Everything is Awesome

So, tonight again,
really,
at this point in history as we move into our setting,
we have pretty much lost the language of heresy as a church declaration,
but we can still talk
about heresy as a bad idea,
or we can at least talk about things that may be problematic
in terms of how we think about them.
And to do that tonight,
we’re going to take a little bit of a detour through some philosophy,
which may not sound exciting,
but then we’ll get to some places that takes us.
So the place we’re going to start is what some call postmodernism.
And postmodernism is the idea that we are in a cultural change,
that we’re in a shift
when we look back from say industrialization to modernism to now postmodernism,
what comes after modernism, that we are in this cultural shift in which the assumptions and practices
of the world in general are changing.
Now, I have some skepticism about postmodernism.
A, we’ve named it while we’re in it,
and I think that’s a little arrogant.
It probably is for future generations to determine whether we broke new ground or not.
Having said that, though, the people that point to shifts and trends,
I do think make a strong case,
I just don’t know if I buy the idea that we can say we live in a period
of change until the future looks back on us.
It may or may, it could correct,
and lots of things could happen.
But for whatever that means,
postmodern is the way that many people will talk about the
very late 20th century to the current 21st century and into the predictable future.
And it is a move away from some of the ideas of modernism,
and I’m not going to go into
that.
You can read thousands of books about this if you want,
and some of them would be good.
But one of the major tenets of postmodern is the idea that we deny the metanarrative,
which sounds like philosophy class, right?
So the metanarrative is the idea that there’s something that is meta, big,
and narrative, the big story.
In other words, we deny the idea that there’s an overarching story that fits everyone,
or that applies to everyone.
We deny the idea,
if you want to put it in these terms,
of a universal truth,
something that’s true for everybody.
Now in modernism,
a great deal of stock was put in science and reason,
rational,
logic, those kind of things were thought to be the kind of things that were true for everybody
and led to conclusions that were “universally true.” Well in postmodernism,
there is no universal truth.
Our personal story is our truth.
So what’s true for you, by definition,
may not be true for me,
and vice versa.
Now this is helpful in some instances,
where this has opened our eyes to different cultural stories,
where this has made us sensitive to the fact that I can’t speak really to what
it’s like to grow up as a young African American female in an inner city,
that I can’t project
my story upon that,
that I need to listen to that story in order to learn from it.
That’s helpful.
But this has had some downsides also.
For instance,
modernism,
in regard to gender,
would say,
“Apparently there are some disparities
in culture between men and women,
and we want to work to kind of even that up.”
As a father of two daughters,
we want to live in a world where if you’re male or female,
you’re paid for what you’re worth.
That if you do the job,
if you’re a female doing a job, doing it well,
there’s no reason a male should make more than you do,
unless they’re doing their job better.
That there should be an even playing field.
Well,
that makes sense.
Then postmodernism comes along,
and when postmodernism gets in the gender discussion, it says,
“Well, what do you mean by gender?”
Well,
we mean there’s male and female.
Oh, no.
That’s what you think there is.
I think there’s something else.
If you go talk to a gender person right now,
you’ll find that there were,
as of last count,
29 suggested pronouns to talk about these various categories of self-identified gender.
And that is the key term,
self-identified.
In postmodernism,
the self determines truth.
So what is true for me,
you have to then respect.
I get to determine it.
And I’m speaking in generalizations here,
but I think we do see that.
Another place that I think we see this,
I find this fascinating,
poor Roger’s head’s going to probably explode.
I’ve been lately fascinated,
if you get on YouTube,
if you want something that just boggle your mind,
get on YouTube and learn about the Flat Earth Conferences.
That significant groups of people,
and this is the interesting part,
who are not idiots.
Some of them are educated,
capable people,
and they get together under this assumption
that the government has pulled the wool over our eyes,
that the Earth is essentially a
big table with a rim around the edge,
and they literally,
as far as I can tell,
believe this to be true.
