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| "Responsibility." by Nathan Siemers, on Flickr |
A confession right the start: I'm really glad that I'm not preaching this Sunday. I've preached the last two weeks, and Jesus has been absolutely horrid, continuing to hammer away at the point that faith asks you to give yourself to others, in real and tangible ways. Especially your wealth. And so I'm grateful for a week off of preaching.
This week's texts aren't all that much better, to be honest. They talk about faith, which is nice enough, but also about the demands of faith. We are stuck in a place in Luke where Jesus is saying things like, "Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to anyone by whom they come! It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble. Be on your guard! If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive. And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, 'I repent,' you must forgive."
And the disciples start reeling from the seemingly impossible challenge and task of, you know, reprioritizing their whole lives around new values of lifting up the poor, forgiving one another relentlessly, staying faithful to Jesus even when life sucks for them. I mean, Jesus has warned them that working on God's side for a complete reordering of the world could possible cost them their lives. It all seems too hard, like they aren't qualified to do any of this stuff. And so they say, exasperated, "Then increase our faith (to give us at least a fighting chance...)!"
And Jesus, pesky as always, tells them that even faith the size of a teeny tiny mustard seed is more than enough to be his ambassadors in changing the world. And he even goes on to compare them to faithful slaves who do all their work, not looking to find extra favor or accolades, but taking the humble disposition of "only doing what we ought." Let me tell you, it's kind of infuriating. And especially in a post-slavery culture, it's a pretty terrible illustration.
But the point is that Jesus doesn't consider any of the tasks that are set before us to be extraordinary, nor do any of them require extraordinary amounts of faith, knowledge, education, whatever. The ordinary life of a disciple, in Jesus' eyes, is a life of generosity, forgiveness, compassion, justice, hopefulness, humbleness, and grace. I might debate with Jesus about the "ordinary-ness" of any of these things, because they all seem pretty radical to me, but the point is that people of faith are, quite simply, empowered and called to live in this way. To make these values the hum-drum core of our worldviews and our personalities.
We don't need super-powers to do any of these things, unless you count conviction as a super-power. And we don't go out into the world to be congratulated for our efforts. These beautiful callings of our faith are just simply what we, as followers of Jesus, ought to be doing.
This election season has started making all of us a little crazy. (Ok, well, I don't know if it is making YOU crazy, but I know that it is starting to mess with MY head.) And in trying to process this week's debate, I started thinking about all of the extra stuff we try to pile onto elections and candidates as we campaign for them or denounce them.
At the heart of the election is the simple job of a nation to cast a vote for the candidate that we feel can best handle the job description. I mean, at the end of the day, we need a president who is simply doing what a president is called and empowered to do; we elect someone who will take responsibility for the tasks of the position.
But this is not what we actually vote for, is it? I've been through enough election cycles in my lifetime to know that we vote for candidates for a whole host of unrelated reasons. Do we like the person? Could we have a beer with them? Do we agree with their lifestyle and life choices? Do we hold allegiance to a political party, come hell or high water? Do we believe their promises, despite the fact that every candidate is going to have to slog through Congress (for good or for bad) to get things done? Do we like their morals? Do we resonate with their faith? Do we want someone of their creed, their class, their race, or their gender in office? Are they the best of a slate of good candidates? Are they the lesser of evils in a slate of terrible candidates? Do we have to agree with everything they've ever supported? What if they have changed their stance on something - is that laudable or laughable?
We lose sight of the essential and work ourselves into a frenzy about all the other stuff. Stuff that matters, sure, but stuff that is peripheral to the basic function of any candidate: to serve in the role of president and to do what they ought to do to fulfill the nature of the role. Can the candidate do the job? That's all that matters.
Don't we get caught up in some of the same peripheral stuff when we think about faith, too?
We wonder if we are smart enough or if we have enough social clout to work for justice. We wonder if we are likeable enough to initiate compassionate conversations with our neighbors. We worry about whether someone who has offended us deserves our forgiveness, or we worry about whether we are letting somebody off the hook if we forgive them. We wonder if we can suffer depression and anxiety disorders and still be a voice proclaiming God's hope in the world. We worry that we might be generous to the wrong people or in the wrong ways, or we worry that we don't have enough to give to others. We wonder, with the disciples, if we actually have enough faith to live out our calling, and we procrastinate on the tasks Jesus calls us to do until we feel better about our faith, ourselves, and our situations.
We lose sight of the essential and work ourselves into a frenzy about all the other stuff. Stuff that feels important, sure, but stuff that is peripheral to the basic calling to follow Jesus: to live out the values of God's kingdom the best we can in this life, to do what Jesus has asked us to do. Do we have even a speck of faith? That's all that matters.
What if we imagined the life of faith (and the life of politics?) as having a much simpler, more basic set of criteria:
What is it that needs to be done? (What is the calling?)
And how will we do what we ought with the tasks that are set before us?
All of the peripheral stuff is...well...peripheral.
Here is what the world needs: generosity, forgiveness, compassion, justice, hopefulness, humbleness, and grace. How might our world be transformed if we, our politics, our social interactions, and our communities-at-large viewed these values not as something extraordinary to our everyday existence, but rather the things that we simply ought to be doing?