Stop Joking About Canada

Everyone please stop saying that you’re going to move to Canada because of the election.  It’s not funny, and it’s not helpful.  In fact, I would argue that it’s quite harmful.  We shouldn’t be saying it, and we never should have been saying it.

Before I go on, let me acknowledge that we all say silly things in moments of frustration, and I know there’s been a lot of frustration in the last week and a half.  Sometimes you just have to vent – we all do, for one reason or another.  I also know that we’re not serious when we make the Canada joke.  I mean, I’m not dumb.  I know there isn’t actually going to be a wave of mass migration over the northern border.  But it bothers me because it’s a symptom of a serious attitude problem that is actually doing a lot of damage to the American political conversation.

On one level, the Canada joke is a symptom of childishness.  Throwing a fit and quitting because you lost is what little kids do.  It may be harsh to say that so bluntly, but I think it’s true.  We cannot do politics under the conditions that we will only participate when we win, and physically withdrawing from the country is the ultimate form of refusing to participate.  Friends, when we say we’re going to up and move to another country because we lost, we’re acting like children.  We’re not acting like adults, and still less are we acting like disciples of Christ.

I must rush to say that this last bit is directed at people like myself – straight, white, males, who are very unlikely to suffer any real consequences whatever happens next.  For many people, the election represents something much deeper that mere frustration over a loss.  For the undocumented, for people of color, and for Muslim Americans the situation is more dire.  Many of them are legitimately scared, and they have a reason to be.  What their response should be is something I don’t think I have any right to dictate, so let me clarify that this is not intended for them.  I don’t have the right.  But for those, like myself, who are among the privileged, let me offer this advice: you shouldn’t have a quitting attitude, and if you genuinely think this election was a disaster, that’s even more reason to knock off the Canada stuff.

I would offer Dietrich Bonhoeffer as someone to emulate.  Bonhoeffer was a leader in the Confessing Church during Adolf Hitler’s regime – one of the few Christian groups that resisted Hitler’s policies (tragically, the vast majority of churches and denominations went right along with Nazism).  As a widely respected theologian with connections overseas, Bonhoeffer had the opportunity to flee Germany.  But he stayed, because he felt that his country was going to need ministers who had stuck it out through the darkest days.  He was executed by his Nazi captors mere hours before rescue by Allied soldiers.  Yet he died doing exactly what God wanted him to do.

I need to make another clarification.  I do not think the election of Donald Trump is equivalent to the rise of Hitler.  I do think, given his rhetoric, that many parallels could be drawn; I do think, given the demonstrable danger of ethnic and religious hatred that no amount of vigilance in stamping it out is unwarranted.  However, a direct comparison between Trump and Hitler, like almost all comparisons to Hitler, remains hyperbole, at least for now.  So no, the point I’m making is not that things are as bad as Germany in 1934.  The point is that even if things were that bad, the best response by Christians would still not be to quit.

But don’t take my word for it.  Don’t even take Bonhoeffer’s word for it.  Take Christs’ word.  Jesus Christ, as it says in the gospel of John, was the living Word of God who was with his Father in the beginning of creation.  And then, “the Word became flesh, and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14).  He made his dwelling among us.  He did the very opposite of leaving when things didn’t go his way.  He responded to our rejection of him by going deeper – by incarnating himself into the very midst of our brokenness so that he might redeem us.  He has ever since been calling is followers to do the same – to plant ourselves unmoving in the darkest corners and be a light.  It’s the very antithesis of leaving the country.

As I said before, I don’t actually think we’re about to see a mass emigration.  But I do think we see plenty of “I’ll unfriend you if you _____________,” which is a symptom of the same disease.  I do think we see plenty of retreating into our own little echo chambers of people who think just like us.  Perhaps most importantly, I do think we’re far more willing to express anger at injustice (real of or perceived) by throwing a fit than doing something to actually resist it.  And I do think that withdrawal is the last thing this country needs right now.

So if you’re mad about the election, resolve to plant yourself firmly where you are and be a voice for justice.  Get involved in your community.  Serve in a ministry at your church.  Find out what you can do in your own city to promote dialogue across racial lines.  Give to causes that matter.  Throw an arm around someone who’s hurting.  Stand up for someone who’s being picked on.  Have a beer with someone you totally disagree with.  Love your neighbor.  Love, love, love your neighbor.

And you know what?  If you think a bunch of us are crazy and Donald Trump is going to be a great President, do all the same stuff.  Because even if against all odds Trump turns out to be good for America, it’s still for certain that the world needs Christ followers who will suck it up and stick it out when things get tough.  That’s what the world always has needed.

Trump, Sexism, and Human Dignity

The tapes of Donald Trump talking about groping women do not shock me.  They disgust me, but they fail to shock because they fail to surprise.  The man on the tapes is exactly the kind of man I have thought Trump was from the beginning.  If anything, I’m surprised that so many members of his own party are surprised.  As I have heard many ask, why now?  Just exactly what about these offensive remarks is making the rats jump off the sinking ship when so many other sexist, racist, xenophobic, and just plain ridiculous comments have failed to register the same response?  As far as I am concerned, the 2005 tapes are par for the course as far as Donald Trump is concerned.

But there is something here that does shock me, and it’s the people who are defending Trump’s words as “the way men talk.”  This has me truly baffled.  I am not surprised that Trump would say things like this, but if any significant portion of our nation is prepared to normalize that kind of speech, then I am shocked, saddened, and scared about the state of our society.

Let’s get one thing clear: what Donald Trump said was not “inappropriate.”  “Inappropriate” is a word that can be used to describe mild infractions against people’s sensibilities.  If someone tells a joke about consensual sex in the wrong setting, then they are being inappropriate.  Bragging about kissing women and touching them in their private areas (yes, I’m dancing around this; I’d frankly not repeat Trump’s exact words) is something that we have a very specific term for, and that specific word is: sexual assault.  Sexual.  Assault.  It is a crime, a crime which far too many women are the victims of, and a crime which dehumanizes women in a way that is totally, completely unacceptable.  Let’s stop calling this lewd, and start calling it an offense against human dignity, which is what it is.

And some people want to say it’s no big deal because this is just the way men are.  First of all, let me say that not all men are this way.  I am a man, and I do NOT talk this way about women.  I am not saying that because I consider myself a particularly good person.  No – let me be even clearer.  I am NOT a good person.  I would never propose myself as a shining example of morality, but I feel quite confident in saying with the apostle that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of which I am chief” (1Timothy 1:15).  Of whom I am chief – this I mean from the bottom of my heart.  But I do not talk about women this way, and neither do the people I associate with.  The notion that this is normal behavior for men behind closed doors is something so ludicrous, I’m not even sure which gender it’s more of an insult to.

But let’s play with a hypothetical.  Suppose that this were correct – that men really did brag to one another about sexually assaulting women when no one was around to listen.  Suppose that men really did regularly say these things and worse on a regular basis.  Would that for one single second make it excusable?  Would that make the dehumanization of women OK?

