Under New Management

Posted on 27 April 201424 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | 1 Comment

You may have heard of the Presbyterian pastor and author Tullian Tchividjian; he’s Billy Graham’s grandson, and the successor to D. James Kennedy as the senior pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church down in Fort Lauderdale. I haven’t read a lot of his work, but he wrote a remarkable little essay last fall called “Church, We Have a Problem” that I’ve been mulling ever since. In it, he writes this:

Spend any time in the American church, and you’ll hear legalism and lawlessness presented as two ditches on either side of the Gospel that we must avoid. Legalism, they say, happens when you focus too much on law or rules, and lawlessness when you focus too much on grace. . . .

It is more theologically accurate to say that the one primary enemy of the Gospel—legalism—comes in two forms. Some people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by keeping the rules, doing what they’re told, maintaining the standards, and so on (you could call this “front-door legalism”). Other people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by breaking the rules, doing whatever they want, developing their own autonomous standards, and so on (you could call this “back-door legalism”). . . . Either way, you’re still trying to save yourself—which means both are legalistic, because both are self-salvation projects. . . . We want to remain in control of our lives and our destinies, so the only choice is whether we will conquer the mountain by asceticism or by license.

This is a profound insight. Rev. Tchividjian goes on from there to talk about the importance of preaching grace, which is indeed the main point at issue. I want to take his comments in a different direction, though, because I think he highlights something important about the world. The world wants us all to be legalists, and on the whole, it doesn’t really care which kind. Put another way, the world wants us to be conformists. Some times and cultures favor “keep the rules” conformists, while others favor “break the rules” conformists, but what really matters either way aren’t the obvious rules being kept or broken. What matters is the deeper set of rules you aren’t allowed to question.

This is important to recognize when we talk about our individualistic culture. It is indeed individualistic in the sense that it values the desires of the individual above the well-being of the group (hence no-fault divorce laws, for example). It’s quick to praise self-expression and denounce “conformity”—by which it means keeping the standards of previous generations, which are now hopelessly passé. But have you ever noticed that non-conformists run in packs? It’s great to be an individual and chart your own course, as long as you’re an individual just like everyone else. Be “different” in one of the approved ways, and you’re golden. If you’re actually different from the world, you’ll be attacked—as, among other things, a conformist. And no, no one will see the irony.

Obviously, the world isn’t monolithic. It has factions—different groups that want different things and approve of different things. They’re rather like political parties. But just like our political parties, they only fight each other when there’s no common enemy. Introduce a threat to the system and the existing power structure, and they band together to defeat it. We see an example of this in the gospels. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Herodians hated each other, but they teamed up willingly to kill Jesus because they hated him even more. As long as you’re in the system and belong to an accepted group, you might get flak from other groups, but you’ll be okay.

The key question from the world’s perspective is, are you a part of the system? Do you follow its rules and honor its priorities? If so, you might think you’re the one calling the shots, but it’s the world that’s running your life; you’re under its management, in its employ. For example, you might be a spender or a saver; you might believe in working hard and living frugally, or you might live one paycheck behind and borrow from everyone in sight. These are different factions which honor money in different ways, but they agree on its importance. That’s what the world really cares about. Even as Christians, it’s easy to fall into these patterns, thinking and acting much like everyone around us does—acting as if the world owned and ran us, too.

Now, on a quick read of 1 Peter 4, it looks like the apostle is only concerned about obvious bad behavior, as he seems to be describing an extreme group of sinners—acts of lawlessness, lust, orgies, drunkenness, carousing, and so on. There are two points to consider, however. First, with the exception of the final item on his list (idolatry), everything he’s denouncing was also condemned by pagan writers. These were vices that society recognized as vices. Second, I don’t think we can assume that the Christians to whom this letter was written had all been addicts of the worst sort. It’s probable that most of them had lived reasonably respectable lives before their conversion. And yet, Peter tars all of them and their whole society with this broad brush. Why?

