Lightening in a Bottle

A friend of mine owns a cabin in the woods by a small lake, about an hour’s drive away from my house. Last week, I went there to spend a night and the next day to read, think and pray. I took several books with me.

I ended up reading Heaven Below: Early Pentecostalism and American Culture, By Grant Wacker.

I am not always impressed with books about Pentecostalism.  They often seem to miss the real spirit of the movement. I grew up in the Pentecostal movement. I can tell when a writer doesn't really get it. I am also old enough to remember many of the characters quoted in the book. This writer knows the territory.

He suggests that Pentecostals united three principles that formed their movement’s ethos:

1. Community that  contains and processes spiritual ecstasy;

2. Primitivism; and,

3. Pragmatism.

Non Pentecostals visiting a Pentecostal church, he says, may think the worshippers are utterly uncontrolled.  However, as any Pentecostal knows, there are boundaries that define and contain their experiences. If a worshipper crosses that boundary, they will be pulled back. The spirituality is only apparently individualistic; the community actually controls the boundaries of ecstasy and how it can be expressed.

By primitivism, the author refers to the word’s original Latin root, “primus,” which means “first.” He is saying that Pentecostals continually seek a return to the first stages of Christianity. They are unconcerned with what occurred between the apostolic age and the early twentieth century. At worse, this principle calls Christian history itself into question. In that case, the teaching, art, and actions of past believers are either irrelevant or even deliberate and malicious errors. At its best, the principle merely requires tradition to explain itself.

It is the third principle, he says, pragmatism, which grounds Pentecostals to their own time and local culture. Despite their yearning for otherworldly experiences, Pentecostals often turn doctrine, structure, habit and old alliances on a dime when conditions seem to warrant it. As an example, he cites how each generation gradually moved away from the pacifism and apolitical nature of the movement’s early days. He also points to the movement’s entrepreneurial nature that encourages its adherents to launch great dreams with little money or without careful planning. Most of these enterprises don't turn out well, of course. But many of them do.

These three principles, Wacker says, allowed Pentecostals to “put lightening in a bottle.”

After I finished that book , I read a few pages from Sister Mercian Joseph’s book, The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric. This book draws from the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas to train the reader’s mind in critical thinking.

It is a powerful book that must be sipped rather than gulped.

After I had read awhile in The Trivium, I wrote: “It’s amazing how our faith produces such different approaches. And yet, if one digs a bit, he discovers underneath all the difference a common essence that flows from Christ and His apostles to become the teachings and practices of Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals and Copts."

The Trivium flows from the mind of the apostle Paul, which was formed by both his Hebrew and Greco-Roman education. Paul was interpreted and explained by St. Augustine. Augustin's ideas were codified into an intellectual system by Aquinas after he rediscovered Aristotle. Educators used this tradition to develop the Trivium because they wanted Christians to learn how to think. They wanted us to experience the world as something created, orderly and deliberately constructed to reveal the Presence above and beyond it.

Science and Technology; medicine and jurisprudence; philosophy and psychology are all the results of centuries of work produced by people educated in the Trivium. The Thomasts -- followers of Aquinas -- were some of the most important warriors in the battle to make education a vital part of Western Civilization and this classic model of learning was their weapon of choice. 

In its own way, I guess the Trivium was also “lightning in a bottle.” The classical thinkers created the bottle but they got the lightning from the same place Pentecostals got theirs.

Pentecostals and Thomasts guard the borders of our faith.

Beyond Pentecostalism one walks into Gnostic and pantheistic territory.

Beyond Thomas one enters rationalism and humanism. 

In between one encounters a spirit-filled life disciplined by a rigorous and honest intellect.

That is healthy Christianity, or so it seems to me.

I have experienced God too many times in a Pentecostal service to believe it is all hype or mass hypnotism. However, I also know that pure primitivism quickly becomes a justification for ignorance and intellectual sloth.

I have experienced God reading C. S. Lewis, Thomas Aquinas, and Alister McGrath but I know that reading about God can be an excuse to avoid intimacy with God.

I honor its borders but I respect the whole faith too much to restrict my loyalty to one of its parts. Just as New England offers gifts that one cannot find in Colorado, each of Christianity’s expressions offer gifts difficult to obtain in the others. Pentecostals offer celebration and release more than other parts of our faith. Quakers and Anglicans offer the worshipful structure of silence. Presbyterians offer the intellectual foundation that arguably produced the American government and its economic system.

That day in the cabin, I read books that took me from one border of the Kingdom of God to the next. Heaven Below made me want to listen to James Cleveland sing Something Got a Hold of Me. The appropriate music for reading the Trivium however was Motzart’s Ave Verum.

Ecstasy ought to lead to intellectual formation. Intellectual formation ought to lead to ecstasy. Joy opens the mind. Learning makes the heart rejoice.

Most Christians live closer to one of these borders than to the other. Our various denominational cultures reflect that. Calvinists tend not to think well of Aquinas but they live closer to him than they admit. Quakers are rather like introverted Pentecostals. Black Gospel choirs are not that different from the soul shattering music of the Russian liturgy. From border to border, our faith draws upon the same spirit and drinks from the same streams.

