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Family Ties – Galatians 1:3a

December 3, 2020December 3, 2020Nathan Wilkerson

In the first two verses of Galatians, Paul renounced the forces which constrain and control humankind – conformity and authority. In their place, he introduced a new order that promotes individual expression and social cohesion – the divine family. As we move into verse three, we’ll see begin to see some of the implications of leaving human society to join God’s family.

One nation | Two worlds

The New Testament writers seem to have sorted the diverse population of the Roman Empire into two major categories, Jews and Greeks. Consider this instance from Acts 14:1-2:

At Iconium Paul and Barnabas went as usual into the Jewish synagogue. There they spoke so effectively that a great number of Jews and Greeks believed. But the Jews who refused to believe stirred up the other Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brothers.

Luke mentions only two kinds of people at the synagogue that day. These “Greeks” weren’t even Greek. They were from a region in modern day Turkey which at that time was called Galatia. It seems that to the first century Jews everyone else in the Roman Empire was a Greek regardless of their race. This may sound backward to our ears like calling everyone from below our southern border “Mexicans,” but I don’t think it was meant that way.

Luke and the other writers of the New Testament weren’t referring to race or nationality. When they referred to them as “Greek” they were thinking of a cultural distinction. Notice that Luke didn’t speak of Jews and Romans. While the Roman Empire was vast and diverse, almost everyone within it including Romans aspired to be culturally Greek. I say “almost everyone” because there was a sizeable group who resisted cultural assimilation – the Jews.

You lost me at hello

A seismic cultural shift has reshaped the landscape of my hometown over the past thirty years. An area previously comprised of nearly 100% southern whites now features taquerias every quarter mile. As an off-white foodie, I’m not complaining! I remember being shocked to discover that when Spanish-speaking people answer the phone, they don’t say, “hola,” the equivalent of our “hello.” They say, “bueno,” meaning “good.” That’s not just a linguistic difference; it’s a cultural one. Our cultures are rooted in our shared history and show up in our greetings. Did you know that “hello” came from trying not to get shot upon approaching a house in western frontier?

Our cultures also reflect our shared values as can be seen in ancient Greek and Jewish greetings. When Greeks met each other in the first century (and to a lesser degree today) they would say, “chaire,” which means something like, “rejoice.” I like that. I’ve taken to saying, “rejoice,” when I come into a room by which I mean, “Aren’t you glad I’m here,” but I don’t think that’s how the Greeks meant it. “Chaire” is the verb form of “charis,” which we translate, “grace.” In the Greco-Roman world, obtaining grace from the gods ensured a joyful life, which I think is why essentially the same word means, “grace” and “rejoice.” Perhaps, “chaire” as a greeting meant, “may you enjoy the gods’ favor.” It’s a kind wish and a great way to start a conversation off on the right foot.

The Jews on the other hand would greet one another with, “shalom,”¹ which is commonly translated, “peace.” Nobody knows for sure how or when this greeting originated. It could have been a declaration of benign intent serving a purpose much like “hello,” but I don’t think that’s the case. “Shalom” does connote the absence of hostility, but that’s a secondary meaning to a much richer concept. The word more literally refers to “wholeness” or “integration.” When my body experiences shalom, I’m healthy. Shalom in relationships looks like mutual respect and shared goals. Societies demonstrate shalom through justice and security. When the resurrected Christ greeted his grieving disciples with “shalom aleykhem,” he must’ve meant more than, “I’m not here to hurt you.” I think he was reinforcing his people’s shared longing for the restoration of the created order.²

If I’m right about all of this, then the greetings of the Greeks and the Jews reveal two very different cultural aspirations. These fundamental differences meant that Jews and Greeks in first century Rome would never cohere into one society. During the time of Jesus and Paul, the two cultures coexisted on either side of a chasm which both had helped to dig.

The gospel invaded this rift to produce a third culture both open and offensive to the other two. We can feel its texture in Paul’s first “hello,” to the Galatians.

Here’s the passage:

Grace and peace to you from God our Father…
Galatians 1:3a (NIV)

The third way

I’m sure you see what Paul did there; he brought together the Greek and Jewish greetings into one. This was how Paul greeted his readers in all of his letters except the two to Timothy where he adds, “mercy.” And Paul wasn’t the only apostle to use it. Peter did in both of his letters. John used it too in 2 John and Revelation. The Christian movement in the first century wasn’t aimed at spinning off a new sect of Judaism or even spawning a new religion altogether. The early proclaimers of the message about Christ had their sights set on the foundation of a new, unified humanity called out from among all the peoples on earth. This compound greeting affirms the truth of the Galatians’ collective identity.

We might not be impressed with the coming together of people from various cultures into one nation in the land of e pluribus unum, but this was more than multiculturalism. We might allow Mexican people to celebrate Cinco de Mayo on US soil. Heck, we might even join them for the good food. What we won’t do is create a new “Independence Day” on May 4th or July 5th to celebrate the liberation of both nations from Europe. In his unified greeting, Paul insisted on equal status for everyone under God. “Grace and peace to you,” didn’t broker a compromise; it created something completely unique, but also familiar.

The churches in Galatia were new societies made up of people from both cultures to form a third, transcendent culture. Paul reworked the greetings of both the Greeks and the Jews to express the norms of the third culture. He deconstructed the Greek greeting, “rejoice,” to its basis, “grace.” I believe he had theological reasons for this especially in light of his message about grace. I think he also had a cultural reason to make the change. He reformatted the imperative verb form into a noun so that it would better compliment the Jewish greeting, “peace to you.” So, he included the greeting of the Greeks while making it culturally non Greek.

While he retained the format of the Jewish greeting, “peace to you,” he wrote it in Greek, a practice for which there is almost no precedent in contemporary Jewish literature.³ I’m inclined to think that this is because Greek-speaking Jews in Paul’s day continued to greet one another with the Hebrew, “shalom,” even if they proceeded to continue the conversation in Greek. It seems to me that since “shalom” had such a nuanced meaning, those who used it would be reluctant to translate it. Also, modern day English-speaking Orthodox Jews, continue to greet one another with “shalom aleykhem” rather than saying, “peace to you.” This seems to be true of orthodox Jews in every country around the world even if they’ve spoken the local language for generations. By writing “eirene humin,” Paul included Greeks into the history and hopes of Israel thereby erasing the distinction.

Paul’s greeting to the church reinforced the kingdom call for Greeks and Jews to contribute their cultural wealth to one new culture not beholden to either. Depending on your perspective, this is either a glorious hope or a treasonous threat. I always used to think that the persecution which Paul suffered throughout his ministry was due to his theology. Upon closer inspection of the New Testament, I no longer think that was the case.

In Acts 22, Paul makes a defense of his ministry before a mob of Jews in Jerusalem. He tells a fantastical tale of persecuting the church and then meeting Christ on the road. He identifies Jesus as The Righteous One of God. He relates the details of his baptism in Jesus’ name. Then, he tells of how Jesus warned him that the people who live in Jerusalem (his audience) were too stubborn to hear the message about their own messiah. Through all of this the mob listened quietly.

Then, he says:

“Then the Lord said to me, ‘Go; I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’ ”
Acts 22:21 (NIV)

Their reaction?

The crowd listened to Paul until he said this. Then they raised their voices and shouted, “Rid the earth of him! He’s not fit to live!”
As they were shouting and throwing off their cloaks and flinging dust into the air, the commander ordered that Paul be taken into the barracks.
Acts 22:22-24a (NIV)

They had tolerated his calling Jesus, “Adonai,” which was the word they used for God. His ascription of messianic language to someone they’d crucified didn’t draw their ire. They even put up with a personal insult supposedly from this crucified messiah. Nothing drew a response from them until he suggested that Gentiles could participate in the covenants of Israel. And what a response it drew! I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been so mad that I’ve reached down, clutched a handful of dust, and threw it into the air. This was a murderous, nearly animalistic rage. It serves to illustrate the human tendency to jealously guard our own cultural identity.

Even before this defining moment in Jerusalem, Paul knew the incendiary implications of his call to unity. In the Galatian letter itself, he spells out the reason he faced such hostility:

Brothers and sisters, if I am still preaching circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been abolished.
Galatians 5:11(NIV)

Maybe you struggle to understand why Paul’s message pushed godly people to murderous intent. Let’s go back to my illustration about Cinco de Mayo. How would you feel if a charismatic politician began gaining popular support to blend July 4th and May 5th into one holiday perhaps in June? Would you oppose it? On what grounds?

I use this example to illustrate the gospel call for people to dislodge from their cultural allegiances so they can embrace the new, free society. This call is at the very core of the work of Christ. Paul makes this explicit in Ephesians:

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace,
Ephesians 2:14-15 (NIV)

Israel had long expected that the nations would come and join them in the worship of YHWH⁴, but they hadn’t considered the implications of that expectation for their cultural identity. As the apostle to the Gentiles, Paul didn’t teach those godless Greeks to say, “shalom,” rather he expected both sides of the divide to adopt a new greeting adapted from what was true in both.

Alternatively, Paul could have created a new greeting without reference to either Greek or Jewish culture and insisted that everyone use it, but that would have just produced another society based on conformity. Cohesion without conformity is part of the culture of the new society. I’m sure that Greek believers continued to greet other Greeks with, “chaire,” and Jewish believers continued to greet other Jews with “shalom.” To some extent these patterns are truly part of our identities as individuals. In the kingdom of God, every individual is equally valued and that includes their cultural leanings. At the same time, no culture is superior so nobody stands above anyone else. By greeting with “grace and peace to you,” Paul diminished any pretense of cultural superiority while at the same time valuing the differences between people.

The citizens of God’s new society are free from the conforming pressures of culture because the culture of God’s kingdom is unity in diversity. Can you imagine such a society? I hope so, because if you can, it means you had a pretty good upbringing.

Related opposites

I have two daughters and two sons.