Now, the ancient, the ancient, ancient Egyptians figured out very simple ways that led them
to think the world is round,
the Greeks after them.
Dig three holes in the ground and watch what the shadow does.
It tells you there’s a curve.
If it’s flat, you should be able to see down all three holes to the bottom at the same time.
You can’t.
There are lots of,
but the denial of science and the idea of a personal truth,
and by the way, like conspiracies,
and we can throw that probably a different twist,
but that there are reasonable and intelligent people that you would meet and you’d think,
“Oh, they seem pretty good,” until they tell you,
“Oh, by the way, the Earth is flat.”
And then you say,
“Uh,
okay.”
So,
in this setting,
religion,
rather than a search for ultimate truth because there isn’t one,
becomes a personal truth,
a personal preference,
or it becomes a deception.
And I think it’s not surprising that at the end of the 20th century and moving into the 21st century,
we saw a wave of academic atheism.
We saw popular atheists.
We saw atheists writing books and doing podcasts,
and we still see some of that.
Why?
Because the idea of ultimate truth is a lie unless it happens to be that there is no ultimate
truth, but that’s a philosophy thing.
So, there is this new wave of atheism,
and then there are two other responses,
and this is what I want to kind of focus our discussion on tonight.
Neither of these are new,
but I think we are seeing them in some new ways.
The first is the word syncretism.
Now, when you see the prefix sin, synonyms,
that means similar,
alike. So, to make things alike,
essentially, syncretism is when you take elements from one thing and
you blend them and mix them with another thing.
So, you take schools of thought or religions,
and you take some of their practices and some of their ideas,
and you sort of mash them together.
Michael would call it the hot dish.
I’d call it the casserole.
Syncretism is the casserole of spiritual ideas.
You just shove things together,
and you mix in those various practices or ideas.
Now, this isn’t new.
In the Old Testament,
when the people moved into the land of Cana,
they began to interact
with other gods.
Specifically,
the two that show up the most in the Old Testament story,
the god Baal, B-A-A-L,
and the goddess Asherah.
And Asherah is the goddess of fertility,
and the symbol of the goddess of fertility is
just a pole stuck in the ground.
And she is the one that the Canaanites would pray to for crops and for seasons,
for fertile,
to be fertile, for children.
And the Israelites, if the story is accurate,
become kind of seduced by the ideas of the
Bails and the Asherah cult,
and they begin to practice after them.
And if you look at 2 Kings,
the 21st chapter,
there’s a king named Manasseh.
Verse 7 of that chapter tells us that Manasseh takes an Asherah pole and puts it inside the
final straws for God, by the way.
But he thinks,
well, we’ll come to the temple,
we’ll worship Yahweh,
and then we might as well
have the Asherah pole right there.
We’ll just mix it together.
It’ll be like a one-stop place.
We can do all that in one place.
We see some of this in the New Testament,
where there’s sacrifices of meat and things to idols,
and there are these in 1 Corinthians,
there are these meals in the church that seem to kind of have
some pagan practice put into them.
Paul’s a little suspicious.
He’s trying to sort that out with them.
And we also see this in missionary practice.
One of the things that missionaries sometimes did was to try and appropriate local practices
and then Christianize them.
So if the people did something,
if they had some ritual,
say a sweat tent or going out by yourself
to be self-sufficient for a young man,
they would kind of try to take that and Christianize it and say,
well, you can still do that,
but now it means this.
Now you’re going to go off,
and instead of praying to the spirits and seeking guidance from the trees and the rocks,
you’re going to talk to Jesus for three days.
You can still do those things,
and they kind of put them together.
Well, in postmodernism,
we essentially have this buffet of religious ideas,
and people feel comfortable picking and choosing which ones that they want.
So I know people,
for instance, who would talk about themselves as a Christian Buddhist.
Arguably, that’s not a thing that can exist.
It certainly can exist in modernism.
It can exist in orthodoxy.
In postmodern,
the idea that I can be Buddhist and Christian,
sure,
that’s not really a problem.
