When We Butt Heads in the Pews

My central thesis in preaching and teaching on Matthew is that one of the author’s major concerns in writing the gospel was teaching his readers how the community of faith was supposed to live together.

Being part of the faith community is a non-negotiable for Jesus. As I have said in the pulpit recently, there are no Lone Ranger Christians. You can’t follow Jesus all by yourself; the path of discipleship wasn’t designed to be a solitary road.

Sometimes we wish we could walk it by ourselves, because it’s not always easy to be part of a community. We might discover we are called to follow Jesus alongside people whom we may not particularly like. Or we may protest we are too “different.” Or we might say, “I’m not comfortable around people like that.” We might not like the way another member of the community prays or sings; we may disagree with their politics, or find their wardrobe distasteful.

But that’s all beside the point in the faith community, or “church,” if you like. When God calls us to follow , there is always a group of disciples ready to accompany us on our journey of faith. And these disciples are just as flawed and imperfect as you and I are. We learn on the road together. That’s the beauty and the struggle of church.

Fortunately, the Gospel of Matthew also gives us some great advice on how to navigate the conflict which will ultimately confront any church. In the eighteenth chapter, Jesus gives us a three-step process and one guiding principle by which disciples are supposed to handle conflict.

The three-step process goes like this:

1) “If your brother or sister sins against you, go and correct them when you are alone together. If they listen to you, then you’ve won over your brother or sister.” (Matthew 18:15)

This step is the best piece of advice I’ve ever heard, and as a pastor, it is the primary way I advise all staff and laypeople to act towards each other: if someone has wronged you, then you are supposed to go to that person directly and speak to them about it. Not to a third party, nor to Facebook, nor to anyone else.

This is also the least-followed piece of advice I have ever given. It’s difficult to confront people with whom you are in conflict. I know that because it’s hard for me, too. However, it’s the best way to address conflict, and it prevents things from circulating on the rumor mill or gossip circuit. Most conflict in the church would immediately cease if this practice were followed as a general rule by everyone.

However, Jesus recognized that this tactic wouldn’t always work …

2) “But if they won’t listen, take with you one or two others so that every word may be established by the mouth of two or three witnesses.” (Matthew 18:16)

If the situation escalates, Jesus recommends that you take one or two friends with you to confront the person with whom you feud. The presence of others keeps everyone honest, and can de-escalate tension.

But if that doesn’t work …

3) “But if they still won’t pay attention, report it to the church. If they won’t pay attention even to the church, treat them as you would a Gentile and tax collector.” (Matthew 18:17)

This step sounds extreme; in fact, it sounds as if it can be used as justification for kicking someone out of a church. But is that a bad thing?

Let me suggest some moderating thoughts about this passage:

First, I believe that this is an extreme step to be taken only when and if someone’s behavior is harming someone else. We can all think of situations in which a church member’s actions could be so destructive that we would have to take drastic measures to keep them from hurting people in the congregation.

However, this process ensures that there would be no arbitrary and punitive measure taken against anyone. If there is a problem, the offender is confronted privately first; if he or she doesn’t respond to mend the problem, only then is the matter widened to a larger group of people.

And third, scholars have argued that treating people like Gentiles and tax collectors isn’t as bad as it sounds. After all, we know how Jesus treated Gentiles and tax collectors — he ate and drank with them! He treated them as people worthy of his time and attention!

Finally, there is one overriding general principle that Jesus preaches about community life — forgiveness. Just after teaching this process of conflict resolution, Peter asked Jesus, “But what if the same person keeps sinning against me? How many times do I have to put up with it? How many times do I have to forgive — as many as seven times?”

We all know how Jesus answered: “Not seven times, but seventy times seven.”

Forgiveness is the heart of church life. This is the only thing that will hold us together in the end. For we will offend each other, we will sin against each other, and we will say harmful things and do hurtful things. That's just the way humans do each other.

But as the redeemed disciples of Jesus, we have a remedy for reconciliation — the ability to say, “I forgive you.”

Let’s learn to say that a little more frequently.

God Has No Point System

The opening scene of the pilot episode of one of my current fave TV shows finds Eleanor (Kristen Bell) sitting on a couch in a waiting room staring at the words “Welcome! Everything is fine” painted on the wall opposite her.

A door to an inner office opens and a man in a blazer (Ted Danson) invites her in. They sit across a desk from each other, and he introduces himself as Michael. She responds by asking, “Where am I?”

Michael says that she is dead. “Your life on earth has ended, and you are now in the next phase of your existence in the universe.”

Eleanor answers, “Cool, cool. I have some questions … Am I … (pointing upwards) or is this … (pointing downwards)?”

“It’s not the heaven-or-hell idea that you were raised on,” Michael says. “But generally speaking, in the afterlife, there’s a Good Place and there’s a Bad Place. You’re … in the Good Place.”

Did I mention this is a comedy?

It doesn’t take long before the show’s central conflict reveals itself — Eleanor shouldn’t have been sent to the Good Place; she was actually a pretty terrible person on earth, and the only way to get to the Good Place is by accumulating a net positive amount of points. She is the first to realize this problem, and tries her hardest to keep from being “outed.”

What plays out over the next three years of NBC’s “The Good Place” is a hearty dose of ethics, smart metaphysical humor, and a sassy robot girl named Janet. Except she’s not really a robot, but … it’s complicated.

One of my favorite scenes is the orientation video produced for new arrivals to the Good Place. You can watch it above. I’m especially fascinated by the point system that the Good and Bad Places are based upon.