You can’t really carry lightning in a bottle, although my family thought so three generations ago. Every West Virginian knows that his grandfather's unmarked bottles contain lightening. But that sort of lightning can burn down one's house and turn his dreams into ashes. St. Paul actually said that once; “don’t be drunk with wine; be filled with the Holy Spirit!”

My great grandparents walked away from the production and consumption of our region's famous bottled lightening. One night at the edge of their village they entered a tent meeting  and were seized by a power that propelled them into the family of God. Like James Cleveland says, “They went to the meeting one night and their heart wasn’t right but something got a hold of them.” That something made them shake and weep. However, at least in my family, it also made them read: first the Bible, then commentaries on the Bible, but in time books about history, literature, current events and all the rest.

Our family slipped into this kingdom over a distant border but because we are wondering souls we have keep walking the land. As we go, we always carry with us bottles of Joel’s fiery brew.

That’s why, after reading a few pages from the Trivium, I shouted out my gratitude to God for His power that shatters  ignorance and enlightens the mind as His joy delights the soul.

Covenant, Sexuality and Spiritual Life

Warning: This is a long blog.  It is in fact a sermon I plan to preach on May 20, 2012.

Sermons are longer than blogs, although most sermons probably shouldn't be. I am posting this one only because I thought it might be helpful for those of you who wanted me to go further with the ideas I introduced in the last blog.

The sermon title will actually be Imitating God and is a personal reflection on Ephesians, chapter five.

**********

A week ago, our President announced that he favored same-sex marriage and that he will work to make it legal throughout the nation. Like everyone else, I heard him and reacted. Nonetheless, I did not intend to address the issue so soon. I don’t rush into themes that are current in political life if I can help it. I try to keep our church as safe as possible for people of all political persuasions. That is not because I don’t have political opinions. I refrain from political talk because you do not come here to listen to me talk about that. You come to hear a word from eternity about eternal things.

There are issues however that cannot be separated from faith because they impact the way we understand and live out the teachings of Jesus. In such cases, even if our words divide friends or congregations, we are responsible to address them in the light of Holy Scripture.

Same-sex marriage is not the main theme today. The main theme is the fifth chapter of Ephesians. However, because this chapter is about covenant, sexual morality and marriage, we can hardly ignore the current national discussion about what constitutes marriage.

I will do my best to speak more about this as the months go by. For now I will say that I don’t believe a political state has the right to define marriage. A state may decide whether it will recognize a marriage; it cannot define what the word means. There has been no time in recorded history when human beings did not know what marriage was. In every culture and in every century, marriage has always involved at least one woman and one man. Although in some eras of history and in some places marriage has included more than two persons, Christianity gradually pressed upon Western civilization the norm of a two-person marriage, consisting of one person of each gender.

Marriage is one of those words that have an assumed meaning, like “motherhood.” When one hears another person speak of motherhood, one may assume, without thinking about it, that the conversation must necessarily involve a woman. If a man fervently wants to be a mother and sues the state because it refuses to acknowledge his right to become a mother, we are going to get confused. We know that a man can become a parent. We also know that a mother is a parent, but we cannot stretch the meaning of the word “mother” to describe a man who is a parent; at least we can’t do it yet. In time, if science develops a way for a man to carry an implanted embryo in his abdomen – and one fervently hopes that the baby will be born by C-section – we may create a new word to describe a man who carries a fetus in his body. It is most unlikely however that the word will be “mother.”

Language exists to define things. In most cases, the meaning of words shift over time. But some words acquire a level of sanctity or horror that move them beyond the power of any culture or nation to change. ‘Mother’ is one of those words. ‘Eucharist’ is another. For that matter, so is “Nazi.” Time and circumstances have fixed the meaning of these words. We are not free to use them any way we choose, at least without damaging healthy conversation.

The Bible repeatedly warns us about the power of language and about the sinfulness of misusing language. In today’s passage for example, we are told to not use profanity. Profanity is the use of words to shock or to insult people. It has no other meaning and no other purpose. In the past few years, profanity has become more common. One hears it a lot more than in times past. Most of us occasionally use profanity, as I have done on occasion. But it is not good for a Christian to swear. I am sorry for having done it and I believe this chapter clearly teaches us to avoid it.

The misuse of language includes jokes that belittle individuals because they belong to a particular race or a religion. I don’t mean cute jokes that begin with something like, “there was once a German, an Englishman and a Cajun who were arguing about how to choose a wife. The Cajun finally said ‘when I choose my wife …” Everyone here will want to know the end of that story! Unfortunately, I made it up. Since I didn’t get around to creating an ending for it I can’t share it with you!

I can tell you another one though.

Europeans tell jokes that compare their different cultures. I heard one about how in heaven the English run the government, the French cook the food, the Germans run the trains and the lovers are Italians. But in hell the joke claims, the Italians run the trains, the English cook, the French run the government and the lovers are Germans.

That’s funny because it makes light of the various strengths of those nations and because it is so over the top that no one takes it seriously.