An interesting place we’ve seen this mix.
This has always existed to some extent,
but you might remember that we talked early on
that in the history of the church,
there was a heresy,
not Martianism, the other one,
that held that you had to follow all the Jewish laws,
that you could believe in Christ,
but you had to continue to be Jewish.
I’ll shout out a word in a little while,
and you’ll know that’s what I was trying to think of.
Well,
in the last 50 years,
and I would say in my own time in the ministry,
so say 25 years,
there has been a rise of what is called Messianic Judaism.
Interestingly,
many of those people were Jewish,
to begin with, and who came to an idea that Christ was a Messiah,
but they wanted to retain their roots.
They wanted to still do the feasts and festivals,
they kept the kosher diet,
they practiced the Sabbath laws.
Interestingly,
though, the other wave that has come into that are Christians who were Jewish,
who decide they’re going to start doing that.
I have some very good friends who are faithful Christians who keep a kosher diet,
who keep the Sabbath law,
who hold the feasts and festivals and try to practice those when they can.
They are combining the ideas of following the law with the idea of Christianity.
And interestingly,
they are doing something that the church at one point said,
“At least you didn’t have to do,
and probably you shouldn’t do,
depending on how you understand the law.”
Now, I’m not saying they shouldn’t do that necessarily.
I also know Christians that will talk about reincarnation,
they’ll comfortably talk about believing in reincarnation,
which is historically problematic.
I know Christians that have visited other countries,
or specifically Native American reservations,
and brought back to their churches practices that they’ve seen there,
that are outside the Christian tradition.
Maybe one of the most obvious places,
there is a group,
Jews for Jesus, they send us a letter every year,
and about this time of year,
they go out into churches,
and they’ll come to the church,
and they’ll do a Seder meal.
They’ll take you through the Passover meal,
and they’ll do that with a Christian spin on it.
They’ll blend together what Judaism does,
and what Christianity believes,
and they’ll mix them.
And I’m not saying that’s wrong,
and I’m not saying it’s not helpful,
we can learn a lot from that.
But it is this idea of putting things together.
I think I could possibly even argue that if you consider culture an entity,
we have seen some of this blending in regard to things like worship music.
Worship music that has not only copied cultural music,
but in some cases,
I’m aware of several churches
whose praise bands regularly do non-Christian music,
but do it in the service.
So I’m not making this up,
I know of a church where they on somewhat regular basis will play the Bon Jovi song,
living on a prayer,
because it has the word “prayer” in it,
and they have appropriated that for worship.
Well, if you consider culture an outside entity,
what have you done?
You’ve mashed things together that…
I’ll just leave it there,
you’ve mashed things together.
So that’s called syncretism,
the idea that we just push things together,
whether they fit or not,
we make them fit,
or at least we don’t care if they fit.
The second response is called pluralism,
and pluralism is related to syncretism,
but in this one,
rather than to mix things together,
this is to assert that each thing has its own truth.
So in a religious context,
this is the classic,
well,
Christianity is true for me,
Islam is true for my neighbor,
Hinduism is true for that person,
so everything is true,
it’s just true for the person who finds truth in it,
that where you experience truth,
there you have truth,
capital T.
So to get here,
there’s either no ultimate truth,
so it doesn’t really matter if something is meaningful to you,
it’s true for you,
or there is ultimate truth,
but nobody has it,
so everybody’s small truth points to a bigger truth.
And this has been around for quite some time, this isn’t new,
but it is popular.
Nothing in this case is exclusively true,
it’s inclusively true, there’s always more truth.
You have a truth,
and I have a truth,
and we get them all together,
and nobody’s right,
nobody’s wrong.
If I were to point out in a group that has tried to live with these premises,
I might point to a group like the Unitarians,
who essentially have said,
we’re going to be a church,
but not have any doctrine.
We’re not going to have anything that we objectively proclaim as true,
except tolerance and inclusivity,
so everything is true here,
everything’s fine, come in and look for your truth.