How can I say this loud enough?  The objectification of women is wrong.  Full stop.  It is not OK to judge a woman’s worth based on her body.  It is not OK to touch a woman without her consent.  It is not OK to treat women as though they existed solely for the purpose of male pleasure.  It is not OK for women to be harassed in word and deed by men who think their desires make it acceptable to treat women as anything other than the image bearers of God that they are.  And yet that treatment of women is a reality every day.

I said I was shocked at the defense of Trump’s comments, but maybe I shouldn’t have.  Some apologists have pointed out that Trump differs little from other politicians and men of power – not excluding the husband of his primary rival.  As indefensible as Trump may be, they may be right about this.  And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the real problem.  Sexual harassment is all too real for so many women.  And that means sexism like what we have seen in the last few days needs to be called out at every turn.

Donald Trump, at this point, is probably not going to become President.  I consider this a good thing, because I think he is utterly, hilariously unqualified for the position.  But I will not celebrate when we keep Trump out of the Oval Office.  I will celebrate when no woman fears being sexually assaulted.  I will celebrate when girls grow up knowing they will be judged on their minds and their characters and not on their bodies.  I will celebrate when every man with a conscience recognizes the objectification of women as the disgusting behavior that it is and not as harmless “locker room talk.”  I will celebrate when women get treated as the human beings that they are – because that is more important than what party holds an office.

The Resurrection and the Life

What does it mean for the world that Christ is risen?  So much more than I could possibly put into a few paragraphs, certainly.  If all the ink in the world were spilled to write of Easter, it might still not capture all that this day means.  It means, in the first place, that death is defeated and eternal life is possible.  It means, beyond that, that there is always hope, because if our Savior can handle the cross, then what can’t he handle?  It means our sin is gone.  It means salvation.

But if I had to pick out one particular aspect of Easter that has really struck me this year, it’s something that comes from the other great resurrection story in the gospels – the resurrection of Lazarus in John 11.  It is in this story that we get one of the great “I AM” statements of John … “I am the Resurrection and the Life.”  That’s a claim Jesus would dramatically back up on Easter morning.  What strikes me, though, is the sheer immediacy of it.

One has to remember that at the beginning of the Lazarus story, everyone thinks that Jesus has let his friend down.  When Martha sees Jesus, she says, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  We can hear the unspoken rebuke in her words – Why weren’t you here?  Mary and many of the onlookers say the same thing.  They all think Jesus has arrived at Bethany too late to do anything.  (And it’s a similar kind of grief to what the disciples experiences on Good Friday, when they assumed, not realizing that the Resurrection was coming, that the cross meant Jesus’ Messianic mission had ended in failure.)  But Jesus looked at Martha and promised that her brother would rise.  Martha didn’t get it.  She thought Jesus was giving her the standard funerary consolation.  Yes, there is a resurrection … someday.  A resurrection in which she believes, to be sure, but a resurrection waiting so far over the horizon that it barely touches the grief of the present day.  And that’s when Jesus said it – “I am the Resurrection and the Life.”

It strikes me that Jesus took the hope of resurrection – the hope of Easter – and planted it firmly in the now.  What he’s saying is, no, the resurrection is not located in some distant future.  The Resurrection is standing in front of you.  The Resurrection is talking to you.  The Resurrection has hands and feet and skin and eyes.  The Resurrection is me.  So you don’t have to wait for your brother to rise, because if I am here, then the Resurrection has already come.

I wonder if that’s what God is trying to get us to believe – that the Resurrection is now.  I do not mean in the most literal sense.  For most of us, rising from the dead will indeed happen at the end of days.  But I do mean that salvation appeared in fullness in the person of Jesus Christ.  I do mean that Jesus was serious when he said the Kingdom of God has come near – as if it were so close you could reach out and touch it.  I do mean that God is redeeming us now.  God is putting broken things back together now.  God is changing lives now.  God is driving back the darkness now.   I mean that the power of the Resurrection is already loosed into the world.

I confess that sometimes I want to locate all God’s work in some far off future.  I begin by acknowledging that some things – in my life and in the world – suck.  Then I assume that they will always suck, so what’s the point of trying to change them?  What’s the point in hoping for redemption?  It’s not that I don’t think God will do something.  I just think God is going to do something a long time from now, at a time far enough removed from the present that I don’t have to bother with radical living or radical hoping today.  But could this attitude be blinding me to the reality that the Resurrection is already, and that the Kingdom is invading earth today?  That things really could change for the better, and maybe I ought to be working towards that end?  When we believe that things are as they are – when we live according to the narrative that some things and some people are just too far gone for God to save them, that Jesus is too late getting to Bethany – it hurts.  But it’s also convenient, because it gives us an excuse to live complacently.  And it gives us a reason not to get our hopes up an risk another disappointment.

But I think the gospel dares us to believe in something greater.  It dares us to believe that this broken world can be saved, and God is already trying to do it.  It dares us to believe that God can raise the dead, can even raise the dead parts of me.  And it teaches us not to put living the resurrected life off until tomorrow.  So if we believe in Easter, let us dare to hope.  Let us dare to love.  Let us dare to fight for truth and justice.  Let us dare to think that if Jesus is with us to the end of the age, so if the power of his Resurrection.  Let us dare to be the people of the Resurrection and the Life.

Because Christ is risen.  Christ is risen indeed.  Let the darkness tremble.

How We Became A Hateful Church

This week, World Vision announced that it would begin openly hiring gays and lesbians.  Within days, threats of withdrawn support from the evangelical world caused World Vision to reverse course.  On one hand, I am sure this response was a well-intentioned attempt to hold on to the authority of scripture.  On the other hand, I am equally sure that a watching world saw it as an act of hate.  Desperately striving to keep gays in a state of exclusion, threatening to break fellowship with other Christians over an issue barely present in scripture, holding the welfare of third world children hostage to your own beliefs, and loudly and arrogantly declaring that it is impossible to be gay and Christian is hard to interpret as anything other than hateful.

I know that many Christians feel compelled by scripture to take a strong stance against homosexuality.  The being committed to scripture part of that is something I can respect.  But it’s difficult to stomach a church that gets more fired up about excluding people that about helping poor kids.  There is no doubt in my mind that many people in America were turned away from the gospel by the World Vision affair, and there is no doubt in my mind that among these people were many gays and lesbians who concluded, with considerable justification, that evangelical Christians hate them.

There is also no doubt in my mind that most of the people who were guilty of these hateful behaviors were not, in almost any other circumstance, hateful people.  Most of the people who angrily threatened not to feed starving children unless gay people were shown the door were, I am sure, people who would greet you with a huge smile at the front door of the church, who would wrap you up in a bear hug if you said you were having a bad day, who would give you the shirts off their backs if you needed it.  I really mean this.  As much as the World Vision affair makes me frustrated with the church, I know from experience that most Christians really do want to be compassionate people.  As paradoxical as it seems, nasty things are being done by incredibly nice people.  How, I have to ask, is this happening?  How is it that so many people who genuinely care about loving their neighbors can honestly not realize how hurtful it is when they demand inequality for gays?

I suspect that the answer is not really that strange.  If you want to create a group of really nice people who do really nasty things, all you have to do is follow exactly the trajectory that evangelical Christianity has been on for the last hundred years or so.  Here is, so far as I can see, the way we turned ourselves into the church we are today.