We cross a line though when we demean and belittle others with our jokes. We all have a good idea where that line is too because we usually stop telling the story when someone comes into the room that belongs to the group we are belittling.

Sexual stories are in the same category and are mentioned in Ephesians, chapter five that we have read today. When men get together they often tell funny stories about sexual situations. Up to a point those stories relieve tension. They make light of the fact that sexuality is something that preoccupies most of us. But we can cross a line where funny becomes crude. When we do that, we devalue ourselves. We lose our dignity as people made in God’s image and likeness.

So, the Bible has much to say about misusing language and about how corrupt communication harms our ability to discover and to share truth. The ninth commandment tells us to not bear false witness. Jesus tells us to not take oaths. James tells us to not curse our neighbor. Again and again, the Bible tells us that words can bless and words can also harm. Because of this, we are responsible to govern our language.

Words also set boundaries and borders. They do this by describing where one kind of thing begins and another kind of thing ends. The word “night” defines a period of time. We may not know exactly when night becomes day but we all know that it occurs sometime just before sunrise. After that point, we know that time has become day. To call day night or night day would be a form of mischief because it would confuse our ability to express clear thoughts. Sloppy language creates sloppy thoughts. Sloppy thoughts create sloppy deeds. A Christian, who strives to live in truth, must avoid all forms of deception, including self-deception. So he must watch how he uses words.

States as well as individuals can misuse language. Jesus said on one occasion that the lawyers had sinned against God and had “taken away the key of knowledge.” (Luke 11:45) He was referring to the sort of practice that makes common words mean uncommon things in a legal context. When that happens, only the lawyers will know what the law requires and will use their knowledge to control the masses. To understand what Jesus meant, just read a credit card contract. If you understand it at all, you will discover that credit card companies may change the date your payment comes due and to charge large late fees when you inadvertently send in your payment two days later than the newly established due date. You will be notified in advance in that very fine print at the bottom of your monthly statement.

This is wicked and dark because it corrupts language.

Changing the meaning of the word “marriage” is another example of abusing language. It is an act of cultural hubris because it shifts the meaning of family to mean something no human society has ever embraced before. Polygamy will not be far behind and shouldn’t be. If a man has a right to marry a man, he ought to have the right to marry three women. We at least have precedent for that form of marriage. It won’t be a Christian marriage, of course, but that is another subject altogether.

In the end of course, the state will do what the people wants it to do. States, like individuals, can agree or disagree with God’s law. However, the people of God within those states are obligated to resist human law in those rare situations when human law becomes illegal. We are under no obligation to obey the state if it violates that law that governs nations as well as individuals. We established this principle at Nuremburg. When we tried the Nazis for crimes against humanity, we determined that human law is not created but rather discovered. Law cannot be drawn out of a magician’s hat, like a rabbit. It evolves out of something immensely greater than itself that both precedes it and supersedes it. The English call this principle common law. Americans call it precedent. The Bible calls it wholesome communication.

The chapter goes on to tell us that our actions must also be governed.

Christians don’t get drunk, for example. The Bible continually warns us about the dangers of intoxication and to avoid it. Bishops must “not be given to much wine.” Proverbs warns that wine can deceive and that those who give into it are not wise.

All of this can be said of drugs of all sorts, legal or illegal. The misuse of mood altering or intoxicating substances is something Christians must avoid. And verse 17 reveals the reason: “Don’t act thoughtlessly but understand what God wants you to do.” Intoxication numbs our reason. It captures our attention. It hinders our ability to understand what God wants us to do.

There is a single thought that unites everything in this chapter, namely that we must govern the powerful elements of our lives because if they are misused, they will destroy life instead of giving it. Furthermore, this chapter assumes that the health of the community is ultimately more important than our personal fulfillment. We tend not to like this principle but it is one the Bible assumes; from Genesis to Revelation. The community gives us life and must be safeguarded by those who live within it. Because words and deeds either strengthen or harm our communities, they are important for a disciple to govern.

We must also govern our attitudes and other facets of our inner life.

We must avoid greed, which is a form of drunkenness and idolatry. Greed destroys life by making us slaves to things. It leads us to think of persons in terms of their utility to our desire to acquire things. Greed quickly becomes a god. It makes us forget The One true God.

Do you begin to see pattern? This chapter is a warning to avoid things that erode life.

But it also addresses the sorts of things encourage life.

Being filled with the Holy Spirit will encourage life, according to verse 18.

Singing the Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs encourages life, according to verse 19

Making music in our hearts to the Lord encourages life, according to the same verse.

Understanding and obeying God’s order of things encourages life, as we see in this chapter’s instructions about marriage and family.

The Christian view of sexuality and family is at odds with our current culture to such a level that I don’t see how the two can be reconciled. The surrounding culture ridicules the very foundations of our beliefs about sexuality and family and so we are increasingly apologetic about those beliefs. We shouldn’t be. However, we should actually live the values we claim to believe instead of yelling at other people.

