Faith Fights: Morality

Hello again, friends.
Welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
It is a pleasure to
have you with us as we continue on in these conversations about faith fights.
We’ve now traveled some different terrains in this conversation.
We began with some history.
We’ve talked a little bit more practically recently about
history of worship,
about some of the things that we might bump into more
often in church life.
Last week, of course, talking about that sort of common
human experience of dividing into teams and to opposing groups and to how in the
church we’re called to really navigate that differently than other
organizations because of our commitment to Jesus Christ.
And in some ways, Clint,
I think that this conversation combines a lot of those strands into one.
And let me explain what I mean by that.
The conversation about morality in the
Christian church is a very ancient, storied history.
We have in our history
engaged with the question of what is right and what is wrong,
what is moral conduct and what is immoral conduct.
And you can look at any stage of the
church’s life, both pre-reformation and especially post-reformation,
and you can see how different Christians,
different Reformed Christians, have answered those questions differently.
And then you can follow those strands that lead directly
to our present experience with our own self-understandings of what we’re called
to reflect as Christians in our own time and place.
And as you have in any moment
that is fraught with division, tension, oppositions,
we do have Christians today
who have really lived into very different identities of what things do
live on different boundaries of morality.
And that’s not to say that any
Christian has given ground that morality is not important or that truth doesn’t exist.
But we do live in the moment in which Christians can have substantial
conversations about those topics.
And so in some ways,
I think this conversation
is going to bring some of those strands together.
It’s both history and also it is very contemporary.
And I also think,
Clint, that this is a thing that,
though we may not think about it every single day about what is right and wrong,
we strive as Christians to be people who do live right lives.
And so in that sense,
I do think this conversation is very practical.
Michael, whether it was the intention or not,
the Reformation produced a diversity, a variety.
And we now,
as, you know, a couple centuries now removed in that
whole process, we stand at a place where we have hundreds,
literally hundreds of different ways to be Christian.
And all Christians have always said that our
actions matter, that as people of faith,
what we do and what we choose not to do
is important.
In fact, this is one of the primary ways we live out the faith by
making choices about what is acceptable behavior and practice for a Christian and what isn’t.
But amidst the diversity that we now live with post Reformation,
probably no surprise that Christians have always come to different
conclusions about practices, about things that we do.
And so in some ways,
this isn’t a particular theological or particularly theological conversation
because it has to do with nuts and bolts of is this okay or isn’t this okay?
But I think our hope today is rather than speak into the individual yes and no of any given issue,
to sort of examine what do we do and how do we handle it when
Christians find themselves disagreeing on whether something is acceptable or not.
And you don’t have to go far to find lots of examples.
They’re everywhere.
Yeah.
And I think largely what you’re going to find in the beginning of those
conversations is an appeal to Scripture.
And I think that’s a good place to start.
You’re going to have Christians turn to the Bible for a source of reflection
upon what is and isn’t in the character of a Christ follower.
And I do think that
on one hand, that seems like a simple place to start.
And what I mean by that
is the Bible is full of moral imperatives of things that God has called
the people to do.
It becomes much trickier and much more nuanced very quickly
when you engage with those moral imperatives to the Israelites in the Old Testament.
Jesus’s later critiques of those Jews who followed the imperatives to their own sake.
And Jesus’s then emphasis and really intensification of the law by
saying it’s not just you committing the sin,
it’s you harboring the sin in your heart.
Imagining the sin is enough for you to participate in it.
When Jesus does that, in many ways, he completely blows up the moral law that comes before,
because every human knows that we have participated in that sinfulness.
And then, you know, you have beyond that the Pauline letters,
you have this very
strong, reformed history of what God has done on our behalf,
this idea of justification by grace through faith.
None of these are actions that we take
that we merit the gift of salvation.
It’s not the moral action that earns it,
but rather it’s God’s gift to us.
And so, you know, I’m obviously blowing by just
an unbelievable amount of thoughtful scholarship here,
Clint, but I wonder if
it’s helpful to just say right from the start,
Christians will immediately turn
into question what is right and what is wrong.
We’re going to turn to Scripture.
That is a good place to turn,
but that’s not just an open-shut yes or no on or
off flip of a switch,
because there’s a lot of reflection,
prayer,
discernment that we need to bring to the Scriptures as we seek to understand what that role
of morality is in our Christian life.
Sure.
I think discernment has always been difficult,
and not to single us out as
some sort of special case,
but I do think there’s a sense,
Michael, in which the modern and postmodern world,
it has become more difficult in the sense that
we are less and less connected to the patterns and the assumptions and practices
of the Old Testament world.
