The limits of Hope

The idolatry of hope can take at least two forms.   The first is to provide a false promise of escaping our struggles without pain or effort, by the promotion of baseless dreams, or fantasies.  

We need to be careful with dreams.   Dreams that are not rooted in realism on one side and in faith on the other become stumbling blocks to achievement.  If we fantasize about getting in shape, anticipating the pleasures that would be ours, our fake pleasures may become substitutes for real pleasures that come only after months of painful effort.   Hope that does not include effort is not hope at all, but life-denying fantasy. 

Here is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of our modern civilization.   We live in a society where fantasy is fast becoming our main commodity.   Movies, video games, music, fashion industries are all about selling fantasy.     We dream of being thin while becoming fatter, of being richer while becoming poorer, of being popular while becoming more isolated from others.   Marx once called religion the “opiate of the masses.” Today, it is fantasy.  

Fantasy produces a feeling of success while we fail, of strength while we become weak, and of knowledge when we know nothing.   Our dream based society has become the destroyer of real hope.

The other danger hope creates in us is confusing conditional, temporary hopes with unconditional, permanent ones.   In this case, the methods for achieving hopes may be confused with the hopes themselves.   Then, we the achievement of our conditional hopes leads us away from the realization of permanent, lasting ones. 

Security is a promise from God.  It comes because He is over all things.  God does not tell us, though how He will fulfill His promise.   He may do it by providing us with enough finances to save for the future, or He may use other means.  

Jesus told this parable.  

"The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop.  He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.'

"Then he said, 'This is what I'll do.  I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.  And I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of good things laid up for many years.  Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry." ' 

"But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you.  Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?'

"This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God." 

Luke 12:16-21

Idols are often hard to recognize, since we often rationalize them by saying we are only trusting in God.   We would be better off with no security in this world than to confuse our temporal sources of security with real protection from God.  

Financial savings can confuse us into thinking that we are more secure than we are. Even if our finances are more secure, the hope we have is not leading us to trust in God, but could really lead us away from God.  

All human hopes are conditional on circumstances which lie always in the hands of God.  We can build walls to protect us against enemies, but the can not stop the plague. For every earthly precaution there is something that can and will in time overcome it. 

The turtle is a remarkable animal, which has survived on earth for millions of years. They move slowly because they can.  There are few natural enemies it needs to fear.  But millions of years of successful defense could not prepare the unfortunate turtle crossing a road on a summer evening for an eighteen-wheeler traveling sixty miles an hour. 

When our hope is in our own cleverness or strength, there is no certainty of success. But when our hope is in Christ, and our hope is aligned with His will, hope gives us strength and confidence facing forward.

With this blog, we have finally finished the eight facets of the matrix. But this is not the end of the blog.  I have a few more “rants” I will be putting up soon.  I will also be looking for other bloggers and material to fill this blog.

Soon, I will be launching a faith matrix website, and will be offering materials for sharing there.

If you have enjoyed this series, let me know, and share the posts that are meaningful. 

Thanks for reading. 

The disciplines of Hope

How do we develop hope? Here are some activities may help:

Being Thankful

“In everything give thanks,” Paul wrote “For this is God’s will.” (1 Thess. 5:18) This isn’t a suggestion but a command.  He does not say to give thanks if we feel grateful, but to give thanks whether we feel anything like gratitude or not.  It is wonderful if our heart can be involved, but it is not necessary. In time our heart will catch up with the rest of us, and we may feel something like gratitude, but it isn’t necessary. Give thanks anyway.

Thankfulness helps to orient our mind towards ultimate purpose and destination.  It is an acknowledgement that is or can be part of God’s great satisfaction. Thanksgiving lifts us out of the tyranny of the moment and helps us see the vistas around us 

In the novel The Hobbit Bilbo Baggins his friends are stuck for weeks in a dark, foreboding forest.  Despairing of their predicament, they send Bilbo to climb one of the highest trees and look around.  Once above the treetops he feels fresh air and sunlight again and is greatly encourage.  More importantly, he sees their destination, the Lonely Mountain, is not far away. 

Thanksgiving gives us a glimpse above the treetops. We may be stuck in the muck of today, but it reminds us that we are actually making progress. Thanksgiving is the assurance of our souls that we are holding to the right course. 

We thank God for small blessings in the middle of major disasters.  Terminally ill patients can sometimes be filled with hope, not of a long life, but of seeing a loved one again, going to a graduation, or feeling a sea breeze. Small thanksgivings can be ours in big disasters.  The discipline of thankfulness reminds us of our many blessings.