A few years ago, I wrote a book about sexual life from a Christian perspective. It was more explicit than some people thought it should have been, but I thought it was writing for adults who would be mature enough to discuss adult subjects. It is back there in the bookstore.  I encourage you to pick up a copy and let me know what you think.

The core reality about Christian morality is that sexual life is challenging. It is challenging for nearly everyone, whether they are a free soul or a puritan. It is especially challenging for a Christian living in a promiscuous world.

I don’t mind telling you that at various times in my life, I have found this part of faith difficult. There have been times when it felt like wild horses were pulling me away from fidelity to my wife and family. During those times, I felt like a hypocrite, especially when I was teaching passages like the one we read today. I have never had an affair but my restraint was sometimes not so much about morality as I might like to think. I escaped because God sent people into my life to hold me accountable and to help me through the seasons of temptation. Also, I may have just been a coward, the truth be told.

I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable by over sharing my struggles. I am merely trying to say that moral life involves a struggle. And it is a struggle that nearly everyone has, in one way or another. Jesus said that when we want to have a sexual relationship with someone who is not our spouse, we have crossed the line. Unfortunately, that includes lusting after famous people like Sofia Vergara and Salma Hayek!

There are a few people in the world with low sexual desire. They may tell us that sexuality is not an area of great concern for them. That is all well and good unless they marry someone who does have sexual desire and then their lack of desire will quickly become another kind of problem.

What I am saying is that nearly everyone finds moral life challenging in some way or another. For this reason we should not demonize one another for struggling with sexual life. Whether we are tempted by the opposite sex, the same sex or in some way that humiliates us, we all need the encouragement and love of God’s people as we struggle with what is for many of us the most challenging part of our lives. On the other hand, we cannot afford to trivialize immorality. If the Bible is to be believed, the effects of immoral behavior on individuals, families and communities are often devastating. Trivializing the effects of immorality erodes our resolve to be morally upright people.

We need to also recognize that hypocrisy always intrudes into this conversation. As we enter our national debate about homosexual marriage, we don’t want to be lectured by people who have played fast and loose with their heterosexual lives. Politicians and talk show hosts who have repeatedly cheated on their wives and have gone through multiple marriages have little to say to us in this debate. They can hardly claim to be proponents of traditional values. Their lives have corrupted their speech. If they want to speak to us humbly about how their mistakes have cost them and their families, then our ears should to be open to hear them. If they rage at others because they believe that the immorality of others is in a different class than their own immorality, we can, and should, easily dismiss them.

What our times require of Christians is what all eras of history have required of Christians: that we love justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God. If we warn people about the affects of immorality it must be out of love for their souls and not out of a desire to control them. Furthermore, we must be willing to confess our own sins. We are all pilgrims. None of us have arrived. All have sinned and come short.

In verse five of today’s passage, Paul puts his finger on the real issue: “imitate God in everything you do because you are his dear children. Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ. He loved us and offered himself as a sacrifice for us, a pleasing aroma to God.”

It is easy for me to get worked up about homosexual sin because that is not an area of temptation for me. However, this chapter speaks just as much about greed, which I have not addressed at any length today. That is because I am rather inclined to explain away all the Bible passages dealing with greed. I also have not talked much about lusting in one’s heart. After all that is something that, bless our hearts, most of us do from time to time. Boys will be boys. Give us a break!

Perhaps if we have learned anything from this chapter it is that without humility and love, we will not make any progress in our spiritual life. For without humility and love, we will not be able to fill our hearts and minds up with God. And without filling our hearts and minds up with God, all the rules and moral guidelines in the world will not make us holy.

Some of you in this service today have dedicated children to God. You will now decide if it was just a cute little ceremony or whether you intend you children to become covenant people. If you do want them to become covenant people, you must set your own life in order. You must become a covenant person. You must decide to be faithful to your wife and husband. You must turn away from all the temptations that will undermine your ability to teach by example as well as by words. And, if you fail, you must repent and confess to your family that you have made a mistake but that nonetheless you do not intend to forsake the ways of God.

To lead your families, your love for them must speak louder than the rules you impose because of love. If you do, your children will learn God’s ways even if they later think you were a bit overboard. If you do not love, they will reject your rules, and probably resent the church and the God who they believe led you to become such a tyrant.

We must also love our spouse. Christian marriage is not meant to be an endurance contest. Even a good marriage is not all sweetness and light and most marriages will face daunting challenges. Sometimes, sheer boredom and a desire for novelty will become the challenge. Sometimes it will be the seasons of life that change the ways we think or act. Having children, raising children, releasing children, growing old – all of these things present challenges. In some of these seasons, we may have to choose love and fidelity with less effort than at other times. But scripture teaches us that doing precisely that – choosing to love and to remain faithful, will result in holiness of life for ourselves, for our families and for our communities.

Some of you in this service today just graduated from high school or college. You have prepared yourselves to go out to work and live in a culture that is changing so quickly that we can hardly catch up. Much of what you have experienced in church may soon appear irrelevant for the decisions you must make. I urge you to not make that mistake. The way we have said things, the way we have lived our lives, and the way we have experienced church is indeed far from adequate. Nonetheless, there is something here that is the very essence of life and if you lose it, nothing will compensate for the loss.