They’re all pretty different from each other, but my two sons are opposites in almost every way. Caleb is a builder and fixer. Jadon tends to destroy things. Caleb avoids confrontation. Jadon thrives on it. Caleb doesn’t like to get dirty. Jadon doesn’t like to get clean. Caleb is a man of few words. Jadon talks when even when no one is around. They’re about as different from each other as any two people on this planet and yet they share one of the closest bonds that humans can share. They’re brothers.

As Paul continues in Galatians 1:3 we see that the “grace and peace” were offered on behalf of “God our Father.” I don’t think I could grasp unconditional love if I weren’t a parent. These people came into my house with nothing but needs and demands, yet I love them. Because I love them, I don’t want to confine them to some prefabricated notion of who they’ll be. If I did that, it would mean that I love the ideal of my child more than my child. Their individuality doesn’t make me love them less. It makes me love them more because I marvel in the one-of-a-kind person that God has produced from me and my wife. Don’t you think God our Father loves us at least that much? If we really believe that God is our Father we ought to express it through ever-deepening authenticity.

As a father who loves my kids as they are, I don’t impose prescribed expectations on them. What I do require is that they treat each other well and that they contribute to the good of the family. When Paul calls God, our Father, he’s not only affirming each person’s place before God as they truly are, he’s also implying our duty to each other. My children are stuck with each other for life because they share a common parentage. We are to embrace as spiritual family everyone whom our Father has adopted. We don’t get to set up additional stipulations. We must love them on the sole basis of shared spiritual parentage. In this way, we retain their freedom and our own.

Please hear what I’m saying. If we are going to be the same kind of Christians Paul was, we must be free from conformity and authority. This is so important to know because in my experience one of the best places to find conforming pressure and authoritarian leadership has been at church.

Why?

Because these social dynamics are powerful and predictable. If you want to start a church, you just need to master the art of building a cohesive culture among a bunch of people who find you credible. It works, but it’s the opposite of the new society which grows from the gospel.

I remember almost ten years ago meeting some people who were part of a former cult. In the mid nineties, Newsweek had named this movement the largest cult in America. In only fifteen years, this group had exploded in numbers from a single congregation of a few hundred to a worldwide movement with over one hundred thousand members. After moral failure among the top level leadership, the member congregations repented of some of their more authoritarian tendencies. Even though they were supposedly reformed, I could sense the hunger for proselytes still churning in their members.

Besides the excessive friendliness, I noticed something else strange about the couple who took a particular interest in recruiting my family. Their clothes were way out of fashion. When we accepted their invitation to dinner I realized that this wasn’t due to frugality. As I looked at pictures of the couple with their friends displayed around he house, I felt like I was looking back twenty years in time to the nineties. I asked my host when the photos were taken. He answered, “Last year.” Then I realized that the members of this cult had frozen in time. They had formed their picture of the Christian ideal from the people who’d led their movement in its ascendency – during the nineties.

I share this story to illustrate the danger of conformity in a church setting. Now, there’s nothing sinful (maybe) about dressing like the nineties, but it’s probably not helpful either. Imagine walking into a room full of people dressed that way. Would you feel like they’d discovered something transcendent or would you think they’d relinquished a part of themselves to a hive mind? Would you think they’d each found a personal faith or would you pity them as pathetic joiners? It’s possible to think you’re responding to God’s call when you’re really just following the crowd. It’s possible to tell yourself you’re in a spiritual family when you’re really in a cult. Healthy families promote diversity because they’re predicated on unconditional love. The church is supposed to be the ultimate family. If you’re in a group that discourages diversity, it’s not the church.

I’d love to discuss these ideas further, so leave me a comment!

Notes:

The best evidence for the use of “shalom alykhem” as a greeting by Jewish people in the first century comes from the Gospels of Luke and John where Jesus is quoted as greeting his disciples with it after his resurrection. cf. Luke 24:36; John 20:19, 26
Evidence of this shared hope can be found in Acts 3:19-21: “Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah, who has been appointed for you—even Jesus. Heaven must receive him until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets.
The Dictionary of Paul and His Letters. p. 699
Isaiah 2:1-5 as an example.
Acts 15:36-41

Free Association – Galatians 1:1-2

November 30, 2020November 30, 2020Nathan Wilkerson

Let’s do a little word association. When I say, “Christian,” what word pops into your head? I’d be willing to pay $20 to anyone who can honestly say that they associated “Christian” with “subversive.” If your first word was “conservative,” “fundamentalist,” “rightwing,” or the like, you can send me $20. In America, Christians institutions work to defend “traditional values.” But that’s not the ancient faith. It’s something else – something tame and malignant.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against “values.” It’s the “traditional” that betrays Christ with a kiss.

Everyone knows that Jesus was a subversive, but we assume that his opponents were to blame. Jesus didn’t like hypocrites and he called them out, isn’t that right? Aren’t you glad that you’re not a hypocrite like those Pharisees? I know I am. Surely if you and I were in power at the time of Christ he would have used his carpentry skills to build more tables for our merchants and money changers.

No, I’m not a revolutionary.

I’m an expositor…of something revolutionary.

This is the first installment in my exposition of Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

Stick it to the man…and all the rest of y’all!

Paul, an apostle—sent not from men nor by a man, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead
Galatians 1:1 (NIV)

Apostles represent.

Paul introduced himself as a representative first and foremost. He did that a lot in his greetings. This one is different from the others in couple of ways.

He begins by telling them who he didn’t represent. If Christ himself met me on the road to Damascus (or any road for that matter) and made me his emissary I would lead with that. I’d get some business cards made up and maybe a badge of some sort. Paul didn’t discount his position as Christ’s apostle, but in this particular instance, he distanced himself from any human influence before giving his credentials. Why would he need to do this?

As we unpack this letter, his reasons will become clear, but at this point it’s important to observe that a person can claim a divine office while representing a human institution. The most notable example would be the pope. He may be known as the vicar of Christ, but he’s appointed by a conclave through a majority vote. The pope might write a letter and sign it as the apostle of Christ, but he can’t legitimately add, “and not of men.”

Paul didn’t just include such a disclaimer, he led with it.

He not only led with it, he repeated it. Notice the seeming redundancy – “not from men nor by a man.” Why couldn’t he have just said, “not from men,” and left it at that? Wouldn’t “men,” include any particular “man.” Did he repeat for emphasis? If so, I think I would have phrased it, “not from any man or even all men.” No, I think there’s something more here.

Paul didn’t repeat himself; he just got really specific. “Not from men nor a man,” would only be redundant if “men” and “man” referred to essentially the same thing. As we continue through this letter, we’ll see that they refer to two separate, but related forces – conformity and authority.

In saying that he wasn’t sent “from men,” Paul declared his office free from the influence of humans as a group. Whatever Paul was doing rose above, and, when necessary, defied social pressure. Herodotus was right that custom is king, but 500 years later, Paul declared that king dethroned.

And custom wasn’t the only king that Paul disavowed.

At the writing of Galatians, the Roman Empire spanned from Spain in the west to Syria in the east, from Britain in the north to Ethiopia in the south.

The people within those borders lived, worked, and traded under the dictates of one man, Caesar. How could one man control the conduct of millions?

Authority.

A cynic might have answered, “armies,” but armies operate on authority in even higher concentrations. Think of the drill sergeant hurling verbal abuse at squad of armed fighting men. Authority keeps these men, any of whom could end the sergeant on the spot, in line. Literally.

Whether in the case of a sergeant, a Caesar, or a CEO, authority doesn’t depend on numbers like conformity. When Karen wants compliance, she doesn’t rally the cashier’s coworkers; she demands to speak with the manager. Every human institution operates on authority and authority is wielded by individuals.

In saying that he was not the representative of “a man,” Paul severed any connection between his office and any human authority.

Eleven words into his letter (eight in Greek) Paul knocked out the two props which have supported civilization for millennia. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a conformist, but without conformity we wouldn’t be able to anticipate the actions of others or conduct ourselves successfully in social situations. We might resent authority, but we’re probably glad that interpersonal disputes get solved in courtrooms rather than through armed conflicts in the streets. Now, here’s Paul disavowing cultural conformity and human authority.

Talk about subversive!

A better offer

If I told you that I got a letter in the mail today, you might ask who it was from. What if I told you it wasn’t from anyone? You might be confused. The very idea of receiving something in the mail implies a sender. So did the notion of apostleship. To be an apostle was to be sent. Paul began by excluding any sort of human sender, but that doesn’t mean nobody sent him.

He goes on in Galatians 1:1 to say that he was sent, “by Jesus Christ and God the Father…”

There’s been some dispute over the past 150 years or so about whether the earliest Christians thought of Jesus as God or whether that idea was syncretized from pagan sources and later adopted at the Council of Nicaea. Let me submit this phrase as exhibit “A” in the case for an early understanding of Christ’s divinity. Paul, writing around 55 CE, didn’t see Jesus as just a great man. He said that he wasn’t sent by a man, but by Jesus Christ.

Not only does he distinguish Jesus from human authorities, Paul associates Jesus with God. The two “persons” sent Paul together. He wasn’t sent by God through Jesus, but by Jesus and God. That God would do anything in partnership with someone else has serious theological implications. The Qur’an insists that such a thing could never happen:

Allah forgiveth not that partners should be set up with Him; but He forgiveth anything else, to whom He pleaseth; to set up partners with Allah is to devise a sin Most(sic) heinous indeed.
Surah 4:48 (Al-Qur’an English Edition. Islamic Studies Press.

According to the Qur’an, Paul has committed the unpardonable sin and he’s not even completed his greeting. This would be true if Jesus were not God, but he is.

Paul’s apostleship stood above the purview of all human authority because it sprung from divine authority. Every child knows that you can only resist authority through another authority. If mom said you can’t go with your friends, ask dad and vice versa. In that case, the other authority may not outrank the first one, so freedom may not be achieved. The legal system defines levels of authority, and so a prisoner may be released by appealing to a higher court. Authority trumps authority. Paul’s apostleship was free from human authority because it was based on the ultimate authority.

