Divine Plagiarism

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20 August 2007

Saul the Roman. (A Gentile with a Tan.)

It is strange, really… sometimes your greatest strengths are hidden in the things that you hate most about yourself. We are taught to hate in ourselves the things that make us different, taught by everyone around us to hate the things that don’t belong. Yet, it may be that the Creator’s signature is in those very things, and in those very things He may have equipped us for the story He has prepared. Redemption works in funny ways sometimes.

We know much of the story of Paul the Apostle. We know less of the story of Saul of Tarsus. Please allow me a bit of artistic license with his story.

The accusation was born on the day he was, through no fault of his own. Half of it was born in his curly hair and brown eyes. The other half was inherited from his father’s citizenship, in the town of his birth and in the language he would grow up speaking. None of these things were meant with malice, of course. None of them were meant to threaten anyone. A child of Shem and a child of Abraham, Saul’s hair and eyes were just part of that birthright. Likewise, his father didn’t sell out the Maccabees, didn’t betray Israel, and didn’t make sacrifices to the Emperor. He simply wanted to provide security to his family, and Roman citizenship bought more security than gold, so he wisely bought Roman citizenship with some of his gold. Alexander, Xerxes and Nebuchadnezzar decided Saul’s birthplace, each of them scattering the Jewish community to the winds as they swept through. And that birthplace came with a language. Like anyone else, Saul’s parents just wanted to go to the market and buy grain and olive oil (and maybe a little wine,) and the merchants spoke Greek. So they spoke Greek too. Saul had no real choice about any of these things.

Nor did he have much in the way of choice in his early upbringing. Like any good father with the means to do so, Saul’s father sent his son to the best of schools. And those schools, most likely, were Greek. Logic, reason and Greek poetry was drummed into young Saul’s head. But just as he spent his school days with Plato and Aristotle, he spent his weekends with Moses and the Torah. His father, a devout Jew, would make sure that Saul understood his heritage. His father lived in a tension: he was of a successful businessman in a Gentile world, yet he was first a son of Israel, a follower of the Law of Moses. It is a tension that he managed for his household, as well. Inside the walls of his house, it was safe to be a Jew in a Gentile world. But Saul could not live forever inside those walls.

It is said that children are cruel. Perhaps they have not yet learned how to hide vicious intentions behind nice words. Perhaps they have not yet realized why it would be useful to do so. Regardless, they are brutally honest, and brutally ready to ostracize those who don’t belong. So young Saul spends his hellish school days hearing his classmates speak mock Hebrew to him, seeing curly-haired stick figures on camel back, watching other students make ‘snipping’ gestures at him in first-century locker rooms. He wasn’t a Greek, and they made sure that he knew it. ‘You aren’t one of us,’ they told him.

They weren’t the only ones to tell him that. Everybody knows that Jewish children don’t go to Greek schools: after all, are not the writings of Moses and David far superior to any pagan philosophers? Everybody knows that the son of a Roman citizen is Roman, not Jewish: after all, is not Rome is the evil oppressor of the Jewish people? And everybody knows that real Jews are born in Judea: after all, what kind of Jew would leave the promised land? So a child of a Roman citizen who goes to a Greek school in a Cilician town couldn’t possibly be a Jew. I’m sure that someone informed Saul of this fact. ‘We thought you were a gentile with a tan.’ ‘Whatever you are, you aren’t one of us,’ they told him.

Young Saul finds himself in the cross-fire of a war he never chose. Too Jewish for the Greeks, too Greek for the Jews, both groups gun him down as the most accessible representative of the other. So he chooses a side. His appearance bars him from the Greek side, perhaps, though he might pass for a Cypriot. Still, were he to choose the Greeks he will always face the question, ‘so, what are you? I mean, where are you from?’ It is easier to side with the outcasts. After all, that is what both sides keep telling him that he is. The Jews are the outcast group, the persecuted minority. So if the Greeks hate him for being Jewish, he will become everything that they hate. And he will prove to the Jews, beyond the shadow of any doubt, that he is more Jewish than any of them. If they speak Hebrew, he will speak Hebrew better. If they quote Moses, then he will quote Moses, Elisha and Ezekiel. If they keep the ten commandments, he will keep all three-hundred-some. By the sweat of his brow, he will earn entrance into the nation of Israel; by the fury of his works he will vindicate himself. And when he is done, nobody will ever, ever dare say that he is a ‘gentile with a tan.’ (That is, with the exception of the voice always whispering that exact thing in the darkest corner of his fears.)

He is successful beyond his wildest expectations. Saul, now a young man, has by now become a lion in the Sanhedrin, a Pharisee of Pharisees, the brightest rising star under the great Rabbi Gamaliel. Nobody would dare voice the accusation anymore, few would even think it. Saul’s identity is at long last secure. He has arrived. At least, he should have arrived. For some reason, his mad ambition still looks too much like rage. For some reason, it still looks like he’s trying to prove something. (Deep down, further than he cares to look, he still rages at the Jews for having once excluded him. He expresses this rage by beating them at their own game. He overthrew the leaders, superseding all the playground bullies in his meteoric rise. But he never really conquered them: their cruelty was reborn in him on a much bigger playground, covered by righteous and subtle words. I wonder if Saul ever really felt at peace with his identity as a Jew, with rage fueling his doubt and doubt fueling his rage.) If the young man stopped for a moment, he might realize that his efforts are the very thing that keep the accusation alive. The shadow of that realization keeps him running. But he runs into Someone he does not expect.

Something about the followers of the Nazarene got under Saul’s skin. (This something like saying that the Inquisition was impolite.) Saul’s rage and his driving ambition find themselves perfectly synchronized in his persecution of the followers of this new heresy. He gives some pretty good reasons. He may even believe them himself. ‘They divert worship away from the Holy Temple.’ ‘They are idolaters, worshiping this carpenter Y’Shua.’ ’They blaspheme Jehovah, saying that He has a son.’ These were enough for the Sanhedrin to send Saul with their sanction and a detachment of heavily armed Temple Guards.

If Saul had been honest with himself, he might have found his deeper reasons. The greatest crime of the Nazarene was his blasphemy against the laws. Not the Law. The laws. The hundreds of rules that Saul had so fastidiously kept, proving to any law-abiding Jew that he was surely a Jew. The Nazarene also spoke against the temple. The temple, that impregnable fortress of Saul’s identity, for his service there ensured him a place of honor with his people, a place where no one would ever question whether he truly was of his people. Most abominably, the Nazarene spoke against circumcision. The gift of Abraham, the gift that had caused him so much grief growing up, the one thing the world could never deny, the Nazarene called it worthless. For all of this, the Nazarene was put to death; for all of it, everything that remains of him must be burned to the ground. For Saul must protect all the bastions of his hard-earned Jewish identity at all costs.

Just as the original accusation had two halves, so did Saul’s rage: Jew and Greek. His rage for the Greeks was as overt as his rage toward the Jews was subtle. ‘Love your brother, but hate your enemy.’ They hated him, so he would hate them. If they hated him for being a Jew, then what a Jew he would be! He would be infinitely different from the filthy goyim who reveled in their lurid perversions and pagan idolatries. He would be as far above them as a man above a cockroach. And he would look upon them only with contempt, the same way they had looked upon him. But this Nazarene, this carpenter from nowhere, he looks upon the goyim with love. He goes to the Decapolis and wins their adoration with cheap magic tricks. He goes to the half-breed Samaritans and claims to be the Messiah. He compliments a Centurion while deriding the Scribes and Teachers of the Law… he is no Jew. For no Jew can love the goyim. Because the goyim hate Jews. Because the goyim hated Saul. To Saul, being Jewish meant not being a gentile, for his identity was forged in the war between the two groups. Anyone who sought to reconcile the two must then be an enemy. And thus, Paul’s civil war finds an outlet in his war against the Nazarenes.

Like any war, there are casualties. The first casualty is Saul’s integrity. It was nothing as simple as a bald-faced lie. The most dangerous lies never are: the deadliest falsehoods turn inwards. Self-deception always starts and ends in pride. And so it does with Saul. You see, he is in a bit of a quandary. The deepest and darkest parts of his heart all scream out with rage toward this sect. But he has amassed quite a bit of religious social capital, and certain things are expected of a ‘spiritual leader.’ Rage is not one of these things. So in obedience to his own pride, he finds the loftiest of words for the basest of emotions. He paints spiritual-sounding whitewash over his hatred, which brings with it the added benefit of inciting others to do his dirty work. So Saul stands watch over the cloaks of Stephen’s killers and looks on with approval, clad in white but red in tooth and claw. With every stone, he feeds both his rage and his pride. They are his stones, and this is his stoning. Thus the heretic Stephen dies at the hands of Saul, the next casualty of his civil war.

He does not stay dead. Stephen is reborn each night in Saul’s nightmares. Stephen’s face becomes the splinter in Saul’s mind, his words the hangnail in Saul’s memories. The more he pulls at it, the deeper a wound it becomes. This man received the greatest of rage with the greatest of peace. This man answered so much hate with so much love. How can such things be? Saul’s universe, boiling and frozen with rage, was safe in its own way. Stephen is the first crack in that ice, the first doubt that is not turned inward. And face with doubt, Saul does what he has always done: he runs. If he can silence these Nazarenes, then perhaps he can silence his doubts. So somewhere between Valjean’s Soliloquy and Javert’s Suicide, Saul sets out for Damascus.

