Taking One (Knee) for the Team

Race relations in the U.S.A. all too often play out like this:

African-American people: "We have a problem in this country with race, and it is important to us."
White Americans: "Be quiet!"
African American people: "Lives are impacted both in the past and now."
White Americans: "Get over it!"

I wish I could say this were an exaggeration. Sadly, I have seen these responses quite literally on the social media pages I manage and elsewhere.

Right now, this controversy is playing out intensely over athletes taking a knee during the national anthem in protest over racism and police brutality. Before any of us gives our opinions on the flag, the national anthem, racism or the first amendment, there is something more fundamental that we are missing:

Our brothers and sisters in Christ are raising their voices. They say there is a problem. The rest of us may not see the problem, but we can hear their voices raised. Maybe we ought to walk in their shoes for a while until we can also see the issue as they see it?

The fundamental issue is: How do we treat our fellow citizens when they cry out in pain?

Whenever people respond with denial, trying to shut others down from speaking their voices or dismissing their concerns without any reasonable discussion, that just about guarantees that the original concerns are probably a little too close to the truth for comfort. Or at the very least, they have hit some nerve somewhere.

That is simply not an appropriate way to respond when someone comes to us in distress. People who attempt to shut others down are very often—if not always—trying to hide something. I suspect that white America knows its guilt, but it is still largely trying to run from it. White America has never been very good when it comes to mature accountability for its actions around race. Tragically, all this does is allow the injustices to continue to be perpetrated, and it passes the buck for later generations to deal with. Problems do not go away this way.

You may not agree with my assessment. But can you please demonstrate that you are listening deeply to the concerns of protesters before reaching that conclusion?

Some do not like the method of protest where athletes take a knee during the national anthem. However, the debate over the method has obfuscated the original reasons for the protests. The original issues have little to do with the flag, and many were doing it long before President Trump weighed in. It is about racism and police brutality.

If you don't like the way folks are protesting, could it be because you didn't listen to all the other ways folks tried to tell you before? We, as a nation, did not hear their cries, so prophets had to find new ways of getting the message across. This is not hard to understand. What is difficult, as history reminds us, is finding the willingness to hear.

If you don't want athletes to kneel during the national anthem, are you willing to come to the table to hear their concerns in some other way? Or do you want them—and their protest—to simply go away? I have heard many detractors call for these protests to end. I have not heard a single detractor invite the protesters to the table to listen with an open heart to their concerns.

It seems before we can resolve a conflict as serious as racism, we have to first learn how to talk to each other. This means active listening and taking each other's concerns seriously. That has to come before any other consideration.

Treasure Map: Christians United in the Search

Confusing passages in Scripture are an unlikely conduit for Christian unity.

For 2,000+ years, Christians have studied the words of Jesus, the Apostles, Ancient Israelite prophets, psalmists and lawmakers in the Bible. We have been locked in theological debate over the meaning of life and how to achieve the union with God we so desire.

For as many times as preachers tell us "the Bible clearly states," the truth of the matter is that it is not very clear about much. For every line that says one thing, we can find others that seem to say something else. I'm not suggesting that the Bible doesn't point us into a singular direction, because I think it does. I'm just saying that it can be hard to figure that out when reading the text at face value.

Some estimate there are as many as 40,000 denominations of Christianity, many of which claim that their precise doctrines and Biblical interpretations are the "right" ones.

If you approach the Bible as if your very eternal life depends on getting the precise theological formula right, it can be an enormously frustrating text.

Treasure Map

We often treat it as if the Bible like a mysterious treasure map. It is written in ancient, coded language that is hard to decipher. Our modern day preachers may tell us it's straightforward, but if that is so, why do Christians spend so much time agonizing over lines of Scripture trying to figure out precisely what it means? Why didn't God just hand us a bullet point list?

If the Bible is God's life-or-death, desperate message-in-a-bottle to us, why in the world is God making it so difficult? There are literally dozens and dozens of Scriptural references to things like salvation, justification and sanctification, for example. And what those words meant 2,000 years ago may be very different from what they mean today. There is no possible way to reconcile all of them into one coherent theology. Even if it were possible, the task it would take to do that would be beyond what any one person could do.

Why in the world would God play with us this way?

It seems like an extremely cruel joke. God gives us riddles and clues hidden in this 2,000+ year old collection of puzzles, which need to be translated into various formats and languages, and it's up to us to figure out the riddle before the clock runs out and it's eternal curtains on us.

Even the most twisted episode of The Twilight Zone was not nearly so twisted.

What Is Our Task?

I do believe that it is our job to pray unceasingly, study fervently and devote ourselves to contemplation of the texts. I do believe God keeps us on our toes. We are called to grow deeper in our knowledge, sensitivity and wisdom. I do think there are consequences of where our journey takes us and what conclusions we reach.

But I also believe there is a whole lot more grace and mercy in the system that we have been led to believe. The Bible may be less of a book of answers than a book of really good questions—and in those questions lie the answers, but perhaps not in the way we typically think. The questions we ask of the Bible—and perhaps more importantly the questions it asks of us—are perhaps more important than the answers.  In other words, it would seem that God wants us to struggle, debate and search unceasingly for the answers. The search itself has value. That is the only thing that makes sense based on how the Bible is put together.