This may not sound like liberation at first blush. We’re conditioned to think that God’s standards are more stringent and his retribution more certain than any human authority. That would be true if God’s kingdom operated on the same mechanisms as human authority. As we will see, while there had been a system like that in place, it has been outmoded. We get a clue as to the nature of this better system from the little word, “and.” Remember, Paul wasn’t sent by God, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father.

The ground of all being is a Partnership. Dictators, despots and tyrants rule alone, but God has never been alone. We might think of the whole enterprise of creation and redemption as the Eternal Partnership looking to take on new members. While membership implies obligations, it also, as they say, has its privileges. Partners share responsibility and authority. We pray because we’ve been authorized under divine authority. From within this partnership, we experience God’s supreme authority as final permission to break with the social contract and take the better offer.

But what happens when human authority won’t defer to the divine?

Reversed rulings

Painting by Jan van ‘t Hoff on gospelimages.com. Click on photo to view his site.

Jesus exemplified free living under God. He also demonstrated the price of such living in a world still controlled by human power structures. Among all of the glorious messages reverberating from the passion of Christ is this truth: “God won’t stop human authorities from enforcing their rule however they see fit.”

So, how can he expect us to live above their control?

The answer lies in the last phrase of Galatians 1:1, “…who raised him from the dead.”

God doesn’t prevent evil deeds. To do so would only delay and perhaps amplify further evil. Instead, he converts them. If Jesus was who Paul said he was then the crucifixion was the nadir of human evil. First light on the third day would reveal that act to be the righteousness of God. Conquerors forcefully subjugate the will of others. Christ did more than conquer.

Following him means we must do the same.

Consider these familiar words from Romans 8:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
Romans 8:35-37 (NIV)

It has been said that freedom isn’t free. Unfortunately, we’ve come to expect that someone else will pick up the tab, whether that be a soldier on foreign soil or Christ himself on the cross. Paul would have repudiated that thinking. In saying that he’d not been sent by a man, he understood that he was obligated to live in the costly freedom which Christ has purchased. Those of us who’ve been redeemed by the Lamb must also be counted as sheep to be slaughtered.

At this point, you might be tempted to look for freedom on your own terms. It’s not out there. Remember, there are two controllers of human behavior – authority and conformity.

On earth as in heaven

People who dodge authority find themselves conforming to a counter culture. When I was in high school, you could pick out the “partiers” by how they talked and dressed. Their behavior in some ways defied authority, but it was still bound to the group. From my brief foray among their ranks, I remember how they used certain language to encourage group loyalty. For instance, nobody was to use the phrase, “go straight,” regardless of context. If you were giving someone directions and used the phrase to mean, “don’t turn here,” members of the group would emphatically recite the motto, “Don’t go straight; go forward!” It was a tacit way of saying, “If you give up partying, we’ll disown you.” Counter cultures can even become more oppressive than the mainstream.

Ironically, when counter cultures become large and powerful enough, they always develop their own authority structures and codes of conduct such as in the case of gangs and criminal syndicates.

The human condition comes bundled with authority and conformity. There’s nowhere among other people that we can go to escape these two controlling forces. I think this has been the appeal of monasticism. People disappear into the desert to “find themselves” or to silence the demands of society so they can find enlightenment or nirvana or something esoteric. This isn’t a bad thing, so long as its temporary. The great weakness of the monastic path in my opinion is that it doesn’t readily translate into concern for other people or action on their behalf. Surely, we’ve not found the best version of ourselves if the person we find is self-centered. For freedom to be worth pursuing, it mustn’t become an end in itself. We become free to become truly good and we become truly good for the sake of others.

We must become free from our community to become good, but we become good to contribute to our community.

This brings me to the next verse in Paul’s letter.

and all the brothers and sisters with me,
To the churches in Galatia:
Galatians 1:2 (NIV)

This letter wasn’t sent from an individual, but from a family – Paul and his siblings. In the previous section, I said that we’ve been invited into an Eternal Partnership, but that was only part of the picture. If you were as astute, you noticed that Paul has already described God as “the Father.” Jesus Christ and God the Father partnered in the sending of Paul, but that partnership is also a family. To join the Eternal Partnership, we must be adopted into the Eternal Family.

To accept God’s invitation into his family is to join an alternative society. We are the “called out” also known as “the church.” The letter to the Galatians is a letter from Paul and his spiritual siblings (i.e. the church) to others in their spiritual family, the churches of Galatia.

Just as the authority of Jesus Christ and God the Father supersedes that of human rulers, so the culture of the church supersedes human cultures. We’re free from cultural conformity because we’ve joined a new society with its own norms. Because this society is God’s family, those norms spring from each person’s essential nature with infinite room for personal expression.

Maybe the best way to summarize what I’ve said so far is to say that Paul introduced himself as a representative of a regime that commands its subjects to be free and of a culture where the norm is personal authenticity.

That may sound like a lot to get from two verses. The only way to know whether I’m just making all of this up, will be to explore the rest of the letter.

A Christlike Enigma -DDWJWD Final

July 31, 2019July 31, 2019Nathan Wilkerson

I’ll confess that I’ve struggled to write this series. I almost feel like one of those people who critique Mother Teresa for not doing more community development. Even if God didn’t exactly mean for us to mimic the details of Jesus’ life, surely aspiring to be more like Jesus can’t be a bad thing.

Or can it?

I’ve only seen it yield bitter fruit in my life. At the beginning of this series, I shared some about my struggles to live up to Jesus’ lifestyle. In the shambles of my failure, I began to pursue a different vision of following Christ. Yes, I entertained the notion of giving up altogether, but where could I go? He has the words of life.¹ I went back to the Epistles and committed to obeying this passage:

Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for their wrongs, and there is no favoritism. (Colossians 3:22-25 NIV)

Paul wrote those instructions to slaves, but the first century CE didn’t have “employees,” so I made it work.

I still remember the sublime joy of lifting, sorting, loading, and delivering for Jesus. I discovered the paradox of resting at work. While everyone around me cussed and fussed, I smiled.

One time, a coworker named Jeremy threw down a box he was holding and came storming up the belt to where I was standing in a heap which had flowed into my area from a recent “slam.”

“Nate!” he yelled, nearly apoplectic, “Is it because you’re a Christian; is that why you’re so happy here?”

That was the reason. I had learned to express the life of Christ as a UPS worker. I didn’t need God to get me out of there to find joy or meaning. I only needed to find him within my circumstances.

I would be lying if I said that I never again struggled with dissatisfaction at my work, but at least I knew that the problem wasn’t with my circumstances.

One of the great difficulties with maintaining a Christlike posture in a secular profession for me was the lack of role models. Francis of Assisi, George Muller, Watchman Nee, and Dorothy Day were among my “dead mentors.” I read their biographies and watched movies about their lives. I aspired to walk in their footsteps as they certainly walked in Christ’s. Everyone one of them looked a whole lot more like the portrait of Jesus from the Gospels than anyone I knew and all of them worked full-time serving the poor and preaching the word. My aspirations to live as they did were about a ridiculous as a 5’6” overweight mathlete emulating LeBron James.

Then, I found him – a dead mentor who walked a different path. Actually, he walked the same path, but with a different gate.

George Washington Carver pursued his calling with peanuts rather than preaching, science rather than spiritual disciplines. Born a slave and raised by a white couple, George encountered his “Mr. Creator” through nature in the forest and farm of his southern Missouri home. Eventually, his faith and curiosity would lead him to obtain two degrees in botany and position as a professor at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. There, he saw the vulnerability of black sharecroppers who were starving on ten acres of land too depleted by cotton to produce food. Mr. Carver discovered that peanuts could not only grow in the depleted soil but could restore nitrogen into it. He encouraged the sharecroppers to plant them instead of cotton.

When harvest came, they found no market for their goods. Thousands of bushels of peanuts sat unwanted, rotting in warehouses. Now, the farmers had neither subsistence crops nor even the meager proceeds from cotton.

George went into his lab with a bushel of peanuts and requested that he not be disturbed. Over the next three days, he discovered over three hundred commercial uses for the peanut including household items, plastics, and, yes, peanut butter.

At a speech given to the YMCA in North Carolina, Carver reflected on how he came to make these discoveries:

Years ago I went into my laboratory and said, “Dear Mr. Creator, please tell me what the universe was made for?”

The Great Creator answered, “You want to know too much for that little mind of yours. Ask for something more your size, little man.”

Then I asked. “Please, Mr. Creator, tell me what man was made for.”

Again the Great Creator replied, “You are still asking too much. Cut down on the extent and improve the intent.”

So then I asked, “Please, Mr. Creator, will you tell me why the peanut was made?”

“That’s better, but even then it’s infinite. What do you want to know about the peanut?”

“Mr. Creator, can I make milk out of the peanut?”

“What kind of milk do you want? Good Jersey milk or just plain boarding house milk?”

“Good Jersey milk.”

And then the Great Creator taught me how to take the peanut apart and put it together again. And out of the process have come forth all these products!^²

peanuts-1735672_1920 — Alexas_Fotos / 20275 images

People remember George Washington Carver as the peanut guy, but peanuts were just a tool in the hand of a man who, in turn, was a tool in the hand of God. Through that tool, God demonstrated his transcendent wisdom which we experience as a paradox.

G.K. Chesterton once said that with God white and red stand together in perfect harmony with an abhorrence for pink. He meant that seemingly opposing concepts which we struggle to reconcile through compromise agree perfectly before God with no need to minimize either. Where the “third way” solves contradictions, there we find the fingerprint of God.

That fingerprint covered the life of George Washington Carver.

