Outraged

“I just feel angry all the time.”

So shared a Christian friend of mine last week. “I feel like I’m going to snap. There’s so much wrong in society right now,” he continued.

I can sympathize. Maybe not about all the specifics - my political views don’t quite align with his - but certainly with the general sentiment. Over the last eighteen months in particular, there’s been a lot to feel angry about. And a lot of people have snapped:

• On July 31, an airline passenger allegedly assaulted and groped three flight attendants. He was duct-taped to his seat to get him under control.
• On July 6, a woman allegedly tried to exit an airplane in midflight. She was duct-taped to her seat to restrain her.
• In May, a flight attendant lost two teeth after being assaulted by a passenger.
• Nearly half of McDonald’s workers were verbally or physically assaulted over the summer of 2020.
• At least four employees have been killed in fights over masks.
• Domestic abuse rates have spiked since the pandemic started. According to Time: “300% in Hubei, China; 25% in Argentina, 30% in Cyprus, 33% in Singapore and 50% in Brazil… 18% in San Antonio, 22% in Portland, Ore.; and 10% in New York City… One study in the journal Radiology reports that at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, radiology scans and superficial wounds consistent with domestic abuse from March 11 to May 3 of this year exceeded the totals for the same period in 2018 and 2019 combined.”

I could go on for quite some time. And that’s without getting into the deeper fault lines over race, politics, religion, and economic differences. There’s so much to be angry about. To quote Heather Heyer, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” (Heather Heyer was herself a victim of the anger of the last five years; she was killed when someone drove a car into her during the Charlottesville, VA protests in 2017.)

“Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on the cause of your anger. Do not give the devil an opportunity.” - Eph. 4:26-27

By itself, anger is just a feeling, right? And feelings are simply part of being human; they aren’t automatically good, bad, moral, or immoral, any more than being tall or short or breathing oxygen or drinking milk or any other facet of being a human. Dallas Willard defines anger:

In its simplest form, anger is a spontaneous response that has a vital function in life. As such, it is not wrong. It is a feeling that seizes us in our body and immediately impels us toward interfering with, and possibly even harming, those who have thwarted our will and interfered with our life… The primary function of anger in life is to alert me to an obstruction to my will, and immediately raise alarm and resistance, before I even have time to think about it. (The Divine Conspiracy, p. 147-148)

This clarifies the situation: the reason everyone’s so angry is because there are so many obstructions to people’s wills right now. We will to go to restaurants and social gatherings without restriction or fear; to know that those around us are taking appropriate health precautions; to not have unreasonable health precautions forced upon us; to read the news without seeing the latest Democrat or Republican outrage; to work a stable job; to not lose loved ones. These wants and so many others have been repeatedly dashed over the last eighteen months.

“O Lord, do I not hate those who hate you and despise those who oppose you?” - Psalm 139:21

Add to that the deeper causes for anger. We will for there to be racial harmony and justice; for sufficient resources for the poor; for a society that correctly balances and exercises freedom and responsibility; for political leaders who demonstrate moral character and promote moral policies; for freedom from natural disasters like Haiti’s earthquake and Hurricane Ida; for peace and justice for war-torn countries like Afghanistan and oppressed peoples like the Uyghurs of China. And, as Christians, we will for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done on an earth where it so often isn’t. All of these wants, too, are repeatedly dashed. Righteous indignation is a natural response: to respond, like the psalmist in Psalm 139, with anger toward the enemies of God.

“The anger of the Lord will not turn back until he has fully carried out his intended purposes. In future days you will come to understand this.” - Jer. 30:24

And righteous indignation has a place. And it can be rather intoxicating: the rush of being angry, combined with the moral certitude that we’re right and the pleasure of being able to judge others. But the critical assumption behind hating God’s enemies is that we can correctly identify who God’s enemies are; we too often forget that, in present days, we may not yet understand his intended purposes. Because racism and poverty and political leadership and foreign policy are all wicked problems, and just maybe some of the people we think are God’s enemies actually have better ideas about how to address these temporal problems than we do, and just maybe some of the people we think are God’s enemies are actually appointed by him (for example, Isa. 45:1) for purposes we may not yet see.

The psalmist said in Psalm 139:21 that he hates God’s enemies, but that was only after Psalm 139:1-18, where he meditates on the mystery of God’s omniscience and the limitations of the psalmist’s own ability to understand him. And David demonstrated this attitude in his own life: when Absalom rebelled against him and David fled Jerusalem for his life, he refused to take action against a man who cursed him, because he realized that it was possible that he was in the wrong and that this opposition was from the Lord (2 Sam 16:5-12).

