The Apologetic of Hope

The most often quoted Bible verse concerning apologetics is 1 Peter 3:15: “But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.” Christians typically focus in on the word “defense” as the key word in the verse. The original Greek word is in fact where we derived our term “apologetics” from in the first place so one would be justified in picking it out as the most important word in the verse, or so we think. But there is a more important word here.

When read in context this verse is part of an instruction to Christians in the midst of persecution. Peter tells them to make sure they never do anything to deserve the persecution but instead to show themselves to be hoping in their God. The key word in this verse is not “defense” but “hope”.

Christian, has a non-believer ever asked you what gives you so much certain expectation in God amid your trials? Apologetics begins with hope in God, not with discussions with people. That should be a result of our hope. Apologetics is not really about questions so much as questioners – real people with real lives who need someone in whom they can hope. This goes far beyond discussions and information to souls.

The early church had the greatest boon to apologetics: persecution. The world around the early church punished them severely and Peter knew that as Christ had gone to His death obedient to the Father so the Christians should live amid death hoping in their savior. It was that kind of outlandish hope that would cause the persecutors to wonder at the Christians’ reasons for holding so dearly to their Christ.

The thing that really makes apologetics difficult in America is not the hostility to Christians but the comfort of Christians. There are certainly individuals and groups in the U.S. that are hostile to Christians but by and large few terribly violent things happen to Christians here. You might like to think you are persecuted because your family gatherings are awkward or because strangers are not excited that you want to talk to them about why they need Jesus before you even asked their name. You are not persecuted. American Christians have learned to fight for their rights and to seek to always be the dominant force in their country because of course, they seem to reason, God could never will anything for them except to run the country and be left alone. The mentality that Christians are persecuted in America but should be dominant ought to be reversed. We are not truly persecuted but evangelism would benefit if we were. The church is growing in places like Iran and China by incredible measures while in the U.S. it is largely becoming flabby and sleepy at best, conceited and flamboyant at worst. Peter would be the first to say that we should not do anything to instigate persecution, however we should allow our persecution to instigate hope and allow hope to invite the world’s questions.

Precious in the Sight of the Lord

I couldn’t help but notice that the last several memorials at our church have come on days when the news ran stories of the death of someone famous. While the workers in newsrooms scramble to gather biographical information and get it on a teleprompter small families gather together and tell stories of their loved ones recently lost. These precious people were never famous, never even terribly successful in the eyes of the world. You will not hear their lives outlined on the news, no dedicated fans will leave flowers at the front gate of their mansions. They die without any pomp and there are no traffic snarls because of their funerals. But these seemingly quiet deaths sing loudly in the ears of the Lord.

The day Steve Jobs died a lady from our church also died and the reaction of the world to the death of Jobs could never compare to the love this lady’s family showed at her memorial. Comparatively few people knew that she died and yet her death, not Jobs’, was the more momentous.

When a celebrity dies the usual news report is full of their life achievements. It is because of these achievements that we are expected to find their death to be of great moment. But a life full of achievements is not what makes one’s death important. The elderly lady who died on the same day as Steve Jobs had perhaps not had as industrious a life as Jobs and yet her death had greater value in the sight of Lord. This morning the news carried a story of the death of a member of the Beegees while this afternoon our church had a memorial for an infant boy. A baby has had no opportunity to live a life full of accomplishments. But it is not such a life that finds favor with the Lord.

Psalm 116:15 says, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.” When one of His own dies the Lord does not look upon fame or fortune, success or failure. He looks upon His own and lovingly welcomes them into His kingdom and His rest. Their death is so precious to Him because they are so precious to Him and the Shepherd knows His own. And therein we find our life.

The Little Ego That Could

“Don’t you want to do something great for God?” “Since God did so much for me I want to do something great for Him.” American evangelicals have often heard and perhaps said things such as these. Whether spurred on by ambition or by guilt they are a part of a narrative that we can no longer see for all the trees.

Stories are wonderful indicators of a cultural mindset. You will find very different values and perspectives if you look at stories from around the world and throughout history. Whether these are myths, novels, urban legends, or even historical accounts they will reflect the culture in which they were created. In America we find particularly endearing the stories of the underdog, the pathetic sports team, the failed entrepreneur, the little engine that could. We like to see hope and willpower overcome obstacles. We want the team to come back and win, the entrepreneur to strike it rich, the little engine that could make it up the hill. This sort of narrative feeds off the American culture and in turn drives that same culture.

