Warn them before God against quarreling about words; it is of no value, and only ruins those who listen.

I often find myself frustrated over arguments about words.  They seem so pointless and divisive.  It’s nice to see the thought in one of Paul’s letters.

I think the half-truth takes a lot of forms with different people, some of them contradictory, but all of them have, at root, the same incomplete picture of who God is.  It might look like, for example:

• The “health and wealth” gospel, in its most egregious and shameless forms – corruptions of the prayer of Jabez, etc.
• A subtle belief that the extent of Christianity is to affirm the American middle class lifestyle – don’t get drunk on weekends, provide for your family, stay true to your wife, attend services regularly.  Church is a step on the way to a pleasant existence with kids and a nice school district.
• A belief that the extent of Christianity is to affirm your crunchy, urban lifestyle.  Jesus’s teachings are turned to support moral consumer habits and trendy attitudes – the blue state version of the same red state half-truth.
• A simplistic view of God termed “moralistic therapeutic deism” – God is “there for me,” and exists primarily to comfort me when I’m down. Sure, God wants me to be a good person (whatever that means), but doesn’t ask for any radical lifestyle changes.  God is a teddy bear in the sky.
• A push to make Christianity “practical” for the “here-and-now,” as opposed to a focus on the afterlife (expressed by Pastor Bob Cornwall in a post linked to by fellow Boston-area worker Steve Holt as the future direction of American Christianity)
• An overemphasis on natural living, spiritual disciplines, and meditation, carrying the implicit belief that being right with God means feeling peaceful all the time
• An overemphasis on the idea of “community,” particularly the good parts – forgetting that community (like marriage, like friendship, like lots of things) is really hard, often hurts like crap, and takes work.

There are many other ways the half-truth gets promulgated – and I would like to reiterate that I don’t think it’s a lie.  Just an incomplete picture of who God is (as all pictures must be).  God really does grant good things in the here and now, really does work all things for the good of those who love God, really does give us a spirit of peace that passes understanding.  It’s all true.  But it’s not the only truth.

The actual lie part of the half-truth that I find myself having to pull away from is this:  the more “in tune” you are with God, the more you obey his will, the happier and more pleasant your life will be in the here and now.  It’s the life trajectory we want – it’s the American dream, the human dream, in any of the various forms it takes – urban or rural, blue state or red state, old or new.  We want life to gradually get better and better, more stable or more exciting (depending on our personality), more peaceful or more thrilling.  First you add an education to the pot, then a marriage, then a job, then a family, a house.  Or maybe it’s a different set of things – a job that gives you variety and independence, a lifestyle that gives you excitement or tranquility when you want them, a sense of purpose to your life but not a purpose that encroaches too much.  I feel this way a lot (granted, more the red-state version than the blue-state, but you get the idea).

If you could draw a graph where the x-axis is “walking with God” and the y-axis is “peace” or “happiness” or “prosperity” or any number of positive things that we want for our lives, you might get the impression listening to various Christian authorities that the graph looks like a big, diagonal line going up all the time.  The more you walk with God, the happier you get.

I don’t think the Bible teaches that.  I don’t think life teaches that.  The universe is practically screaming at us that there’s more to it than that.  Pain, suffering, and death play a huge role in the life of a Christian.  They have to, because love always comes with hurt, and life always comes with death.  Paradoxically, Jesus both conquers death and submits to it – in fact, teaches us to die every day – take up our crosses daily and follow him.  The metaphors we often get for the Christian walk in scripture are things like running a race, doing a job – even fighting a battle.  With these metaphors, the chart I talk about would actually look like the letter U.  Things start out pretty good, and then you work, and you suffer, and you hurt, and you die every day, and then – you receive your reward, and it’s the most glorious thing ever.

The “U” looks a lot more like Jesus’s life than the upward diagonal line.  Think of Philippians 2.  Did Christ live a funky, crunchy lifestyle, being in tune with nature and living the good life so much that people were just naturally drawn to this life-well-lived?  I don’t believe so.  He suffered, was persecuted, and died horribly – as far as living life well in the here and now, it seems like he could have done better.

Consider Matthew 8:20:

Jesus replied, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

He talked about his life as a cup that he had to drink, and nowhere does he imply that this cup is overbrimming with chocolatey goodness.  And here’s a difficult teaching (Luke 14):

²⁵Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: ²⁶“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. ²⁷And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

²⁸“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? ²⁹For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, ³⁰saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’

³¹“Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? ³²If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. ³³In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.

³⁴“Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? ³⁵It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; it is thrown out.
“He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Gee.  Is Jesus really saying that, for some people, not following him is the rational choice, because it’s going to be so difficult and challenging that they won’t be able to complete the job?  There are gazillions of passages just like this throughout the New Testament – shockingly brazen, frightening, and tremendously convicting and challenging.  Where does all this fit in with the idea of God who wants us to live more “effectively” in the here and now?  Where does perseverance fit in?  Where does persecution and suffering and dying every day fit in?  Walking with Jesus isn’t the way to live more effectively in the here and now.  It’s a way to die more effectively in the here and now.  Over and over.