“The Lord passed by before him [Moses] and proclaimed: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness, keeping loyal love for thousands [of generations], forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. But he by no means leaves the guilty unpunished, responding to the transgression of fathers by dealing with children and children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.”” - Ex. 34:6-7

And, however much righteous indignation we may experience at the state of the world, however much we feel anger at having our will for the world thwarted, God could be said to experience even more. Not that his will can be meaningfully thwarted (it would be wrong to suggest that of an omnipotent God), but there’s a great deal that he has said is contrary to his will, and he knows all of it - every cutting remark and broken relationship and falsehood of our political partisanship, every story of every suffering person who we see only briefly in photographs and newscasts from foreign correspondents, every hunger pang and addict’s craving, every act of greed and selfishness and bigotry and rage. And it does make him angry - in fact, the Bible talks quite a lot about the wrath of God - but, as shown in God’s glorious self-revelation to Moses, his love and forgiveness outweighs his anger hundreds of times over.

“Where do the conflicts and where do the quarrels among you come from? Is it not from this, from your passions that battle inside you? You desire and you do not have; you murder and envy and you cannot obtain; you quarrel and fight.” - James 4:1-2

Because the other aspect of the problem is that our “righteous” indignation isn’t nearly so pure as God’s. Our hearts are deceitful (Jer. 17:9), and that includes deceiving us into mistaking our warring passions for righteous anger. And modern society encourages and accelerates this: social media divorces people’s words from their actions and lives, so that all we can judge are the words. Technology has made sharing these words effectively free, so the supply becomes effectively infinite, and the constraint - what determines whose words are consumed - becomes people’s attention. And the easiest way to attract attention, in both traditional media and social media, is to be extreme, inflammatory, to rile up the emotions of the people on your side and to provoke inflammatory responses from people on the other side, because that just draws more attention. And so voices that are calmer, more moderate, more loving get crowded out. Pundits and politicians keep adding fuel to the fire - some of them because they’re deliberately quarreling and fighting and spreading falsehoods to get what they do not have, and some of them because their hearts, too, have deceived them. And, too often, we willingly participate, by joining in the debates and listening to the pundits and politicians and giving platform and fame to those who inflame and divide.

“Let every person be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.” - James 1:19

If anger is merely my response to my will being thwarted, then the Bible offers a different way of dealing with it. If I’m humble enough to recognize the limits of my own agenda and let go of my own ego, if I remember that there are things more important than my task list, then I can let go of my anger when my computer doesn’t work or I’m stuck in traffic or I get a frustrating work email or my kids don’t do what I want. If I pour my love and attention into my relationships with those around me, then I can accept when their wills interfere with mine. Remembering that “this present world is a perfectly safe place for us to be” (Dallas Willard, echoing Mt. 6:25-34) helps me take the losses of the pandemic in stride - not that it doesn’t hurt, and not that we don’t feel anger, but we put it in its place, because we know the bigger picture and how it all ends. If I remember that it’s the Spirit’s job to change people and that God is still working on us (Phil. 2:12-13, 3:15), then I can accept when people don’t agree with me. I can choose to prioritize Christian community over social media tribalism; I can place my hope in God rather than in politics; I can seek truth and understanding instead of seeking for my side to win.

“For human anger does not accomplish God’s righteousness.” - James 1:20

Anger has a place. There are things in life that are contrary to God’s will, and that’s something that we need to care about. But, even at its best, I’m not sure that our righteous anger does much to accomplish God’s righteousness. And, ultimately, God’s own anger did not accomplish his righteousness: that was done by his love, poured out on the cross.

So let’s follow his example. “Be angry and do not sin” when the situation calls for it, but grieve and lament as well - those are also biblical, and they’re too often neglected. Relax our grip on our own egos and desires so that we can accept when our wills are thwarted. Take a step back from the warring passions of contemporary media and spend more time in true community. And love one another.

Gradually Then Suddenly

About a month ago, Gallup published new research showing that, for the first time, the percentage of Americans who are church members fell below 50%.

This, by itself, may not be too surprising. Many of us have some general awareness that American culture is less religious than it used to be. What’s really surprising is how quickly it’s happened:

What’s going on? What changed in 2000 (to pick a nice round number) to cause the rate of decline to accelerate so much?

I’m not a sociologist or a professional minister; there are others who are better qualified to speak than I. But, looking at that chart, I’m reminded of a quote from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises:

“How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

This is one of those pithy, attention-grabbing quotes that seems contradictory but, upon reflection, contains a lot of truth. Because that’s often how bankruptcy works - a household or a business may be able to continue for quite a while living just a bit beyond their means, making the minimum credit card payments, or with expenses gradually creeping up while sales gradually creep down. Then something hits - there’s an unexpected medical expense or costly repair, or one too many late payments cause fees and penalties to snowball, or an economic dip or competitive pressure suddenly makes the fragile business unsustainable - and bankruptcy occurs seemingly all at once.