So in early America,
for instance, when people are still chopping trees,
burning wood, there’s no automobiles,
they’re growing food themselves.
There is a sense in which that is not terribly disconnected
to the way that New Testament and even Old Testament people lived.
And so the idea of don’t have an idol and,
you know, you set aside the Sabbath and some of
those things, for instance, are Puritan ancestors who really still felt like
they could open Scripture and in many ways look into a window that fit their life.
Well, that becomes very difficult,
I think, in the 21st century when you talk
about medical advancements, when you talk about technology that the Bible really
couldn’t imagine.
And as it is increasingly difficult to just open the Bible and find
a direct line of guidance for complicated and complex issues that the Bible doesn’t
picture, that weren’t a part of the people’s experience,
then we have to make
those decisions by inference and by interpretation.
And that, of course, leaves lots of room for disagreement.
And, you know,
what does the Bible say about
medical research?
Well,
nothing.
So how do we then determine whether we consider
that a moral practice or not?
What does the Bible say about eating genetically engineered food?
We could name a hundred things just in our day this morning that
the Bible isn’t going to have a direct correlation.
It’s not going to be able to
speak clearly about those things because those things are not a part of the world
that created the Bible.
And that leaves Christians with a big job and within
that job, lots of room to disagree with each other.
Yeah, we’ve already had a conversation about the fights over scripture,
and I don’t want to linger too long here,
but we could not overemphasize.
I don’t think it’s
possible how significant the scriptures,
the significant role rather,
the scriptures have played in the Christian understanding of what is in right character as a
Christ follower.
And I just think it’s worth noting here from the start of this
conversation that I’m very suspicious of any reading of the Bible that that is
done with a razor edge scalpel.
If you go to the scriptures and you find one
passage or you find three passages in three different books and they all say the
same thing and you build a moral understanding of what a Christian should
or should not do from those,
I find that very dangerous territory.
Scripture read in isolation and not with an overarching understanding of the story
and meaning of scripture.
For me,
it tends to lead us, I think,
down a direction that we focus far more on ourselves than we do on the one who wrote and speaks
through scripture.
And there’s this image that some people use of scripture as a map,
that if we could just open scripture in front of us,
it would lead us through life.
I find that image rather unhelpful because if you open scripture in some of those
pivotal moments in life,
it can be frustrating because it isn’t a map.
It does not tell you now go to point B.
Rather, scripture is a signpost that
points us to the creator of all things and it introduces us to the one who has
a plan.
That’s what we call the gospel,
the good news for our salvation and for
the transformation of our hearts and souls.
And so as we come to these texts,
I think what I find unbelievably helpful is where does scripture point us to Christ?
Where does it resonate with who Christ was and what he calls us to be as his people?
And as we now really reflect on that reality,
it does have concrete,
consequential implications for how we live our lives.
And that I want to say very clearly
is that all Christians living on the other side of the revelation of Christ have taken seriously
that Jesus Christ means a difference in our lives.
Full stop.
So there’s not a question of
should there be morality?
Should there be right and wrong in the Christian community?
Yes,
absolutely.
What’s at question here is how broad of a field are Christians given to discern what
those markers are and how are we called to live into them?
And that is where I think it gets far
more nuanced and discernment is far more required.
But I don’t want to start this conversation
with the sense that in any way we’re dismissing scripture,
that we’re dismissing the significance of morality in the Christian context.
Absolutely not.
It’s just more complicated than opening the the scriptural text and it’s saying
this is what you should do and then you do it.
In the Reformed Church, we have
lived with the idea that Jesus is God’s highest revelation.
In other words, Jesus is the clearest
message that God has given us and that Jesus resonates with the truth in scripture.
But because of this,
it makes it very difficult to simply open the Bible,
particularly to the Old Testament,
and say this is what God says because there is another question
that needs to be asked,
which says is the way that we think this speaks to us in keeping with
who we think Jesus is?
So when we read an Old Testament passage about we stone people who do
this and we say see God hates people who do this,
we have to balance those kind of statements and
those kind of interpretations with well this is also the God who sent Jesus Christ to the cross
to die for our sins out of a deep passionate love for his people.
Do those two things,
do they fit?
Do they match?
And if they don’t,
our history of interpretation says
that we land on the side of Jesus.
And so it is never for Presbyterian,
it is never quite as simple
as the Bible says this or that.
And I don’t mean in any way that we don’t trust what the Bible says,
I mean only that it’s a more layered conversation than simply one source.
And when you only pick one source,
particularly when you only pick one part of one source,
and you try to use it as a club to tell others they’re wrong,
we have been historically,
and I think rightfully so,
suspicious of that.