We thank God for big blessings in the middle of minor disasters. When we are late for work,  our car breaks down, or we are caught in a rainstorm,  we can easily forget that life for us is actually pretty good. When we feel bad about something we forgot to do, we forget that God has redeemed us and still loves us, wholly and completely. Giving thanks for big blessings helps us deal with small disasters. 

Affirmation

Affirmation is the practice of self-reminding.  We sometimes forget who we are and where we are going.  The daily practice of affirmation helps us remember this. 

Affirmation is not magic. Reciting to ourselves “I am a good person” does not really make us a good person if we are not.  No, affirmations must first all be the truth to have power. 

A good affirmation is based on our position in Christ. It is a statement of how Christ thinks of us, and what He can do with us. It is not a statement of our own abilities, but of His 

Here is an example of an affirmation I have written and used for years.

“Today, I will remember that I am forgiven

“Today I will remember my worth in God's eyes.

“Today I will remember to give others my honesty and friendship

“Today I will remember that I am already loved enough

“Today I will remember that I can do all things through Christ

“Today I will remember the shortness of life and to live inthis moment

“Today I will remember to be thankful for all things

“Today I will remember that I can trust Him

“And in trusting, hope, and in hoping, know

“And in knowing, rejoice.”

A good way of writing an affirmation for yourself is a “beloved covenant” described in Trevor Hudson’s book Discovering our Spiritual Identity:

 Sit down in a quiet place and recall your favorite verses from the Bible.  If you aren’t familiar with the Bible and are just starting out reading it, just thumb through and write down a few promises.  Ask the Holy Spirit to lead you to verses that stand out to you.  After you have a few verses,  read them over and over slowly.  Don’t look for things to do or to pray for—look for what God says about you, and His relationship to you.  Take these verses and write them down.  Then go back over them for about ten minutes a day for a few days.  Let these statements sink into your soul. You will find that it really helps to build confidence and hope to know just what God thinks of you.

Patience

We usually think of patience as a gift, but it really more of a choice. It’s knowing the reasons for hurry, but choosing to ignore them-- a hundred times a day, if necessary. 

I may be in a hurry to get home, but I choose to slow down and be safe instead of speeding up, because I know that home will be there when I arrive.  I want to buy a new car, but I choose instead to save my money, because I believe in the future I can afford it. I think that school is too hard, but I choose to do my homework, because I hope to graduate one day. I make these choices because of hope for the future. By choosing to say “no” to my immediate impulses, I am expressing my hope of future reward. 

Do not confuse impatient feelings with impatient actions. We can still be patient even when we feel impatient. Worry is resistible, and the act of resisting it is what we mean by patience. In time, the feelings of impatience will give way to peace, but it will not happen until we choose to be patient.

Use your Imaginations

Sit down, and make a list with three columns on it.  Label the first  “1year from now”,  the next “3 years from now” and the third “10 years from now.”

Now, close your eyes and use your imagination. Picture yourself one year in the future, with God in absolute control of your life and your situation.  What would your life be like in the best possible future with God in control, at these three points in the future?  Don’t focus on what your occupation will be, whether you have accomplished your occupational goals.  Don’t imagine a life without enemies, struggles or opposition, but instead concentrate more on who you will be inside,  and what your attitudes and inner realities will be.  Not so much what your will be doing at this time but who you will be inside.  Then pray over the lists and save them. Look back over them from time to time as you approach the future.

Hope is faith for the future.  In order to have hope future, we must see God there.  This requires a sanctified imagination. We need to have an image of our future selves with God in control, and what our lives would be like if we were.

A pessimist envisions the future and sees all the things that can go wrong. This is useful, since we all know that things can go wrong and it is good to be prepared. But pessimism alone cannot motivate us to do anything good. The more we imagine bad things happening to us,  the more we are that our negative imaginings will actually happen.

An optimist envisions the future and sees what can go right.   Hope arises from these positive imaginings. But we must be careful where our positive imaginings take us. If we divorce our hopes from our faith they are just wishful thinking. Our hope must come from God, and His power to change us.  If we just hope to be a better, kinder person without being a more Godly person, there is no real reason to believe we will succeed.  If we see ourselves conquering our present calamities and we do not see God in charge and getting all the glory, then our real hope is not in Him but in ourselves.

Real hope is not imagining a future without problems, but imagining a future with God’s sufficiency. It is unrealistic to think we can live in a sinful world and find everything easy and uncomplicated. But it is realistic to imagine that in the future we may be better equipped to cope, when we pursue a deeper relationship with God. 

Circumstances are guaranteed to change for us, but the relationship we have with God, who is the provider of all things can get stronger with every passing day. With His help, we will better be able to cope with life changes because we learn to trust Him daily,  The struggles of today will make us more able to trust Him in the future.