In the video, Michael explains:

During your time on earth, every one of your actions had a positive or a negative value depending on how much good or bad that action put into the universe. Every sandwich you ate, every time you bought a magazine, every single thing you did had an effect that rippled out over time and ultimately created some amount of good or bad … When your time on earth has ended, we calculate the total value of your life using our perfectly accurate measuring system. Only the people with the very highest scores, the true cream of the crop, get to come here, to the Good Place.

In “The Good Place,” going to heaven or hell depends on one’s final “score.” That might sound amusing, but it absolutely amazes me how many people live their real lives according to this reasoning. This kind of moral reckoning likely makes sense to lots of people. In fact, I would guess that a large percentage of Americans believe in heaven and hell, and most of them probably believe that the way to get to heaven is to accumulate more good actions than bad.

What shocks me even more is that so many Christians live this way, too. Throughout my career as a pastor, I have visited more than one person on their deathbed who has said to me, “I’m not worried about going to heaven. I know I’ve been a good person.”

I want to say to them, though I usually don’t say it as bluntly as this, that BEING A GOOD PERSON HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HEAVEN OR HELL.

In fact, that’s the exact opposite of the good news of Jesus Christ. The core gospel message is that God loves us — period. We are all sinners, all flawed and broken, but God forgives us anyway, and not because of anything we have done, but on the merit of Jesus Christ’s advocacy on our behalf.

This was the central theological point of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther protested the clergymen who were traveling the countryside selling “good points” to folks to boost their chances of gaining heaven. Luther insisted that God didn’t work this way; we couldn’t earn our way to heaven, but could only rely on grace to get us there.

In other words, God has no point system.

Paul put it like this: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God — not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Eph. 2:8-10).

The good news is that we are saved by grace, not by good works, but that we are created to be people who do good works. The good works are not a means to an end; they are the end themselves. They are what constitute a meaningful, purposeful life.

You are already loved, already saved, already held in the arms of God. Nothing can tear you from God’s arms, nothing can separate you from God’s love. You are secure.

You will be in the Good Place one day, along with everyone else.

But until then, let’s do everything in our power to make this planet, this earth, this nation, this neighborhood, God’s Good Place.

Join us at our next Faith on Tap session, Feb. 12, 7 pm at 723 Ft Worth Ave, as we take a deeper dive into “The Good Place” and what it means to be good.

Turning the Head of Christ

A feature story in last Sunday’s Dallas Morning News brought back a flood of nostalgic memories. The article was about the famous painting of Jesus by a graphic designer named Warner Sallman in 1940.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. It was ubiquitous in the second half of the twentieth century; I remember it hanging a number of places in family members’ homes, as well as a few churches I visited. It’s a … shall we say, “pretty picture” of Jesus.

Jesus has flowing brown hair, a full beard, and blue eyes gazing off into the distance. His lips are slightly pursed, as if he’s about to say something calm and soothing.

The article speaks of the picture’s enormous popularity and quotes Billy Graham as saying about the work that it was “probably more satisfying to Americans than the more ancient conceptions which portrayed Christ as weak and emaciated.”

If by “weak and emaciated” Graham meant non-white, then he would have been spot on. Because this famous painting is nothing like the historical Jesus, of that we can be sure. The real Jesus was born in Palestine and was certainly darker than the famous picture, no matter that Sallman claims that he was inspired by a dream in which he saw Jesus.

Since we don’t have a clue as to what Jesus really looked like, the truth is that any drawing, painting, or sketch of Jesus tells us more about the artist and the person viewing the art than it does about Jesus.

Thus, this artwork and its subsequent popularity tells us a great deal about 20th-century American Protestant Christianity and all that was right — and wrong — about it. Sallman’s Jesus is a docile, submissive, and entirely-too-nice Savior of the World. He would have likely made a very good church member in 1950s Methodist churches. He might have even been a very good Methodist pastor, except for that long hair. The long hair is Sallman’s only acquiescence to Jesus’ essential strangeness. But the rest of this Jesus is entirely domesticated. This Jesus would never have turned over the tables of moneychangers, or challenged the High Priest, or told Peter to “Get behind me, Satan!”

It’s hard to imagine Sallman’s Jesus making too much of a fuss. Instead, he appears as a very loving, personable figure. And that is entirely in keeping with the Christianity of the time; Jesus was consistently preached as a sentimental figure who loved children and animals and would ultimately lay down his life so that those who believe in him would have their sins forgiven and live in heaven with him. This was the version of Christianity that was especially popular in white America at the time.

This was the Jesus that Americans wanted to believe in, and the fact that this Jesus was a Scandanavian-looking white dude made the whole idea palatable to the white church.

However, Sallman’s picture overlooks a vital aspect of the historical Jesus. The man from Nazareth spoke and acted in the tradition of the great Hebrew prophets, the rough-edged proclaimers of justice in the face of the world’s illegitimate powers.

In the midst of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and the subsequent anti-war drift, Protestant Christianity began to fracture between those who continued to think of Jesus in terms of Sallman’s vision and those who … didn’t.

I would argue that Sallman’s picture is sadly dated and largely irrelevant to our world. Not because Jesus’ hair is out of style, or that he is simply too white. But because what the world needs now is not a sanitized, BFF Jesus and pie-in-the-sky Christianity.

What the world needs now is more of the prophet Jesus who would be angry that children are being torn from their parents after fleeing from war-torn homes, who would be incredulous that children don’t have enough to eat in our cities, who would be outraged that we spend so much money on frivolous leisures, dangerous habits, and military hardware.

Now I’m not saying that Jesus wasn’t a loving figure, nor am I saying that we don’t find forgiveness of sins in him. I believe in life after death, too. These are all part of the Christian faith. However, they aren’t the total picture of the faith.

If we are to have a balanced faith, then we have to come to terms with Jesus the prophet, Jesus the troublemaker, Jesus the justice-seeker.

And a picture like that might not be very pretty.