by Ralph Blair
“Gifted with GOD’s Way as Our Way!” is Dr. Ralph Blair’s Keynote at the 78th EC Summer ConnECtion, June 1-3, 2018 at The Kirkridge Retreat Center atop the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania.
(For PDF version click here.)
Who knows folks who think everything needs to go their way? Anyone come to mind? It’s a common notion, it’s usually selfish, it’s always naïve and it can be deadly.
Nobody holds the patent on “my way”, and so, many try to claim it’s their own special right for all to go their way. But who’d want the right to be so wrong? Anyone that’s wrongheaded enough to think that, all must go “my way – would and does.
We get ourselves irritated when others try to get their way but we’d be wiser to feel sorry for them. They’re foolishly setting a trap for themselves, trying to get hold of fantasies that, as such, are always out of reach. What they fantasize can’t and won’t materialize. They’re trying to have an unmixed bag experience in this everyday world of mixed bags.
We pretend that we’re not selfish and use euphemisms for ours and for our jealousy over others’ seemingly “getting their way”. But, efforts to conceal our selfishness reveal that we’re just as selfish and clueless as the others.
Well, it isn’t easy to see that, “needing” things to go “our way”, is naïve, since fantasies of “our way” get in our way. They trip us up. Refusing to examine “our way”, so as to learn how “our way” might more probably end – and not in the way we intend – we double-down in trying to get “our way”. And, we don’t get “our way” – because we can’t. But we don’t get it. Blinded by fantasies, we can’t pull out of our full-speed-ahead into disappointments, even despair, that, though unplanned, was predictable all along our way. You see, denial can’t afford to predict what’s not desired.
When others “need” things to go their way, since their fantasies aren’t ours, we easily disparage their efforts as, so naïve and foolish. We tell ourselves, we’re not that stupid. “But, ya are Blanche, ya are!”
Still, in detecting naïveté in others who try to get “their way”, we might be able to identify with them and learn from our fellow fools. That’s what we do in group therapy. We also might be able to afford to be more patient and less judgmental, for they’re all like we are – patsies for falling into stupid self-set traps of self-centeredness.
Believing that all needs to go “my way” is the way of this fallen world. “Been there, done that”. Still do it.
And, it’s not only that every thing needs to go “my way”. Every one needs to go “my way”, “my when”, “my where”, “my how”, and my “Why not!” That exasperated whine, “Why not!” is not a question. It’s a self-centered demand that all must go “my way”, and there’s no reason for it not to go my way! Except, of course, that it’s not going my way, and can’t go my way, for “my way” is but a fantasy.
Frustration is the clue that, getting “my way” isn’t all up to me. If something or someone else is needed for it to even seem to go “my way”, I can’t make it go “my way” by myself. But, why even buy into the notion that I need it to go “my way”? Can I predict my experience of outcomes? Am I omniscient? Need anyone ask? Have I ever been disappointed after getting what I’d thought was “my way”?
In reality, “my way” lies at intersections of blind alleys of “What if!” and dead end roads of “If only!” Imagined vistas beyond blind alleys of “what if”, may seem alluring and imagined vistas beyond dead end roads of “if only” may seem rosy, but there’s really no way to get beyond those roadblocks at intersections of “what if” and “if only”. That little word “if”, says it all: “Ain’t gonna happen!”
“My way” was the deadly dogma of our first parents in God’s gracious gift of Eden’s Garden. That ancient idiocy of self-idolatry is religiously rooted in the notion that, by ourselves, we can create reality, ex nihilo. We can’t make up truth to suit “my truth”, that self-centered, supposedly “postmodern” excuse, for trying to get my way. It’s really the oldest excuse in the book. What book? The Bible.
When something hasn’t gone my way or isn’t going my way, or looks like it’s never going to go my way – we idolatrous idiots feel fear and frustration that affixes to our own fixations on the fictional and can end in fatalities we so foolishly fail to forecast.
These unwanted feelings are the unavoidable spillage of our preoccupation with self. We don’t aim at these results when we stage our scenarios. But they hold us hostage, anyway. It’s inevitable! We write scripts, we try to direct the cast, but we can’t control what cast members bring to their performances. And, they are performances, as are ours. The cast, no less than we, is preoccupied with scripts and scenarios of their own. Each thinks all needs to go his or her way, not our way. Happy landing, folks!