We cannot change the world, but we can change ourselves.  In changing ourselves we learn to better  cope with the world. 

the Virtues of Hope

“Everything that is done in this world is done by hope.” Martin Luther

On a certain day each week, the convenience store in my neighborhood has a line stretching almost out the door as the lottery tickets for the lottery go on sale.  Never mind that the chances of winning are only slightly better than being hit by a meteor, the hope of sudden riches keeps them coming back.

Lotteries run on hope, but not realistic ones.  If a person had real hope for a win, they would sell everything they owned to buy tickets. Their hope is just a happy fantasy. Real hope demands the surrender of our souls.

Christian existence is a hopeful religion.  Our faith is not based on one hope, but on three: 

First, the ultimate hope of heaven.  The heavenly hope is that we will attain heaven in the next life.   If we lose our lives in this world, we have a new life in the next.  This hope has sustained martyrs and missionaries for centuries.

Second, the hope that the world may be improved.  This hope has spurred social renewal wherever the Gospel has gone. This hope keeps Christians active in evangelism and social change.

Third, the hope that we may become more like Jesus. It is the one that is most essential to spiritual growth—not the perfection of the world, but that we may attain a greater resemblance to Christ.    Our hope is for peace and assurance. for an inner life so strong that neither poverty or prosperity matters, not or the absence of personal problems, but for the ability to survive and thrive.  We place our faith in Christ in order that we might become like Christ, sharing in his Divine personality and nature.

 The Bible puts it this way:

“How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! . . .  Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.  Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure.” 1 John 3:1-3

For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. Rom 8:29

The goal of the Christian life is to be Christ-like, not in one area of our lives, but in all of them. 

What does a hopeful person look like?  He or she will exhibit four characteristics—perseverance, patience, planning, and flexibility.

Perseverance is the ability to keep on course, no matter what. A persevering person does not expect instant gratification, but is willing to continue without seeing results for a long period of time, in expectation of future benefits.

Consider the perseverance of a fisherman.  He may make cast after case with his bait, waiting for a big fish.  He may be out for days without the slightest nibble. Or consider perseverance of a salesperson.  She makes one cold call after another, getting yelled at, cussed out and hung up on countless times.  But when she makes a sale, it is worth the effort. Or consider the perseverance of a bodybuilder.  Day after day he strains his body to the breaking point. All he gets for his efforts are sore muscles.  Only after weeks of effort does he start to notice significant changes. Anything worth accomplishing only happens through frustration and discomfort. 

Patience is passive perseverance. It’s not what we do, but what de don’t do for the sake of accomplishment.  We feel we must do something, anything, but wisdom says wait for God’s voice.  We have hope that God will give us discernment and direction.  We are often tempted to jump at anything, but patience shows us the right time.

How do we discern when to wait, when to leap, and when to stay the course?   It isn’t easy. Patience is not waiting forever, but waiting on the Lord.  We must be attuned to hear His voice and His will. While we wait, we pray and be attentive, learning to recognize His voice when He calls, and keeping always before us the hope of God’s promise.   

Planning. While we wait, we plan.  Here we must make two distinctions about planning

First of all, planning isn’t worrying.  Worry approaches the future fearfully, anticipating all the bad things that can go wrong.  Planning is approaches the future hopefully, anticipating  how things may go right. Worry look at problems in big pieces, dreading how hard the whole task will be. Planning looks at the future in small segments. It doesn’t focus on the top of the mountain, but on what handholds and footholds we might try in the next few feet, and where we might attach our ropes. 

Flexibility. No plan ever goes smoothly. Nothing goes exactly as planned. Plans are always tentative, subject to God’s higher plan for us. Our plans need contingency plans, in case we need to go another way.  But they all should lead to our ultimate goal--conformity to the image of Christ.

We must not invest too heavily in our own correctness.  We are certain to be wrong at times, so we had better be prepared to change courses.  An inflexible person approaches his target like a bullet.  Once he is committed, there is no changing course, he will either hit or miss.  Most of them time, inflexible people miss their target. But a flexible person approaches target like a predator drone, guided intelligently to change course and make correction in her flight.  She has a much higher chance of hitting.  A flexible person bent on conformity to Christ’s image cannot miss in the end, since he or she has a distant target, and cannot help but come nearer to it at every moment.   

The hope of a Christian is certain, but the steps to that hope are uncertain. We need to keep our eyes on the hope, and not get bogged down in the details. Just keep moving towards our ultimate goal, which is to be like Christ. 