And so I’m trying to think of an example,
Michael, maybe one of the clear ones,
well it’s actually maybe not that clear,
but there have been many
moments where Christians have looked to social issues and said a Christian cannot participate in that.
Go to movies,
dance,
be in the military,
help me here,
read science fiction,
you know, read Harry Potter, read whatever, that a Christian can’t participate in X,
Y, or Z because it’s somehow against the Bible.
And Presbyterian Christians have always tried to say, “Well,
let’s have a deeper conversation about that.” Yeah,
and this is where we have to really
make sure that everyone understands there’s two significant forces that have to be reconciled as
Christians think through morality.
I have a professor who once said that every morning when
you put on your pants,
you have to choose what leg you’re going to put in first.
And her point was
all of the pants matter,
right?
But you have to choose where you’re going to start if you’re
going to have the whole thing.
And this is, I think, true in this conversation.
Christians have always said that we have the actual concrete things that we as people choose to do and choose
not to do.
And this should be a reflection of the saving grace of Jesus Christ.
In other words,
if you read the book of James,
it’s very clear that faith that without works is worthless.
And so if a Christian lives their life and they are indiscernible from the culture that surrounds
them, they are not living into the truth of the gospel.
If their morality is not shaped by their
Christianity, they are not practicing their Christianity to the fullness that they are called to.
On the other hand,
there’s a sense in which that should not be directly connected
to any sense of having earned your salvation.
In other words, it’s not causational that you do
these things and that therefore God will smile upon you and will give you salvation.
No, Christians also affirm that it is God’s work that works within us,
the inner transformation that is then reflected in these outward acts.
And these two things happen together in this
beautiful mixture in which it’s really mysterious.
There’s no clear boundary between these things.
God, by the power of the Spirit,
binds these things together in a way that is beyond just
simple classification.
God works and then our lives are changed.
But throughout the history
of Christianity, Clint, different families of faith have emphasized that differently.
Some have emphasized the work that happens in the Christian life.
There’s this thing called the
Holiness tradition in which Christians have believed that after one receives salvation,
they must, as part of their Christian discipleship and growth as a Christian,
begin to have their life reflect certain social things.
So within different moments in that history,
some Christians believed that,
like you’ve already mentioned,
if you would be dancing,
that that would be sin.
That should be stripped from your life.
If you played games with
cards or with dice,
that’s a form of gambling that should be involved in your life.
Some Christians have gone so far as to talk about what kind of clothes you should wear,
what kinds of food you should eat.
These are reflected most often in Old Testament
laws and different purification rituals.
And what’s interesting in that,
Clint, is these groups will begin to emphasize the holiness or the moral qualities of a person’s life.
And they might be tempted.
In fact, the Reformed critique would be that they are tempted to put
themselves in a causational relationship.
In other words, that my works are the thing that I focus
on and that the salvation is just sort of part of it.
But the Reformed tradition is going to say,
“No, you need to start in the other place.” And it’s because of that diversity of understanding
that what you see is different Christians live out morality with different emphasis
and to different degrees.
And that there is a significant amount of disagreement on what I
should and shouldn’t do,
not based on the things themselves,
Clint, but a deeper understanding of
how those things play out in a Christian life.
So,
think about if we could talk generally about maybe the two ends of the spectrum.
And let’s start with the other end,
because there are really, realistically,
there are very few
Presbyterian fundamentalists.
There are very few Presbyterian,
what we would call,
legalists.
And in that circle,
there is this idea that God is intimately involved in every moment of our life,
which is a commendable thing to think.
But where it sometimes has led people is the idea
that in every choice I make,
God is either pleased or displeased.
That there is inherent in every
decision an opportunity to either please or displease God.
And so,
can I wear earrings?
God has an opinion about that.
That’s a yes or a no.
Should they be small earrings?
Or can they be hoops?
That’s a yes or no.
Could I wear a bikini,
a one-piece bikini,
or a two-piece bikini?
Not me, but yeah.
Okay. So, right.
And the idea inherent in that is that there is a right and
wrong in every choice.
And that’s not a bad way to think,
but it is a good way to get to legalism,
because now the idea is that every choice should be enforced by people who know the right answers,
even though many of those things are not things that the Scripture would necessarily say anything about.
We believe that we can infer from Scripture a yes or no in virtually every decision.
The danger of that is moralism,
legalism, the idea that you become obsessed with the right and wrong,
because if every choice has it,
then you’re constantly navigating that both for yourself and, unfortunately,
sort of looking at others through that lens as well.
And, you know,
Michael,
I would say that large portions of the church,
in our experience,
still live in that struggle
to implement faith in our life,
but somehow avoiding legalism.
