Your Individuality in Jesus Christ
September 25th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
For many Christians, individualism has become distasteful.
The phrases American individualism or rugged individualism do not carry positive connotations anymore. The team player is now the epitome of godliness in churches — the guy who doesn’t make trouble. The person who goes it alone, who isn’t swayed by majority opinion, who makes his or her own decisions based on inner-directed priorities is a difficult person, someone who needs to be teachable.
Which is to say, malleable.
When I was in seminary, individualism was the cultural trait blamed for the breakdown of community in local churches. People were just too independent. They didn’t realize how much they needed each other.
I see similar themes among emergents, many of whom are searching for corporate identities to restore a sense of togetherness, and to discover a mission that is larger than self. For them, individualism is the beating heart of the consumer society, in which people take, use, and throw away without regard for their responsibilities.
I also hear a distaste for individualism among reformed evangelicals, who criticize a therapeutic gospel they see as too centered on the first-person singular. Self-esteem, the morphing of sin into addiction, the rationalizing of personal failings, they say, all come from a sick culture of self-love.
All of these perspectives target real problems. But they finger the wrong culprit.
In John 9, we get an extended look at a man whom Jesus heals of blindness. In almost every respect, this man is helpless: physically incapable of sight, economically destitute, socially outcast. Yet, after he is healed, we discover that he has one quality that raises him above the civil and religious rulers. He is able to stand alone. In the story, he will not yield to any form of pressure — not to intimidation by his neighbors, nor to the status of the Pharisees, nor to the lack of support from his frightened parents, nor even to the formal punishment of excommunication.
In a new series of sermons, we will explore how Christ used this man’s individuality to glorify the Father. In the process, we’ll discover how individuality results from the unique way a person comes to identify with Jesus.
I believe one of the most important qualities a Christian can exhibit is uniqueness. Put another way, the greatest potential witness for the power of Christ is a Christian who refuses to conform, who does not give in to fear of what other people think. Like the man born blind, the Christian who can stand alone has the opportunity to reflect Christ’s glory through a singular gem.
Churches should be nurturing individualism of this kind. It is characterized by a discerning conscience, a gut-level attachment to Christ and his power, and a willingness to stick out — all qualities that we will unpack in this series.
To be sure, every Christian is called to the relational graces of love. The restraint of self in the interests of others is at the heart of Christian community. Those who practice self-indulgence in the name of individuality are missing the deep identification with Christ they should exhibit in their thoughts and actions.
But love is not the sum of people-pleasing flatteries.
The real culprit behind the breakdown of community, the loss of shared mission, and the growth of the self-esteem gospel is not individuality but consumerism.
The consumer measures goodness by how much can be bought for the lowest price. The Christian individualist measures goodness by how high a price Christ paid for him. The bottom line for the consumer is, “What’s in it for me?” The bottom line for the Christian individualist is, “What’s in it through me for Christ?” To find the safe bet, the wary consumer looks at what the majority does, but the Christian individualist looks only at what Christ does — and sees no risk.
I don’t think consumerism is individualistic at all. Consumerism is deeply conformist. If the bottom line is what’s in it for me, then my assets had better be safe. And the safest thing is to be with the herd. Though we can’t escape the refrain, “Be true to yourself,” we see masses of people who dress the same, talk the same, listen to the same music, and drive the same cars.
For the consumer, the self to which he must be true is his demographic.
In this new series, then, we will explore the paradox that strong, healthy individuality is the expression of a life submitted to loving Christ. And I think we’ll also stumble onto a greater paradox — that strong individuality in Christ is the foundation for strong togetherness.
Tough Questions 2008 Audio
September 24th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
“In Another Season” By Christopher Raley
September 24th, 2008 § 1 Comment
South wind shivers the leaves an anxious relief from summer’s heat,
and the moon fights a thin cover that might,
in another season, be a storm.
Bushes groan laments against the splintered fence,
and grass blades whisper a chatter so quiet
you get closely and do not hear it.
The man wants sleep but wonders: do enemies yet live?
Every liar is a mirror and every friend what I want,
so perhaps I should wonder, do friends yet live?
Is there a language more vague than friends and this wind?
She has traveled with this man
where brown fields are the truth of mid-day heat
and wondered how she truly knows
one who smiles through words so difficult to say.
Do distant oaks stand a line of cool?
Or, like thunderheads over the mountains,
offer relief delivering pressure?
They live life like the gap in the stride of shoe falls,
longing to hear a word so true it is substance,
yearning to blanket love in the rise and fall cave of winds
where close marches the beat of motive.
But the south wind blows through the screen
a channel of breath between two backs in bed.
The anxiety of trees is music for dreaming.
Tough Questions 2008: Do Evangelicals Portray Jesus Accurately?
September 18th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Sermon audio: Do Evangelicals Portray Jesus Accurately?