And when you hear those groups,
they’re fairly easy to identify because they’ll talk to you about discovering your truth,
not the truth, but your truth.
And again,
that’s not a criticism,
there’s some goodness in that,
but understand that you’re hearing something that probably fits in this category.
Interestingly enough, this is not new either.
I just finished a very interesting book written by a historian about how it was that Christianity started with,
say, 20 people in the first century,
and by the fourth century is around 25 million people.
Half the empire, by the year 400,
is Christian.
And to get through that story,
the author goes into the ancient Rome and the religious situation of ancient Rome,
and it’s really fascinating.
If he’s correct and he makes a very strong case,
there are thousands of gods recognized by the Romans,
and yet there are really no religions.
There’s not Zeusism,
there’s not Apolloism.
If you have a local god,
you sacrifice to that god,
you make offerings to that god.
Essentially, you try not to make that god angry because that turns bad for everybody.
So you have to keep the gods happy,
but you don’t pit the gods against one another.
This god isn’t true and this god is false.
They’re all true, they’re all fine.
And the thing that gets Christians the most negative attention is that they buck that system,
that they say of their god,
he’s the one.
And to come to Christ,
you have to deny all the rest of the gods.
And this author makes the case that more than anything else,
this is what angers Rome about the Christians.
Now,
the Jews are also doing that,
but the Jews are not evangelistic.
So the Jews are sort of,
they’re an oddity in the Roman world.
Yeah, they think there’s one god and they don’t think the rest of these are god,
but they don’t bother anybody and will leave them alone.
The Christians go out with this message and begin telling people.
And every pagan that comes into the fold is expected to renounce the fact that there are other gods,
which is going to do what?
It’s going to anger those other gods and turn bad for Rome.
So it’s this that really fuels the fires against Christianity,
requiring converts to renounce other gods.
So if we have these two ideas,
what do we make of them from what we could call an orthodox position?
An orthodox belief and ortho is right.
So a right belief,
a correct belief, which is an arrogant term and we may or may not have a correct belief.
But orthodoxy is the word we use to refer to the primary teaching of the history of church.
In other words, it’s the standard that the church has set and it hopefully is correct.
At least we believe it to be helpful.
So what do we make of syncretism and pluralism from an orthodox position,
from a typically Christian position?
Well,
there are lots of problems.
The danger of syncretism is that it elevates personal preference versus the Christian tradition.
In other words, our ancestors, our fathers and mothers in the faith have handed down practices and ideas.
And we feel free to just grab from other places and sort of baptize these practices and try to make them fit.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing,
but there’s certainly a danger in it because we may be introducing ideas that don’t belong.
Pluralism, I would argue,
is the more dangerous of the two because pluralism asks us to compromise what has been the foundational assertion of Christianity that Jesus Christ is uniquely true.
That Jesus Christ is true truth with a capital T.
That God in Christ gives us what is true for all people.
That we are all sinners in need of redemption and that Christ came in love to rescue us from our sin.
To open the way to God for all people.
And we have historically said that that’s true for everyone.
If you live in Africa,
if you live in India,
if you live in Spirit Lake,
that the truth of Christ is a truth for all people.
And when you make an ultimate truth claim,
you are hopefully graciously and hopefully humbly saying that anything else that claims to be ultimate truth isn’t.
And this, of course, is where religions get in trouble.
This is not to say that we should be ugly or arrogant or loud or aggressive with this claim.
But if Christ is what the church and who the church has claimed Him to be,
then that’s not the same as Hinduism.
It’s not a matter of preference,
what we profess and what we follow.
It’s not all equals that point to some bigger truth.
Christ is the truth.
And in that sense,
I would say that pluralism represents the larger threat to the church as we move into the 21st century.
The idea that it ultimately doesn’t matter what we claim as true is going to put us squarely at odds with the historic teaching of the Christian faith.
Which, of course,
gets us to a conversation of a word that has been popular when I was in seminary.
I would like to have a dollar for every time I heard this word in my three years of seminary.
