Relocating To Elfland

An exhortation before our corporate confession of sin this morning:

Brethren, I’d like us to think for a few minutes, especially this morning, about the great sin of asking for more. It is not asking for more in itself that is sinful, actually (we will learn that today at the Supper); it is a heart that asks for more because it refuses to see what it has already been given. Most of us have been on either the giving or the receiving end of a Christmas scenario in which a recipient of a pile of gifts, having torn through them all in short order, immediately asks, “Is this all?” Perhaps some of us blush to remember asking such a question! We blush because, in its own way, this question is as grinchy as a refusal to give any gifts at all. The one who will not give has a heart (so the saying goes) that is two sizes too small; the one who will not thankfully savor what he or she has been given has an identical problem. The fabled spirit of Christmas is, biblically speaking, the spirit of God’s kingdom, the spirit of God Himself. Our God is fundamentally characterized by abundance, by an extravagant excess of goodness and glory and joy; there is a kind of playful prodigality (we might say, a wasteful generosity) in the way He dispenses His inexhaustible resources. The appropriate human response to this is to swim about cheerfully in the goodness, seeing it everywhere, delighting in gifts great and small, sharing generously with no thought of the cost, no fear of going hungry – for even were hunger to come, it would be freighted with the good grace of God (“it is good for me,” says the Psalmist, “that I have been afflicted”). The one who knows God as He really is can never ask, “Is this all?” because he can never quite get over the goodness of the Lord right in front of him, and all the promises of goodness still to come! One grinch clutches, because he needs what he has to fill the hole in his heart; another grinch demands because he needs what he doesn’t have to fill the hole in his heart. The child of God neither clutches nor demands, for the ice of unsmiling fear has been melted in his heart by the faithful love of the Father in heaven. If God spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not with Him also freely give us all things? Repent therefore, brethren, of an unthankful heart, one that demands, “Is this all?” And let us turn ourselves to see with joy all that the Father has given to us.

I think some of us Protestants actually do believe in purgatory. Only we move it up a level. We live as if this life in this world is it.

“Having set up His name and promises as a strong tower, God calls His people into His chambers, and expects them to enter and make themselves at home.” (William Gurnall)

“The structures of our experience, especially the everyday, routine, invisible taken-for-granted structures, have a profound effect in shaping the way we perceive reality. The deep, often unarticulated assumptions that guide each of us are shaped by a matrix of usually unremarkable experiences channeled in specific directions by cultural institutions. Over time, especially as we are part of a community with the same pattern of experiences, a pattern of conviction and affections begins to take shape. Call it a sensibility or a consciousness or a prejudice or a mentality or a mindset: it is deeply ingrained, usually unconscious, and extremely powerful.

“While we may hold explicitly to certain core beliefs, it is possible (and I would argue likely, in our time and place) for explicitly held core beliefs to be out of synch with deep assumptions, so that, when we have to react quickly or [in] a new situation, we often fall back on the deep-set assumptions rather [than] on what we actually profess. This is why, I believe, in our own time, the affinity between what Christians profess and how they act is increasingly vague and weak.” (Ken Myers, “Cultural Discernment, Christian Faithfulness, and the Postmodern Multiversity”)

For sheer headiness, it would seem hard to surpass Paul’s statement concerning the ministry of young Timothy: “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Tim 5:18). These are God’s words, and we shouldn’t immediately jump to qualify them. Ministers save people. Under God, they do.

I would like to draw attention, though, to the first part of Paul’s statement: “Keep close watch on yourself.” If a minister doesn’t do this, he’s not going to save anyone; and I’d like to suggest that a grave danger lurks in the life of a minister precisely because he is trying to save others. There’s something wonderful, of course, about being used by God to pour out His grace, truth, wisdom, and love to His people and the world; but a minister who fails to keep watch over his heart in this matter can fall prey to a poison so subtle that it remains largely imperceptible until its deadly work is already done.

As C. S. Lewis pointed out in The Four Loves, we humans need to be (and to feel) needed. This is not sinful, per se: it’s a good thing to be needed (take parenting, for example), and the pleasure we feel in being needed (holding an infant, for instance, or lifting a load from a neighbor’s back) is perfectly legitimate. God made us to love others, to meet their needs, and we can and should feel His own joy in doing so.

But there’s a dark side, thanks to sin. Pastors are not immune from the deep insecurities, fears, and longings that beset other mortals; and whereas others may drown these things in distracting pleasures, or mask them behind professionalism or machismo or other forms of self-protective detachment, a pastor can hide behind . . . well, ministry. Love. Giving care and compassion and counsel. And this can be quite addictive. One can reach a place of justifying one’s own existence – deriving a sense of personal value and purpose – from the fact that one is saving others. This is a problem on many levels, but maybe we need to think through the psychology of it a little more.