Looking at that Gallup chart, I can’t help but think that something similar happened here. A healthy, vibrant church, full of active, committed Christians, doesn’t simply have its membership plummet in less than a single generation; I can’t help but wonder what kind of gradually-then-suddenly scenario American Christendom has been going through, what weaknesses we’ve allowed to fester and grow until our position became untenable in the face of a worldly culture.

It’s easy to guess at what those weaknesses might be. I suspect that part of the decline is because we’ve too uncritically allied ourselves with particular political agendas and a particular political party; even when those causes have been good, it’s hard to maintain our distinctiveness when the broader culture sees us as yet another political interest group. Russell Moore writes:

Even as a teenager, I could see that the “voting guides” that showed up in Bible Belt America were kind of like the horoscopes one could find in the newspaper. The horoscope could say, “Today you will find a surprising new opportunity,” and a certain sort of credulous person would be amazed at how this just happened to be true—without ever thinking about the fact that this is true of virtually every human being at virtually every moment, if one just pays attention to it. Likewise, the voter guides lined out the “Christian” view from the “anti-Christian view” on a list of issues that just happened to line up with the favored party’s platform that year. Somehow the Bible suddenly gave us a “Christian view” on a balanced budget amendment or a line-item veto, things that… were never noticed in the text until the favored candidates started emphasizing such things.

And along with all that came apocalyptic warnings that if these candidates weren’t elected, or these policies weren’t enacted, we would “lose our entire culture.” But when those candidates lost, no one headed for the bunkers. The culture didn’t fall—at least not any more than it had before.

The sad fact is that, for many Americans, the only experience they have with evangelicals is at a distance, as their opponents at the ballot box. To borrow from Philip Yancey and Gregory Boyd, it’s incredibly difficult to extend grace to people when you’re also trying to defeat them politically; it’s hard to advance both the kingdom of the cross (which transforms people from the inside) and an earthly government (which can merely compel external behavior).

I suspect that part of the decline of the American church is because we’ve allowed moralism and legalism to be portrayed as key parts of Christianity. This shows up in a variety of ways - an emphasis on “obvious” sins like sexual immorality, alcoholism, and drug addiction instead of subtler sins like pride and dishonesty and bitterness, as well as picking out everything from R-rated movies to teetotaling to particular styles of clothing to Dungeons & Dragons to violent video games as vital moral issues. Please don’t misunderstand me. Morality - trying to live a life pleasing to our Creator, following the way he wants us to live - is obviously incredibly important. And I love that my brothers and sisters have been trying to apply God’s standards to every facet of their lives - R-rated movies and teatotalling and the rest - because examining every facet of our lives and living with a clear conscience is also part of trying to live a life pleasing to our Creator. I’m even in agreement on a decent amount of this. But the problem comes when we set up these as a central aspect of the faith, rather than our best human effort to live out our faith; people mistake the legalism for the Gospel and walk away from it all, or they see the inconsistencies in our causes or the flawed, human, sometimes arbitrary morality (because we’re all flawed and human and sometimes arbitrary) and think that the whole of the faith is that. In The Life You’ve Always Wanted, John Ortberg suggests that part of the problem is that we let these moral issues become “boundary markers” - “highly visible, relatively superficial practices - matters of vocabulary or dress or style - whose purpose is to distinguish between those inside a group and those who are outside”:

The church I grew up in was a fine church, and I am deeply in its dept, but we also had our own set of markers there. The senior pastor could have been consumed with pride or resentment, but as long as his preaching was orthodox and the church was growing, his job would probably not be in jeopardy. But if some Sunday morning he had been smoking a cigarette while greeting people after the service, he would not have been around for the evening service. Why? No one at the church would have said that smoking a single Camel was a worse sin than a life consumed by pride and resentment. But for us, cigarette-smoking became an identity marker. It was one of the ways we were able to tell the sheep from the goats…

A boundary-oriented approach to spirituality focuses on people’s position: Are you inside or outside the group? A great deal of energy is spent clarifying what counts as a boundary marker.

But Jesus consistently focused on people’s center. Are they oriented and moving toward the center of spiritual life (love of God and people), or are they moving away from it? (p. 34-37)