Consider the conflicts of the twentieth century:

The industrial revolution started a war between economics and ecology. Through his agricultural innovation, Carver advanced both simultaneously.
After the Civil War, despicable assumptions regarding race retreated before painful and important conflicts between black and white. George absorbed the injustice and bigotry hurled at him and converted it into opportunities for his own people. He had been born a slave and died a celebrated hero to people of all ethnicities.
While Darwin’s Origin of the Species had been published in 1859, the debate between creationism and evolutionism and, by extension, religion and science, reached its zenith in the early twentieth century. While religious leaders suppressed inquiry and secularists took incendiary measures, Carver spoke humbly to the generation coming up behind him,

In the 12^th chapter of Job and the 7^th and 8^th verses, we are urged thus: But ask now the beasts and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee. Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee; and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.

In St. John the 8^th chapter and 32^nd verse, we have this remarkable statement:

And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. Were I permitted to paraphrase it, I would put it thus: And you shall know science and science shall set you free, because science is truth.

There is nothing more assuring than, more inspiring, or more literally true than the above passages from Holy Writ.

We get closer to God as we get more intimately and understandingly acquainted with the things he has created. I know of nothing more inspiring than that of making discoveries for oneself.³’

Just as Christ came to preach peace to those who were near and to those who were far, so George Washington Carver announced that same peace to the industrialist and the ecologist, to black and white, to the scientist and the theologian. These words of dedicating the Roosevelt Medal to Mr. Carver beautifully summarize the divine purpose which he fulfilled:

To a scientist humbly seeking the guidance of God and a liberator to men of the white race as well as the black.⁴

God obviously expressed himself through George Washington Carver, but that expression was distinct in detail from Jesus and from other heroes of the faith. While Christ experienced a dramatic call into ministry at the waters of baptism, Carver followed a circuitous route that required years of preparation. Jesus traveled and taught itinerantly, but Carver remained at the Tuskegee Institute throughout his career. Jesus spent forty days fasting and long hours in prayer. In contrast, George prayed aloud very little remaining rather in a posture of silent prayer throughout the day. Jesus pointed people away from a preoccupation with earthly provisions, while George made them his primary mission. Jesus was executed in the prime of life, George died peacefully as an old man well regarded by all.

George Washington Carver didn’t live by WWJD, but he embodied the spirit of Christ as well as anyone I’m aware of. When wronged and mistreated, he chose to forgive. He lived in constant, grateful communion with God. He gave full credit to God for every good thing he did. He mentored small groups of men to carry on his work and expand his impact. He devoted himself to the betterment of humanity. He chose his calling over the allure of riches or prestige. He even spent long hours healing wheelchair-bound people.⁵ He didn’t mimic Christ; he imbibed him and so became a son of God expressing the Father according to his own unique constitution.

I needed Mr. Carver in my disillusioned days. The National Monument established in his honor sits just an hour to the north of my home. After a visit there, my wife and I decided to name our second son, Jadon Carver, after him. I want my children to know that they can follow Jesus as he calls them and not according to any template, even one found in the Bible.

I also want them to know that God wants to be found and worshiped outside of formal religious contexts as well as within. I believe that George received a great blessing by being denied entry into the church because of his race. Forced to resort to the open-air cathedral of the forest, he found unbroken fellowship with God who won’t be confined to “sacred space” and for whom all space is sacred. To Jack Boyd, a YMCA official, Carver wrote about his Tuskegee students:

I want them to find Jesus, and make Him a daily, hourly, and momently part of themselves.

O how I want them to get the fullest measure of happiness and success out of life. I want them to see the Great Creator in the smallest and apparently the most insignificant things about them.

How I long for each one to walk and talk with the Great Creator through the things he has created.

My beloved friend, keep your hand in that of the Master, walk daily by His side, so that you may lead others into the realms of true happiness, where a religion of hate (which poisons both body and soul) will be unknown, having in its place the “Golden Rule” way, which is the “Jesus Way” of life, will reign supreme.⁶

If we really want the “Jesus Way” of life, we’ll need to hold open the breach which Christ tore between sacred and secular. We must learn to express in our ordinary lives the Spirit of love by the faith which comes through the gospel. We’ll need to stop “going to worship,” so we can start worshiping. I’ll share more about that in my next series, “Stop Going to Worship.”

Footnotes:

From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.“You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve. Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. (John 6:66-68 NIV)
Federer, William J. George Washington Carver – His Life & Faith in his Own Words. 2002. Amerisearch, Inc. St. Louis. P. 35-36
IBID. p.71
IBID. p.86
IBID. p.79-82
IBID. p.60-61

Divine DNA – DDWJWD Part 7

July 30, 2019July 30, 2019Nathan Wilkerson

I’ve been using Paul’s Epistles to argue against mimicking the life of Jesus as he is depicted in the Gospels. That doesn’t mean the two parts New Testament contradict. The Gospels tell about Christ’s earthly ministry, his death, and resurrection. After Jesus came back to life, everything changed including the way we view him and other people. The letters of Paul written to disciples who’d undergone the change. Paul describes the difference in these words:

And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Corinthians 5:15-17 NIV emphasis mine)

Through his death and resurrection, Jesus has transcended the one configuration of his earthly life to become a “life-giving Spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45) manifesting himself in an infinitely diverse set of expressions through all who trust in him. Notice that Paul didn’t say that everyone ought to be a new creation, but that they are. Renewal is past perfect – perfect because God has done it in the past. (Okay, it’s cheesy. Sorry.)

Now, spiritual progress manifests itself in us as we accept that which is already true of us. Rather than attempting to remediate our deficiencies or aspire to others’ merits, we rest by faith in what we already are and in doing so, find it increasingly so in our experience. This is the process of spiritual growth described by Paul:

Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:15-18 NIV)

Faith looks into Scripture (in this case the Old Testament) to see Christ there. It’s not a human biography, but a portrait of God – a coded image of Christ that reflects what we are becoming. Because he’s doing the work, we progress ever upward “with ever-increasing glory” instead of undulating on a sine wave of effort and exhaustion.

The WWJD ethic would have each person comb the Gospels to ascertain just how much more they need to do to be like the man, Jesus of Nazareth. God would have each person contemplate Christ in all of Scripture and find in him the person they’re destined to become.

Rather than commanding us to conform ourselves to the example of Jesus, God puts within us the essence of Christ. That life springing up from within will produce a unique version of God’s Son. As John Oman said it:

The quality of all He said and did was derived straight from His amazing insight, which was just perfect love. Though echoed to the letter, therefore, the soul of it would still be wanting, and would no more be His example than a death-mask a living face. Our life also, if it is really to be living, must, like His, follow our own insight. As His own understanding of God’s love was the fulfilment of His law, so our own understanding of it alone can be the fulfilment of ours.¹

God is love. The essence of the person who was God in flesh is divine love. We take that love as our own when we let ourselves be perfectly loved. That is, when we believe the Good News that God sent his beloved Son to willingly, lovingly die for our sins and to rise again for our sakes. Love, the divine DNA, enters our hearts through faith. Then, having seen God in the face of his Son, we recognize that visage in all of Scripture. Reading the Bible becomes communion with God and his Son.

If we go to the Bible looking for a standard of conduct, we reject the very trusting faith by which we received the divine DNA in the first place. For some, not having a prescribed standard is a terrifying thought. But if it’s not scary, it’s not faith. A skeptic might think I’m making up an “easy believism” version of Christianity by side-stepping the requirements of the Bible. Thing is, I got this from the Bible. Look at these words from Paul in Galatians 5:4-6:

You who are trying to be justified by the law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit we eagerly await by faith the righteousness for which we hope. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. (NIV)

The letter to the Galatians was written some time around 49 CE. The earliest Gospel was penned around 65. Both were written to people who were already living the Christian life. Christianity doesn’t arise from the New Testament. The New Testament arose from a community of people already transformed by faith in the gospel. Unless we understand this, we’ll turn the example and words of Christ into a new law and the affect will be the same as the Galatians experienced.

This is why the shine wears off of Christianity for so many new believers. They start out energized by the love flowing through them by grace through faith, but then they encounter the codified Jesus of the WWJD approach. They see how far they fall short and exert effort to span the distance only to fail time and again. That failure makes them feel unloved and the flow of grace gets severed.

We must stop asking, “What would Jesus do?” if we’re going to become like Jesus.

We must also stop asking, “What would Jesus do?” so we can obey Jesus’ commands which are simply believe in him and love each other.

Since God both accepts and grows each believer in his or her own way, we can banish any tendency toward comparison or judgment in favor of familial loyalty. I’m an only child, so I never learned to live with siblings, but I do have four kids. As I’ve mentioned, they’re very different from each other. I can tell you that nothing would hurt my father heart more than to hear my kids arguing over which of them really belong in my family. Nothing would give me more joy than to see them band together under the truth that they all have an equal share of my love.

But, love can’t be compelled by any external standard. We can’t love because he said so. We can’t love because he or anyone else has. We can only give love that we have first received. We receive love as we trust that we have been and are loved.

John, the “disciple whom Jesus loved,”² said it this way:

No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. (1 John 4:12-17 NIV)

Footnotes:

Oman, John. Grace and Personality (Kindle Locations 2862-2866). Kindle Edition.
This phrase appears five times in the Gospel of John (13:23, 19:26, 20:2, 21:7, 21:20) and is commonly thought to be the way the author referred to himself.

Crazy Radical Legalism – DDWJWD Part 6

July 29, 2019July 29, 2019Nathan Wilkerson

The WWJD fad flamed out almost two decades ago, so why talk about it?
While people no longer wear the plethora of merchandise, the ideal lives on. In fact, the teaching that Jesus, as he’s presented in the Gospels, ought to serve as the believer’s true north has made a resurgence over the past ten years.

Responding to consumerist megachurch trends, influential teachers like Francis Chan and David Platt have begun to call people back to the Gospels as the gold standard. Both men teach that Christians aren’t people who merely agree with traditional doctrines of the church, but rather are those who live like Jesus. To avoid the charge of legalism, they go through a few soteriological gymnastics. They say that people aren’t saved by works, but those who are saved will behave like Jesus did.¹ In other words, they challenge people to conform to a written standard to prove that they have been saved.

