Getting your theology from pop lyrics is usually a poor idea, but there are wonderful exceptions. Take Terry Taylor’s 1998 solo album, John Wayne. Known better for raucous numbers like “Hide the Beer, the Pastor’s Here” and “Darn Floor, Big Bite,” Taylor has also written many quiet and meditative songs over the years. Read more »
One of Jesus’ many well-known parables is the parable of the sower, which imagines a man with a bag of seed, casting the kernels this way and that. The seed, which represents the gospel, lands on different types of soil, which represent human hearts, human lives.
We often think of this parable as speaking primarily about evangelism. The sower is the evangelist, spreading the Word. But that’s only the most basic dimension. The story applies to the whole of a Christian life because we must bring forth the seed of the gospel in our hearts at all times and for all time.
With that in mind, consider Christ’s statement about seed that fell in brambles: “[T]hey are those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature” (Luke 8.14).
This is something we all must beware, not merely new Christians. As we go our way, are we entangled in “the cares and riches and pleasures of life”?
Are we full of anxiety and fears, worries and distractions? Is our treasure in material ease, pleasure, and comfort? Do we identify God’s blessing too closely with gain and his displeasure too closely with loss?
Some people lose everything and draw closer to God. Think of Christians who suffered persecution, great persecution. What of the faithful believers behind the Iron Curtain, for instance, those who lost everything but the honor of dying in witness to the gospel? The Word took real root, deep root, in their lives and blossomed to the glory of God.
When we face our petty cares or fondle our small desires, can we keep them in perspective? The bramble patches of our lives should shrink as the gospel grows in our hearts. Taking the imagery from the parable a bit further, we should pray and strive so that the gospel will choke out the cares and lusts and vain ambitions of this life. Then we can “bear fruit in patience” (8.15).
What sorts of things do you find in your life that choke out the Word? One thorny bramble for me is anxiety.
In our culture today, to believe in — much less confess and defend — absolutes is deemed arrogant. To insist that something is one way and not another provokes charges of egotism, presumption, and superiority. That’s tricky for Christians because we absolutely believe in absolutes.
Perhaps nowhere is this more tricky than in the area of morality and its exclusivity, about which the faith is very serious. Certain people will be excluded from the future kingdom for certain things (try 1 Cor. 6:9-10 on for size). But to say as much in public today almost requires a masochistic streak.
Still, while Christians will always be deemed disagreeable when speaking on unpopular subjects, we should give no unnecessary room for the charge of arrogance or presumption. Again, Christianity asserts various absolutes. The fact that we will all face a future judgment implies as much. But the fact of an absolute does not mean that the Christian always has access to it, and that necessitates some humility. We won’t always get it right.
This is why God provided a solution for those who became accidentally unclean in the Old Covenant system and why liturgical prayers for forgiveness include language regarding sins of both “knowledge and of ignorance.” Jesus even offers warning about this. We come before him and say we did x, y, and z in his name, and (Lord, have mercy) he says, “Depart from me. I never knew you.” We can miss the mark even when we think we’ve nailed it.
There are a lot of reasons for this. For one, we’re limited. We have blind spots. For another, we’re sinful ourselves, and sin deforms us and our capacities to judge and act. For yet another, we’ve been conditioned by our families and cultures to see things certain ways. We operate in function of that conditioning, whether against it or for it or something in between. It’s unavoidable. So we mustn’t become arrogant in our certainty.
But neither should we become debilitated in our humility. I think of something Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon said in a sermon: “We almost never have all the light we need, but we must go forward.” We have to act with the light we have, and if that light has illumined (even if only partially) the truths of God, then we are obligated as Christians to believe, confess, and defend them, to act on them in the face of people who radically disagree.
We don’t do so because we are presumptuous, let alone superior. We do so because we humbly love God and want to obey him.
Question: How does it strike you when someone defends a moral or doctrinal absolute?
Joel Osteen’s disturbing inability to say that Mormonism is something other than Christian reflects a particular affliction from which our culture suffers. I’m not sure what to call it other than the cult of agreeableness, a widespread tendency to avoid disagreement, conflict, and contradiction whenever possible, a disposition to never draw hard lines for fear that we’ll upset or make ourselves unattractive by the action.