Unfortunately, it can be lost. You can lose your way. You will not lose it because of your sin or mistakes, although those will humiliate you and hurt those you love. You can lose it if you corrupt your communication to the point that truth becomes impossible to recover. And, you can lose it by walking away from love.

The essence of life is learning to love God and learning to love your neighbor as yourself. Keeping rules, even good rules, will not compensate for a lack of love. But neither will a form of love that you have defined for yourself. To be a Christian is to be submitted to God and to be submitted to God is to wrestle with what His word says in the company of Gods people. If you allow the world to define the meaning of love, or morality or of life, you will lose your way.

So make a decision this morning to imitate God in everything you do, because you are His dear children. Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ who loved us and offered Himself as a sacrifice for us, a pleasing aroma to God.

In short: we offer ourselves to God by doing what Christ did – offering ourselves to serve others and in so doing become a sweet aroma to God.

How Will Evangelical Christians Respond to Same Sex Marriage?

Two major issues threaten to fracture American Evangelicalism: growing awareness of what the Genome project implies and America’s gradual acceptance of same-sex marriage.

We will move quickly past the first issue. It isn't less important. It’s just that although scientists mapped human DNA more than a decade ago, the implications have not yet become clear to most people. However, the fact that a single biological language defines all forms of life will ultimately prove more challenging to our traditional ways of thinking than all the fossils and skeletons uncovered since the death of Darwin. Although we tend not to get as emotional about DNA as about same-sex marriage, the Genome project presents a much more fundamental challenge to our faith.

In the last couple of centuries, Evangelicals learned to compartmentalize thought. Science, economics and art became unrelated to faith. For the most part, the secular parts of our lives did not affect, and was not affected by, our decreasing knowledge of our own faith. More than a century after the discoveries of Einstein and Quantum Mechanics, few Christians ask about how living in a post-Newtonian world affects their faith.

And yet, the fact that we are in a post-Newtonian world is the most important motivation behind modern art, liberal theology, the New Age movement, the rise of Eastern religion in the West, and iPads. Evangelical ignorance of these things will not protect us from their affects. We cannot ethically use iPads and CT scans while pretending that the science that produced them is irrelevant. But Evanglical attention to this science is long overdue.

Nearly twenty years before the First World War, an unknown Austrian father was beating a little boy named Adolf. Meanwhile, in Vienna, better-known people were brewing up revolutions. Those revolutions would soon move boundaries much older than the national borders of Europe that Hitler would rearrange. The physics and psychology that were launched in Vienna during those first twenty years of the twentieth century would reshape the entire mental framework of Western Civilization.

Western artists, scientists, political leaders and religious thinkers began wrestling with the implications of a universe in which everything must be defined only by its relationship to everything else. The doctrines they embraced, and which Adolf Hitler and his friends would attempt to suppress, were simple.

Nothing is fixed.

Nothing is stable.

Nothing is solid.

Nothing is permanent.

If Freud was correct, even the human self was a fabricated illusion.

Outside Europe, these ideas did not greatly alarm the working class. Although they indirectly provoked Two World Wars, it would be the nineteen sixties before most Americans began to realize that Western Civilization as we had know it had unraveled.

Meanwhile, American Evangelicals thrived. In fact, Evangelicalism became a bastion for Protestant refugees fleeing from the madness of change. As historic denominations gradually reinvented themselves into something akin to Unitarianism, Evangelicals kept building churches and spreading the faith.

Protestant conservatives proved unable to stem the tide of cultural change. It swept over their seminaries, universities and churches. It left few survivors. One had to either convert to theological liberalism or flee.

Evangelicals welcomed the refugees and prospered. They did not think much about the incoming tide. They didn’t see it approaching their own institutions.

Since the likes of Carl Henry and C. S. Lewis, most prominent evangelicals (if we can place Lewis under that category) had had little to say about the implications of science, technology and globalization. Instead, they tinkered with politics, trying to impose by force what they were unable to influence through argument. They learned how to appeal to more and more people by saying less and less about less and less. They built empires of books, music and electronic media that reinforced the piety but did not deepen the understanding of American believers.

As a result, Evangelicals have produced two generations of believers who experience their faith as something emotionally satisfying but largely disconnected from practical life. They maintain some remnant of traditional morals in regions of the country where they are in the majority. Even then, they often base their reasons for moral and ethical behavior on cultural habit more than upon a coherent system of Christian thought.

Many, perhaps most American Evangelicals will rage for a while about same-sex marriage. Then they will discover a way to embrace it. In probably less than a decade, the debate will be over.

Why?

Four reasons.

First, American Evangelicals embrace a radically individualistic interpretation of scripture. “Every promise in the book is mine,” means, at least to most, that the scripture is addressed to individuals rather than to a community that discerns together through the centuries what the Bible means for everyday life. See if this sounds familiar: The Bible was not the product of a community; it came down from heaven on a velvet pillow. It magically assembled itself into a single volume.  It would have always been available if the institutional church had not cruelly kept it from us. There are no intervening centuries between the Bible’s writers and me. My era of history, denomination, and language doesn’t affect my understanding of the text. I just read what the Bible says. It means exactly what I think it means.

