WWJD, Faith Recovery Podcast

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.

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.