Baby Snatchers

There are those who snatch the orphan child from the breast, and take as a pledge the infant of the poor… From the city the dying groan, and the throat of the wounded cries for help; yet God pays no attention to their prayer. (Job 24.9,12)

Dedicated to the memory of hundreds of murdered children and those who loved them.

During Advent our pastor asked a question that has haunted me ever since. “Can we continue to idolize violence and still believe the Gospel’s message of love?” She paused to scan the congregation. With a catch in her throat that fueled the fire of her insistence, she said, “The answer just has to be, ‘No!’” By idolizing violence, she meant faith in hostility and death over love’s decisive power to sustain life. This violence runs much deeper than movie mayhem and gangsta rap. It drills down into the marrow of our social and spiritual beings.

We participate in a culture that places nearly all of its confidence in aggression and retaliation. It’s not enough to resolve our differences in a loving, peaceful manner—in part, because doing so requires tremendous effort and sacrifice on all sides. No, we opt for the inferior alternative: settling scores. This compulsion takes root long before we reach for physical weapons. It’s the product of low biology—what the New Testament calls “the flesh”—that obsesses about survival and perceives every life challenge as a potential threat. Darwin optimistically framed this instinct as “survival of the fittest.” But, at its core, it’s a kill-or-be-killed mentality that goads us to take preemptive strikes and meet violence with violence. Thus, violence is an attitudinal issue that, if unchecked, becomes a behavioral problem. Its primary weapons are hearts and minds; fists, guns, knives, and—most commonly—words are merely hardware.

Violence always carries hidden costs that ultimately discredit its effectiveness. Years may pass before the bill comes due. But the instant our hearts and minds turn to violence—whether physical, verbal, emotional, or spiritual—the invoice is in the mail and it will arrive bearing interest. And violence doesn’t care who pays the tab, as long as it’s paid. So when excess pride in our children causes us to instill in them a ferocious competitive streak, we shouldn’t be surprised when its attendant anxiety and selfishness erupt in rage. When paranoia about safety and loss of “what’s ours” compels us to attack others, we shouldn’t be perplexed when we become targets of hostility. When fear of losing respect breeds disrespect for others, we shouldn’t be shocked when what we’re determined to preserve evaporates. Faith in violence doesn’t just look ridiculous. It is ridiculous.

Because violence can’t coexist with love, it provides no brakes to stop our slide down the slippery slope. The gaps between “venting” and berating, “defending” and bullying, “winning” and humiliating are not as wide as we imagine. If we listened more closely to how we talk, we’d get this. We talk about “letting people have it” and “crushing the competition” and “butting heads.” Even when we’re on the losing side, we glorify the violence we suffer, saying we’re “floored” by what was said to us, or “blown away” by another’s actions. Kids and sports fans have a term for our use of violent speech—“talking smack,” which gets to the nub of the issue. Saying leads to doing, and with so much of our language devoted to violence how can we not admit to its prominence on the altars of our hearts?

Giving violence different names or redefining it to highlight its extremes won’t remove its place of idolatry. When violence becomes the thing we rely on for protection and the thing we most fear, it is our god. What else but a god could persuade us to wage war in the name of peace, to assert the sanctity of our land by invading and occupying another, to exhibit self-worth by diminishing the value and rights of others? These are not instinctive responses to fear and threat; they’re conscious acts that constitute wholehearted worship of violence. And don’t be deceived: this god is a filthy liar. Nothing it promises ever pans out.

In the 24^th chapter of Job—which some scholars believe is the Bible’s oldest volume—the hero’s complaint about the violence of his day reads like our daily news. Evildoers scam widows out of their property. Poor parents scavenge to feed their children, while thugs seize fields and vineyards. (Job’s loathing for this crowd is so vehement that he accuses them of not having enough sense to come in out of the rain.) Murderers kill the poor and defenseless. Women are routinely abused. And several times, Job’s focus turns to children born into a world consumed by violence. “There are those who snatch the orphan child from the breast, and take as a pledge the infant of the poor,” verse 9 says. These baby snatchers place no value in human life. Nor do they bow to the God of love. The violence they worship deadens their senses to the agonies they cause. “From the city the dying groan, and the throat of the wounded cries for help,” Job tells us. “Yet God pays no attention to their prayer.”

