False Gospels

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel…” – Galatians 1:5

Paul begins his letter to the Galatians in rather stark manner. It seems that teachers in the church, motivated by a desire to win the favor of Jewish leaders (6:12-13), were telling people that they were not truly Christians until they joined the Jews in following Old Testament law, such as observing Jewish feast days (4:10) and being circumcised (5:2). This may seem irrelevant to us, but if one considers that what they were doing was combining the gospel with old ways of earning worth, for the purpose of pleasing others, in a way that fit in with the cultural majority—then it’s not all that unlike what we do today. 

Our culture touts not feast days and circumcision, but a kind of “expressive individualism” or “hyper-individualism,” based on a moral ecology which, as Brooks writes about in his book The Second Mountain, is built on a series of assumptions including the buffered self, the dream of total freedom, the centrality of accomplishment, the God within, and the privatization of meaning. Mash this together with the gospel, and you get a sort of hybrid gospel that says we can believe in Jesus but still do whatever we want to, that makes our faith a private affair, that judges our faith based on how much we can measurably accomplish with it. Many of us also have cultures from our families of origin, or individual personality types or histories, that tend to mingle in with the gospel whether we are aware of it or not.

The fact is, the gospel does not say that we are saved by Jesus and ____. Jesus and “successful” children; Jesus and our accomplishments; Jesus and a husband; Jesus and money; Jesus and career success; Jesus and our feelings. Any hybrid gospel is a false gospel. Any gospel that does not stand entirely on grace is a false gospel. And this truth is one we have to keep learning, because it requires un-learning so many other things, so many other ways of seeing and living.

Meritocracy

“For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” – Romans 5:7-8

We live in a moral ecology, writes David Brooks, built on assumptions that include “the centrality of accomplishment”: we are not measured by how well we conform to code, or the “thickness” of our relationships, “but by what we have individually achieved… promoting the self is the prime mission.” One New Yorker article describes how this works when it comes to education: up to high school, you just need to show up. But college is different. It’s a bottleneck, a sorting mechanism. “You are either selected or rejected. And it matters where… The narrower the entryway, the broader the range of opportunities on the other side. College, in turn, sorts by qualifying some students for graduate and professional education… And graduate and professional education then sorts for the labor market. It’s little gold stars all the way up.”

Little gold stars all the way up. Even as someone who has outwardly stepped off the escalator of career ambition, I’m finding that it’s incredibly difficult not to apply some system of meritocracy to everything else: my parenting, my housekeeping, my marriage, my ministry, my hobbies. My spiritual life. Soaked deep into me is the assumption that my accomplishments determine my value. I like to think, oh, I’m beyond wanting to get into Harvard, but really, it isn’t that simplistic, and it never was. There’s a good thing in me, that wants to be excellent, that thrives best with challenging goals, but I live in a world based on meritocracy, so immersed in it that we can’t even tell we are. I have to constantly distinguish between good thing for God’s glory and good thing that makes me good. Between effort and fruit, between self-justifying works and holy discipline. And the line between those things can be thin.

The most spiritually formative experiences in my life have been those that cause me to hit the limits of my merit. Marriage. Parenting. And now I can add to the list: quarantine. Even starting off with all the advantages I could have—a spacious house, no need to work, a healthy family foundation—I am struggling to accomplish it all, to homeschool, parent, housekeep, cook, write, self-care, support a necessarily absent spouse. I’ve let creep in, as I so easily do with any new venture, this silent but deadly belief that I ought to be able to, even that I am measured by how well I do it. Part of what this time is doing is confronting me with the functional meritocracy in my life. This is what Paul was trying to do in Romans. He is saying, the way that God loves you has nothing to do with what you have accomplished. More than that, it has nothing to do with how you have messed up. Jesus says you alone are worth his life, completely apart from anything you have or haven’t done. How would my life look different if I truly believed this? 

Time In The New World

“The Lord is king forever and ever; the nations perish from his land.” – Psalm 10:16

“In every critical event, there is an opportunity for God to act creatively and reveal a deeper truth than what we see on the surface of things.” – Henri Nouwen, Discernment

Many people have commented on how this pandemic has forced the clearing of calendars in an area where people are typically busy and overscheduled. Miraculously, nearly overnight, my own days have been wiped clean, all the daily and weekly markers simply vanished. I used to make five, six school and swim runs in a day: I haven’t started up the car in a week (Dave has driven during the times we’ve gone out to now-overcrowded parks). There will be more and more zoom events scheduled as schools and activities boot back up virtually, but in the meanwhile, we’re all forced to sit in this space where our sense of time has been warped. I am starting to understand how my six-year-old feels. Even pre-pandemic, he would ask us regularly, what day is it?

The Greeks had two words for time. Chronos is clock-time, time in compartments, in series of events. The other word for time is kairos, and I like how David Brooks writes about experiencing it in nature: “The wilderness lives at the pace of what the Greeks called kairos time, which can be slower but is always richer. Synchronous time is moment after moment, but kairos time is qualitative, opportune or not yet ripe, rich or spare, inspired or flat—the crowded hour or the empty moment… The soul communing with itself in the wilderness is at kairos time, too—slow and serene, but thick and strong, like the growing of the redwood.”

