R3: radical, revolutionary, different

Watching your 401(k) disappear is never a good feeling.  All that work, all that saving, all that energy feel like they are wasted.  I’ve only been putting money into savings for a few years.  Some people have spent 50 years making responsible decisions, saving money, doing the “right thing” only to see it all destroyed in a few months time.  People are angry.  But should we be?

The same is true about the country.  I love the United States.  I think it’s the greatest country in the history of the world.  I think we’ve done more to protect, support, help, and provide for the world than any country in history.  So it pains me to see the talk of an end to US supremacy.  But should it?

There’s no question these events are awful.  Tragic even.  But none of this really matters to a Christian.  Why?  Because we don’t live for more things.  Sure it’s great if we have them.  But that’s not the point. There’s a reason Jesus said that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven.  Not because being rich is bad, but because Jesus knew that wealth consumes us.

We live for the Kingdom and anything that advances the Kingdom.  If the first Christians lived with joy and happiness as they were being tortured to death, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to act in love as our 401(k)’s fall apart.  If Jews lived under the oppression of foreign rulers, but still managed to love God, is it impossible for us to live in a time when the US isn’t the number one country and still be obedient to God?

Life is hard now.  It’s not easy or comfortable.  But from a Kingdom perspective, is that bad?

Getting stuff and having things isn’t bad. 

Being consumed with getting stuff and having things is. 

Right now people are tapped out.  They are spent financially, emotionally, and for many, relationally.  How can it be otherwise?  We are constantly told that we need more to fill our lives.  That no matter what we have it isn’t enough, or it’s not the right size.  So we go out and try to lose more weight, or buy more gadgets, or have more dating relationships.  But it’s never enough.  We need more. 

Frankly that’s a tough place to be because the more we embrace a consumerist mindset, the more we believe we have a right to wealth, prosperity, and happiness.  And now that we might not be able to get our next fix, we’re terrified. 

As much as I wish it were true, God never promised that just because we beleive in him, everything will be fine.  In fact, just the opposite may be true.  It seems that the closer you get to God, the more likely “bad” things are going to happen.  Of course that’s only if you define “bad” as not getting gadgets, toys, and pay raises.  Losing our toys may be annoying, losing our jobs may be difficult, losing our lives may be unfortunate.  But losing our souls?  Devastating.   

The thing is, God can still use each of us.  God still wants to be in a relationship with us.  No matter how far we’ve fallen into debt.  No matter how bad the country’s (or world’s) economy looks, there’s always something we can be doing for God.  There is always a way to advance the Kingdom.

And where the Kingdom advances, there is hope. 

Orthodoxy.

What a strange title for a book.

I mean, it doesn’t sound very revolutionary.  It doesn’t sound very radical.  I’ll admit, it does sound different.  But probably not in a good way.  So what made GK Chesterton call his “autobiography” of faith “Orthodoxy“?

The answer is the same as why R3 focuses on God’s revolutionary, radical, and different nature.  In short, orthodoxy is the most radical thing we can experience - if it’s from God.  Or as Chesterton says, “the orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable.” (Orthodoxy, p. 93)

I bet you didn’t expect that when you saw the word “orthodoxy”!  That’s okay.  Neither did I.

But that’s how God works.  He does the unexpected.  Sometimes he works in ways that at first don’t seem oblivious.  And yet when we look back we realize everything made perfect sense.  That’s where I found myself when reading Orthodoxy.  There were just certain things that didn’t make sense about Christianity.

On the one hand the Bible says that we should love our neighbors and be willing to give up our lives for them.  But at the same time we’re told that the world is broken and defective.  That it’s not how it should be.  So why, as Christians, should we work so hard to fix something which can never be fixed?  Wouldn’t it be better to just pick one philosophy and hold to it?

Life would be so much easier if we could just love people without working to fix problems.  And it would be easier still if we could just give up on the world and say, “I don’t care.”  But that’s not where God asks us to be.

So how do you find a balance?

The world’s answer is that we need to find a balance between the two.  That the solution is somewhere in the middle.  That we should love some people, but not everyone.  And that while the world isn’t perfect, it’s not really that bad.

Let’s face it, that doesn’t sound like too bad of an idea.  Isn’t compromise a good thing?

But compromise is not the answer Christianity offers.  It says the tension itself is what’s important.  That when you try to create balance what you’re really doing is losing something important.     

That’s why Christianity can say radical things like “hate the sin, but love the sinner.”  On the surface it sounds crazy.  How can you separate the two?  Shouldn’t we have some sins that are “bad, but acceptable” (e.g., stealing food because you’re starving), and other sins that are “beyond redemption” (e.g., murder, rape)?