Our first step towards becoming unintentionally hateful was to develop a pathological fear of uncertainty.  We avoided sermons or Sunday school lessons that dealt with tough or complex issues.  We treated every question like it had a straightforward, black and white answer.  On no account did we acknowledge that life presents us with questions that take months or even years of soul-searching to answer.  We took it as a matter of course that on every issue or interpretation of scripture, there is only one possible conclusion that intelligent and well-meaning people could ever come to.  This step was an easy one, because certainty was so comforting.  We made church a place where could indulge our desire for certainty rather than being challenged to think, grow, change, or wrestle with mystery.

Second, we made correctness into the be all and end all of what it means to be a good Christian.  Starting in the early twentieth century with the original fundamentalists and their reaction against classic liberal theology, we defined faith as assenting to orthodox propositions and labeled anyone who did not assent as a false Christian.  As time went on, we tended to list more and more things as essentials with which no true Christian could disagree.  We conveniently forgot any scripture that emphasized obedience or love as a mark of true discipleship.  We got ourselves into a place where our horror of false teaching was greater than our horror at greed or selfishness or arrogance or bullying.

Then we adopted an all or nothing approach to faith.  We bought into a slippery slope metaphor so deeply that we stopped remembering that it was a metaphor.  We started actually believing that anyone who disagreed with us about anything really was trying to destroy everything that gave us peace and comfort.  The notion that we could take every question on its own merits, and consider it rationally, like we did in every other part of our lives, was something we stopped applying to our faith.  Soon it seemed like the foundations of everything sacred really were slipping away around us.  Needless to say, all this helped us keep that terrible uncertainty at arm’s length.

At this point the only sensible thing seemed to be to stop associating with people different than us.  We disengaged from culture and built our own Christian schools, Christian social circles, Christian media industry, and Christian publishing industry, all in an attempt to insulate ourselves from that dreaded false teaching.  Pretty soon we could go through life without meeting anyone who seriously challenged our assumptions about anything.  This was also comfortable, and we felt safe from bad influences.  Why anything that was actually true was so fragile that it needed to be protected from cross examination we did not ask.  After all, we already knew that there was only one set of conclusions that intelligent and well-meaning people could come to.  There was nothing in life except for pure, wonderful, biblical truth and horrible, dark, willful error.  Clearly the people we were not associating with were just being bad on purpose, and it was easy to go on thinking they must be bad because we didn’t know any of them.

Finally, in a last crucial step, we developed a persecution complex.  We were quite blind by this point to that fact that we were, and always had been, the overwhelming majority in American religious life.  We had no conception of our own privilege, and certainly no conception of what persecution really meant.  We genuinely thought that people were persecuting us simply by having a different set of convictions.  And once we really thought that the whole world was out to get us, we were mixed up enough that we saw no illogic in serving the Lord of love by threatening not to help poor children unless the gays got the door slammed in their face.

If we want to stop being a hateful church –or, if you prefer, one that stops coming across as hateful – then we need to reverse these trends.  We need to accept that people different than us are not trying to destroy our way of life just by living theirs.  We need to rediscover a tolerance for uncertainty, for ambiguity, for nuance.  We need to stop seeing every dispute as a potential rupture in the very foundations of a biblical worldview.  We need to get close to uncertainty, to let it stretch us, challenge us, and shape us.  It will not be comfortable, but we need to remember that our faith is in God, and not in what we can see.

Most of all, we need to let the walls down and get to know people.  We need to get to know gays and lesbians.  We will find out that they are not a demonic enemy.  They are flesh and blood people with hopes and dreams, fears and wounds, minds and hearts.  We will realize that when they find love, it fills them with the same happiness that fills us.  When their loves end, their hearts break in the same way that ours do.  We will find out that in most ways they are like us.  And that will probably make us very uncertain.  And after we have sat with that uncertainty for a long time, we will probably still come to a lot of different conclusions.  Some of us will decide to affirm homosexuality, and we will not love Jesus any less because of that conclusion.  Others will still ardently believe that homosexuality is a sin.  But no matter our conclusion, I don’t think that we will still act like we did with World Vision.  We will be disabused of the silly notion that people choose to be gay.  We stop acting like gays have an agenda against Christians when it is really the other way around.  We will know how much slamming the door hurts, because we will know the faces it is being slammed in.

And to anyone who is gay or lesbian, let me say I am sorry about the World Vision affair.  I am sorry that my faith keeps treating you like an enemy.  I want you to know that I believe Jesus loves you, and that I love you as well.  I don’t know whether the church will ever wake up to how our actions seem, but as far as I am concerned, you deserve your rights.  I will continue to stand up for your rights, no matter now uncertain it makes me feel.

The Church of Wells and the Need for Grace

There’s a church in Wells, Texas, known simply as the Church of Wells, that has been much in the news lately.  If you aren’t familiar with the Church of Wells, there was an excellent Texas Monthly article about them which would fill you in.  Suffice it to say that the Church of Wells has a disturbing habit of tearing parents away from children and of treating all other churches as false.  Whether they are technically a cult is debatable, but they certainly exhibit a lot of cult-like behavior.  They are, I am sorry to say, the sort of group that gives Christianity a bad name.

Groups like the Church of Wells intrigue me, though.  It’s easy to condemn them, but I always find myself wondering, how does this happen?  How do people who intend on serving the same God I serve end up like this?  (And again, if you don’t know what I mean by “like this” you’ll have to go read the articles on them.)  I suspect that the answers to these questions aren’t as unusual as we might think.  My friend Craig has been writing an excellent series of posts about how the characteristics of the Church of Wells are really just extreme versions of unhealthy tendencies that are widespread in evangelical Christianity.  I’ve been having similar thoughts myself.

I think the Church of Wells is a classic illustration of why theology matters.  Now by “theology” I don’t necessarily mean being able to follow, much less enjoy, every twist and turn of a debate between PhD’s in religion.  I mean theology in a much more down to earth sense.  I mean that it matters what we think of God.  It matters what sort of God we think he is, because that determines who we approach faith.  To me, one of the most important ideas in theology, one that has been emphasized by theologians such as Karl Barth and NT Wright, is that Jesus is the starting point for understanding God.  As Michael Gorman would say, it is not just that Jesus is like God, it is that God is like Jesus.  I hope it is not to theologically thick to put it like this, but the question I would ask about the Church of Wells – and more importantly, about the many Christians who lean in their direction without being so extreme – is this.  Is their view of God Jesus-like?  Is their God who Jesus said God was, or someone else?

I’m particularly thinking here about grace.  I mean that amazing, earth-shattering announcement that God loves us and will save us in spite of our sin.  And yes, I know that grace is one of the most basic and most talked about truths in Christianity (and it should be).  But I sometimes wonder how many of us really believe in grace.  There’s a lot of people who are very insecure about their salvation.  Catherine Grove – the young woman whose story the Texas Monthly article focuses on – joined the Church of Wells because she felt, or at least could be convinced, that she was not “really saved,” in spite of having given herself to Jesus.  Tragically, that;s not the only time I’ve heard that sentiment.  There are many people who believe in Jesus and serve Jesus, yet persist in the anxiety that they’re not really “in.”  I’ve even seen literature that criticizes pastors for giving their congregations a false sense of security by making it sound like salvation is too easy to get.  Now let’s ask whether that God – the God who is so exacting that people can be legitimately fooled about their salvation – is the same as the Jesus-like God of the gospels.