He never gets there. In the sound of thunder, eyes without sight are blinded. In the sound of thunder, the crack Stephen began shatters Saul’s universe. In the sound of thunder, Saul of Tarsus is undone. The ancient Psalmist calls for God’s vengeance against his persecutors. Like Christ, Stephen called for God’s mercy upon on his enemies. He is avenged nonetheless. Saul of Tarsus does not survive much past Stephen‘s martyrdom. He is killed by a man named Paul of Tarsus. Like Javert, Saul drowns himself in the riverine springtime swells. Like Valjean, he is reborn rising from the waters of his baptism. Three entangled streams become one river: Saul dies, Paul is born and Stephen is vindicated.

Redemption happens in a moment. Sanctification takes a bit longer. For a surgery as deep as Paul’s, the incisions will take some time to heal. Mercifully, God gives him plenty of convalescent time in the desert. The man who once wove the scriptures into arguments is taught to weave hides into tents. Yet, in that weaving, he is rewoven. It begins with the humbling of his name. Sha’ul, a Jewish name for the first king of Israel, is replaced with Paulus, Latin for child. It ends with the breaking of his fears. Like the wayward lamb with broken legs, he no longer can run from his fears. Yet in this is the greatest miracle yet: the fears of the unbroken Saul break themselves upon the broken Paul. As the flotsam of the wreckage of Saul floats to the surface of Paul’s heart, he discovers that burdens become treasures in God‘s hands. In the course of two years in the desert, the very things he hated most about himself become his greatest strengths. The Pharisee of Pharisees becomes the Apostle to the Gentiles.

He is perfect for his role; he performs it magnificently. He wields logic and reason with the elegance of intimate familiarity, illuminating the Scriptures to a people who never knew Abraham or Moses. He meets the Athenians with their own poets, translating Christ into their culture. In the Aeropagus, he intuitively identifies where the ice is thinnest, preaching to them about their Unknown God. The Greek poets that caused him so much grief with the peers of his youth become his allies for the Gospel, Greek logic and culture become weapons in his arsenal. He may have been too Jewish for the Greeks of his youth, but he is Greek enough to get inside their heads. He may have been too Greek for the Jews of his youth, but he is Jewish enough to know the Scriptures like the back of his hand. The boy that was lost in the void between two worlds becomes the man that can bridge them both in the name of Jesus Christ.

Surely there were counter-attacks. The adversary reaches for his old accusations, his old weapons of identity. He hurls them at Paul, and they shatter upon him. He is undiminished. The accusations never surrendered, but Paul surrendered the accusations. Finding his identity in Christ, every other identity lost its power over him. He no longer has anything to prove; with nothing to defend he has robbed his adversary of things to attack. He is accused by the Jews as a traitor to the law of Moses. The accusation breaks upon his identity in Christ: ‘there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.’ The greatest hopes of Abraham, Moses, and Elijah are realized in the Messiah. The law, the promise and the covenant are all completed in the Christ. He is accused by the Greeks as a backward son of a superstitious people. The accusation breaks upon his identity in Christ: ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised pierced for our iniquities, the chastisement that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we have been healed.‘ The foresight of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah puts any Greek oracle to shame, the justice of his prophecy exceeds even the loftiest Aristotelian dreams. Beyond Jew or Greek, Paul is made whole in Christ.

In this wholeness, Paul becomes all things to all people. He puts on and takes off whatever robes will advance the Gospel; a Greek to the Greeks, a Jew to the Jews. A man who worked so hard to earn admission into his own culture lays it down freely, for he has found free admission to something beyond culture. He is free to lay one robe down and don another, knowing that God will safeguard each. He is free to lose himself in the security that he will never again be lost. In the light of that freedom, his hard-earned Hebrew resume amounts to little more than an accounting of wasted time. In Philippians, he accounts for each of his achievements, and then discounts them all in the light of knowing Christ. And so Paul is completed. The child Saul sets out to prove something to the world. The man Saul proves more than he had ever hoped. The broken Paul realizes that he has nothing to prove. The reborn Paul surrenders everything that he had proved. The most glorious chords of a symphony happen near the finale, so now the completed Paul must meet the completion of his story.

It ends as it began. The Saul was born in Tarsus to Roman Citizens. Paul dies in Rome as a Roman Citizen. Saul hid his Roman Citizenship, afraid of any association with the oppressors of his people. Paul claims his Roman Citizenship, convinced that the oppressors need the Gospel just as badly as the oppressed. So Paul becomes the freest man to wear chains, weathering storms and shipwrecks on his way into the heart of the people who hated him. Thus, Paul the Roman, Pharisee of Pharisees, proclaims the Gospel of Christ to the Emperor of Rome. And on a chopping block outside of the capital, the martyr Paul rejoins the martyr Stephen in the stream of Christ. Like Stephen, Paul is vindicated. Like Stephen, Paul is reborn in his once-enemies. Three decades later, the unthinkable happens: Christ rises in Rome from the seed of Paul‘s blood. Jove lies shattered on the ground as the Chi-Rho is lifted high. Paul triumphs over his childhood tormentors by loving them. In his weakness, Paul found his true strength. The gentile with a tan became the second most influential Jew of the last two millennia.

Ecclesiastes teaches that there is nothing new under the sun. Culture and identity, community and belonging are issues in 21st century America as much as they were in 1st century Judea. I do not think that Paul’s story is entirely unique. I have seen it happen, in bigger and smaller versions, in versions more and less complete. But as Aslan reminds Shasta, ’I am not telling you their story. I am telling you your story.’ So I will tell you mine.

‘Loser.’ That was what they called me. So I learned to succeed. And I succeeded with a vengeance. I disproved them time and again, until one day I had racked up so many successes that no one would ever dare make the accusation again. No one except myself. So I fought on with mad rage, proving something to the universe. I think they called it ambition. I think they were wrong. I think it’s called fear.

I expected to find a home at Grad School. I think I expected too much. I thought that in the self-proclaimed intellectual Mecca of the country, I would find people who understood what it was to be hated for being different. I was half right. They understood what it was to be hated. And they decided I looked a lot like the people doing the hating. Ironically, I learned to blend in so well that I became indifferentiable from my once-persecutors. ‘Oppressor’ completed the accusation. Caught in the void between cultures, I sided with the outcasts. If they hated me for being a warrior, then what a warrior I would be. So upon leaving, I set myself to winning the respect of my people while defying my interlocutors. I succeeded.

But I didn’t find an answer. Perhaps we are afflicted with Midas’ curse. We seek success, and we find it. But we never find what we’re looking for. Our need for success steals the life from our blessings. So I continued to amass joyless victories. And then I received a blessing I would never have asked for. I received failure.

I don’t think I would have opened the blessing, had I known what it was. Knowing this, God wrapped the blessing in everything I had ever wanted. Time and again, I would seek success. I fought with all my heart for a victory. But time and again I would find only defeat. And I would fight all the harder and lose all the harder. The last defeat is the only one I am proud of. In that defeat, I lost honestly, I lost before God, and I lost in the center of His will. And in that defeat, I found something I did not expect. I found brokenness.

It is amazing how much God can heal in the course of a year. Broken of success, I find that I now actually enjoy success. Now that I don’t have to succeed, I find that I want to succeed. Now that I have nothing to prove, I find that I actually value the many blessings I have been given. And I find that I have been blessed in ways that I would never have been able to understand.

Jesus calls the poor and the persecuted blessed. I would never have understood how before. It makes perfect sense, though. Christ was God in the flesh. Yet He chose to be a carpenter. The apostles were not much to speak of. Yet they unintentionally conquered the greatest empire this world has known. God has used the foolish things of this world time and again to humble the wise. He does not use pretensions of wisdom.

I hated being an outcast. I hated being a loser. But I do not anymore. I embrace the accusation. In my weakness, He makes me strong. And how many times have the outcasts won? How many times have the weak overthrown the strong? So for all the Frodos, the Skywalkers, and the Galileans, this is now my prayer. ‘For my inheritance, give me the poor, the sick and the weak.’

Perhaps weakness is such a great gift that it needs to be unlocked first. Perhaps it is a gift so beautiful that you must be taught to use it lest you hurt yourself. The most beautiful gifts are this way. And so before we can wield it, God must teach us His accounting of things. Blessed are the poor, the sick and the weak. The world hates us for our differences, but God loves us for them. This is redemption‘s deep magic. Yield your insecurities to Him and let Him astonish you. Perhaps His most precious artistry is hidden in the very things you are trying to hide. Perhaps you are a Paul.

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07 August 2007

Churchianity. (Managing the tension between faith and culture in the Body of Christ.)

I have to admit to plagiarizing the title from Joy Davidman Lewis’ ‘Smoke on the Mountain.’ My conscience thus clear, let’s get started.