That last sentence troubles us, as it should. It certainly vexes Job. The entire chapter begs the question, “Why would God allow this?” It’s the same question we ask when reading reports of children gunned down in drive-by shootings and we’re gripped with grief by grade-school massacres. Where is God? The answer may be simpler, and closer to home, than we think. We’ve replaced the God of love with the god of violence. In Matthew 6.24, Jesus explains, “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.” A society—including its religious right—that looks to violence to solve its problems has cast God from its presence. Before God can intervene, idolatry of violence has to be torn down. Then the love of God will return and that, in and of itself, will be the answer to our prayers.

Holy Week starts early for me this year, as Walt and I and members of our church join thousands of Chicagoans for tonight’s CROSSwalk, a sacred processional honoring the memory of over 800 young humans sacrificed to violence since 2008. Although the demonstration will be peaceful, it is intended to confront the idolatry of violence that plagues our city with baby snatchers, abusers, murderers, and war-makers. It is a fitting start to Lent’s closing act, when God’s love will challenge violence’s power and rise from death in decisive triumph.

This evening, as we hear the names of our lost called out—as we ponder the horrors of homicide and baby-snatching—we’ll want to ask, “Where is God?” But the answer to that won’t satisfy, because it’s the wrong question. With repentant hearts, we need to ask, “Can we continue to idolize violence and still believe the Gospel’s message of love?”

The answer just has to be, “No!”

Do Not Fear

Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak. The LORD, your God, is in Your midst. (Zephaniah 4.16-17)

Enflamed with Defiance

Last Friday I was on the phone with a San Diego colleague who'd been awakened in the wee hours by an earthquake. “It went on quite a while,” he said, “long enough to look out and see the water sloshing around in my pool.” I told him I lived in L.A. when the Whittier earthquake struck and knew how unsettling it is. “Then there’s the eerie period waiting for the aftershocks,” I observed, adding that I was so unnerved that, for the first time since relocating to the West Coast, I seriously considered moving back home. “In the Midwest, we have the advantage of knowing a tornado or blizzard is headed our way,” I said. “We have time to brace ourselves. Earthquakes don’t give you that.”

As we concluded our business, I kidded, “Here’s hoping nothing else rocks your world today!” To which he replied, “We’ll be fine.” No sooner had I hung up than Walt rushed into the study and turned on the television. There it was: 27 dead in elementary school shooting. The ground shook so hard I gripped the arms of my chair. The prior evening, at our church's annual holiday remembrance service, I recited the roll of nearly 150 young Chicagoans killed by firearms in 2012. We sang songs of solace and hope, heard Advent poems about light’s power to conquer darkness, and prayed God’s strength in our endeavors to vanquish gun violence in our city. And now this—the latest in an increasingly frequent series of moments when it feels as though there’s nowhere to hide from an onslaught of mad violence we can’t foresee or contain. A brutal flood of emotions poured through me, threatening to take all of Advent’s optimism with it. I felt stranded in a midnight world of menacing evil.

This weekend, as we gather in our communities of faith, we must adamantly reclaim Advent’s promises of peace and salvation. We must attend closely to the prophets’ assurances that God hasn’t left us. Our worship—the hymns we sing, the prayers we pray, and every word we speak—must be enflamed with defiance. We will not surrender hope. God is with us. Christ is coming to us. Darkness will not stand.