And that’s really hard to do.
Yeah, I can speak to this as someone who lived my entire early faith life,
really, on the other side of this equation.
I did grow up in what I called these holiness traditions.
So, for me,
it’s funny, Clint, that we’ll talk sometimes about things that,
you know, would have just been natural
to someone who was Presbyterian growing up,
that from my side of the Christian fence,
I couldn’t have imagined doing.
I couldn’t imagine listening to that band or going to that concert or reading that book.
These are things that were just so foreign from my experience,
because these were off-limits.
And so, I only say that to say this.
I can speak a little bit from those shoes.
And let me interrupt you there,
Michael.
When you say off-limits,
help fill in the gaps for
maybe people who haven’t lived through that.
What inherently made them off-limits is the idea that they were worldly,
is the idea that they weren’t of the faith,
that they didn’t build the faith,
that they weren’t religious.
Help us complete that picture.
Yeah, I think that there’s a couple things at play there.
One is they’re all connected to
an idea of Scripture.
So, the idea that men shouldn’t look at women lustfully.
This is something that Jesus says.
The idea would be then that that should have some effect or some
implication for not only what men do,
but women wear,
that Christian women,
we also see this in
the pastoral letters, should have some sort of a decency in what they wear so that they can help
men keep that command that they’re given by God.
So, it’s grounded in this idea of what Scripture
has called us to,
even in that case,
what Jesus calls us to.
But then there’s also this sense, Clint,
where the church should not look like the culture that it lives in.
There’s this belief and this understanding that as a Christian community,
we should very much reflect a different
kind of kingdom.
And so therefore,
when you go to the beach and all these clothes are being worn,
I don’t know why I’ve been drawn to that particular image.
Let me shift examples.
When you have all of
these people reading these popular books,
there’s a suspicion that you shouldn’t be reading those
books because it’s likely that that’s tainted with a different morality,
that’s tainted with a
different source of sort of sacred text.
And so, there’s very much this kind of immigrant community
mentality that Christians are set apart and so therefore,
these things are not fitting for our community.
Is that fair?
Yeah, I think so.
I think that’s helpful.
So, what I was going to say,
I think is that what we have to reckon with is that in reality,
when you are in those shoes and you’re
trying to live out these daily choices and you’re trying to,
as you said, Clint, live into this discernment of what should I do in this particular circumstance,
what that tends to do is it tends to
bring our focus down onto the stuff of our life,
the present choice that needs to be made.
And while that is good, that we’re seeking to connect our higher ideals, our faith,
the good news of Jesus
Christ to our actual lived life,
the danger and temptation of that is we become fixated on only
our lives, on only our choices,
on only our situations and contexts and dilemmas.
And as we do that, Jesus anticipated this so much throughout the Gospels that when we become fixated on what we do,
even when it’s for good reasons,
when we become fixated on us,
we very naturally shift into
judges of other people.
Because as we’re focused on,
okay, is this a godly choice?
Is this a godly choice?
We just naturally bring that lens to,
are you making a godly choice?
Well, you chose differently.
And I made this choice and I discern that this was God’s will.
And when you made a different choice,
clearly you’re not following God’s will.
And now suddenly we start evaluating
the people around us,
not because we want to.
I think just very clearly because that is our human
condition.
That’s what we talk about,
this idea of original sin,
that we set ourselves over and
against those that surround us.
And so we become very quickly,
not on purpose, I don’t think,
but just naturally judges of neighbor.
And the moment that we make that transition from those
who are trying to work out our faith for ourselves to those who are holding a faith over others,
we’ve now crossed over a line into moralism as opposed to those who are shaped in fashion than
the character of Christ.
And you can see how that would be easy to do in a system in which each
decision is faithful or unfaithful.
In a decision where every book you read,
every song you listen
to, every movie that you choose to see or not to see represents a make or break moment,
a did you get it right or wrong moment in your faith.
Ambiguity is not welcome.
The idea of uncertainty
or difference of opinion does not play well.
It is threatening to that system because it
introduces question marks and a tight system of morality
does not, question marks are not welcome because they bring uncertainty,
they bring the possibility
of being unfaithful or something not being a matter of faith,
which is very hard for that system to
incorporate.
So if we put that over on one side,
then I think most of us perhaps have had an
experience on the other side,
which is to say that we largely have grown up in the faith in a
system that thought there are right and wrongs.
And then there are lots of things that are not
faith matters.
If I choose to read a book,
if it’s not an offensive book,
if it’s a say Harry Potter
or if it’s some other book,
if I go see a movie and there’s some things in it,
you know, there’s a crime in it or whatever that I can separate those things from my,
the morality of my faith.