‘A personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.’ Carried on horseback by circuit riders a century ago, projected by Power-Point by Campus Crusade today, this simplest of creeds stands as the very foundation of Evangelical Christianity. Easily understood and easily shared, this phrase has introduced countless men and women to the Love of their lives. It is the merest of Christianities, ideal for introducing one individual to the person of Jesus Christ. There is, of course, a slight snag. You see, when a bunch of individuals have personal relationships with Christ, they start to have a corporate relationship with Christ too. A perspective optimized to win individual souls to Christ may find itself struggling with the intricacies of Christians trying to live in community. So Evangelicals’ greatest strength is also our greatest weakness; what we gain in Evangelism, we lose in Ecclesiology. And culture is more an Ecclesial question than one of Evangelism.

People and Peoples.

‘I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return.
I am not taína. Taíno is in me, but there is no way back.
I am not European. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there.

I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish.
I was born at the crossroads
and I am whole.’
- Aurora Levins-Morales, ‘Child of the Americas.’

A Puerto-Rican Jew born in America, this poet speaks of being a hundred things all at once. She partakes in many identities, yet she cannot be entirely captured by any of them. In this simple truth, she speaks for all of us. Each of us encompass many things, but we are rarely encompassed by any one of them. I exist on many levels. I am a man. I am an American. I am a soldier. I am a human being. I am a hundred things. Some are insignificant. I am tall. Some are central. I am a son of I AM. All these things are true of me, and all at once. I am all of them together. Yet, even together, they are not all of me. I am a member of many communities, but I must first exist in order to exist in any communities. So there must be levels of existence.

Scripture confirms this conclusion. It is clear that God covenants with individuals, such as with Abraham (of course, that individual became a people in the course of that covenant.) God also covenants with nations, as the Old Testament unquestionably proves. And ultimately, He covenants with all of humanity. Genesis speaks to this, as does Revelation. Let us delineate our levels accordingly: individual, defined by the person themselves; corporate, the person in a community of culture; and universal, the person as a member of the human race. So now we have levels, but levels do not tell us what to do, nor where to start. For those answers, let’s turn to some wise council. With a Belfast accent.

C.S. Lewis, in his essay ‘Christianity and Culture,’ argues for the primacy of individuals vice cultures. (Please hold on the deconstructivist scalpels until you hear his argument. Or at least read ‘Bulverism’ first.) It has everything to do with permanence. A man lives, at most, eleven decades. A culture lives on anywhere from centuries to millennia. If this world is all that there is, then culture must logically be primary. Christianity, though, teaches that individuals live on forever. And if this is true, then the individual must be primary. It is St. Augustine, not Carthage, that goes to heaven. We must start at the person, and from there move to the culture and the universal. Even intuitively, this checks; many who are the first to point out the injustices perpetrated by humanity are the last to do anything about the injustices they perpetrate themselves. There are already enough demagogues who preach systemic ethics and practice little personal ethics. (Lewis again, ‘The Dangers of National Repentance.’) The plank in your own eye and all of that. Of course, the verse doesn’t stop there, and neither should we. ‘And then you can see clearly to remove the speck of dust from your brother’s eye.’ We are to work for social justice, but we must first pursue the justice that is closest and hardest, treating others as we would want to be treated. But I digress.

We must begin with the individual. But we cannot end there. St. Augustine goes to heaven, but he still goes as a Carthaginian. On some level, St. Augustine brings the best of Carthage (or Hippo) with him to heaven. Together with the other Carthaginian believers, they represent Carthage amongst every tribe and every tongue. There is a primacy of individuals, but it is not an exclusive primacy. We are all Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels. And salvation history plays out on every level upon which we exist.

Stories that you can’t read are just gibberish and music that you can’t understand is just noise. So we must learn to hear all the chords to understand the symphony. The individual may be the easiest to understand, as the boundaries of the identity are objectively definable and fixed in space and time. Individually, I am two hundred pounds of water and tissue. I can immediately identify where I begin and end. I can look at my outstretched fingertips and say ‘I go this far and no farther.’ My fingers are part of me. The keys upon which I am typing are not part of me. Like most people, I figured this one out before my first birthday and haven’t looked back. My identity as part of the universal is a bit more esoteric, but still one I feel as if I can nail down. Really, that one is pretty objective and fixed as well (generally only redefined in the ugliest of actions. Like Dred Scott. Or Roe.) My physiology and psyche are undeniably human. I think human thoughts and feel human feelings, and in doing so I am able to relate to other humans. Every cell of my body contains Adenine and Cytosine wrapped around each other in a uniquely human pattern, and all of those cells together are immediately recognizable to another person as a human being. While I may not exhaustively understand what it is to be myself individually or as a member of the universal, I can at least recognize the boundaries of those identities. I cannot say the same for my identity as a member of cultures. Corporate identity is written in grays, not in black and white, (even when it is defined as black or white.)

Cultural identities are the hardest for us to wrap our minds around, because it is the hardest to define. And this is why we have so many problems understanding each other: few of us even understand ourselves. Most cultural identities seem imposed on group members from within and without. You find yourself drafted without ever really being asked, people kind of assume your allegiances and run with the assumption. To try to make sense out of chaos, we write pasts-that-never-were that tell us who we are now and why. Unfortunately, we are fallen storytellers, and our stories reflect our fallenness. Many of our mythologies are simply fairy-tales to shield us from the scary complexity of the physics of a fallen world. We try to draw clear lines, generally where we are and always have been the righteous, the trespassed against, the ones-who-are-not-to-blame. And in our gerrymandered pasts, we forget the simple truth that for every time we have been hurt, we have hurt others. We live in a cascade of brokenness that reaches all the way back to the garden, and all of our identities are thus broken.

This is the challenge of cultures. There are a thousand fault-lines, and they change entirely based on context. The boundaries seem to always come down to some fuzzy definition along some mostly arbitrary distinction. The axis of the division is rarely objective, and the point of sundering along that axis is equally relative. It is who and what someone identifies with, and who and what others decide that someone should be identified with, and even those two things wrapped around each other. Americans, at least domestically, tend to see culture as an issue of race and ethnicity. But even that is hard to define… something that shows up conclusively in voting patterns cannot be defined concretely in any objective terms. There isn’t a critical concentration of melanin that predestines someone to think or act a certain way. Between contexts, the point of sundering changes; someone who is considered black in the United States may be considered white in Brazil. Economics is another fault-line, but there is no critical net worth which causes one to move from one group into another. In fact, the relationship may even be reversed at times: the nouveau riche may be ostracized from the rich-culture, while an old money blueblood, deeply in debt, may still retain their membership. Geography? It changes. The inextricably Irish Celts lived in the Carpathians in Alexander the Great’s day. Nobody’s really, truly indigenous anywhere on this side of the fall. Language? A third of the Knesset speaks Russian as their native tongue. Culture changes at every level: look at the rivalry between schools, and you will find that in each school there are punk rawkers, band geeks, jocks and preppies. Their fault-line is music, but where is the critical MP3 that moves you from one group to another? The military is almost an artificial ethnicity, almost impenetrable to an outsider, but just below the surface there are fault-lines between services: zoomies, grunts, squids and jarheads. There are always lines, but the lines are generally arbitrary. And even their gradations are relative.

There is, of course, one fault-line we haven’t discussed yet. Religion. The height of a tree has much to do with the soil in which it is planted. Plant a tree in shallow, sandy soil, and its growth will forever be stunted. Plant a tree in deep, rich soil, and its branches will reach the sky. There are few soils deeper than religion. (It can be a rocky soil as well.) It should not surprise us, then, that the identities that grow from that soil are thick and strong. I think of Orthodox churches in America. Almost invariably, next to any round-domed church, there is a cultural center of the corresponding people group. Be it Greeks, Ukrainians, or Armenians, culture is built upon a bedrock of religion. This is, of course, not confined to our Orthodox brethren. For Irish and Italian immigrants, Catholic churches served as a fortress to the beleaguered identity. And for Korean immigrants, Evangelical churches with services in Hangul served as a touchstone for identity. Synagogues have been the heart of Jewish Diaspora culture for two millennia; throughout a sixth of the world, Muezzinin broadcast culture from Minarets with their calls to noontime prayers. And lest we think ourselves immune, the ATL would be hardly recognizable without the hundreds of churches (and thousands of billboard advertisements.) I can hardly imagine a Colorado Springs without Focus on the Family, New Life Church or Glen Eyrie. There is undeniably an American Christian-ese culture, a unique religion-based identity that is not necessarily synonymous with the Christian faith. This is not a bad thing. Challenges are not necessarily bad. But they are challenges.

Growing up Christian-ese. It is remarkably easy to mistake your expression of something for a universal expression of that same thing. Especially when you haven’t encountered any different expressions of that thing. I think of Lucy Pevensee’s first meeting with Tumnus the Fawn in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Assuming that a handshake is a universal expression of greeting, she offers him her hand. And he stands there perplexed. Tumnus, of course, was well acquainted with the concept of greeting. He just didn’t see any reason that grabbing someone’s hand should have anything to do with it. Conversely, Lucy probably would have never realized the difference between a handshake and a greeting were it not for the fawn’s puzzled response. Fortunately, Lucy and Tumnus both find the goodwill and trust to understand each others’ expressions of greeting, and they are able to move from there into friendship (except for the slight complication of Tumnus kidnapping Lucy to deliver her to certain death at the hands of the White Witch. But that works itself out.)