Out of the Ancient Mist

Sunday’s Old Testament reading (Zephaniah 3.14-20) steps out of the ancient mist to grab us by the collar, confronting issues that could be ripped from today’s headlines. The prophet addresses a nation gripped with religious and social malaise. He takes prophetic office during the reign of Josiah, Judah’s great reformer. Previous kings were lax in honoring God’s demands for faithfulness and justice. As a result, the nation founders on the hollow shoulders of idolatry and conspicuous consumption. Unlike other prophets, who seek to restore the faith of God’s people after long nights of foreign opposition, Zephaniah speaks to a country rotting from within. The gaps between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, are wider than ever. Violence, injustice, poverty, and despair have reached intolerable levels. Only those who profit from Judah’s indifference feel safe. An even slimmer minority realizes their nation has lost its way. The vast majority has grown woefully apathetic, presuming things have got so bad they can't be fixed. “Not so!” Zephaniah cries. With true reformist zeal, he proclaims the advent of better times—“the day of the Lord,” he calls it—when God’s righteousness and faithful presence will once again prevail. Does any of this sound familiar?

After he scorns the corruption of Judah’s officials and indicts the majority’s lethargy, Zechariah speaks to the relative few profoundly distressed with their nation’s descent into chaos and violence. Listen to the confidence—the unshakable defiance—with which he assures them their faith will be vindicated:

The king of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more. On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem: Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak. The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; God will rejoice over you with gladness, God will renew you in God’s love; God will exult over you with loud singing as on a day of festival.

Then, speaking in God’s own voice, Zephaniah declares:

I will remove disaster from you, so that you will not bear reproach for it. I will deal with all your oppressors at that time. And I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth.

God’s Song

Tragedies like the one we’ve just seen in Newtown, Connecticut evoke natural reflexes we struggle to absorb: first the horror, next the grief, soon followed by reproach and recriminations for not having prevented them, the vast majority of us ultimately believing the lie such horrors are unpreventable. We are momentarily quaked out of our national slumber and wring weak hands, as if nothing can be done to brake our perilous slide into chaos, violence, and fear.

But the Word of God reaches us this weekend in the defiant voice of a reformer from long ago, urging us not to surrender hope. Do not fear, it says. Do not let your hands grow weak. God is in your midst. The day of the Lord draws near. God will renew us in love and exult over us in loud singing. In the crushing darkness of our anguish, confusion, and despair, we listen for the faraway strains of God’s song beckoning us to the light of God’s day. The darkness that presently engulfs us will not stand.

God is with us. Christ is coming to us. The crushing darkness of our anguish, confusion, and despair will not stand.

Zealous for Peace

The effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever. (Isaiah 32.17)

Yesterday our church gloried in the promise of peace. Our guest preacher, Rev. Dr. Edward Campbell—a highly regarded Bible translator and seminarian whose title belies his salt-of-the-earth pragmatism—said something that stuck with me. As we read Scripture, he said, we should remember it’s the story of people figuring out how the world is supposed to work. Thus, the tension that binds together 66 books written across centuries is manifest in a contest of wills: human will and its wantonness versus God’s will and all that God desires for, and from, us. Consequently, we’ve invented an alternate reality to accommodate weaknesses that, as Scripture persistently reminds us, bear no reflection of God’s vision. Nowhere is this discrepancy more magnified than in human proclivity to make war. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is rife with war zeal. Repeatedly, we watch Israel engage in military conflicts that lay ruin to its country and other nations. The extreme losses are plain to see. And while it’s true that God sometimes—though not always—intervenes on Israel’s behalf, no stretch of scriptural interpretation can be made to translate God’s role in human combat as a divine sanction of war. When God steps into military conflicts, miracles occur that restore peace. Peaceful cohabitation is how the world is supposed to work.  It is God’s will. Why can’t we figure that out?

I submit we have figured it out. What we’ve not yet resolved are the international, cross-cultural, and political conflicts that cause war. Proverbs 14.31-34 diagnoses our failure when it says: “Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honor God. The wicked are overthrown by their evildoing, but the righteous find a refuge in their integrity. Wisdom is at home in the mind of one who has understanding, but it is not known in the heart of fools. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” (Emphasis added.) When we set our hearts to prove our superiority over other nations—when we advance policies and actions that promote poverty, violence, and suffering, whether abroad or at home—we forsake God’s call to righteousness. We will not live in peace. As we’ve recently experienced in a recession largely brought on by reckless war-making, the costs of militaristic bravado are enormous. Conflicts wrought of aggression inevitably exact a huge toll on the aggressors. And the prices aren’t just paid out of pocket: they’re deducted in human lives, bodies, minds, and emotions. War is not God’s will. Why can’t we figure that out?

