Tag: community

Spiritual Heritage

And you should not think to say among yourselves, “We have Abraham as father.” -John the Baptist (Matthew 3:9a)

The Pharisees who came against John’s baptism thought that they did not need to “make fruit worthy of repentance,” because they could trace their lineage back to Abraham. They claimed Abraham as the forefather of their religious and ethnic identity. They saw themselves as the ones who had things right, who had God figured out. And John the Baptist’s life and message did not fit into their paradigm.

When I think of the Pharisees claiming Abraham as their forefather, I think of some of the people who might be claimed as forefathers by different groups of Protestants today. John Calvin could be claimed as a kind of forefather for Presbyterians; Martin Luther for Lutherans; John Wesley for Methodists.

Some churches claim no particular forefather other than Bible itself; these churches too, of course, have their own forefathers. Many evangelical churches, for example, stem from the US revivalist tradition―a tradition that spans, over three centuries, from George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, to Charles Finney, to Dwight Moody, to Billy Graham.

Sometimes different kinds of churches and faith movements can also function as our forefathers. For me―for better or for worse, and usually some of each―the Presbyterian church is my forefather, InterVarsity is my forefather, the nondenominational Bible church movement is my forefather.

It can be good to claim our heritage and traditions, to remember the people who shaped these traditions, to declare whom we have as predecessors in the faith. Naming these things, as the Pharisees might have named Abraham, can help us understand where we come from. It builds a more secure sense of identity. It helps us wrap our minds around why our practices and beliefs are what they are. It can even aid us in imagining how we might continue to form and re-form our traditions to carry their best gifts into a new time with its new experiences and new issues.

After all, every forefather was only human. None of them was right about everything. And each of them needs to be re-examined and re-framed anew each generation, to make sense in a changing world, to offer insights that are life-giving for a new group of people in a new situation.

On top of all this, all of the Protestant forefathers I have named so far―and I’m sure we could name many more―were white men. All of them. What perspectives, insights, and knowledge are we missing if these kinds of voices are the only voices we acknowledge and invite to shape our sense of faith?

Fortunately, we live in a time when female scholars and scholars of color are many and their work is accessible. Unfortunately, seminaries do not always include much of this work in their curricula, and churches do not always include much of it in their Bible studies, preaching, book recommendations, etc.

For those of us who tend to dwell in white-male-dominated church-y spaces, expanding our sense of our spiritual forefathers to include foremothers and people of color can help us have a broader and fuller view of God. It can help correct some of the blind spots and prejudices of our white spiritual forefathers―which, in most of their cases, is sorely needed.

Ultimately, Jesus says that we are not to call anyone on earth father, because we have one Father, the heavenly one (Matthew 23:9). God in heaven is our parent, the one in whose image we are made. God, not Abraham or Calvin or Luther or anyone else, is the one we are meant to reflect. The one whose heart and mind we are to seek to embody.

God in heaven is our parent. We are all children of God, and therefore siblings to one another. We belong to each other and are responsible for one another. The Pharisees thought of religious family very narrowly, and so (often) do we―but for John, and for Jesus, family proves much broader and deeper than a claim to any particular human predecessor.

There must be a way, however elusive, to claim the gifts and strengths of our own various spiritual heritages without devolving into tribalism, without seeing others from different traditions through a competitive lens, without letting these lineages cause us to forget that at our core we are all part of one human family.

This is not to diminish the differences between faith traditions, or to say that they are all equally good. There are movements within the Christian faith that work toward justice, and movements that work against it. Not all forefathers and foremothers are equally worth claiming. Not all traditions are worth keeping alive―and even those that are worth keeping alive need to be updated and adjusted over time.

So, as we think of John the Baptist’s warning to the Pharisees, may we remember our forefathers and foremothers, but also remember that no predecessor in our spiritual heritage is our parent in the same way that God is our parent. 
May we remember that spiritual predecessors are not grounds for superiority but sources of strength and courage. 
May we expand our openness to being shaped by female voices and voices of color as important parts of the spiritual heritage we choose.
May we keep alive traditions worth keeping, and re-think traditions that need re-thinking. 
May we, as John wanted the Pharisees to do out in the wilderness, drop all of our various claims to holiness via association and instead come to God humbly and directly.
And, as we do these things, may we find our place within God’s family.

Brood of Vipers (Part 2 of 2)

But when John saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Matthew 3:7).