A deeper truth I’m seeing in this unscheduled space is how much our busyness forces us to live in chronos time: life as measured from segment to segment, activity to activity. Our view of time becomes so myopic that we’re less able to discern the movement of God, which so often occurs outside of our calibrations. Henri Nouwen writes in his book Discernment that kairos time is when “time becomes not just something to get through or manipulate or manage, but the arena of God’s good work in us… Time points beyond itself and begins to speak to us of God… To start seeing that the many events of our day, week, or year are not in the way of our search for a full life but rather the way to it is a real experience of conversion.”

I see that conversion in this Psalm. The point of conversion is verse 10, when the writer emerges from despair and lament to suddenly say: “The Lord is king forever and ever.” It’s as if he’s emerged from his myopia, put on his spectacles, and glimpsed God in kairos time: the God who outlasts nations. Can you imagine forever? Yet God is there, so far outside of our calendars. And it is from this truth about God that the writer then says: “you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strength their heart; you will incline your ear to do justice” (verses 17-18).

It’s disorienting when our routines are taken away. But these changes bring an invitation, to sink for a moment into a different view of time. To allow time, and the happenings of our lives in that very time, to speak to us of God, and to practice discerning Him in it.

Becoming What We Worship

“The idols of the nations are silver and gold… Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them.” – Psalm 135:15, 18

Buried in this Psalm is this startlingly incisive reminder that we become what we worship. When we worship something, we turn ourselves towards it. We invest our money, time, thought, and energy upon it. We fix ourselves within its presence. And the Psalmist is saying, it is impossible to do all of that and not be yourself changed in the process. And the direction of change will always be that you become more and more like what you worship.

What might have been behind the impulse to make a silver or gold idol? Perhaps a desire to adore something bigger than oneself. A desire to gaze upon something beautiful. A desire to possess something tangible and valuable. Something accessible on one’s own terms and easy to control. Something public and obvious to others. The root of some of these desires are God-given—the need to have something to admire that is outside of ourselves, the longing for something of real value—but when we decide to create it ourselves, we step into the place of God. When God created, he breathed into his creation life. But our creations are dead. “They have mouths, but do not speak; they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear; nor is there any breath in their mouths” (verses 16-17). Why does the Psalmist go to such lengths to state the obvious? Because we need to see that these idols we create have no life, and thus they cannot give us life. As we worship them, we become more and more void of life ourselves.

It is surprisingly hard to be intentional about what we worship. We are often asked to participate in acts of worship before it’s clear what we even are worshipping: we are invited to invest our resources in jobs, schools, diets, entertainment, relationships, before we’ve necessarily thought about what those things are worshipping and how that will change us. I decided which residency to attend based on what programs offered in terms of prestige and career options: I didn’t ask myself, “what does the culture of this program say about what they worship? Is that the kind of person I want to be like in ten years?” As David Brooks wrote, when you choose to work at a certain place, you are turning yourself into the sort of person who works in that place. Be careful of the idols you make, and the idols others you dwell with are making, this Psalmist says. Whether you mean to or not, that is what you will become.

Life In The Loops

“A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.” – Proverbs 10:4

“People underestimate the importance of diligence as a virtue. No doubt this has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as ‘the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken.’” – Atul Gawande, Better

I have no qualms about staying at home more than being a physician, but it is strange to have trained for over twelve years for an entirely different thing than what I do now most of the time. I found during training that in the world of medicine at least, I am at heart a surgeon: I thrive best employing mind and fingers, knowledge and artistry, to achieve visible results and progress. At home, if there’s action that needs to be taken in a crisis, I’m great: figure out if a cut from a fall needs stitches or just steri-strips; get four kids, four backpacks, one cello loaded into the van in minutes.

But that’s not most of life at home. Most of life is a litany of unremarkable, mindlessly Sisyphean tasks. Packing lunchboxes only to have to clean them out and pack them again. Dropping off kids only to pick them up only to drop them off again. Cleaning things only to have them get dirty again—counters, towels, sheets, dishes, children, clothes, floors. Teeth. I actually had this moment where I realized that having four children meant keeping 128 teeth clean (and straight) over the course of 23 years. 

Medicine does not exactly train you for this. At my previous job in private practice, the mantra was, “physicians should only do what only physicians can do.” I had two scribes with me in clinic, two assistants in the operating room; I didn’t have to touch paperwork, drape the patient, do anything except call out orders or hold out my hand for instruments or lenses. This wasn’t to be nice to us, but to work us harder, through a higher volume of patients and cases, and the pace was anything but mundane.