In childhood, all the dichotomies are pretty straightforward. You go to church, church is good. Jesus is good. Jesus is associated with church. And church looks a certain way, meets at a certain time, and plays a certain type of music. You just assume these things are synonymous, because you don’t really see anything to challenge those assumptions. Truth is coherent, and A equals B equals C. Automatically, you start to build a framework for understanding your world. As you leave the comfort of the familiar, you find yourself in the middle of a complicated, chaotic universe. In the midst of that chaos, the structures do exactly what they are designed to do: bring order out of chaos. So we come back to our dichotomies. Christians talk a certain way, using words like ‘youth group,’ ‘saved,’ and ‘praise music.’ People who don’t talk that way aren’t Christians. So when you meet the kid who calls himself Catholic, you aren’t surprised to find that he doesn’t talk much about Jesus. Nor are you surprised that he spends his weekends getting drunk. Of course, you also probably don’t notice the other kid who wears a crucifix, the shy one who quietly prays every day before eating his school lunch. And until someone drives a eighteen-wheeler through your assumptions, you probably won’t even realize you have them. (In academic-ese, I think its called disturbing frameworks. I like the Big Rig picture better.)

Mine was nowhere near so dramatic. In college, I took a fascinating class on the History of Christianity. Though the subject matter was interesting, the most memorable aspect of the class was the teacher. If you’ve ever heard a pilot talk about their aircraft, it is something like a parent talking about their kid. They know all the facts, all the numbers, but it is deeper than that. It’s almost like the aircraft is a part of them. And this is how this man taught that class. He certainly knew the issues, the numbers and places, but it was deeper. It was like he was talking about his family. Really, nothing up to this point would have been particularly surprising… there were a good number of Christian professors at my college. But this professor happened to be a Lebanese Eastern Rite Catholic (and a Pave Low driver to boot.) Talking to him after nearly every class, I came to one inescapable conclusion. It wasn’t any specific doctrinal point, but he more than knew what he was talking about. Nor was it any Christian catchphrase. He didn’t really use any of those. But unmistakably, undeniably, this man loved the same Jesus that I loved. This was obviously inconvenient for my framework. Looking back, I was a bit like Lucy, realizing that there is a difference between a handshake and a greeting. A realization grew from between the cracks in my framework: Evangelical religiosity isn’t the same thing as knowing Jesus.

Denis de Rougemount tells us that love ceases to be a devil when it ceases to be a god. The same is true of cultures. There are a lot of good things about Evangelical culture. I deeply appreciate the passion in praise music, the way that we emphasize intimacy with God, the simplicity of our message. But that culture cannot be a god. It would, of course, not be a novel mistake. The Pharisees were given a perfect law upon which to build a perfect culture. Their mistake was when they made that law into a god; it was then they became devils. At the very heart of idolatry is the idea of a controllable god. And so it was there: the Sanhedrin pulled the levers and cables behind the image of the law they had constructed. It all came down to control, to pride. If they had ever found the humility to bow before the Lawgiver, they would have found Him far greater than the Wizard of Oz they had fashioned. We are no different.

When people want to hurt each other, they generally fashion some plowshare from their identity into a sword. Intellect, power and wit are all readily sharpened. And sometimes, they actually look you in the eye as they draw swords. When Christians want to be vicious to each other, we rarely allow ourselves the frankness of the profane. We usually invoke some sort of divine license. We turn the weapons of our churches, our authority and our theology against each other when we want to draw blood. Consider how many PKs ran and never looked back. Consider how many petty disagreements between elders have shattered churches. Consider how many unreached people we have turned off with our inability to be vulnerable and real. Our wars of pride have created more casualties than we care to consider.

Pride is the death of all things. It is at the heart of all discord, at the heart of every sundering. We are all undoubtedly too familiar with the ugliness of individual pride. And we should be familiar with the universal pride of humanity, blaming God for all the things that are our fault, refusing to thank Him for all the privileges we enjoy. That pride will get uglier before it is finally broken. (I hope not to be around for that chapter of history.) But there is a pride in cultures as well. Circumcision was an honor God gave to His people. It was intended to be an external expression of a circumcision of the heart. But without that true circumcision, the physical expression is absolutely worthless. Without an obedient heart, circumcision no more makes me a son of Abraham than an appendectomy makes me a son of Buddha. When circumcision became a god, it became a devil; those who worship it became, in Paul’s words, mutilators of the flesh. The Pharisees prided themselves on being children of Abraham. But Abraham was a child of God. When they got those two things out of order, they lost both. Their pride in the trappings of Abraham sundered them from Abraham and God. It is not merely an Old Testament problem. Pride has sundered the church at thousand times. A millennium ago, Eastern and Western Christians decided that they cared more about being Eastern or Western than they cared about being Christians. Fighting over the trappings of Peter, they abandoned both Peter and the God he loved. In the same way, our pride in the trappings of Jonathan Edwards sunders us from both that great saint and his God.

Culture becomes a devil when it becomes a god. But when it loses both the divine and diabolical, it becomes what it was originally intended to be: a gift. All identity is given to us as a gift, intended to adorn our reflection of Christ. Therefore, it only can fall into place when placed beneath our identity in Christ. The Church is simply many identities in Christ gathered together in fellowship. In that fellowship, there is transcendence, but the rule still holds. Individually and corporately, our identities are only beautiful when they reflect Him.

Churches vs. the Church. Circumcision does not a Jew make. But it certainly does make one easier to identify (at least in the first century equivalent of gym class.) Likewise, a Jesus Fish does not a Christian make. But it definitely makes one easier to spot in traffic. We’ll skip the whole anthropology discussion on ritual, totems and the like, but suffice it to say that every culture finds their own way to express the deep magic. The ritual deepens the experience of the deep magic, bathing it in the richness of space and time. Still, the magic and the ritual are not the same. Experience the magic outside the ritual, and you may miss out on some of the fullness, but try to practice the ritual outside of the magic and you will miss out on the entirety of both. Better to be a uncircumcised God-fearing Greek than to be a Pharisee of Pharisees and not know Him at all. Of course, better still to be a Pharisee of Pharisees and be head over heels in love with Him.

Theologians speak of a mystical communion amongst believers, a community between Christians that transcends the tangible. There is a deep magic that transforms a group of strangers infinitely estranged in their depravity into brothers and sisters bound together by the blood of Christ. As Abraham’s obedience is manifested in circumcision, this mystical communion between Christians is manifested in the visible church. There is a very real and very important dispute over whether that manifestation is rightly expressed in organic spontaneity or in sacramental hierarchy. Either way, though, that manifestation is undeniably real, made up of real people with real issues and real preferences. Complete with all the problems those things bring; redeemed people are still people.

Paul the Christian doesn’t look that much different from Saul the Pharisee (unless he somehow became taller falling off his horse.) After his conversion, he probably still liked the same kinds of foods and wore the same kind of tunic. He probably had much of the same personality quirks, as Barnabas clearly discovered. But something happens to Saul on the road to Damascus when he becomes Paul the Apostle. In the same way, something happens to a crowd of Ephesians when they become the Church in Ephesus. In the mystery of redemption, God gives us new names. Saul becomes Paul, a man becomes a Christian, a crowd becomes a Church. We live between our two names, the one that is passing away, and the one that awaits us. And in this is a tension.

I am a Christian, yet Christianity is not me. I am captured by Christ, He is not captured by me. When I get these things out of order, I become an idolater. Here is the paradox of the two names: Pursue the Name of Christ, and you will find your own name. Pursue your own name, and you will find neither. The same is true of cultures. There is undoubtedly an American Christianity, but Christianity is not American. Nor Roman. Humanity was created in the Image of God. We were made to be mirrors. Looking in a mirror, you focus on the image a mirror reflects, not the mirror itself. Focusing on the mirror itself, you only see smudges and cracks, the things that are least mirror-like about it. Focusing on the reflected image, you see both the mirror itself and the reflection. Still, even if you focus on the right Image, you have to clean off the smudges from time to time.

Remember back to the eighteen-wheeler disturbing our frameworks. The impulse to change usually starts with the still, small voice. Of course, if you don’t listen to that voice, it usually gets louder. We’re back to the tension… the old name tenaciously resisting change, the new name continuing its inexorable conquest. Paul tells us about the war between the old man and the new. The better angels of our natures, the speech goes. How telling that speech was written while this nation was at war with itself. What is true within each of us is true of all of us together. A culture sometimes follows the whispers of its collective conscience. More often than not, though, it takes men with megaphones. Often, those men are the ones who hear the whispers the loudest.