The question for the American Christian is whether one is more American or more Christian. Has the Biblical narrative or the American narrative had more influence on the way one thinks? We find it easy to think that God has some grand course of action in plan for us. If we could only discover what his plan was we would certainly embark on a whirlwind of ministry, shaking the world for Christ. If your culture taught you that you were such a unique individual that the work of the Holy Spirit could not effectively go on without you or that your true calling is to rise to greatness please hear a different narrative.

Some in the Bible were called to do things of great moment. However the Bible does not tell the stories of great men but of a great God who chose and worked through them. The message of the Bible is not a call to rise to the challenge or to do what the world doesn’t think you capable of: the Bible calls you to die and be small.

Jesus told his hearers to follow Him by taking up their cross. He effectively said, “I go to be killed. Who will come with me?” Christianity is death.

Jesus’ disciples argued over which of them would be the greatest in the kingdom of God. He showed them that His was a kingdom the likes of which they had never conceived. He taught them that those who were the greatest would serve rather than be served. Jesus called John the Baptist the greatest of men and said that John was the threshold of prophetic history and yet John said of Jesus, “He must increase but I must decrease.”

When we think much of ourselves we will think much of our motives. We may tell ourselves that we are taking on some particular Christian endeavor out of our sheer love for people. But when in our pride we think ourselves magnanimous and then see magnanimity as reflective of how wonderful we are and our pride then blinds us from seeing our prideful motives we have a problem. Ask yourself if you are doing something for your glory or for God’s.

As Americans we are driven and goal-oriented. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this as long as the drive is from God and the goal from His word. But the goals we often set for ourselves are those things that we assume the Bible must say and yet the Bible continually surprises us.

The Bible does indeed call us to something great in that it is beyond our human nature. It calls us to humility, to quiet service one for another. It calls us to be at peace with and in submission to one another. When it calls for a driven pursuit it has in mind the pursuit of love, peace, righteousness, and spiritual gifts (II Timothy 2:22b; 1 Corinthians 14:1; Romans 14:19). When it speaks of desiring another person it does not intend that we absorb them into our pride but that we desire to give ourselves to them for their good (1 Thessalonians 2:8). The Christian community is indeed in need of growth and change. It certainly needs goals and a drive. But the goal should be to be a church of quiet servants who love one another. God does have dynamic things in store for the believer but nothing will ever be more dynamic than a community that has the true heart of Christ.

If your Christian goal is to be bigger, faster, louder, busier, and more awe-inspiring you are missing a narrative of Christlikeness. If you think of yourself as The Little Christian That Could you may not be the little Christian that should.

Disciple

“Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me,” he said.

I asked if he would make sure not to lead me anywhere too dangerous and if he wouldn’t walk too quickly. I asked if he would wait until I’d thought about it and if I could at the very least build up my courage a bit before we left. He remained silent. I asked where we were going but he only turned around and started down the road.

As I watched him go I became enamored with the way he walked. His gait was sure and peaceful. As he got smaller and further away I began to point him out to people around in the expectation that they would find him as enthralling as I did. I pointed and squinted  as I could just make him out down in the distance. A small crowd approached me. ”What did he say to you before he left?” they asked me.

“He said to follow him,” I replied with great relish. “And isn’t that just it? That is the answer I’ve been waiting for: someone worth following. When he said it I looked behind me to see if maybe he was talking to someone else. I was so surprised that he actually meant me. It was really quite a privilege and such a powerful thing to watch him go. I wish I’d had a camera.”

“What should we do then?” they asked.

“Well one of us should paint a picture; maybe one of us can make a movie about it. Does anyone think they can preach a sermon or write a book about this?”

A little boy in the crowd who had been inching away from us began to walk slowly down the road in the direction that he had gone. But when his mother noticed she ran after him and grabbed him, demanding to know where he thought he was going.

“I’m going with him,” the boy said.

“No, you can’t,” said his mother. “You don’t know what might be down that road. And did you ever think about what that would do to me? You’re a selfish boy, you know.”

The boy’s father approached them as the rest of us looked on.