We’ve been racing this way since the start of the race. But now, hooked on digital heroin, setting our sights on our selfies, we sense we can’t escape being noticed and we can’t escape noticing that. So, we posture, pretend and pose as we try to hide inside our selves. But inside our selves, there’s no hiding place. Inside us, we’re all still so distracted with our self-obsessed assessments of us and of others, and, with all those otherwise scenarios of ours.
What’s even more frightening is that many who think that they, too, need it all to go their way – lie, cheat, steal and even kill, trying to get their way over our way and over us. If it still doesn’t go their way, they may amp up their lying, cheating, stealing, and killing with ever more determination and brutality to get their way over us.
So, doubling down yet deeper into our own irrationality, it seems to us to be even more necessary for things to go “my way”. But, others notice the same sorts of threats – real or imagined – so they, too, come to the same sorts of conclusions and raise the stakes in their defensive and offensive dealings against us. So it goes, running around in circles of fear, frustration and hostility, round after round after round, and with plenty of rounds of ammunition.
It’s scary. Sin always is – in the sinner and in the sinned against. And, it’s all so stupid, for it’s all so self-centeredly self–defeating.
Fallen, stuck, trying to get “our way”, we’re motivated to oppose others with whatever’s at our disposal. Given that we can all be predisposed to dispose of other’s ways – and even of others, themselves – it’s not a promising prospect.
Now, some do gang up with others they dub “our kind”. In cahoots, they then try to screw the excluded others to save their own “us”, i.e., me, myself and I, writ large.
Selfish schemers of religious bent, rig self-righteous twists on Bible verses – Left and Right. But, belligerent blaming and boasting with Bible verses vs. “them”, begets belligerent blaming and boasting with Bible verses vs. “us”. Then, retaliation results in more self-righteous grievance, ad nauseam, and more self-righteous retaliation, ad nauseam. None of it leads to any real satisfaction on either side, for each still longs for what fantasies can’t provide.
So it has been for ages past; so it is now in this age of ours, and so it will be, to the end of the ways of this world.
And if we don’t recognize us in at least some of our self-centered opponents, we’re stuck in dangerously stupid, self-righteous denial that blinds us to what they’re up to and blinds us to what we’re in for. It’s so long been so: “Pride precedes destruction; an arrogant attitude foreshadows a fall.” (Prov 16:18)
But this wisdom so often goes unheeded. Inescapably, then, there’s further loss. And whether or not we see it coming, that tragic payoff of pride is always predictable.
Well, given the evidence of which we’re all somewhat aware, all agree on one thing: All’s not right with the world! We don’t agree on what’s not right with the world, but we agree on who aren’t right: Them! That, right there, is not right. We agree, too, on who is right: we are – at least, I am. That, too, isn’t right.
When G. K. Chesterton was asked, “What’s wrong with the world?” he rightly replied: “I am”. Do we rightly reply? A right reply is the most practical way to do something about what’s wrong with the world since, we’re in charge of us, and we can’t be in charge of anyone else. We can do our part. Our part might help – or hurt. But,
if we don’t take responsibility for us, and our part, forget about fixing what else is wrong with the world.
All have our own priorities and resentments, our vested interests, our values, our versions of things as they are, our verdicts on what’ wrong and our visions of what’d fix it all.
But, agreeing that, “All’s not right with the world” is useless if we all accuse each other of what’s not right and we all applaud ourselves for what is right. We fault others whose ways we can’t control and we excuse ourselves whose ways we don’t control. There’s no hope for the world, if hope’s all up to us.
So all’s not right with the world. Here’s what’s more to the point: All are not right. All is not right with the world, because all are not right with the Lord.
And it’s no surprise that this baseline truth is, and always has been, deeply resented and deeply resisted. That, too, is the way of this fallen world.
An honest look behind our bragging and blaming would reveal our rationalizations about what we think isn’t right about us, but pretend is right, and our rationalizations for our faulting them to absolve us. But, trying to cope by bragging and blaming that we can’t buy, can’t do the trick. We can’t relieve us, because we don’t really believe us.
