Going Out and Coming In

I recently saw a rerun of A Nun's Story, in which Audrey Hepburn plays Sister Luke, an accomplished nurse who serves in the hospital of her Order in the pre-World War I Congo. There she develops not only medical, but listening and caring skills that endear her to her patients. As war approaches in Europe, she returns to the mother house in Belgium and continues nursing. There she experiences growing conflict with her Mother Superior, primarily because she habitually skips Vespers because she is ministering to patients. In the final confrontation, Mother Superior reminds her, “You are a nun first, and a nurse second.” The implicit response to this statement is, “why should there be a difference?” and is really the theme of the movie. She leaves the Order to go back to the Congo.

There is no question that a Christian who serves God in the world will burn out if he does not operate from a center. Jesus withdrew from the crowds to pray. I read somewhere that Mother Teresa found it necessary to have the Eucharist served to her daily. But the time of separation and the time of service--what the Old Testament calls "going out and coming in"--is the devout rhythm of the Christian life, not an inner struggle between two priorities. Each grows out of the other.

The church as I have known her errs in the direction of the convent. During one of my pastorates I became involved with the local rescue mission. That meant that occasionally some unkempt folks showed up at our services. One of our parishioners allegedly asked another, “What bridge did he find them under?” He was concerned that everything be neat and clean and in its proper place. He had become a nun first. But lest I condemn him unjustly, I have to ask how much I, as his pastor, helped contribute to his attitude. I like neat and clean and orderly, and was never fully comfortable with those folks on the back row.

When I was sixty years old I left the institutional ministry, and discovered an alarming thing. I no longer had a title that allowed me to talk about God publicly because I was a “preacher.” I was suddenly just a naked Christian-in-the-world. It was depressing to find out, once titles and collars were gone, how little of the faith there was in me. I pouted for several years at what I perceived as a loss, and the stripping away of a veil. I had become a nun first, and God put me into a crucible.

I have gradually learned (very, very late) some basic truths out of this experience: 1) God is more concerned with a man’s character than his ministry. 2) Often, God sows older people into the world. 3) God loves the world. 4) John 15:5 is true. His life flowing through us brings permanent change. 5) That life is not some kind of cold power; it is the gift of the heart of God who is in love with the world. From God it reaches down. When it passes through us, it reach up to our fellows. 6) There is no difference between a man in Christ, the place where God places him, his everyday contact with other human beings, and a man’s ministry. Christ in man, and man in Christ, is ministry. The nun is a nurse, and the nurse is a nun.

Repentance

(The Assistant Pastor at our church preached on repentance last week. Not sure which of these thoughts are mine and which are his, so I'll plagiarize right in front of everybody. Thanks, Mark.)

Last week I heard a sermon on Mark 1:15: “Repent and believe the gospel.” It stirred some basic truths in me, and it was good to hear them again.

First, to “believe” means that there is something outside myself that calls for my response. That means that the gospel has a separate identity from me, and is not something that comes into existence by my experience of it. The gospel in some sense leaves man out of the equation--though man receives its fruit, the gospel is really a covenant among the Persons of the Trinity that reconciles man to God. The Trinity acts upon its own counsels, and man’s response is to believe or reject. I find that a great comfort when I feel that I’ve failed as a Christian.

Second, is this easy believism or a legal fiction? No, because Jesus precedes the command to believe with the command to repent. The root meaning of repent is “change.” Therefore a command to repent presupposes that a man can change, or, better, that the gospel can change him. A man who is not changed by the gospel has failed to believe it. Belief brings change. The gospel is about the love of Christ. Love brings change. Christ call us to a beauty that only the imagination can reach. Beauty brings change. Repentance, therefore, grows out of the struggle and yearning to enter the future where Christ is.

Repentance breaks boxes--boxes not only of sin and addiction, but the boxes of self-interpretation that keep us from believing we can be more. Repentance is freedom.

(Picture: El Greco, The Trinity)

Renewals and Emergence

Institutions state, “They know where I stand.”
Movements say, “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?”
-Henry Strunk

Renewals are both a reaction and a rediscovery. They are a reaction to deadness and lack of spiritual fervor, and the rediscovery of a forgotten emphasis: salvation, holiness, the Holy Spirit, tongues, healing, etc. Renewals also produce fruit or side effects, or what (until I come up with a better term) I will call attitudes.