I think of the old monastics. Departing from the distractions of society, they tuned their ears to that whisper. They were the artillery, preserving society with their prayers from far behind the front lines. In the same way, the Old Testament prophets went into the wilderness to hear the words they would shout in the streets. In many ways, American Evangelicals live in the legacy of the Puritans. They, too, sought to preserve their church by retreating into the wilderness. When the holiness of their society was threatened, they withdrew into cities on a hill. These cities were intended to shine as examples of Godly society, inspiring the larger society back to holiness. Over the course of four centuries, Evangelicals have in this way maintained doctrine in the absence of a centralized decision-making body. There is a certain secessionist impulse to it, but it is not necessarily schismatic. (And even when it is, remember that the seditious colonists came back across the ocean two centuries later to save Britannia in her hour of greatest need. Catholics and Evangelicals owe more to each other than either side cares to admit.) To be holy is to be set apart. So from Plymouth Rock to L’Abri, we have set ourselves apart to find holiness.

A nation set apart. It is not a new idea in Salvation History. God calls Abram out of Iraq to father a great nation in a strange land. The Chosen People Israel, a holy nation built upon the Holy Law. The Law of Love completes the chord. God calls His chosen from all peoples, setting them apart as His own. Yet, even a people set apart sometimes need to be called back. This is the function of the prophets. They are set apart themselves to call their people back, sacrificing their own comfort to disturb the comfortable culture of their people. Elijah goes into the waterless wastes and John feasts on locusts and honey in the wilderness. But many who depart into silence come back with loudspeakers. So Elijah meets the prophets of Baal with words of fire, and Athanasius meets the acolytes of Arius with words no less fiery. The king Josiah rejoicing in his rediscovery of the Scriptures, calls his people back to the simplicity of God‘s intimacy. Martin Luther, rediscovering the Scriptures himself, chooses to confront the comfortably corrupt churchian culture of his day. There will always be those who challenge the culture of the church. We need to make room for them.

There will always be the Joseph Smiths, as well. Pelagius, Sun Myung Moon, any of a hundred names, there will always be prophets of newer, better Christianities. Without the pesky Christ part. I can’t imagine a man saying to his siblings, ’we all have different conceptions of who our father really is, but the only thing that really matters is that we all have faith in him.’ Family is not a esoteric concept. A man cannot be the son of many fathers. In the same way, as we enter into fellowship within the church we must ensure that we have the same Father, that we love the same Jesus. This is the function of the creeds. A line drawn with the blood of Christ, the creeds stake out the bounds of His family. Still, within a family, each child has a unique and distinctive relationship with their father.

So we return to churches and churchianities. The Church invisible, the mystical communion of believers, becomes manifest when those believers gather together in fellowship. They become the visible churches, and they are all as unique as the believers that comprise them. The Church in Corinth is made of Corinthians, and it has a undeniably Corinthian flavor. But they are not just Corinthians… they are Christian Corinthians. They have become a sub-culture. Accordingly, over time they will find ways to express that distinction, be it in rituals, practices, or customs. Like circumcision, these things are gifts to the local believers, physical expressions of the deep truths of their faith. Together, these become Corinthian churchianity, the culture built up around a local manifestation of the Christian religion.

Oops. We just said the r-word. What about ‘not a religion but a relationship?’ One word may mean two entirely different things to two different people. That word certainly does. We Evangelicals are ever distrustful of religiosity. Appropriately so, considering many of our backgrounds. For many of us, all we ever knew of religion was a suffocating set of spare rituals (props to Cross Movement) that gets in the way of knowing Jesus. It should not be surprising that we don’t look back on it fondly after we’ve actually met Him. To us, religion is the picture of the Tower of Babel: man trying to climb to divinity through his own strength and wit. A bunch of men make up rules, and they put them together into a religion, which in turn gives birth to a god. Like any idolatry, that god simply allows men to worship themselves. They end up right back where they started: nowhere. We don’t like religion. Given our definition of religion, we shouldn’t.

Ours is not the only definition, though. Consider a married couple. The way the story’s supposed to go, they meet, they fall in love, they get married, and they build a life together. If you believe the movies, the best parts are the ones leading up to the ‘ever after.’ If you ask an actual couple, though, they will most likely tell you that the most challenging and rewarding parts of their relationship were after that point. Who can forget Aragorn and Arwen’s reunion atop Gondor? But a reunion does not make a marriage. I’m sure that ten years hence they would have long since found more consistent ways to enjoy their relationship. Perhaps they read together before they go to bed, perhaps a visit back to Rivendell from time to time. Certain things become important over time as you build a relationship. This is just as true in our relationship with God, individually and corporately. You fall in love with God, you enter into relationship with him, and over time you learn to express that relationship in consistent ways. This is true religion. It is a third-order thing: the Church universal manifests in the local church, which in turn manifests their fellowship with these churchianities. And each church’s churchianities are as different as just as each couple’s love rituals.

It all comes back to Liberty in Christ. I think back to the Old Law. You did not adapt God to your culture, you adapted your culture to God. The way you did so was inscribed quite inflexibly on stone tablets. You don’t get to vote on it. If you love God, you will follow the Torah, and the Torah tells you not to eat pork. And, by the way, the Torah is written in Hebrew. So if you really want to understand God, you should learn Hebrew. And you cant understand a language without understanding its culture, so you really should learn Hebrew culture while you‘re at it. I just don‘t see the Sanhedrin sponsoring an Old Testament version of Wycliffe (Septuagint aside, of course.)

When the New Law comes, Jesus changes everything. The Jewish Carpenter Y’Shua Ben-Yosef Min Natz’rati more than understood the Torah in its linguistic and cultural context. The Word completed the words of Moses, giving them to every tribe and every tongue. Jesus showed up in one culture to redeem all cultures. Y’Shua, Jesus, Isus, Iesu, Jésuchristo, Yesua, or Isa, each Name is equally beautiful. As the sheet unfolds in Peter’s dream, the seed planted with the Court of the Gentiles bursts into full bloom. Every person and every culture is invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb just as they are. The invitation reads: ‘Come in your rags, and I will give you royal robes. Come by grace, through faith, and I will transform you. Come as Jews and Greeks, mystics and philosophers, fishermen and lawyers, and I will show you who you are in Me.’

It is for freedom that He has set us free, and He sets us free to pursue Him. Redemption’s song is free-form, a hundred different harmonies dancing around one Melody. He sets us free to write it. Augustine tells us to have charity and do as we will. Seek Him first, and He will guide your steps. So eat pork or don’t eat pork. Consume food sacrificed to idols or don’t. Drink or abstain from drinking. But whatever you do, do it for the glory of God. So one group of Christians partakes in the fruit of the vine, as Christ did at Cana. Another group of Christians, seeing only drunkenness and debauchery around them, chooses to abstain. Praise God. Both are right. A catacomb Christian is baptized by immersion in the Jordan River. A medieval Christian is sprinkled as he proclaims his allegiance to the cross. And a twenty-first century believer tells the world that he loves Jesus in the waters of Destin beach. Praise God for the gift of Baptism. Trust Him to know the hearts of those who practice it.

Liberty in Christ gives us the freedom to love God in any cultural context. So the first-century Christian wife wears a headscarf and lives in fidelity. And the modern Christian wife wears a wedding ring and lives in fidelity. God, our Lover, gifts each of us with special times and places with Him. A song, a story, a sunset, whatever it is He gives it to us to express intimacy. ‘This is this place I have made just for you.’ He does the same with churches. Circumcision to the people who would best understand it. Priests that choose to become like Paul. Praise music with electric guitars and drums. These are all gifts, specifically tailored to who we are culturally in Him. We cannot confuse these gifts with necessities. A first-century Syrian church service should look different from an contemporary suburban American church. Identity in Christ comes in many colors.

Created Equal vs. Actually Equivalent. There is a not insignificant counterpoint to all this multi-culti stuff. In the ancient world, people went to war with whatever weapons were at hand. One man shows up with a mace, another with a broadsword, a third with a dagger. Inevitably, any formation disintegrated into a brawl upon first contact with an enemy. Alexander the Great changed all of that. Standardizing the weapons of the Macedonian army, he formed his men into Phalanxes. Each man’s shield would interlock with the next, and the formation would move as one. Wave after wave of enemies would break upon their spears like water upon rocks. Perhaps we should do the same. Use one Bible translation. One language. One liturgy. Create a culture-neutral Christianity and rid ourselves of the problems of cultures. (Unfortunately, a culture-neutral Christianity would have to be made up of culture-neutral people, and I don’t know any.)

Like anything else, the Phalanx was eventually surpassed. It was overcome by a diversity of weaponry, the very thing it initially overcame. Heavy cavalry could easily outflank the monolithic formation, cracking it open. Infantry would then charge into the formation and tear it apart. Combined arms tactics were born. Pikemen, horsemen, archers, swordsmen, and musketeers, no army would ever again exclusively use one weapon. Still, there is all the difference in the world between a integrated medieval force and an archaic band of brawlers. Each pikeman moves as one with the other pikemen, each archer shoots as one with the other archers, each cavalryman charges alongside the rest of the cavalry. The unity of expression within each branch is matched by a unity of purpose amongst the entire army. The commanding general matches the unique strengths of each group against the weaknesses of their enemy. God has made us in diversity for a reason. The fisherman, the canon lawyer, and the Greek, the Synoptic Gospels are richer for being told from different perspectives.

