But I heard this one last night at Ash Wednesday services, and it completely sums up the way I have been feeling about the failure of the monolith of modern American Christianity to do practically any of these things... we are called to be so much more than what we are at present, and we are instead being a stumbling block; judging everyone else, lacking compassion, more concerned with protecting our religious and political rights than being a blessing and loving others who need our help...
2
Corinthians 5:20, 6:3-10 (NIV)
We
are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal
through us.
We
put no stumbling block in anyone’s path, so that our ministry will not be
discredited. Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in
great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; in beatings,
imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger; in purity,
understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love;
in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the
right hand and in the left; through glory and dishonor, bad report and good
report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown;
dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always
rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing
everything.
I know there are exceptions; there always are. Plenty of missions are doing just what we've been called to do; like Magdalene House/Thistle Farms, or Room in the Inn - but these are the exception, not the rule. It may be that we must lose everything before we can become what we were intended.
3 comments:
Beautifully put. Thank you for posting this!
This is going to be long, but check out what N.T. Wright has to say along these lines in "For All God's Worth:"
"God heard [the Israelites'] cry, and God rememberedthe covenant he had made with [them]. Our remembering often turns to nostalgia or recrimination; God's remembering turns into action. The next thing we know, Moses is standing before a bush. The bush is on fire, but the fire is not burning the bush.
...
"Young man Moses, charging off to do the will of God, killing the Egyptian: there's the wild horse, worse than useless. Mature Moses, standing before Pharaoh: he doesn't even have to raise his voice. ... The secret of the difference is what happened at the burning bush, where Moses stood and trembled in the very presence of the living God.
...
"I want now to suggest that Western society has got to the same stage Moses had got to when he found he had to flee Egypt in a hurry [after killing the Egyptian]; that what our society desperately needs is a fresh vision of the living God. ... Vision without action would indeed be escapism; action without vision is blundering folly. We have a fair amount of both in the church and the world at the moment, perhaps more of the latter than the former.
...
"We are all passionately in favor of justice, but somehow it slips through our fingers. We all long for peace in the world, but nobody quite knows how to achieve it. When we did decide to do something, as in the [first] Gulf War, we ended up protecting and liberating some of the most oppressive regimes in the world, while leaving the Kurds to freeze in the mountains, and the Shi'ites to be gassed in the marshes. ... The West has looked suspiciously like Moses, doing the right thing for the wrong reason, the wrong thing for the right reason, and, as often as not, the wrong thing for the wrong reason.
...
"Meanwhile, the cry of the poor gets louder. ... And if God hears this cry, and remembers his promise that the wolf shall lie down with the lamb, that swords will be beaten into ploughshares, that the whole earth will be filled with his glory, just and peace, then how is he going to act? What is he going to do? When God remembers his promises, his memory moves him to action: as the Red Queen said, it's a poor memory that only works backwards. But God's way of action, now as then, is through a people, maybe even through an individual, who have glimpsed a fresh vision of his fire, and have heard for themselves his words of promise.
...
" We too need to cultivate a memory that works forward as well as backward. ... We must listen also for the voice which says: 'I have heard the cry of my people; so I am sending you to Pharaoh.' We are not escapists, when we come to worship the true God and to pray for his bruised and bleeding world. On the contrary. We come so that, in whatever ways God calls us, small or great, we can be his agents in rescuing the world that still lies in gaol and cries for freedom. We, after all, stand before a yet more glorious tree: the tree of Calvary, which speaks, more truly than any words, of the fire of love which still burns at the heart of the living God."
--N.T. Wright, For All God's Worth, 70-74.
Thanks, David - very apt!
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