I suspect that part of the decline is specific sins that we’ve allowed within the church: the racism of the American south, sexual abuse within the Catholic priesthood and other churches, financial exploitation by televangelists and others. The sad fact is that we have a lot to answer for here. White southern evangelicals did little to help the civil rights movement, and many of our private Christian schools in the south were founded in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education by whites who wanted an alternative to the newly desegregated public schools. Sexual abuse by religious leaders and organizations from Catholic priests to Ravi Zacharias to Kamp Kanakuk have done grievous harm; organizations frequently chose to protect themselves or the perpetrator (for example, by trying to handle it internally) rather than prioritizing bringing justice for the victim, and Christian teachings such as Bill Gothard’s downplayed the harm and blamed the victims (before Gothard himself was accused of repeated sexual harassment). Christian leaders such as Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, and Jerry Falwell Jr. have all had heavily publicized scandals. These aren’t just “a few bad apples”; I’ve read too many accounts of racism, of theology that’s abused to excuse sexual sin, of a willingness to overlook warning signs if a ministry is successful, of preying on people’s political fears or luring them with health-and-wealth. We need to repent. Now, especially, when the broader American culture is seriously confronting sexual harassment and abuse and America’s history of racism - through some mix of God’s common grace and fallen human moralism - the church’s failings in these areas become even more glaring. I’m afraid that we at times even let attitudes on race and sex become boundary markers themselves - “secular progressives are emphasizing these things, so we’re instead going to de-emphasize them, because those guys are our enemies.” This should not be.

And I suspect that part of the decline may be that some of the church membership and church activities from 2000 and earlier was, in fact, just going through the motions. In a 2014 column, Ross Douthat suggests that we’re seeing “the Christian Penumbra”:

Here is a seeming paradox of American life. On the one hand, there is a broad social-science correlation between religious faith and various social goods — health and happiness, upward mobility, social trust, charitable work and civic participation.

Yet at the same time, some of the most religious areas of the country — the Bible Belt, the deepest South — struggle mightily with poverty, poor health, political corruption and social disarray…

The social goods associated with faith flow almost exclusively from religious participation, not from affiliation or nominal belief. And where practice ceases or diminishes, in what you might call America’s “Christian penumbra,” the remaining residue of religion can be socially damaging instead…

It isn’t hard to see why this might be. In the Christian penumbra, certain religious expectations could endure (a bias toward early marriage, for instance) without support networks for people struggling to live up to them. Or specific moral ideas could still have purchase without being embedded in a plausible life script. (For instance, residual pro-life sentiment could increase out-of-wedlock births.) Or religious impulses could survive in dark forms rather than positive ones — leaving structures of hypocrisy intact and ratifying social hierarchies, without inculcating virtue, charity or responsibility.

And it isn’t hard to see places in American life where these patterns could be at work. Among those working-class whites whose identification with Christianity is mostly a form of identity politics, for instance. Or among second-generation Hispanic immigrants who have drifted from their ancestral Catholicism. Or in African-American communities where the church is respected as an institution without attracting many young men on Sunday morning.

Several Christian leaders have suggested that religious faith within a family follows a regular pattern: The initial converts of the first generation are active and passionate in their faith. Their children, the second generation, inherit their parents’ faith; they’re still active, and their faith is still meaningful, but they lack the firsthand commitment and passion of their parents. As a result, in the third generation, religion is more of a formality, just going through the motions. The fourth generation then leaves the faith completely.

All of this is, of course, a generalization; every family is unique, and plenty of families (including my own!) have a powerful, multi-generational legacy of faith. But it’s a penetrating illustration. I suspect that much of church membership has been these “third-generation Christians,” going through the motions, and what shows up in the polls as church decline is merely the next step of the decay. The remedy is for each generation to be the first: each new generation of Christians must make that personal, passionate, first-hand commitment for themselves.

I grieve over the American church’s decline. I love the church, and I believe that it can offer enormous good; I love Christ, and I want people to know him. But, if what I said is accurate, if what we’re seeing is the merely the next step of the Christian penumbra and nominal third-generation faith, then it may not even be a bad thing. C.S. Lewis observes in Mere Christianity, “When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realises that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going-provided he does it for honesty’s sake and not just to annoy his parents-the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him then than it ever was before.” Christian novelist Leif Enger writes,

If I may offer a perspective on the church ‘losing a generation,’ it’s worth considering that widespread disillusionment with evangelicalism is largely a positive development. I can’t speak for a soul outside my experience, but as the product of Midwestern charismatics who subscribed early to Fox News and never looked back, I suspect the progression from Falwell Sr. to Falwell Jr. applies more broadly than any of us care to imagine. A teen who sees through the rot and ‘falls away’ remains as available to the Creator as any prodigal in history; those who remain despite the rot will learn to tolerate it, follow it, and finally exalt it. This is predictable and proven before our eyes. At this fraught moment it’s the non-skeptics I dread.

God is still at work, in his church and in the world. The story isn’t over yet, not for the individuals whose decisions make up the decline or for the American church as a whole. Church attendance numbers and cultural influence are nice, but the point is following Christ. The Gallup polls show a snapshot in time, but we know that ultimately the gates of hell will not prevail and every knee shall bow (Matt. 16:18, Phil. 2:10).

So let’s re-center our lives and our faith on Christ and his kingdom, not on political causes.

Let our morality flow out of following Christ, rather than being a legalistic cause and identity marker.

Confront and repent of our sin.