Evangelical piety follows suit. Membership in the Lord’s church is not a significant part of our spiritual walk. Church is simply an aid to our individualistic, personal relationship with God. It is not an intrinsic and essential part of God’s order. We go to church to get our needs met. We do not go to learn how to bring our being into harmony with God and with his people in the past, the present or around the world.

Secondly, we do not understand the covenantal or sacramental nature of Holy Matrimony. Indeed, we have nearly abandoned sacramental life altogether. Worship is about what we enjoy. It is not about “tasting of the powers of the world to come.” Marriage has become about self-fulfillment more than about God’s gift to redeem us from narcissism as we develop covenantal families.

Thirdly, we gave the state the right to define marriage a long time ago.  Many Evangelical ministers include in the wedding ceremony (if what they do is still a ceremony) these words, “And being authorized by the state to do so, I pronounce you man and wife.” Such words reveal that we base our authority to make covenant between a man, a woman, and God on the permission granted to us by the secular state rather than upon the authority granted to us through ordination by the Lord’s Church. Indeed, with the exception of English Protestantism, the early reformers were united in their opinion that marriage was a matter of the state rather than a sacramental action of the church.

If the state has, or ever had, the right to define marriage, why can’t it define marriage as it wishes? We have no reason to believe that young Evangelicals will disagree with what the state decides today since we have already granted it a power it never should have had in the first place. What would possibly be our children’s basis for disagreeing with the state about this?

Fourthly, disagreement with society over gay marriage will cost us too much. If our stand on this matter, or any other matter that affects our church’s finances and attendance, most of us will find a way to adjust our teaching to accommodate the people’s changing opinions. This is particularly true for mega churches because they simply cannot afford to do otherwise.

If you are still with me, you may imagine that I am a fire-breathing, prejudiced, proponent of old time religion. My mind is closed. I am a prophet of doom, proclaiming disaster and devastation.

No! I am saying that Evangelicalism lacks persuasive reasons for resisting cultural change. It often opposes changes that have nothing to do with the gospel but does not engage with issues that do.

I am saying that the issues of our times require thought rather than the regurgitated clichés from earlier times when believers still had brains.The issues require prayer. They require meaningful connections with other believers in the past, the present and around the world. They require humility. Most of all, they require courage.

I am saying that mere cultural conservatism does not offer an adequate Christian response to the issues we face. Neither does fundamentalism. Made-for-television, Christianity-as-circus, offers even less. We must recover our intellectual heritage in order to think clearly about the discoveries and changes of our times. The answers of the past may prove inadequate for the questions of the present but knowing them will be essential for arriving at contemporary answers.

Shouting louder will not help. Moving to rural Greenland will not help. Capitulation to secularism, whether all at once or by degrees, will not help. Taking over the state will not help.

What will help is picking up the cross, becoming disciples, and offering our society real answers for the faith that lies within us. Many, probably most, will not accept those answers. Very likely, biblically faithful Christians will become a minority. They will, in all probability, be forced to walk the narrow road that leads to life if they want to keep company with the saints.

The question is, will those who do this become a life-giving, joyful minority? Or will they become a disgruntled, poorly informed people, mostly angry about having lost their power?

In the end, a self-righteous people who cling to their old ways simply because they are cantankerous will offer no more holiness to our Godless nation than their hedonistic neighbors. And, if one is going to hell anyway, he ought to do it in the company of people who are having a good time.

The soup kitchen, prayer meeting and bible study will do a lot more for our cause than yelling at people or 'getting out the vote to drive the heathen out of office'. Saintly lives offering informed conversation; listening as well as speaking; loving people enough to tell them what we believe to be true, will save many, perhaps even ourselves.

Idols of the Tribe: Chasing Francis Series

Let’s call Sir Francis Bacon the father of the scientific method. We can do that without much exaggeration. He is the one who best articulated the process through which one tests a theory and supposition to arrive at fact.

In his book, Novum Organum, Bacon outlines the courses of study that would advance our scientific knowledge and technology. He invents academic disciplines that would not surface for another hundred years. And, he describes various intellectual traps that would hinder our progress. He called them idols.

Bacon calls our mental traps 'idols' because they capture our attention and devotion. Because we are emotionally attached to them, we refuse to question them. Indeed, it usually doesn’t occur to us to question them.

What Bacon calls idols, Charismatic Christians call 'strongholds'. Strongholds are complex systems of thought and habit that become dwelling places for powers of darkness that control or influence our lives. But let's stay with Bacon’s language for the moment.

Bacon listed his idols under four headings.

Idols of the Marketplace involves corrupt communication. We corrupt our communication when we use meaningless words, words that have a double meaning, and jargon that those outside our occupation do not understand. We also corrupt communication when we use inflated vocabulary to impress others because it actually obscures the conversation. Obviously inaccurate or inflated marketing corrupts human discourse. Anything that makes it difficult to arrive at truth through discussion, debate or conversation is an idol of the marketplace.