Then, extrapolating from our self-centered, and therefore, disadvantaged point of view, we can’t believe that our bragging is believable to others. We can’t hide from us, what we’re trying to hide from them, since we keep our eye on what we’re trying to hide. Stuck in cells of solitary confinement in our brains, where our sense of self tries to hide, we can’t help but assume – so naively – that others see through our charade as we do. Then, we’re all off and running in yet another round of never ending attacks and counterattacks that lead to more fear, frustration and, then, to more hostile outrage at, and from, the others.
This all reinforces to us, how far short we fall in our own eyes as we blindly assume, that’s the “us” in others’ eyes. Of course, it’s not. They use their eyes, not ours; they’re in their brains, not ours. So, this prompts them to get angrier with us if they ever fall for our posturing or ever fail to suspect our camouflaging.
In our self-centered bragging and blaming to obtain our fantasies for “my way”, we’re repeating the foolishness noted in Ecclesiastes: “The eyes are never satisfied with what they see, the ears are never satisfied with what they hear. … I looked on all I’d tried, it was meaningless – a chasing after the wind I never could catch. So I tried to tell myself, there’s no meaning under the sun.” (Eccl 1:8; 2: 11)
Under the sun that yet shines above all the rationalizing and the storm clouds in our fallen hearts and minds, we’re all so easily distracted by superficial sights and sounds that we try to spin into super sights and super sounds. But our souped-up solutions are all still so superficial.
Truth, you see, is based beyond mere sights and sounds. As Paul told Timothy: “No one has ever seen or can see the true God”. (I Tim 6:16) And he told Corinthians: “Fix your eyes on what’s unseen”. (II Cor 4:18) He recalled Isaiah’s words: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard” what God has prepared for those who love him.” (I Cor 2:9; Isa 64:4)
Our own immature and premature imaginations fixate on fantasies that are, indeed, superficialities, and, in no way, are spiritually substantial or sustainable. Even to begin to try to imagine the wideness of God’s limitless loving and mighty imagination for the welfare of all requires God’s revelation not our wishful thinking. We must stop chasing after the winds of change that promise peace but don’t, and can’t, deliver, and seek the winds of God’s Spirit, Who’s always seeking all of us.
Led by myopia, we’re misled. But, in a secure response to God’s deep love, imagination can mature and move us to empathy for others and creative imagination for discovery and stewardship of all of the wonders of God’s gifts.
Besides, don’t we realize that our notions of those we so disturbingly envy, aren’t their own senses of themselves? If we were, who they think they are, we’d be back in the uneasy familiarity of “ourselves”, still stuck in dissatisfaction over self, coveting our mere images of our fellow self-doubters.
Well, nice going, fallen folks! It’s not strange that, all self-centered, self-seeking is still, but “a chasing after the wind” that we never can catch.
But in all of this idolatry of self, we still don’t even begin to catch on to, how monstrously far short we all fall from God’s glorious goals intended for us all. Even as Paul was writing of our deeply sinful condition, he couldn’t refrain from alluding to the life God intends for us. (Rom 3:23)
And it’s at this point in our experienced guilt, consequent shame, fear and lame-brained bitterness and hostility, that we’re graciously gifted by God with the opportunity for true self-awareness that, when admitted to ourselves and confessed to God, opens us up to God’s amazing grace.
It’s this deep and abiding grace of God that Christians in Philippi gratefully received. Paul followed up on their new life in Christ. He knew that, now liberated, they could afford what he urged: “If, you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, any comfort from his love, if now, you know the fellowship of God’s Spirit, if there’s any tenderness and compassion, then complete my joy in you by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose. Do nothing from selfish ambition and boast. Instead, in frank humility, consider others before you get all bogged down in your selves. Look out for the ways of others, as you do your own.
“Your attitude should be that of Christ Jesus: In his very being, God from all eternity. But he didn’t count that as something to cling to for himself. By free choice, he made himself to be nothing, taking on the nature of a slave, and made like a human. Coming to earth as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient down to death – even death on a cross! For this, God raised him to the highest place and gave him the name, the authority, above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow, in heaven, on earth, and in the world below, and every tongue proclaim: Christ Jesus is Lord, to God the Father’s glory.” (Phil 2:1-11)
If it was for us, as lost sinners, that Christ left eternal intimacy with the Father to come into our sinful world, live a sinless life for us and die in our place, where in this fallen world of ours is there any basis for boasting in self? Where’s there any basis for blaming instead of confessing our own faults and, so, relating to others with earnest empathy and fully affordable forgiveness?