I think the answer lies in the fact that this list ends with the condemnation of idolatry. Most if not all of the rest of the terms in verse 3 refer to behaviors which, though generally recognized as wrong most of the time, were practiced every year at some of the Greek and Roman religious festivals. If you participated in the religion of the culture, however upright and upstanding your daily life may have been, there would be times you would abandon self-control and any sort of moral constraint as a part of your worship of the gods of the culture. To refuse to do so was to mark yourself off as someone who followed a different Lord than the world around you and gave your allegiance to a different authority—and thus as someone not properly under control.

That’s what it’s all about. The world always talks about morality—even those who denounce traditional morality speak in moralistic terms—but the underlying theme and purpose is control. Remember, our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers of this present darkness, as Paul says in Ephesians 6. The world wants to make us legalists, either striving to use law to control our desires or letting our desires determine our law; either way, it has us in its grip.

Peter reminds us that we’re free of that grip, and calls us to live free of it. Christ suffered in this world, the perfectly just bearing the weight of all our injustice, to buy us out of our slavery to sin—and he is now done with sin. He came into this world resolved to defeat sin, he carried that through and broke its power by his death and resurrection, and he has now left it forever behind him, passing through and returning to the presence of God the Father. Because of his work, we no longer belong to this world, and we are no longer slaves to sin and death; instead, we too look forward to the day when we will leave them forever behind us, passing through them to live with God, in whom there is neither sin nor death, eternally.

Peter says, fix your eyes on that, and arm yourselves with the same resolve to live your life to do the will of God. We are no longer slaves to this world, we are slaves of God; we’re under new management, accountable to a new master. We need to set our hearts and minds to live in that freedom, even though it will mean suffering abuse from others, and possibly worse. We need to steel ourselves to bear that suffering as Christ did, neither running away nor fighting back, but trusting in the justice of God the Father and accepting suffering as an opportunity to bear witness to the love and the grace of God. As that translator said in the video of the Masterworks China trip from a couple years ago, “Don’t pray that we will not have persecution, but pray that we will prevail and stand throughout persecution.”

Doubt and Faith

Posted on 20 April 201429 March 2020 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Ezekiel 37:1-14; Luke 24:33-43, John 20:19-31)

Thomas has gotten a raw deal from the church over the years. For centuries, in the Western church, he’s been remembered not as an apostle of stubborn faith and the man who first preached the gospel of Jesus Christ to India, but as “Doubting Thomas.” For centuries, that phrase has been a byword for a skeptic, and particularly a foolishly unreasonable one. He doesn’t deserve that. The fact that we so often read John’s account as if he did says more about us than it does about either Thomas or John.

We don’t see a lot of Thomas in the gospels (only a few brief appearances in John), but I think we get a picture of an introverted man of deep emotions, with a definite pessimistic streak—perhaps the sort who used pessimism to protect himself against hope. In John 11, when Jesus tells his disciples he’s going back to Jerusalem, they try to talk him out of it; when Jesus persists, Thomas says, “Let’s go with him so that we may die with him.” Here, we’re not told why Thomas wasn’t with the rest of the group on the day of the resurrection, but I have a hunch he was off by himself trying to come to terms with the disaster of the crucifixion. You may know people like that—when they’re hurting, they shut everyone out and process it by themselves, until they feel ready to deal with other people again. I suspect that was Thomas all over.

As readers, we have the advantage of a bird’s-eye view of the events that followed Jesus’ resurrection. We know the whole story, and we can see where everyone is and what they’re doing. The disciples didn’t have that. They hadn’t read the end of the book—they were living the story and trying to make sense of it. We see this in John 20. Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb, finds it open, and comes running to Peter and John to tell them someone’s stolen Jesus’ body. They go running, look in the empty tomb, and think—what? John tells us that “he saw and believed,” but in the next breath he says, “They still didn’t understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” So what, exactly, did John believe?

