nathaniel ogden kidd (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} bland_hyssop) wrote,@ 2007-01-04 07:16:00 |
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contentment
I remember only the last line of my dream.
My good friend, probably my best and closest non-Christian friend these days, asked me, “Am I content?”
It wasn’t a remarkable dream. But it woke me. It woke me at 4.30. The wheels in my mind started turning, to the point that I became conscious, dropped into something of a minor crisis of faith.
As an American, it is difficult to deal with Christ’s narrow claims of salvation. He claims to be the way, the truth, and the life. Do I believe it?
I think I have come to believe it only functionally. If you were to ask me last week, I probably would have said, “Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation that I know. And he gives good indication that he is indeed the only way. So let me talk about my Jesus; you may draw your own conclusions.”
Yet if Christ is indeed the only way of salvation, there is a greater firmness and urgency to his call on the lives of those who do not follow him. The medicine of the Gospel may indeed be bitter, but it cures, and every man I see on the street is perishing without it, whether that decay is visible or not. That is a bold statement, and I do not know quite how to respond to it.
I worry that my faith is American, more than it is Christian. I worry that my faith is filled with little compromises which warp and distort the true Gospel, impinging on both the transformative work it is doing in my life and the forward motion of the Kingdom of God from me outward into the world. My assumptions, my instincts; they are all American. In speaking of my faith, I am quick to laud the spiritual benefits of knowing Jesus, but I ignore his radical, beautiful, paradoxical plan of salvation.
Why? Because I, like most Americans, am not a sinner. I have absolved myself of any moral obligation, either personal or collective. If I see a poor person on the street, it is not my responsibility; we need a better bureaucracy to protect the rights of the poor. If there is a problem in my life, I do not need salvation, I need therapy. It is not my fault, not what I have done, but what has been done to me.
I must put to death my Americanness, and let God raise me up a Christian.
At any rate, this is of course far removed from that initial thought which woke me. My friend asked, “Am I content?”
I thought a great deal about this after I laid aside other theological concerns. Besides being such a good friend, this man is also a good person; I find much in him admirable and worthy of emulation. He has a natural gift of hospitality, a natural ability to lead and direct others; something that I hope to have one day with much difficulty and training on my part.
When he asks me, then, he speaks not only for himself, but also for a idealized version of myself. He speaks that clever and sagacious fellow, I daydream myself to be. He speaks for that respected and influential member of the community who sits in his office surrounded by the warmth of books and the sharpness of wit. “Am I content?”
And the answer is, to both of them: You are not content, but comfortable. You are not content, but complacent. It is the living experience of the Living God which brings contentment to all: rich and poor, smart and dull. To follow him is to move, yet you are sitting still, justifying your discontentment with so many shallow words. Hear the words of Jesus to the rich young ruler: If you would have eternal life, go, sell all you have and give the money to the poor, then come, follow me.
To our shallow lives, Jesus responds with a call to sacrifice, and then to journey.
As a brief aside, I do not think it is a coincidence that while I sat writing this, I received a return email from the chair of the Department of Archaeology and History of Art at Bilkent University, Turkey. The fact that this is an uncomfortable and somewhat unexpected place for me to go makes me wonder all the more: could this be God’s calling?
But the reality of obedience is that it is something we can only take one step at a time. We shall see what tomorrow brings.
I remember only the last line of my dream.
My good friend, probably my best and closest non-Christian friend these days, asked me, “Am I content?”
It wasn’t a remarkable dream. But it woke me. It woke me at 4.30. The wheels in my mind started turning, to the point that I became conscious, dropped into something of a minor crisis of faith.
As an American, it is difficult to deal with Christ’s narrow claims of salvation. He claims to be the way, the truth, and the life. Do I believe it?
I think I have come to believe it only functionally. If you were to ask me last week, I probably would have said, “Jesus Christ is the only way of salvation that I know. And he gives good indication that he is indeed the only way. So let me talk about my Jesus; you may draw your own conclusions.”
Yet if Christ is indeed the only way of salvation, there is a greater firmness and urgency to his call on the lives of those who do not follow him. The medicine of the Gospel may indeed be bitter, but it cures, and every man I see on the street is perishing without it, whether that decay is visible or not. That is a bold statement, and I do not know quite how to respond to it.
I worry that my faith is American, more than it is Christian. I worry that my faith is filled with little compromises which warp and distort the true Gospel, impinging on both the transformative work it is doing in my life and the forward motion of the Kingdom of God from me outward into the world. My assumptions, my instincts; they are all American. In speaking of my faith, I am quick to laud the spiritual benefits of knowing Jesus, but I ignore his radical, beautiful, paradoxical plan of salvation.
Why? Because I, like most Americans, am not a sinner. I have absolved myself of any moral obligation, either personal or collective. If I see a poor person on the street, it is not my responsibility; we need a better bureaucracy to protect the rights of the poor. If there is a problem in my life, I do not need salvation, I need therapy. It is not my fault, not what I have done, but what has been done to me.
I must put to death my Americanness, and let God raise me up a Christian.
At any rate, this is of course far removed from that initial thought which woke me. My friend asked, “Am I content?”
I thought a great deal about this after I laid aside other theological concerns. Besides being such a good friend, this man is also a good person; I find much in him admirable and worthy of emulation. He has a natural gift of hospitality, a natural ability to lead and direct others; something that I hope to have one day with much difficulty and training on my part.
When he asks me, then, he speaks not only for himself, but also for a idealized version of myself. He speaks that clever and sagacious fellow, I daydream myself to be. He speaks for that respected and influential member of the community who sits in his office surrounded by the warmth of books and the sharpness of wit. “Am I content?”
And the answer is, to both of them: You are not content, but comfortable. You are not content, but complacent. It is the living experience of the Living God which brings contentment to all: rich and poor, smart and dull. To follow him is to move, yet you are sitting still, justifying your discontentment with so many shallow words. Hear the words of Jesus to the rich young ruler: If you would have eternal life, go, sell all you have and give the money to the poor, then come, follow me.
To our shallow lives, Jesus responds with a call to sacrifice, and then to journey.
As a brief aside, I do not think it is a coincidence that while I sat writing this, I received a return email from the chair of the Department of Archaeology and History of Art at Bilkent University, Turkey. The fact that this is an uncomfortable and somewhat unexpected place for me to go makes me wonder all the more: could this be God’s calling?
But the reality of obedience is that it is something we can only take one step at a time. We shall see what tomorrow brings.
