Perspective: Failure to Communicate

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

Comments are always welcomed.

If you find these thoughts helpful, please share.

Failure to Communicate

See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

Matthew 10:16 (NRSV)

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Don't brush off Spirit-inspired messages, but examine everything carefully and hang on to what is good.

1 Thessalonians 5:20-21 (CEB)

Ruin my life, the plans I have made

Ruin desires for my own selfish gain

Destroy the idols that have taken Your place

Till its You alone I live for

You alone I live for

From "Ruin Me" by Jeff Johnson

One Sunday, back in December of last year, I was rather perturbed with the pastor of my church.  A day or two later, while I was at another church, I saw something I didn't particularly want to see, and I realized that not all pastors are quite as supportive of their parishioners as my pastor has been.  Though I was still frustrated with her, I remembered all the times she had supported me over the past five and a half years, and I felt the need to send her an email to clear the air and thank her.

Not unlike the email I sent to my pastor, there is, in the Bible, a letter of thanks written by an elder in the early Church to a man who supported the elder's associates, when other people in the Church hadn't been quite so supportive.

In the Gospel, we read that Jesus once sent out seventy evangelists ahead of Him to the various towns He intended to personally visit.  Jesus instructed them to proclaim that the Kingdom of God has come near and to heal the sick as a sign of the fact.  He also told them to rely on the hospitality of the people in the town.¹  Years after Jesus ascended into Heaven, in the days of the early Church, there were traveling evangelists who carried on the tradition of Jesus and the seventy He sent out ahead of Him.  They would travel from town to town, preaching the Gospel, relying on the hospitality of the Christians living in each town.²  Christians had no choice but to stick together and rely on each other's hospitality, as they were considered to be a somewhat undesirable element in the Roman Empire.³

A man named Gaius, who provided food and lodging to a number of these traveling preachers, apparently went above and beyond the call of duty.⁴  One elder in the Church is so impressed by what his friends say about Gaius that he is compelled to write him a letter of encouragement and gratitude for his support.⁵

In the same letter, the elder laments that a church leader named Diotrephes has not been quite as supportive as Gaius.  Not only does he refuse to support the elder's associates, he threatens to excommunicate anyone who might want to support them.⁶  The elder describes Diotrephes as a man "who likes to put himself first."  Basically, he is suggesting that Diotrephes has come into church leadership with his own personal agenda.  In the days of the early Church, as in our own day, there were people who used the Church and the Gospel as the means to their own ends.

Of course, it is also worth noting that the way of life of the traveling evangelists also attracted people with an agenda.  There were many fraudulent preachers who posed as servants of God all the while living off the hospitality of others.⁷  It seems that people have always known that religion is good business.  In another letter to a different recipient, the same elder writes about such false teachers, going so far as to call them "deceivers" and "antichrists."⁸  He goes on to say that people should not even invite them into their houses, since offering them food and lodging would be tantamount to supporting their evil deeds.⁹

Wait a minute!  Isn't Diotrephes doing exactly what the elder instructs people to do regarding false teachers?  Does Diotrephes have his own personal agenda?  Or is it possible that he genuinely believes that the elder and his associates are false prophets and that he wants to protect his community from their influence?  Perhaps - to borrow a phrase from a classic movie – "what we've got here is failure to communicate."  It sounds like the elder and Diotrephes need to sit down with each other and lay all their cards on the table.

So how do we tell the difference between a true servant of God and a fake?

Jesus once told His followers to "be wise as serpents and innocent as doves."  In other words, we must be mindful of the fact that there are evil, self-serving people in the world without allowing this reality to change us.  We must be familiar with their ways without adapting to them.  We must not sink to their level but instead live according to the standard Christ set for us.  We must not give into cynicism by assuming that everybody operates out of selfish motives, and we must not give into paranoia by thinking that everybody is out to get us.

