Double-edged swords are dangerous...

This semester, I’ve been much more deliberate about reading the scriptures than I was last fall.  It’s a dangerous thing, this scripture-reading business.  It shakes the very foundation of your being, of your desires and aspirations, and it demands a response: obedience or rebellion (which may take the form of apathy or attempts to justify the status quo).  Last night I was explaining the story of Josiah to a friend. For anyone needing a summary, Josiah became king when he was only eight years old.  Eighteen years later, he ordered that the money offered at the temple be used to rebuild and restore it to a state befitting its role as the house of the Living God.  During the cleanup process, a book of the law was found. They brought it and read it to Josiah.  Upon hearing the words of God found in that scripture, Josiah broke. He recognized that despite his best and most reverent intentions, he and all of Israel were not living as God had commanded.  And Josiah believed that God meant what He said.

So he fixed it.

And so there’s a part of me that gets a little nervous when I open scripture, when I pray that God grant me the ability to look at life and this world and the people in it through His eyes, to love them as He loves them—for I too suspect that He meant what He said.

Christ’s love cost Him everything. Christ’s love is exemplified by the cross. Think for a moment what that means. Think about what that life looked like.  He commands—this is not optional—us to pick up our crosses daily and follow Him.  What does that look like? I don’t know for sure.  I do know that there’s no possible way that I personally can carry a cross if I’m clutching other things in my hands.

I’m going to ride on some Bonhoeffer theology for a moment, so bear with me.

The gospel demands a blank check.  Anything less is potentially more dangerous than offering nothing at all, for if you have offered nothing, then Christ’s call to give at least has a sounding board in your heart.  If you’ve given a little bit, then you just flip to a different song, because you reason that you’re covered.  We’ve partitioned Christianity into two nice little layers.  There are Christians, and then there are radical Christians.  There is a minimum level of service that we find acceptable. Sure, some people go beyond that to a state of reckless abandon and radical faith, and we venerate that as good, but not as necessary.  Bonhoeffer suggested that maybe the latter is the minimum after all, and the former is an inadequate and dangerous label.

And if Jesus meant what He said, then I think maybe Bonhoeffer was onto something.

Because the disciples were told to drop their nets and follow.  Some left their father standing there, net in hand.  They were sent out without savings accounts or bullet-proof vests or even an extra cloak. Paul was called to step out of an influential authority position, out of comfort and prestige into obscurity and derision.  Moses, the prince of the greatest empire of his time, had to fall to nothing and become a nomadic refugee to fulfill the role God had for him.

What if lukewarm Christianity isn’t really Christianity at all? If our inaction (or half-action) is just as wrong as deliberately sinful action? If like the rich young ruler, we have kept all the commandments since childhood, but when we were asked to give back, we refuse.  Or we just give enough to make us feel good about giving, because let’s face it: that’s a big motivator for why we give.  We like the nice warm fuzzy feeling we get afterwards. But there’s the difference between giving because it makes us feel good, makes us feel like we’re doing the right thing… and giving until it hurts.

That story is such a hard one to wrap my head around. The man was, overall, “doing the right thing.”  The problem wasn’t that he wasn’t doing enough (for could we ever really do enough?); the problem was the underlying spiritual condition that caused him to “not do enough.” 

This is all so convoluted.  The popular Western line of reasoning is “safe evangelism.” You give within your means, because after all, you want to feed the homeless, but you don’t want to be homeless. You reach out as much as you can without putting yourself in any danger.  Moving into a community where the light of Christ is missing isn’t really feasible, because no one wants to hear gunshots on their street at night, and how could you justify sending your kid to that school?  The safety of a steady income allows us to “give generously” whenever the need slaps us in the face, or even to deliberately go find a hungry person once in a while, and we feel good because we had the money to do it.  We go to college and spend years paying off the debt because society says you need those letters behind your name in order to have the influence to make a difference, and we bought into that.  We justify our climb on the social ladder as a necessary means to an end, and as long as we make sure that end is something admirable—“Christian,” even—then we’re golden.

Further convolution: I don’t know what this looks like in everyone’s life. I know that it won’t look exactly the same, because we are all different parts of one body; we have different purposes and different skills.  That being said, if anyone reads that statement and sees it as a disclaimer, as justification to avoid some component of the call of costly discipleship because “that’s not what it looks like for them,” then may God forgive me for perpetuating such an excuse.

Forgive me also, dear reader, if this sounds at all condemning.  If I am condemning anyone, it is only myself.

That’s the danger of scripture:  once you’ve heard it, you can’t pretend you don’t know. 

This is what I do know (courtesy due partly to Katie Davis).  If you compare the number of self-professing Christians in the world to the number of orphans, it becomes apparent that if only 7% of all Christians… SEVEN out of every ONE HUNDRED… would care for just one more child, then there wouldn’t be any more orphan statistics.  And I know that God tells us in (that dangerous) scripture that the purest form of religion is to care for orphans and widows in their distress.  Something is just not computing there…

I know that I am to love my neighbor as myself.  Myself doesn’t want to be hungry, or cold, or homeless.  Myself doesn’t want to be sick or ignored because it happened to be born in a poor country instead of a privileged one, because coming to me is too inconvenient, too costly.

And so it would be nice to be a nurse at Vanderbilt or St. Jude’s.  There is nothing wrong with that.  Some parts of His body are called to that.  I am not.  It would be so easy to justify. It would still be “good.” The selfish and proud part of me would like it because it seems the best use of my intelligence and skill.  I could work alongside the best and the brightest.  And I could do it in relative comfort, in proximity to my family and friends, and I could build a little house on a big hill with a big east-facing bay window and a big backyard with four little boys playing football and two dogs trying to eat said football. That’s what is expected of me. That’s what success looks like. Safe evangelism allows for that.

So what’s the difference, then, if I take those skills and use them in the poorest corners of the planet?  I’m still using the same skills.  I’m reaching an even more desperate humanity.  I’m still a nurse.

The difference is the prestige, the honor, the self-glory, and the opportunity to be “heard” and listened to, to be respected because I’ve “earned it.”  The difference is the possibility that I’ll never have safety or that little house, that I’ll have to put down those dreams in order that my hands might be free to pick up my cross. I can put whatever label I want to on it, but at the end of the day, that’s what it is.

Oh…. that’s the difference?

Good riddance.

Because safe evangelism allows for that. But costly grace does not. Not for me.

The stories that light our hearts on fire are those of people like Moses, Paul, King David, the apostles…  And those stories are still told.  They are stories of life, love, and triumph that God placed into the Grand Narrative, and so even thousands of years after these men walked the earth, their stories are still heard.

But they are heard because GOD’S power made them heard, because HIS glory and ability was proclaimed.  Scripture (that most dangerous of things…) tells us that His power is made perfect in weakness.  Sometimes I read that as a means of comfort, that when I am weakest and the most incapable, He will be strong.  I think that’s true.  I think it’s more than an insurance policy though.  It is also an admonition and a reminder that any grasp towards power on our part is essentially us placing a limit on how much we will let God do through us—not how much will be done overall, but how much will be done by the power and might of God.  We say, “No worries, God.  Your servant has got your back. I can take care of this. It’s under control. I don’t need your power just yet; my own is quite sufficient. I’m a prince of Egypt/king of Israel/teacher of the law. I have the authority and ability to do this.” 

We are fools and children.

So…

What if God meant what He said?