This question from the community invites me to do what some believe I do best: criticize my own subculture. Of course, I will answer, “Evangelicals often do not portray Jesus accurately.” And, of course, I will try to specify which evangelical qualities are misleading. By merely asking this question, someone has presumed a negative answer.
There is a larger issue. What attitude should we have toward the deepening problems of evangelical churches?
The criticisms from emergents that American evangelicals are Christianized consumers, that they lack authentic community, that their worship is stilted, and that they are not on the side of the poor all have merit. The doctrinal criticisms from the reformed movement (MacArthur, Piper, et al.) rightly indict the lack of biblical integrity among many evangelicals. Even the criticisms that the church growth movement has made over the past thirty years — that churches are not reaching non-Christians — are accurate. (The criticisms just happen to be accurate of the church growth movement itself, as well.)
Put all of these criticisms together, and the picture is dire. A movement that is not growing, not intellectually coherent, and not engaged with other cultures is a movement near death.
James Stockdale, one of the most famous American POWs in North Vietnam, has been used as an example of how to survive dire situations by business author Jim Collins. (The book is Good To Great.) What kind of man did not survive the POW experience? Stockdale said the optimist, the man who was sure he’d be home by Christmas, but whose steadily retreating target dates for release were never kept. The positive thinkers died.
The survivors, said Stockdale, had two things. They had faith that they would survive, and discipline to confront the brutal facts of their environment. Collins tagged this the “Stockdale paradox,” the irony that unstinting honesty about dire situations can actually bolster the faith one needs to survive.
I want to see evangelicals eschew optimism about their predicament.
Let’s take, as an example, their recent explosion of support for Gov. Sarah Palin. Personally, I like her. She gives a great speech. I admire her decision not to abort her baby boy, and I respect the way she and her husband have handled the appalling media abuse of their 17-year-old daughter. I think the clash of the classes her nomination has provoked is good old-fashioned political fun.
But the adulation of her by evangelicals is in one important respect delusional. She will not change Washington from the vice president’s mansion — populists to the contrary. She will not change American culture. She will not even change the culture of evangelical churches — though she reflects and represents them well. Her presence on the national stage simply does not address the spiritual issues we face.
We won’t be freed from the dire evangelical crisis by Christmas.
A brutal honesty about our future says:
- Our compromise with America’s consumer society has been a disaster. Consumerism will have to be rooted out of our churches soul by soul.
- Our transformation of churches into entertainment platforms has been a disaster. Devout worship of the living God will have to be rediscovered soul by soul.
- Our financial selfishness will have to be corrected by the good hand of God soul by soul, until we are once again the people who stand with the poor.
- Our doctrinal ignorance and folly has turned our brains to mud. Knowledge of the truth will have to be taught soul by soul.
- Our fear of the cultures around us, and our refusal to interact meaningfully with them — that is, interact beyond marketing ploys — has left us unable to articulate the gospel in our own time. Soul by soul, we will have to rebuild a vigorous way of life and witness in hostile territory.
I believe that, once we are honest about these things, we will have ground for a strong faith that Christianity will survive and prosper in the future. The moment we look at these five realities, harsh though they are, we realize that the tool for teaching soul by soul is everywhere in this country: the local church. The body of Christ in its many meetings has been doing this job for centuries. We just need to start doing the job again.
Our ultimate ground for faith is our Lord and his plan. As we follow him afresh, Jesus is well able to portray himself accurately in his churches.
“The Liar” By Christopher Raley
September 17th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
The liar sat at the table drinking his favorite beer.
Calloused, bloated feet scuffed the tile
and the ocean air breezed through the open windows.
He ranted his gravel voice his views
on politics, on prisons, on children.
He stood in the entry as we were going out,
elated and stamped the booming floor,
growled at them, clawed the air a stained hand,
man as animal in jubilant pretend
and the dog barked, shivering.
We took the boys to the beach
so they chased the waves in and out
and screamed happy fear,
a child’s fear of danger that never quite touches.
But of a sudden they were quiet
and sat making signs with driftwood.
We laughed to them the meanings
but their serious faces cast mystery.
Seagulls sounded the kind of cry that pierces a pleasant dream.
The dog snapped at their shadows as they passed across the sand
Some Hacker Hit OEFC’s Site
September 11th, 2008 § 1 Comment
So, those of you who have been missing the sermon audio for the Tough Questions series can now get the mp3 file on this blog. I have put the audio for the first four sermons in their respective posts here, here, here, and here. I’ll continue to do so until the church puts up a new site. Thanks for your patience.
Tough Questions 2008: Can We Live Like the Devil and Go To Heaven?
September 11th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
Sermon audio: Can We Live Like the Devil and Go To Heaven?