Tolerance.
Now,
tolerance is a wonderful idea.
The idea that we live in a society where we’re free to pursue different ideas,
where we’re free to disagree,
where we’re free to have different ideas about what is ultimately true.
We tolerate one another.
We have tolerance.
The church should clearly be a place of tolerance.
With the exception,
that tolerance is always subject to the idea that Jesus Christ is the way,
the truth, and the life.
The way, the truth,
the life.
Tolerance,
in my humble opinion,
does not mean that we have to bow to pluralism.
It means that we are respectful.
It means that we are humble.
It means that we listen.
We don’t have all the truth.
We may learn great lessons from other religions,
from other faiths, from people of other faiths.
We may see in them what we want to emulate,
the kind of dignity,
the kind of passion and ministry and compassion.
But ultimately, that’s all subject to what we proclaim about Jesus,
that He is the ultimate thing that is true.
And as we move forward in the church,
particularly in the mainline “liberal” church,
we’re going to have to come up with some…
I think we’re going to have to define what we mean by tolerance,
and what the relationship between tolerance and truth is.
There is a line there that is sometimes difficult to find,
and the church has struggled with it at times.
So I want to finish with one other idea,
but let’s stop here for a minute.
What do you have?
Questions, comments, thoughts?
Makes sense, doesn’t make sense, don’t buy it.
What do you got?
Yes, sir?
I think the hardest thing I’ve had over the last ten years of teaching at a college is
that kids don’t know what to do with the pluralism of the tolerance.
They don’t like to be judgmental, but yet,
if you can direct your grandkids and your kids,
in the end they really see that you can’t be bold.
But when they get there,
they’ve grown up in a world that looks like that.
I think the culture…
I think our culture would like us to believe that tolerance and pluralism are essentially the same.
That to be tolerant is to be pluralist.
I think that’s a place that the church may have to challenge the culture.
If it wants to stay orthodox,
whatever that means.
The problems that the church faces today are not unlike the problems it has faced historically.
It’s just in a different form,
and we could go back to Luther again who dealt with the same thing.
And his friends asked him to be tolerant of the Pope,
tolerant of the church.
Come on, we can find a way to work with these guys.
And Luther said,
“No way.
You can have a conscience,
but it has to be in line with the Scripture.
I mean, it has to line up with the Scripture, guys.
Sorry.” And that’s the only way I look at it.
So, historically, I think you could find different periods of history in which we face the same problem.
Yeah, I think I would argue that people being people,
we rarely, if ever, run into something new.
We run into new versions of it.
New evolutions of it.
But I find it rare that we encounter something that hasn’t cropped up before in the Christian story,
in the human story.
It seems to me,
Clint,
that the problem of orthodoxy,
though, is how does it change?
Mm-hmm.
Is it still changing?
Or,
if I hear you correctly,
“Orthodoxy,” by your definition is,
“the relationship of Jesus to the inimidic distance.”
Well, I would say that orthodoxy represents,
in our tradition, the historic guidance of the faith.
So, the doctrines and practices that have been handed down to us,
and if you would use the word “vetted” by the history of the church.
Does that make sense?
Not quite.
So, in the midst of,
let’s go back to early in the class,
early in these discussions,
Trinity battles over the Trinity.
Is Jesus divine?
Is He not?
Is there a spirit?
What is that?
Is it 3-1 that doesn’t make any sense?
And eventually, the church came out and said,
“The truth we proclaim is God is one,
and God is three,
and since then, that has functioned as an orthodox,
a right belief, if you will,
about the Trinity.” So, that represents the position of orthodoxy.
Now,
you’re asking a great,
and I think a difficult question.
What is orthodoxy in a splintered church?
In other words, among 40,000 denominations,
and in a world that is increasingly global,
what do we mean?
If we’re going to talk about the big picture of Christianity,
there is almost nothing we all agree on.
Maybe with the exception of the death and resurrection of Christ,
but even then, there’d be some people that would maybe stand outside of that position.