Then that evening, the disciples are all gathered—with the doors locked, because they’re afraid the Jewish leaders might come after them next. Then, suddenly—there’s Jesus. Never mind locked doors, never mind walls, there he is. They’ve been telling each other he’s alive, but when he actually shows up, they think he’s a ghost. That sounds bad, but we shouldn’t be too hard on them. After all, it was one thing to believe that Jesus had come back to life; that was hard enough. To have expected him to defy the laws of physics by suddenly appearing in locked rooms would have been quite something else again. What else would you call someone who walks through walls, but a ghost?

Jesus doesn’t condemn them. He gives them his peace, to calm their fear, and then he invites them to touch him and to see his wounds. He even goes so far as to eat a piece of fish in their presence before they believe it’s really him; only then do they begin to rejoice. They’ve been told Jesus is alive, and they say they believe it—but when he actually shows up, they need proof.

Then Thomas rejoins the group, having started to come to terms with Jesus’ death, no doubt expecting to spend some time mourning with his friends—and instead, he gets a cockeyed story about Jesus raised from the dead. Put yourself in his place: what would you have thought? Yeah, you’d have thought they’d all cracked under the emotional strain and taken a group vacation from reality. Thomas understandably refuses to believe a word of it unless—notice this—he gets the same proofs Jesus gave them.

The next Sunday, they’re all together again behind locked doors, and once again Jesus just shows up in the room. Once again, he gives them his peace, and then he turns to Thomas and says, “Here I am, and here are my wounds; touch me, and believe.” But Thomas doesn’t need it. He doesn’t need to watch Jesus eat lunch. He looks at Jesus and exclaims, “My Lord and my God!”

This is the central confession of this gospel, the point to which the whole book builds, because Thomas goes farther than any of the other disciples ever had. To avoid accidentally taking God’s name in vain, no observant Jew would ever, or will ever, say it. Instead, they substitute the word “Lord.” For Thomas to call Jesus “My Lord and my God” can only mean one thing: he understands that Jesus is the one true God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Notice how Jesus responds to Thomas’ great confession of faith. He doesn’t praise Thomas for it, as he had earlier when Peter said, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God”; nor does he chastise Thomas for his doubt. Instead, he prods him a little. “Because you have seen me, you have believed,” Jesus says. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” He’s not comparing Thomas to the other disciples here—they had all had to see Jesus before they believed, and the others had had to see rather more of him. He’s pointing Thomas beyond himself and beyond his own situation, to days yet to come.

It would not be long before Thomas would be proclaiming the news he had at first refused to believe—Jesus who was crucified has risen from the dead!—to people who wouldn’t see Jesus come popping in to prove it. The Lord is pointing Thomas to those of us who would come later, who would have no choice but to believe without having the evidence right in front of us; and he’s speaking to us. From the first readers of this gospel down to the present day, we’ve all believed in Jesus without seeing or touching him. We’ve known doubt, just as Thomas did, but unlike him, we’ve had to go forward by faith; we haven’t been able to rest on personal proof the way he did.

When we dismiss Thomas as a doubter, we read this passage as if we stood above him, as if his doubt were somehow exceptional. When we do that, we cut ourselves off from the comfort Jesus offers here. We need to come into the story at Thomas’s level and stand beside him, as people who also have times when we struggle to believe, and maybe even are afraid to. It can be hard to believe in Jesus. We haven’t seen him, and we haven’t seen anyone who was embalmed and buried come alive again. I suspect that many of us have wished once or twice that we could just see Jesus, and touch him, and have him tell us we’re doing okay. The thing is, in his words to Thomas, we have his assurance that he knows how hard it is. That’s why he pronounced a special blessing on us, and on our faith; and that’s why he sent us the Holy Spirit, to carry us through.