Idols of the Cave are obsessions with one’s own mental habits. An unreasonable conservatism or an unreasonable attraction to novelty, intellectual sloth, limiting one’s intellectual curiosity to his own small part of the world, and irrational appeals to authority are all examples of idols of the cave.

Idols of the Theatre are unreasonable attachments to the ideas and practices we receive from the past. Habits, protocol, and traditions can all become idols of the theatre.

I am ending this series on Chasing Francis with reflections on Bacon’s fourth category of mental traps.

Idols of the Tribe are the errors and limitations we accept from our society.

Common sense can be an idol of the tribe. Common sense is the collection of judgments and beliefs human beings throughout history have been gathering from experience. We absorb it as we grow from infancy to adulthood because all human families have at least a measure of access to this accumulated wisdom.  However, common sense is not always right, as discoveries such as the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have shown. Reality, as it turns out, is very different than what common sense suggests. As in the case with all these idols, the gifts we receive from our tribe are nearly always helpful unless they become idols.

Applying Bacon’s idea to spiritual life, I would suggest another idol of the tribe: sectarianism. This is the practice of honoring the beliefs and practices of one’s sect as though they are the final word in spiritual life. If one becomes sectarian, the ideas, vocabulary and habits of his sect set the boundaries of his relationship with God and with others.

A sectarian Christian cannot envision how other kinds of Christians might even be sincere or authentic. If one is radically sectarian, then the music of other Christians, or the way they organize, the way they practice communion, or even their architectural preferences can become insurmountable barriers for fellowship or friendship.

However, with few exceptions, doctrinal and cultural differences between Christians have arisen from their race, nationality and/or their language. This blog is too short to demonstrate why I say this, but I believe it can be easily proven.

I mean, how many African-American Presbyterian Churches have you visited?

How about Swedish Snake Handlers?

Have you ever met a French-speaking Amish believer?

Can you imagine a group of Arabs forming a Messianic Jewish congregation?

Our various Christian communities are rooted in a particular tribe. The tribe forms our theological language, our ways of worship and the practices of our faith.

That brings us to the most powerful stronghold of all the idols of the tribe: nationalism.

As a missionary kid, I used to hear older missionaries discuss nationalism. They viewed it as a spiritual problem because it so easily becomes an obstacle for new converts. Missionaries discovered that if the faith and the customs of the convert’s nation came into in conflict, it was often difficult for that convert to understand why it was such a big deal. Polygamy, the veneration of ancestors, nudity and many other issues come to mind here.

“He’s a good man and a great preacher", the missionary would say while shaking his head, “but he’s such a nationalist.”

It was years before I realized that the missionary’s own nationalism was often invisible to him. In fact, missionaries who confronted and deconstructed their own nationalism were usually viewed as odd by the other missionaries.

“Poor thing, he’s been here so long I think he’s gone native,” one might whisper to another.

Going native was such a dreaded thing!  Missionary kids were especially vulnerable to the sin of going native. They might even fall in love with a native girl. That serious sin could destroy decades of missionary service. It could undermine the essential difference that needed to be maintained between missionaries and native converts.

The missionaries were preaching the gospel, but the gospel as understood and practiced through their own nationalistic parameters.

Nationalism becomes an idol if it demands our deepest devotion and our highest loyalties.

To determine if you worship your nation, just ask yourself this: are you an American who happens to be a Christian? Or are you a Christian who happens to be an American?

If someone walks down the aisle of your church with an American flag are you surprised? Offended? Delighted? Moved?

What if someone walks down the aisle of your church with a cross? Are you surprised? Offended? Delighted? Moved?

Do you find yourself having two different reactions to those two scenarios? Why? Does your imagined reaction to each reveal anything about your deepest loyalties?

And how do you feel about other types of Christians? Is it possible for you to receive ministry from Christians who practice their faith a bit differently than you? What do you think are the essentials of your faith? What sorts of things create the boundary and border that defines where your faith ends and begins? Do you know the difference between a sect and a cult? Can you learn from a person of another religion without blurring the lines of your own faith? Can you honestly listen to and process a challenging question posed by an atheist? Do you react in such situations with fear or anger?

In Chasing Francis, the pastor of a nondenominational mega church hits the wall. He learns that his faith has been too limited by trite answers to serious question. His observations about the world have proved superficial. So he goes to Italy and explores the history of his faith. He realizes that although he is a Christian, he has been experiencing Christian faith as an expression of contemporary American culture. He learns that becoming a Christian involves stretching beyond ones own time and place to become a citizen of the Timeless Kingdom of God.

The pastor meets a fellow citizen of God’s kingdom named Francis. The saint just happens to have been born in a different country and a different century than he. After walking with Francis for a while, the pastor discovered that he too is now living by a different set of values and reaching toward different goals than what he had known while he had worshipped the the idol of his tribe.

He doesn’t become a Roman Catholic. He doesn’t become an Italian. He doesn’t become a medievalist. He remains a contemporary Evangelical American. But these things are now the spice rather than the substance of his identity.