Tomato – toemahtoe.

I fear their efforts will push sincere believers into the self-righteous angst of every other legalist on the planet.

Their books celebrate breathtaking examples of Christian devotion, but those examples can just as easily provide insecurity as they can inspiration. In Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphira were moved to emulate the generosity of other believers and that didn’t work out so well for them. Such comparative Christianity divides the church into the judgmental accomplished and the resentful failures. And maybe everyone is a little of both.

I praise God for everyone who honestly has the faith to pray all night like Jesus did, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs to pray all night or to feel inferior because they can’t. I would love nothing more than to be among believers who were joyfully selling their property to share with the poor, but we’ll never get there under compulsion. We’re just not all at the same place in our faith and guilt never helps. If we’re going to avoid the (literally and figuratively) deadly mistake of Ananias and Sapphira, we’re going to need to pay attention to Paul’s instruction in Romans 12:

For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully. (Romans 12:3-8 NIV)

Rather than encourage everyone in the church to minister exactly like Jesus, Paul encourages them to express their unique gifts of grace commensurate to the measure of their faith as members of Christ’s body. No individual believer is the full embodiment of Christ. Together, we are his body. None of us has all faith. God has distributed faith among us, so we’ll partner with our spiritual family to see mighty works get done.

Unfortunately, the attempt to pressure each believer to live up to a crazy radical standard undermines the unity which expressing him as a body requires. The external conformity to behavioral precedent which Chan and Platt prescribe will always lead to comparison and judgment. Both authors look to passages like Matthew 7:21-23 to call into question the eternal destiny of those who don’t come up to their understanding of what Jesus would do. While Christ did teach that some on the Day of Judgment would face the ultimate disappointment, he never called us to question sincerity in others. It’s just not up to us to question whether another believer is a “real Christian.” When we begin to divide the church into “professing believers” and “real believers,” we’ve begun to do God’s work for him, and he’s never keen on that.

When it comes to determining who’s in and who’s out, we need only to ask what Christ requires of those seeking entrance into his family. We don’t need to look at someone’s performance to determine their fitness for the kingdom. We can’t possibly evaluate another person’s faith or sincerity. All we can do is “Accept one another, as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.” (Romans 15:7) with the confidence that, “The Lord knows those who are his.” (2 Timothy 2:19)

Jesus said some extreme things in the Gospels about the cost of discipleship. I don’t mean to minimize those. I’m simply saying that practically speaking we can’t comb through every divided motive in ourselves or others in hopes of perfecting holiness. We can’t compare ourselves either favorably or un with other believers to make spiritual progress. That progress toward holiness comes through other means. Which I will tell you about in tomorrow’s post.

Footnote:

Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God. Francis Chan. P.84; Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. David Platt. P.39

What Would Jesus Don’t – DDWJWD Part 5

July 26, 2019July 26, 2019Nathan Wilkerson

Of course, there’s about as much danger of everybody “doing what Jesus would do” as there is of everybody Wanging Chung. Jesus was an outlier even in his day. Really doing what Jesus would do would require everyone to quit their jobs, spend forty days in wilderness prayer and fasting, preach itinerantly trusting God for provisions, heal the sick, cast out demons, raise the dead, lambast the religious establishment, train a small band of followers, forego marriage, live homeless, the list goes on. If you’re a Christian, sit down right now and try to count how many people you know who’ve just chosen singleness for the kingdom. One such person was the late singer, Rich Mullins. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he wrote a song titled, “Hard.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKnm1StIrXE&w=560&h=315]

I love the person I read about in the New Testament. The depiction of his lifestyle of poverty and community compels me. I can’t live that way, though, without neglecting the people I’m supposed to love. I suppose I could “junk it all, but Jesus,” but then, what would he have me do but love those around me? Don’t get me wrong, I believe that we must “hate”¹ our families for his sake, but that doesn’t mean every person should abandon his or her responsibilities to preach about the kingdom.

Such a requirement seems to fly in the face of the rest of the Bible. Jesus left his family in Nazareth to preach about the kingdom and then he left them for good by getting himself killed. His being “devoted to God” resulted in the neglect of his mother in her old age. At this point, Jesus’ example and his teaching come into conflict. Consider his rebuke of the Pharisees in Mark 7:9-13:

And he continued, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corban (that is, devoted to God)— then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.”

The apostle Paul had an even harsher rebuke for those who would attempt to live like Jesus instead of caring for their aging parents:

But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God. Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. (1 Timothy 5:4,8)

I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m not going to leave my family and live homeless if I find caveats like these in the Scriptures. Much less will I tell other people that they need to do such things. Exceptions like these leave the WWJD ethic up for interpretation. We know that we ought to follow Jesus but we’re not told which specific aspects of his life we must reproduce.

With implicit divine authority stripped away from Jesus’ example, people are left to decide just what WWJD looks like in practical application. WWJD comes to represent any moral code that a good percentage of our peers say reflects the essence of The Nazarene.

love-1221444_1280 — Image by John Hain from Pixabay

Charles Sheldon, the author of the book upon which the WWJD bracelets were predicated, answered the question, “What Would Jesus Do?” with acts of charity and social action. Not coincidentally, he ministered during the ascendancy of the “social gospel” movement which emphasized community development and poverty alleviation as Christian works. While no one would disagree with Sheldon’s motives, his application falls a bit short of the entire person of Christ. For instance, Christ taught about the end of the world and judgment – two topics that the social gospel tended to minimize.

The WWJD merchandizing fad took place in the nineties, a time when church leaders were pushing back against the lax discipleship of the church growth movement of the preceding decades. Ministries like Promise Keepers and True Love Waits ascended along with the WWJD fad. The church had failed to weave moral fiber into its revivals and crusades so we turned to parachurch and packaged programs to rehabilitate our atrophied souls. Honestly, we were less interested in whether Jesus would feed the poor and more interested in whether he’d go to an “R” rated movie or have sex with his girlfriend (spoiler – he didn’t watch movies or have a girlfriend).

According to Mike Freestone, co-creator of the first WWJD bracelets, “People wear them to keep a check on their lives and to witness to others.”²

It doesn’t take too much reading between the lines to recognize that the real question behind the embroidered letters, “WWJD,” was, “What Would Jesus Don’t?” This real question hiding behind the challenging, but impractical one on the surface, turned the exalted Lord of all into an invisible chaperone. The Jesus of the Gospels, whose life was far too alien to present to kids in youth ministry, got left out in favor of one crafted to look over shoulders either in approval or disapproval.

Unsurprisingly, a sociological study of over 3000 religious American youth in the early 2000s found that almost none of them espoused traditional Christian beliefs. Rather, they had come to adopt a system of doctrines which the authors of the study termed, “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” the tenets of which are listed as follows:

1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.³

I know correlation doesn’t establish causation, but it doesn’t require too much of a stretch to find a connection between the replacement of “turn or burn” appeals with a culturally contingent slogan and the subsequent replacement of evangelical essentials with fuzzy moralism. It’s likely that asking “What would Jesus do?” has bred a non-Christian religion within our churches.

Footnotes:

Luke 14:25-26
“WWJD Products Inspire Thousands,” Christianity Today, November 17th, 1997. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1997/november17/7td75a.html
Smith, Christian. Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (p. 162). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Multiple Personality Design – DDWJWD Part4

July 25, 2019July 25, 2019Nathan Wilkerson

Even if millions of Jesus clones could somehow produce a functioning society, his example would still fail to address the vast array of choices and experiences even within the life of one individual. Consider this admittedly-hard-to-follow quote from the singular mind of John Oman:

But, when we imagine that we can finally direct our lives by mere imitation of the life of Christ, we fall into a misleading and distracting encyclopedic estimate both of Christ’s life and our own. How, we are asked, can the life of Jesus have been perfect? Was He interested in art? Did He concern Himself about public service? Are we in our complex time to have no other interests than sufficed for His simpler age? And then we find that many interests which have nourished themselves from His spirit, are ruled out by His example.¹

We just don’t have enough information in the Gospels about the life of Christ nor did the life of Christ encompass enough experience for it to serve as a pattern to shape the behavior of every believer. This flaw would besmirch the wisdom of God if it were not for one glorious fact – God wants each of his children to be a unique individual and not a Jesus clone.

Have you ever seen one of those families where every member favored every other? When you see one of them out in public away from the rest of them, you know immediately that they must belong with that family. Yeah, we’re not those people. My wife and I look different from each other and I suppose that has resulted in all our kids looking pretty different from each other. Not only do they all look different, but they all also act differently. My two sons especially differ from each other as much as any two people anywhere in the world. One likes to be clean, the other likes to get dirty. One likes to build; the other likes to destroy. One can be gentle to a fault; the other would pick a fight with Leroy Brown.

We love both of our sons. We love the things that make them unique. We’d never want the younger one to be more like the older one or vice versa. We like their differences. God’s that way too.

Every person is unique and that’s a good thing. A cursory observation of creation reveals God’s desire for diversity. Belief in creation colors our worldview to value the whole spectrum of human variation. When God crafted beings to bear his image on this planet he made them diverse:

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27 emphasis mine NAW)

When we use the word, “image,” we often mean something like, “exact likeness,” such as with software, in photography, or when we say, “That boy is the spitting image of his father.” God’s image, though, must be expressed through variety. Perhaps that’s because part of the character of God is a love for diversity. God began humankind with diversity and has tended to our growth as a species to produce further diversity. As a case in point, consider this excerpt from Paul’s sermon to the Athenians:

From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. “For in him we live and move and have our being.” As some of your own poets have said, “We are his offspring.” (Acts 17:26-28)

In other words, God orchestrated racial, ethnic, and cultural differences between people because he’s big enough for all his children to find him in their own way.