There is an opposite and complimentary mistake. If culture is such a great thing, then all churchianties must be equally valid. Cultural relativism in a Christian guise, complete with all the same errors. Here’s a simple mathematical truth: whatever is relative is also absolute. Imagine two points on a graph. They are a certain relative distance from each other. Yet both are a fixed absolute distance from the origin.
In the same way, there are valid and necessary critiques of cultures. You just need to make sure you’re starting at the Origin when you make them.

It is a question of categories. Consider a forty year old man versus a four year old child. They are equal in terms of their humanity. Both are undeniably human, and over the course of their lives, both will achieve an equality in totality. But they are not equal right now. So the forty year old can vote and the four year old can’t. Appropriately so; I shudder to think of Teletubbies in Congress. When the forty year old was a child, he couldn’t vote either. When the child becomes forty year old, he will most likely continue to exclude four year olds from the body politic. The system’s justice is in the equality of totalities: equity within categories, not equality between categories. (For all you academics out there, I still don’t like Rawls. Here‘s why.)

Morality is a tough question in a fallen world. Humanity lives in depravity. The perfect light of God’s perfect law has long since been dimmed in our hearts. Within or between categories, there is no guarantee that someone with a corrupt sense of justice will ever accept a just rule as such. In order to anchor any system of morality, we must appeal to a perfect sense of justice. None of us have it. Such justice has to come down from Sinai in the hands of Moses. Or from heaven in the arms of Mary.

The Word of Life gives us words to live by. The Creator is the Lawgiver. He gives us every good and perfect gift, and He gives us the Law. So the Law is perfect, for a Perfect Creator creates in perfection. It is we who fall short. Even here is the question of categories and individuals. Humanity was created to be perfect, yet every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve chooses to fall short of that perfection. Still, even amongst sinners there are gradations. Both Adolf Hitler and John Paul the Second were carefully crafted in the womb by a loving Creator. Only a fool would argue for any actual equivalency between the two. Hitler stands as a testament to the magnitude of the fall. John Paul II stands as a testament to the redemptive power of Christ. Both are sinners, but only one chose grace. They are both creations, but only one was a new creation.

In the same way, each culture is created for perfection, and each falls short of it. In terms of categories, every culture is equivalent. Each is entirely fallen and each is completely redeemable. I imagine that a perfectly redeemed Aztec culture would have brought something beautiful and irreplaceable to the Kingdom, just as the perfectly redeemed Jewish culture of prophecy. But the streets of Tenochtitlan, wet with the heart-blood of sacrificed slaves, are in no way the same as the streets of the City of David, where freed slaves dance in the Year of Jubilee. There are distinctions within categories, and individual cultures in actual terms can be better or worse.

The same is true for Christian cultures. Consider the Book of Revelation. Each church is called to perfection, each church falls short. Each is redeemed by the Blood of Christ. Nonetheless, the Angel has a very different message for each of them. One is commended for their faith, another chastised for leaving their first love. Though we all need His grace, we should strive for His perfection. The culture of corruption and indulgences is a far cry from the catacomb churches of the first century. There are better and worse churchianties. We should seek the better.

Salt and Light. We return to Schaeffer’s immemorial question: how, then, should we live? Perhaps the answer is not as hard as we make it. At the very least, we should know Whom to ask. ‘You are the light of the world.’ In the days of the Apostles, there were Gentiles who chose to draw near to the culture of Judaism. Perhaps the Justice of the Law, perhaps the passion of the Psalms, perhaps the mercy of the Sacrifices, something drew these God-Fearing Greeks to the temple. There was light in the corporate life of those who dwelt in the old sacraments, and that light drew these men to God. The eighth chapter of Matthew tells of a Centurion who cared greatly for the Synagogue. Without knowledge of Jewish customs, I doubt he would have sought out a young Jewish street preacher to heal his servant. The culture of Messiah prepared him to understand and embrace Messiah. A culture cannot introduce you to Christ. But it can certainly can prepare you to meet Him.

‘A city on a hill cannot be hidden. In the same way, no man takes a light and puts it under a bushel. Instead, he puts it on its stand, and it gives light to the whole house.’ By its very definition, a city on a hill is set apart from the rest of the world. But a city is not a fortress. A city invites people in, while a fortress keeps people out. Culture has always kept people out as well as in. It has always been the invisible wall around communities. Walls are not always bad. Ancient cities built walls to guard against marauders and thieves. We face marauding neo-orthodoxies and thieving political agendas. Still, the walls of a city have many doors, while a fortress has only a very few. The doors of a city are closed only in extreme circumstances, while the gates of a fortress are rarely open. We cannot hide our city behind ever deepening fortifications. The walls of our churchianities must have many doors.

‘In the same way let your light shine before men, that they will see your good works and praise your Father in Heaven.’ As Evangelicals, we are well aware of the relationship between our walk and our witness. We know that we may be the only Jesus that many of our friends will ever see, and the way we live may either draw them to Him or turn them off forever. We are certainly called to be a light to the darkness. We are also called to be a light to other lights. The verse says ‘let your light shine before men,’ not just ‘before the world’ or ‘before the unreached.’ Our walk is no less a witness to the Body as it is to the world. Righteousness begets righteousness, and our righteousness strengthens our brothers and sisters. Righteousness begets reconciliation as well, for children who resemble their Father also look like each other. Thus, the best way to work for unity in the Body is for each part to chase hard after God. Light is light, regardless of hue. The brighter we shine, the easier it will be for us to recognize each other.

Christ’s command applies to all of us, not just each of us. Our corporate witness is just as important as our individual witness. ‘They will know we are Christians by our love,’ the song goes. Do they? How can a family that hates each other preach love to the world? ‘And if you greet only your brothers, how are you different from anyone else? Even the pagans do that…’ If we cannot achieve even this minimal level of human loyalty, how can we possibly love those who hate us or pray for those who persecute us? We have to start realizing we’re family. Brothers are not brothers because they see eye to eye, nor because they do things the same way. They are brothers solely because they have the same Father. The blood of Christ flows through all of our veins, and binds us together. We would do well to remember that. We’ve spilled far too much of that Most Precious Blood opening each other’s veins in our intramural vendettas already.

Neither one person nor one culture can hope to encompass all of Elohim‘s song. We must learn to reconcile all of our different movements within His symphony. We must sharpen each other, as iron sharpens iron, inspiring each other toward holiness. And we must learn not to break fellowship, even as He stretches us. It is a question of wineskins. Older vintages may be better, but new wine cannot be put into old wineskins. The new wine ages as the old wine is consumed. Both the new and old wines are good wine, for all bad wine is thrown out into the street. Praise God that there are many kinds of good wine. May we find joy in all of them.

E Pluribus Plurum. (The Church in multiculturalism.) ‘The Church in Ephesus.’ It sounds pretty straightforward. If you are a Christian in Ephesus, you are part of the Church in Ephesus. I mean, most of the people in Ephesus understood what it meant to be an Ephesian. They spoke the language, lived the culture, took part in the collective economic life of the town. But what if you didn’t? What of a Centurion from Cordova who comes to Christ? He speaks a soldier’s Latin (one that would eventually become Spanish,) his culture is Roman, and his paycheck comes from Caesar. Does he belong to the Church in Ephesus? What of a believing merchant from Thessalonica, just passing through on his way to Antioch? He is undoubtedly Thessalonian: is he not of the Church in Thessalonica? How many days would he have to live in Ephesus before his church membership changed? Perhaps he himself becomes the Church in Thessalonica in Ephesus. Perhaps it is not as straightforward as it sounds.

I don’t have any good answers. I just don’t think it should be that big a problem. Diaspora culture complicates things, certainly. But we must remember that Christianity itself is a Diaspora culture, a remnant born out of the Synagogues of Jewish Diaspora culture. Now we have the echoes of the colonial experience, the tidal wave of globalization, and economies sundered by technology into a hundred professional sub-cultures. So now we have a thousand diasporas. We are Black, White, Asian, Latino, HAPA, Arabs, Armenian, Greek, Jewish, upper-class, middle-class, lower-class, Westerners, Southerners, Northerners, IT professionals, professors, plumbers and soldiers, and a thousand other categories. Where does one church begin and another end? It would take a smarter man than I to draw those lines. I just don’t think we have to. Let the lines happen on their own. We just need to remember that we are family in His Blood.

Dr. Martin Luther King once said that it was a shame that Sunday morning was the most segregated time of the week in America. This begs a huge question: what do we do about it? One on hand, we could take the ostrich approach. Ignore it, hope it goes away. We’ll all just be the same kind of Christians (which will incidentally, given weighted averages and all, look a lot like the current majority Christians.) On the other hand, we could make culture a central focus of each ministry, where racial reconciliation seminars replace discipleship and evangelism at every Christian conference. The first answer is foolish, for race was given to us as irrevocably as any other gift of God. The second answer is equally foolish, for when one gift starts to displace all others, it begins to become an idol. What, then, is the third answer? Run as hard as you can after God, and then look beside you for someone running just as hard after Him (yes, kids, its not just for spouse-finding anymore.) Each church should pursue God’s best with all of their heart. And they should keep their eyes open for others who are doing likewise. Unity in the Body must start with Unity in the Spirit.

