Fleeing the World Is Not a Faithful Witness
Fleeing the World Is Not a Faithful Witness
Obviously, we need tactics to deal with temptation, but abandoning the world to be true to God is as wrong as it is old.
Bethany was taught that boys had evil minds, filled only with thoughts of sexual conquest. She was also taught her body was evil, only a subject about sex, sexual attractiveness, and sexual possibilities that were to be shut down at all costs until marriage. The width of Bethany’s straps and the length of her shorts were metrics of her purity. No one wants to be thought of as impure, to have impurity as the definition of oneself. Fear of impurity regarding sexual issues can come to dominate spirituality.
It is understandable that many parents in the 1990s feared how far the sexual revolution of the 1960’s had come. The consequences of AIDS, premarital sex, and unintended pregnancy were real. Unfortunately, fear is a very bad master in the realm of discipleship. Fear tells us a wrong story and leads to wrong goals. Fear makes us want to flee: flee our minds and bodies, and to flee the world that tempts our minds and bodies.
Obviously, we need tactics to deal with temptation, but abandoning the world to be true to God is as wrong as it is old.
For example, in crowds listening to Jesus were people who held the views of the Essenes, the Qumran sect, the quietest, pietist, separatists of his day. Jesus would have been out of harmony with them because he was too worldly. He went to dinner parties at the home of notorious tax collectors. He spoke to a Samaritan woman at a well. He touched lepers. In short, Jesus failed to live up to the Essene expectation of having nothing to do with the world. Most Essenes did not hear Jesus and “repent and believe” as Jesus called for. They simply rejected him because he did not fit their previously held commitments about what it meant to faithfully be the people of God.
Fleeing the world to find bunkers in privatized Christian groupings is a classic missional/ecclesial mistake.
We cannot be agents of Jesus and his Gospel of the kingdom unless we are prepared to be proximate to human sin and brokenness. Bruised reeds need a tender, healing touch. Smoldering wicks need the oxygenation that comes from gentle, loving breath. Excluded lepers need the gift of inclusive touch.
Jesus knew that his calling was impossible to achieve from the caves of the Qumran. Messianic ministry was a public reality. The kingdom of God is a this-world reality. The people of the kingdom must find a redemptive place in the world as well. There is, of course, nothing wrong with the gathered, worshiping, discipling Church. But those gathered-inside activities are not fully definitional. They need the missional aspect of being scattered, being proximate to the world, working in it, doing evangelism, justice, mission and peace-making.
The debate raised in this arena brings focus to the missiological concept of contextualization: the translation of biblical meanings into contemporary cultural contexts. Images, metaphors and rituals that are current in the culture are used to make the biblical message both understandable and impactful. This is precisely what Jesus was doing in parables. Contextualization assigns control to Scripture while reminding us that the Bible must be thought about, translated into, and preached in categories relevant to one’s cultural context. David Bosch has rightly said: the Christian faith never exists except as translated into a culture.[1]
My kingdom proposal, contra the Essenes, makes missional application of the work of Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve. The call of Christians is to fully differentiate as followers of Jesus while staying connected to the various manifestations of human brokenness through Jesus’ peace (John 14:27; 16:33), being Spirit-inspired (Luke 12:11, 12), non-anxious people. Such engagement cannot be done from a modern cave.
Jesus is the premier model of differentiated connection.
He had a “cave of separation” so to speak in the realm of Trinity, of heaven. But he decidedly left his realm to come to the realm of earth—and did so with no fear of being tainted by the contact and interaction implied in incarnation. As Eugene Peterson so profoundly articulated it in The Message Version of the prologue to John: Jesus pitched his tent and moved into our neighborhood.
This is what explains one of the great controversies that surrounded Jesus: why, in stark contrast to the religious leaders of his day, was he joyfully proximate to sinners? Why was he at a party at Levi’s house? Why did he speak to a Samaritan woman, alone, in public? Why did he and prostitutes seem to have rapport? Why did he want to have dinner with Zacchaeus? Why did a sinful woman get close enough to Jesus to do something intensely intimate: weep on his feet?