It’s in the deep security of the self-giving Savior’s love that we can afford to drop our pretentions, cover-ups, and ludicrous notions that we need things to go “my way”.
Resting in God’s love in Christ, we get, to get on with our privileged calling to be the people we’re created and redeemed to be for one another, to God’s glory. Otherwise, we’re stuck, digging ourselves deeper into defensiveness and estrangement from what God means for us to become.
Well, here’s the world’s oldest sad story of needing it to go “my way”. Genesis, Chapter 3. Let’s not assume we’ve already heard it, and let’s not assume we all weren’t there.
The snake was the shrewdest of the wild animals the Lord God had made. It stalked the woman with a lie: “So, God said you mustn’t eat any of the fruit in this garden, huh?”
“Well, we can eat from any tree but that one”. She then pouts a lie: “We can’t even touch it”. She does cite God’s warning: “If you eat the fruit of that tree, you’ll die!’ ”
“Hah!” scoffed the snake: “You won’t die! Let me tell you something: God knows, if you eat from that tree, your eyes will be opened wide. You’ll be divine, knowing and defining all good and all evil. You’ll be a ‘know-it-all’.”
At first, she thought the snake’s assessment was too good to be true. But, she also thought it was too good to pass up. Decisions. Decisions. Yes, she had a choice. We all have choices. And she chose to buy the lie she wanted to buy.
She gazed at that fruit. She liked what she saw of it, but she saw what she chose to see. She supposed, if it looked good, it would taste good. And, she couldn’t let go of her fantasy of what all it would be like, to be, “a know-it-all”.
The Lord God had already told her all she really needed to know about the fruit of that tree. But she fell for a lie she told herself. To outsmart the Lord God, she rejected divine revelation and bought her own damn dogma. Trying to get “her own way”, she swallowed the fruit of her own lie.
Needing an ally, as we all do when trying to validate our wrong ways and spread the blame, she shared some of that forbidden fruit with the man. He, too, fell for it. Suddenly, they both felt what they’d never felt: the horror of guilt and shame. Now they knew experientially, the evil they’d only heard about in the Lord God’s gracious warning.
They quickly grabbed up some fig leaves to cover up their guilt and shame, but fig leaves were useless for that.
In the cool of the day, trying to hide inside their sin and shame, they heard the familiar approach of their generous Creator, coming to them again, as their loving Companion.
“Where are you now?” These words were no guilt trip. They were a sad wake-up call, confirming what the man and woman already sensed about where they were, now.
The man mumbled: “I’m scared. I’m, ah, naked. I’m hiding.” The Lord God asked, “How do you know you’re now naked, by eating fruit I told you not to eat?”
Ignoring this useful question, the man barked back in blame: “That woman you gave me. She gave me the fruit. So, I ate some.” He blamed God for giving him a partner who, unlike all of the other creatures, was bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. Receiving her, he had jumped for joy.
The Lord God asked the woman, “What have you done?” She ignored this useful question, and barked back in blame, “The snake! The snake deceived me! So, I ate some.”
The Lord God didn’t waste a question on the snake, but declared: “Since you’ve done this, you’re cursed. You’ll crawl on your belly as lowest of all, for as long as you live. I’m putting enmity between you and the woman. Your offspring and hers will be at odds. Her offspring will crush your head as you crush her offspring’s heel.”
The Lord God told the woman, “I’ll increase your pain in childbirth; longing for your husband, he’ll rule over you.”
The Lord God told the man, “You agreed with your wife to eat fruit from that tree, though I’d commanded: ‘You must never eat its fruit.’ The ground is cursed because of you. By hard labor you’ll eat from that ground all the days of your life. It will sprout weeds and thorns; you’ll eat wild vegetation. By the sweat of your brow, you’ll find food, until you return to the ground from which you were taken. You’re dust, and to dust you’ll return.”
The Lord God clothed the two in animal skins. But, as they were now fallen, they must be kept away from the Tree of Life lest they trap themselves in their fallen state.
So, the Lord God expelled them from the Garden and put angelic guards with flaming swords, turning in every direction east of Eden, to keep them from that Tree of Life.
Well, in spite of how very true-to-our-everyday-life this ancient account of sin is, leave it to fallen humanity to toss it away as an outdated fable.