I left the wording of this question exactly the way it came to me. I like the flamboyance. But I do wonder how anyone came to ask it at all. I think one factor is the evangelical reliance on the sinner’s prayer.
Here’s the gist: “Jesus, please forgive my sins because of your death on the cross. I ask to you live in my heart, and to give me eternal life.” People are exhorted to pray this way to become Christians, and many have been encouraged to see their prayer as the guarantee of their new life in Christ. After praying this, we’ve been told, you cannot lose your salvation.
Our questioner is asking how strong that guarantee is.
My own relationship with the sinner’s prayer has been troubled.
In a sense, my Christian life did begin by “praying the prayer.” One evening when I was five, my dad was giving me a piano lesson. At one point, he stopped talking about music and asked if I’d ever invited Jesus into my heart. I said no. So we prayed together and that same night my parents took me to both sets of grandparents to tell what I had done. Which was better than finishing my scales.
Dad told me recently that he saw a marked change in me after that prayer.
In another sense, however, the prayer was not the beginning of my Christian life. It only summed up what the Lord had already been doing in my heart-and-mind, and gave expression to a faith I already had. Crucial aspects of walking with the Lord came later in my experience, and these were more deliberate moments of commitment.
In my teenage years, I wondered what the sinner’s prayer really accomplishes.
Some of the things I saw growing up in church had made me skeptical. One Sunday morning a man gave his testimony, telling a great story of how he came to pray the prayer. A couple weeks later, I overheard a conversation that my mom had on the phone, in which she learned that this man had left his wife for another woman.
I saw kids in youth group go forward during the altar calls at big conferences. We would throw a party over the sinner’s repentance, only to see him continue his immoral lifestyle. In fact, few of the converts from youth group remained Christians past college.
The more questions I asked about salvation, the more I heard answers that didn’t work.
One idea was that those who abandoned the Christian life after praying the prayer were still eternally saved. I thought it was simply unbelievable, flying in the face of both direct experience and scriptural teaching. Another idea was that lapsed converts didn’t believe “enough,” which wasn’t any clearer to me. By and by, I learned that there was a theological category for “carnal Christians,” who live like the devil but make it to heaven anyway. Another flop, as we’ll study on Sunday morning.
I concluded that the Christian life was founded on something larger than one prayer. (More thoughts here.)
But after years of wrestling, I’m returning to the sinner’s prayer because it does accomplish a few basic things.
It gives a person words.
Someone who senses the reality of Christ needs a way to express his faith, even if he has a church background and biblical knowledge. When a person recognizes his sense of Christ in the words of the sinner’s prayer, and adopts those words as his own, his understanding grows.
The prayer also articulates a beginning.
Repentance has to start somewhere, and the prayer offers an excellent place. Viewed as the start of an earthly life of hope in Jesus Christ — as opposed to the final purchase of a ticket to heaven — the prayer can frame a person’s future decisions about right and wrong, personal crises, and relationships.
The sinner’s prayer can even set that hope into a pattern.
If someone confesses sin specifically, seeks forgiveness explicitly, and asks for the work of the Spirit, then she has a model for a spiritual discipline she can use every day. When salvation is taught as the work of God rather than the result of a prayer formula, there is less danger of her thinking that she’s “lost her salvation” when she sins, and more encouragement to return to her salvation’s source.
The biggest virtue of the sinner’s prayer is that it can put the individual face-to-face with Christ. The person summons the courage to address God — no small thing. He asks for something according to God’s promise. And he starts acting on the belief that Jesus is not dead but alive.
In other words, the work of God in a person’s soul is what guarantees salvation, not a prayer — however significant that prayer may be. The Christian life is founded on God himself.
“The Fairy Tale” By Christopher Raley
September 10th, 2008 § 1 Comment
And what poetry is there to write here?
Achievement lacks the labors of time
and borders the safe guard of hazard:
truly the place where dreams come true.
You slide from scene to scene
and no meaning takes you.
Over large creatures still their faces
and no words greet you.
What can I say?
Not even the irony of unhappy kids
and angry parents is of any value.
Just believe in your heart that you are good
and lo! Dreams come true.
Yet outside the castle lives an animal
more demon than any fairytale.
Off the road where busses pace and
beyond the median of mowed grass
stands a wall of tree and vine yet untouched.
Look and you cannot see.
Enter and you may not know.
But she is there like a myth
in the swampy heart of your careful footfalls:
Perhaps her thick green hide once beautiful skin,
her yellow eyes once blue,
their narrow once innocent.
Do not look and you will see.
Stand too close and then you know
when the hiss and the steam:
It was like this that men once called her Dragon.
Tough Questions 2008: Should God Send People To Hell?
September 4th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
Sermon audio: Should God Send People To Hell?