Answer: For the Son of Man came to find and restore the lost. (Luke 19:10, MSG) In doing those things Jesus is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His nature (Hebrews 1.3). God, demonstrating his solidarity with marred creation, called to fallen Adam: Where are you? Ezekiel further revealed God’s heart: I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak (Ez. 34:16). It is that same spirit, that same bent of will, that same desire that provoked the sending of the Son and the sending of the Spirit to carry on the work of the Son in and through the Church.
There came a moment when God’s attitude expressed in Jesus was causing controversy, leading to condemnation from religious leaders:
By this time a lot of men and women of questionable reputation were hanging around Jesus, listening intently.
The Pharisees and religion scholars were not pleased, not at all pleased.
They growled, “He takes in sinners and eats meals with them, treating them like old friends.”
Their grumbling triggered this story.
Luke 15, MSG
Snarling legalism, mal-practiced religion and self-centered grumbling was the interpersonal soil from which emerged three of the best-known stories in all literature: a lost coin, a lost sheep, and a lost son. Each of them sheds light on The public searching for God.
In another setting this happened:
When the Pharisees saw [Jesus] keeping this kind of company, they had a fit, and lit into [his] followers. “What kind of example is this from your Teacher, acting cozy with crooks and misfits?”
Jesus, overhearing, shot back, “Who needs a doctor: the healthy or the sick? Go figure out what this Scripture means: ‘I’m after mercy, not religion.’ I’m here to invite outsiders, not coddle insiders.” (Matthew 9:12-13, MSG)
The Apostle Paul sought to mimic Jesus, saying of himself:
I have voluntarily become a servant to any and all in order to reach a wide range of people: religious, nonreligious, meticulous moralists, loose-living immoralists,
the defeated, the demoralized—whoever.
I didn’t take on their way of life.
I kept my bearings in Christ—
but I entered their world
and tried to experience things from their point of view.
I’ve become just about every sort of servant there is
in my attempts to lead those I meet into a God-saved life.
(1 Corinthians 9, MSG)
The positive aspect of being in the world cannot be lost in an effort to not be of the world. Giving a commencement address, Dallas Willard put it beautifully:
How are we to think of in but not of? Think of a desert landscape. Dust and dryness as far as you can see. But right in the middle of it a spring of water bubbles up, forming a pool of life and refreshment for all who come by. Do you have that picture?
Now the spring and the pool are in the desert but they are not of it. They do not partake of the nature of the desert but of rain and snow and limpid streams on far away mountains that feed the springs through hidden passageways in the earth. We know how that works. Think of this applying to you. Indeed, it applies to everyone who makes contact with Jesus Christ and draws life from Him.
…you can know the action of God in your place [in the world]. You can live the presence of God in the midst of a spiritual wasteland. Your soul can be both a conduit and a receptacle of those refreshing streams that come from the mountain heights and course through the earth’s hidden passageways.[2]
In its seeking of spiritual transformation into Christlikeness, the Church is aiming at this: the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over me (John 14:30). “No hold over me” is complete renunciation and separation for the sake of offering welcome and embrace to those with whom we interact. Paul, following the example of his Lord, sought the profound Christian both/and: renounce the world (that which is led by Satan, the Prince of this World, and is contrary and hostile to God and his purposes) and announce Jesus within specific contexts of the world.
The call of the gospel is for the Church to implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love.[3] This means we cannot repeat the mistake, sincere as I am sure it was, of the Essenes of Qumran. As a prominent scholar puts it:
…it is impossible to commit oneself to Christ in isolation from our culture. A measure of solidarity with our environment is inevitable; we are products of it and as Christians we are responsible to it as salt and light…a commitment to God frees us from subservience to lesser principles [of culture] and helps us keep [these lesser principles] in proper perspective.[4]
Separatism is not the best, most faithful way to be the people of God in our space and time.
Reading the news on any given day gives understandable motivation to flee the world. But surrounded by profound need, it is much better, though self-sacrificial, to remain connected to the communities of daily life through confidence in the Jesus-project and the empowering of the Spirit.
In my next newsletter, we’ll take a peek into the Herodians, a clear warning sign that the Church must never engage in Christian Nationalism.
End Notes
[1] Believing in the Future by David J. Bosch
[2] http://www.dwillard.org/articles/artview.asp?artID=109
[3] N. T. Wright. (n.d.). AZQuotes.com. Retrieved September 20, 2017, from AZQuotes.com Web site: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/1196196
[4] Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, Elwell; p. 215, 216.