Isaiah 32.17 says, “The effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever.” We are not so naïve to expect global righteousness and its peaceful effects will prevail in our present world. Yet, as Christians, we must also ponder how we can expend our resources to promote righteousness. That we need adequate defenses against malevolent powers is a given. The question is whether we permit our leaders to pursue unrighteous policies of aggression—to foster nationalistic, military bravado that is quick to pull triggers and create undue poverty, suffering, and loss of life. We must be zealous for peace at all costs, as the price of warfare is more than we can bear. We are regularly confronted with the harrowing realities of warfare, yet we cling to the myth that war can ever be just. Military aggression is the way of the world. But it’s not how God intended it to be. It’s time we figured that out.

Too Much

“If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell.” (Mark 9.43)

Centipede

I left college brimming with lofty ambitions and no earthly idea how to make them happen. I kept falling into low-paying positions—private high school English teacher, church music director, freelance movie critic, among others—that required taking odd jobs to stay afloat. After writing a Christmas pageant for my church, a gospel theater troupe engaged me to write a contemporary musical they could produce in Los Angeles and hopefully tour the country performing. They gave me the premise: three talented sisters get famous singing for their local congregation and must deal with tensions between faithfulness and worldly success. I thought it smacked a little too much of Dreamgirls. (The L.A. Times critic agreed in his unflattering review). But it was good money. So I threw myself into cranking out a script worth every cent I’d been paid. In my original version, every imaginable gospel stereotype turned up to, as the Bard put it, “strut his hour upon the stage.”

As we began assembling scenes we’d rehearsed separately, it was all too apparent I’d written too much by half. The first complete run-through timed out at nearly four hours. The producer and director sat down with me to discuss drastic cuts needed to trim the show’s length. They gently assured me they loved everything I’d written. Yet as good as it was, it wasn’t good enough to fasten an audience to its seats until midnight. “Folks will start walking out at 10:30 and by the time it’s over there won’t be a soul in the place,” the producer said, reminding me one or two nights of that would hasten the show’s untimely end. The problem was, I’d fallen in love with every character, every scene and song, every point I wanted the play to make. 

Once it became clear I would push back on the cuts they suggested, the director threw up his hands. “If you had a baby that with 10 arms and legs, would you force it live like a centipede? Or would you have its extra limbs removed so it could succeed?” he asked. Then he said, “These kids have worked really hard to get this play up on its feet. Are you ready to destroy that just so you can hang on to ideas you love so much?” I took out my red pen on the spot and hacked away, sadly—yet firmly—accepting losses that, not five minutes before, seemed too terrible to contemplate. Despite the Times’ reservations, The High Life was hit in L.A. and enjoyed a profitable East Coast tour that helped pay my rent for a couple of years.

Faith Suicide

Sunday’s Gospel (Mark 9.38-50) resounds with echoes of my backstage episode. The disciples come to Jesus in alarm. Someone outside Jesus’s tight-knit circle has been touched by the gospel flame and is now working wonders in His name. The disciples try to stop the impostor, no doubt believing Jesus will appreciate their efforts to control His message. But Jesus’s response surprises them. Rather than acknowledge their good intentions, He praises the outsider for reaching people He might never meet. “No one who does a deed of power in My name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of Me,” Jesus explains. “Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I tell you, whoever gives a you cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.” (Mark 9.39-41) In other words, this person the disciples are so eager to shut down is a true friend—a partner whose efforts advance Christ’s mission. Instead of taking offense at him, they should be grateful and support him!