So, then you begin to talk about orthodoxy as within your own tradition.
What does it mean for a Presbyterian to proclaim an orthodox faith?
What are the things that we can reasonably expect that a Presbyterian would believe about God,
and about Christ, and about humanity,
and about living as a disciple?
And obviously,
as you can imagine,
you don’t get very far in those discussions
before you start hitting differences of opinion.
And one of the markers,
and I would call this,
some people would put this in postmodernism.
I would say it was already rearing its head pretty well in late modernism,
so it may not be a modern thing at all.
It may be just a shift in culture.
But one of the tenets that we seem to see in postmodernism is a kind of distrust of institution.
So, you don’t need to get a degree,
for instance.
The idea that the college,
that the church,
that the government, the historic institutions of humanity are suspect.
And as such,
you don’t need them.
And in that suspicious environment,
it becomes very difficult for a church
to talk about orthodoxy.
So in the Presbyterian church,
the idea that the General Assembly has some authority
to hand down right thinking,
your average Presbyterians are saying,
“Eh, I don’t know those people,
and they’re not telling me what to…”
It gets difficult.
Particularly in a church like ours,
where we’ve tried to leave room for lots of people,
where we’ve said, “We want very few things that you have to…”
I mean, we want room to disagree and to have various opinions,
and so orthodoxy gets messy.
It’s hard.
So the challenge to orthodoxy tolerance,
is that the challenge?
Because the more we tolerate,
the more we erode what the orthodox faith is.
So we all want to be tolerant,
and in fact, that’s the challenge of today,
is that we don’t want to be seen as intolerant.
That shuts us up.
We talk about political correctness,
and it’s the same thing in the church.
We’re afraid to speak up because we don’t want to offend someone.
So my fear is that orthodoxy is eroded by tolerance.
And I’m not saying you can’t be tolerant.
No, understood. I think there’s some truth to that.
Michael and I have had this conversation,
and to be honest,
I think he’s better at it than I am,
because he studied probably when this was more of an issue.
So we have orthodoxy.
We have this other word,
“orthopraxy.”
And this is right belief.
“Praxy” is practice.
This is right behavior.
This is right practice.
And there are some who make the case,
and I believe convincingly,
that we are replacing orthodoxy with orthopraxy.
What does that mean?
That means, what do you do as a Christian versus what do you believe?
The idea of having the right beliefs is going away,
and the idea of doing the right thing is replacing it.
So what’s the right thing?
Be tolerant,
be loving,
be open,
be engaged, be in mission.
I mean, there are good things on that list,
and there are questionable things on that list.
But I find this a helpful paradigm that we are more and more talking about Christianity
as a thing you do than a thing you believe,
and there’s upsides to that.
There’s some good to that,
but there’s some danger in it
because at some level we may say that then what we believe doesn’t matter
as long as we do Christian things.
And obviously we are at our best when right behavior is related to right believing,
when good ideas and good practices support one another
and don’t work against one another or replace one another.
The church is at its best when these things are hand in hand.
Clint, I see a lot of belief groups that are replacing the church,
and that’s exactly how they look at things,
what’s right and good and all these things,
but the thing that they’re missing and the thing they talk about,
Oprah and all of it she is doing, and the secret,
I mean they just keep coming out, keep coming out.
They all sound wonderful.
They all sound like God.
God’s not in it.
And that is troubling to me that people think that they need to rediscover
and can’t believe in an ancient period that started their church.
I think that’s a huge challenge for our generation and our church.
Well,
one of the things this suggests,
I think,
if we think about how we represent the church in this era,
this is not likely to be productive.
If you encounter the person on the street and start arguing about what’s a right belief,
your belief versus their belief,
in this day and age,
that’s not likely fruitful.
Now, an exchange of ideas,
a sharing of what do you believe about ultimate truth,
what do I believe,
what do you believe about goodness,
about badness, about struggle,
about fairness,
about all of those justice, all those issues,
that that can be productive.