Commit to Christ, and teach our children to do the same.

Further reading:

• Russell Moore’s “Losing Our Religion” wrestles with the Gallup poll’s findings and presents his personal perspective, and David French presents an Easter meditation on it.
• Rachael Denhollander is doing critically important work on sexual abuse within the church. Her Twitter feed and her husband’s are good (and sad) reading. (I first heard about her when she extended the Gospel to her abuser, former USA Gymnastics team doctor, Larry Nassar, in courtroom testimony.)

Dayenu

Back when I was a student at the University of Tennessee, I got involved in the Christian Student Fellowship (CSF), a small non-denominational campus ministry that met in a house just off a main campus thoroughfare. UT is a big school in the Bible Belt, and so of course the CSF wasn’t the only campus ministry at UT. I walked past the Episcopalian ministry every day on the way to class; there was a Catholic ministry a bit up the hill, in between the Baptists and the Methodists; and so on.

On the corner near those ministries, in a brick building with a window wall looking out over the street, was the Jewish Student Center. Each year, they invited the anyone who wanted from the Christian campus groups to join them in a Passover meal. I attended along with several others from the CSF; after all, we believe in Passover, too, and it was an interesting cultural experience and good food. (From what I recall, they served a full conventional meal, in addition to explaining the traditional elements of the seder.) And I found out some interesting trivia at the Passover meals, too; for example, one year, a Jewish student who sat at our table explained that they couldn’t drink beer during Passover week, because it was made from grain and needed yeast to produce, but vodka was fine, since it was made from potatoes.

At these events, someone from the Jewish Student Center talked about the Passover feast. It’s an ancient tradition, rich in symbolism: bitter herbs to represent the bitterness of slavery in Egypt, vegetables dipped in salt water to represent tears shed, unleavened bread to remember both the poverty of life in Egypt and the haste of the Jews’ departure from Egypt, and the Passover lamb itself, remembering the means by which God delivered his people. One year, the woman who spoke talked about this theme of deliverance. She suggested that we Christians had too small a view of deliverance; we primarily or only talked about God as delivering people from sin. In reality, she argued, God is always interested in and acting to deliver people in every way, offering all-encompassing freedom and overturning oppression of every kind: sin, the slavery of the Jews in ancient Egypt, racial and political and economic injustices and oppressions in the modern world, and so on.

Perhaps to drive home this point, they recited or sang Dayenu, a thousand-year-old Jewish song: (“Dayenu” is a Hebrew word meaning “it would have been enough” or “it would have sufficed.”)

If He had brought us out from Egypt,
and had not carried out judgments against them
— it would have been enough!

If He had carried out judgments against them,
and not against their idols
— it would have been enough!

If He had destroyed their idols,
and had not smitten their first-born
— it would have been enough!

If He had smitten their first-born,
and had not given us their wealth
— it would have been enough!

If He had given us their wealth,
and had not split the sea for us
— it would have been enough!

If He had split the sea for us,
and had not taken us through it on dry land
— it would have been enough!

If He had taken us through the sea on dry land,
and had not drowned our oppressors in it
— it would have been enough!

If He had drowned our oppressors in it,
and had not supplied our needs in the desert for forty years
— it would have been enough!

If He had supplied our needs in the desert for forty years,
and had not fed us the manna
— it would have been enough!

If He had fed us the manna,
and had not given us the Shabbat
— it would have been enough!

If He had given us the Shabbat,
and had not brought us before Mount Sinai
— it would have been enough!

If He had brought us before Mount Sinai,
and had not given us the Torah
— it would have been enough!

If He had given us the Torah,
and had not brought us into the land of Israel
— it would have been enough!

If He had brought us into the land of Israel,
and not built for us the Holy Temple
— it would have been enough!

I don’t completely agree with this Jewish woman’s take. God is, of course, concerned with justice and deliverance. However, I’m concerned that making broad temporal justice an emphasis of the church can too easily drag the church off its mission. We are to be first and foremost a foretaste and beachhead and first installment of God’s eternal kingdom, not an inherently temporary fix for the kingdoms of this earth.

And yet…

There are pitfalls in our emphasizing only deliverance from sin. In The Deep Things of God (p. 15-16), Fred Sanders writes,

Evangelicalism has always been concerned to underline certain elements of the Christian message. We have a lot to say about God’s revelation, but we emphasize the business end of it, where God’s voice is heard normatively: the Bible. We know that everything Jesus did has power for salvation in it, but we emphasize the one event that is literally crucial: the cross. We know that God is at work on his people through the full journey of their lives, from the earliest glimmers of awareness to the ups and downs of the spiritual life, but we emphasize the hinge of all spiritual experience: conversion. We know there are countless benefits that flow from being joined to Christ, but we emphasize the big one: heaven.