How do you maintain you hope?  What keeps you persevering.

I would love to hear from you, about how you maintain hope in your life. 

The Limits of Heritage

Since I’ve passed my sixty-fourth birthday,  I find myself doing what I swore I’d never do.  I am becoming nostalgic.  I love the music of the past, the items of the past, even the toys of my past.  Nowadays, the only place I find those things are in antique stores. 

That love of the past is nostalgia. It’s purely personal and depends on when I was born, where I was raised, and by whom.  

Nostalgia is a constant danger to Christians.  It is a form of perception bias that makes us think what we loved in the past is somehow qualitatively better than what there is today.  It causes us to judge more harshly the people and trends of today.

In one church I pastored, an old-timer shared a story he heard from his fathers about their church bought their first musical instrument—an organ.  There was a long, hard, and angrily debated.  When it was over, one of the elders shouted, “you can keep the Devil’s squeezebox!” and stormed out of the church, never to return. Today, the thought of an organ being a worldly instrument is far out of their minds—its music has been sanctified by nostalgia.

The old songs of today were the new songs of yesterday and were opposed by the people who thought they were dangerous innovation. Isaac Watts was savaged by his contemporaries for ruining the metrical psalms.  Choirs were looked upon as sinful by many churchmen of the Middle Ages.  Perception bias based on nostalgia keeps us anchored to the past and prevents our moving in the Spirit.

Think of tradition as the tail of a kite. It gives weight and stability in a hard wind, but if it is staked to the ground the kite will never soar.  Think of it as an anchor. An anchor is very important, but we must raise it to move. It’s important to understand the difference between a living heritage and pointless sentimentality.  Tradition is an enrichment to our faith. Traditionalism is an idol and competitor to faith. 

Tradition worship is a constant danger to Christians.  Those who worship tradition seldom realize they are doing it, or that there is anything wrong with it.  Traditionalism is when we cannot tell the difference between the house we worship in, and the church itself.  Traditionalism is when we believe all worship music must be in some traditional style, or that church building must have the same architecture, or that people should dress a certain way in worship.   It confuses cultural bias with faithfulness. It is when we cannot imagine that someone outside of our tradition can love God as much as we do, or that God can be pleased with people who look or sound differently.

We shouldn’t assume, however, that this is a problem only with “traditional” churches.  The tendency to confuse form with faith is at least as pronounced among “contemporary” churches as it is among the old-school churches.  The contemporary “seeker-sensitive” church has already become a tradition, and those who have grown up in it naturally assume that their worship style is “blessed” while old-fashioned traditional churches are not, based on their own biases and prejudices. In many contemporary churches, worship style is as heavily regimented as it is on old Protestant churches. 

Music is the language of the heart, but it is not a universal language.  If we use a musical language that is not understood or appreciated by those who listen, we may as well be praying in tongues.  We need to constantly remind ourselves that just because we understand or appreciate a musical or worship form does not mean it is bad, nor should we insist that people who cannot understand our musical language to be required to agree that ours is better.  To say that traditional or contemporary music is more “godly” is like saying that English is a better language than Spanish.  Our insistence on the spiritual superiority of whatever we enjoy is the sign of spiritual immaturity.

No matter how much we love the past, we still must live in the present. That means sometimes we must leave there safe place of our heritage and start something new, or reform it. Traditionalism can sometimes lead us to hang on too long to a church we should have left.   If our denominational has changed, or if we have, it may be to our mutual advantage to part.   The argument that “this has always been my church” is a weak one since the church never did belong to us.

A man once approached Jesus and offered to become a disciple.  He said he would follow him anywhere, once he had buried his father. Jesus’ response was gruff and brutal.  “Let the dead bury the dead, come and follow me.” Jesus wasn’t being unloving—He was just clarifying priorities.  If we cannot love God more than our past connections, we cannot be His disciple. Most of us may never be called upon to leave our family behind, or even the comfort of our church, but if we are we must be willing to go.  Our heritage and our faith may travel far together, but sooner or later our paths will diverge. Sometimes God will say, “leave your father and mother, and follow Me.”  When He does, we must throw aside nostalgia and be ready to go.

Do you lean towards the past or towards the future?  Are you ready for new things, or do you want to hold on to the old?  

How do we separate what is actually God’s working in the past from our feelings of nostalgia?  Are you willing to embrace new thoughts and ideas?

Write a comment and share. I’d love to hear from you.

The disciplines of Heritage

Here are four ways we can get reconnected with our spiritual heritage—

Know the roots,

Taste the fruits,

Understand the teachings, and

Try the rituals.  

