Sometimes the most discouraging part of reading the Bible
is how little we can relate. It becomes difficult to see ourselves in these
amazing situations and characters and we find ourselves distanced by the
language. There are “thees” and “thous” and “shalts,” not to mention all those
names. It’s sort of like explaining how to say “Wayzata” to anybody from
outside of Minnesota—it
doesn’t seem to make any sense. Then, there are modern translations of the
Bible that sound a little more colloquial but it still sometimes feels like a
code—like nobody talks like this, really. Of course, there are also all the
completely unrelatable moments. You know, it’s just hard to put yourself in the
place of the centurion watching Jesus die or one of the people on the hill
watching the bread and fish multiply or one of the disciples in the boat when
Jesus comes walking across the sea. These moments are so exceptional we just
can’t relate.
And yet, sometimes we can relate exactly. In Acts 17 when
Paul and Silas visited a couple of villages in the Greek region of Thessalonica
they went there to tell people about Jesus. They were in all likelihood the
first to share this good news that Jesus had died and was risen to this part of
the world. Their results in sharing this good news are, I think, pretty much
what we would expect. Some of them were persuaded and some were not. People who
were oppressed, generally, had their coming-to-Jesus moment. The rulers, the
leaders of the synagogue and others, were not as enthused. They saw this as a
political movement that needed to be stomped out.
And you know what? They were right. It was a political
movement. A very strange political movement. A political movement that has been
used and abused by flawed human beings ever since Jesus rose from the dead. The
synagogue leaders got it. They knew that whoever claimed to be a Jesus-follower
was claiming a dangerous kind of politics based on self-sacrificial love and
grief and suffering; they also understood that such beliefs could be misused
and championed to claim authority over them. Two thousand years of history has
given us many examples of Christians killing in the name of God, lording their
beliefs over the Jews, even blaming them for Jesus’ death.
This is foolishness. But being a true Christ-follower is
a different kind of foolishness. The reason I can relate to Paul and Silas is because
some people followed and some people resisted, and I experience this every day.
It gets even messier still because some of those that follow are in it for
themselves, while some of them are in it because they actually believe in Jesus
with all the challenges and struggles that entails. And even that’s probably
too simple because many of those who do not follow remain pondering in their
hearts what all of this means; they just aren’t in a place to take a leap of
faith. I truly believe that we are all created with a yearning for God inside
of us; that God doesn’t give some the gift of faith and others the gift of skepticism
or anything like that. Instead, we all are born to be Jesus-followers and on
some level we all want God to fill that hole inside of us, but we are
complicated people faced with immense challenges to our faith. To assume that I
get it and you don’t, or you get it and somebody else doesn’t, is the wrong way
to look at faith. I don’t blame the person who is not persuaded by Paul or
Silas or you or me, and I don’t blame the one doing the persuading, as if
perhaps they could have done a better job of it somehow. Rather, I pray for
each to come to faith in their own time.
This world is messy. Every one of us is messy. We have to
remember that we all reject God on a daily basis. It’s mostly just my high view
of myself that allows me to believe I’m doing better at this Christ-following
thing than the friendly neighborhood atheist down the street. Belief matters,
but let’s not pretend belief is as simple or as perfect as the categories we
create—Christian/non-Christian, saved/damned, faith-filled/doubting,
sinner/saint. We are flawed. Paul was flawed. But Paul was persistent, and I
think that’s about as much good as we can be in this life. Just keep at it.
Don’t get dismayed that some will be persuaded and some won’t. Don’t focus on
the rejections. Don’t let the fact that somebody got upset stop you from trying
in the future.
I was listening to an NPR chat with the poet-philosopher
David Whyte this past week and he was talking about meaning in life, and he
defined purposeful living as those times where we explore where we end and the
other things begin. Life is lived at that frontier of where we end and the
world begins. So, I think, is faith, because it is letting go of ourselves, our
needs, our desires, our guilt, and our shame, for the sake not of persuading
everybody—some will be, some won’t—but because that’s the only place where we
will be alive: At the frontier of our selves. We spend so much time not living
out there, happy to retreat to the bar, to nights on the sofa and to mindless
technology and media. These keep us from actually, truly, living. To live is to
take the chance of discovering that you are less important, or more important,
than you imagined.
Live
through your successes, learn from your failures. You will have both. I can’t
tell you how many chess games I’ve lost; how many times I haven’t been the best
pastor or person; how many times I’ve disappointed Kate in small ways and
large; how much work I’ve left undone; how many things I’ve forgotten, people
I’ve unintentionally neglected. I can’t tell you how often I fail except that
it’s directly proportional to how much I try, and that’s exactly what God would
have us do. I also can’t tell you how many times I don’t try, how often I
retreat to the comfortable place inside of me, where I refuse to explore the
end of myself and refuse to put myself out there. This is easy, but it’s
meaningless; it’s a waste of a precious life.
Paul was a big failure. Terrible persecutor of
Christians. Awful person. Then, after his conversion, he was imprisoned again
and again, he failed to convince people in town after town, he was rejected by
Jewish elites and Roman authorities, his relationships suffered. He was driving
the struggle bus all over the Middle East. And
yet, nobody looks at Paul’s life like that, because of what he did do. He
failed and he succeeded. He jumped in with both feet and changed the world for
it.
You are called to follow in those footsteps. It won’t be
enough; you won’t change everybody. In fact, you may change very little. But
that’s not the reason you do it. You do it because that’s how you fill that
God-space inside of you. That’s how you follow Jesus. Jesus is found at the
intersection of ourselves and our world. We have so many different talents,
different gifts, different passions. We aren’t all going to be telling the
world about Jesus with words; some of us don’t talk so good, ya know? But we
will tell the world about Jesus in a thousand ways as we meet the world at the
end of ourselves. Then, we will show the world Jesus through our work, through
our effort, through the way we handle defeat and the way we handle success. We
will tell the world about Jesus by what we value most, what we value little,
how we use our time, how we pray, and how we are vulnerable or how we are not.
Some will be persuaded. Some will not. It’s not your job to force it; you can’t
anyway.
Your job is simply to live as if the death and resurrection
of Jesus Christ matters. Then you will be Paul. You’ll have some success, some
failures. Probably to the rest of the world you’ll just look like another
normal person, but you’ll know better and others will sense it as well. This is
the “best life now” that Joel Osteen tries to guarantee but it comes apart from
riches, apart even from health or security. None of that is promised. What is
promised is salvation. At the end of the day, that’s the only way things will
add up. You are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. It makes all the
difference. So you are free to try, free to explore where you end and the world
begins, free from shame and regret. You are free to be more, do more. It’s what
Paul did; it’s what you’re called to.
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