What can we deduce from all this?

#1:  We need to be part of a community of believers who help us in this journey of understanding.

#2:  We need to take the conclusions of that faith community seriously, and that includes doctrines and dogmas.

#3:  But maybe—just maybe—we can dispel some of our anxiety about the conclusions we reach.

After all, the very idea that Scripture is a riddle to figure out with eternal consequences is an assumption that we bring to it. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that this is how we must approach it.

Christians United in the Search

Our common faith in Jesus and our mutual pursuit of the Way of Jesus should be enough to make us all traveling companions one with the other.  Christians are all trying to figure it out, live it out and grow into it. Even though we have come to different conclusions and have different ideas as to what it all means (conclusions that we are continually adapting), we all share in this common journey.  And maybe that's enough of a foundation for the unity of all believers.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; 

but then face to face: 

now I know in part; 

but then shall I know 

even as also I am known. 

1 Corinthians 13:12

How You Become Like Your Enemies

You have to be stubborn as a mule to budge this stubborn mule.

See the first post in this series:

Love Your Enemies (i.e. Love Yourself)

In a previous post, I talked about how loving your enemies is the key to finding your own wholeness—and ultimately loving yourself. The people we consider our "enemies" often—if not always—represent a projection of what we dislike in ourselves. Therefore, loving them affords us the opportunity to love and accept the broken pieces of ourselves.

On an energetic level, you can't oppose someone without being like them. It's actually impossible! 

Look at this example: Imagine if someone is on one side side of a wall attempting to push it down. You get on the other side of the wall and resist them. In order to do this, you have to push back on the wall in exactly the same way that they are pushing. The two of you may be pushing in opposite directions, but you are pushing in exactly the same way. This is a model of what happens to us whenever we oppose someone and call them our "enemy."

I noticed this when I—literally—had a turf war with a former neighbor. This man had little regard for anyone else's boundaries. He would police his own yard strictly but would overstep into our yard, claiming pieces of it as his own. In order to stand up for ourselves, I found myself quickly spiraling downward until I ended up guarding our yard as strictly as he was guarding his. I got sucked in and sank to his level. 

I grew up in a rural area where there was plenty of land. We had only a vague idea of where our yard ended and our neighbors' yards began. I used to roll my eyes at "city folk" who squandered their time squabbling over inches of yard in dispute. Yet, there I was doing everything short of stretching out a measuring tape to check if we still had all we were entitled to have.

It is healthy to set boundaries, but something went wrong here. The relationship became oppositional—I wasn't just respecting my boundary, I was opposing him. That was a subtle but extremely significant difference. I labeled him my "enemy," and in doing so, I started acting like him. One of us could have overpowered and outsmarted the other and technically "won," but the real story is that we both were in the same space. I lost simply by playing the game. I didn't just lose a conflict, what I lost was myself. I stepped away from my values and took on the values of my "enemy."

I wasted so much time and energy focusing on a small section in the back of our yard, a section that in normal circumstances would not have occupied much of my attention. Whether I became like my neighbor or whether my neighbor brought out a piece of myself that was lying fallow is a curious question to consider. The truth is probably both are in play whenever we go down the path of enemy-making.

So then how do we respond when people legitimately trespass against us? As stated before, it is healthy to set and maintain boundaries. It is not good to be a doormat for bullies. The radical self-sacrifice of the Gospel is not the same as having no self-respect or boundaries. But it is also risky to respond to fire with fire.

I think this is what Jesus was warning us about when he told us to turn the other cheek. A punch in the cheek seems to demand a punch on the cheek in return. However, whether you "win" or not by punching the other person, the other side has controlled you and gotten you to play their game. Play this out long term, and you realize there is no winning as life simply deteriorates into an endless game of king of the hill where no one stays on top for long. You refuse to play their game when you turn the other cheek. You set and live by your own values. Your center is solid and unmovable by others. It doesn't mean you become a doormat. It just means that a peaceful person remains a peaceful person even if others around you are not. It is actually a position of amazing strength.

I think the key in the situation with my neighbor would have been to focus on my own values rather than focus on opposing him, keeping my attention at as high of a level of consciousness as I could imagine. Compassion and patience should have factored in heavily, too. Long term, I could see the opportunity here. Obviously, there was something about my neighbor that made it difficult for me to stay on the high road, fears or old triggers of some kind, and this interaction was a chance to become aware of that and work on it. 

If a situation absolutely demands that direct resistance is needed, try to spend as little time at that as possible. Spend most of your energy creating a new paradigm rather than fighting on someone else's turf (no pun intended).

I'm reminded of the Pink Floyd song, "Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert" off their brilliant anti-war album, The Final Cut. The title is a sharp critique of maddeningly endless geopolitical wars over—quite literally—completely arbitrary lines in the desert sand.