I want to be able to read Scripture and not feel like I have to massage or maneuver around the words to get it to make sense.  Accepting that the cost of following Jesus is high, and that there will be suffering and death, makes the words fall into place so much more easily for me.  The continual talk of perseverance and discipline makes sense again.  The peace and joy that God offers, paradoxically, I think, become even more astonishing and important, given the task at hand.  Suffering is no longer an indication that I’m doing something wrong – that God lied or reneged on his promises – that God isn’t there.  Suffering is part of the walk, part of the path God has laid out for us.  And he will help us endure it.  But we still have to endure it.  It scares the crap out of me, but it’s much better than wondering if the negative feelings that come with life “mean” all these really awful things.

And, weirdly, being ok with suffering on some intellectual level feels right to me.  Does it feel right to you?

It strikes me as too simplistic.  A godly community, like a godly marriage or a godly friendship, has many obvious and wonderful benefits.  But would it hurt to acknowledge, every so often, that it requires a great deal of effort?  That true community, like marriage or friendship, doesn’t just “happen” and stay “happened”?  That to a certain extent, it isn’t natural, organic, or easy?

Community and friendship are easy (and even then not very easy) only with people who are pretty much just like you.  But that’s clearly not what God calls us to.  Nor is engaging in community with people who are very different simply a question of getting over our initial prejudices and giving it a try.  It can take continual effort to be engaged with someone who isn’t like you.

Some Americans, I think, fool themselves into thinking that they have reached across boundaries.  Some have, of course, but a great many have reached across only superficial boundaries.  Skin color, sexual orientation, sex, national background, etc. can be barriers, but among people who are otherwise basically the same they’re not that difficult to cross – if we’re both educated, intellectual, young people who think alike and value the same things, being in community with each other isn’t that hard.

But crossing other kinds of boundaries – age, culture, and education level, for example – can be harder.  A whole heck of a lot harder.

And then there’s another paradox – the more effort it takes to be someone’s friend, the less that friendship actually feels like a friendship.  Friendship isn’t supposed to be an effort, right?

I remember feeling this way in my church youth group back in high school.  There were a couple people like me, but most of the other kids were very different in one way or another.  They had different tastes in things to do, were much older or younger, lived in a different culture.  But they were all very nice, and often made honest efforts to connect with me.  It just didn’t matter much to me, because who wants to be the guy who takes effort to talk to?  I made a distinction to myself around the 7th or 8th grade or so:  there’s a big difference between being friendly and being a friend, and “friendly” can only take you so far.

It presents a difficult core to the question.  An ideal-looking community would surely have everyone be sincere, authentic friends with everyone else, regardless of intelligence, background, age, or culture.  But there’s a level at which you just CAN’T be authentic friends with everyone.  You can only make an effort, and that effort will at some level be noticeable.

So when it comes to building a community of Christ, is it reasonable to expect that everyone be authentic friends with everyone else?  Is that what a godly community really looks like?

I’m inclined to say no.  I think loving each other is very different from being best friends with each other.  Evangelical churches talk a lot about “relationships” and so we figure that’s the end-all, be-all of Christianity, but there’s also the “mission” component (another recent fad, but one I respect somewhat more).  What should unite us should not be, at bottom, our love for each other.  What should unite us should be our commitment to Christ.  We love each other not because we like each other, but because we’re committed to following Jesus.

The idea of working together towards a common goal can actually break down more barriers than the idea of liking spending time with each other – since there’s lots of people out there we don’t really like spending time with.  I imagine that, if you want to form bonds with someone not at all like you, it’s easier to do so as a fellow solider in an army rather than standing awkwardly at a “mixer” with drinks in hand.

Community can, of course, bring about mission via encouragement and spurring.  But mission can also bring about community, by giving us something to work towards outside of ourselves, making us a part of something bigger – our personal enjoyment of another person’s company matters less.

I don’t think this means we shouldn’t be friendly or make efforts to be friends with people not like us.  But we should be aware that it isn’t easy (it’s artificial, to a significant extent, which isn’t bad), and we shouldn’t base all our evangelistic efforts on our ability to like being around other people.  Because we won’t always.

“Take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well.”

“Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

“Recover your sight; your faith has made you well.”

I don’t believe this language is merely a cultural idiosyncracy or a euphemism. Today’s evangelical culture makes a big deal about giving God the credit for things, and it’s hard to argue with that, although it does strike folks as lame, silly, or contrived to see victorious athletes point upward, as if trying to deflect the glory they have received.  Preachers and ministers struggle with their desire to be praised for their talents with their desire to be humble before God.  And yet…

Here we have Jesus giving the credit for several miraculous signs, including the salvation/forgiveness of sins of one woman, not to God, but to the individual’s faith.  Does faith have power on its own?  This concept doesn’t seem foreign to scripture at all.  Consider Matthew 17:20:

[Jesus] replied, “Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

He didn’t say, “You can pray to God for X and God will do X.”  He placed a direct connection between your word and the action, based on faith even as small as a mustard seed.