Where to begin?  Jesus was known as a friend to “sinners,” so much so that he occasioned compliant from the religious (e.g. Mark 2:15-17).  It’s true that he was never shy about declaring what it really meant to follow him (e.g. Mark 4:34-38), but search the gospels and show me one place where Jesus heaps guilt on people.  You won’t find it.  In fact, Jesus intentionally refrained from condemning people he could have condemned (John 8:11), and he specifically stated that condemnation was not his purpose (John 3:17).  He seemed eager to throw the boundaries of salvation as wide as possible, even describing the kingdom of heaven as like a wedding banquet filled with unlikely “undesirables” (Luke 14:16-24).  He wasn’t a Savior who delivered salvation grudgingly; he was someone who desired salvation so desperately that he prayed for the people who crucified him (Luke 23:33).  What’s more, he described that kind of enemies-loving grace as reflective of the Father’s own actions (Matthew 6:43-48).

But maybe the oddest thing about Jesus wasn’t his grace, but the way he let people access that grace.  In stark contrast to an evangelicalism that runs people through formulaic Sinner’s Prayers and altar calls and constantly cross examines people’s beliefs and practices to make sure they’re “true Christians,” Jesus was comfortable affirming faith expressed in many forms.  One person believed that Jesus could heal his servant from a distance, and Jesus described him as someone who would feast in heaven (Matthew 8:10-11); another person gave away half his money, and Jesus called it salvation (Luke 19:9).  Jesus announced that people’s sins were forgiven for a variety of odd reasons, such as being lowered through a roof by one’s friends (Matthew 9:2).  When a bleeding woman demonstrated her faith by sneaking up behind Jesus and touching his cloak, he told her to go in peace (Mark 5:34).  He did not, apparently, feel the need to run her through a checklist to make sure she “really understood the decision she was making.”  He saw her faith, though expressed in the most unorthodox of forms, and affirmed it.  And then you have the disciples.  Oh, the disciples.  The gospels give us example after example of them not understanding what Jesus was saying to them ( e.g. Luke 22:24, Mark 8:16).  Peter even tried to talk Jesus out of dying for his sins on one occasion (Matthew 16:21-23).  The disciples could be pretty dense.  It would not be difficult to make a case that they didn’t understand Jesus well enough to be “really saved.”  And yet, they were the apostles of Christianity.

I hope you’ll forgive me for bludgeoning the point home with the blunt end of a loaf of Bible references, but I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how important this is to the gospel.  Jesus was not trying to tell us about the god of the Church of Wells.  There is no possible point of comparison between a God who forgives people for hammering him to a cross but does not forgive people for failing to achieve some intangible level of “really meaning it” during an altar call.  A god who forgives grudgingly, a god or fear and exclusion, a god who demands some almost unattainable standard of purity before he considers us “in” – this god is not like Jesus.  And the importance of this goes far beyond critiquing some East Texas oddity.  Most people who suffer from the anxiety that they’re not “really saved” are not going to be snapped up by the Church of Wells.  But a whole lot of people are going to go through life deeply miserable, deeply disconnected from God’s love, plagued by emotional or relational problems that spring from a deep-seated sense of unlovedness, emotionally and physically burned out from an over-commitment springing from a guilty conscience.  The antidote to this is to believe in grace.  Jesus like grace.  Grace that accepts, grace that pardons, grace that makes God approachable, grace so explosive that it overflows to enemies, grace that brings the kingdom of heaven near.

I think it’s worth asking why, in spite of the evidence, we don’t believe in that kind of grace.  I would suggest there’s at least two reasons, one theological and one pragmatic.  The theological reason is that we want to hold on to a biblical sense of our own sinfulness.  That’s fair so far as it goes, but it only goes so far.  Our faith teaches us that our sin is, indeed, a big deal – such a big deal that it cost the Son of God his life.  But we would be missing the point if we forgot that he did give his life – that the question of whether God will accept us was answered once for all in the affirmative.  We shouldn’t think that letting the sinful, the lukewarm, the poorly committed, or the biblically ignorant join that ranks of the “really saved” will water down the faith we profess.  Letting the outsiders in is the faith we profess.

And the practical reason is this: people who doubt their salvation, even subconsciously, are easy to manipulate.  Now I don’t think most church leaders overtly want to manipulate people (though some do).  But I do think that a lot of ministers are addicted to response – seeing tears during an altar call, being able to rack up lots of “recommits,” getting people to volunteer more and more of their time for an ever-growing list of church programs.  It’s a lot easier to get people to act that way if they feel unsure of themselves.  When someone knows that the know that they know that they know they are loved, it’s a lot harder to make them do stuff.  And so, we’re content to leave people with a little sliver of fear that they’re not “in.”

But ultimately, we’re doing people a grave harm if we let them go on in insecurity.  (And we’re doing ourselves a grave harm if we let ourselves go on that way).  We have got to stop thinking about God as anything other than Jesus-like.  The more we see grace as narrow, the more we set people up to see the next extremist who comes along as a true insider.  But there’s an antidote to that, and the antidote is to believe in Jesus and in his awesome, boundary-melting grace.

Dear Human Being

Dear Human Being,

I am writing to you because I have something very important to say.  Actually, I have two important somethings to say.  I have, you might say, some good news and some bad news.  I suppose I will do the obvious and tell you the bad news first.

The bad news, My dear child, is that you are not important – at least, not according to the silly definitions of the word “important” that you use down there.  I am sorry to have to tell you this so bluntly, but I really did not make the world to revolve around you.  Though I do listen very carefully when you talk to Me, I do not consider your comfort or prosperity to be My reason for existence.  It may some as something of a shock to you, but I am in fact your God and not your genie.  The purpose of the faith is not you.  There is a very good chance that no matter how much faith you have, many of your dreams will not come true.  You may never be rich; you may never be famous.  There is a good chance that you will never amount to anything – at least, not according to the silly definitions of “anything” you use down there.  I say this because I know how desperate you are to be “somebody.”

What I am saying is that you are not special.  I know a lot of people told you that you were, but they were wrong.  There are seven billion of you, and I have no more or less love for any.  You are no more special to Me than the people you lose to or the people who lose to you, or a destitute family eating garbage in a frightful slum on the other side of a world, or all the lonely, broken souls plodding unnoticed through the world.  Your well-being is not more important to Me than theirs.  Bad things are not more tragic because they happen to you personally.  Nothing you accomplish will change any of this.  You will find Me most unsympathetic to that clamoring voice inside you that keeps saying you need to be noticed or accomplished in order to matter.  And you will find, if you follow Me, that your thoughts and deeds will revolve less and less around you and more and more around the lonely and the broken and the destitute.  I warn you that you will not like this at all.  It will feel like a part of you – the self-centered part – is being starved of something it needs to live on.  It will tell you that not being special is worse than death.  That is why I said you must deny yourself and take up your cross.  That is the bad news.