“It’s only a phase, dear,” he said to his wife. “He’ll get over it soon enough. He won’t make it a mile before he gets frightened and comes running back. Let him go play.”

At the first easing of his mother’s grip the boy ran down the road. “Wait!” he called to the man. “I’m coming with you!” And then turning back to his parents with great tears collapsing over his face he pleaded with them to come along as well. They declined and he turned and ran down the road.

“I thought he would come back,” said the mother, sounding rather shocked. ”He will come back when he gets homesick,” replied the boy’s father.

But I suspect that little boy had always been homesick until that day.

At Once

If you have ever anxiously desired something, whether to gain something you lacked or to be free of something you wish you did not have, you know what it is to want something at once. In fact, I really cannot think of too many scenarios in which someone would not want something at once. Typically when we say that we want something in five years it is because we know it is not available to us right now. Perhaps forestalling having children or pets might be an exception but few others come to my mind. When we want something we usually want it at once.

Part of the nature of sin is its duality. Sin contains conflicting desires. Psychology professor and author Daniel Yankelovitch illustrates this well in his 1981 book New Rules: searching for self-fulfillment in a world turned upside-down. He writes: “If you feel it is imperative to fill all your needs, and if these needs are contradictory or in conflict with those of others, or are simply unfillable, then frustration inevitably follows. To Abby and to Mark self-fulfillment means having a career and marriage and children and sexual freedom and autonomy and being liberal and having money and choosing non-conformity and insisting on social justice and enjoying city life and country living and simplicity and graciousness and reading and good friends and on and on. The individual is not truly fulfilled by becoming ever more autonomous. Indeed, to move too far in this direction is to risk psychosis, the ultimate form of autonomy. The injunction that to find one’s self, one must lose one’s self, contains the truth any seeker of fulfillment needs to grasp.” While there is quite a lot to unpack in this statement please notice the problem and solution Yankelovitch presents. He says that we pursue conflicting goals and find nothing wrong or even contradictory in doing so. We want our cake and to eat it too. We want two different things at once. The solution, he says, is to lose oneself in order to find oneself.

Having is never greater than being. Often in wanting to have something we are really wanting to be something. If I want to have a large house and expensive car I may really want to be rich, powerful, important. Greater than obtaining what we want at once is to be at once. What you are is more than what you have. We are people of conflicting desires; the God of the Bible is a God of paradoxical nature. He is at once merciful and wrathful, comforting and frightful, loud and silent, penetrating and forgiving. Do you want to be human? Be in conflict within yourself. Do you want to be like God? Jump from your sunken ship and discover the one who brings together in Himself all things at once. Let go of having and take hold of being. His real blessing and promise is in giving of Himself to your self, not in giving into the maw of your battling desires all shrieking to be fulfilled.

Jesus of Nazareth once stood before his disciples and announced that he would suffer and then lose his life and rise again and offered them the same if they would follow him. Peter tried to stop him from saying such things but Jesus taught them a darker solution when he said: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?”

How to Hide Jesus

Today I’d like to give over a blog post to a poem called “How to Hide Jesus” by Steve Turner.

 

There are people after Jesus.
They have seen the signs.
Quick, let’s hide Him.
Let’s think; carpenter,
fishermen’s friend,
disturber of religious comfort.
Let’s award Him a degree in theology,
a purple cassock
and a position of respect.
They’ll never think of looking here.
Let’s think;
His dialect may betray Him,
His tongue is of the masses.
Let’s teach Him Latin
and seventeenth century English,
they’ll never think of listening in.
Let’s think;
humble,
Man of Sorrows,
nowhere to lay His head.
We’ll build a house for Him,
somewhere away from the poor.
We’ll fill it with brass and silence.
It’s sure to throw them off.

There are people after Jesus.
Quick, let’s hide Him.

The Pharisees are Right About You

By the first century the strict interpretation of the Pharisees and Sadducees replaced the office of the Levitical priesthood which God designed centuries before. Today Christian readers of the Bible are conditioned to instantly recognize the two sects as the villains of the story, not unlike the early moviegoers who knew to boo and hiss when the mustachioed man with a cape appeared onscreen. It is difficult to bend our perspective to that of the time and understand that these men knew more about the scriptures than anyone and followed it almost to the letter. It is difficult for us to see them as heroes and yet that is in a sense what they were to the people. What is even harder is to admit that they were right about you and I.