Because so many of the traveling evangelists in the early church turned out to be frauds, a good portion of an early church document known as the Didache details what should be expected of a traveling evangelist and offers rules of thumb for spotting a false teacher.¹⁰  In short, early Christians were encouraged to be hospitable while using common sense.¹¹  Likewise, we should give people the benefit of the doubt until they prove themselves to be unworthy of our trust.

I think that one hallmark of a trustworthy church leader is a posture of service.  I do not know if Jesus is the person who came up with the concept of servant leadership, but He certainly exemplified it in His life and in His teachings.  He was a leader who "came not to be served but to serve."¹²  He taught His disciples that whoever wants to achieve true greatness must become a servant to all,¹³ and He demonstrated this truth by washing His disciples' feet – a task generally reserved for the lowliest of servants.¹⁴

According to John C. Maxwell, "Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flowcharts.  It is about one life influencing another."  If we find ourselves in any place of influence, then we are leaders, whether we like it or not.  True leaders lead by example and not by intimidation or coercion.  True leaders lead not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of those they lead.  Christ taught us that we are only as great as our love for others, so may we learn to put our agendas aside so that we may serve God by serving each other.  May we learn to use whatever leadership we might have, not for our own gain but for the building up of others.


Notes:

1. Luke 10:1-9
2. Tony Jones.  The Teaching of the 12.  2009, Paraclete Press.  p. 107
3. N.T. Wright.  The Early Christian Letters for Everyone.  2011, Westminster John Knox Press.  p. 184
4. Wright, p. 185
5. 3 John 1-8
6. 3 John 9-10
7. Jones, p. 108
8. 2 John 7
9. 2 John 10-11
10. To read what the Didache says regarding traveling evangelists, see chapters 11 and 12.  The full text of the Didache can be found here: http://www.paracletepress.com/didache.html.
11. Jones, p. 108
12. Matthew 20:28
13. Matthew 20:26
14. John 13:1-20

The photograph featured in this perspective is public domain.

Perspective: Party of the Year

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

Comments are always welcomed.

If you find these thoughts helpful, please share.

Party of the Year

The wind blows all around us as if it has a will of its own; we feel and hear it, but we do not understand where it has come from or where it will end up.  Life in the Spirit is as if it were the wind of God.

John 3:8 (The Voice)

The freedom to be in the moment

The reason for making a memory

Never wasting all that comes my way

As I take in what I see

From "Somewhere in the Sky" by Kutless

Jesus once told a story about ten bridesmaids who were waiting with a bride for the arrival of her groom.  Five of them were prudent enough to bring extra oil for their lamps, but the others weren't quite so prepared.  Unfortunately, the groom was late.  When word came in the middle of the night that the groom was on his way, the five prudent bridesmaids got their lamps ready so that they could go out to meet him, but the other bridesmaids had already run out of oil.  The foolish bridesmaids asked the others if they could borrow some of their oil, but the wise bridesmaids said that there wasn't enough and that they would have to go out and buy their own.

By the time the foolish bridesmaids were able to buy some lamp oil, the groom had already arrived, the wedding reception had already started, and the door to the venue was locked.  Their lack of preparedness had cost them the party.¹

I've never really understood the Parable of the Bridesmaids.  I've always realized that this parable is meant to teach us that we should always remain alert and be prepared so that we don't miss out on what God is doing.  What I've never really understood is the parable itself.  To someone like myself who was lives in a modern context, the details of this story don't really make much sense.  I have been to a number of weddings in my lifetime, but I have never been to a wedding that didn't start on time, nor have I ever been to a wedding reception to which people needed to bring their own lamps.  Whenever I read this story, I am always left with a lot of questions.

Why did every bridesmaid need her own lamp?

Did the wise bridesmaids really not have any oil to spare?

Couldn't the foolish bridesmaids just walk beside the wise bridesmaids so that they could share the light of their lamps?

Why didn't the wedding planner set up some lanterns so that everybody would have plenty of light?