“Christianity came in here as before.  It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another.  It divided the crime from the criminal.” (Orthodoxy, p. 87)

Orthodoxy, when it’s about God, is startlingly revolutionary. 

“The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven.  The crime we must not forgive at all…We must be more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before.”  (Orthodoxy, p. 87)  It’s out of this answer that we find how we’re supposed to live our lives.  And it’s out of this answer I began to understand how Christians can say things that seem so obviously contradictory.

Now when I look back at my questions, I see they aren’t contradictory at all.  I see that we really can hate the sin, but love the sinner because I don’t need to somehow balance them.  Instead they are two things that are fundamentally separate.  And it’s in that “separateness” that we find our answers. 

This is an idea that applies across Christianity and applies to courage, sacrifice, life.  It’s no wonder that an orthodox church doesn’t take a tame course. 

Sometimes we need to know “not only that the earth is round, but [know] exactly where it is flat.” (Orthodoxy, p. 90)

It’s easy to become overwhelmed with bad news.  Every day it seems like another problem crops up, or society takes another step away from following God.  And perhaps that’s true.  Perhaps today really is “worse” than yesterday.  But let me tell you a secret…

None of that matters.

God doesn’t call us to judge non-Christians.  He calls us to love them, and share our faith with him.  In a way, the more problems the world has, the more opportunities we have to share His message.  Now clearly a broken world is not a thing to rejoice over!  But we don’t have time to feel sorry for ourselves.  We have a mission to accomplish.

That’s what I love about organizations like LifeChurch.tv.  They saw a situation and instead of defining it as a “problem” they recognized a need.  This “need” was a lot of people, who probably don’t know God, in a game called Second Life.  So they bought some virtual land and built a virtual church. 

But they aren’t alone, Catholic missionaries are getting into the act.  And others are asking important questions. 

Now as much as I love video games, I’ve never played Second Life.  So I don’t know if these virtual churches are still open.  But that’s not really the point. 

What matters is that people recognized a need, and they acted.  Instead of treating the game as a problem, they saw it as an opportunity to share a life-changing message.

I wonder what things in my life I treat as a problem, instead of an opportunity to grow?

Some movies stick with you.  They make you think long after you’ve seen the ending.  That’s how it is with Cloverfield. It seems strange that a monster movie would have such a strong impact on me.  But I can’t stop thinking about it. As with any good movie it makes you think about your own life.

Before I go any further I want to warn people that there may be some spoilers here.  So if you don’t want to know anything about this movie, then you might want to skip this post.

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Okay, now we can move on.  After watching Cloverfield I was left thinking about a few things.

1.  The movie involved sacrifice.  Not in the traditional Hollywood way.  The characters you saw in the movie weren’t action heroes, they were ordinary people.  But they chose to stick together and try and save a friend - even thought it may cost them their lives (and even though most of them didn’t want to go).  There was something intense about that.

When I watch Arnold Schwarzenegger or Chuck Norris I know they are going to survive.  After all they’re the Terminator or Walker Texas Ranger.  But an ordinary person?  That has “monster food” written all over it.

As I watched them roam around an abandoned, monster infested New York, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “would I have been willing to do that for someone?”  I would like to think so, but to be honest, I have no idea.  And I think if I’m really honest…I probably wouldn’t.

How hard must it be to know you’re going to die, but still act?

That’s one of the things that strikes me about Jesus.  He knew exactly what he was going to do.  He knew that by following his path he would die.  And he knew better than any of us, exactly what that would mean.  And yet he still did it.  He still went through with it, suffering one of most painful ways to die.

Cloverfield reminds me that I don’t think about that sacrifice enough.  I don’t consider what that cost God, especially when I’m busy being selfish and needy.

2. We don’t have much time to act.  Cloverfield opens up with a group of friends and family celebrating.  It’s just a bunch of people who are living out an ordinary day.  But their lives were destroyed and they never saw it coming.  I think this is the most shocking aspect of the whole movie.  We simply don’t know when tragedy will strike, and by the time we realize it, it’s probably too late.

No one believed a 500 foot tall monster would go on a rampage in NYC.  Just like we never believe we’ll die in a car accident, or of a heart attack.  Characters in that movie said and did things because they thought they had time to make it right later.  But they didn’t.  And that regret ate at them.

There’s something insidious about that thought process.  Because sometimes death really is a long way off, and we never act because we procrastinate.  We assume that because we have all the time in the world we’ll use that time to make things right.  But so often we don’t.

Cloverfield manages to catch both sides of that thought.  And it haunts me.