Know the roots 

Evangelicals are fond of saying that “faith has no grandchildren.”  While it is true of individual churches, it is not true of the church at large. What God started in Christ will not end because of our incompetency or neglect. Their work will stand until Christ returns, and on into eternity afterwards.  

Each generation of Christians brings a new perspective. The early church relied on the Holy Spirit and on the authority of the living apostles. The ancient and medieval churches, developed habits of devotion still practiced today.  The Sixteenth Century gave us thinkers and theologians who took us back to the essentials--Christ alone, Scripture alone, Faith alone, Grace alone, for God’s glory alone.  Eighteenth Century pietism challenged the overly scholastic heirs of the Reformers to experience God with their heart.  Writers like Blaise Pascal and Jonathan Edwards put the heart and the head together. Puritans emphasized separation from the world and a whole-life commitment. Moravians, Anabaptists, and Methodists emphasized Christian community.  The Holiness, Pentecostal, and Charismatic movements cherished the warmth of the Spirit.  Millerites, Adventists, and Dispensationalists gloried in the Second Coming, while the Salvationist and Missionary movements emphasized societal and personal change. Every branch of the tree of faith has some dynamic and useful aspect to contribute to the whole. 

Start exploring the Christian heritage by discovering your own spiritual roots. Many times people criticize the differences between these groups as if being different was necessarily wrong.  But it’s not the differences that are bad, but the intolerance and hatred of people who see things differently, plus the prideful assertion that only our denomination is right that divides the church.  We can enjoy our distinctives without being intolerant of everyone else.

Our roots are worth preserving.  Each branch of our faith preserves a portion of the whole.  If one segment of the church is lost, we are diminished, and a piece of Christ is missing.

Taste the Fruits

What are the positive fruits of our tradition? Baptists are known for their upbeat worship and doctrinal simplicity.  Presbyterians emphasize education and the majesty of God. Methodists have a tradition of transformational social action. Pentecostals are known for their enthusiasm and the reliance on the Spirit. Lutherans emphasize grace and the sacraments. Catholics are marked by their elegant and elaborate worship and their emphasis on humility.  Every tradition of the church has aspects that all Christians may admire. 

We know, or think we know, our tradition only through the experience of our own home church.  This is like saying we know our country because we know our own back yard. Our heritage is larger and richer than we can possibly imagine.  Our own experience is extremely limited. Until we study the fruit of our faith tradition, we cannot fully comprehend it.

After we have tasted the fruit of our own tree, we should sample some of the fruit of others.  It is a sad mistake to think we can understand the whole of Christianity from our own limited perspective. Being a Presbyterian does not mean we cannot enjoy a Baptist revival or a Catholic cantata.  Other Christian traditions are not competitors—they are companions on our journey to spiritual maturity. 

Many recent authors have recently written the positive nature of Christian diversity.  Books such as Kenneth Boa’s Conformed to His Image and Longing for God: Seven Paths to Christian Devotion by Richard Foster and Gayle Beebe have explored the rich, historical landscape of the multi-traditional church. We can enrich ourselves from the Puritan writers, the early Methodist classes, as well as the ancient traditions of lectio divina and the daily office.  All lift up Christ, and each explores a different aspect of Him.  The more places we look, the more ways we learn to tune our hearts to God.    

Understand the Teachings                                                                                                                                                              

Of course, we should try to understand what our church actually believes.

All attempts to explain God ae really only metaphors. They are our attempts to explain the unexplainable.

 Most of the time, when comparing what churches believe, we focus on our differences.  This is unfortunate.  A more interesting study is to look at how traditions approach expressing the same truths.  The Westminster Confession of the Presbyterians and the Second Helvetic Confession of the Dutch Reformed are similar, but not the same. The Eastern and Western branches of the church expressed the Trinity differently.   On issues where we disagree--such as baptism, church government, and predestination—there is much to be learned from both sides.  Debates over doctrine have been going on for centuries, and much careful thought has gone into all sides of these issues.  It is unlikely we could come up with any arguments that have not been suggested before. But reading the arguments helps us to understand the awesomeness of God and His Scriptures.   

God gave us scholars and teachers who debated, challenged, speculated, and questioned, discarding bad ideas and keeping good ones, seeking always for the truth, to give us a firm grounding in what it true.  We are free to doubt, disagree and speculate, also, but we must understand with whom we disagree.

Try the rituals                                                                              

Ritual is history lived out in practice. It is our way of remembering what should never be forgotten.