Obviously Jesus lived in a culture that was very different from my own, so the significance of the details in this parable is lost on me.  To gain some much-needed perspective on this parable, I decided to consult biblical scholar William Barclay.  Though this parable seems rather contrived from my point of view, Barclay writes that the scenario Jesus describes might have actually happened to somebody in first-century Palestine.

In Jesus' day, marriages were arranged either by parents or by matchmakers.  After a bride and a groom were officially engaged, there was a year-long engagement period, during which the two lived apart from each other.  Though they lived apart, their marriage was already legal.  Once the engagement period was over, the groom and his entourage would travel to the home of the bride's parents, and the groom would finally take his bride home with him so that they could begin their life together.  When the groom arrived, there would be a massive week-long celebration to which the whole town was invited, and the bride and groom would be treated like royalty.  It was an event nobody wanted to miss.

Though the groom was culturally obligated to send a messenger ahead of him to announce that he was on his way, there was no way to know for certain when the groom would actually arrive.  He might arrive during the day, or he might arrive during the night, so one must be ready for his arrival at all times in order to get in on the celebration.  It is also worth noting that nobody was allowed outside at night without a lamp and that to be absent when the groom arrived was a mistake that would exclude you from the festivities.²

(If you are a preacher, a Sunday school teacher, or a Bible study leader who feels led to discuss the Parable of the Bridesmaids, then I recommend that you share this information.)

According to Barclay, in the same way that it was difficult for the bridesmaids to buy oil that night, there are just some preparations we cannot make at the eleventh hour.  Furthermore, like the scarce lamp oil, there are some things in life that cannot be borrowed from another person, like faith and character.³

I affirm what Barclay writes about this parable, but, when I read this story as someone from a culture very different from that of the original audience, I begin to think about people's priorities.  I wonder if maybe the foolish bridesmaids were foolish not because they ran out of oil, but because they were so concerned about their lamps that they missed the party.  I wonder if maybe the wise bridesmaids gave the others bad advice when they told them to go out and buy oil when they knew that the groom could arrive at any moment.  I wonder if the foolish bridesmaids would have come up with a solution that wouldn't have cost them the party if they had been as focused on the celebration as they were focused on their lamps.

In Jesus' culture, things like lamps and oil were necessary, so they represented important things.  In an age of electricity and street lights when people actually complain about "light pollution," lamps and oil aren't quite so important.  I've been downtown after sunset a number of times, and I've never needed a lamp or a flashlight.  Today, maybe such things represent nothing, and by "nothing" I mean all the trivial matters that occupy our minds.  Nowadays, the five foolish bridesmaids seem even more foolish, for it would be utterly ridiculous for a person to miss out on the party of the year because he or she was out looking for flashlight batteries.

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the minutiae of day-to-day life that we miss out on the bigger picture of what God is doing all around us.  In other words, we don't see the proverbial forest for all the trees.

In Jesus' day, the Jewish people looked forward to the day when the long-awaited Messiah would arrive to set everything right in the world.  Similarly, Christians, who believe that Jesus is this Messiah, look forward to the day when Jesus returns to do the same thing.  Sometimes this coming age of peace is compared to a wedding celebration - the party nobody wants to miss.  One day, somebody asked Jesus why His disciples didn't observe ritual fasting when other religious people did.  Jesus replied, "The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they?"⁴  Basically, He was suggesting that people were so wrapped up in their religious rituals that they didn't realize that, through Him, God was already working to put the world back together again.

After Jesus compared Himself to a bridegroom, He said,
No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made.  And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.⁵
I think that maybe Jesus was saying that the new thing God was doing through Him was bigger than the religious people's traditions and expectations.  According to Richard Rohr, "The last experience of God is frequently the greatest obstacle to the next experience of God."

Some things, like faith and character, are timeless.  They will always be important because they transcend both time and culture.  Other things, like cultural conventions, social norms, traditions, "just the way we do things," certain personal interests, and even some aspects of religion are not quite so timeless.  Such things can actually come between us and God, for God does not always act in ways we might expect.  May God give us the wisdom to know the difference between what is trivial and temporal and what is essential and timeless so that we may always be ready to celebrate the amazing things God is doing in our midst.