God calls us to take action, and almost always it’s to act now.  Very rarely does God ever ask someone to act in the distant future; when God asks us to do something it’s to fill an immediate need.

I don’t want to leave this world knowing that I never got around to doing something God asked of me.  Just like I don’t want to live my life for word counts and blogs, I also don’t want to live a life that is empty of accomplishments for the Kingdom.  I want to be able to look back and say, “Yes.  I seized those divine moments.”

Tomorrow is that day that may never come.  So I choose to embrace today.

I just finished an amazing book - Chasing Daylight by Erwin McManus.  Over the course of a weekend it has radically shaped the way I view my life.  And my relationship with God.  McManus has a gift of rephrasing the world so you see it in a new way.  But more on that Friday.

Chasing Daylight discusses the times God presents us with unique moments where we are given the opportunity to act on God’s behalf.  McManus calls this “seizing your divine moments.”  As God so often works, I was given a divine moment on the plane back from LA yesterday.  I felt God asking me to give my copy of Chasing Daylight to the woman sitting next to me.  I remember thinking, “yeah right, I just spent 10 hours reading this book and taking notes.”  But that excuse didn’t last very long.  So I switched to the ever popular, “but I have plans for this book.”

That’s when it really hit me, God was presenting me with a choice.  I was placed into an opportunity no one else could fill.  I doubt this woman would ever sit next to someone reading Chasing Daylight, and certainly not on her current cross-country journey.  If she was going to get this book, it was going to have to be through me. No one else could do my job for me.

I also knew that I could never look at Chasing Daylight again if I was too afraid to give a book to a stranger.  How could I claim I wanted to seize my divine moments if I couldn’t do this simple task?  So I sucked it up, and decided to give her the book.  I tried to start a conversation about the book.  But she wouldn’t bite.  This wasn’t going to be easy.  Of course I knew all of this.  Somehow I knew all along that I was going to have to turn to her and say, “would you like this book?”

Time was running out.  I could hear God saying “go! act!”  But I was still afraid.  Afraid of giving up my book because I wanted it, and afraid of looking like an idiot in front of this woman.  As the wheels of the plane touched down I turned to her and said, “I finished this book, would you like it?”

She looked at the book, and then at me.  When our eyes met I could tell she was thinking “why do I always sit next to the weird ones?”  After a brief explanation of why I was giving her my book, she accepted and said something like, “I could really learn to hear what God wants of me.”

I have no idea if she’ll ever read the book.  Maybe she thinks I’m some idiot or a Bible-thumper.  I don’t know.  But I do know that sharing God’s love is always the right thing.  Even if it’s awkward and embarrassing.  But there’s more than that - I had to intentionally choose to act.  I was hoping God would make things easy for me, but deep down I knew I was going to have to step out boldly and just “do it.”  This was my chance to do something radical. 

Just as we have to choose to believe in God, we also have to choose to act on those beliefs.  It’s not always easy.  In fact I’d say the vast majority of times it’s difficult.  It comes with risk and often sacrifice (even if that sacrifice is just a book).  We need to be intentional in not only choosing God, but in following him.

I’ve been fighting a nasty cold the last few days (hence the irregular updates for R3).  As I’ve been shuffling along with my achy muscles, taking medicine, and generally being miserable, I began to think about the cross.

That may sound like a strange train of thought, but bear with me for a moment.  Sometimes I have a tendency to gloss over what Jesus did for me.  “Yeah, yeah” I want to say, “I know he died for my sins.”  But, man, that’s such an understatement!  He didn’t just die - he died in a way that is possibly the most vicious method man has invented to kill someone.  God chose to die a painful, humiliating (crucification was for criminals), and slow death.  Just so we could be saved.

That’s all pretty shocking to think about, and it makes me a little uncomfortable.  Especially because I get pretty grumpy when I’m sick.  I tend to snap, and be rude towards people who are just trying to help me.  I tell myself that I’m not a ‘people person’ when I’m sick.  As if that somehow justifies my behavior.

So each time I’ve reached for my medicine I’ve been reminded that God suffered for me (and you).  And he did it without Tylenol.  The bottom line is my suffering is nothing compared to what he went through.  I don’t have much excuse for being mean while I’m sick if I want to follow the example God set.  If God loved us so much that he sacrificed his own son, then I can at least smile at people when I’m at the store picking up more Kleenex.

I believe God can use any circumstance to teach us something.  For me I now have a better appreciation for what God did for me.  So now, instead of being sick, I find I’m also grateful.  Grateful for God’s salvation, and grateful for modern chemistry!