(Same verse as yesterday, new thought.)

It must not have been very fun to be called a brood of vipers―the offspring of a venomous snake. I don’t know about you, but I have felt offended by words several shades more diplomatic than that!

A Christianity that tries to make people look more like some (not-particularly-biblical) image of a gentle Jesus―meek and mild and perhaps a bit anemic―has no place for harsh words like these. And yet, John says them. And, later on in the book of Matthew, Jesus says them. Twice. (See Matthew 12:34, 23:33).

I wonder where, or whether, there is a place for harsh words like “brood of vipers” in our world and in our faith communities today. Are we supposed to be nicer than that? I usually am―at least to people’s faces. It’s easier to say harsh things about someone than to someone.

When I think about harsh name-calling from Christians―things not entirely unlike John’s “brood of vipers”―I think about this recent article by Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. Wehner thoughtfully addresses statements recently made by (author and radio host) Eric Metaxas and (evangelist and Samaritan’s Purse CEO) Franklin Graham, in which Metaxas and Graham agree that there is a demonic spiritual power behind opposition to Trump. They don’t exactly call people who oppose Trump demonic, but it kind of feels like it.

Wehner’s piece is worth reading, I think. He takes issue, and rightly so, with Graham and Metaxas’ implication that everyone who supports Trump is on God’s side, and everyone who opposes Trump is on the side of the devil. For Wehner, this is a “dangerous” worldview that “leaves no room for the democratic virtue of compromise” and “makes makes learning from others who hold different views all but impossible.”

Wehner has some pointed (and very fair) critiques of Graham and Metaxas’ harsh words about Trump’s opposition. But Wehner seems hesitant to use harsh words in return. Among the strongest things he writes, he accuses Graham and Metaxas of “acute political tribalism” and says that they are “acting irresponsibly and unwisely.” He specifically does not want to say that either of these men is “wicked, malevolent, or at the mercy of demonic powers.”

Wehner has no interest in doing what I think he would see as stooping to Graham and Metaxas’ level and arguing that people who oppose Trump are actually the “Children of Light” and that people who support Trump are actually the “Children of Darkness.”

Wehner wouldn’t say these things. I wouldn’t say these things. Most Christians wouldn’t say these things. But if John the Baptist were here in the US today, would he? Would he call Trump and his cronies a brood of vipers?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I am wary of assuming too quickly that he wouldn’t. 

(Of course, in a case like this, I don’t know if there would even be a way to call out broods of vipers without the conversation devolving into a shouting contest of “you’re the brood of vipers.” “No, you’re the brood of vipers.” Brings back memories of “You’re the puppet!”)
I don’t know whether using words like “brood of vipers” is actually helpful in our context. It seems worth noting that John called the Pharisees and Sadducees―the religious leaders―broods of vipers, not the people who followed them or lived under their authority. So, if John were to call someone a brood of vipers, I imagine it would be Trump and the powerful people in his inner circles rather than every regular American who supports him.

There is also a difference, I think, between John’s “brood of vipers” and Graham and Metaxas’ “demonic influence.” While a viper, being a kind of snake, may bring to mind the devil (who is often called a snake in the Bible), the Greek word Matthew uses for “viper” is actually not the same word that the devil is called. “Viper,” as opposed to “snake,” seems to be more about the venomous or poisonous nature of the snake than about demonic powers per se.

It seems that John is saying that the Pharisees’ and Sadducees’ opposition of his baptism is poisonous. It works against the health and wellbeing of individuals and the community.

Perhaps in this light, we are not to demonize our every opponent, but we are to discern and name what is healthy and what is poisonous. This discernment can be complicated and involves hearing both from the Bible and from a diverse group of people’s stories and experiences.

Even if the demonizing impulse is to be avoided, though, I don’t think it’s necessarily helpful to just meet accusations of demonic influence with an “oh, well, people like Graham and Metaxas are mistaken, but that’s okay, no big deal, we’re all part of the same Christian family and we just need to be nice to each other and have unity.” (I don’t mean to accuse Wehner of doing this; I’m just reflecting in general on the state of things.)

John the Baptist did not meet the Pharisees’ and Sadducees’ opposition with “oh, well, I think you’re mistaken, but that’s okay, no big deal, it’s chill that you’re here trying to keep people from being baptized, all that matters that everyone’s nice and we all get along and no one gets upset.”