Bible, cross, conversion, heaven. These are the right things to emphasize. But in order to emphasize anything, you must presuppose a larger body of truth to select from…

When evangelicalism wanes into an anemic condition, as it sadly has in recent decades, it happens in this way: the points of emphasis are isolated from the main body of Christian truth and handled as if they are the whole story rather than the key points. Instead of teaching the full counsel of God (incarnation, ministry of healing and teaching, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and second coming), anemic evangelicalism simply shouts its one point of emphasis louder and louder (the cross! the cross! the cross!). But in isolation from the total matrix of Christian truth, the cross doesn’t make the right kind of sense. A message about nothing but the cross is not emphatic. It is reductionist.

God delivers us from sin, not because he doesn’t care about deliverance from slavery and racism and poverty and the rest, but because sin is the root problem behind slavery and racism and poverty and the rest. It’s not that the others aren’t important; it’s that God is too big to fix only those temporal evils without also fixing sin and death and the entire universe. In our commendable desire to emphasize salvation from sin and eternal life in heaven, we sometimes almost give the impression that Christianity is mostly a “get out of Hell free” card. It is that, but it’s not only that; it’s God speaking to us through his Word, and the fellowship with other believers, and an abundant life that starts now, and a purpose and provision on earth, and the joys of God’s creation, and the treasury of God’s actions on behalf of his people, from the Passover culminating in Jesus. Any one of those, as the hymn says, would have been enough.

Everything belongs to you, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future. Everything belongs to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. - 1 Cor 3:21-23

And yet…

From our perspective, any of those blessings would have been enough. After all, any of those blessings are more than we deserve; that’s why we preach grace. God’s perspective, though, seems to be different. He “made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6-7, ESV, emphasis added). If we take Paul at his word here, he’s saying that part of God’s reason for giving us eternal life is so that he can have eternity to continue showering grace upon us, to grant us “the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and… the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Eph. 1:18-19). For God’s love and God’s grace, nothing less than infinity is been enough.

For Christ

I like Paul.

There are a few reasons for this. One reason, of course, is that he wrote about a third of the New Testament. That’s obviously nice and important. I like that he’s smart and a good thinker, even if he is hard to understand sometimes (2 Pe 3:16). I like how passionate he is and how that comes out in his letters. It means that, when I read his letters, I’m not just having someone tell me what to do, I’m also seeing how someone thinks and feels when they’re totally committed to Christ and to letting others know about him.

One reason I like Paul is that he’ll give totally ordinary advice for daily life - the sort of thing that moral teachers and philosophers and parents and self-help guides have been saying for thousands of years - but tie it to the grandest, most cosmic reasons and rationales possible.

Consider, for example, Philippians 2:6-11:

who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself
by taking on the form of a slave,
by looking like other men,
and by sharing in human nature.
He humbled himself
by becoming obedient to the point of death
—even death on a cross!
As a result God highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee will bow
—in heaven and on earth and under the earth—
and every tongue confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord
to the glory of God the Father.

Embedded in the middle of Paul’s letter, it’s a beautiful hymn to Christ. It clearly states Jesus’ divinity, it movingly describes what he gave up in order to serve and save us, and it concludes with a ringing statement of his future glory. It’s one of my favorite passages of Scripture.

And the reason why Paul wrote this beautiful hymn? Going back a few verses to Phil. 2:3: “Instead of being motivated by selfish ambition or vanity, each of you should, in humility, be moved to treat one another as more important than yourself.” Phil 4:2 goes into a bit more detail: “I appeal to Euodia and to Syntyche to agree in the Lord.” In other words, Paul thought that people in church weren’t getting along well enough, and two people in particular were having enough trouble that Paul called them out by name, and so he told them to shape up.

There are lots of reasons that Paul could have given for why Euodia and Syntyche and the rest of the Philippians should stop arguing and avoid ambition and vanity. Arguments can increase levels of cortisol (the stress hormone). Humility had been recognized as a virtue at least since the days of Moses (Num 12:3), who was revered by any Jewish Christians in Paul’s audience, and was commended by Solomon (Prov 3:34), the wisest man who ever lived. Arguments, selfish ambition, and vanity all hurt group dynamics and cohesion and can impair organizational effectiveness. For the church in particular, they can interfere with its mission of reaching others for Christ. Paul could have given any of these perfectly valid reasons and arguments, but instead, he ties it with the biggest reason possible - the example of what Christ did for us - and he does so seemingly effortlessly and naturally.

