Tough questions

Dave Black echoes some of the very feelings I have and along the way he asks some tough questions, questions that I think we all know are out there but are too afraid/apathetic to answer.

The fellowship we enjoyed went far beyond the gastronomic. As we talked my mind wandered to a famous book published in 1967 by Hans Hillerbrand called The Fellowship of Discontent. Each of us feels a holy discontent with the status quo in our churches. (I hope it is a holy discontent.) Like the radical reformers of the sixteenth century and earlier, we desire to cut to the root of the church. We feel a holy dissatisfaction with the "affluenza" (Kevin's term) that characterizes Western Christendom. We desire with all our hearts the establishment of a church that Luther once described as "Christians in earnest who profess the gospel with hand and mouth." (This is my only nod to Luther on Reformation Sunday!) We see the church today mired with its own success and apathy. We long for a community of believers that is characterized by simplicity, democracy of organization, theological purity, humility of spirit, strong fraternal feelings -- in sum, a church composed of those who, in the words of Waldo (the founder of the Waldensian church in 12th century France), "follow nakedly a naked Christ." We want to be believers who live in such a way that proves that the church's task is to give itself in love and service to the world. I doubt that any of us -- I know I don't -- think that we live up to our aspirations. Sometimes I feel like the perfect hypocrite. Here I am, preaching about sacrifice, and but have I sold everything to follow Jesus? No. Am I just another Zwingli, a Greek scholar who had become (in the eyes of the Anabaptists) a mere "halfway man," afraid to face the consequences of his own teaching? The Anabaptists made the Great Commission the responsibility of every Christian. We Baptists have outsourced missions to professionals. The early Quakers went into all the world with a carelessness about geography. We ask ourselves, "But is it safe?" The Methodist leader Thomas Coke died in 1814 on his way to Ceylon. James, a 24-year old Burji, willingly exposed himself to grave danger when he translated for me while I preached to the Gujis, not knowing that a few weeks later it would cost him his life. Am I really seeking in my own life what the Hutterites called Gelassenheit -- a German word that connotes a complete yielding to God's will by the radical elimination of self-will? It is a high and holy privilege to serve Jesus. It is our assignment to reveal Him before a watching world. And you and I are added to the list of participants. Will we carry our weight?

Boy does that hit me like a ton of bricks. I am quick to ask those questions of others but less eager to ask them of myself and I fear that I often am more hypocrite than prophet.

The big question we all are faced with is: am I willing to sacrifice everything for the cause of Christ? Comfort, affluence, safety, life? I know what the answer should be but I don’t think the answer is yes for very many people and especially not for people who live in the affluent West.

This is not a question of justification by works or of seeking after our own righteousness. It is a question of what sort of faith we have. Is our faith a comfortable, Sunday morning, God-talk kind of faith that is an addendum to our lives as Americans or is our faith the ancient faith of the disciples, the faith of the Anabaptists and others who suffered persecution with joy and gladness. When I look at myself, and to be blunt almost all of the other Christians I know, I don’t see a life that is reflective of the life we have been called to. Christianity is part of who we are, it impacts what we do and the choices we make but it is not the sum total of who we are. It becomes an identifier: I am a Christian, I am an America, I am a Republican. In my case and in many others it is by far the most important distinction about me but it is still one of the distinctives among others.

Perhaps I am simply being morose today, a peevishness brought on by the shorter days, impatience with some impending big decision and the cesspool of politics that I keep diving into. I just can’t shake this feeling that I am like so many others, sleepwalking through our Christianity. I taught an overview of Jeremiah yesterday and when I think about how he lived for God in spite of the cost of being hated and reviled, being beaten and put in the stocks, seeing virtually no fruit for his efforts except faithfulness, I feel pretty unfaithful. I wonder what I would do if God called me to abandon everything and then I realize He has called me to do just that, to see what the world values as worthless. This goes way beyond the various, vague external pieties that we use to try to convince ourselves that we are true blue disciples.

I don’t want to be a religious American, I need to be a Christian who happens to currently live in America.