But the good news is that none of the bad news matters.  You will find, if your heart is open to it, that all the things you hoped I might help you get – money or fame or success or whatever your poison is – are in reality pretty poor substitutes for what actually matters.  You will find that you sacrificed very little by giving them up.  Most especially, you will find that you lost nothing by giving up on your own importance – whether you are most tempted by fame before flashing cameras or, more likely, the seductive lure of being judged as good enough or strong enough or smart enough or pretty enough or man enough or woman enough or Christian enough or successful enough or simply “enough” by the people around you.  I am inviting you to stop fretting so much over whether you are “somebody” – remember, it’s not a game I was going to help you win, anyway.  I am inviting you to discover that you were not made to be praised from afar but to love and to be loved up close, without regard to your praiseworthiness.  I hope you will not think it sappy of Me to say this, but love is what you really need.  Love is what you were really looking for all along, and what you were afraid of losing if you were not judged as enough.  But I have laid the possibility of loving and being loved where anyone can reach it, and compared with the rapture of it, your fondest dreams of accomplishment were always nothing.

The good news is that you are loved.  You always have been.  That is what they were trying to say when they said you were special.  All your life, you have been making the mistake of thinking that you needed to be special to get love, that you needed to be “important” to be important.  But you don’t, and if you come with Me I will cure you forever of your silly obsession with deservedness.  That is why the bad news does not matter.  That is why I am content to let your ego starve to death on the news that you are one of seven billion unremarkable human beings – because an unremarkable human being is all you ever needed to be.  It is true I will never love you more than I love anyone else.  It is true you will never be more deserving than you were when you were born.  It is true, I fear, that I will never love you more than I love those who hate you.  But you will find that none of that matters if the love itself is real.  And My love is real – realer than the rocks on which you stand.  So I plan to leave you with nothing, and everything.  I am hoping for you, that you will be able to accept this.

With all my love,

God

Phil Robertson: It’s Not An “Issue,” It’s About People

If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, then you ought to care about the pain of other people.  This is not a complicated truth, but it is, apparently, a truth that needs to be reiterated.  And I think that one of the sharpest barriers to caring about the pain of others is the simple inability to see that pain – to become so focused on ideas or philosophies or agendas that we lose sight of what matters most – the actual experiences of real, live human beings.  We need an empathetic imagination.  We need the ability to understand what life is like for other people, and to recognize how our own words or actions affect their life.  This has been illustrated dramatically by the Phil Robertson incident.

I have been disappointed in the way many Christians have responded to the situation; not because I disagree with their views, but because I see them failing to ask a simple question: what is it like for a gay or lesbian person to hear words like Robertson’s?  At the center of this controversy is a basic truth: Robertson’s words about homosexuality (and race) were hurtful to many people.  I beg you to note that this is open to debate.  Many issues related to this topic are open for debate.  Reasonably good and intelligent people can debate the rightness of homosexuality, the wisdom of allowing same-sex unions, the correct outworking of freedom of speech, and so on.  But that people were hurt by Robertson’s words is an objective fact.  You may think them it misguided of them to have been hurt, but even if you are correct, that does not un-hurt them.  And that means that behind all the talk about agendas and beliefs and worldviews there is a group of actual human beings who have experienced pain.  It is binding on us to be sensitive to that pain.

It seems that many Christians have gotten the idea that it doesn’t matter how mean you are, as long as you are telling the truth.  This is not the case.  Yes, there are times when unpleasant truths are bound to ruffle some feathers, but that is not a license to be a jerk.  If I see a 300 pound woman walking down the street and scream at her that she is fat, my words might be defensible as a statement of fact, but they are completely indefensible as the behavior of a moral human being.  If I backpedal and say that I was lovingly trying to warn her about the dangers of heart disease and type II diabetes, I am playing around with true medical facts, but I am still not acting like a morally responsible human being.  It doesn’t matter how right or wrong you are – we are all responsible for saying things in a way that does not hurt, if at all possible.

So it is here.  The central truth is that when people talk as Robertson did, other people get hurt.  Unfortunately, it is not only during the Duck Dynasty debacle that this truth gets ignored.  The same blindness to the reality that there are other people out there and it matters whether we hurt them is present whenever someone expresses frustration with “political correctness.”  I have thought for a long time that we would be well served to do away with the expression “politically correct,” because it so poorly describes why these things matter.  It’s pretty simple.  If words come out of your mouth, and those words are sexist, racist, bigoted, mocking, demeaning, or insensitive, and those words cause pain to someone, then you have not transgressed against politics, you have transgressed against another human being, someone with thoughts and feelings, someone made in the image of their Creator, someone for whom Christ died.  It is that person, not adherence to some arbitrary standard, that is the point.  A person who tells you not to make racist jokes is not comparable to a pedant who tells you not to end a sentence with a preposition.  We don’t need to be “politically correct,” we need to care about whether we hurt one another.  Why so many people find it surprising that others do, in fact, feel pain when their race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or culture is mocked is something I really do not understand.

And lest we should think that kindness of speech is some modern affectation, let me point you to one of the strongest statements ever made by Jesus Christ: “Anyone who says to a brother or a sister ‘Raca,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin.  And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell” (Matthew 5:22).  Notice, again, that Jesus did not leave correctness as an excuse.  He did not say, “Don’t call your brother a fool, unless he did something stupid, in which case he demonstrably is a fool, so you are free to insult him.”  The rule is simple: do not use your words to hurt people.  Period.

But let’s get back to the Phil Robertson thing.  I have been using the word “pain” a lot, and I want to say that is exactly the word I meant to use.  I was not exaggerating.  Friends, there are gay and lesbian teenagers who have killed themselves over the things said to them by parents, by peers, by bullies, and – I am sorry to say – by ministers.  When we talk about the pain experienced by the LGBT community, we are not talking about people who are merely “offended,” as someone is offended by a four-letter word at a dinner party.  We are talking about real, serious,  even life or death emotional trauma.  This is the pain that we must see.  I don’t have a problem with Christians ardently believing that homosexuality is a sin – the verses are right there in the Bible.  But anyone whose heart does not break at the thought that right now there are young men and women contemplating suicide over their orientation has completely lost touch with the compassion embodied in Jesus Christ.

My plea is that the church will learn to see people before we see issues or worldviews or agendas.  Those things are abstractions, but people are not.  And Jesus did not die for an abstraction – for an idea or for a cause.  It was for real, live, flesh and blood people, capable of suffering pain, that Jesus Christ gave his life.  Those people are what matters.  And let me say, by the way, that I feel a little bad for Phil as well.  Yes, I think he was kind of a jerk.  I think his words were pretty vulgar, and I think his comparison to bestiality was pretty silly.  But I may as well be honest – if I had to have my name dragged through the mud in the media and the blogosphere every time I said something dumb, I’d be a miserable person.  So I feel bad for Phil Robertson – I am not interested in demonizing him.  And, I care about the people he probably hurt.  May we all learn to value others more than we value the correctness of our opinions.

