Election Blues

I know a lot of good Christians are concerned about the November presidential election and I’m right there with them. I sometimes wonder, though, whether the country would really be the better for it, whether the cause of the Kingdom would be any better served, if everything turns out the way we’d like.

When we have “our people” in power don’t we tend to relax a bit? It’s an unstated assumption, I think, that if we can just get our party in, the group that we think best represents our values and makes policy accordingly, then it can turn our country around and reverse our culture’s moral decline. When this happens, when it goes the way we deem as “ours,” the sense of urgency seems to ebb. It’s a natural tendency. (We show it in our fellowships even. We hire a team of qualified ministers, then kick back in our designated pew, write our weekly check and leave the rest to our professionals.)

This all ties in with something I wrote recently about how political action is truly powerless to bring change in the place where change must occur if it’s going to work its way through the culture – the hearts of individuals.

Make no mistake. I shudder to think that a President of the United States could believe it is morally acceptable to take a premature baby who has survived an unsuccessful abortion, even as it cries for its mother, its tiny lungs filling with new air, and toss it aside to die. For a President to hold this position, invoking the so-called “right” to choose as including its protection, the practical consequences may not be great. We’ve so perfected this cruelest of expedients that it seldom fails the first time. What does this belief say, though, of a candidate’s underlying worldview? It’s frightening. Chilling, really.

But again, God often gave wayward Israel the bad leaders it deserved, men who indulged their own and the people’s lusts for all manner of pagan excess, even child sacrifice. As a nation, we’ve become practised in similar rituals. We sacrifice our children to the god Choice. The altars are built by black-robed men, but to our own specs -- all to ringing chants of “rights” and “freedom.”

The point: If we don’t like our leaders, it may be that we’re getting our just desserts as a nation. As Christians, we should certainly pray for our country. Come November, we should go to the polls and do our duty as good citizens, voting as our consciences guide us. Then, whether we get the outcome we want or otherwise, we should forget about it. Put it out of our minds, for all practical purposes, rejoin our brothers and sisters and get on with the hard task of taking Christ to a country that no longer knows its right hand from its left.

Because it’s in the trenches of everyday life, not the marble halls of power, where souls are won and cultures are changed.

What Was Wrong With Lamar

Something was wrong with Lamar.

There just had to have been. To commit suicide is bad enough. But to do it that way -- to walk out to a dark highway, to pick out the next pair of emerging headlights, to turn toward them, waiting, and then at last to step in front of them. I’d like to think that their eyes -- Lamar’s and the driver’s -- locked in that moment before impact. And the horror in hers helped drive the haze from his, granting him a nanosecond of clarity, time for one urgent “Forgive me, Father” before he had his life crushed out of him.

But that’s just wishful speculation. All I really know is that something was seriously wrong with Lamar.

What was wrong with him, of course, is what is wrong with me and you. I did a post last week about a writer who became fascinated with the preserved remains of a two-headed calf and how she came to associate that freakish image with our own divided natures as sinful human beings. She described how the calf’s own deformity had apparently worked to destroy it, how its one perfectly formed head had embraced life, and how its other head, misshapen and hideous, had sought death, to the point even of spitting out all the nourishment its counterpart took in.

The idea was put forward that we are all two-headed calves -- creatures burdened with split natures, each of our halves working against the other, always at cross purposes. There’s an answer to our internal division and it involves a Cross and a purpose. But if we do not avail ourselves of it, the death head will win out like it did with Lamar. It is only by the Cross that we will find life and wholeness.

Culture And How To Change It

I notice in today’s paper that one of our Oklahoma state lawmakers has proclaimed herself "a cultural warrior for Judeo-Christian values."

While I have no doubt that she means well, I think her statement springs from a sentiment that has taken deep root among American Christians in recent years -- the idea that the best way to get our morally adrift culture back on the right course is through political action.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be concerned about laws and government and who our elected leaders are; we certainly should be. But if that becomes our central concern, we are focusing on a symptom and missing the real problem, which goes much deeper. Real change for good occurs on an intimate personal level, as individual hearts come to realize their alienation from God through sin and find reconciliation in Jesus Christ. That and only that is how individual souls, and by extension groups of people, will find their bearings.

As long as the individual hearts of our country are turned away from God, it is going to be reflected in their collective whole -- the culture at large, of which our laws and governing institutions are but an emanation. Laws are top-down solutions to problems that originate at the bottom of a society: the individual hearts of its members. Laws are necessary but they are ultimately ineffective at getting at the real source of corruption. Even if you could somehow magically transform all our laws overnight to reflect Judeo-Christian values, it wouldn’t change one single solitary heart and our society’s slow backwards drift into spiritual narcolepsy would continue unabated.

As for this particular lawmaker, whose intentions I’m sure are noble, if she is committed to the cause of Christ, she would serve it much better by spurring her fellow Christians to get out of their church buildings and take their message to the streets, getting involved in their communities through acts of service -- not acts as ends in themselves, but as avenues for reaching individual hearts with the Good News about Jesus.

That, brothers and sisters, is how you change a culture. Anything else is confusing effects for the real cause.

Curing Our Edifice Complex

The opinions are still coming in but if I’m any judge, this week’s Backyard Bible Camp was an overwhelming success -- and, I hope, a model for how we do outreach at Open Door. Even when we have our own facility, the goal should be to get out of it as often as possible and into the community. The Bible Camp did just that. Big kudos to everyone involved!

The fact is, many people outside the Church are intimidated by our facilities. They see them only from the outside. What’s going on inside is left largely to their imaginations, which are colored by popular culture and its generally negative, even hostile, attitude toward organized religion of any stripe. The only sure way to show them who we are and what we are about, our Father’s business, is to get outside the walls.

I’m not knocking facilities as such. They’re tools and if they are used to successfully advance the Kingdom, then great. But if we’re not careful, they can encourage over time a kind of mental retreat from the world outside. A circle-the-wagons mentality has become common across our brotherhood today. We raise our physical edifice, retreat behind its comforting walls and then wait for the world, if it’s interested, to come to us. The mindset often goes with -- and reinforces -- this fractious zeal for defending our turf and traditions that for some brothers has come to trump all other considerations, including the Great Commission.

Let’s work hard so that our Open Door serves not only as an invitation to the world, but as an ever-present reminder of our own charge to go forth boldly into it.