But trying to convince somebody of a right belief is perhaps not going to be the best place we start in the 21st century.
Perhaps a better place may be connected to this idea of practice.
Hey,
you think this thing and I think this thing,
but here’s a house that got knocked down in a tornado.
Let’s work on it together and be in relationship.
Orthopraxy probably gives us a better opportunity to be relational and then move this direction.
I think in postmodernism,
it may be hard to start here and move here with someone.
It may be more likely to go the other way,
from praxy to doxy.
I have not put a lot of thought into that,
but off the top of my head,
that feels like it makes some sense.
I wish you had the opportunity to have the dialogue and express how you forgot.
Yeah, and let’s be honest,
I mean, in fairness,
the church has not always handled the idea that we have right ideas very well.
One of my favorite cartoons is clipped somewhere in my office.
It’s a Peanuts cartoon and some of you have heard this in a sermon.
Lucy is talking to her brother Linus and says,
“When I grow up,
I may be a missionary.”
And he says, “Yeah?” And he says,
“Yeah, today at lunch,
I convinced a boy that my religion was better than his.”
And Linus says, “How’d you do that?” And she says,
“I hit him with my lunchbox.”
Well, there’s been a lot of lunchbox evangelism in the church.
We’ve hit people over the head with our truth,
and we’re paying the price for some of that.
So we have to be,
if we have anything that’s true,
we didn’t come up with it.
It was revealed to us.
It’s not our truth,
it’s God’s truth,
and therefore we should handle it very humbly and very graciously.
I want to finish with,
just because the last word,
I get the last word,
so it’s going to be one of my favorites.
And this, I do think, is a heresy of our age.
I think it is rampant.
It’s the lens through which I see lots of stuff.
I’m probably not even going to spell it right.
But,
yeah, you got it.
I even got it written,
and I can’t spell it.
Too many S’s?
Oh, oh no, okay.
If that’s not right,
people listening to this whole podcast assume I spelled it right,
and you people just look at it and assume it’s right,
okay?
I think a very strong case can be made that we live in an age of tremendous self-importance,
that we live in an age of narcissism, self-love.
Now,
self-love is,
to an extent,
an okay thing,
until it gets out of check,
and I think we are here.
I think that pendulum has swung very far,
and in the midst of trying to prop up self-esteem and treat people well,
I think we fell into this place where the self has become,
as it probably always has, our biggest idol.
My way,
my idea,
I don’t have to listen to people.
If you
buy into this idea of narcissism,
you can see it everywhere,
and I think I can see it everywhere,
the heresy of the self.
And again, one of the great challenges for the church of our day is going to be gently reminding people it’s not about you.
You don’t need to be on the pedestal.
I don’t need to be on the pedestal.
And I would say we have a lot of work to do in this regard,
and not to pick on anybody,
but particularly our younger generations.
We worked very hard to make them feel good about themselves,
and we’re
now wondering if we overdid it,
and it will be interesting.
It will be interesting.
I don’t want to make this political,
because I know we have lots of…
But I watched a news story the other morning in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting.
As you know,
there had been a wave of students who have felt motivated to march.
They interviewed a young girl,
I think she was about 10, 12 years old,
and she said,
“We’re going to march,
we’re going to do this,
and we are not going to stop until we get what we want.”
Now,
I’m not going to touch in this group gun control and Second Amendment,
but understand that that is a 10-year-old child getting on the news about an incredibly difficult issue in our country’s history and future,
saying we won’t stop until we get what we want,
and somebody thinks that’s a good idea.
Now, if you’re going to make a law,
you’re not going to ask a 10-year-old,
“Hey, tell me about the Second Amendment and how we exercise it in a reasonable,
responsible way in our history and our future.”
And I’m not trying to be callous,
why do we care what a 10-year-old thinks about?
We don’t need to talk to 10-year-olds.
A 10-year-old,
I’m glad you feel passionate.
Wonderful.
You don’t need to be on the news, honey.