Please don’t misunderstand; I’m not espousing pluralism any more than Paul did. In context, Paul used this truth about God’s superintending the diversification of humans to affirm that he can’t be worshipped through idolatrous practices. God loves diversity, but it doesn’t follow that he loves everything. The point remains, God’s children come in all shapes, sizes, preferences, and propensities.

The life of Jesus as recorded in the four Gospels can’t possibly accommodate these differences. When we encourage people to reproduce the life of a thirty-something, male, Jewish, carpenter-turned-itinerant-preacher, we promote uniformity over diversity. Nothing could be further from the message of Scripture or the gospel.

I used to host a Meetup for religious defectors. One time I asked an atheist ethnic Jew what made him abandon his faith. He told me that he was born with mild cerebral palsy and that as a child he had to go through eight hours per day of intensive therapy. To maintain their existence and his therapy, his parents recruited strangers from the community to come into the home and help him a day at a time. He explained, “As I’ve thought about all of those people who gave up their time to help a stranger, I realized that good people come from all kinds of backgrounds. I just couldn’t accept that we Jews could be God’s chosen people when there were so many good non-Jews in the world.”

I responded, “It’s interesting that you say that because I was just reading in Joshua 5 where Joshua meets ‘The Commander of the Lord’s Armies’ and he asks him, ‘Are you for us or for our enemies.’ Now, if I was writing a tribal narrative about how the Jews are better, I would have had the angel respond, ‘For you,’ but that’s not how it goes. Instead, The Commander says, ‘Neither.’”

At that point, a young lady who was also an atheist, but former Baptist, let out an audible gasp. She did not expect that response either. Critics of the Bible want to cast it as dogmatic and racist, but nothing could be further from the truth. God didn’t institute the nation of Israel, so everyone could convert to Judaism; his work with that race had the redemption of all nations as its aim.²

This doctrine of diversity becomes nonsensical if we must hold up one expression of human life as the gold standard. How can we do what Jesus would do by leaving baby penises in their natural state or by working on Saturday or by eating pork? These issues divided the early church, but the apostles all came down on the side of diversity.³

God created humans in diverse forms. Then he orchestrated the development of humanity to produce a myriad of expressions. Then, he called people in a variety of circumstances to reflect his image within those circumstances. Not only didn’t he require them to become Jews, he also didn’t require them to change much of anything except for their self-reliance. Consider Paul’s counsel to those in Corinth:

Nevertheless, each person should live as a believer in whatever situation the Lord has assigned to them, just as God has called them. This is the rule I lay down in all the churches. Was a man already circumcised when he was called? He should not become uncircumcised. Was a man uncircumcised when he was called? He should not be circumcised. Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Keeping God’s commands is what counts. Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them.
Were you a slave when you were called? Don’t let it trouble you—although if you can gain your freedom, do so. For the one who was a slave when called to faith in the Lord is the Lord’s freed person; similarly, the one who was free when called is Christ’s slave. You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of human beings. Brothers and sisters, each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them. (1 Corinthians 7:17-24)

It’s hard to imagine clearer instructions not to do what Jesus did than this one. Paul asserts that God endorses our circumstances when he calls us in them. Gone are the days of leaving nets and abandoning occupations to follow an itinerant preacher. Now, God wants to demonstrate his redeeming power in husbands, wives, Jews, Gentiles, accountants, doctors, IT professionals, technicians, and even lawyers.

God wants everyone to be conformed to the image of his Son, but that image cannot be confined to the life of one man who never married or raised children and died before reaching middle age. Christ requires that those who come to him lay down their life, but only so he can give it back redeemed and released to fully shine in all its unique hues.

Footnotes:

Oman, John. Grace and Personality (Kindle Locations 2872-2876). Kindle Edition.
Deuteronomy 4:5-8; Isaiah 49:5-6
Acts 11:1-18; 15:1-35

Every Third Person Wang Chung Tonight! DDWJWD Part 3

July 24, 2019July 24, 2019Nathan Wilkerson

In 1986 pop music reach its zenith with the release of “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” by the group, Wang Chung. Check out this excerpt to see what I mean:

Across the nation
Around the world
Everybody have fun tonight
A celebration so spread the word
Everybody have fun tonight
Everybody have fun tonight
Everybody Wang Chung tonight
Everybody have fun tonight
Everybody Wang Chung tonight
Everybody have fun tonight
Everybody have fun

Okay, so maybe it’s not a classic, but it was fun to sing especially for high school sophomores. One of my friends at the time couldn’t just sing along, though. Keith sat there thinking out loud, “What does it mean to Wang Chung? How do you do it? Is it a good idea for everybody to Wang Chung at the same time? If they do, what will happen to society? Wouldn’t it be more responsible to say, ‘Every third person Wang Chung tonight’?”

I never learned to Wang Chung and I’ve never met anyone who has. We needn’t petition Wang Chung to amend the song for fear of societal collapse.

Keith’s ponderings, when applied to WWJD, do require a response. If we’re going to aspire to do what Jesus would do and encourage everyone we know to do that same, we’d better ask, “What does it mean to do what Jesus would do? How do you do it? Is it a good idea for everybody to do what Jesus would do?”

For most people I’ve met, doing what Jesus would do requires reading through the Gospel accounts to form an algorithm of sorts and then overlaying it onto our lives. We read that Jesus spent time socially with sinners, so we go to share the gospel in the entertainment districts. He gave up his earthly possessions, so we sell what we have and give to the poor, or at least we think we should. He cared for marginalized people, so we volunteer at a soup kitchen. These are the kinds of things that Christ did which we admire, and aspire to reproduce.

This approach has some fatal flaws. For one, we tend to selectively purvey vignettes from the Gospels to construct our template. Most “radicals”¹ ignore Christ’s tendency to push people away to find a time of repose. In Mark 7:24 we’re told that he went to a pagan city and cloistered himself in a house, posting his disciples outside his door to keep visitors at bay. Many people imagine Jesus as always gentle. That image comes more from pastoral paintings of him than from the actual Gospel accounts. Recently on a Facebook group, I was accused of being un-Christ-like for dismantling Mormon doctrine. I directed my accuser to Matthew 23. Almost every Christian I’ve met would distance themselves from red-faced street preachers shouting at the “whoremongers” to repent, but that style of ministry much more closely resembles Jesus’ own than the one we’re comfortable with. I’m sure everyone would agree that Jesus was generous, but the Gospels present not a single vignette of Jesus giving anything to anyone. There was that one time that he paid the temple tax, but that four-drachma coin had never actually been in his possession.
Jesus got money from the mouth of a fish. Now, go and do what Jesus would do!

glass-1017451_1920 — Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay

Christ’s spiritual mastery shakes our attempts at imitating him. Jeff Walling, the well known Church of Christ preacher, once related a story about a time that he came into his kitchen to get a glass of chocolate milk only to walk in on his son holding a glass containing the last chocolate milk in the house. Bro. Walling hinted around that he wanted some of the milk. As the willfully ignorant son put the glass to his lips, the preacher blurted out, “Now Billy, what would Jesus do?”

Billy responded, “Jesus would make more,” and he downed the entire glass.

Peter preached to Cornelius’ household that Jesus, “went around doing good,” but those good works consisted of miraculous deliverance and healing empowered by the Spirit of God. When we contemplate doing good because it’s what Jesus would do, we usually mean serving in some way or giving money to the needy. Very few Christians in America would answer the question, “What would Jesus do?” with “heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out demons!”² Don’t get me wrong, I believe that Christ’s disciples can and will do these things in his name, but they are not the first things we consider when seeking to emulate his life. If performing these works is what it means to do what Jesus would do, then very few people will be found to have met the standard on the last day.

Besides our inability to rise to the miraculous example of Christ, there’s another more mundane problem with aspiring to do what Jesus would do.

We just can’t know for certain what Jesus would do in every situation by reading about what he did do. We can’t know for certain what anyone would do in every situation. Human personalities defy predictions. Variations in mood, recent history, and immediate environment affect choices and attitudes. In a way, we’re a bundle of reactions. As fully human, Jesus was affected by these factors as well. He had tendencies to be sure, but he was more than that. In a way, our attempts to formulate a behavioral decision-tree based on the accounts of his life dehumanize him to the point of making him inaccessible.

Even if we could come up with a list of things that we could say with absolute certainty Jesus always would do, adhering to that list wouldn’t be possible or practical for most believers. Jesus of Nazareth was the only person to live that specific life. Much of what he would do cannot be generalized to everyone. We might say that Jesus would always welcome and bless children, but Jesus never had children of his own. Applying the “always welcome and bless” value to parenting will no doubt produce a generation of self-indulgent brats.

jesus-christ-2516515_1920 — Image by ariyandhamma from Pixabay

It’s a pretty safe bet that Jesus would preach everywhere without regard for personal consequences, but it’s probably not best for a married father of four with a mortgage to stand up on his desk and call on his workgroup to repent and believe the gospel.

Jesus left his home and traveled throughout towns and villages. Does that mean a mother of small children should do the same? If so, should her husband? How about both sets of that couple’s parents and their aunts, uncles, cousins and so on? If so, who’s going to take care of the babies?

Forget about the implications of everybody Wang Chunging (or is it Wanging Chung?) for one night; an entire society of people living the life of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels is simply untenable.

As much as we’d like to think that everyone ought to just quit their jobs and do life together, not even the early church could make that way of life work for very long. If anyone was ever qualified to do what Jesus would do it was his twelve chosen disciples. They’d lived with him for over three years and experienced a rich taste of kingdom living. They had abandoned their homes and occupations for total immersion in Christ’s teachings, example, and community. After three thousand people joined their ranks on the day of Pentecost, those people were incorporated into fulltime kingdom living as Acts 2:42-44 describes:

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common.

Christians often read that passage with a mix of longing and guilt. We see the experience of those first believers as the golden age of the church. We compare that description to our earthbound existence and long for the church to go back to that expression of the kingdom. There can be no doubt, we think, that those Christians were doing what Jesus did, or at least what the disciples did when they were physically following Jesus.

