Whither Perseverance?

I’m starting to wonder about something.  I feel like Christianity has a tendency to want to turn faith and love into “chicken soup for the soul,” and I think I’ve been very guilty of this myself – searching scripture for references to peace, joy, and promises, and forgetting about suffering and perseverance.  It’s a half-truth – an understandable half-truth, but a half-truth nonetheless.

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?

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 31st, 2009 at 6:17 pm and is filed under Christian Life, Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.