Not long ago, I attended for the first time a high Lutheran service.  When I entered the sanctuary, I was surprised to find the baptism font in the center aisle.  As people entered the sanctuary, the made the sign of the cross with their hands on their forehead.  At first, I was put off by this, but I came to realize what they were saying.  They were not being baptized multiple times but signifying that everything we do is covered by the grace, expressed in that original baptism.  Each time they entered, they celebrated that grace.  It was not the way I had seen it before, but it made sense, and it was beautiful.

Don’t be fooled by pseudo-knowledge passed down from uninformed laypeople. When visiting a new church, don’t assume you understand what people mean by it.  Take the time to read what the church says about itself, and hear their own reasons in their own words.  Don’t go by hearsay, but discover the meaning from informed people within that tradition.  You can accept or reject is, just make sure you properly understand it before you do.

Rituals speak to us when words do not.  A dying man asks for communion or baptism.  We child learns to fold hands in prayer and bow his head before he learns to speak.  People go to church even when they are too deaf to understand a word.  It is the actions themselves that preach louder than the words. 

Rituals remind us of God’s continual presence.  It is not necessary to do them all, but neither is it necessary to perform all physical exercise to keep in shape. We choose to perform the rituals which most closely remind us of God’s power and goodness.

Here are some questions to get you started thinking about your heritage:

Do I know the faith traditions of my parents and my grandparents?

Can I trace the history of my church back, without skipping large parts of that history?

Do I know what makes my church tradition different from others?

Can I accept other traditions of the church, without judgment or feeling compelled to point out why they are wrong?

What can I point to in my church tradition that makes me proud to be part of it?

What’s your faith tradition?  What do you like about it? What have you learned from the traditions of others?  What would you like to know about your own faith tradition, or from others? 

I’d love to hear what touches you in your own faith background.  Write a comment below. 

The virtues of heritage

Once it took a trip to Israel and stayed at the famous Seven Arches Hotel on the Mount of Olives.  The Seven Arches is the place where most of the panoramic pictures of Israel was taken. It is just feet away from Bethpage, the beginning of the Palm Sunday road.
What a place it is!  There is the temple mound before you, and Mount Zion. There are the walls of Jerusalem rebuilt by Saladin the Turk along the foundations of the original walls. The Garden of Gethsemane in the valley below, and a little sign pointing down into the vast white sea of tombs in the great cemetery by the Eastern gate.  The sign says ‘the tombs of Haggai and Zechariah.”  The enormous sense of the ages long past is in that place as you are taken up in the realization of your own smallness and insignificance in time.  I have never been to the Grand Canyon but it must be a similar experience. You see your own place in the great scheme of creation there. But standing on that mountain in Israel, you cannot help but be overwhelmed by your place in the great scheme of creation, the heritage of Biblical history.
But what is history to us?  If we don’t have the eyes to see it, it is nothing.  A lizard crawling on that same spot would feel nothing but a hunger for its next meal. But God gave us the ability to appreciate what has come before us, and what will come to pass. This gives us the ability to appreciate what God has done, is doing and will do. 
But this sense has to be developed, just like every other sense.  To learn from history we must develop the virtues of heritage, so we can sharpen our connection with the past.  These virtues include memory, honor, and fidelity.
Memory is the second virtue of heritage. We need to remember the past.  The Psalmist wrote in Psalm 143:5 
“I remember the days of long ago;
I meditate on all your works
And consider what your hands have done.” 
Deuteronomy 32:7 says:
“Remember the days of old;
Consider the generations long past.
Ask your father and he will tell you,
Your elders and they will explain to you”
Our modern church suffers from a kind of Spiritual Alzheimer’s, which can be almost as devastating to the soul as the real thing. To have memory is to have wisdom. We are told in Proverb repeatedly to remember the voices of the past. 
Listen, my son, to your father's instruction and do not forsake your mother's teaching.
They will be a garland to grace your head and a chain to adorn your neck.
Prov 1:8-9
My son, do not forget my teaching, but keep my commands in your heart,
for they will prolong your life many years and bring you prosperity.
Prov 3:1-2
Listen, my sons, to a father's instruction; pay attention and gain understanding.
I give you sound learning, so do not forsake my teaching.
When I was a boy in my father's house, still tender,
and an only child of my mother, he taught me and said,
"Lay hold of my words with all your heart; keep my commands and you will live. 
Prov 4:1-4
Listen, my son, accept what I say, and the years of your life will be many.
Prov 4:10
This small sampling of verses is enough to show how important memory was to the writer of Proverbs.  Listening to our heritage gives us the gift of wisdom, prosperity, success, and a long life. 
“Do not move an ancient boundary stone set up by your forefathers.” Proverbs 22:28. Once removed, it’s almost impossible to reset. We cannot fully appreciate why that boundary was there in the first place until it is gone.
Honor is a recognition of the debt we owe people of the past.  A person may be dead but that doesn’t mean we owe them nothing. We still need to see that their work is carried forward.  The fifth commandment states “Honor your father and your mother, that your days be long upon the earth.” This commandment is considered the foundation for all human social relationships.   The Westminster Shorter Catechism elaborates by saying that included is this command is “preserving the honor, and performing the duties, belonging to everyone in their several places and relations, as superiors, inferiors, or equals.”
Honoring the past means submitting in love to the wishes and desires of those who have gone before, whether they are dead or alive.  Honor to the past does not mean we should slavishly copy the past. Sometimes it is imperative that we go against the wishes of our ancestors, as they found it necessary to go against the wishes of their own. Honoring them does not mean slavish obedience but respect and love. 
The Hebrew word for “honor” is "kebed", which means “weighty.”  To honor our ancestors is to place weight on their wishes.  Honoring our historical roots gives us the wisdom to face our current challenges.  Our parents left what wisdom they could behind, to show us how to survive.  To place no value on the wisdom of ancestral tradition hurts ourselves.  We must remember that we will someday be ancestors to others, and we will want to leave some of our own traditions behind, too. 