And most of us have lived in that system where we navigate those choices without really ever
thinking of them as faith issues at all.
They’re simply preferences, whether we dance or not,
whether we listen to rock music or not,
whatever it is, whether we drive a nice car or wear expensive clothes.
And the danger in this system that if that’s the far end over there,
the far end over
here is that we end up in this place where we think nothing is really a faith choice,
that we have the freedom to do whatever we want.
And we might use limitations like,
well, nobody got hurt or no crime was committed or there wasn’t a victim.
And we say it doesn’t matter what we do,
that everybody can make their own decisions about everything.
And somehow morality kind of gets
pushed behind personal decision,
personal happiness,
personal identity.
And that would be,
it seems to me,
the danger on the other end of the spectrum.
Yeah, that is a real danger in the tradition where we focus on the Kingdom of Jesus Christ
and we try not to get fixated on the individual choices,
is that we begin to baptize our culture.
And what I mean by that is we take the stuff that surrounds us and we say,
hey, you know what,
God’s okay with that.
It’s in the, it’s our, our friends are doing it.
Our, our friends are watching it, reading it,
engaging with it.
This is just the discourse of the day.
This is just what it means to be American or to be,
you know, wherever you live.
And fundamentally, the danger of that Clint is we essentially just give it a hard pass.
We just say, you know what, it’s okay.
And I’m going to go to church on Sunday.
I’m going to compartmentalize my faith from my life.
And ultimately I’m just going to go through life that way.
And that is a tempting
choice for the same exact reason that the holiness code is attempting choice because it’s simple.
It’s not easy.
Don’t hear me wrong.
It’s not easy to live out a faith in which, you know,
Hey, I went to church on Sunday and heard a thing that’s very different than what I did this week,
but for an hour,
I’m okay with those differences,
right?
That that’s not an easy thing to live with,
but it’s a simpler way to live than to try to bring these things into difficult conversation.
And that’s exactly, I think the best of the reformed tradition is that we have always said
that faith must reflect the actual work of Jesus Christ in our lives.
The reform tradition,
we emphasize Jesus Christ,
but we don’t in any way undervalue what that means in the life of
a Christian person.
In fact,
the reformed faith, Presbyterians,
different Dutch reformed, all of these different sort of instantiations of the reformed faith have taken public service,
public life very, very seriously.
How you vote,
what kind of political power you exercise if you’re a leader.
All of these things have been very prominent in the discussion thought ethics
of that tradition, because we take very seriously that if Jesus Christ is Lord,
then that does have an impact on our lives.
But we emphasize that you should never get those out
of order, that Jesus Christ is Lord and everything else should follow that,
that nothing should be
done unto its own sake.
You don’t live in a particular way or vote for a particular reason
just because you think it’s right.
It needs to be connected to a larger understanding
of the gospel, the good news.
And the problem with that is, Clint,
if I’m going to introduce it,
is that it requires of our tradition an awareness of and acceptance of mystery,
of nuance,
and therefore humility.
We as a people are very often,
not always, there are some things
that are just clearly cut and dried and those things exist,
but there are so often in the
conversations about what we should and should not do as Christians.
A lot of room for discourse
and for struggle and for discernment.
And to be a reformed Christian means on some level
to have the humility to enter those conversations with the willingness to listen and be challenged
and to live into even sometimes a little uncomfortable tension with those who are in different places.
Because fundamentally,
remember,
the thing that unites us is the person of Jesus Christ,
not where we land necessarily on some of these issues that Christians are tempted
to use as sort of judgments against others and even against self.
The great irony, I think, is that the legalist and the person who sort of thinks I’m my own
keeper of law or purveyor of law,
they both end up ironically
obsessed with self.
They both end up inwardly focused on me.
And I think that much more
difficult position in the middle is to say there is right and wrong,
but it may not be simple.
It’s not as simple as one obscure verse.
It’s not as simple as what makes me happy or what I want to
do.
There is a very real struggle to determine what is the will of Jesus Christ in this moment,
in this issue, in this decision.
And it is a higher calling and I think a more difficult process
to then sort out what are the things that are non-negotiable?
What are the things that apply
to all of us?
What are the callings of the gospel that are incumbent on every person who calls them self-Christian?
And then what are the areas of life where we have the freedom to navigate
our own conscious, our own journey,
our own relationship with God in the humility of saying
God, help me figure this out.
And the reality that I may land in a little different position
than someone of a different culture,
of a different place, a different tradition.
And that’s a much more difficult and I think it’s a much more frightening way
to try to move forward because the certainty of what I want or rigid rules are appealing.