Why 'Works' Are Necessary

A recent Pew Research Center poll has reopened the old debate about faith vs works--the line of scrimmage of the Protestant Reformation. Whereas Martin Luther and the heirs of the Reformation have always held that it is through faith alone that salvation occurs, many Protestants and Catholics today have a blended view of the role faith and works--at least, according to this poll ("works" is defined differently by different denominations, but could refer to any effort on the part of humankind, whether it is doing good deeds or following any religious prescription that guarantees that God will act a certain way after we do it).

The controversy has famously raged for the last five centuries, but its roots go much deeper. St. Augustine and Pelagius went several rounds over very similar issues in the fifth century A.D. The question is peppered throughout Scripture, as well, sometimes in more subtle ways. It is one of those theological questions that never seems to go away.

The issue is riddled with problems of semantics. Catholics and Protestants often understand terms like "justification" and "righteousness" differently and therefore answer questions about them differently. There is also a difference between attaining salvation through works and simply seeing works as evidence of a healthy, living faith. Furthermore, the article above saying that "a historically Catholic position" is that "both good deeds and faith in God are needed to get into heaven" is a misleading statement. The Catholic position is much more nuanced than that. From the standpoint of church apologetics, it is both problematic that the poll asked misleading questions, and it's even more problematic how people answered those misleading questions.

Nevertheless, all this has been hashed out by theologians much more trained that me, and it's hard to  find a place in the "faith vs works" debate that hasn't already been explored vigorously. But I think I've found one such place. There is one point that is extremely significant, but it seems to get lost in the shuffle almost all the time in this debate. In fact, I would argue that the subconscious purpose of this debate is actually to make sure this issue gets lost in the shuffle. In all the debates about whether works are essential for salvation we forget one very crucial thing:

Works are essential for discipleship. Whether or not those works are essential for salvation is a very different question. 

Maybe this is obvious to some, but I don't think it is said nearly enough. 

In light of this, does it really matter how we understand the reasoning behind our actions? Maybe one person feeds the hungry believing it is a means to earn salvation while another feeds the hungry in gratitude for the free gift of salvation. So what? 

I have always believed that our theology matters. How we understand God, who we are and our relationship to God and the universe are all extremely significant. But we must not forget that there is an orthopraxy at work in our lives. We grow in wisdom by doing. After all, its much more biblically accurate to say that Christians follow the way of Jesus rather than subscribe to the conclusions of Jesus. The implication is that the Christian life is a journey to be undertaken rather than a test to get all the rights answers on.

I'm reminded of the famous poem by Dr. Kent M. Keith (with additions attributed to Mother Theresa), "Do It Anyway." It contains this line:  "If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway." [Both versions are included in the link.]

I find great wisdom in this. In light of the faith vs works debate, I interpret this line as saying it ultimately may not matter if our good deeds have the purest motivations or not. Perhaps we do good deeds because we think we are earning a reward or because we may mistakenly believe we can control God's award of salvation. However, doing good deeds is still a good thing to do. We ought to do good deeds anyway, even if our motives and our theological foundations are less than pure. In fact, they almost certainly will be less than pure, because 100% purity of heart is either impossible--or else extremely rare--in our world of limited, fallible human beings. We will grow in our wisdom while doing those deeds. We shouldn't wait to do good works until we have all the theology figured out, because we may need the praxis of doing them to properly form our theology in the first place!

In this broken world filled with human limitations, if we need 100% pureness before we do something, we will end up never doing anything.  

When I see people locked in debate on this issue, I just see people who have allowed themselves to be distracted. I understand why it's so easy to distract ourselves. Discipleship involves real change. It can be scary, especially when we are confronted with the self-sacrificial way of the cross preached by Jesus through both his words and deeds. It's so much easier to wax theological for hours on end and find that the time for putting those thoughts into action has simply slipped away while the debate raged on. You see, that was the whole point of the debate in the first place!  

Don't get me wrong, I understand why people think salvation is a big deal and very much worthy of their attention. If you think that your eternal life depends on getting a question right, I can understand the anxiety. But I also think debating theological minutiae is a clever way of distracting ourselves from the tasks of Christian discipleship. Jesus tells us to love one another, feed the hungry, turn the other cheek, forgive 70 x 7 times, love our enemies and so forth. He tells us over and over again to let go of anxiety over the future and simply follow his way--all shall be well. Yet, so many churches lock horns and obsess over doctrinal nuances.

In conclusion, all Christians should be dedicated to living out the commands of Jesus and following in his way. In practice, all Christians should look pretty much alike, even if they are motivated by very different theologies. A "faith alone" Christian should be working side by side with a "faith plus works" Christian. Whether they understand themselves as earning salvation by their good works or simply living out the requirements of a justified person growing in righteousness should not interfere with doing the good works required of discipleship. The tasks should be the same. They should be working just as hard doing the same things. This is what we seem to forget in this debate.

Addendum

While not the focus of this piece, it is worth pointing out that this issue has been largely settled by many of the key players of the Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church (through the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity) and the Lutheran World Federation signed a joint statement on justification in 1999. Other denominations have signed on since then, including the World Methodist Council and the World Communion of Reformed Churches. The Anglican Church is also expected to sign. To these signers, the faith vs works debate is over because a common understanding of this issue has been accepted. It is also worth pointing out that each of those denominations has detractors who don't support statement, as well.