I’m not entirely sure what my conclusion is on these points, although I’m leaning towards a few things.

1) I think we ought to be careful not to allow a false humility to disempower ourselves.  Rather than chastising ourselves for feeling like we did something and saying, “No, I know God really did it,” we should instead acknowledge the honest power that God has allowed us because of our faith, and not be afraid to use it.

2) The point isn’t that God is ultimately not in charge, but that he has willingly empowered us to do his will (or to do evil), and we should act like it.  It’s a great responsibility.

More thoughts to come.

I should be packing now, but I’d much rather respond to a post my friend Taylor Williams put up on his personal blog today, so interesting did I find it. It’s a short post full of things to mull over, and here are my mullings:

I guess the primary thing that struck me is just how different Taylor’s sensibilities are towards creativity than mine. He says he chose photography because it was a fundamentally humble art form – rather than creativity, you simply “reflect” the beauty of things you discover. This is akin to the Christian life, in that we are to humbly reflect the glory of God to those around us.

Some things about this strike me as true, and others not as much. The division of photography from other art forms on this basis is a bit oversimplified. First off, there IS a good deal of creativity involved in photography, from what I am able to tell – finding new ways to look at things, using devices and personal skill – there is a lot of you in the pictures you take. I suppose on the higher level it’s less evident, as the immediate focus of a camera is something the photographer is not personally responsible for – but the photographer, by simply taking the photograph, is making a judgement on the subject, and inviting others to either share or reject that judgement – most likely hoping that people will enjoy it for the same reasons he or she did. The photo is full of the photographer.

The interesting thing is, other forms of art are pretty much exactly the same in this regard. Take lyric writing. On one level, there’s “creation” – once there was no lyric on this page, now there is. But on a deeper level I think it’s closer to photography than people might realize. For example, I find it intensely affecting when the long “I” vowel is held on a long note. I didn’t really come up with that, it’s just there, and it affected me, in the same way that that beautiful scene was there and it affected the photographer. So the lyricist puts that “I” on the long note because it sounds cool, and the photographer captures the scene because it looks cool – both actions full of the creator, in the sense of, “I found this neat – don’t you?” A lot of art, it seems to me, is essentially finding things that we’re not responsible for and arranging them and displaying them in ways to call attention to the things about them we like. I suppose there’s more evident arrangement and technical skill involved in lyric writing than photography, but I imagine some photographers out there would happily disagree. Nor is it true that personal skill always shines through lyrics while great photographs minimize the role of the photographer. The truly great songs are the ones that are so natural, so perfectly affecting, that they don’t seem written at all. It floors us that great songs were “written” because they seem to us to have been “discovered.” I suspect, in a very deep sense, they were.

So the distinction is less important here. I suspect Taylor enjoys photography not because it’s not creative, but because it allows him to share what affects him in a way that allows him to use his talents, which is what creativity mostly is, anyway.

After all, none of us are really “creating” anything. That’s God’s realm alone. But we get a thrill over mixing ourselves into this thing that we like, by “making” (arranging and manipulating) something or “capturing” or “reflecting” it, and gets us close enough to creativity to give us the thrill. That thrill, I believe, is a wonderful gift from God that we shouldn’t beat down. After all, he made us in his own image for a reason. Bible major syndrome (”I don’t want to glorify me, I want to glorify God“) can get too extreme in creative people, incapacitating themselves out of fear of becoming prideful. I’d like to think that it’s not pride to recognize when something is good, to recognize when you have a talent for sharing that with people in artful ways, and to take joy in what you’ve done. That’s a gift and we ought to treasure it. We are told to think on whatever is right, noble, pure, lovely, virtuous, etc. and so it seems like a good idea to me to be pumping out as much lovely, noble, pure stuff as we can, so we have more to think on.

Now moving on to Taylor’s idea of “humbly reflecting the glory of God to those around us.” I’m sure he does not actually have in mind by this what immediately popped into my mind, but then, I am a lot more cynical about this kind of thing (I bet). And that’s the idea of passivity, embodied in that wretched movie Joshua, in which Jesus returns to 20th century Alabama in the form of a really nice guy who changes a town into a utopia without ever being confrontational, aggressive, or offensive in the slightest way – a modernized Jean Valjean. But not terribly close to Jesus of Nazareth, it seems to me. Jesus did not simply lead a perfect life and expect other people to notice and fall down at his feet – he taught, he preached, he cajoled, he pronounced “woe,” he engaged, to use Steve Holt’s word that I find so appropriate. We, of course, should be reflecting the glory of God to those around us, and it should be so wrapped up in our identities that it shines from us, and we should be humble. But we have to make sure that humble doesn’t mean “not bold” and “not powerful” and “not willing to confront or offend when necessary.”

But that’s really a side point, I think.