In Matthew 5:20 Jesus made this debilitating pronouncement: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” The Pharisees were right about the absolute need for absolute holiness.

At one point in the gospel of Luke Jesus was a guest in the home of Simon the Pharisee. A woman that Luke describes as “a woman of the city, a sinner” heard where Jesus was and somehow made her way into the house. As she began to anoint the feet of Jesus with an incredibly precious ointment and wipe his feet with her tears and hair and kisses Simon said to himself that if Jesus were truly a prophet then he would know what kind of woman this was. Simon did not even need to mention the further implication that if Jesus knew her he would never permit her to do this. Jesus said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.”

At this point those who are used to this sort of gospel story may think that Simon does not know the woman but they certainly do. She’s secretly a good woman, which Jesus can see but no one else in the room can. We are ready for him to reveal her true self to Simon and put him in his place.

But Simon was right about the woman. In fact, he had her nature pegged. The person he was wrong about was Jesus.

Jesus does know the sinfulness of the woman weeping at his feet. He knows you and he knows me. The real me, the one that I don’t even always know. But by knowing me more than I realize he loves me more than I realize. Simon did not know himself as he should have. That is why Jesus turns his remark back on him in order to show him his heart of pride. While the Pharisees were right about our need for holiness before God they were wrong about the means of holiness. Jesus said to the woman in this account that it was her faith that saved her and she could now go in peace.

You will be mistaken about others and even about yourself until you are no longer mistaken about Jesus.

One Thing We Can All Agree On

You most likely saw social media publicity of the Kony 2012 video campaign. One of the main posters to promote the campaign has an overlapping republican elephant and a democratic donkey with an olive branch between them and the phrase “ONE THING WE CAN ALL AGREE ON” at the bottom.

The matter of Joseph Kony and the child soldiers and other atrocities in Africa and around the world are not really a particularly political issue. The poster works so well precisely because the elephant and donkey do not really belong on it. We feel that we can breath so much more easily when there is finally something on which we can all agree. Certainly you have had the experience of talking with someone whose political, religious, or philosophical views are starkly different from your own. When the topic of conversation becomes too divisive we are quick to use the pressure valve of the weather or sports or anything innocuous. But we might also try to have a conversation about things of great meaning by finding a common moral ground talking about vague things such as love or functional society or something without any real definition. We might dissolve a politically nuanced matter with a statement like, “I just think we should help the poor,” and thus erase all real substance of a conversation by thinking we have arrived safely at the heart of the matter.

The Kony 2012 poster taps into this mentality. It upholds an issue and takes it as a matter of course that we can all agree that Kony is doing wrong and must be stopped. The young people today are hungry to feel that they have fought for social justice and pushed the 21st century world toward the inevitable progress we have promised ourselves. Western youth yearn for harmony and peace in the social discourse and feel that while there are so many divisive issues it is so refreshing to settle on one which everyone would find agreeable. We feel no qualms about posting things about the Kony video; in fact we feel excellent.

A team interviewed young adults for the book Lost in Transition: the dark side of emerging adulthood (Oxford, 2011) and asked them questions about their moral reasoning. They found that 40% said that they primarily decide on what to do morally based on what will make them happy and one in ten would do what would help them get ahead (p. 51).

In his book Terror in the Mind of God (University of California Press, 2000) Mark Juergensmeyer wrote of his interview with convicted terrorist Mahmud Abouhalima in the United States Penitentiary in Lompoc, California. Juergensmeyer said that Abouhalima “challenged our dedication to the virtue of tolerance when we have been unwilling to tolerate religious enthusiasts such as himself” (p. 245). Mr. Abouhalima is exactly correct.

Joseph Kony and his ilk may not think that what they are doing is wrong at all. It might make them rather happy. It might be their best means of surviving and “getting ahead”. In fact those who would say that morality is based on such things or that it is all really just relative in the end have no basis to call what Kony is doing wrong, yet they are the same young adults who feel so reassured that nobody would disagree with stopping him. There really may not be something on which we can all agree, after all. To the moral relativist who says that the right thing to do is what you desire to do, Kony ought to hold a place of honor as one of the few men brave enough to actually take that idea and run with it.