What in our world or in world history makes this account outdated? It’s in an ancient genre, but reflects what we all know of our own human nature – historically, culturally, anthropologically, psychologically, sociologically, and most readily, autobiographically. But our fallen human nature resists truth as readily, as selfishly, as our first parents did. They rebelled in our place; we take after them.
The Forward is a progressive Jewish periodical, founded in 1897 as a Yiddish defender of socialism. Now, it claims to be “a guide to the varieties of Jewish experience”, but smears Orthodox Jews as the “new white supremacists”.
Here’s The Forward’s perversion of the story of Adam and Eve. It’s spun by a rabbi from Humanistic Judaism.
She claims: “The story that begins the bible … is actually the story of the first sexual assault of a woman.” And, she says, God was “the perpetrator”. God raped Eve!
In all the centuries of Hebrew and Christian commentary on this story, all missed what this come-lately rabbi now projects into the text. Of course, they missed it. During all those centuries of biblical study – BC and AD – none could have found her nonsense before our postmodernist PC.
The Humanist rabbi opines that Eve was simply “hungry, so she does the most natural thing in the world and eats a piece of fruit. For just following her instincts, trusting herself, and nourishing her body”, engaging in “self-care”, God “rapes” her.
Well, “self-care” can be and often is, motivation for sin. It’s a very common euphemism for trying to get our wrong ways. And the rabbi does what she claims Eve did. But, tunnel vision “self-care” blinds us to unintended, though predictable, outcomes.
How does this rabbi describe Eve’s punishment? With more PC! “She will never again feel safe in her nakedness. She will never again love her body. She will never again know her body as a place of sacred sovereignty.” So, she concludes: “Eve, our blessed mother, is saying #MeToo.”
Whether ancient, medieval, modern, or postmodern – blaming God is the continuing self-centered attempt to reconstruct reality. We copycat the Fall even here on this far side of the world, east of Eden.
To try to justify us, we say, “It’s just, self-care”. But that sneaky little word, “just”, that we “just” slip in, to justify us and hide our misbehavior, is unjust and cannot justify us.
Saying, “what’s true is what’s true for me, my truth, what I feel” doesn’t help us, for what we feel depends on what we think, what we’re telling ourselves. We can’t unravel our feelings unless we unravel our thoughts that result in our feelings and that then motivate our behavior.
But, most people have no idea how to think their way out of troubling feelings to identify, challenge and change what they could discover are irrational notions resulting in their unwanted feelings and unreasonable, even deadly behavior. So, they remain mired in an emotional morass they can’t escape, tied up in ego-driven, bull-headedness, thinking they need everything to go, what they call, “my way”.
Discarding the Bible, even if they’ve never really read it, people set themselves up to miss the deepest Truth and thus, what’s really true or false about them. Without divine revelation, with mere self-talk, they trust their feelings for truth. But feelings merely reflect thoughts, feelings can’t reflect upon thoughts so as to discern whether the thoughts are grounded in reality or fantasy. If the feelings flow from misinformation and irrationality, they’ll mislead us into unwise, dangerous and even deadly, behavior.
Augustine observed: “The New Testament is in the Old concealed, and the Old is in the New revealed.” From Adam and Eve to Noah to Abraham and Moses and on through the Law and Prophets, down to Jesus of Nazareth and the witness of his apostles after his resurrection, we learn of the outworking of God’s divine plan to redeem fallen humanity. In April, A.D. 33, on a cross outside Jerusalem, God’s promise in Genesis 3 was fulfilled. Three days later, the risen Christ proved it.
In Romans 3, we read Paul’s witness. His way had been to self-righteously persecute Jesus’ followers. But, on his way to persecute still more of them, Paul was suddenly overwhelmed by Christ’s astounding Self-disclosure. Ever after that, Paul took Christ’s Way across the Empire.
In his letter to Romans, he asked rhetorically: “Should we think that we Jews are better than others? Not at all, for we see that all Jews and all Gentiles are under the power of sin. No one is just, not a one. None understands. None really seeks God. All have turned away from God.” (Rom 3:9-12)
Paul’s previous trust in self-righteousness, as “Hebrew of Hebrews”, is left behind and he now explains: “A righteousness from God, apart from Law, has been revealed, to which the Law and Prophets bear witness. This righteousness from God is by faith in Jesus, Messiah, to all who trust him. There’s no difference, all have sinned and all fall short of the glory that God intends for all.”