That’s also why John wrote this gospel, to carry that blessing. He wrote to give us reason to overcome our doubt and fear and believe in Jesus Christ—and that isn’t a once-for-all struggle that we leave behind once we accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. At least, for most of us it isn’t, and so we need John’s witness, we need to hear the promises Jesus made to all who follow him. And we need the reassurance that in the times that we doubt, Jesus does not condemn us; rather, he comes gently to us as he did to Thomas and restores our faith, so that we can say with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”

We are no less in Christ when we doubt than when our faith seems strong; and we are no weaker when we doubt, because it was never about our strength anyway. Christ has risen from the dead by the power of his Holy Spirit, and he has breathed his Holy Spirit into us—the Spirit of resurrection, who makes the dead ones live and the dry bones dance. The power is not in our faith, but in the one in whom we put our faith; and he holds our faith firm even when we can’t. He holds us together even when we can’t. He has given us his life, which has overcome death. No matter how dark things may seem, he will bring us through, and in the end, we will see the Son rise.

Nonviolent Protestors

Posted on 13 April 201424 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Isaiah 8:11-15; 1 Peter 3:13-22)

Peter has exhorted his readers not to fight fire with fire, but rather with blessing, offering the assurance of God’s word that “the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are open to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.” He follows that in verse 13 with a proverb: “Who’s going to persecute you for being eager to do good?” The implied answer is “no one,” and in general—which is the level on which proverbs work—that’s true. In the normal course of events, if others see you doing things they consider to be good, they aren’t going to attack you for that. Peter’s appealing here, as he has at earlier points in the letter, to the fact that even a corrupt society recognizes much of what is truly good, and appreciates it as such. As a general rule, people who do evil are punished, and those who don’t, aren’t.

Still, that’s only generally true. It doesn’t always hold, and Peter knows it. Some people hate what is right, and enjoy tormenting “do-gooders”; others feel threatened by those whose example makes them look bad. Then too, there are those for whom it’s strictly business. Nothing personal, but the morally upright are just easier to rip off and abuse, that’s all.

Beyond that, while there is much that God calls good with which the world agrees, we know the world is in rebellion against God; it seems each culture and every generation rebels in different ways, but there are always aspects of his righteousness which the world declares evil rather than good. As we saw in the Beatitudes, anyone who hungers and thirsts for the righteousness of God will end up being persecuted sooner or later. If you hunger and thirst for his righteousness, then you aren’t hungry and thirsty for the bill of goods this world wants to sell you, and you aren’t aiming to go where it wants you to go. Instead, you will find yourself a walking contradiction to beliefs and commitments which the culture declares self-evident and non-negotiable, and the world will find it has no hold over you; that makes you a threat.

Instinctively, the fight-or-flight reflex drives us to react to worldly opposition by either backing down or going to war. Large sections of the church in this country have taken the latter course as official policy, whether by trying to wall the world out or through political and cultural offensives. Tellingly, their efforts do little to convince the culture of the love and grace of Jesus, and too often they end up being of the world even though they aren’t in it. But for the rest of the church, which seeks to remain engaged with the world, compromise is a constant, insidious temptation. There’s always the pressure to conform to the world—to look for some way to justify telling our society what it wants to hear. Though we learn to hunger and thirst for righteousness, the hunger and thirst for the approval and applause of those around us never quite goes away.

Neither combat nor compromise is the right course. As Peter tells us, we’re called to a third way: to oppose without fighting, to stay connected without compromising. Our job is to be different from the world—conspicuously, but not combatively, assertively but not aggressively. On the one hand, we need not fear what the world fears—and fear drives the world as much as anything does. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, as the Scriptures tell us, in part because it puts every other fear in perspective: compared to him, every earthly threat is insignificant. If we fear God, we can be fearless with the world, and thus free to proclaim our faith boldly without feeling the need to protect or defend ourselves from anyone or anything around us.

Thus, on the other hand, we don’t actually need to fight for our faith. We’re to contend for it, yes, but not in the world’s way. It’s not our job to defeat others and win arguments, and nothing justifies tearing other people down or belittling them. You’ll notice Peter says in verse 15 that we should always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks the reason for our hope. We’re supposed to preach the gospel, yes, and do it without compromise, but Peter doesn’t tell us to push that conversation. Rather, he envisions us living in such a way that other people ask usabout our faith. What we say about Jesus ought to be credible, whether they want to accept it or not, because it’s backed up by what they’ve already seen in our lives. If people haven’t already seen the sermon, they aren’t going to want to hear it, or be likely to believe it if they do.