Because they are no longer idols, they become adornments, baptized elements of a faith that receives the gifts of every tribe, kindred and nation and lays them down before the One we call King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

Holographic Jesus : Chasing Francis Series

It is the year 2030.  

Most American cities have one church, to which most professing believers in the area attend, at least a few times a year. At Easter, one of these city churches puts on an amazingly spectacular laser show, complete with live tigers and bears. At the end of the presentation, a holographic Jesus walks on water and rises into the heavens.

One can always expect a marvelous performance whenever his schedule allows him to attend...but never anything like this. This takes worship to a whole new level! The church world is abuzz about the holographic Jesus. Hundreds of churches are already planning to do it next year.

Aspiring Christian leaders in 2030 carefully study the techniques and performances of the most brilliant and creative pastors. They realize that only the best will emerge from the steady dying out of the less talented. They diligently apply themselves. They focus their drive toward success. They work hard to continually improve their presentation. They realize that holography has now become an indispensable part of their work.

The churches in 2030 require leaders with superb organizational skills. They must maintain the financial wherewithal to build state-of-the-art facilities capable of continual technological adaptation. They know the competition is fierce. They understand that some young upstart may draw away their crowds at any time with an exciting innovation.  Church leaders stay on their toes. In this environment, there is room only for the quick or the dead.

A few church leaders still know something about the Book of Ruth and the meaning of the word Logos from St. John’s Gospel. However, no congregation expects their leader to use company time for such arcane and irrelevant studies. A consultant gently reminds one pastor that his audience has become bored with his references to the Sermon on the Mount. “Save that sort of thing for academic conversations at the pub,” the consultant says to the pastor. “Get back to those great messages on topics that are more....relevant. After all, that is what built your church!”

Of course, this is only one possible future of American Christianity. We may experience a more European one, in which immigrants from other countries go to worship in old strip malls. As they drive to the worship service, they pass old church buildings used as restaurants, art galleries or theatres. If that is the future, churches will lack enough resources to offer a holographic Jesus.

We hope to avoid both of these scenarios, of course. If we do however, we must become aware of how secularism has already eroded our faith. For some time now we have been headed toward a future in which “church” will mean something very different than what it has meant for two thousand years.

Christians on the theological left have openly embraced and celebrated this shift. Indeed, they articulated its course and organized its advance. We wise, conservative Christians know this.

Christians on the right have experienced the shift without premeditation or even an acknowledgement that it was occurring. That is because there is not much of an ideological structure left in conservative churches. Existing structures simply have us do whatever we must to keep the people coming in the doors and the money dropping in the plates.

Indeed, if a church in 2030 puts on that laser show complete with live bears, tigers and a holographic Jesus, the people who attend it will likely think of themselves as conservatives. If there are any liberal Christians left by then, they will be meeting in an old church building to chant beautiful passages from the Baghavad Gita.

What is missing from my futuristic scenarios is not conservative or liberal churches but orthodox ones; communities which teach and practice “that which has at all times and all places been believed by the whole people of God.”

A church, you see, is meant to be a spiritual family. Eccelesia, after all, means “called out.” That implies a deliberate movement of a people out of an earthly kingdom into a heavenly one.

Church should be an embassy of heaven; a place one goes to breathe the air of his eternal country.

Church should be a school, one that teaches us the structures of Christian thought and trains us how to apply what we learn to everyday life.

These impractical but indispensable things are the essence of what we mean by “church.” When they become secondary, or when we eliminate them altogether – whether by neglect or by design -- the institution that survives is no longer a church. It may be large. It may be rich. It might have laser shows with bears and tigers. But it is not a church.

Unfortunately, for several decades we have been eroding or eliminating the spiritual components of church life.

Worship, meant to offer transcendence and to provoke awe – meant to lead us “to taste the powers of the world to come” -- has become entertainment. In fact, the word “worship” now means “musical performance” to great numbers of believers. Worship in that case, is a product we observe and judge, not an entrance into heaven’s court.

We have replaced biblical and theological training. Where we once grappled with concepts to transform us by renewing our minds, we now focus on practical life skills and the maintenance of traditional culture.

Instead of thinking of the members of our congregation as parts of a spiritual family, we now tend to treat them as stakeholders of a corporation. Pastors have become CEOs rather than fathers. Evangelism has become marketing.  Spiritual direction has become counseling.

In short, we have been steadily replacing our spiritual quest with technique. We have become religious consumers rather than spiritually hungry souls. We are a backslidden nation, much like the people in the Book of Judges, in which “everyone does that which is right in his own eyes.”

Ours is a world in which orthodoxy has become an unspeakable form of radicalism.

In Chasing Francis, the pastor shocks his congregation by saying such things out loud. He discovers his path by following a saint rather than a rock star. He walks away from the idols of the age. He turns his feet toward Zion.

One hungers for such courage. Then...he wonders if he just might become the first great innovator to offer a holographic Jesus, complete with bleeding hands and feet, ascending into the air as thousands gasp between their sips of award-winning coffee.