Fidelity goes beyond honor and memory. It is being faithful where we are placed. In Matthew 10:11, Jesus gave His disciples some unusual travel instructions.  "Whatever town or village you enter, search for some worthy person there and stay at his house until you leave.”
 But what if, while we are staying at a home, someone gives us a better offer?  What if the family down the street offers you a bigger room and better meals?  Why not just leave them and go where the house is bigger and the food better?
That’s where fidelity comes in.  To change houses is to insult our host. If we were led to stay with one hose, don’t change until there is a clear calling of God to go elsewhere.
St Benedict, in his rule for monks, called this stability. When a monk entered holy orders, he stayed at the house where he was called unless sent out for mission work. There was no reason to change location until God called them elsewhere. They stayed loyal to that one house.
Loyalty is a precious commodity in our world.  Most people change careers two or three times in a lifetime. They change churches several times. We even change spouses! 
But in our constantly changing lives, we miss the value of a deep, long-term relationship with the same people over time.  After many changes, we lose all sense of history. We become like the lizard on a rock in the Holy Land, who can only see what is before him, missing the grandeur of God’s working through the ages.  
Don’t ignore your heritage. Go deep in it.  In the next blog, we’ll talk about how.

Do you think that heritage is undervalued or overvalued in the church?  What purpose does heritage serve in the church.  I'd love to hear from you. Let me know what you think.

The value of heritage

Humorist Harry Leon Wilson, while visiting the Grand Canyon, once remarked, “At last, I know a place to throw my old razor blades!”

His comment reminds us of what is wrong with our current view of history. We look at the great figures and events of the past and trivialize them.  History becomes caricatures. Washington is just a face on the dollar bill.  Napoleon becomes a pastry; Caesar becomes a salad; and Babe Ruth a candy bar.

Contemporary church seeks to relate to our fast-changing world by denying the past.  Some will not sing songs more than twenty years ago. Sanctuaries are designed (without the slightest recognition of irony) to not look “churchy.”  There’s little to remind us of our faith’s deep historical roots.

It’s a shame. By ignoring history, we deny what connects us. Think of history as a tree We are the topmost branches. We see other believes as separate branches, and do not see how we are interconnected.    But if we trace our origin back, we discover we discover our commonality, until we all eventually come from a common source, which holds us together. 

Our faith depends upon its historicity.   If it were discovered that Buddha did not exist, Buddhism would not be changed significantly.   But Christianity depends upon the historicity,  divinity, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ.  It is based on real, objective events that happened in real time and space.  

In the best-selling book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher writes “To cut a people off from their tradition is to break the chain of historical memory and deprive them of a culture. No wonder Christian culture withers in modernity.”[1]

Yet we are severing ourselves from our roots even while the rest of the world is seeking theirs. The internet giant Ancestry.com has sold more than a million aps for smart phones, owns subsidiaries in twelve countries, and is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Recently, it acquired its ten billionth genealogical record.[2] History books continue to sell well, and are regularly listed on the best-seller list.

There are a growing number of Christians who grew up in the rootless “newness” the modern evangelical movement who are ditching it for something with historical resonance.  The fascination with the Puritans within the Reformed movement, the Messianic Jewish movement, the renewed interest in Eastern Orthodoxy, an increased number of conversions to Catholicism as well as the exploration of ancient faith practices in the Spiritual Formation movement demonstrate the hunger Christians to connect with Christian heritage in a meaningful way.  

