my focus away from prayers of lament and prayers for guidance (though both those have their place, and will continue to have their place) toward prayers of thanksgiving for grace received, and prayers that God would show his grace through me to others.

Anyway, to keep the reversed meme going, I tag Happy. (I can’t tag anyone else because no one I tagged with the original meme did anything with it, except my wife, who gave it back to me.)

Meme tag

Posted on 12 October 200718 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | 3 Comments

Despite the fact that I hadn’t posted in almost four months, my dear friend Happy was good enough to tag me with a meme that’s going around, courtesy of Good Will Hinton, off the book UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity… and Why It Matters. Apparently one of the co-authors of the book, Gabe Lyons, is a friend of Will Hinton’s; I’ll admit to knowing nothing more about it than what I’ve read in his post. (As a side note, the whole concept of “memes” has had rather an interesting journey since Richard Dawkins coined the word.)

In any case, the rule of the meme is as follows: name three negative perceptions about Christians and one thing Christians should be known for. Bearing in mind, as others have noted, that this is purely in relation to Western culture in general, and America in particular (my friends from Zimbabwe, for instance, would have a very different response to the question), here goes.

Negative perception #1: Christians are shills for the Republican Party.

This is a base libel on the denomination in which I serve, the Presbyterian Church (USA), whose leaders (like most mainline leaders) are in fact shills for the Democratic Party, thank you very much. . . . That said, there are far too many prominent evangelicals who deserve this label, so there’s rather more than just a grain of truth in it. Politics in America is pretty polarized right now, and the church isn’t really helping much; there are churches which are apolitical and churches which are enmeshed in the political system (on both sides of the aisle), and very few which are modeling a Kingdom perspective on political engagement. Let’s work to change that.

Negative perception #2: Christians are more interested in winning arguments than in caring for people.

I don’t know that this is any truer of Christians than it is of any other group; but it ought to be far less true. Here’s another place where simply by not being different, we fall short.

Negative perception #3: Christians are intolerant.

There are two levels to this one. On one level, by the world’s highly problematic definition of tolerance (which is basically a threadbare mask for apathy), yes, Christians are intolerant—and what’s more, we’re supposed to be. God doesn’t tolerate sin, and neither should we. On another level, though, there are all too many Christians who truly are intolerant, who feel free to reject people whose sins offend them.

The problem comes when we forget that we, too, are sinners, not just those people over there, and that God doesn’t tolerate our sin either; and yet, he doesn’t write us off, nor does he merely tolerate us, but instead, he actively loves us. Lose that, and we lose sight of the fact that even as we refuse to tell people their sin is OK, we must not merely tolerate them, but actively love them.

What Christians should be known for: Living what we believe.

In the terms of James 1:22-27, we’re called to be doers of the word, not merely hearers; which is a pretty major thing. As I put it in my sermon this past Sunday:

What does this mean? It means that if you say you believe the gospel, and it doesn’t change your life, you don’t believe it. If you listen to the preaching of the word, and you nod your head and say, “Good sermon,” and you don’t go out and put it into practice, you don’t believe it. If you read the Bible, and you understand what it’s telling you, and you don’t do everything you can to live accordingly, you don’t believe it. It’s not enough to say the right things, it’s not enough to sing the hymns, it’s not enough to repeat the Creed, it’s not enough to think all the right thoughts—if you don’t do it, if you don’t live this book, then you’re missing something. You might be saved for later, you might have your ticket to heaven punched, but if all this never leaves your head, if it never reaches your hands and your feet, then you aren’t living God’s life now.

You see, we aren’t here just to think certain things, or even to say certain things; it’s not enough just to know God’s word. It’s interesting, that phrase “doer of the word” is an odd one—this is an example of James thinking in Hebrew even though he’s writing in Greek. The Greek verb there is poieo—the noun version, poiēma, is the word from which we get our word “poem”—and it means “to do,” but even more, it means “to make”; and in normal Greek, this would have been read as “maker of words”—in our terms, “wordsmith,” or “poet.” To take the typical Hebrew phrase, “doer of the word,” and just import it into Greek the way he does creates a very interesting bit of wordplay—and a profound one, I think. As Christians, we’re called to be in a very real way God’s poems, to write out his words with our lives, so that people who look at our lives can read his message to them in us.