But Christians must be willing to upset and be unattractive. After all, we believe things that are upsetting and unattractive. When Jesus tells us to pick up our cross and follow, he’s bidding us to do something that many others will avoid because laying down one’s life is hardly appealing. Dying to our ego, ambitions, passions, and delusions is undesirable for most of us; I don’t even want to do it most of the time that I’m aware of the choice. So when we ask those people to join us, we shouldn’t be surprised that they say no. Further, when they do say no, we shouldn’t say, “I understand. Your position is quite reasonable. By not picking up the cross you’re really pretty much doing what I’m doing when I pick up mine, so it’s all good.” Real differences exist and cannot be papered (or smiled) over.
We shouldn’t seek to be disagreeable for its own sake, but we have to be willing to be disagreeable from time to time if for no other reason than that the world disagrees with God and we’re on his side, or trying to be. No truth is harder to swallow than God’s truth.
When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn addressed Harvard University in 1978, he said, “[T]ruth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.” This is particularly true when someone has to call out failings, sins, perversions, and the like, as Solzhenitsyn did in part at Harvard. He talked about the “spiritual exhaustion” of the West and our disordered priorities and values. That hurt, but it was (and is) necessary to hear, and the only way for Solzhenitsyn to say it was to apostatize from the cult of agreeableness, to be willing to oppose, confront, point a finger, and contradict. We need more people willing to so apostatize. The pay is bad; just ask the prophets. But that’s part of picking up our cross.
Our spiritual exhaustion is worse as a culture, and our priorities and values are more out of whack now than in 1978. Perhaps nothing makes this so obvious as a Christian minister unwilling to defend the traditional, creedal, biblical understanding of Christ and the Father vis-a-vis Mormonism. But of course it isn’t just Mormonism. What about our materialism, our political subservience (on the right and left), our sanctioned immorality, our alienation from suffering, our doctrinal infidelity? The list can go on just as long as we’re wiling to be disagreeable. But too many of us are unwilling, and so we stifle the conversation and abort the argument like an importune fetus. We should let the kid come to term and scream a little. It might clear the air of all the insufferable apologies for simply confessing the truths of the gospel.
Christians face intense cultural pressure to conform and agree with the world. That’s normal and natural, and it should be opposed at every possible turn. It’s part of picking up the cross and laying down our life to ease, self-deception, and false peace. It’s just disappointing that it has to be opposed in the church too. But it must be because the cult of agreeableness has adherents warming many a pew.
Question: How do you think the cult of agreeableness affects the Christian witness in the world?
The early Christians and later patristic writers read the Old Testament with a view to Christ. They saw his shadow in the law, the prophets, and the writings like Psalms. They also saw him in the Song of Solomon, seeing in the Hebrew love poem a picture of Christ and the church.
The Old Testament prophets used marital imagery to describe the relationship between God and Israel, and Paul absorbed that metaphor, that mystery, into his understanding of Christ and the church. So it’s no surprise that preachers and theologians attuned to finding Christ in the Old Testament would see him in the Song of Songs, too.
Modern interpretation often frowns on this view. It wants to see the Song primarily in its original context, as a love poem. But I think there are some real benefits in going back to the patristic interpretation, not only for the rich theological possibilities but also for pastoral benefits.
How many of us have had periods where God has felt distant, where we felt alone? In those moments we desperately want God, but he’s nowhere to be found. He’s absent. We could be made to feel wrong for thinking such things, for feeling such things, but Scripture doesn’t do that. Scripture identifies with the pain and gives it expression.
Upon my bed at night
I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
I called him, but he gave no answer (Song 3.1).
If we see Christ in Solomon, the lover, and ourselves in the Shulammite woman, the bride, we secure validation and identification for those feelings of abandonment. Others have felt it too. If we see the Shulammite as a picture of the church, we can see that this is a common experience of all believers. We sometimes seek God and cannot find him. We call and get no answer. The Scripture is saying, “It’s okay, it’s part of the experience.”
And it can be heartbreaking.
I opened to my beloved,
but my beloved had turned and gone.
My soul failed me when he spoke.
I sought him, but found him not;
I called him, but he gave no answer.
The watchman found me,
as they went about the city;
they beat me, they wounded me . . . (5.6-7).
The struggle through these moments is a real and important dimension of true Christian spirituality. How else do we explain David’s cries in the Psalms? What the Song is saying is that there is support and understanding in the moments of crisis and doubt. And the Song goes further and says that Christ will come. God will not always be distant. The groom will return, as Solomon did, as Christ always does.