There is a huge difference between a relationship in which the other person acutely needs me and a relationship in which the other person doesn’t. In the first case, I don’t have to face much in the way of insecurity: I am needed. It’s gratifying. It gives me a sense of strength and value. But in a relationship where I’m not acutely needed, I face a fearful question: will the other person choose to relate to me simply because he or she wants to, because he or she sees who I am (not just what I have to offer) and is either genuinely attracted or (which is perhaps even more comforting) glad to love me in spite of myself? This, in a word, is vulnerability.

A minister can shield himself from such vulnerability by crowding his life with relationships in which, in one form or another, he is constantly needed. Which becomes a self-feeding problem, because eventually he has no life apart from the ministry. When he looks in the mirror, he sees nothing that could attract anyone “just because,” and it’s a terrifying prospect to show himself to others apart from a ministry context. What if they see what he sees: that if he stops offering what he has to offer, there isn’t much of a life or a person left? He has become his ministry; if a person doesn’t need ministry, what else is there to be attracted to? So he goes on hiding behind ministry. He has one secure reason to exist, one sure basis for personal value: he’s saving people.

Of course, the way to deal with this is not to stop ministering! It is not to stop caring and giving oneself for the good of others. It is, rather, to keep watch on oneself and, by the grace of God, to open oneself to all the vulnerability and hurt that can come in a different sort of relationship: the sort in which one’s only basis for acceptance is the love of God in the heart of the other. It is to invite and explore relationships in a non-ministry context, where the basis for the relating is not acute need, but sincere desire. It should go without saying that human relationships don’t neatly fit into compartments of “need” and “desire”; but still, I hope what I am trying to get at is clear.

One avenue to this other sort of relating is for a pastor to do things simply because he desires to do so. There’s a time to go play a round of golf “just because”; there’s a time to go hiking in the woods “just because”; there’s a time to play a board game for no other reason than that it’s fun. These are activities in which the pastor is seen as a mere man; and these are contexts in which it is fairly easy for others to engage him as such. Maybe he will turn out to be a loser, and no one will want to come back for more – but that’s a risk we all have to take in this world, and it has so much to do with this thing we call grace. We are utterly vulnerable before the grace of God – we have no control over whether He will extend it to us. It’s no different in our human relationships. The one who will not embrace this truth will dwell in the prison house of his own self-protection. And it is hellishly dark and cold inside.

There’s a much finer line than many of us would like to admit between (a) wanting someone else to be like Jesus and (b) wanting someone else to be like me, since I’m so much like Jesus.

A part of great preaching is to be able to say something once and have it stick, to say it so vividly and well that it is instantly memorable. The preacher who has to say the same thing four times to make the lights go on is wasting three attempts, which suggests the lights are dimly lit in his own mind. Lacking a scalpel, he must flail about with his machete, and his audience is in for a very long sermon.

I recently listened to an interview with Kenda Creasy Dean on the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Dean is a professor at Princeton Seminary, served as a researcher with the National Study of Youth and Religion, and has recently written a book (based on her work with the NSYR) titled Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church. Here are her opening few lines from the interview: “I think one of the things that is really tricky, particularly to convey to parents, and to congregations as well, is that if you are trying to form your kids to be Christians, it’s not going to fit them very well for American culture. And actually, it’s probably going to deform them for some of the things that we value as a society. And nobody wants to deform their kids – everybody wants their kids to fit in, and to be able to do well.”

This is a call to discipleship that many Christian parents simply won’t embrace. They want their kids to have everything that’s valuable by the standards of North American culture – comfortable affluence, popularity, sex appeal, social experience, all the toys and perks and bells and whistles – and they hope their kids will somehow also want to be in church and keep their virginity as long as possible. The idea that following Jesus might deform their children from the standpoint of cultural values, that maybe their kids won’t fit right in and succeed in all the paths their peers are treading . . . it’s unthinkable. Jesus wouldn’t require such a thing.

Having grown up in separatist Christianity, I’m sensitive to the problem of Christians making themselves “weird” for weirdness’ sake. There’s no problem, for example, with Christians being comfortably affluent – for some, it’s their calling. For every one of us, not to work hard in order to have for purposes of enjoyment and generosity is simple disobedience. But anyone who thinks a life fully oriented to the glory of God won’t make you look weird by North American standards is asleep to the cost of Christian discipleship. Christian faithfulness doesn’t fit in. Get over it.

People say a preacher must preach to an audience of One. That’s ridiculous. God didn’t ordain preaching because He needs to hear it, but because His people need to hear it. It is true, however, that a preacher must preach for the approval of One. And in this he must be resolute.

“Leaders choose daily, but the real weight on their shoulders lies in the need to decide. And there are no easy decisions. To decide requires a death, a dying to a thousand options, the putting aside of a legion of possibilities in order to choose just one. De-cide. Homo-cide. Sui-cide. Patri-cide. The root word decidere means ‘to cut off.’ All decisions cut us off, separate us, from nearly infinite options as we select just one single path. And every decision we make earns us the favor of some and the disfavor of others.” (Dan B. Allender, Leading with a Limp)