Tough Times and Tough Love

Is there a difference between generational sin and just seeing your kids make the same mistakes you made? Over the past month we have replayed our own pasts in the lives of our teenagers and it has been an intense time. I hope we got through with all this but my own experience tells me that like the old Carpenters tune, we've only just begun.

There seem to be only a relatively few variations on the ways in which we seek out individuality and identity as adolescents, and nearly all of them are destructive to us and our inter-family relationships. I have gone through prayer for forgiveness of my family but never for seeking forgiveness from my family for the tough years when they stuck by me when I was incredibly difficult. As a parent now I have much greater respect and love for my own parents.

Humility and the Parables

On Sunday we read the parable of the weeds from Matthew 13 and it occurred to me that we have the wrong perspective on that parable most of the time. We think we can know the difference between the wheat and the weeds and we put ourselves into the role of the servants in the parable and make our judgments accordingly.

There is a significant problem with that perspective on the parable. When Jesus gives its explanation he tells who the servants are and they aren't us. The servants, according to Jesus, are the angels. We think we are able to judge the difference between the wheat and the weeds but that isn't the way Jesus explains the parable, in fact, we are only either wheat or weeds in the parable.

Most of the time when I hear that parable preached it seems that the preacher forgets to read the explanation which doesn't call for us to make those judgments at all. For some of my life people would definitely have decided that I was not likely to be wheat and I am thankful that the harvest was delayed. We need to be careful about judgment, we don't know what God may be up to in someone's life and we need to have the humility to keep our judgments to ourselves until God is done.

Running from the past

The Old Testament lesson we read in our worship today is about Jacob's vision of heaven in Genesis 28. As I think about Jacob I see a man with a past he is running away from into a future he can't imagine. He is a man who desperately needs to understand the aphorism, "Wherever you go, there you are."

This man is running from the problems he created at home. He has destroyed the family and now has made what seems to be a plausible excuse for leaving, to find a wife among his family's people, but that isn't the real reason. His mother has heard his brother breathing threats of murder against him because Jacob has ended up with what should have belonged to his brother. (There is a hint of Cain in this story.) God had promised these would be his but Jacob and his mother took them instead of receiving them from God (see Eve in Genesis 3 as she took and ate).

Jacob's past hasn't yet been dealt with, that comes later, but now he is going to meet a deceiver who is better than he is in order to come face to face with the destructiveness of this pattern for life. We can't run from the truth about ourselves, it needs to be dealt with in order that it doesn't continue to haunt us forever.

The Search for Identity

Why is it that our search for identity, in adolescence or middle-age crisis, almost never begins with God? It seems to me that this search for meaning and identity apart from God is, in many ways, the first sin. There was something other, something God had denied them, and the temptation included a sense of you will be complete when you have this.

The search for identity, for Christians, is found in reflection on our being created in the image of God and the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. In John's Gospel we hear the depth of the Fall, "He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him." (John 1.10-11) Those who were created in the image of God no longer recognized the one whose image they bear, the Fall was complete.

If we believe we are created in the image of God and we also believe Hebrews 1.3a: "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word," then how is it that we search for identity elsewhere? Our identity is hidden in Christ with God and in order to discover our identity we must seek to know Christ by and and every means.

Truth against the world

Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, had a personal motto, "Truth against the world." The man was an incredible creative genius for certain but he was also an iconoclast and a man so consumed by his own genius that the motto essentially meant that he had transcended the world in most every way imaginable and had a bit of a messiah complex. In his field, Wright certainly pushed the envelope and taught the world a great deal about form, but his personal life was a disaster.

While his motto at first seems noble, worthy of Ayn Rand's attention and admiration, leading to the book, The Fountainhead, it is also defiant and egotistical in the extreme. It matters what principle we choose for living and Wright's perspective on life led him to stake out ground that set him above and apart from the world, alone with his truth. For Ayn Rand, it was an heroic choice, and based on the results of a survey by the Library of Congress in the 1990's which showed that Rand's Atlas Shrugged was second only behind the Bible when they asked which books most profoundly shaped their worldview, such a life is considered heroic by many in our culture.

The message of the Bible is, however, quite different from "Truth against the world." There is certainly that reality in the Gospel, that the way things are is not the way they should be, but the ultimate message is "Truth for the world." It wasn't and isn't a claim or play for power, God is pretty sure of His own sovereignty and doesn't need the acclaim of a small portion of His creation in order to establish His sense of identity. (Sarcasm intended) The basis of the claim of truth and the life that proclaimed it, is love, pure love, which gains nothing in the bargain.

Our common birth defect

The past couple of weeks I have been working on original sin and the effects of the fall in our lives and in all of creation and am realizing how incredibly frustrating it is to have only a few minutes on Sunday morning to attempt to get that into the hearts and heads of those whom God has given me to teach and equip. The implications of that understanding of the world are staggering and yet I have only 20-25 minutes to try and explain it.