One common attitude of a fresh renewal is eclecticism (See Let’em Eat Cake, 12/11/09). Renewals see themselves as the focal point of unity for the church, and are accepting of different forms of religious expression. The other attitude is inclusivism (See More Thoughts on Renewals,01/31/10). Inclusivism refers to the renewal’s treatment of unbelievers or seekers. Although past renewals have not analyzed it this way, inclusivism reverses the traditional steps of believe, behave, belong; to belong, behave, believe. I saw this work in the early days of the Charismatic movement. Young people came to our meetings and were immediately accepted. Peer pressure and teaching conditioned behavior, and belief was the result. I don’t remember that we ever compromised biblical morality in the process. The presence of God and the love of their fellows changed minds and lives. There was a power at work.

But it is a fact that renewals consistently reverse these attitudes within 20 or 30 years. Disillusionment over failed unity and persecution create an esoteric mind-set, and the need to define who “belongs” breeds exclusivism. This is a consistent pattern.

Eclecticism and inclusivism in renewals have always been treated as afterthoughts, something to be examined by Christian historians years after the fact. But something different is happening in the emergent movement. These two attitudes are not on the shelf. They are in the forefront of emergent literature. They are being self-consciously studied and examined. That is something new. The movement, for all its haziness and dangers, is defining itself by those two concepts, something I don’t believe any previous renewal has done.

If emergence can pull this off—really define eclecticism and inclusivism, and find ways to sustain them, then we are on the verge of a Reformation that could last beyond the normal life span of renewals. A whole new way of thinking could come forth. This is already manifested in the emergent description of their detractors as “necessary ballast” in the church—a case of including one’s potential adversaries in a greater scheme.

If, however, the gathering reaction to emergent attitudes begins to “get under the skin” of the movement, it will wear out in the next fifty years and become another persecuted True Church. Even worse, it could find ways to enforce eclectic and inclusive attitudes—a tragic paradox. Personally, I’m more hopeful than that.

Consistency

"...the current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious. Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in the competition."

I recently reread Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address of 1978. It was a watershed evaluation of the decadence of Western culture seen through Russian eyes, and was not well received by the American liberal intelligentsia. Let me summarize two major emphases in the address. 1) Secular humanism has become the basic philosophy of both Western democracies and Eastern Soviet Communism. In the West it manifests itself as crass materialism and decadent freedom. In the East it expresses itself economically and politically. The secular humanism of both cultures represents a rejection of God, that is, a higher power that makes man significant apart from the state. 2) Communism is the most perfect and consistent expression of secular humanism, its culmination. In any culture war, the most consistent world-view will win. Therefore, says Solzhenitsyn, the West should fear Communism. The West simply does not have the courage to withstand Communist intensity, especially since the American intelligentsia is intrigued with it. The West cannot fight Communism because she is carrying the same disease.

So what happened? We have not feared the Soviet system since the Reagan era. Did consistency win? If we listen to the Western Press, plain old American democracy, freedom, and capitalism conquered the Communist beast. The lust for pepsi, pornography, Wrangler jeans, and toilet paper without a queue overcame the quest for the workers’ paradise; proof that in a contest among the seven deadly sins, greed will consistently trump envy. That’s the Western take on it. But as a romantic, I prefer to believe that the poetic Christian soul of Mother Russia could not be crushed, and remained more consistent in itself than its persecutors. I’m opting for that unless I get more data.

Of course we face a more direct and brutal consistency now. It is not secular, or humanistic, but intensely religious, giving divine sanction to an utterly simple directive. It does not require subtle exegesis to understand "death to the great Satan." Can our secular society out-consistent that? I have heard men in authority declare that the great enemy of our freedoms is fundamentalism (any fundamentalism, including the Christian variety). Their reason for this is interesting: "Any man who is willing to die for something is willing to kill for it." A huge assumption, given that Christians have generally preferred martyrdom to murder. That statement says much more about the speakers than about the object of their dislike. How can such a pusillanimous attitude stand in the face of a man who will joyfully blow himself into heaven with an igniter button? Even if we take Solzhenitsyn's much fairer version (any man who is willing to die for something will defend himself), where is the will in secular humanism against such consistency?

The fact is that secular man has no place in his understanding for such commitment. It is not the shahid that frightens him as much as the passion behind him. Again, where is there anything on this earth that can be more consistent than that?

Such consistency can be found only within the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. She understands passion without murder, commitment that opens arms to the world rather than closing against it. She knows that God's enemies are not necessarily hers; she knows that her death is for the life of the world (Schmemann). She has always outlived the ruthless and been there for exhausted cultures who were trying to remember who they were. It is time for the church to evaluate her own consistency.