Notes:

1. Matthew 25:1-13
2. William Barclay.  The Parables of Jesus.  1999 reprint, West Minster John Knox Press.  pp. 133-135
3. Barclay, pp. 136-138
4. Mark 2:18-19 (NRSV)
5. Mark 2:21-22 (NRSV)

The photograph of the wedding reception was taken by Wikimedia Commons user Styop and is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.  The photographer is in no way affiliated with this blog.

Perspective: What Then Do We Love?

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

Comments are always welcomed.

If you find these thoughts helpful, please share.

What Then Do We Love?

Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and His love is perfected in us.

1 John 4:11-12 (NRSV)

Won't You tell me now when did I see

You in need of water?

Oh, and tell me now, when did I see You

Hungry on the street?

God, I hear You calling out to me

In the voices of the least of these

Calling me to reach beyond my world

To the beautiful stranger

From "Beautiful Stranger" by Rebecca St. James

At the end of the fourth century, St. Augustine wrote a series of introspective writings that came to be known as the Confessions.  In the tenth book of these Confessions, Augustine reflects poetically on his own search for God.  He approaches everything on the earth and everything above the earth, asking about God.  No matter who or what he asks - be it a human, an animal, an ocean, or a star - he always gets some form of the same response: "I am not He, but He made me."

Augustine then raises the question, "What then do I love when I love my God?"¹

The purpose of the field of theology, the study of God, is to help us to figure out who or what God is.  Theology can only go so far to accomplish this.  We cannot see God with our eyes, nor can we observe God directly with any of our other four senses, so no claim we make about God is scientifically verifiable.  In this sense, God is beyond our reach.

Not only are we unable to see God, we are also forbidden to attempt to make any kind of representation of God.  The second of the Ten Commandments prohibits the creation of idols or images of deities,² including images of the God who gave us this commandment.³  Many think that such images are prohibited because God is so far beyond human comprehension that any artistic expression of God would fall far short of adequately describing or representing God.  I would go so far to say that the images of God we have in our own minds could very well be classified as idols, for the finite human mind is incapable of fully understanding the infinite.

We are not even fully capable of naming or labeling God.  When Moses asked for God's name, God gave him a name that we are not able to pronounce.⁴

In short, we do not fully know who or what God is, for God is beyond us.

The Christian faith offers us some Good News, for it teaches us that, though we cannot see God, we have been given a proper "image" of God.  We can learn something about the nature of God through Jesus Christ, who is called "the image of the invisible God."⁵  St. John writes that "God is Love,"⁶ and this truth is demonstrated through the life of Jesus.  We know that God is a God of grace, love, peace, and mercy because of what we read about the life of Jesus.

So how do we love a God whom we cannot fully comprehend?

The purpose of religion is to help us to answer such questions.  The word religion is derived from the Latin word ligare, which means "to bind."  It is from this same Latin word that we get the word ligament.  In the same way that the ligaments in our bodies connect one bone to another, religion is meant to somehow connect people to God.⁷  Religion can only do so much to connect us to God, for, no matter how much we chase after God, God always seems to remain out of reach.  People go to church every Sunday, seeking God, but, after an hour or two, they are thrust back out into the world once again.  People seek God through "mountaintop" experiences, but they must inevitably return to the valley.

Has it ever struck you as odd that, for an all-powerful supreme being, God does not seem to call a lot of attention to God's self?  In the Bible we read about pillars of fire, voices from Heaven, and other manifestations of the divine, but we don't typically experience such things in our day-to-day lives.  Why does God remain so elusive?  Why doesn't God show God's self?