Everything that we think about the world should be influenced by that idea, that there is a terminal infection shared by all creation that keeps everything from being as it should be. Out of the chaos that was before creation emerged God's intentional universe where order and harmony were seen. Into that perfect world came sin and, mercifully, God didn't destroy creation, it bore a curse that keeps it from being perfect but not from testifying to His goodness in creating it.

In this week's Gospel reading, the birth of the twins Jacob and Esau, we see them struggling in their mother's womb for dominance, a struggle that will consume most of their lives. In Genesis 25 we see original sin beginning before they emerge into the world, it isn't an environmental issue, it is an issue of our nature, written into our DNA. That makes all the more amazing what we see in Luke 1 when the baby in Elizabeth's womb (John the Baptist) leaps within her as she greets Mary the mother of Jesus. Here we have no struggle for dominance, but recognition of God's will in the older giving way to the younger, as he would do his entire life, but with joy.

The demise of Truth

This issue of truth isn't a new phenomenon, Pilate asked the question "What is truth?" the serpent asked the question, "Did God really say..." followed by "You shall not surely die." The first paragraph of the Screwtape Letters contains the following:
Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen
incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't
think of doctrines as primarily 'true' or 'false', but as 'academic' or 'practical',
'outworn' or 'contemporary', 'conventional' or 'ruthless'. Jargon, not argument
is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to
make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark,
or courageous - that is the philosophy of the future.

I would say that is a most prophetic passage and a grand place to start to understand our own world. We have become those who embrace truth that has to commend it as actually true in science or experience so long as it supports what we already believe. Christians and Jews have been accused of this for centuries, believing in things that have no archaeological evidence, only to find later that they were indeed true. We are capable of saying something is false but accurate.

We are a world with an opinion seeking proof that our opinion is true and reliable. What we have seen is the breakdown of consensus and optimism that began in the Enlightenment. We believed in progress through science and the abandonment of religion and it hasn't happened. We have more stuff but less life, less joy and less optimism. We have lost coherence and hope in the face of disappointment and we now cling to doomsday scenarios as our organizing principle and our consensus.

Truth

Truth is the word that has suffered the greatest indignities of them all. When two people believe two different things about the nature of something, they can both be wrong or one of them can be right but they can't both be right. Truth is an impersonal concept, not a personal one. We can guide our lives by what we believe and be completely wrong. As I like to wander and find back roads, I have this experience more regularly than I would like to admit. My sense of direction isn't all that great, apparently my internal compass isn't working, and so I will sometimes end up in places I had no intention of going.

If I were not a man I would have somewhat fewer problems with this but since I am male I have a built-in aversion to asking for help and directions. As it is, I compound my problems by asking my wife to read a map and help me out. Since she is pretty bad at reading maps, it doesn't generally get us back on track to ask her to help in this way. I wish I could count the number of times she has said to me, "Just stop here at this store and ask."

Pride gets in the way, I won't ask for help and she won't spend time learning how to read a map, so I plow ahead without any real sense of where we are or where we are going. Sometimes there is a happy coincidence of finding ourselves where I intended to be. The way we now define humility would be for the person who knows the right way to affirm my current direction in order not to offend me and tolerance would be for Suzanne to sit back and enjoy the ride without respect to the destination. The reality is that there is a true way and what I really need is for someone to tell me I am headed in the wrong way and give me the truth, both about my mistake and the right way.

Language and meaning in postmodern religion

I think I believe in tolerance and humility. I believe we should not do attack evangelism because I never see either Jesus or Paul doing that. I see them both insisting on and defending truth without compromise and without ever giving ground and saying, "Well, I suppose you could be right as well." If either had been willing to be tolerant in that way, their lives would have ended quite differently. Neither were victims of intolerance either. They were victimized because they insisted on a particular truth which would not allow them to accept that any competing truth If Jesus was a victim for tolerance, it was His intolerance that made Him a victim, not His tolerance.

Likewise, Jesus was humble but not by the standard in the article about faith in America. He repeatedly said He was sent to a particular people, the chosen people of God, there is nothing humble about such a statement or a belief with respect to one group of people. His claims were certainly not humble in the sense that they invited diversity of opinion and belief, He said that diversity of opinion about Him was not possible if life were to be the outcome.

How did we get here? It seems that in the absence of a belief in truth we have substituted values about which we can have some consensus of their "goodness." After we are certain of the "good" values we then project language backwards onto those values in order to affirm the value. In the process, words find new meanings. We haven't changed the vocabulary, only what we intend by it. When we interpret the Bible, we do so in community, but the community of interpreters needs to include the original writer(s), the original audience, those who have interpreted it before us, and the community of faith in which we find ourselves, and we can't exclude any of the above as we do the work of interpretation. With respect to language, it seems that we have tossed out the history of meaning.