This Good News outshines and overcomes all ludicrous self-righteousness of tribal rivalries and all of the uselessly defensive huffing and puffing about “us” over “them”.
Paul wrote: “All are justified freely by God’s grace through redemption by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his shed blood. … Where then, is there any room for boasting? It’s excluded.” (Rom 3:21ff)
Jesus was the final Adam, our final representative. As God in flesh, he lived a sinless life, where the first man, Adam, fell into sin. Paul contrasts the first “living man” with Christ, the “life-giving” man. (I Cor 15:45) “As in Adam all die; in Christ all will be made alive.” (I Cor 15:22)
But fallen humanity, even graciously granted a gnawing sense of guilt, tries to ignore the truth, defiantly boasting in self while uselessly blaming all else but self.
The heavy fallout from fallen humanity’s hostility to God in Christ is evident in the history of hostility against those who are in Christ. Christ had warned: “All will hate you because of me.” (Mark 13:13; Matt 10:22) He explained: “If those who are of this world’s ways, hate you, recall, they hated me before they hated you. If you belonged to this world’s ways, this world would embrace you as its own; but you’re not of this world’s ways, so this world hates you.” (John 15:18f; Ps 35:19; 69:4)
For two millennia, God’s Spirit of Truth has sent His truth around the world. But sadly, even in many so-called “Christian” countries, fewer and fewer now believe in God. Still, God’s word is taking root throughout the Third World while, here in America,L Pew Research finds that, only 43 percent, in ages 18 through 29, believe in the God of the Bible. And, no wonder! Churches, Left and Right, have preached “another gospel” that’s not the Gospel of Christ.
Legalists boast of rule keeping in their own self-righteous settings. That’s self-worship. Others virtue signal a silly “interfaith” creed to gain their cred, or they say that they’re “spiritual, but not religious” to flash their postured “progressive” largess. Still others boast of atheism to boost themselves in secular circles. But it’s all idolatrous self-worship – sanctimonious self-seeking for status and approval from others whose coveted affirmation is utterly worthless, today and everlastingly.
What the Psalmist noted about fools saying, “There’s no god!”, really isn’t about speculations. (Ps 14:1) It’s about being sold out to self as to a god. None is godless; all are worshippers. In the end, we worship self or the Savior.
After their Last Supper, as Jesus and his disciples went up into Gethsemane, he said to them: “Tonight, you’ll all be scandalized because of me. You’ll run away, as scripture says: the Lord “will smite the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered”. (Matt 26:31; Zech 13:7) And when Jesus was arrested, they all ran away.
Jesus cautioned: “Don’t think I’ve come to bring peace on earth – not peace, but a sword.” (Matt 10:34) He meant the inevitable conflict between his way and this world’s way. The resistance is, and always has been, fierce, for this world’s way is opposed to Christ and his followers.
Today, for the 3rd year in a row, worldwide persecution of Christians is at another record high with 215 million under high levels of persecution – that’s 1 in 12 Christians. With Jesus’ Twelve, it was 11 killed and 1 banished to Patmos.
Most major persecution of Christians today comes from Islamic and Communist enemies of Christ, though there’s also persecution from Hindus and Buddhists. Eight of the ten most oppressive countries are Islamic. North Korea is the most oppressive of all countries. The persecution is based in rival religions, including the religion of atheism. Persecution of Christians in Mexico and Columbia is from organized crime and governmental corruption.
Cultures that most oppress Christians most oppress gay men and lesbians. But Western culture, rooted in Christian values, attended to the oppressed, the sick and disabled, the illiterate, prisoners, women, orphans and other children, slaves, racial minorities, the unborn, et al. When concerns for gay and lesbian rights came up, and even if it wasn’t clear to the secular activists of that movement, Christian motivation for liberty for all was the backstory there, too.
Christianophobia in America today is mainly from secularist contempt. It’s not the physical or deadly violence found elsewhere, but it’s unrelentingly vicious.