The Christian community has an enormous opportunity with the young adults today. Somewhere in them they know something of what is right and they hunger to be a part of establishing justice for the oppressed. As Christians we can offer them someone in whom they find their place: one of submission to a law of love and of value imparted by the lover. We offer a fixed standard, a person to whom we can belong both in obedient service to the one who defines justice and in a fixed and committed relationship with the one who invented faithfulness. We can offer the one who makes people valuable and who values them alongside his own son. Let us look to meet the needs not only of the oppressed but also of the groaning hearts of those who seek to rescue them.

One Million Animals

As the world begins again to notice the need for just working conditions for workers we must all ask the key question: “Why?”

It has recently come to light that a subcontracting company producing products for Apple has been grossly overworking its factory laborers in China. In a speech at a year-end party Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou made a comment that startled many across the world. Hon Hai is the parent company of Foxconn, the company that is actually producing Apple products in Chinese factories. Gou made his remark at the Taipei zoo, a place that apparently reminded him of his own company. His statement was: “Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”

At first glance this comment struck many as terribly insensitive, overbearing, and a sign of the mentality that is required to subjugate a company’s workers. But this begs an important question: if we generally believe people to be animals why does someone calling them animals bother us? Although many believe in theory that humans are an animal species they still recoil when someone actually refers to them as animals.

We seem to understand that there is a difference between animals and man. What many don’t seem to understand is that what they claim to believe often does not match up with the rest of what they believe and is not really lived out in their actual lives (how many people really wonder why their dogs aren’t good conversationalists or if fish have discussions about what it is to be a fish or what the whales ever did to save us?).

Perhaps there is something of value in humans. Perhaps they truly are different from the animal world. Perhaps there is a reason that we should be concerned about the welfare of people. If there is a value to people there must be something good by which to measure value and from which it is imparted to people. May I humbly suggest a fixed, inherently valuable person is needed to impart value to humans and that the difference between humans and animals is evidence that they are made in a higher image.

The evolutionary system of thought has philosophical implications. It raises the issue of whether or not humans are morally superior, equal to, or inferior to other animals. Of course there are many who believe each of these. The first step for each of us is to decide where we stand because the implications of humans being just another mammal species and the implications of them being something more are of no small significance.  But if we truly are animals then for pity’s sake let poor Mr. Gou be… or fight him and refuse him mating rights in the herd but please make up your mind.

Begging His Pardon

Although my former college campus was open the public and the area was rather poor I never once saw anyone there begging. What was all too common was people asking for money for various organizations and causes. No one ever asked them to leave or seemed to feel that they shouldn’t be there, but I felt that it was a rather safe assumption that the reaction would have been quite different to a person begging in their own behalf. There were no signs posted but it seemed to be an unwritten cultural rule. But when someone would approach me asking for money for their organization it begged the question of what the difference was between the two situations. Why does it make us uncomfortable when someone comes up to us and asks us for money but we don’t feel the same way when someone asks on behalf of someone else?

I believe it is because when someone asks us to help a third party they are trying to identify with us. They are implying that they are economically equal with us and we find this less unnerving. For whatever reason, when we are with someone clearly below our economic level we feel uncomfortable, perhaps guilty or disconnected. Perhaps we are embarrassed on their behalf. But when it is an organization asking that element is not there, and yet there is essentially no difference between the two: someone is asking for our help.

No wonder it makes us uncomfortable to be faced with a God who stooped to our level. In Philippians 2:7 Paul writes that Jesus “made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” Jesus came down from the glories of the divine throne room to be born in a manger on earth and live a life like our own. This is so incredible as to be scandalous. But it goes further.

The fuse of Christ’s humility lit in Philippians continues in II Corinthians 5:21 where Paul writes: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Here in black and white we are told that Jesus Christ took on our sin, becoming sin on our behalf. Jesus became revolting, unholy, and accursed.

In Matthew 25:40 Jesus said that when anyone serves the least of his brothers he is serving Christ Himself. He puts Himself in the place of the lowly in His life, death, and kingdom to come. The beauty in Christ’s humility is that he came the first time as one at our level, a thing no charitable organization seeks to do, and when He welcomes the believers into His future kingdom He still puts Himself in the place of the destitute. How humble His love.