Put another way, we’re supposed to incarnate the word of God—to make God’s word real in our lives, to wrap the flesh of our lives around the bone of his will and his commands, to become walking examples of his teaching; as we follow Christ, who was the Word of God incarnate, we are called to be “little Christs”—that’s what “Christians” means—to be copies of Christ, copies of the word of God, walking around in this world. The Bible is the word of God written, presenting us with Jesus Christ, the word of God made flesh; and our job is to become the word of God acted out, lived out, in 21st-century America. It’s true, as many have said, that you are the only Bible many people will ever read; it’s also true, says James, that that ought to be enough. If you are the only Bible people have ever read, that ought to be enough to tell them who God is, and who Jesus is, and why they should follow him. That’s what it means to be a doer of the word, and not merely a hearer of the word. That’s what it means for your life to be a poem for God. That, says James, is what it means to be a Christian.“Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.” —St. Francis of Assisi

So, to keep the game rolling, I tag:

In a mirror, darkly

Posted on 26 February 200718 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

Since I don’t get HBO, I haven’t seen Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary Friends of God, though I’d be interested to watch it; at this point, though, I don’t know much more than what I read in Michael Linton’s post on the First Things blog, On the Square. Linton’s post, though, is plenty and enough to spark reflection—mostly grieved reflection, unfortunately. I’m in no position to pass judgment on Pelosi’s work one way or the other, but it seems that those of us who call ourselves evangelicals (and really, any serious Christian) ought to take a long, hard look at what she shows us of ourselves. The parking-lot scene Linton cites, in which Pelosi is talking with Ted Haggard and two of his church members about their sex lives, looks particularly painful, and not just because of the subsequent revelations of Haggard’s gay infidelity. As Linton puts it,

The possibility that it might be deeply indecent for a Christian minister ever to ask a man to reveal the most intimate nature of his relationship with his wife in front of anyone else—let alone in front of a camera—is apparently not within his ken. And the idea that these men should protect their wives’ privacy and refuse to answer isn’t in their ken either. They boast about their . . . well, you fill in the blank (we’ve all been in locker rooms). It feels so great. It’s all for the Lord. High fives, everybody.

Yeah. For all the fuss many evangelicals make about our country’s moral decline, we too often accept the same assumptions and impulses that have driven that decline; as someone put it, instead of being in the world but not of it, too often we manage instead to be of the world but not in it, creating our own little subculture with “Christianized” versions of everything the world has—including, all too often, its misdirected desires. As such, there’s all too much truth to Linton’s charge that

We, “us,” the Evangelicals with the capital E, have become thoughtless, sensualistic braggarts. . . . What doctrinal rigor we might have had has been progressively smothered by sensuality draped with arrogant irresponsibility. We don’t think; we feel. If it feels right, it’s the Lord’s working, and if it’s the Lord’s working, we can be proud of it.

I don’t want to beat up on evangelicals; I am one, and I make no bones about it. But we have enmeshed ourselves far too deeply in the culture and system of this world, this present age, and we have come to think far too highly of ourselves. To quote Linton again,

We’ve forgotten the Scriptures and allowed ignorance to characterize our preaching, and delirium our worship. In our confidence in God’s grace, we have become presumptuous in our salvation. And we’ve too often confused salvation in heaven with right voting on earth. We need to change. We need to repent.

We need, I would say, to remember that the true gospel is countercultural and costly; we need to set aside the idea that we can, or should, be comfortable with God. We need to go back to Isaiah 6 and remember the reaction of that great prophet when he really saw the glory and holiness of God: he cried out in terror, for he saw his sinfulness for what it really was. And maybe, just maybe, we need to stop singing “worship” songs about how wonderful we are and put the worms back in our hymnody. May God have mercy on us for our presumption.

Right for the wrong reasons

Posted on 26 October 200418 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | 2 Comments

The Rev. O. Benjamin Sparks, interim editor of The Presbyterian Outlook–a weekly journal covering the PC (USA)–put out an editorial a week ago titled “Praying for the Powerful,” which makes an important point in a remarkably wrongheaded way. I agree with his opening sentence (“The first duty of responsible citizenship is prayer – even before we wind our way into the voting booth”), and his conclusion that “the first duty of Christian citizenship is prayer: prayer for all persons; prayer for kings and rulers to keep peace; prayer that the church catholic be kept humble before God, who made all humankind, and who desires that all humankind be saved.” Unfortunately, most of what comes between them is highly problematic, to say the least.

The first problem I have with the Rev. Sparks’ editorial is its smug, condescending, self-righteous leftism. I was struck, for instance, by his complaint that “factions within the church catholic are trying to capture U. S. government for religious purposes: restoring prayer in the schools, posting the Ten Commandments in public places; outlawing all abortion, and permitting or restricting gay and lesbian civil unions or ‘marriage.'” I have three problems with this statement. First, “factions” is a loaded word–by connotation, it marginalizes those groups and labels them divisive. Second, “capture” is a biasing word: it implies that the U. S. government rightly belongs to those who hold other positions (no prayer in schools, no Ten Commandments, unrestricted abortion license, same-sex “marriage”) and that anyone who challenges those positions is trying to steal our government from those who properly own/control it. Third, this sentence paints those with whom the Rev. Sparks disagrees with the broadest possible brush, assuming unanimity of opinion which in fact isn’t present. In short, it appears that in his understanding, when liberal Christians argue for liberal political positions, that’s fine, but when conservative Christians argue for conservative political positions, this is somehow sinister and inappropriate; only liberals, then, have the right to claim that their politics are supported by their faith. Such a conclusion is not only biased, it’s ridiculous.