What does this look like? I’m not quite sure. I just think we could afford to show each other a little more grace. Going back to our Early Church Example, I could imagine a church plant from Rome to the Imperial administrators in Damascus. I would imagine that church would look a lot more Roman than the rest of the Syrian Church. I don’t see why this should be a problem, provided they didn’t break fellowship with the rest of the believers in Syria. So if InterVarsity wants to have LaFe, then praise God. And if the Southern Baptists want to keep a geographical region in their name, then praise God. If the a cop’s kid experiences the presence of God through loud music, simple chords and straightforward messages, then praise God. And if a genuflecting Northeasterner experiences His presence through an ancient liturgy with an intricate homily, then praise God. Praise music and the Eucharist were both given as gifts from God. We would be better served by rejoicing in both than by arguing over which one is better. We should break bread, not break fellowship.

Perhaps this is itself an answer. A hundred Diaspora churches, all in fellowship. A hundred churches, each so in love with God that one cannot tell where one ends and the next begins. A place where the Assemblies of God pray alongside the Armenian Orthodox, where Jesuits and military Chaplains break bread together, where the Veritas Forum and Focus on the Family rejoice in each other’s successes. We have always had our tales of two cities. Rome and Constantinople, London or Avignon, now it is Cambridge and Colorado Springs. We have forgotten that we are all in Diaspora. Our homeland is neither Colorado nor Massachusetts nor Italy nor anywhere else in this world. Our homeland was Eden. Our Lord has promised to bring us back home. Until then we are refugees.

There are differences between us. There always have been. There always will be. And there are supposed to be. Still, there is a tension between us. Only trust can bridge that gap. I understand in no uncertain terms that a Christian academic might have difficulty seeing how a Christian soldier could in good faith head into Iraq. And I understand in no uncertain terms how a Christian soldier might have difficulty seeing how a Christian academic could in good faith advocate divestiture from Israel. Perhaps if we started with trust, we might get somewhere. I suppose things were simpler when the household of Abraham was a hereditary family. Now, Father Abraham has many sons, and most of them are adopted. This is the challenge of the New Law: believers from every tribe and every tongue must together become one nation.

We have a long way to go. We need to at least know where to start. There may be a clash of cultures, but I’ve never met a culture. I’ve only met people. In the same way, Heaven will have every tribe and every tongue, yet heaven is not populated by tribes nor tongues, but by people. So we must start with people. We must encounter each others first as brothers and sisters in Christ. He must be the foundation, and we must build with the mortar of fellowship. When we begin to understand each other’s love for Jesus, we will build the trust to deal with these larger issues. Every reconciliation between groups starts with a thousand reconciliations between people. We have to start by realizing we’re family.

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03 August 2007

Hardest Thing I Ever Did.

Looking over the story of C., I once compared memories of her to shrapnel. As our interaction exploded into a million pieces, words took on sharp edges and penetrated deep beneath my skin, still red hot with her hatred. So I took a piece of her with me. Whether I wanted to or not.

With as terrible as things were between her and I, it is easy to forget that not all similar interactions are similarly bloody. Any time your path and another’s path wrap around each other, you take a piece of them with you. There are places and words and things that remain. They are not always shrapnel.

‘I will be a part of you meeting your husband. And you will be a part of my meeting my wife.’ I said these words to N., sitting on a riverbank in the Ukraine, seven years ago. I rejoiced in that then. I rejoice in our friendship even now. I know that I brought something of her with me. Maybe more than I knew. I hope I gave her something in return.

From time to time, I am still reminded of her. Of who I was then, and who she was then. We are not so different now from the way we were then. We are completely different now from the way we were then. We were just kids, maybe. Maybe we still are kids. I’m not sure that’s so bad.

I loved her. I knew it with my whole mind, my whole heart and my whole body. Of late, I think I bought into the idea of forgetting the previous beloved in the light of the new one. Probably because of C. If C. is not my wife, then I truly desire nothing of her to remain, all of my feeling for her to be subsumed by my love for my spouse. I realize, though, that sometimes people act with honor and kindness and courage. Sometimes, it is worth holding onto a piece of your love. That if they loved you back, you do not rob your wife of love to still love them. You just get that much more love for your wife. I am proud and honored to have loved N. She is an amazing woman, kind and courageous, and I treasure the time we spent together as undeclared more-than-friends. Even if it is a place that I cannot return to.

Looking back, I think I lived in the aftershocks of her for four years. She was all I knew of loving a woman. In that, I was in no way impoverished. But you cannot live always looking backwards. We were friends, but I don’t think my heart ever really believed it all the way. I think my heart believed that in calling each other friends, she and I could remain close to each other, and that was what my heart wanted. I don’t know how she felt. I don’t know if I should have asked.

We were both in a safe place, I think. We had stayed there for a while. So I suppose I should not have found it that surprising when God said ‘move.’ Really, He more said ‘decide.’ Before flying out to see her the last time, I felt like God was telling me ‘I will give her someone else, if you don’t act.’ Not that He was saying do or don’t. He was saying ‘choose.’ You can’t stay in a halfway place forever.

So two months later, I was kneeling on a Moscow balcony, tears streaming down my face, listening to Miracle by Vertical Horizon. Praying. I knew the choice. He said that He would bless us if I went with her. She is a good woman. I loved her. She was everything I knew of love. We were good together. Things would go well for us. But He told me He had something else for me, something crazy, but He would not let me see it. And it was the hardest choice of my life.

I think I understand something more about that. If I had gone with her, I would not have wanted to see the road not traveled. No academic questions, I would be there with her, and she would have been my path, and all of my heart would belong there. There would have been no ‘what ifs.’

A gifting you are not willing to use can become a curse. Unless she has changed, C. makes choices from her deep fears. One of those choices may be marriage, a safe one where she will not be challenged, where she can try to prove all the things she wants to the world and (unsuccessfully) to herself. This is not a path that is compatible with the deep dreams and destiny I saw in her. Were that to happen, (perhaps it already has,) my prayer would be that He would take her destiny and her deep dreams from her in her sleep, so that she would be at peace with the choice she made, so that she could inhabit her life and be all the way there. Not thinking about paths that she could never again walk.

This would have been true for me, though in much better terms. If I was with N., I would have been all the way with her. And it would have been good.

But, good as it may have been, that was not my choice. Maybe I was right. Maybe I was wrong. Certainly both possibilities have crossed my mind on this journey. Maybe it would have not even worked. But I doubt that. I always felt very comfortable and very natural with her. She said the same of me. Perhaps more of us would have fit together as easily as our conversations did. Perhaps this is too much. I will leave this line of thought, for I will not inhabit with my mind a place that I have left behind with my choices.

So this is the road less traveled. Praying about this choice, the path felt like falling off a cliff. It has lived up to expectations. I don’t know how it goes, nor how it ends. But I know He is here. (Of course, He would have been on the other path too.) All I know is Christ, and Him crucified. I thought I knew a lot more before.

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02 August 2007

On The Dangers of Cardiac Amputation.

This is clearly edited somewhat from its original form. I am guarded about certain aspects of my life. I make no apologies for that. But I hope I retained enough honesty to make this useful. May God's love and peace be with you.

In ‘That Hideous Strength,‘ Lewis describes in dreams and allegory the problem with letting someone into your world: they tend to disturb things. They add, share and claim. They entwine themselves around whatever you choose to share with them. And when you want to banish them, you have to face questions of custody.

So she got in my head. Of course she did. And I let her, even invited her. The most precious places, the most guarded dreams. LOTR. Star Wars. ‘I would die for my faith.’ Some she didn’t even know that she claimed. ‘I want to retire to the Middle East to be a missionary.’ She chose a tattoo of a symbol that I used as a signature for two years. She put flowers in a [certain caliber] howitzer shell. My very thoughts, which she seemed to be able to finish (and is the only one so far to do so.) These things were mine. These were my dreams, my peculiarities, the special things that made me unlike anyone else. My own. To be guarded. And with her words, she insinuated herself between me and them, even unknowingly. They were not hers to take, and she took them nonetheless. There were parts of me that changed, parts of me that were added. But there were older parts, parts that were mine before she became a part of them.

To squash ones heart. To amputate. It was standard ops, really. Want to let someone go, get rid of their pictures, throw out everything that reminds you of them, burn all traces of them from your life. And it usually worked. The thing was that it was rare that they could find any real parts of me. Most of me was hidden in plain sight. I said many words, but the real words were buried between them. So they never had any real access to my heart. When I cut them out of my life, the memory withered quickly. There might have been a word or two, a place or two that reminded me, but the memories for all intents and purposes were gone. But it didn’t work here. It frustrated me to no end… it should have worked. But really, I don’t think I knew much about myself.

She had entwined herself around my heart in more ways than I had realized, even if she did so unintentionally. She is from [a certain state] and her family still lives there. My job takes me to the one stable job [in my career field,] located in [that same state.] I watch Pride and Prejudice, and fall in love with the movie. And then I discover that it is one of her favorites too. I dream dreams, and she dreams the same dreams with different flavors. [My specialty and my profession] was mine. And she, the cultural anthropologist, decides to research [a topic directly related to both of those.] Perhaps, on some level, I came here to get away from her. Yet even here she wrapped herself around my dreams. And it was not fair.

