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We're beginning a series about the Psalms. I'll be working my way through the Psalter with Martin Luther as my companion. I hope you'll join us.Reproducing here Chuck Colson’s latest Breakpoint Commentary. You may access it online here.
Blessings in Tough Times
Rediscovering Community
March 30, 2009
For years I have prayed that God would do whatever it took to get our attention—to turn us from false idols and back to Him. If the current economic meltdown is an answer to prayer, God is certainly getting our attention.
Like everybody else, I find myself squirming. My personal retirement plan has taken a hit and our ministry, like so many others, has to cut its budget.
As bad as things are, I’ve also seen good things emerge. Christian friends tell me unsaved acquaintances are increasingly asking about their beliefs. Many Christians themselves are rethinking their priorities. Americans, maybe, are relearning important lessons: the need to lean on God, depend on one another, and to create a sense of community—the kind we forget about in our affluence, but which I remember from my childhood.
I grew up during the Great Depression. Few complained about hardships; we were too busy helping worse-off neighbors. And we’re seeing the same attitudes develop today. For instance, when a Texas woman recently lost her home to foreclosure, she cried as she watched it auctioned off. Observing her, another woman impulsively bid on the house, won, and then gave it back to its original owner—a total stranger.
Why did she do it? Her answer was, “People need to help each other, and that’s all there is to it.”
Other Americans—newly on tight budgets—are discovering that it’s much nicer to eat a home-cooked meal as a family than to grab a burger somewhere. Others are opening their homes to adult children who can no longer afford their own apartments—and enjoying family life once more.
Another surprising benefit of renewed community spirit is that history tells us crime rates will go down. An extensive study by Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the Kaiser Institute, found only one reliable predictor of crime rates in a community: whether it had, or lacked, a strong sense of community values and a willingness to impose those values on public space—what researchers called “community cohesion.” Crime was low in neighborhoods where people felt free to discipline neighborhood kids caught skipping school or scrawling graffiti on walls.
Sociologist James Q. Wilson found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, crime always drops in hard times. “The Depression pulled families together, and this cohesion inhibited crime,” he writes.
It also lessened divorce, as Mike Gerson noted in the Washington Post. Many Americans “adopted a set of moral and economic habits such as thrift, family commitment, savings and modest consumption that lasted through their lifetimes—and that have decayed in our own,” Gerson writes.
Finally, a 2007 study by professor David Beckworth shows evidence that the church grows in hard times.
While I did not wish for this economic collapse, we can at least be glad to see some lessening of our moral decay and signs of renewed spiritual interest.
As the recession plays out, Christians should be looking with confidence to God, living radically holy lives, truly loving God and our neighbors—and letting a fearful world watch us. That would be a powerful witness.
The next time you’re sitting in your office or at your desk in the library, consider these words from Thomas Merton: “Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our on life, our own identity, our own destiny.”
The wisdom of this quote is Merton’s connecting the working of God to our own work and effort. God is the primer mover, the chief shaper of our lives. But he works in concert with us. He uses Scripture, community, experience, and the disciplines to do His re-creative work in our lives.
This is the on-going work of conversion (sanctification) rather than the completed work of conversion (justification).
“The industrial economy…reduces the value of a thing to its market price….But when nothing is valued for what it is, everything is destined to be wasted.”
-Wendell Berry, “A Nation Rich in Natural Resources,” in Home Economics, 135.
“Then some of the scribes and Pharisees spoke up. ‘Master,’ they said, ‘we should like to see a sign from you.’ He replied, ‘It is an evil and unfaithful generation that asks for a sign! The only sign it will be given is the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah remained in the belly of the sea-monster for three days and three nights, so will the Son of man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.”
Matthew 12:38-40
Thursday, Fourth Week of Lent
We’re in the fourth week of Lent and getting nearer and nearer to the ultimate sign that validates the life and ministry of Jesus Christ: His victory of over sin and death in the resurrection. It’s ironic, don’t you think, that the compiler of the liturgy should choose this Gospel passage so near to culmination of 40 days of waiting.
Or is it?
Don’t we all fight the inner urge to make demands upon Christ? To make him perform? Advent and Christmas proclaim the miracle that God is made man. But in our frenetic pace, in our pragmatism, don’t we want to jump ahead to Easter Sunday? Let’s get to the point of it all: Jesus achieving something for us.
In the story above, some religious leaders wish to have Jesus’ claims validated. The span of some two thousand years and a lack of self-awareness can make it very easy to look down upon such men. What’s their problem? But a deeper look into our own hearts will show us just how like them we are.
A little over ten years ago, I traveled to my family home in southern England. I was some five or six years removed from living in the UK. I was having dinner with some families from the small independent church of which my family were members when we lived there.
