Incurable Wound
It has been a while since my last post. It’s not because of writer’s block. It has more to do with the increasing burden I feel for America and, especially, the American church. I’ve wondered if I should delete Twitter from my iPad. Or should I say, X? More like XXX. So much nastiness and bitterness. So much anger. And so much of it reveals the cancerous state of the church in our country.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m still experiencing reverse culture shock after twelve years serving an international church in Seoul. What a life-changing, refreshing breath of Holy Spirit air that was! Diverse in culture and Christian traditions, we demonstrated the unity Jesus prays for in the seventeenth chapter of John.
Now, I’m back in the toxic, anti-Holy Spirit atmosphere that is the church in the United States. Like our nation, it is deeply divided. It is filled with hatemongers rather than peacemakers. And it is deeply infected with scandals, both good and bad.
From the Roman Catholic Church to the opposite end of the Christian spectrum, the Southern Baptist Convention, sex, money, and power are the bad news undermining the good news of Christ’s kingdom. The lines of division - who’s in and who’s out - are growing wider. And darker.
I am reminded of Paul’s warning to the churches in Galatia. They were infected by the teaching of Jewish nationalist Christians — cultural missionaries seeking to make their converts into Jewish Christians just like them. Their view of Scripture was literal and unyielding. They were blind to the Spirit and message of Jesus.
Their promised Messiah had come to do fulfill what his people had failed to fulfill. The mandate of God to Israel was not to make everyone else into Jews, it was to open the doors of God’s Kingdom to every tongue, tribe, people, and nation.
Unity in diversity was God’s plan all along. That’s why He put an end to the building project in the plain of Shinar. The Tower of Babel was all about unity through conformity. But when the Day of Pentecost came, and those Jews in the Upper Room were given languages from around the world, God made it clear - the new and revised building project of His Kingdom was all about unity in the midst of diversity.
It was and is a scandal. In our divided, fractured world, where unity through conformity confirms that Babel remains buried in the heart of sinful humanity, the idea of accepting others and building relationships with those different from us is anathema.
But the call of Jesus remains the same - go into all the world, making disciples of all ethnos or people groups. Cross the barriers. Break down the walls. And lest we forget, Jesus commands us to teach them to observe all the things he commanded us. Things like “Blessed are the peacemakers, the mercy givers, and the meek.”
Our Lord crossed those scandalous boundaries. His disciples are proof of that. What a motley crew they were. A Zealot (Jewish terrorist), tax collector, and thief, together with a band of uneducated fishermen from the outskirts of Israel. He reached out and touched the untouchable lepers, spent time with a Samaritan tramp, and taught the Scriptures to women, something no other Rabbi dared to do.
Like the religious leaders who conspired to put him to death, so many in our day not only reject these “outsiders,” but even more tragic, they reject and disown others who, in the name of Jesus, dare to cross the so-called boundary lines between “us” and “them.”
I see these things in my divided nation, where so much of that division is reflected by the church. Instead of working to end these divisions, we are actively sowing seeds that increase the hostility while undermining the faith we are meant to demonstrate. “The only thing that counts,” Scripture tells us, “is faith expressing itself through love.”1 And love does more than talk the talk. Love walks the walk.
Some say America is breaking apart. I disagree. The United States of America is imploding. We are, to quote the dictionary, “collapsing violently inward.” That is what happens to those who refuse to look outside their own camp. To cross boundaries and tear down walls of division. To be the peacemakers and mercy givers Jesus calls us to be.
From where I stand now, it looks like an incurable wound.2 That’s how Jeremiah described his nation many years before the fall took place. We need more Jeremiahs in our nation today. More men and women who recognize the problem and are neither afraid to call it out nor stand steadfastly against it. We need more scandalous Christians. More willing to pay the price to follow the way of Jesus.
In Christ,
Dan
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Galatians 5:6.
Jeremiah 30:12.