Go clean your room.
No,
I’m starting to sound more and more like an old grumpy guy,
but again, there’s an interview, maybe you saw this,
a 17-year-old,
and he was at the high school,
he was a student at Parkland,
he was there, hitting a room.
Classmates die.
They stick a microphone in his face,
and he goes on a 10-minute tirade about the NRA and F this and F that,
and I think this is not what we need.
This isn’t how we make progress.
This isn’t a good way forward.
It is good that we have empowered young people.
All of us need to condition our empowerment with humility and wisdom,
and that takes a while to figure out.
And that doesn’t mean if you’re old,
you’re wise, and it doesn’t mean if you’re young, you’re foolish.
It just means that we all need to learn to listen and recognize wisdom when we hear it,
and that’s a hard task.
And this doesn’t help.
This self-focus doesn’t help.
So I could talk about this all the rest of the evening,
and we could have lots of fun with it.
We all struggle with this.
This is not just 20-year-olds,
this isn’t just 10-year-olds,
this is everybody struggles with self-importance and self-idolatry.
It’s built into who we are as human beings,
and part of the Christian life is constantly wrestling with that,
but I think the church is going to have to
find a voice in that,
a gentle voice, but a firm one.
Just a little follow-up on that with the young people,
and I’m probably going to get this wrong,
but one person has said,
“If all the young people would go back into their classroom and treat the kids who are sitting by themselves,
treat the kids who are in trouble and has no place to go,
and spend all that effort and time being with those kids,
maybe some of these problems would go away.”
And I suppose there would be a situation that we’re acting rather than a belief,
acting out our belief to a certain extent.
Yeah, yeah, and I do think we want to…
Absolutely,
absolutely, and I think we all recognize the massive complexity,
and we all at some level probably are touched by this simple message of young people that say,
“We don’t feel safe,” and I literally pray that those who are making decisions about laws hear that and respond to it,
but in my opinion,
putting a ten-year-old on TV doesn’t help us.
Michael?
I think this does directly connect to that idea of orthodoxy as well,
because in an age of self-importance,
the real weapon is the charge of hypocrisy,
and I think I would point to that through…
Even late night television now,
it’s just essentially weaponized hypocrisy.
It’s everybody trying to figure out how everybody else is screwing up whatever they say they believe.
And this, I think, is a very dangerous weapon when it comes to the church,
because we do have ingrained in us this history of orthodoxy,
this history of the fact that ideas matter and what we believe,
and so lots of people in the church have turned to apathy as a defense against that.
We don’t believe anything,
we’re just good living,
moral people,
and that becomes the defense,
and I think the problem with that is that fundamentally,
the things that are closest to the center of orthodoxy are things that we don’t wield.
In other words, the Trinity,
incarnation,
resurrection.
You give me a person that can clearly identify, describe,
and understand every aspect of those beliefs,
and I’ll be shocked.
Those are deep mysteries that claim us,
not the other way around.
We can be people who believe in orthodoxy, this is right,
but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t figured out,
that doesn’t mean that we know exactly what the answer is,
and that we’re going to wield it and feed people over the head with it.
I just think those two things don’t go together,
right?
You can believe that this is true,
it’s just the irony is that those are also the deepest,
most complex, most nuanced things, and for some reason we let that dissolve,
and we let ourselves be the metric of truth.
And that’s unnecessary.
Which functionally is idolatry.
We create something we control,
in this case a concept of truth,
and Michael makes a good point.
What is hypocrisy?
Hypocrisy is a disconnect between belief and action.
It’s saying you believe something,
but doing something that isn’t in keeping with it.
So, to connect praxe and doxy in genuine ways,
and not live hypocritically as Christians,
is perhaps our strongest witness.
Need to stop, we’re out of time,
thank you for your patience.
We realize that not all of this was stuff that you would have probably wanted to know,
so thank you for hanging in there.
Thanks again for the food and the fellowship, and so,
appreciate it, yeah.
Your tolerance is appreciated.