There are things that are in fact demonically influenced, like racism, and misogyny, and homophobia. Not in the sense that every person who says or does something racist, for example, is demon-possessed, but in the sense that racism is something God hates, something the forces of evil love. Racism, in all of its personal and structural forms, is evil, and there is no good that comes from beating around the bush and pretending otherwise.

To me, saying that there is demonic influence involved does not free us from responsibility for our own racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. Rather, it acknowledges that part of why evil power structures like these are lodged so deeply in our experience and prove so difficult to root out is that their roots are not entirely merely human.

“Brood of vipers” may or may not be the best word choice for us in our time and place, but reflecting on these words that John chose reminds me that there are higher values than playing nice and trying not to make waves. There is real evil, real poison, that needs, with careful discernment, to be named as such.

And in the areas where well-meaning people disagree about what makes for poison and what makes for health, let’s talk it through, even if it means that uncomfortable words are exchanged. The cost of pretending poisonous things are healthy is too high.

Unsatisfying Apologies

And they were baptized by John in the Jordan river, confessing their sins. (Matthew 3:7)

Confession can be a vague thing. It might sound like someone is confessing to a crime, or confessing their love. It might conjure up images of a confessional booth in a Catholic church, where a priest listens through a little window as someone talks about their sex life or how they haven’t been to church in a while. It might bring to mind a moment in a Protestant service for silent, individual soul-searching and prayer. (For me, this moment is often too short. I’m just starting to bring my mind back from wherever it was wandering and maybe just beginning to think about asking God to reveal my sin to me…and then the too-chipper pastor moves the service along to brighter and happier things.)

Confession can mean a lot of things, but at its core it just means to name something, and to do so openly. The Greek word translated as “confessing” in Matthew 3:7 is a conglomeration of roots that mean something like “out,” “together,” and “word.” (The meanings of Greek words, like English ones, are not always exactly equal to the sum of their parts, but the parts usually still provide some useful clues.)

A close relative of this word, which is made up of just “together” and “word,” is used more often in the New Testament. It is what Jesus uses when he says, whoever acknowledges (confesses) me before others, I will also acknowledge (confess) before my father in heaven (Matthew 10:32). It is what Paul uses when he writes, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved (Romans 10:9). Jesus wants to be named and acknowledged before others, and Paul wants people to speak and believe that Jesus is Lord.

Similarly, the people who confessed by the Jordan river were just naming their sins. They were acknowledging the wrongs they had done, in all of the ugly, awkward, painful specificity of these wrongs. I don’t know exactly how public these confessions were. I don’t know if people mumbled under their breath, ashamed, or if they shouted out so that the whole crowd could hear―or maybe some of each, depending on things like personality or perceived gravity of sin―but the confessions were put out there in some way. It was not just a silent time of personal prayer but, in some way, a shared communal experience.

When I think about these people being baptized by John in the Jordan and confessing out their sins―braving acknowledging and bluntly naming the specific ways they had failed to love God and people―I think of the courage it takes to do that. And, in contrast, I think of confessions I have heard, or heard about, that are not at all brave or blunt. Attempts at apologies that are in fact completely inadequate and unsatisfying.

I think of the various “apologies” high-profile men have offered when confronted with their actions over the course of the #metoo movement. Things like “I’m sorry if you took my comment that way,” or “I’m sorry if so-and-so didn’t think that what we did was consensual.”

I think about Matt Chandler, who is the lead pastor at an influential megachurch in Texas called The Village Church. A few months ago, Chandler addressed fellow Southern Baptist church leaders regarding his church’s gross mishandling of a woman’s accusations of child sexual abuse by a church leader, saying that The Village Church is “an imperfect church with imperfect people,” and “I’m not sure what we could have done different” (quotes are from this article).

These kinds of statements are so distant from any sort of real confession. They don’t actually name any wrongdoing. The people who speak and write them care much more about trying to clear their own public image and avoid legal repercussions than about taking ownership, understanding how they hurt someone, changing their ways, and, in the cases where it makes sense and is possible, seeking actual reconciliation and restoration of relationship.