Thy Will Be Done

Sometimes a phrase can take on a completely different meaning depending on how it’s said.  That’s certainly true of the phrase “thy will be done,” words I fear we often say like a sigh of resignation, with an attitude of apathy.  Confronted with a situation of seemingly certain tragedy – a loved one dying of cancer, a typhoon smashing the Philippines – we hollowly mumble a request for deliverance and amend it by saying, “But if now, well, then just let your will be done.”  I’ve heard that said at a few prayer meetings.

Let me hasten to add that there are situations where pain is so immense and God so seemingly absent that all we can really do is hope against hope that God’s ends are somehow still going to be served.  There are times when all explanations fall flat.  And there is something to be said for having faith, even peace, in spite of circumstances and setbacks.  There is also something to be said for opening ourselves to the possibility that God’s idea of what needs to happen is different than our own.  These things being said, I don’t think we should think of the will of God as being only or even mostly equivalent to the strange ups and downs of life.

Jesus taught us to pray “Thy will be done” as part of the Lord’s Prayer.  But it’s part of a series of requests: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  These two requests feed off each other.  In fact, one might say that are three requests all helping define on another, because (if you’ll forgive me for being a theology geek) in Greek “hallowed be thy name” is also an imperative (let thy name be hallowed), and it actually rhymes with the lines about kingdom coming and will doing.  This is totally different than a sigh of resignation.  This is saying that God’s will is something, and that something is not anything.  God’s will is for his kingdom to come.  God’s will is for his name to be honored.  God’s will is for these things to happen so perfectly that earth is transformed into a new heaven.

The trouble with saying “Let your will be done” in apathy is that it let’s us baptize any state of affairs as God’s will.  It lets us give up on trying to change things and pretend that God is OK with that.  But if we really believe in the gospel of a Christ who healed the sick, who preached the sermon on the mount, who rebelliously kicked over the tables of the money changers, who promised us abundant life, who transgressed against every kind of barrier in the name of love, and who did many other wonderful things besides, then we must believe that God’s will is something specific and that much of what goes on in this world is not it.  God’s will is life.  God’s will is justice.  God’s will is love.  God’s will is healing.  God’s will is peace.  But pain, despair, brokenness, alienation, exploitation, dehumanization, want?  By what ridiculous logic could these ever be called God’s will?

I believe that if we could have even the tiniest part of God’s burning desire for the redemption of this world, “Thy will be done” would become in our mouths of slogan of protest.  To be kingdom people is to step in wherever evil is happening and say, “Instead of this, let God’s will be done.”  It is to get fully behind the project of seeing his kingdom come until earth is as much like heaven as possible.  God’s will; nothing less.  Let that be our battle cry.

God Bless The Eunuchs

We sometimes think that the Old Testament is all about law and boundaries and purity while the New Testament is all about acceptance and inclusion and grace.  But throughout the Old Testament we catch glimpses into the heart of a God whose love has always been bigger than human divisions.  There is one such place in Isaiah 56, a passage that must have scandalized its first hearers, because it speaks about God’s love for Gentiles, to the point of suggesting that they should be welcome at the temple, a house to be called a house of prayer for all nations.  It’s the same passage that Jesus quoted when he cleared the temple of the money changers.

But setting aside for a moment an important sermon about how God’s love transcends borders, there is another part of Isaiah 56 that has something important to say to the church.  Isaiah talked about God’s love for foreigners, but he also talked about God’s love for eunuchs, “of his desire to give them a memorial better than sons and daughters.”  This is another scandal for traditional Old Testament worship, because eunuchs are forbidden in the Law of Moses from participating in the worship life of Israel.  It’s an exclusion that underscores a story in Acts 8, one of an Ethiopian eunuch who wanted to know the God of Israel.  Now it’s easy to see God’s encouraging words to eunuchs as something outdated.  After all, we no longer have a practice of emasculating young boys who will be brought up to serve as court officials, so there are no literal eunuchs left for this passage to speak to.

But I think the eunuchs do have something in common with a lot of folks in today’s world.  The thing about being a eunuch is that you don’t get to participate in what everyone else gets to do.  Everyone else gets to be married.  Everyone else gets to have children.  Everyone else gets to be part of a family.  There’s this one great trajectory that everyone else’s life is on, and as a eunuch you’re forever outside that trajectory.  I suspect that being forever outside what everyone else unthinkingly labeled normal must have been the most difficult part of being a eunuch.

We modern people also have a pretty clear idea of what counts as a “normal” life.  There’s a certain Script that life is supposed to follow.  And the Script says that you’re supposed to date for a while, and then, at just the right time, when you’re not too young and not too old, you’re supposed to get married.  You’re supposed to have a career, be successful, make a progressively more money throughout your life, all that stuff.  Then you’re supposed to have children, who go on to have grandchildren.  That’s the Script.  That’s what’s considered normal.  And the truth is, it’s not difficult to see why the church tends to hold this up as the gold standard for God’s Plan For Your Life.  The Script is good.  The Script is what most people want for their lives.  The problem is that life has a painful way of turning out differently.

Sometimes, you find yourself 30 years old and still single, not by choice or because there’s something wrong with you, but just because that’s how life has turned out up to this point.  The church, unfortunately, has a subtle way of pretending this category doesn’t exist.  I once heard of a church tossing around the suggestions that a Sunday school class be renamed “Young Marrieds With Children” over the drier “30-somethings” – an unintended but hurtful suggestion that there is only one correct stage of life to be at when you’re in your thirties.  Again, it’s not that the Script is bad.  As someone in the thirty-and-still-single category myself, I can tell you that I would take the Script over my actual circumstances in a heartbeat.  But the question is, does God have any less love for you, any less use for you, any less hope for you if you are still single?

Or sometimes, you get married, and children don’t some right away or at all.  Maybe that happens through choice, or maybe by biology.  I had a friend who couldn’t conceive without medical treatments, and couldn’t get medical treatments until she and her husband saved up some money, which couldn’t be done overnight.  She got very tired of people asking her about her childlessness.  She would have preferred the Script.  But the question is, does God have any less love for you, any less use for you, any less hope for you if you don’t have children?

Or sometimes, your marriage ends in divorce.  So many people have gone down that painful road, and there are many ways to get there.  But one thing I think you can universally say about the many different sorts of broken marriages is that divorce hurts.  No one ever had a good time getting divorced.  A healthy marriage is way better.  But the church does a tremendous disservice to the divorced when we either pretend the category doesn’t exist or throw around judgmental statements about how divorce is not God’s plan.  The Script may be better.  But the question is, does God have any less love for you, any less use for you, any less hope for you if you are divorced?

This is why it matters that God speaks words of inclusion to the eunuchs, that he opens the doors of his sanctuary to those who will forever be barred from doing what everyone else calls normal.  It shows that the heart of God is not exclusive, not rigid, not judgmental, not narrowing life down to one correct formula, but rather open, accepting, gentle, and willing to love us as we are and not as we wish we were.  The answer is that God does not love you any less, or see you any differently, or have any the less hope for you if you are divorced, or childless, or single, or anything else that the world calls abnormal.  Because the God who welcomes the eunuchs is that God who is there for you even when life doesn’t follow the Script.