Toward the powers of this world, then, we are to live as nonviolent protestors, actively resisting without fighting back. Our strength is the strength of the Holy Spirit, which is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, who suffered without even threatening to retaliate, and died to save even those who were killing him. In a culture which is increasingly convincing itself that orthodox Christianity stands against progress, we must stand firmly against what this world thinks is progress, but do so with only gentleness and respect. If we do so, there will be loud voices that will slander us in every way they can think of, and many will believe those slanders because they want to; but those who take the time to look at us will see them for the lies they are, and that will be a more powerful witness to Jesus Christ than anything we could devise.

Our culture, for all that it’s running on the fumes of the faith of generations past, still has a deeply-ingrained belief that love is the best thing there is—a belief which really didn’t exist apart from belief in the God of the Bible. This society has divorced that belief in love from any belief in God, but for now, that belief in the idea of love remains. As a result, we have a culture which loves to talkabout love, but is losing any sense of any obligation to show love, especially if that would require any sort of self-sacrifice. “Love” has become a weasel word, used to justify whatever the powerful and the fashionable want to justify.

>We can’t out-argue that. It’s hard to argue someone into believing what they don’t want to believe, and at this point, the cultural headwind makes it impossible. Even if that weren’t so, the best an argument could win us with most people would be intellectual agreement, and that isn’t our goal; that doesn’t change people’s hearts. Indeed, it often doesn’t even change their behavior, unless you have the power to require the behavior you desire—which only hides the fact that their hearts haven’t really changed.

But then, we can’t change other people’s hearts, no matter what we do. Only God can do that, and he does it through his love. We can’t argue the world into believing its view of love is wrong; we can only show it to be wrong by loving the world as God loved the world. We can only show the world the love of God by loving one another, and by loving our families, and by loving our neighbors, and by loving the desperate, the powerless, and the outcast—and by loving our enemies, and seeking to bless them rather than insult them or condemn them.

This is hard; and for a long time in Western culture, the church could believe it didn’t have to do that, because the cultural authorities were outwardly friendly. But now, even in America, we are riding out of Palm Sunday and toward the cross. We’ve been accustomed to the praise, and we’ve taken it as our due, expecting it to continue. Jesus knew better. He knew the crowd’s allegiance was shallow and fickle, and that they would soon turn on him; and he knew he wasn’t there to receive their praise, but to suffer and die for them.

A Colony of Heaven

Posted on 6 April 201419 October 2015 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Psalm 34:11-18; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, 1 Peter 3:8-12)

I mentioned a few weeks ago my euphoria when Seattle won the Super Bowl; of course, as any Ravens fan could tell you, after you win, you lose a lot of your players, and so it has been for us. Some of those departures won’t hurt us much; others will be harder to replace. Kathy, you can tell your mother she’s going to love Golden Tate for the Lions. The only two who really stung, though, were a couple of defensive ends who we cut to save money, Red Bryant and Chris Clemons. Big Red especially, because he’d been the emotional leader of the defense for years. He gave the team its rallying cry through the past two seasons: “We all we got—we all we need.”

It’s a great line; and while the line has departed with Big Red, I hope the spirit lives on in that locker room, because that’s the attitude and approach that builds a cohesive team out of a bunch of very different people. “We all we got,” so we have to depend on one another—no one else is going to show up to help us out if we don’t. “We all we got,” so we need to build one another up, not tear each other down—we can’t strengthen the team by hurting one of its members. Any harm we do to another, we do to all of us, including ourselves. “We all we got,” so it’s up to us to take care of each other and be there to support one another—if we don’t, who will? And if we take that approach and treat each other that way, then truly, “we all we need.”