At this point, it’s probably important to make the distinction between what Jesus did and what he would do. I’ve been saying that we shouldn’t do what Jesus would do, but I don’t mean that we shouldn’t imitate Christ. I’m saying that the attempt to produce a template from the Gospels and live that way isn’t something Jesus – the real, living, dynamic person – would do.

The early disciples continued doing what they did when they were with Jesus, but with the addition of thousands more, that way of living became unsustainable. In the very next verse of Acts 2, Luke relays, “They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.”

This example of radical generosity also places an expiration date on the golden age.
By the beginning of chapter 4, the church has experienced further growth with the number just of the men reaching five thousand. At the end of chapter 4, Luke lets us know that this growth wasn’t just numerical:

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need. (Acts 4:32-35)

Luke understood that the coming of the kingdom of God would be accompanied by the abolition of need as wealthy citizens learned to share with the materially poor. We’re meant to interpret the selling of land and houses as tangible expressions of grace – and they are. But, as any financial advisor will tell you, paying bills by liquidating property won’t last forever. Without income, the system will eventually go bankrupt. By Acts 8, God mercifully allowed the First Church of Jerusalem to disband and disburse before scarcity turned the members against each other.

person-2078947_1920 — Image by Hang Nelson from Pixabay

Everyone can’t do what Jesus did because during the years of his earthly ministry he was a financial liability. In Luke 8:1-3 we’re told that Jesus and his retinue soaked up the resources of a cadre of women who traveled with them. No doubt, Jesus’ supporters received back far greater treasures in terms of spiritual blessings, but those don’t feed hungry bellies. At some point, someone’s gonna have to not do what Jesus did so they and others can eat.

Just like Jesus, those who have been gifted and called to spend full time ministering the word of God have a right to support from those to whom they minister, but only a very small percentage of all believers is called to the full-time ministry of the word. Most believers will pursue God’s calling on their lives by maintaining honest secular occupations.

God means to express the beauty of his kingdom through the productive conduct of his subjects. High unemployment in a nation suggests a failure on the part of the government. The citizens of God’s kingdom exhibit his wisdom and righteousness when they go to work.

Christ commanded his followers to love one another as he loved us. Yes, we’re to imitate Christ but not by mimicking the behaviors we see in the Gospels. We can imitate Jesus because we’ve experienced his love at his cross. When we believe that sacrifice was for us and that God vindicated Christ’s trust, we imbibe his love and his faith. Resurrection faith and cruciform love are the DNA of God’s Son. When we express those traits in an incalculable variety of situations, we imitate Christ.

In my life and yours, imitating Christ will often require that we not do what Jesus did. Love requires that we give our resources to those in need. We must work so we can have those resources in the first place. To encourage obedience to the gospel of God’s loving kingdom, Paul chose to serve bi-vocationally. Here’s what he had to say about it:

For we know, brothers and sisters loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and deep conviction. You know how we lived among you for your sake. You became imitators of us and of the Lord, for you welcomed the message in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit. (1 Thessalonians 1:4-6 NIV)

Surely you remember, brothers and sisters, our toil and hardship; we worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of God to you. (1 Thessalonians 2:9)

Now about your love for one another we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. And in fact, you do love all of God’s family throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more, and to make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody. (1 Thessalonians 4:9-12

Paul imitated Christ by not doing what Jesus did, and he encouraged others to do the same.

Footnotes:

The word “Radical” has appeared recently in titles of books devoted to encouraging Christians to mimic the life of Jesus in the Gospels. Two that come to mind are Shane Claiborne’s, Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, and David Platt’s, Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream.
Matthew 10:5-8

What Would Jesus Evade? DDWJWD Part 2

July 23, 2019July 23, 2019Nathan Wilkerson

If anyone ever lived out the “What Would Jesus Do” ethic, Justin did. He moved into an abandoned train depot in the bar district of the next town over and took in homeless people. One night I think he baptized nineteen people in the fountain of the big Baptist church a couple of blocks over. His work with the down and out even made the local newspaper. We all wanted to be like Justin. It seemed that out of everyone anyone we knew, this guy was actually living like Christ.

Justin did what we all thought Jesus would do, but that didn’t mean he had been transformed into the image of Christ. He hadn’t. He could preach on the street one night and then get into a fistfight in a frat house the next night. One day I’d find him sitting serenely among his acolytes; the next I’d get a call from him demanding that I bail him out of jail.

For some reason, Justin was just bad at life. He couldn’t keep down a job. He didn’t know how to navigate his marriage. He had no clue about taking responsibility for his actions. For Justin, itinerancy, singleness, and “martyrdom” offered an easy alternative to tackling his massive growth areas. He could evade life without admitting that he’d failed.

One time, after his wife’s family forced him out of their home, he came to live in our basement. I still remember him staying out to all hours drinking and then complaining that our kids walked around too loudly above his head as he slept until 2PM.

When we went on a short-term mission trip, we left Justin to watch the house. We specifically asked him to make sure the sump pump came on should a heavy rain come through. When we returned, we found our basement flooded and Justin nowhere in sight. He’d been invited last minute to do some outreach to the Rainbow People and decided to just leave the water to sit and the drywall to mold. Eventually, we discovered that he’d raided our five-year-old daughter’s piggy bank for spending money on the trip. When we confronted him over these things, he was unapologetic. Instead, he rebuked us for being too concerned about earthly things!

For Justin, the reproduction of some external details of Christ’s life made him a true Christian regardless of what else he did or did not do. He could wallow in the filth of his own sinfulness while judging every other professing Christian as impostors and Pharisees. Justin called nominal Christians, “Turds with frosting.” Ironically, that epithet could have been applied to him as well. The frosting was just a different flavor.

Justin’s example teaches that external conformity to WWJD accomplishes no more than external conformity to any standard of behavior. Holding up the lifestyle of Jesus of Nazareth as depicted in the Gospels for emulation doesn’t make people like Jesus, it just produces hypocrites of a different type. Whether our confidence before God comes from regular tithing or from selling everything and giving it to the poor, we’re legalists. The only difference is in the law we adhere to.

Not only did attempting to DWJWD fail to develop Christlike character in Justin, I believe that it exacerbated deficiencies which already plagued him. When people struggle to navigate their lives, it can be tempting to escape to someone else’s. That seems to be what drives young people to adopt strange personas such as with the goth or emo phenomena. Finding our authentic selves can be so difficult and risky that we can be easily enticed to abdicate the process and hide behind prefabricated templates. Then, in the dark recesses of our psyche, our souls wither unchallenged and untended. Escape into the Christ persona becomes that much more dangerous since the one who does so will find much internal and external reinforcement of their behavior.

In my own history, I made several attempts at adopting prefabricated personas to compensate for insecurity. I remember in fifth grade, I went through a greaser phase. I figured that if I wanted to be cool, then I couldn’t find a better exemplar than Fonzie. It didn’t work out. As a teenager, I went punk for a brief time. Well, my hair did anyway. Not coincidentally, this phase immediately preceded my conversion to serious Christianity followed by hardcore legalism. When I read about Jesus in the New Testament, I envisioned being him. I wanted to wear a robe and sandals sitting under a tree and laying down wisdom on the masses.

I don’t mean to say that there was nothing sincere in my conversion. I’m just pointing out that insecurity gets often confused for humility and obsessiveness for zeal. I have had times of real healing and insight that I believe have come from the presence of God. At other times, I’ve become inauthentic, judgmental, and self-important while channeling the Nazarene.

When we hold up Jesus’ life depicted in the Gospels as a standard for others to follow, we leave them with a focus on externals that substitutes merit for mercy. Should a person at some point ever perfectly mimic Christ’s life in every detail, they won’t be one whit closer to the actual character of Christ.

As Paul wrote,

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. (1 Corinthians 13:2-3 ESV)

According to Paul, dramatic, self-sacrificial gestures count for precisely zero when borne out of wrong motives.

The attempt to jump into Christ’s sandals often arises from an attempt to escape the slew of the day to day. Love, on the other hand, slogs through the mundane mess over the long haul.

As Paul continues:

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Corinthians 13:4-6 ESV)

WWJD fosters evasion. Love requires engagement – engagement that carries a cross.
Jesus bore a cross every day of his life. It consisted of hardships specific to his own circumstances and calling. His cross isn’t transferable. That’s why he tells those who aspire to follow him, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23) Living by faith will result in an array of struggles, shame, loss, and pain, but each person will only experience their own configuration which is their cross. Ironically, asking WWJD evades my cross in favor of a wire and foam facsimile of his.

jesus-3476251_1920 — Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

If we would become like Christ, we must find our cross and take it up.

Let me illustrate with some examples of personal crosses available in our contemporary world:

A man finds himself stuck halfway up the corporate ladder in a soul-crushing job serving an unreasonable boss. He could walk away from it to serve an overseas mission effort, but without divine orders, that would just be to shirk his cross. Each day at his job, the man experiences powerlessness, pointlessness, and degradation. Taking up his cross will require him to enter those experiences gladly, trusting in God who raises the dead.
A woman who has spent her life raising children must face an empty nest. She might busy herself in a women’s ministry, but that could simply be an attempt to continue mothering vicariously. It could be that her cross would be to use her newfound discretionary time on intercessory prayer. Through solitude, she can find authentic, Christ-like love for others free from codependence.
An academically gifted high school graduate might combat the fear of leaving his church’s youth group by seeking to become a youth minister. Taking up his cross might require him to enter the hostile environment of a secular university and train to use his gifts among hostile colleagues in a secular profession.
A young woman discovers that she’s made a big mistake at work. She might quit, taking the discovery as confirmation of her long-held suspicion that this job wasn’t God’s calling for her anyway. Taking up her cross might require her to come forward to tell the unvarnished truth about the mistake, entrusting her future, either at the job or in unemployment, to God.