The church probably had an average attendance of about 100. At the time I was a member of an 800 member suburban church outside of Las Vegas and, frankly, bewitched with the mega-church movement.
Talking over dinner, I remember describing my new church and basically saying something to the effect that, “if you do church right, it will grow.”I stated this as a universal rule.
Even as I said it, I was horrofied at my own arrogance. It was one of those moments in which you make a statement that is a verbal train wreck. [For the record, I was 18 or 19 at the time and newly sensing a call to ministry with the accompanying tendency of the immature to believe that I had all the answers. Lord, have mercy.]
We could unpack all of the presuppositions and assumptions behind my above statement. Give me a chance and I’d be happy to point out just how full of it I was back then!
What I want to point out, however, is that in making the statement I was really demanding of Christ a manifestation of His identity (proof of His divinity) in a specific way that accorded with my culture. It strikes me now that such a demand isn’t far removed from that of the scribes and Pharisees.
Jesus answers the scribes and Pharisees not by pointing to His imminent resurrection and glorious ascension. Instead He locates the validity of His self in the crucifixion: in His suffering for sinners. How paradoxical is this? That Jesus’ truthfulness should be found not in might and glory, but in weakness and oppression. That Jesus is just as much present in the small things as the big things.
Truth be told, we don’t have much room for this truth in our contemporary church. We like the victorious Jesus not the crucified Christ wracked with pain. Unfortunately for our theology, but fortunately for our souls, we cannot have the former without the latter.
God, help me to embrace your weakness and to find that in it you are strong to save even to the uttermost. Amen.
Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.” “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked. They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right hand and the other at your left hand in your glory.” “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” “We can,” they answered. Jesus said to them, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right hand or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.”
Mark 10.35-40
Tuesday, Forth Week of Lent
The purpose of the Christian life is to make us saints, people whose characters reflect the likeness of our Lord. To be sure, it is a big task and one that takes a lifetime. It is, to borrow Eugene Peterson’s phrase, “A long obedience in the same direction.” This is something that is incredibly difficult to embrace in an instant society. We will always be fighting the urge to scorn ourselves for not getting there faster, forgetting that transformation is sort of like erosion. It is difficult to see it taking place in the moment.
And one of God’s greatest tools in creating saints is that of suffering. This too is difficult for us to hear in a therapeutic society.
James and John come to Jesus with what seems like an audacious request: “let us sit next to you when you’re in glory.” Who wouldn’t want to be seated in close proximity to the radiant, risen, and ascended Lord Christ? Their question shows that they have learned much of who Jesus is and who He will be upon the completion of His sacrficial work. I find myself also wanting to be near to Jesus in His glory.
And yet, the path of coming to Christ has some bumps. Jesus responds to them: “If you want to be with me, you will need to experience the ‘cup’ and the ‘baptism’ that I am going to experience.” Here James and John show that they still haven’t quite got it all figured out. “We can handle it,” they answer.
It’s a hasty response, and one that is not very wise. Yet Jesus tells that they certainly will experience this cup and this baptism, even though they don’t know what he means. However, divine seating assignments aren’t going to be disclosed until the kingdom of God comes to its fullest expression in the life to come.
Jesus response suggest that this cup and baptism of suffering and death will become the norm for Christians. Certainly this proved to be uniquely true in the lives of the earliest followers of Christ. And yet, it is true for us as well.
As Bonnhoeffer puts it, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” [Paraphrase] It might not be the case that we will be put to death for our insistence that Jesus is Lord. However, saintliness requires the putting to death of ourselves that we may be made new in Christ.
We put to death our consciences when we demand of ourselves that our culture not shape our values, rather that they be shaped by the witness of Scripture and of the Church. We put our bodies to death when we affirm with the Scriptures and the Church that comfort is not the chief end of life. We put to death our fallen natures when we humbly rely upon Jesus to allow us to stand, perfectly loved, in the presence of the Father.
Death always hurts. But the promise of Scripture is that there is something we are dying toward. Through the cup and baptism of suffering we are being carried further along a continuum of holiness. And, in the end, it is supremely to our benefit to have traveled that long and winding path. As Gordon Smith has noted, “The only tragedy is to die a fool.” The fool is the man who says in his heart, “There is no God.” What is more, the fool is the man who lives the double life that affirms God’s existence, but acts as though that reality has no bearing on life.
God, grant us strength to drink this cup and experience the baptism that you experienced to the end that we may be more like you. Amen.
Prayer Appointed for the week:
Almighty God, you know that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves: Keep me both outwardly in my body and inwardly in my soul, that I may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