May it be that the church will remember and reflect the heart of a God who welcomes the unusual.  May it be that all God’s children will be welcomed in God’s house.  And may the God who heals heal all our heartbreaks.  God bless the eunuchs.

A Kingdom That Can’t Be Shut Down

Whatever one thinks about the government shutdown, whatever party one blames, whatever issues one thinks are at stake, there is one fact illustrated by the crisis that cannot be denied: human institutions always let us down in the end.  I find my thoughts going back to a sermon I preached last year, during the contentiousness of the last election.  A year later, I still feel like it is one of the most important things I’ve ever said.  As a reminder of the importance of placing our faith in the right things, I offer an abbreviated manuscript of that sermon.  May it be a useful reminder.

A Kingdom Not Of This World

A Sermon on John 18:28-40

Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I founded empires.  But upon what did we rest the creation of our genius?  Upon force.  Jesus Christ founded his empire on love, and at this hour there are millions who would die for him.

Napoleon Bonaparte said that.  And Napoleon was a man who knew a thing or two about building empires.  He was rightly recognized as one of history’s greatest military minds.  But when Napoleon turned from his own magnificent accomplishments and looked to the empire found by Christ – the Kingdom of God – he saw something altogether greater and more wonderful.  He saw something lasting.  And he saw the most radical thing of all – that Jesus’ kingdom operates on an entirely different principle than every kingdom human hands have ever built.  It’s that same radical difference that is exemplified in the Passion story – the story of how the King defeated his enemies not by killing them but by being killed by them.  The same radical difference that Pontius Pilate was so unable to grasp when he cross examined Jesus.  The same radical difference, I’m sorry to say, that many Christians here in America haven’t managed to grasp.

I think now is a good time to remember what kind of kingdom God’s Kingdom is, first because of our need for hope, our need to trust in something that can’t be voted out of office.  But we also need to remember it because there are a lot of people in the Church who have been fooled into thinking that the Kingdom is very much of this world.  There’s this idea that what we need to do to advance the cause of Christ is to elect Christian politicians so they will implement Christian laws and policies so that we can make our society Christian using a top down approach.  But that’s not the Kingdom of God, because it’s based on force rather than love.  Do not misunderstand me – trying hard to run our society as God would have it run is a praiseworthy thing, and it’s right that as Christians and as Americans we should want our government to be as good as it can be.  But the question is this: is our ultimate hope based on something in this world, or something beyond it?  And when push comes to shove, which methods do we really think work for bringing about change?  God’s or the world’s?  Force or love?

I think we could read John 18 as a story of two mistakes we might make in understanding how Jesus relates to this world – two mistakes that we are very much in danger of making today.  Now the first mistake is to think that Jesus isn’t a king.  But he is a king, because he plainly told Pilate that he was.  He meant it.  Jesus isn’t half a king, or sort of a king, or king in a certain sense.  He is literally, absolutely, the King.  And that’s what has the leaders of the establishment so ticked off in this passage, angry at Jesus to the point of wanting to kill him.  There’s really a staggering irony at work here.  You may notice how the religious leaders don’t want to enter the Praetorium here.  They don’t want to become defiled just before the Passover.  It’s totally absurd.  They’ll bend over backwards to avoid ceremonial uncleanness, but when it comes to condemning an innocent man, they think nothing of it.  It’s an utter misplacement of priorities.  And they’ve hated Jesus for a long time because of his attempts to correct their priorities.

I really think that if Jesus had not been King, he would have gotten along a lot better with the powers that be.  But instead he kept on asserting his kingship.  If he had only respected religious traditions, he would have gotten along a lot better with the lawyers and the scribes.  But instead he dismissed their over emphasis on ceremonial purity, healed on the Sabbath, and handed out a bunch of “you heard it said but I tell you” statements.  He acted like it was his Law and he had every right to offer the final word on it’s interpretation.  He also thought nothing of asking for ultimate allegiance, teaching that we should give him a higher place in our hearts than our money or our status or our ethnicity or even our own selves.  He acted like the temple was his to clear.  And then he did something even worse: he stopped respecting boundaries.  He ate with sinners and healed Gentiles and talked to Samaritans and loved tax collectors and touched lepers honored beggars and let a woman sit at his feet.  If he’d had any respect for the norms of social respectability, he might not have made people so angry.  But instead he acted like it was his Kingdom and he could let whoever he damn well pleased into it.  And to the eternal exasperation of his enemies, he kept backing it up with signs of power.  Well, this just would not do.  This new way of thinking and living was just too radical.  So they killed him.  They killed him because they could not stand the claim he was making on their lives.

Now the question for us is – can we stand the claim Jesus is making on our lives?  Are we going to bend over backwards to avoid even a hint of supporting a political ideology we don’t like, yet gleefully engage in the most hurtful political rhetoric imaginable?  Or will we let Jesus correct our priorities?  Because you see, a king is by definition someone who can make an ultimate claim on your allegiance.  It’s easy to forget, living in a land that is – thanks be to God – a land of freedom and democracy, how kingship works.  You don’t take a referendum on a king.  When the king says hop, you hop.  His will is absolute.  So the question is, do we think that Jesus ultimately gets to call the shots on how we live our lives?  Do we think that Jesus’ sayings about love, about grace, about care for the vulnerable, about kindness of speech, about truthfulness, and about love for enemies (yes, that includes political enemies) – do we think these things are commandments, or recommendations?  This matters in our personal and in our political life.  As long as we think that something else, such as a political agenda, is more important than Jesus, then it will be all too easy to say that the teachings of Jesus are very cute, but if we really want to get things done then we’d better resort to the same old game of cutthroat politics that has plagued every society from the foundation of the world.  But if Jesus is King, then living a Christlike life is a higher priority than winning at politics.  And I say to you, what a time for the Church to reaffirm the Kingship of Jesus.  In an era of division, of name calling, of half-truths and of lies, of hatred, of vitriol, of selfishness, of arrogance, of greed, of lusting for power, of demonizing of opponents, of refusing to listen, and of spoiling sport when we don’t get our way; what a perfect time for the Church to say, “We aren’t going to do things that way.  Not for ourselves, and not as we participate in the life of our nation.  We’re going to do things a different way.  A better way.  The way of King Jesus.”  What a time for the Church to say, “Jesus is King,” not in word, but in deed.

So we could make the mistake of saying that Jesus is not king, and of joining the Pharisees and the Sadducees in resisting him.  But we could also make the mistake Pilate makes, which is to think Jesus is the wrong kind of king.  You really get the sense in these verses that Pilate had absolutely no idea what to do with the peculiar ragamuffin the religious leaders dragged in off the street.  If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be funny.  First you have the conversation between Pilate and the leaders, which goes something like this:

Pilate: OK, what’d this guy do?

Leaders: Um … something really bad.  You should probably kill him.

Pilate: Ha ha.  No seriously, what did he do?

Leaders: Oh, you know.  If he wasn’t evil, we wouldn’t come here.  Don’t you trust us?

Pilate: No.

Leaders: Aw geez, you think we’d just drag an innocent man in here for no reason?