And the ambiguity of sorting it out in the middle I think can be really terrifying to some people.
I had a history teacher who I really respected and she had a saying that she returned to very
often.
She would say that you cannot legislate morality.
And what I took her to mean was that
you can’t tell people what morality is and expect them to be at their core moral.
It doesn’t work that way.
You can’t speak that into the world and expect people to conform to it.
As a person who’s given some thought to faith,
who myself have been in this process of formation as a Christian,
and really what that means is bumped up against my own sinfulness over and over and
over again and sought to ask forgiveness and to repent,
to be changed,
hopefully continually renewed into the image of Jesus.
What I’ve discovered is it is one thing to talk about
what is right and wrong and it’s another to allow that to actually begin to change our hearts.
And that is the work that is unbelievably difficult.
And quite frankly,
the energy that we spend
really struggling with and fighting with ourselves,
I see this all the time, Clint.
There are some students in particular who think of going to college as one of these right and wrong choices.
It’s a big choice in a young person’s life where they’re going to go.
In some cases,
youth have internalized this idea that if I go to Northwestern College or Dort College or South
Dakota State University or Iowa State,
that when I make that choice,
I am choosing God’s plan
or not God’s plan.
And though they’re not thinking about it in terms of morality,
they are thinking about it in binary terms,
that there is right and there is not right and they’re seeking the right.
And that’s a good motivation.
But the problem when that is your driving motivation is it keeps
you from seeing God’s goodness and grace and providence that God is willing and able to work
in lots of different places,
in lots of different ways.
And that ultimately,
it may be less about
what does God want me to do in this particular decision and more to do with what gifts has God given me?
Where would I fit?
How could I continue to grow as a Christian in this place?
Some of these questions I think are far more helpful in guiding our actual choices in conduct
than obsessing over the choice that we feel lies ahead of us.
Oftentimes, it’s the things behind the scenes that enable us to discern God’s will in our life.
And that for me,
Clint, is directly connected to what we have in all faith traditions to some varying degree,
and that is this idea of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
It’s not a thing we talk a lot about
in church in general and probably the Presbyterian Church,
but we do believe that we have an advocate,
that God is a live network in us,
that God is connected in our own lives so that the choices
that we’re making aren’t made off on an island by ourselves,
that God is really working in this
making up for the times when we hear wrong and times where we try, but we fail.
Sometimes we become so fixated on,
“Did I do it right?” And this is moralism,
that we no longer allow space
in our life for the grace that Christ wants to offer to us.
And so we sort of edge him out
as we seek to try to be faithful to him.
And it’s an unfortunate sort of movement,
which I think is intrinsic to the human heart.
And so once again,
I think I returned to this idea,
we would all do well to enter into conversations about what is right conduct for the Christian,
and to recognize that the questions behind that are often the most helpful questions,
as opposed to, “Should I or should I not do this one particular thing?”
Right.
I think if we can keep our mind focused on
whether the things that we’re navigating are kingdom things or not,
right?
When I go to the
grocery store, it is very likely that what brand of pickles I choose has no bearing on the kingdom of Jesus Christ.
Now, if I find out one of those companies is abusing people,
is making kids go
out and do their pickle work,
you know,
now there may be a moral consequence in that.
And as I explore and understand those things,
I may feel compelled by my faith to make that a kingdom
issue.
It may come to a moment where I think,
“I don’t want to participate in what is happening
if I’m giving money to these folks.
I don’t think they’re doing things that I want to be associated
with.” But generally speaking,
there is almost nothing at stake in the kingdom of Jesus Christ,
what kind of pickles I eat.
Now,
we could have lots of follow-up conversation about stewardship and et cetera,
but when it comes to other matters,
how do I treat those?
When I’m at the grocery
store, am I picking up extra food to drop off at the food pantry?
Now, these may be kingdom issues,
and when we focus on the minutia of life that I think probably doesn’t have a great deal to do with our faith,
we may miss some of the weightier and deeper moments.
And for me, it really is a matter of motivation.
And ultimately,
what authority are we looking to as we make decisions?
A lot of people don’t know this.
Michael, you probably are aware of this.
So when you become ordained,
when you get ordained as a pastor,
there is a one-time opportunity for you to opt out of social security.
And this has to do with some strange court cases and some kind of fringe religious
groups back throughout history.
And you can sign off on exempting yourself from social security.
But the language is that you have to have a moral or religious objection to the concept of social
security, the whole idea of making amends of…
The idea was people didn’t have enough faith in God,
so they didn’t want to put money aside.
They didn’t believe in retirement, whatever it was.
But you have this moment.