Sociologist George Yancey is an African American Christian who’s taught sociology of race and of religion in secular universities. He says faculties have misgivings about his ability to teach religion classes since he’s a devout Christian. They fear he’d be biased. But, he says, “The fact that I am an African American did not create any fear about my bias in teaching the race and ethnicity course.” He concludes: “Black racial bias is acceptable while Christian religious bias is not.” He says: “I have learned a lot about anti-Christian animosity” in academia.
Did you see The New Yorker’s recent anti-Christian virtue signaling: “Chick-Fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City”? The writer is apoplectic over Chick-Fil-A’s opening in Downtown Manhattan. Chick-Fil-A is not chic. It’s not what a New York restaurant critic, in another context, calls a “ ‘must’ for those who can’t face their friends without selfies they took there … to avoid friends sneering, ‘You haven’t been? Loser!’ ”
But The New Yorker’s blast is aimed at Bible verses and a statue of Jesus at Chick-Fil-A’s Atlanta headquarters. The writer disdains the company’s goal, “to glorify God”, and he goes berserk over Chick-Fil-A cows that, in good-humored salesmanship, urge us to, “Eat Mor Chikin”. He perverts this simple, silly slogan into some sort of deadly exploitation of chickens over cows.
Ironically, he follows all of this with a faux pas in a self-absorbed tweet to his fans: “Welp time to sit down with a Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich and a cold one and read more mentions.” He’s oblivious to the fact that Wendy’s founder was another one of those horrible Christians. If he finds out, can he then tweet: “Welp time for some KFC”? Damn! The Colonel, too, loved Jesus.
But what’s a social snub from a self-styled snob or an insecure elitist’s stink-eye, over against what our Christian sisters and brothers suffer from daily torture and deadly attacks all around the world, while we sit here in safety?
Gay historian Martin Duberman has written two more books. One, subtitled, Hustlers, Cocaine, Depression and Then Some, tells of his gay life in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The other, Has the Gay Movement Failed?, reviews the LGBT movement from the ‘70s to today. He grants that a lot has changed. But, from his Far Left point of view, he says it’s all been far too “conservative”, not “radical” enough to really “change the culture”. Fantasizing a far more radical change of which he dreams, in a fully “liberated” world to come, he, too, ends in unintended irony, as he muses: We “can perhaps be excused for wondering in what distant millennium [really radical] change is likely to occur.”
He has no idea of the earthshaking transformation that’s coming at last, when this world’s “center cannot hold [and] mere anarchy is loosed upon the world [as] the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”, in Yeats’ words. But, Yeats’ and Duberman’s visions fall flat against the everlasting liberation in the Second Coming of Christ and God’s Peace in New Heavens and New Earth.
This fallen world that Paul said, “was subjected to futility and frustration, not of its own will, but by the will of Him who subjected it in the sure hope that it will be liberated from bondage and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.” (cf. Isa 65:17ff; 66:22f; Rom 8:20f; II Peter 3:13; Rev 21:1ff)
When the only Son of God, in the body of the only sinless man, faced the end for which he’d come – punishment for our sins in the most horrible of deaths, to put to death all death – he communed in agony with his Father, known in the depths of eternal intimacy. In three grueling prayers he pleaded to be spared the ordeal for which he’d come, for it would mean his being unimaginably forsaken and his Father’s anguish, as he suffered and died for us.
On that dreadful night, having been betrayed by one and soon to be deserted by the others who were dozing off and would soon be hiding out, he prayed that he might not have to endure the way of the cross, if there were any other way. Yet, in each prayer, he reaffirmed his faithful obedience: “Nevertheless, not my way, but Thy way.”
Our only way back to the Father was by the way of Jesus’ cross. He was The Way. So he laid down his own way and his own life, to be The Way for us by way of his cross.
On that cross, as priests, Pharisees, Roman officials and the rabble seemed to be getting their way, getting rid of him, Jesus, in excruciating pain, asked, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what their doing”. (Luke 23:34) And, they didn’t know what in hell or in heaven was going on there, that unimaginable day, at Golgotha.
But Jesus’ mother and disciples didn’t want him to be up there on that cross. It seemed that they were not getting their way. Yet, three days later, they were with the risen Christ.
Jesus told us to ask every day, for our Father’s way, here on earth, as it is in heaven. Every day, we get to get out of our way, and have God’s way, be our way, grateful that God’s way is Jesus, Who is, Himself, The Way. What a gift – to exchange our fantasy way for God’s way forever!