Pilate: Actually, now you mention it, I sorta do.  No you gonna tell me what’s up, or not?  Guys?

Leaders: Crucify him!

So Pilate sighs and goes back inside to question Jesus for himself.  And he’s kind of disappointed, because a man being threatened with execution doesn’t seem to be taking the situation very seriously.  You’d better open up, he warns.  Are you a king, or not?  And Jesus responds with the truth on which the whole passage, maybe the whole gospel, turns.

My kingdom is not of this world.

His kingdom is not of this world.  And he gives us a convincing proof of it.  His followers aren’t fighting to free him.  You have to admit that if Jesus was trying to set up an earthly kingdom, he wasn’t doing a very good job.  But instead he’s doing something else, something greater, something the world can’t understand.  Something we don’t understand, if we think the fortunes of the kingdom depend on an election.  You see, the forces of evil have already tried to see if earthly power can wipe out the Kingdom.  They gave it their best shot.  They killed the King.  They dragged him out and nailed him to a cross and they killed him.  And it didn’t work.  The King and his Kingdom endured.  So to all the doomsayers on both sides of the aisle who think it will be the end of the world if such-and-such law is passed or so-and-so gets elected, let me respectfully suggest that if the King can handle the Cross, he can also handle Election Day.

But Pilate doesn’t get it.  He doesn’t get that what’s happening before his eyes – the King dying for his enemies, doing the exact opposite of what an earthly king would do – is the most important thing that’s ever, ever happened.  But he thinks he’s struck upon something he can finally understand.  “You are a king!” he cries.  Jesus responds, “You say correctly that I am a king.  For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth.  Everyone who if of the truth hears my voice.”  You get what’s going on here?  Jesus is a king.  A real king.  The realest of kings.  But this king doesn’t operate by holding court, or appointing magistrates, or leading the army, or collecting taxes, or doing any of the things that normal kings do.  This King operates by testifying to the truth.  That’s his mission.  That’s how he works.  But Pilate doesn’t get it.

“What is truth?” asks Pilate.  Now I don’t read that as a legitimate question.  I don’t think that Pilate, a man who was known for his cruelty, who’s probably teed off that the Jews have woken him up and dumped this headache on his doorstep, who is about to go ahead and have Jesus beaten and crucified, has suddenly gotten into a philosophical frame of mind.  Pilate doesn’t care about truth.  This isn’t a question; it’s a snort of derision.  It’s Pilate saying, “Truth?  Truth!  Are you kidding me?!  That’s all you’re up to, after all this nonsense?  Testifying to truth?!  You know, these Jews actually had me going for a second.  I actually was starting to think maybe this time they had actually brought me someone important.  You know, a rebel or something.  I’m an important man!  I’ve got a province to run!  But now I find out they’ve been wasting my time with some crazy idiot from out in the desert, some pansy religious do-gooder, sitting out in the sticks holding hands singing Kum-ba-yah and testifying to truth?  Truth?  What good is truth?”  And in a huff he walks out, because he assumes that anyone whose mission is to testify to truth can’t possibly be worth his time.

Now the question for us is, are we going to recognize the truth to which Jesus testified as the single most important thing that has ever been, or are we going to dismiss it as a quaint little philosophy that can be set aside while men of power get things done in the real world?  And I think that’s a real question, because let’s face it, the Kingdom of God is a pretty different kind of kingdom.  For starters, there’s no borders.  It’s the one kingdom ever founded that you can’t point to on any map.  Then there’s no citizenship, and least not in any concrete sense.  I mean, I can show you a piece of paper and prove I’m an American, but I can’t prove I’m a part of the Kingdom of God.  It’s of the heart, it’s intangible, it’s all touchy-feely, and frankly it’s weird.  I mean, it’s really weird.  It’s so weird that when Jesus tried to tell people about it, be kept having to resort to parables, saying well it’s like a mustard seed and it’s like buried treasure and it’s like all these fish stuck in a net.

But wait – we haven’t even gotten to the craziest thing about the Kingdom.  The craziest thing is grace. ‘Cause if you’re going to to have a kingdom, you’ve got to have rules, right?  And we have rules in the Kingdom of God, all those teachings we’re supposed to live by.  But what happens when you break the rules?  Well, you go to the King and say, “King Jesus, I’m sorry, I repent of this sin.”  And he forgives you.  So you go out tomorrow and do the same thing again. “King Jesus, I’m sorry, I repent of this sin.”  And he forgives you again.  And this goes on forever.  It doesn’t matter what you do or how many times you do it; it doesn’t really even matter if you actually are sorry or really are repenting; he just keeps on forgiving you!  You can’t get to the end of this grace!  The dude’s a complete pushover.  Now folks, I’ve got news for you.  Grace is not the way it works in the kingdoms of the world.  You get caught driving 120 miles an hour down I-35 and you say, “Officer, I’m very sorry, and I repent of this sin,” well that’s too bad, because your butt is going to jail.

So we’ve got this thing, we’re calling it a kingdom.  But there’s no borders, no official documents, no magistrates, no army, no legislative executive and judicial branch, no taxation system, no agencies of any kind, and absolutely no way of enforcing the law except love people and hope that will make them love you back.  I mean, what a ridiculous idea.  Only an idiot would try to set up a kingdom like that.  Isn’t that right?  Isn’t it right that a kingdom built that way can’t possibly stand?

Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I founded empires.  But upon what did we rest the creation of our genius?  Upon force.  Jesus Christ founded his empire on love, and at this hour there are millions that would die for him.

You see, that’s the great irony.  The Kingdom is not of this world, but when it comes to changing the world it’s the only thing that has ever really worked like it was supposed to.  It’s the only kingdom that stands.  Every other program, every other institution lets us down.  Every revolutionary, every great thinker, every charismatic leader, every slick talking politician turns out to be nothing but a crook at worst and a mere human being at best.  But the King of Kings built something that is stronger today than ever.  So folks, it’s time to start placing our faith in the right place.  It’s time to stop looking for deliverance for the day when we elect all the Christian leaders and implement all the Christian policies.  If setting up earthly power structures was going to save us, Jesus would have done that from the beginning.  It’s time to stop acting like the most important thing is who ends up in the White House.  It isn’t.  It may be important, but it’s not most important.  What’s most important is that Jesus reigns in our hearts as King, and that he reigns even more in our hearts, and in the hearts of more and more people.

I am not talking about disengaging.  We should engage our world.  I don’t mean that we go off in a corner and be religious and not care where the world goes and whether it goes there in a hand basket.  You may say, “Yes, but isn’t it good when we can put our faith to work and make godly principles a part of government?”  Sure it’s good.  It just isn’t the Kingdom.  Hear me say it: having honest leaders matters.  Creating freedom and opportunity in our society matters.  Making just laws matters.  But the Kingdom of God is something not of this world, and it … mattters … more.

So let us place our faith not in someone who promises to win a victory by getting himself elected, but in the King who declares he already won a victory but getting himself killed.  Let us look not to parties and candidates but to the Savior.  Let us fix our eyes on a better Kingdom, on a different Kingdom, on a Kingdom that lasts.  The Kingdom of Jesus Christ.  The empire founded on love.