It should not have surprised me, then, knowing anything about myself, that running from my desires would require me to run from my heart. It was not a question of simple withering. Somehow she got inside. Somehow she got through my defenses, my walls that had kept others out so effectively. I was so safely alone, and she comes in and teases me with hope. Perhaps these most intimate places would be shared with someone. Perhaps these deepest desires would be met. But sharing was the farthest thing from what actually happened. It was much more like taking. So I ran. And I killed my heart, over and over. My scalpel had to cut through so many layers to remove her, that I couldn’t recognize what was left. And it didn’t stay dead. As I held it down, it sought fulfillment in career, in a girl or two, in anything that was safe, for she was not safe, and not safe had cut me so deeply.

I begin to understand the hatred in her email. It was not anything I said. It was that I did the same thing to her that she had done to me. I found a way through her defenses, and wrapped myself around her dreams with my words. And I was not welcome. Narnia was hers. Aravis and Cor was her story. Darcy and Lizzy was her story. Not mine to take. They were hers and hers alone. She would control them, and she would not have anyone change them. No one would penetrate her defenses, or disturb her guarded world. So she slashed wildly with her scalpel, hacking on any targets in range. My honor, my character, my friendships, my identity. Anything she could attack she attacked, with fury and hatred. I had interfered with her dreams the same way she had interfered with mine.

And I begin to understand my own selfishness, seeing it in her. No one was invited in, because they would disturb my dreams, wrapping themselves around them. But I interfered in their world, I disturbed their dreams, for the better or for the worse. I denied them myself, always critiquing from afar, always giving when it was safe, when I had plenty more, never asking, never needing, never dependent. This was my world, and they were not invited in. For here I was safe. For here I was in control. For here I was god. And so my idolatry was her idolatry: an idolatry of safety.

Perhaps this is why this current struggle has led to such better outcomes: that idol has been thrown down. I could not amputate her from my heart: I tried three times. And I was tired of letting my heart die. So I gave it to Him. He made it, and perhaps where I could not pry her off, He could release her cords, and remake my heart. And all the passion and desire that I was so afraid of would be mine again. But mine to give away. I am fighting for my wife. I will passionately love her with all of my heart. And God is the only one who can ensure I have all of it to give to her. So this is my prayer: ‘change my heart or change hers.; I am tired of trying to amputate parts of my heart. God will release me of my desire for her, or perhaps we will share in those places where we are already entwined. Either way, I will love my wife with all of my heart. However this turns out. May His will be done. I do pray, though, if it’s over, that He would tell me. That I would not fight on in vain. He is not cruel. I have to believe that. I choose to believe that. God promises, He does not tease. Even if I don’t know what I really want yet (and even if I think that I do.)

//

Looking back over this post, two things strike me. I’ll share the less important of two first. If you want to hide something from radar, you can go about it one of three ways. You can reflect away all the radar waves, stealth-style, so that none of them ever find their way back to their sender. You can use deception jamming, sending out a bunch of signals to confuse the radar operator. Or you can use noise jamming, make so much noise that nobody can see the signal that you’re trying to hide. I’ve seen stealth, where a person blends into the background, becoming a wallflower to stay safe from their insecurities. I’ve seen deception jamming, where a person puts up a front or a number of fronts to hide their real (and really insecure) self. But C. and I both chose noise jamming. On a number of levels. We could make so much intellectual noise that no one could burn through it. We could talk and act so loudly (which seemed to come naturally to both of us) that nobody could burn through and hear the still, small voice of who we really were. We could both broadcast swept-spectrum, high-amplitude noise, and it kept anyone from seeing who we really were. Which was the point all along. Rarely has fear been so loud, I think. Done with the former, on to the latter.

Three days after I wrote this post, I get an email from [a prominent figure in missions,] asking for thoughts on indigenous missions work in Brazil. It occurred to me briefly that she would have been a valuable resource, and that it is sad that we could not have written it in partnership. But God provided nonetheless. Perhaps it would have been better with her. I even prayed that if she was married, we would still reconcile in time to work on this together (and then leave at peace to not talk again.) But it was what it was, and I’m sure God’s grace covered it. Re-reading this post, though, it strikes me that I was more right than I could have known. She wrapped herself around my dreams, but I remember that she dreamed very strongly about ’re-locating to South America for missions work.’ This was her dream, and I stole it. I didn’t mean to, didn’t plan on it, and it didn’t even occur to me that I had done so until after it was done. I don’t know what any of this means. I would have liked to share it with her, but as things stand, I cannot and I will not. I don’t trust her… I think that her deep fears make her more of a liability than anything. I claim no objectivity, certainly, but she has too many wars with herself and with God to bring peace to anyone. As do I, most likely. I wish that we were not at war. May God do a miracle here. This is my hope. I would like to fight with her at my side, rather than her at my back.

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01 August 2007

Agape (Part 2.)

A scene from a much happier story comes to mind. It was not the scene that was happier, but the story. The scene was actually remarkably difficult but remarkably important. So I am sitting in a bathtub in a Ukrainian apartment with tears running down my face. Wrestling with God. Not like ‘bless me’ wrestling, more like ‘I don’t like how You run the universe’ wrestling.

Something stupid started it. I think N. wouldn’t invite me to sit next to her in church. Something little and dumb. But for some reason it ended up being important. It started to mean that ‘I wasn’t special to her. I was just some guy.’ It started to mean that I was mistaken to listen to my heart, that my heart wasn’t trustworthy, that I should have stayed safely alone and let my head kill my heart yet again so that I wouldn’t be hurt. So this was the argument with God: ‘I thought You told me to do this thing!’ ‘Why isn’t this working the way You said it would?’ ‘I finally find someone that I love, after all these years, I finally find a story that is mine, and You take it away!’ ‘Why are you taunting me, offering me my desires and then pulling it away?’ And so on.

Two hours I think it was, beating the air with fists, like Paul says. The storm raging, and the tempest coming out in my words. Until I have one thought: ‘God, I don’t care if she loves me. I love her.’ I shout it defiantly under my breath. But I am not defying Him… I defy my fears. And in a moment the storm is calmed. I feel Him answer: ‘That is the right answer. That is what you needed to learn.’ Half an hour later, I called her. We had a good conversation, and it turned out that the supposed snub that morning was nothing. And the story progressed from there.

I don’t think that there’s any chance that I can call now in this story and find out that it was all a misunderstanding. There was no misunderstanding C.‘s words. She wanted to wound me, wanted to scar me, wanted to hurt me. There was no innocent explanation. Her words were death and were intended to be so. Mine were not tremendously kind, as well. So I cannot chalk the whole thing up to a mis-communication. We communicated exactly what we intended, and we intended to hurt each other. I don’t like it, but that doesn’t do much to change it. But that does not change the truth I learned in that Ukrainian bathtub on the nature of love. Love is unconditional. Only its expression is reciprocal.

‘I love her. I don’t care what she thinks about me.’ I claim this. I do love her. I ask God to purify that love, so that it looks a little less like hatred. If hatred is love plus fear, than I ask Him to strip away my fears. They are actually justified, though, in the light of my own strength. She has the capacity and has shown the willingness to wound me deeply. It is prudent to fear such a thing. But perfect love casts out all fear. And God’s strength is infinite, as is His grace. He surely has given me more than my fair share. So in the light of His grace, there is no cause to fear. There is nothing that she can do to me that He cannot cover, that He cannot atone for, that He cannot make right. Therefore I will not fear.

And I don’t care what she thinks about me. I have a pretty good idea, based on our last conversation, if one could really call it that. She can hate me all she wants. She can call me whatever names she wants. She can poison our mutual acquaintanceships all she wants. She can do whatever she wants, it is between her and God. But I do not need her approval to love her. And I do not need her approval to pray blessings over her. So even if I choose to love her by not expressing that love in anything but prayer, I will love her nonetheless. God’s love for me was not reciprocal. My love for her will not be reciprocal. I have no expectation of return. My expression of that love, of course, must be reciprocal. Well, sort of. She has expressed hatred toward me. I will not return it. But as long as she chooses to leave things broken between us, I will respect her choice. Even if I think she’s wrong to do so.

Here’s the thing. What do I lose by loving her? Absolutely nothing. I am driven to the feet of the Cross to ask for a faith, hope and love that I do not have, and in the process I am filled with His love. This is a good thing. In the asking I find brokenness, a quality that had been absent from my walk for quite some time. What do I lose by hating her? Much. My heart turns to ice, I rebuild my defenses, I become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. I know. I’ve done it before. So I will love her. I do not expect it to ever be returned. But I hope that it will be.

Perhaps she would hate me for this. So be it. If this is something she views as worthy of hatred, then she needs my prayers more, not less. My prayer is unchanged. This is my heart. I will raise her up to You in my prayers every night. May You bind and cast out any deep fears, any temptations, any accusations in her life. Especially the ones I gave her. May You bless her greatly, and conform her into Your image, giving her grace and brokenness and healing and true strength. If this is not Your will, then take her from those hands, from my heart and from my desires. If this is Your will, then prepare her and prepare me so that we may honor each other. I will pray until You answer. This is Your story, however it ends. I will wait for You to write it.

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