And I remember having a conversation with the CPA about
having to make that decision.
And the CPA said,
“Sign this, and we can set you up with
savings account or an investment account,
and you’ll do a lot better than social security.” And I said, “Yeah,
but that says I have to have a religious objection to social security,
and I don’t.” And he said, “Well,
I can make you more money.” That’s the objection.
And I’m not lifting myself up as an example,
because I’ve got a million moral failures.
But my point is,
that becomes a moment.
This thing that doesn’t seem important now is important.
Am I going to be honest,
or am I going to try and chase money?
Am I going to represent my
true conviction, which is not, “I have no problem with social security,” or am I going to take
advantage of a loophole and give my permission to something because I think it benefits me?
And it’s in those moments I think that integrity and honesty and faithfulness kind of surprise us.
They kind of pop up.
And once we see them,
that’s where the choice is.
And unlike the idea of
legalism, the choice is not easy.
Those choices are hard because we are often turning away from something we want.
And that’s the critique of this other side of the thing,
right?
“What I want is
what is right for me.” Well,
Christians don’t say that.
Christians say we are sinful.
And by definition, there will be things we want and things we want to do that are not in keeping with our
faith.
And in those moments,
we have to struggle mightily with who’s going to be the Lord of my
life today, not even today, but in this moment.
Is it going to be the idea that I can make more money,
or is it going to be the idea that I need to be an honest person and have integrity in what I say and do?
And those are the choices I think, Michael,
that those are when our morality comes into play
in a powerful way.
Yeah, it’s really well said, Clint.
And I want to lift out,
I think, some concrete markers for both others and for self really quickly.
And it’s one thing shared by both.
Christians have a long history of using shame as a tool for morality.
When we find ourselves
picking up morality as a weapon to use against others,
the way that we most often do that
is through the passing on of shame that’s taken lots of different forms throughout history.
And whenever you find yourself doing that,
I would invite you to consider that a spiritual
warning light on the dashboard of your soul to
full stop and to reflect.
Why am I being driven
to utilize shame against another person based upon this moral conviction?
Because friends,
scripture makes it clear we are not judges.
And when we find ourselves in a position of judging
and tempted to shame others,
that is a really good sign that we’re living outside of God’s
plan for right character.
But the other is not one that we think about enough.
And I want to make
sure that this is clear.
That also applies to yourself.
We both know that a lot of people
live lives full of shame and guilt and an inability to let go of missed opportunities and moral failings.
And friends, we as people who sin should be expected to have moments of failure.
It will happen.
St.
Augustine, an ancient church leader,
said that the church is a hospital,
and so you shouldn’t be surprised when it contains sick people.
And there have been so many times in
my own short season of ministry where people come to the church and they are either struggling with
an addiction or they have had a moral failing and they are just in free fall and they are in complete
sort of a microcosm of shameful sort of like hurricane.
And there’s a moment where you just
stop and pause and say,
“This is what we mean by grace.” Undeserved gift.
When we talk about mercy,
when we talk about unconditional love,
this is the stuff of Christianity that we are seeking
to trust the promise of.
And when we know our own moral failings,
when we recognize our own
sinful sicknesses, we often struggle to recognize that these truths also speak to us.
And that is the danger of moralism.
It’s not only a weapon we use against others.
Sometimes it becomes a trap
for ourselves.
And if that is your weakness or your struggle or your moment right now,
just want to make it very clear that the gospel speaks into that.
That though we may not always be moral,
we have been counted as righteous by a gift of grace through faith,
which should then move us to address those places in our life where we struggle to be moral.
It’s not permission, Clint,
but it also needs to sort of unlock that part of us that wants to sort of hold on to our
brokenness.
That’s not what it means to be Christian.
Martin Luther had a thing that was very misunderstood.
He once wrote sin boldly.
And what he meant was not to sin.
He wasn’t giving people permission to sin.
What he was saying was that in the knowledge of the grace of Jesus Christ,
we understand that our sin does not disqualify us from faith.
And so our checklist,
this is the danger of legalism, is that it gives us a checklist and sort of insinuates that if you
have enough negative marks, you fail.
That’s not how the grading system of Christianity works.
The grading system of Christianity is,
“Look,
Jesus Christ got an A plus.
You’re all included.”
Now, try to live out that reality in your choices.
Try to do what honors him and glorifies him.
And try to live a life that is motivated by service to him instead of service to self.
And we must, if we trust that grace,
then holding on to guilt is a kind of doubt that we have to
come to terms with.
Lots of people in my experience believe that Jesus forgives other people,
but somehow struggle to think that Jesus could forgive them for their personal shortcomings and misgivings.