By the time I read Christine Pohl’s book Living Into Community, I had heard of―and experienced firsthand―enough confession-avoiding, truth-bending, misleading, manipulative communication from churches and church-y leaders that I was struck by Pohl’s emphasis on truth-telling as one of four key components of Christian communal life. (The other three are promise-keeping, hospitality, and gratitude. It’s a good book.) 
Pohl’s words were refreshing and healing for me: We do not need to save face for God by ignoring certain relevant but problematic aspects of truth or reality (p. 136). Lies, small or large, undermine integrity, discipleship, and fidelity to God’s word (p. 144). It is wrong and irresponsible when colleagues, supervisors, or congregations allow a leader who has been involved in some form of grave misconduct to leave quietly and go to another congregation and continue ministry (p. 134).

These might seem like some very basic, obvious things; but in a world teeming with examples of just the opposite, they need to be said. Where there is no real confession, no real naming of the wrong and acknowledgment of the trauma it has caused, there is no integrity, no discipleship, no fidelity to God’s Word―none of the things Christians and churches and Christian leaders say they are all about.

The little faith community that formed around John the Baptist by the river did not require anything from people, but invited them to confess―really confess―and experience the joy and relief that comes from naming sin and facing up to it. Even, and perhaps especially, when confession might have held real and significant relational or social consequences, setting some of these people on a difficult path.

Some confessions might have continued in the form of hard conversations back in people’s villages, or on the journey home with friends and family. But they started there at the river. John’s announcement of the nearness of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 3:2) brought brave words out of his listeners: words of truth, words of justice, names of hidden sins that were now no longer swept under the rug as if they didn’t hurt people.

God is still near to those willing to speak these kinds of brave words. The kingdom of heaven still comes near.

Paul the Idol

Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region along the Jordan went out to him. (Matthew 3:5)

One of the church-y things churches sometimes talk about (because church-y people like to make up new words) is being “attractional” vs “missional.” Sometimes it feels like there is a kind of tension between the idea of focusing on faithfully worshiping God as a community centered in a place, open to outsiders coming to that place if they want to join―being “attractional”―and the idea of leaving the four walls of the church building to get out there in the community and do good things and perhaps (depending on the kind of church) evangelize―being “missional.”

If we want to try to fit John the Baptist into one of these categories, I suppose it would be attractional. His life and words and actions presented themselves as a weird sort of attraction out in the wilderness, and people from everywhere―the bustling capital city to small villages and remote rural areas―went out to him. “All Judea and all the region along the Jordan” may have been a bit of an exaggeration, but that must have been what it felt like. John didn’t travel from place to place to preach; he just stuck by the river and let people come to him. Lots of people.

When I think about all these people going out to John, I think about the contrast between John and Paul―Paul being the dude who traveled all around the Roman Empire to plant and help lead a bunch of new churches in a bunch of different cities, and in the process ended up writing a lot of the New Testament. And I think about how, at least in some Christian circles, people tend to look to Paul as an example of a good Christian life.

Sometimes people say and/or think things along these lines:

Look at Paul’s life! Paul got out there. He was so bold and courageous in traveling to all those different places to talk about Jesus and invite people to be Christians. He was on FIRE. If each of us mustered up a tenth of his energy for evangelism and missions, locally and globally, think what we could do! So many people would commit their lives to Jesus. So many people might join our church.

This kind of thing is not totally bad. After all, love Paul or hate him, it would be hard to argue that Paul was anything but a remarkable person who was deeply passionate about God. But when we talk about Paul as if everyone should be like him, it can easily turn into an odd sort of idolatry―an idolatry of someone who was, in the end, just a human like the rest of us, with his own unique personality, strengths, weaknesses, and sense of calling from God.

Paul went to meet people in their different cities. People came from their different cities to meet John. Thinking about this helps me remember that Paul’s style of life and ministry was and is by no means the only way to be faithful to God.

I even wonder if what Paul did might have made more sense in the context of Paul’s first-century world, when Christianity was an entirely new thing―a previously unheard-of way of life that many people embraced immediately when they saw it, because it was clearly good and different and promising. These days, I suspect that my friends who are not Christians are just glad I’m not interested in holding up anti-gay signs or campaigning for Trump 2020.

A lot of people, at least in the US, have so many assumptions about the God of Jesus―assumptions which are usually, unfortunately, quite fairly earned by Christians―and have had so many negative experiences with Christianity. Jumping from friendship to friendship and community to community in a frenetic effort to tell as many people as possible about Jesus may have made sense for Paul, but I wonder if the default now should involve staying in a community, staying in friendships, getting to know real people and letting them get to know the real us, investing deeply in a neighborhood and city, and letting God do what God does―bringing healing and hope and mercy and grace, in and around us, in God’s time. This might not look particularly “missional” in the Paul-like sense, but it is good.