My second objection to the Rev. Sparks’ argument is his apparent belief that our government exists to protect the rights of religious minorities but not those of this country’s Christian majority. This would have come as a great surprise to James Madison, who was just as alive to the dangers of the tyranny of the minority as he was to those of the tyranny of the majority. (See Federalist #10.)

Third, there is the Rev. Sparks’ seeming position that the Western church should have connived at the efforts of communist governments to keep their slaves from reading the Bible, rather than trying to smuggle Bibles behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. In making this point, he interprets Paul’s argument in Romans 13 to mean that a) no “subversion of the authority of [any] government” is permissible, that b) trying to smuggle Bibles into countries which were attempting to suppress Christian faith is such subversion, and thus that c) Paul would argue that the church should support that effort rather than trying to share the gospel message with people in those countries. Given that this conclusion is in direct opposition to Paul’s own actions (see Acts 13-28), it is, to say the least, questionable. For Paul, subjection to the governing authorities had definite limits, and certainly didn’t include acceding to their demands to stop preaching the gospel. (See also Acts 3-5 for the consensus of the early church on this point.)

Fourth, I cannot see how the Rev. Sparks reached his evident conclusion that if the Soviet government were still in place, we would never have seen the rise of radical Islam and all would be right with the world; this position is frankly ludicrous. Given that the rise of bin Laden and radical Islam was one of the major factors in the failure of the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan, on the one hand, and the fact that the Putin government is no less authoritarian or ruthless than the Soviets–in this area, it can fairly be said that there is no significant difference between the two–on the other, how can this argument possibly stand?

Fifth, I have serious objections to the Rev. Sparks’ rather Erastian understanding of the proper relationship between the church and the state. In defining “the real business of the church” as “prayer, listening to the memories of the apostles in the light of scripture (still for them only the Hebrew Scriptures), and baptism, holding all things in common, almsgiving, and the breaking of the bread,” he is speaking of the earliest Christians, but if that was “the real business of the church” then, how can it be significantly otherwise now? While he does admit that Christians should call our politicians to be moral and just (well, at least liberal Christians should), his argument makes government dominant over religion and the proper arbiter of religious disputes. Why he puts greater trust in government to act in accordance with the gospel than he does in the church is an interesting question; more importantly, for all that he talks about “the deeply Calvinistic, Reformed understanding of government written into our nation’s founding documents,” this ain’t it (being neither Reformed nor present in the aforementioned documents).

Sixth, it seems to me that at various points in his argument, the Rev. Sparks is a little casual with the facts, that he simply hasn’t taken the time to do the necessary research; my second and fourth objections, above, would be examples of this. Perhaps the most egregious example, however, comes in this statement: “Most religions, including Christianity (though not Sikhs) harbor intolerant, angry factions hell bent on oppressing and killing on behalf of their god/gods.” Excuse me? Though not Sikhs? I can only conclude that the Rev. Sparks lives in the wrong Richmond.

You see, I’ve never been to Richmond, VA, but I spent three years in Richmond, BC, part of five years in and around Vancouver, BC, Canada. As it happens, the metro Vancouver area has quite a large Sikh population, from which came the first Sikh premier in Canadian history, Ujjal Dosanjh (a good man whose time in that office was brief, thanks to the malfeasance of his immediate predecessor). As any Vancouver-area resident who bothered to follow the news could tell you, violence broke out in the area’s Sikh temples on more than a few occasions as extremists and moderates fought for control. Further, one of the reasons why this was such a concern to the BC government was the strong linkage between those extremists and Babbar Khalsa, the Sikh terrorist group responsible for the bombing of Air India Flight 182 and a bombing that same day at Tokyo’s Narita Airport (which was supposed to have been another mid-air bombing, but the bomb went off prematurely). Babbar Khalsa is the largest and worst expression of the militant strain in Sikhism which is also responsible, inter alia, for the assassination of Indira Gandhi.

I don’t offer this to bash Sikhs in any way, shape, or form, or to blame the Sikh faith for the embrace of terrorism by some of its adherents; my point isn’t to single Sikhism out, but rather to point out that the Rev. Sparks did so wrongly, in ignorance. Sikhism as much as any religion may be said to “harbor intolerant, angry factions hell bent on oppressing and killing on behalf of their god/gods,” and he should have done the research to find that out before off-handedly declaring otherwise.

In general, I don’t think this editorial did The Outlook credit, which is too bad; not only does the publication deserve better, but I think the Rev. Sparks’ thesis is important for Christians to keep in mind. Unfortunately, while he’s right in his main point, he’s right for all the wrong reasons.