Philippians 2 isn’t the only place where Paul does this. In Col 3:13, for example, he writes, “Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also forgive others.” There are numerous good reasons that Paul could have given for why we should forgive others. It’s necessary for healthy relationships; any human relationship is sure to have disagreements and failings, and so forgiveness is needed to move past those. It’s psychologically very healthy; numerous books and studies discuss this, and some studies even show that it can have physical benefits. Paul, of course, didn’t have access to these findings from modern psychology, but the ancients had some understanding of the importance of harmony, too (Ps 133, Prov 17:22). For Christians, forgiveness is even more important: Jesus says that our forgiving others is needed to receive God’s forgiveness (Mk 11:25, Mt 6:14). It’s not that our forgiveness is necessary to earn rightness with God, but a failure to extend grace to others suggests that we don’t understand grace well enough to receive it ourselves. Paul, however, doesn’t go into any of these reasons here - the restored relationships and psychological benefits and rightness with God. Instead, he simply says that the reason - and the standard - for our forgiving of others is that Christ has forgiven us. If Jesus has forgiven us the full magnitude of our every offense against God and human, in spite of all that it costs him (Paul implies), then how can we not forgive others of their limited, sometimes provoked wrongs against us?

Rom 14:2-4 is another example: “The one who eats everything must not despise the one who does not, and the one who abstains must not judge the one who eats everything, for God has accepted him. Who are you to pass judgment on another’s servant? Before his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.” This is a somewhat complex situation - probably worth a post on its own - but the short version is that there was a conflict between Christians who believed that their faith required certain moral practices (a restricted diet and observing particular holy days) while others understood that they had freedom in Christ to do or not do these things. As with forgiveness and the Philippian church’s disputes, there are several ways Paul could have addressed this. He could have insisted on unity, in spite of the differences, for the sake of good human relationships or organizational effectiveness or the health of the church. He could have tried to persuade one side or the other to change their views; after all, we can tell from Paul’s letters that he’s a formidable writer and can present a powerful argument when he wants. He could have pulled rank: as an apostle, he could have simply commanded one side or the other to give up their opinions and comply. (We can tell from Paul’s letters that he’s willing to do that, too, when the situation calls for it.) Instead, Paul once again appeals to how God treats us: God has judged us right with him, so it’s not on us to judge each other, and the awesome reality that we now live for Christ supersedes the details of what we eat and how we arrange our calendars.

Several years ago, Jon Acuff wrote about “the Jesus juke”:

At another airport I went to, a humongous bodybuilder spent his time in the terminal doing ferocious push ups right beside me. I tweeted about it… One [response] stuck out. It was different than the rest, but is something I am growing familiar with.

I call it the “Jesus Juke.”

Like a football player juking you at the last second and going a different direction, the Jesus Juke is when someone takes what is clearly a joke filled conversation and completely reverses direction into something serious and holy.

In this particular case, when I tweeted a joke about the guy doing pushups, someone tweeted me back, “Imagine If we were that dedicated in our faith, family, and finances?”

I was fine with that idea, I was, but it was a Jesus Juke. We went from, “Whoa, there’s a mountain of a man doing pushups next to the coffee shop at the airport,” to a serious statement about the lack of discipline we have in our faith and our family and our finances.

I don’t know how to spell it, but in my head I heard that sad trumpet sound of “whaaaa, waaaa.”

Acuff goes on to explain how these Jesus jukes tend to prompt shame (“You’re not as spiritual as I am, because you didn’t think to talk about Jesus here”) and are rarely helpful. And it could almost feel like that’s what Paul’s doing in these examples; whether he’s talking about group dynamics and personal relationships and diet and holidays and work, he keeps going all the way up to God and Jesus. But it doesn’t feel like a juke, a last-second athletic reversal, when Paul does it; it feels like Paul’s life is so saturated in Christ that it’s the most natural thing in the world for him to bring him up. It feels like Paul can’t help but think of what Christ did for him as the motivation for everything that he does, rather than being driven by interpersonal care or abstract ethics or concern for effectiveness.

I want that to be true of me, too.

And whatever you do in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. - Col 3:17

"Forgive me, but it's hard to be a human"

Let’s talk about Congress.

No, not the story you’re probably thinking of. Although we’ll get to that later.

I read last week that the son of Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) committed suicide on December 31, 2020. On January 5, Raskin and his wife wrote a deeply moving obituary for their son:

[In school], his irrepressible love of freedom and strong libertarian impulses made him a skeptic of all institutional bureaucracy and a daring outspoken defender of all outcasts and kids in trouble. Once when third-grade Tommy and his father saw a boy returning to school after a weeklong suspension and his Dad casually remarked, ‘it looks like they let finally let him out of jail,’ Tommy replied, ‘no, you mean they finally let him back into jail.’…

He hated cliques and social snobbery, never had a negative word for anyone but tyrants and despots, and opposed all malicious gossip, stopping all such gossipers with a trademark Tommy line — ‘forgive me, but it’s hard to be a human.’…

Tommy Raskin had a perfect heart, a perfect soul, a riotously outrageous and relentless sense of humor, and a dazzling radiant mind. He began to be tortured later in his 20s by a blindingly painful and merciless ‘disease called depression,’ as Tabitha put it on Facebook over the weekend, a kind of relentless torture in the brain for him, and despite very fine doctors and a loving family and friendship network of hundreds who adored him beyond words and whom he adored too, the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last for our dear boy, this young man of surpassing promise to our broken world.