The warning that arises from this situation is issued not to the outsider, but to the insiders. In attempting to control Christ’s message and discredit the witness of another, they put the outsider’s faith at risk. “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in Me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea,” Jesus says. (v43) To ancient minds, the Sea is the most fearsome, deadly place there is. To die at sea is to be lost forever, completely erased from memory, unburied, leaving no proof you existed. Intentionally throwing oneself into the Sea is utter madness. Yet Jesus tells us it’s by far a saner alternative than what we do to ourselves when we contest another Christian's witness. Believers whose faith doesn’t fully square with our own are not against us. They’re for us. And when we try to censure and obstruct their belief, we end up committing a thing worse than faith suicide. Better we should vanish entirely than cause them to stumble, Jesus says. The question concealed in His statement asks us, Are we willing to destroy others just so we can hang on to ideas we love? It’s a big question we all have to answer.

The Trash Heap

As dramatic as this suicidal image is, Jesus isn’t content to stop there. He goes on to summon a series of shocking visuals that remind me of the director’s centipede analogy. When we answer Christ’s call and our faith begins to grow it assumes a life of its own. We easily become fond of certain characteristics, behaviors, and rituals that support the points we want to make with our lives. If we’re not keenly aware of the shape our faith takes, it can become grotesquely deformed and inept. Too much of a good thing is never good. “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and go to hell,” Jesus advises in verse 43. He says the same of clumsy feet and shortsighted eyes that result in tripping over our good intentions. Better to be lame or blind than land in hell, Jesus says.

The mere mention of “hell” makes a lot of people uncomfortable—which is exactly what Jesus means to do. If we’re to fully appreciate what He’s saying, we have to account for His terminology. Jesus uses Jewish slang here, a metaphorical reference to Gehenna, a valley southwest of Jerusalem where residents burn their rubbish. It’s a foul, suffocating, constantly smoldering trash heap—the most oppressive of all places to live, and hence a common term first-century Jews used to imagine eternal punishment for evildoing. Like drowning, it is a fate worse than death. And we can’t escape Jesus’s implications of what comes of our determination to hang onto ideas and behaviors that cause harm to others and us. It’s not our deficits that send us to the trash heap. It’s our insistence on placing too much value on debilitating ideas and practices that turn us into centipedes stumbling over our faith and tripping up other sincere believers. We mean well, but it’s too much.

Sunday’s Gospel expects us to examine how we live out our faith, to recognize detriments we create by refusing to let go of notions that create divisions and undermine the “little ones” Jesus loves so dearly. It’s not our show. God, our Producer, and Jesus, our Director, warn us that assuming everything we hold dear is vital to their story is a deadly proposition. Our brothers and sisters will suffer. We will suffer. Perhaps it’s time for all of us to reach for our red pens, prayerfully evaluate how much is too much, and start hacking away—not for our sake, but to protect those who stand with us on the Lord’s side, whether we agree with them or not.

Stubbornly hanging on to personal beliefs and philosophies can turn us into faith centipedes. We easily wind up tripping over ourselves and, worse still, risk causing other believers to stumble.

Use Protection

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His power. Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. (Ephesians 6.10-11)

Different Dynamics

Early in the rollerblading craze, Walt and I rushed out to our local Sport Mart and spent a small fortune on gear: skates, helmets, elbow and kneepads. We got home and suited up, laughing at how we looked like gladiators. Then we stored our fancy equipment on a closet shelf, where it sat for several months, waiting for us to get the nerve to take to the streets. One spring afternoon, I came home to find Walt in a terrible state. His arms and legs were bruised and scraped up and covered in Band-Aids. I spotted his rollerblades and said, “You didn’t wear protection, did you?” “Only the helmet,” he replied. “I didn’t like how that other stuff looked on me.” My response: “And just look at you now!”

