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)