The cross as a Christian ethic applies to every individual regardless of the situation, if we learn to apply it. We must imitate Christ as we find him at the cross and not as we find him in the Gospels. The attempt to do that latter often just turns into escapism which keeps misshapen souls from the therapeutic effects of walking under the weight of tailor-made beams.

“What Would Jesus Do” appeals to people who don’t want to face the hardships and drudgery already present in their lives. Christ’s requirement that we take up our cross sends us under that drudgery with a redemptive purpose. The unredeemed of the world, constantly work to minimize the pain and maximize the pleasure of their existence. They resort to unhealthy coping mechanisms to offset misery and monotony. When I take up my cross, I cheerfully accept the full weight of life’s burden relying in faith on the resurrection to restore all that’s been lost. Rather than seeking to evade the unpleasant elements in my day, I relish them for the sake of learning to be more like Jesus.

“WWJD” is evasion.

The cross is full-frontal engagement.

Christ took up his cross and invites us to take up ours to follow him, so we can learn how to master real life. Jesus never evaded. At his cross, he looked life’s one fearful certainty directly in the face and owned that dude.

DDWJWD (Don’t Do What Jesus Would Do) – Series Intro

July 22, 2019July 22, 2019Nathan Wilkerson

Some kid at Bible camp ran up behind my son, Jadon, and slapped him on the back of the neck. I guess he wanted to take on the biggest guy in the cabin.

Jadon whirled around, narrowed his eyes and growled. The kid, immediately regretting his decision, resorted to playing the Jesus card, “Now, now, man, take it easy…what would Jesus do?”

“Well, I don’t know.” Jadon snarled, cocking his head to the side. “Maybe he’d make a whip out of cords and drive people out of the temple with it.”

“What?!” the kid exclaimed as he scrambled to stay out of reach. Apparently, nobody told him that you’d better come well-armed if you want to use the Bible to manipulate a preacher’s kid.

This story illustrates (don’t worry Jadon didn’t hurt the kid) the flaws in a method commonly used to guide Christian decisions – the old WWJD.

After reading Charles Sheldon’s book, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do, a youth minister named Janie Tinklenberg ordered 300 friendship bracelets embossed with “WWJD?” for the students in her ministry to wear as a reminder to consider the question when making decisions.¹ What started as an object lesson became a movement, then a marketing goldmine, and then a farce. I guess nobody ever stopped to consider or care that maybe Jesus wouldn’t turn his own example into a flood of kitsch made by political prisoners in China.

The movement has since waned, but the question remains. Maybe that’s because as we fumble around for a consistent Christian ethic, doing what Jesus would do seems like an idea we can take ahold of even if the reality remains perpetually out of reach. The life of Jesus of Nazareth as depicted in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John holds a powerful allure. The personality that emerges from those pages stands in relief from the sullied characters we meet day by day at our work, in our homes and in our mirrors. Jesus can’t be critiqued. He’s at least “just alright” with everyone.

Christ’s allure drew me the first time I read the book of Matthew. He synergized passion and serenity, acceptance and truth. His piety shamed the most observant Pharisee even while his promiscuous social activities chafed their sensibilities. He called himself the wisest and greatest person to ever live. Then, he invited every burdened soul to come to him because he’s humble and lowly. Somehow, he pulled off the contradiction so well that I hardly noticed it. There he was – acceptance, meaning, purpose, wisdom. He pushed my dreams and drives aside and took up sole ownership of my consciousness. I could only envision myself living as a penniless itinerant, teaching in the open air about the kingdom of God. I thought surely every churchgoer would want to live his way.

But they didn’t.

Six months’ immersion into church culture morphed my frocked and sandaled avatar into a besuited pulpiteer. The vision didn’t look much like the original, but it seemed more doable. Once I cleared the Bible college hurdle, I could go straight to the pennilessness and teaching ministry of Christ’s life.

I didn’t clear Bible college (more on this later), so I returned to reclaim my hopes of engaging in open-air ministry while attending the state university near my home town. That’s where I met Jamie, the girl who would become my wife. I shared some of my vision of following Christ with her on our first date. She seemed to buy in, but communication doesn’t flow as well as it should across a medium of nerves and hormones. For me, poverty meant homelessness. For her, it meant driving a used car and living in a humble dwelling. We continued to date and in the blissful blindness of young love we never did sync up our expectations.

We soon married and then spent the next ten years grappling with each other over the configuration of our life together. The dissimilarity between our lifestyle and that of Jesus afflicted my conscience. I always wanted to give stuff away or sell it. I wanted to move to deeply impoverished neighborhoods serve and to save the residents. Jamie was not inclined to take such drastic measures.

Because my compulsions felt to me like the will of God, I would demonize her. “How could she even be a Christian when she refuses to sell everything we have and live among the poor?” I would ask myself.

Since big change takes more energy than remaining with the status quo, I would normally just stuff my angst and move on to the next mundane task.

At this point, you might criticize my lack of resolve but before you do, you need to know that my conviction was mitigated by another conflict roiling within me. Marriage thrust my heart into the center of an ugly custody battle between the New Testament Gospels and the Epistles. I wanted to radically follow Jesus as he appeared in the Gospels, but I was also beholden to the imperatives in the Epistles. The Gospels didn’t talk about marriage except to prohibit divorce and to require that disciples be ready to leave their wives and children to follow Christ. The Epistles prescribed commitment, love, consideration, and financial support for one’s spouse. Since I couldn’t simultaneously obey the Bible and do what Jesus would do, I would vacillate between each set of instructions depending on circumstances and mood.

During one of my Epistles phases, I agreed with Jamie that we should purchase a larger house. We bought an older craftsman house almost three times the size of our previous place. Aside from the discovery of a profuse water leak in the basement, we were delighted with it.

Then, the Gospels began to rebuke my un-Jesus-like decision. I brooded in my guilt and alienation from God. I hated that house and everything that came with it. According to the ream of papers I had signed at closing, the house would hold the title to my freedom for the next thirty years. I raged over every minute wasted on repairs and improvements. A dark shadow lowered across my brow.

Jamie couldn’t help but notice, and she pried from me the reason for my change in demeanor. By his time, she had endured ten years of this struggle, so she took a different tack. She suggested that we let God reveal whether he wanted us to sell the house. We would put the house up for sale until a date which I would set. If it didn’t sell by that time, we would accept that God did not want us to sell the house after all.

Ha! Now I had her. Obviously, God wanted us to sell the house. This would be my chance to finally pull Jamie across the gulf between us. I prayed for guidance over the configuration of the sale. I wanted to ensure that I didn’t derail God’s plan on its way out of the station. After a time of praying and waiting I felt led to list with an agent for a specific dollar figure. In accordance with Jamie’s proposal, I prayed for guidance over the divine deadline. I felt a distinct prompting that it should sell by March 20th which would be ninety days from the day we listed it.

I passed eighty-nine days in the certainty that God would sell the house. My reasoning was solid. Jesus didn’t have a place to lay his head. He told me to follow him. Surely, homeownership stood between me and doing what Jesus would do. What would Jesus do? Sell the house, that’s what!

As time ran down, my confidence galvanized. Surely, this was just a test of faith and I didn’t plan to fail it. On March 20th, that test intensified into a full-fledged trial. The confidence, hardened over the previous three months, began to crack under the weight of elapsing hours. At the stroke of midnight, my model of Christianity shattered.

My body rose from my bed at four the next morning, an empty shell plodding off to the job I loathed. It required that I spend four-plus early morning hours every day working like a galley slave unloading trailers. Drained of all morale, I pled with God for a reprieve. About twice a year, I got to drive a truck over to the next state to pick up next day delivery packages which the normal distribution network had missed. I asked God to allow me to make that run as a mercy for a broken soul.

I walked under the conveyor belt to get my work assignment for the day. John, my supervisor, shouted out, “Nate, you’re in the unload.”

“Figures.” I thought to myself as I lumbered toward purgatory.

Before I reached the expanded metal platform, my supervisor shouted again, “Nate, forget about the unload. I need you on the returns trailer.”

“Well, at least that’s better.” I thought, half praying.

I’d handled ten packages or so when John changed my assignment yet again, “Brown up,² Nate, you’re going to Tulsa.”

God, it seemed had answered my prayer very specifically, but I wasn’t consoled. I was still angry.

After I’d driven the brown metal box for an hour to the west, I passed a geodesic dome that housed a “health and wealth” church. The marquee out front advertised a guest speaker from Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Disgusted, I confronted God, “You let crap like this go on in your name, but when I try to actually live a sacrificial life, you reject me!” I don’t remember what else I said. I only remember melting into tears and snot, swerving in and out of my lane, as I shouted my pain through the windshield. Somehow, I made it safely to the airport, but I wouldn’t have entirely minded if I hadn’t. I woodenly loaded thirty or so boxes and headed east, eyes glassy and burning from tears.

The rays of first light had just begun to grey the landscape when another church sign stood out in relief. As I neared it, these words came into focus:

“NOT ABANDONED”

I’m sure whoever put those words on the sign had their own meaning in mind, but for me, it seemed like a message straight from God. Though I was no less angry, I did feel less sad.

As I processed this experience, the image of Lucy Van Pelt goading Charlie Brown into kicking a football and then yanking it away kept flashing into my mind. I felt like God had strung me along throughout this process so that I would really run at selling the house and giving everything away. This was finally my big moment to prove myself and I wasn’t about to miss it. Then, “Aaaugh!” His chicanery left me embarrassed and aching, lying flat on my back. But at least I was at rest and looking up.

I’ve come to understand that for zealots like me, only the dramatic failure of rigid expectations can shatter the Christ complex and make way for real spiritual progress. Apparently, (assuming God exists and responds to prayer) he didn’t want me to do what I thought Jesus would do.

Footnotes:

“What Would Jesus Do? The Rise of a Slogan.” BBC News Magazine. December 8th, 2011. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16068178
In UPS lingo, “Brown up” meant to put on the brown uniform.