This isn’t just true in football, either; in fact, it’s a pretty good one-line summary of Peter’s commands in this passage. The bookends to verse 8, which NIV translates as “live in harmony” and “be humble,” could more literally be translated “of one mind” and “humble of mind.” Peter’s point isn’t that we’re all supposed to hold identical opinions, of course. Rather, he’s saying the same thing Paul says in Romans 12: we should all have the same mindset as one another, because all our minds are to be set on the things of the Spirit of God. It’s the mindset Paul describes in Philippians 2: “Let this mind be in you, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who didn’t insist on his rights or cling to his prerogatives, but opened his hands and let them all go to serve us, humbling himself in obedience, even to the point of death on a cross.”

Yes, we disagree on many things, but we share one salvation in one Lord through one faith by one grace, and none of us has any claim to stand above anyone else. The more we appreciate our own desperate need for grace—and even the best of us stands in desperate need, make no mistake—the less we will be inclined to look down on others for their need. The more we see one another as the beloved of Christ, for whom he died and rose again, the less free we will feel to beat one another up to get our own way. If our focus is on Jesus Christ through his Holy Spirit, we will be of one mind and spirit where it matters. We will be humble toward God and one another, and we will treat each other with love, compassion, and understanding, because we will see ourselves in the light of God’s grace, as people who need love, compassion, and understanding.

This is important for many reasons, both spiritual and practical, and the practical reasons are very much on Peter’s mind here. He’s still focused on the reality of their lives as outlanders in a suspicious and increasingly hostile world. He says in verse 9, “Don’t return evil for evil or insult for insult”; the word for insult rarely appears in Scripture, but one of the few places either this noun or its verb form is used in the New Testament is by Peter in 2:23, talking about Jesus. He’s tying this in to his broader theme: when we’re treated unjustly, we need to have this mind in us which is ours in Christ Jesus, to trust in God’s justice and not return fire, and to be more concerned for the good of others than for our own pain.

Part of the reality of that is that we can’t do it on our own—we need the support of other believers. We need the church, and we need it to be functioning as the church. We’re not going to find help in thinking like Christ and living like Christ from the world; the church is all we have. We all we got, and we need to treat each other accordingly. We’re vulnerable, and all the more so if we don’t support and build up one another. The church in this country has been able to ignore that reality for a long time because we’ve been used to having the support and protection of the powers that be, but that’s going away, ever more quickly. We’re being reminded that we aren’t a powerful nation on this earth in our own right, but a colony of heaven, dependent on the power of God.

That colony language doesn’t come from Peter or from 2 Corinthians, but from Philippians 3, which we read a few weeks ago. Philippi was a Roman colony, established to help secure Roman power in that region, and so all the freedmen of the city were given Roman citizenship. They took great pride in that fact. When Paul said, “Our citizenship is in heaven,” he was calling them to radically rethink their whole identity—to see themselves not as a colony of an earthly power, but as a colony of the power of heaven amongthe powers of this world. Peter here is calling his hearers to the same thing.

Of course, like Philippi, we’re a colony with a purpose beyond merely making money. We’re here to be the physical representation of the kingdom of heaven on earth. We’re here to carry forward Jesus’ ministry of reconciliation, calling people to be reconciled to God through him. We’re a diplomatic colony to bear witness to the gospel, that there is salvation in Jesus Christ by grace alone, and that no matter what you’ve done, Jesus loves you enough that he died to save you. We cannot carry out this mission if we don’t show each other the love and the grace of Christ.

We can’t because we’re a colony. We’re an outpost. We can’t appeal to the powers of this world to protect us or to do our job for us. Not any more. We all we got in this world. To borrow from Ben Franklin, we must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately. But God provides and the Spirit is with us, and in his Spirit, we all we need, just as we are.

More than that, we can only carry out our mission if we live with each other in love and grace—to frame it positively—because how we live with each other is how we earn credibility to preach love and grace to those around us. Why should anyone believe in the sacrificial love of Jesus if they can’t see us laying down our lives in love for one another? Why should anyone believe that our God is a God of grace if we aren’t a people of grace? We can only teach people that Jesus lives if they see him living among us. The only way we earn any credibility to tell them Jesus saves is if we live together as people who have been saved. May we ever be so, to the glory of God.