A common trope in evangelical circles is that the church is only “one generation away from extinction.”  This may encourage us to evangelize our youth, but it simply isn’t true.  Heritage reminds us that the church has been going on for a long, long time. It gives us historical perspective that God’s will cannot be thwarted by the mistakes of a single generation. The church has survived heretical disputes, secular takeovers of ecclesiastical power, schism, persecution, and corrupt clergy. It is not about to die now—but will continue until Christ’s return and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

But none of this directly relates to the subject at hand, which is our own personal faith.  Why should we personally value our spiritual heritage?

First, because it gives us a sense of perspective. When the we are in difficult times, history shows us that we were not always there.  When we are in good times, history reminds us to prepare. 

Second, because it gives us a full tool box.  When my father died, I inherited all his tools. Some of them were too told to use and had to be discarded.  Most of them, however, are still useful.  Our heritage gives us a full tool box of ideas that worked in previous generation, and are still useful today.  Methods of prayer such as the lectio divina of the exercises of St. Ignatius are still of value today. So are many of the lyrics of ancient hymns.  It sometimes amazes me that a faith based on a two-thousand-year-old book can see no value in writings and practices of people only two or three generations past! What they learned back for the most part still works today.

Third, because heritage reminds us that we are not as important as we think we are.

Our knowledge of history has repeatedly helped us to challenge the errors of the present.  Whenever we lose our grip on history, we are left adrift in a sea of contemporary relevance, “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men.” (Ephesians 4:14)

Recently, I heard a podcast with a former evangelical leader who had converted to Roman Catholicism.  He described the freedom he felt in being part of a church that did not say everything began and end with him, that did not feel the need to recreate itself every generation. 

When we forget the past, the first result is that we lose humility. We begin to think that we are the beginning and end of all things.  Our lives are not a not as long as we think, and our works do not last very long afterwards.  A generation goes, and a generation comes,
    but the earth remains forever.  

---

[1] Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (p. 104). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[2] http://corporate.ancestry.com/careers/companyhistory/

The Limits of Community

The Limits of Community

Our love of a community--whether it is our nation, town, race or family—is one of the most easily corruptible loves.  It can quickly devolve into idolatry if we are not careful with it. For this reason, we must carefully differentiate our community of faith from our community of origin. Idols are created out of the materials most at hand. The unseen God becomes eclipsed by a visible representation of his attributes we see displayed in the image of God the masses of people of which we are a part. Christians must never treat family values or patriotism as if they were synonymous with Christian values, no matter how much they love family or country.  The splendor of the crowd and the intimacy of family pull at our emotions, catching us up in their currents and into a casual acceptance of their often immoral practices.  Patriotism sounds good until we remember what fascist dictatorships made of it.  Family values sound virtuous until we remember that the Mafia is a family, too.   God must always come first, over every allegiance.

How can a virtuous community become corrupted into an obstacle to God?

The first way is through our desire to conform.  This is not really “peer pressure,” since it is often not the community that pressures us.  Instead, it comes from our own fear of being alone.  We come to look to our community for the things we should get from God—strength, comfort,  meaning,  and so forth. Losing our community seems like losing our lives, so we say, do, or believe anything to keep it.   Our fear of ostracism often can drive an entire community blindly over the brink of folly, when it should be obvious that the group is headed in the wrong direction.   

If our relationship with God which is stronger than our relationship with the community, we do not need to fear being different.  Jesus said “No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields — and with them, persecutions) and in the age to come, eternal life.” Mark 10:29-30

The second way is through our willingness to tolerate abuse against ourselves and others. What happens when our community turns on us?   Wives are called to live in community with their husbands, but not to be punching bags.   Parents are called to love their children, but not to put up with childish anger and destructive behavior. If our love for parents, spouses or children causes us to accept behavior that leads them away from God, it is not love.  Abusive behavior seeks to dominate, by pulling us away from God into orbit around the abuser, making the abuser our god.  When this happens, we need to break away and seek the true God.  

Jesus faith did not depend on the faith of others.  He was comfortable standing up against the whole world, if necessary, because of His self-awareness of His own unique place in the kingdom of God. 

When the drumbeat of conformity in any community becomes too loud, it can drown out the voice of God. That is why Christians need to balance their calling to be part of a group with their calling to be complete in Him alone.   The community is a great gift, but it is not the only gift.   Participation in the community is a great blessing and is a necessary part of every life, but the community without God leads us further into the darkness.

Have you ever been part of an abusive community?  How hard was it to break away?

How do we know when the time comes to break with an abusive community? 

Write me and let me know.

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