There’s no use denying the experience of pain and distance when it comes. Scripture doesn’t deny it. Sometimes we experience dry spells that last for years. But through the Song of Solomon God says, “Continue to look. Continue to wait. I am coming.”
Do you look to the Song or the Psalms for help in such moments?
I knew the sound the second I heard it, a loud sustained cry, undulating but strong. “Is that the call to prayer?” I asked Eva, a Christian woman operating a small crafts shop.
“It is for Muslims,” she said.
It was the first time I’d ever heard a Muslim call to prayer. It wouldn’t be the last during my stay in Uganda. Mosques seemed almost as plentiful as churches do in some places in the U.S. I’d never seen so many as I did driving around Jinja, Kampala, and the areas around the two cities.
You see more men in short brimless hats than women with head scarves, but you can’t miss either of them, nor all the men on Friday wearing their long robes to services. For an American in whose country Islam is still largely an abstraction, the stuff of newspaper articles, I found it all a bit jarring.
Megan and I had traveled to Uganda to adopt two boys, Moses and Jonah, but while there I found the various expressions of faith endlessly fascinating.
I asked Job, a driver, his thoughts on Islam, particularly how Muslims interacted with others. By and large, he said, everyone gets along, but some Muslims are up to no good. He said they largely behave themselves because Christians far outnumber them and they don’t want trouble. Job is Roman Catholic. He has a son named George Walker Bush.
There are many Roman Catholics in Uganda, and if you drive by at the right hour, you can hear masses, Sunday and weekdays too, coming from one church or another. As with many buildings, most churches are fairly open-air with doors or windows ajar all round.
Another driver, Emma, short for Emanuel, took me around to several sites, including the Catholic cathedral in Jinja. It was Saturday afternoon. Several children were playing out front. An elderly nun in a bright blue habit walked out and waved to us. I had my boys in tow; Jonah was strapped to my chest, and Moses rode my shoulders. She beamed at the sight of the two.
Inside, Emma and I stood at the back. Up front, two nuns in blue habits played the drums that are ubiquitous there. Boys danced up the center aisle, rehearsing. The choir sang in Luganda that Mary was the mother of Jesus. Emma translated for me, but even without understand it all, the scene was delightful, even beautiful.
The Church of Uganda, part of the Anglican Communion, also predominates. I attended one service at St. Andrews’ parish in Jinja. The Common Worship liturgy was loosely followed and at one point the choir sang the American spiritual, “I Shall Not Be Moved.” A few of the old hymns were sung as well; sometimes it seems that there is nothing so universal as an Anglican hymn. The priest gave the singles in his congregation a rough time and encouraged the men to go out and find a wife.
There are many other Protestant groups in Uganda as well, including Baptists and Seventh-Day Adventists, but Pentecostals seem to surpass all the others.
Driver Emma is Pentecostal, as is the group from whom we adopted the boys. We attended church there the first Sunday I was in town. I grew up in a charismatic church and I was surprised by the similarities, despite the fact that the service was conducted under an open-air structure with a dirt floor.
The worship was primarily choruses, backed by drums and synthesizers. The pastor, Ivan, and another leader in the community, also named Emma, went back in forth in English and Luganda. The sermon involved a lengthy discussion of proper baptism.
Prior to the service Ivan told me that it is imperative for Pentecostal pastors to get training. Too many people feel the call of the Spirit and then just start ministering, he said. Without training, their ministry suffers because they’re not equipped to lead their people. He said their ministry ends up very shallow. His heart for cultivating serious believers and serious pastors was evident and inspiring.
By far the most moving experience involved attending liturgy at St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral in Kampala. Megan and I are Orthodox and love our church and its worship. To be halfway around the world and find the liturgy virtually identical was wonderful.
The service was in the local language and I could not understand anything but a few snatches of English and one Greek phrase (Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy) thrown in because the priests noticed some mzungus (white folks) in the congregation — there were just four of us in a congregation of about eighty or ninety Ugandans. The other two mzungus, a wonderful missionary couple, would lean over and tell us where we were in the service, but the cool thing was that I knew. I could follow it all even though I didn’t understand the words. I just overlaid the English in my mind.
Uganda has adherents to Islam, Hinduism (there are a sizable number of Indians in Uganda), local folk religions, and even a few Mormons. But Christianity is the dominant expression, and I found its vibrancy there exhilarating.