In Walt’s defense, he’s an amazing four-wheeled skater—a real hotshot on a rink floor. It seemed logical that he’d adapt to inline skating with such ease that the likelihood of falling would be practically nil. But, as he learned, that wasn’t the case. The dynamics of rollerblading aren’t the same as those of old-fashioned skates. In many ways, they’re the opposite, as they require a different sense of balance to maneuver stops and turns. What’s more, the uneven surfaces of city streets require a heightened awareness of the ground one travels. Dodging and darting through traffic and other bikers and skaters complicates things. Until you develop a proper sense of equilibrium to react quickly, rollerblading can be a treacherous endeavor. And—as Walt learned on his maiden voyage—once you figure out you’re improperly equipped, you still have to make your way back. The worst of his spills happened during his retreat, he told me. Finally, he gave up, removed his skates, and walked home in sock feet. “I felt like a fool,” he said. It took some time for him to give rollerblading another try and eventually he got the hang of it. But after that first debacle, I’ve never seen him head out for a leisurely cruise along the lakefront without his full armor. When I read Ephesians’ admonition to use all the protection available to us, I think of Walt.

Danger in the Air

“Be strong in the Lord and the strength of His power,” the Ephesians writer says, urging us to “put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” (Ephesians 6.10-11) It’s an inside-outside strategy. Our strength and power come from within, in our confidence that God is at work in us, daily renewing our faith in new mercies and understanding. Meanwhile, we live in a world of uncertainty, where ground we travel is uneven and navigating our way through life requires a great deal of agility. This hard for us to learn, particularly when we leave ready-made Christianity—where faith is expressed in the polished confines of church sanctuaries—for the mean streets of real life. Following Christ in true discipleship is to calling oneself a “Christian” what inline skating in urban environments is to easily gliding in circles on a roller rink. The dynamics and demands are totally different. The risks are not the same. And if we’re to pursue the freedoms and joys that accompany discipleship, we must use protection—no matter how silly we may look when we’re geared up in the whole armor of God. Trying to skate along without it ultimately results in injuries that cause real pain and make us look worse than we would if we’d taken proper precautions. Undertaking this endeavor without protection is why so many of us falter and end up walking home in sock feet, feeling foolish and smarting wounds we could have avoided.

We need protection not because of any deficiency within ourselves, but because of the atmosphere we live in. The writer reminds us, “Our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Danger is in the air. And one must wonder at the prophetic import of this observation for our day and time, when poisonous hatred and lies literally fill the air, borne on the wings of digital hysteria and fear. More than ever, we must protect ourselves against free-flying evil, taking Ephesians’ prescriptive armor to heart. If we’re to stand—if we’re to maintain our balance and make progress against the onslaught of deceit and negativity whirling about us—we must be properly equipped. In verses 14-17 we read, “Fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

As genuine disciples, we never travel without first doing an equipment check: truth to defend against lies, righteousness against injustice, peace against violence and confusion, faith against cynicism, salvation against surrender, and the Spirit revealed in God’s promises against human reasoning and hopelessness. Danger is in the air. We must guard against its treachery. And as we travel, we’re vividly aware that God’s armor is meant for our protection. It is not weaponry designed to wound or intimidate those around us. When we misuse spiritual protection to inflict pain we join ranks with powers that pollute the atmosphere. We make ourselves vulnerable to the very evils Ephesians teaches us to guard against.

Stand

In Galatians 5.7-8, Paul chides believers actively engaged in conflicts with combative forces attempting to denigrate their faith. “You were running well,” he writes. “Who prevented you from obeying the truth? Such persuasion does not come from the One Who calls you.” Discipleship is an arduous quest to bring truth to light—or light to truth. The strength within us is evidenced in our ability to withstand the dangers and evil in the air, to keep our balance at all times, and journey ahead, undaunted by uneven ground and conflicts we encounter. When those around us succumb to airborne forces attempting to defeat our faith, we remember the Gospel needs no defense. It is we who must be protected. We are equipped with truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and the Spirit made alive and known to us in God’s Word. Be strong in the Lord and the strength of God’s power. Stand. We’ve been given all the protection we need. Use it.

We travel in an atmosphere of airborne dangers; Ephesians teaches us how to protect ourselves against lies, insults, and injuries.