John the Baptist did not make any effort to do the Paul-like thing of becoming all things to all people (1 Cor 9:22). He was completely himself, boldly himself. He ate weird stuff (see the previous post), said harsh-sounding things, told everyone they needed to repent, and preached out in the wilderness by the river, letting people come to him if they were interested. John was an all-around seeker-unfriendly, not-exactly-“missional,” kind of person.

I don’t mean to suggest that we should all be more like John and less like Paul. John was also a unique human with a unique kind of calling. I wonder, instead, if there are ways we might better honor the unique callings, gifts, personalities, passions, and styles that we see in one another. I wonder how we might learn to notice and fight against our tendencies to hold up any human life―that of Paul, or John the Baptist, or any other pastors, missionaries, or mentors we might look up to―as the way to live a good Christian life.

I wonder how we might better see, acknowledge, and be grateful for the people we know who, like Paul in his travels, are excited about visiting new places and talking with new people and starting new things―and how we might do the same for people who, like John the Baptist by the river, do one thing that they feel God has given them to do, in one place―and how we might do the same for the billion people who wrestle with God and faith and the Christian story in a billion different complex and beautiful ways, ways that don’t look much like either Paul or John.

May John’s example inspire us this Advent season to ditch any efforts to make anyone, including ourselves, more like Paul or anyone else, rather than more fully the person God made them to be. May John inspire us to see God in one another in new ways.

Into the Wilderness

In those days John the Baptist appeared, preaching in the wilderness of Judea. (Matthew 3:1)

Of all the places John the Baptist could have gone to preach, the wilderness was an interesting choice. This was not a fun, lively, well-developed national park with a nice visitor center (my kind of wilderness). This was wilderness-y wilderness. It was an uninhabited place, a lonely place, a solitary place―the kind of place where Jesus liked to go to be alone and pray (Mark 1:35). It was not a place that a savvy and strategic marketing team would have suggested for a promising young preacher like John to make his debut.

John’s voice echoed in the wilderness, as the prophet Isaiah had foretold long before (Matthew 3:3). At first John’s cries must have rung lonely and hollow in his own ears, carried off quickly by the desert wind―perhaps picked up, at best, by a small group of tentative followers, still a bit unsure of what to make of him. John kept calling out anyway: Repent; for the kingdom of heaven has come near (Matthew 3:2).

Then, a miracle: other people started to trickle in. In time the slow trickle became a massive flood, as people from the city of Jerusalem and the entire region of Judea crowded around (Matthew 3:5).

For these people, walking out into the wilderness meant disrupting the usual routines of their lives. And it meant stepping toward and into their own history as a people, a people to whom the wilderness meant something. They stepped into a history of forty years of wandering, a history of failure and difficulty and despair.

If we too are searching for a way to hear John’s message―a way to move toward repentance and renewed life and hope―perhaps we too must walk into the wilderness places of our lives and our world.

Perhaps for us, choosing to walk into the wilderness means honestly confronting our own personal past choices and present realities. Choosing to face the places in our lives where we feel lost and lonely. The partially-processed griefs, the hidden wounds, the habitual ways we hurt others.

And perhaps for us, choosing to walk into the wilderness also means honestly confronting our communal past choices and present realities. For white Americans such as myself, choosing to look straight at and regard seriously―and not downplay or skim over―a history and present-day reality full of death-dealing ways, ways of enslavement and genocide and internment camps and detention centers.

This is not an easy place to walk into. But it is the place where we find the possibility of repentance, baptism, new life, forgiveness, cleansing, grace―everything John the Baptist preaches about and offers. Where we find that the kingdom of heaven has come near and continues to come near.

And, as more and more people came out into the wilderness to hear John, the solitary place became less solitary. The lonely place became less lonely.

In that wilderness place there was no social club bound together by shared interests and experiences. The people who gathered together did not all sign the same statement of belief or agree to abide by the same codes of conduct. They did not all like and follow each other on Facebook and Instagram. They were just there, in the wilderness together, united only by a common awareness of their need to hear from God, their need for repentance, their need for forgiveness―just, their need.

The gift of the wilderness is the gift of honest, holy confrontation of oneself and one’s world, and the gift of the unlikely community that forms in that place. Like John the Baptist who preached in the wilderness and the people who went out to hear him, may we bravely walk into our own wilderness places in the hope that God might meet us there.