In the book The Big Guy Upstairs, Rob Strong suggests that God's elusiveness - that we are unable and even forbidden to see God, that we not allowed to try to make "images" to represent God, that we are unable to pronounce God's name - points us to an important truth revealed to us at the beginning of the Bible.⁸  In the story of the creation of the world, we read, "So God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them."⁹

As human beings, we bear the Imago Dei, the image of God.  To say that a child is the "spitting image" of her mother is to say that she looks a lot like her mother.  In the same way that children generally look like their parents, we somehow "look like" God, though we might not fully understand how.  We are forbidden to make images of God, because the only artistic medium that can adequately represent God is a human being.  It took a human, Jesus Christ, the Word of God made flesh, to show us what God is like.  The only way in which we are allowed to make images of God is to have children.

We cast our gaze upward, seeking God, but I wonder if, by remaining elusive, God is redirecting our gaze outward, toward our fellow human beings.  St. John writes, "No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and His love is perfected in us."  He also writes that "those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen."¹⁰  We cannot see God, but we can see God's children, the human beings created in God's image, and, according to John, "Everyone who loves the parent loves the child."¹¹

So, as St. Augustine asked, what then do we love when we love our God?

Jesus was once asked which commandment in the Jewish Law was the most important.  Jesus replied, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.'  This is the greatest and first commandment."  Jesus then said, "And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"¹²  The religious scholar who approached Jesus that day only asked for the most important commandment, so why did Jesus offer him the second?  Was He just going the extra mile by offering the scholar some bonus information?  I wonder if maybe Jesus gave him the second most important commandment because he had to do so.  Maybe the first is the "what" while the second is the "how."

Reflecting on the teachings of Jesus, Doug Pagitt writes in his book Flipped,
Jesus often connects the way we live with one another to the way we live with God, as if there is no difference between the two.  When you love one another, you love like God. When you curse your brother, you curse God.  When you don't forgive, you are not forgiven. In God we are all integrated.  There's no pulling one part away from the other.  Love is not the reward; it is the norm, the constant.  It is the way of God, the perfect way.¹³

As I noted earlier, the purpose of religion is to somehow connect us to God.  According to St. James, "religion that is pure and undefiled before God" includes the "care for orphans and widows in their distress."¹⁴  Similarly, Jesus once said that whatever a person does for "the least of these," the people left most vulnerable, he or she does for Him.¹⁵  I would not say that our religious rituals are without value or purpose, but I would argue that what God wants from us most of all is that we love each other and take care of each other.

When we love God, we love our neighbors.  We love the neighbors who look and act like us and also the neighbors who don't look and act like us.  We love the neighbors we like, the neighbors we don't like, and the neighbors we do our best not to notice.  We must remember that all of our fellow human beings bear the image of the God we cannot see nor fully comprehend.

St. Paul wrote, "Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.  Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known."¹⁶  It is my hope that someday we will have a more complete understanding of God, that we will someday be able to know what we not yet able to fathom.  Until then, we love the God we are unable to imagine by loving those God created in God's image.


Notes:

1. http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/augconf/aug10.htm
2. Exodus 20:4-6
3. The golden calf that the Israelites got in trouble for worshiping was created as a representation of the God who brought them out of slavery.  See Exodus 32:3-5.
4. Wikipedia: Tetragrammaton
5. Colossians 1:15 (NRSV)
6. 1 John 4:8 and 1 John 4:16
7. Kent Dobson.  "Religion, Rites + Rituals: Rebind."  Mars Hill Bible Church podcast, 04/07/2013.
8. Rob Strong.  The Big Guy Upstairs: You, Him, and How It All Works.  2013, Jericho Books.  ch. 7
9. Genesis 1:27 (NRSV)
10. 1 John 4:20 (NRSV)
11. 1 John 5:1 (NRSV)
12. Matthew 22:34-40 (NRSV)
13. Doug Pagitt.  Flipped: The Provocative Truth That Changes Everything We Know About God.  2015, Convergent Books.  p.116
14. James 1:27 (NRSV)
15. Matthew 25:40 (NRSV)
16. 1 Corinthians 13:12 (NRSV)

The image of the NGC 4414 galaxy was created by the Hubble Space Telescope and is public domain.