Henry Adams, the 19th century man of letters, said that his sister Louisa was “quick, sensitive, wilful . . . energetic, sympathetic and intelligent . . . .” In their relationship as adults, Adams wrote (referring to himself in the third person) that “he was delighted to give her the reins — to let her drive him where she would.” (The Education of Henry Adams, Riverside Editions, 1973, p 85)
In 1870, Louisa was thrown from a cab in Italy, and by the time Adams arrived from London at her bedside, he wrote, “Tetanus had already set in.” “Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid, while the mind remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she died in convulsions.” (p 287)
Adams wrote, “[T]he idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. . . . God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a Person.” (p 289)
In so exaggerating the biblical view of God, Adams expressed what many 19th century people were thinking about God and human suffering. God could never cause or permit torment. The idea was unbearable. So He was portrayed more and more as impersonal, a new, humanitarian god rising over inhumane urban landscapes, and rising very much in the distance — uninvolved in real life, only in idealized dreams.
But here is the way Adams described Louisa’s end, one paragraph before his rejection of God’s being a person. In her death, Adams had finally seen “Nature.” Read the passage (p 288) at length, if you can:
Nature enjoyed [her death], played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with midsummer blood. The sickroom itself glowed with the Italian joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows; even the dying woman shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure.
Though Henry Adams could not bear God as a person, he felt able to personify nature — the nonrational, primal person tormenting Louisa, and loving it. In fact, Adams was working up to the theme of his Education, that the essence of modern life is the shift from God’s power to Nature’s. Human beings are still held by vast forces, but at least the savagery squashes us without reason.
It’s hard for me to see what problem Adams solved.
Many evangelicals seem to have appropriated Adams’ vaporized god. When the issue is even more intense than human suffering, like the question I got this year about whether God should send people to hell, evangelicals often spin into waltzes of abstraction. They hope to make the doctrine of hell bearable with banal euphemisms.
The gold standard for evading the realities of the biblical hell has been set by the phrase, Christless eternity. That is where unbelievers go, into that . . . whatever it is. The phrase is a gem of emotional dishonesty: one feels that a Christless eternity must be quite bad, but only theoretically. The apparent doom is enough to cover the phrase’s total inaccuracy (Revelation 14.9-11).
In such versions of hell, God is safely depersonalized. He is absent, passive, merely allowing unbelievers to feel their poverty. Evangelicals often do the same thing with hell that Adams did with human suffering in general: make God incapable of involvement. Evangelicals apparently feel that the picture of a Personality capable of vengeance is indefensible.
But in order to answer questions about hell, that very picture is the one we must face. The Bible claims that God will take judicial vengeance on those who revile him (Jude 8-16). In fact, when the Bible pictures God in judgment, it places his personal hatred of sin front and center. Psalm 2.4-6, in which God laughs at the kings of the earth and terrifies them by pointing to Messiah, is a relatively tame example. The final judgment, as Christ himself taught it in Matthew 25.31-46, is explicitly a personal cursing of the wicked.
So evangelicals should not pretend that the question about hell is whether God punishes sin actively and personally. He does. The question is whether he is right. That is the issue we address on Sunday.
Like Adams, evangelicals do not solve any problems with a vaporized god. Hell is no less painful, no less eternal, when it is described in euphemisms. We should deal with hell as it is, not as a place where God turns away from sinners in disappointment, but as a place where He turns toward sinners, those who never wavered in their hatred of Him, with personal, perfect fury.
Hell is, by definition, unbearable.
“How Many Times the Heroic,” by Christopher Raley
September 3rd, 2008 § Leave a Comment
How many times the heroic have gone down this road
by the same swamp of flat-tufted green and spiking palm,
under the same grave yard sky where thunderheads cast their menace,
to the same rockets, those beasts of a single rage, rockets.
Hear their eruption and feel you tremble.
How to ride on thundering fear to severe stillness?
There is no mistaking the child’s will in this,
for why have we gone if not wonder?
How many times the heroic have died in the blue beyond,
held up and suffocated in their perch,
pushed up and obliterated in the form of Y.
Victorious pontificate peace on the efforts of the dead,
but is not the hand of God a terrible mischief?
See its motion and feel you humble
like the minds of ancients who first heard them babble.
There’s no mistaking the child’s fear in this,
for why have we gone if not pride?
How many times the heroic have dreamed off this road
where once there was no road at all,
where a man’s leather boot first broached a world
of flat and vulnerable, moist and alien horizon.
He saw no familiar of sharp mountains and dusty plains,
felt no weight of throne and icon comfort.
He spoke to a world whose voice he could not hear,
this slave of the stretched finger rule,
and called it for a possession.
Hear the words and feel you disdain
the proclamations of our former greatness.
There’s no mistaking the fall of the child.
He rises above his father with a steel body and a furnace mind,
sparks from which the stars themselves shine no equal.