On the last hellish brutal day of that godawful miserable year of 2020, when hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people all over the world died alone in bed in the darkness from an invisible killer disease ravaging their bodies and minds, we also lost our dear, dear, beloved son, Hannah and Tabitha’s beloved irreplaceable brother, a radiant light in this broken world.

Reading the newsletter where I first heard about this and the full obituary by the Raskins, I was struck by two things:

• Tommy Raskin worked to bring humor, joy, knowledge, and goodness into the lives of everyone around him.
• Tommy Raskin suffered greatly, and his death will bring more pain into the lives of those around him.

Last year was incredibly hard in many ways. It drove home the fact that we simply don’t know how much time or opportunity we’ll have to interact with others. Maybe we’ll have the countless hours over many decades that we expect, or maybe pandemic or violence or accident ends a life much sooner, or maybe life continues but lockdown or geography or changing circumstances makes the relationship impractical, or maybe a relationship that we took for granted decays or is torn apart. Why not take the opportunities we have to give others humor, joy, knowledge, or goodness?

And last year drove home the fact that we simply don’t know what pain others are going through. As we careen through life, scrambling to meet our obligations and check off items on our agendas and satisfy our wants and goals, we’re often oblivious to the nicks and dents we inflict on others who are similarly hurtling down their own paths, and we’re often oblivious to the opportunities we have and miss to make someone’s life better. Often these oversights and injuries are easily shrugged off, forgiven or forgotten, but how often do we unwittingly place a burden on people like the Raskin family who, because of the pain they’re going through, may not be able to handle one more thing?

This may seem trite, but it’s important. Please bear with me.

There are lots of sayings that I could quote right now. “Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” “If you can’t find anything nice to say, don’t say it.” “If you can be anything, be kind.” And so on. These are, frankly, cliches. As such, I dislike quoting them. But calling a statement a cliche doesn’t mean it’s false; it’s merely lost its impact due to overuse because it’s true. Maybe it’s time to reclaim the impact.

Kindness is often equated with niceness - pleasantness, politeness, a kind of superficial avoidance of anything displeasing. It goes much deeper than that. After all, when Paul talks about God’s kindness in Rom. 2:4 and Tit. 3:4, he isn’t saying that God is pleasant or polite; he’s talking about God’s work throughout history to restore humanity’s relationship to him, culminating in sending Christ. And when Paul exhorts us to be kind in Gal. 5:22 and Col. 3:12-13, he links it with “bearing with one another and forgiving one another… just as the Lord has forgiven you; and to all these virtues add love.” The standard of how we treat others is how Christ himself treats us! “Practice random kindness,” indeed.

The events in the Capitol building last week are, I believe, the dark inverse of this. No one wakes up on a sunny day, feeling that all is well with their life and the world, and says, “I think I’d like to participate in a deadly riot today.” Instead, it grew out of many years of political partisanship and mutual hostility, and repeated choices to double down on grievance and anger instead of looking for common ground, and looking for the worst in your opponents instead of extending grace, and a willingness to listen to cynical or deluded or self-serving people who fan the flames of it all. Any single act may seem harmless, but - without minimizing the responsibility of everyone who directly participated in or instigated last Wednesday’s events - it all built up until chaos and destruction and death resulted.

It’s easy to think that small, day-to-day gestures have little impact. But, again, last year - and last week - show that’s not the case; the opportunities taken and missed, goodness such as Tommy Raskin’s life and pain such as his death, all ripple out and affect others far beyond what we can see. In fact, our actions toward others are the greatest impact we can have. As C.S. Lewis writes,

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. — The Weight of Glory

So practice kindness. Make others’ lives easier rather than harder. Remember that it’s hard to be a human.

Hug everyone in your household. Send an encouraging note to a coworker or fellow churchgoer. Give your parents, siblings, or adult children a phone call. Turn off your electronic device so you’ll have more time for others. Go to bed early so you’ll have the energy and patience to be kinder tomorrow. Complain less. (Most folks on Facebook and Twitter probably already know what things bother you; you probably don’t need to inform them.) If you’re struggling, let people know. (Kindness doesn’t mean being dishonest, and you give people an opportunity to be kind to you.) Respond to bad political news with lament and prayer instead of outrage and grievance. Forgive others, as Jesus forgave us. Do what you can to help those around you take a tiny step toward everlasting splendor.

If you or someone you know is struggling, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. Crisis counselors can also be reached by messaging the Crisis Text Line at 741741. — “Uphill” on Tommy Raskin)