And when we do that,
we are misunderstanding who Jesus is and what it
means that Jesus is who he is.
And then on the other side of that coin, Michael,
I think as we read the Gospels,
it is just so humbling to think that the Son of God,
the fullness of God,
the Messiah,
the Savior walked the earth.
And the religious people around him
who knew the law backwards and forwards looked at him and said,
“You don’t know anything about God
because you didn’t wash your hands and because you healed a person on the Sabbath and because
you did this thing instead of that thing.” And looking through their system of very rigid rules,
they missed the presence of the incarnate God standing literally right in front of them.
And that is the danger of moralism,
of legalism, is that our focus on the secondary things
blinds us to seeing the primary thing.
And the history of the church is ripe with those kind of stories.
Now,
the same thing happens on the other side.
I don’t want to beat up fundamentalists.
The same thing happens to “liberalism” as we think that we have the authority to determine
right and wrong for myself.
I’m so busy looking at me that I miss what Jesus is asking me to do.
I miss what I’m called to do because I’m so obsessed with what I can do instead of what I should do.
And the point of both is that they distract us from the central figure of the faith, Jesus Christ,
and from being faithful to him.
Because what we look at will ultimately determine what we’re capable of seeing.
And this may be parabolic.
This may not be true,
but it’s been helpful for me.
I once heard that
when they’re training fighter pilots.
They train pilots when you look from point A and you turn to
look at point B,
that instead of just turning and looking,
that you should look at intermediary
points on the way.
The idea being that you should look at multiple points before you get there so
that you don’t miss something in the middle.
I don’t know if that’s true or not,
but I think it
contains spiritual truth.
That when we focus on ourselves,
we will always miss Christ in the room.
When we are keeping a report card for ourselves,
we will miss the A plus that already sits at the top of it.
And when we focus on the sinfulness that we know we’re prone to,
we will only fall
back into the thing that we are looking at.
And so if you must choose a thing to look at,
which by the way,
we all do, that we’re making choices in what we give emphasis and priority
to in our lives,
may we choose Jesus Christ.
And ultimately, if we do,
it will transform what we
do.
It will shape our sense of what is right and wrong.
But the moment in which we start evaluating
others based upon that,
I would submit to you,
we’re no longer looking at the right thing.
We’ve missed Christ who stands in the middle,
and we are now exercising judgment over others,
which is not a role he’s called for us to play.
It is far more likely that we will be transformed
as moral people if we keep our eyes on Jesus Christ and diligently pursue faith in Him
than if we ever try to track ourselves or others in what they do and don’t do.
There’s clearly right and wrong.
There are clearly standards.
There are clearly things that all
Christians should be held to.
And in the modern Presbyterian Church,
we have been arguing about
some of those for decades.
And the danger is dismissing the idea that there are standards.
For us who really don’t live on the side of the yard with legalism,
our danger is that we accept
too much, that we become too permissible.
That’s the temptation that our side of the church family has struggled with.
And yet,
even there,
in a subtle way,
we begin to focus on the thing itself instead of Jesus.
And it is a harder way to be the church,
to come together with differences
of opinions about the things that people do and don’t do,
and to say we’re going to try and sort
this out in a real way,
in a loving way,
in a kind way,
in a non-judgmental way.
That’s hard, because people are not good at it.
And therefore, it demands the grace of Christ,
the wisdom of Christ,
to lead us in those moments.
And that’s the way we’ve chosen
to try and be church.
And it is a difficult path in moments of disagreement.
And as we continue
to live that out,
I think it bears keeping in mind that when we’re called to make those decisions,
not only in our own life,
which is hard enough,
but in communal life,
we should do so
with an eye toward love,
with an eye toward grace,
and with an eye toward keeping our community
together in any reasonable way possible without drawing lines that Jesus himself doesn’t draw.
And we have to confess that we have been prone to do that.
And so,
as with most things,
Michael, that aiming for the sweet spot in the middle is fraught with opportunity to get it wrong.
I think that’s a very level-headed place to end,
Clint, and I think as we seek to live this out in
our own lives, friends, if you know somebody who you think would be helped by this conversation,
feel free to share it with them.
We have people who join us for these conversations in a completely
mind-numbing number of places,
Facebook, YouTube,
podcasts, wherever.
If you found this helpful,
feel free to share it.
If we’ve challenged you or if you disagree and you’d like to carry on a
further conversation, we’re always open to that.
So leave a comment,
send us an email,
make a phone call to the church.
All of that is welcome as we seek to continue to have these conversations
with you, exploring these places where we are tempted to fight and how we can put Christ first
in our lives together.
So thanks for joining us.
Thanks, everybody.