But at home, mundane is the language of love. Repetition speaks. My vocation is found in doing again what I did before, choosing again what I chose before. A word for this perhaps is diligence. The Hebrew word charuwts has an interesting double-meaning: literally, it means “to dig” (as in a ditch—which makes me think of Brooks’ phrase, “digging the damn ditch”) or “to sharpen” (as in, a threshing-sledge, for agricultural work). Labor-intensive, repetitive, mundane work. But charuwts can also be translated “gold,” as indeed it is in four of the nine times it occurs in the book of Proverbs. No one is sure why—because gold is dug out? Because gold has a sharp or bright color? It certainly adds a bit of poetic redundancy to this verse.

Diligence is not necessarily a vaunted virtue. It is often not seen, or credited. But it is of great value, and it leads to what is valuable. And this proverb praises not “diligence,” but “the hand of the diligent.” Diligence in action is how we live out faithfulness, how we demonstrate love, how we steward well what we’ve been entrusted with. There are days when I feel like all I do is wash dishes: which I mean less as complaint than a statement of fact. Six people eating three meals and, some of them, three snacks a day go through a lot of dishes. But at least right now, this is where I sense God wants me to be: washing the dishes, with the hand of the diligent. Living life in the loops, and believing in the value of it.

The Geography Of The Gospel

“But he went out and began to talk freely about it, and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places.” – Mark 1:45

One way to “beat the gospel into our heads continually” is to ask ourselves as we read, where do we see the it? In this passage, Jesus begins in one of the 240 towns in the rural area of Galilee, speaking in the synagogue in an early flush of popularity. The leper began outside the town, an utter outcast, physically and socially separated by Levitical law: “The leprous person who has the disease shall… cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp” (Leviticus 13:45-46).

A series of remarkable verbs then occur. The leper “came” to Jesus: a man who by law had to warn people away nonetheless sought Jesus out. Jesus “stretched out his hand and touched.” The leper had come within arm’s reach, but no closer; Jesus is the one who reaches out, making himself ceremonially unclean. The healed leper does not obey all Jesus asks him to do, however. At the end of the story, we find the leper, restored into community, speaking freely, but we find Jesus out in desolate places. They have switched places.

That’s the heart of the gospel: Jesus takes our place. The cry of the leper is our own: “make me clean.” He didn’t say, “make me well.” He wasn’t asking primarily for physical healing as much as relational restoration, to be brought back into community. Isn’t that the cry of all of our hearts? We are defined by what we desire, not what we know, and as Brooks writes, “The ultimate heart’s desire—the love behind all the other loves—is the desire to lose yourself in something or someone… The ultimate desire is the desire for fusion with a beloved other, for an I-Thou bond, the wholehearted surrender of the whole being, the pure union, the intimacy beyond fear.” Jesus, knowing it would mean that he himself would suffer alienation, stretches out to touch us, to bear the cost of our uncleanliness so that we can experience the intimacy with God that He created us for, without fear.

This bears remembering. Remember, Paul writes. Remember that at one time, you were separated, alienated, “but now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). Too often, I see myself on my own merits. I forget that grace, while free, is costly. I lack deep humility and gratitude. I lose wonder. I forget that unity not only with God, but with others that I may feel different from, comes only from grace, and should be part of my experience of grace. I need to remember that the only way I came in was because of the One who died outside the city.

The Golden Calf, Part Two: Cultural Idols And Worldviews

“The people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, ‘Up, make us gods who shall go before us.’” – Exodus 32:1

It is interesting that this episode occurs en masse. Aaron acts as leader, but we see that the people were the driving force from beginning to end: the pronouns throughout the story are all plural. The noise is collective. They do it all together. David Brooks says that in our culture of “hyper-individualism,” we have this concept of the “buffered self”; we like to think that we are all making our own choices about how to live. But the reality is, our framework for viewing the world, and the choices we make, are undoubtedly affected by the culture in which we live. The calf wasn’t made in one person’s tent. Similarly, we oughtn’t think about idols as only existing in the personal sphere.

Our community group last spring discussed cultural idols as we read through Tim Keller’s book Every Good Work, summarizing Keller’s points and adding our own. Here is the summary:

Traditional culture: idols are stability, honor, family group, nation tribe, security, tradition, religion. Meaning is derived from being faithful to one’s duty, honoring family, holding status. Pros: loyalty, selflessness, collective well-being, social stability. Cons: racism, marginalization, suppression of liberties, shame

Modern culture: idols are science, knowledge, empiricism, reason, individual freedom, equality, and progress. Meaning is derived from “discovery,” career and personal happiness. Pros: technology, public health (okay, that was from Dave), arts, social mobility. Cons: disenchantment with faith, too much stock in autonomy

Post-modern culture: idols are deconstruction, “mood,” cynicism/suspicion of universal claims, “means without ends,” no moral absolutes, consumerism, capitalism. Meaning is derived from self-actualization, self-expression, and self-determinism. Pros: critical thinking, justice, plurality of voices. Cons: intolerance of absolute truth, over-deconstruction (no meaning in anything), “unconscious conformity,” consumerism

Silicon Valley: idols are ideas, innovation, disruption, optimization, tolerance (“you be you”), inclusion, health/fitness, “changing the world,” social mission, uniqueness, self-care. Meaning is derived from “changing the world,” pursuing your passion, becoming famous, inclusively accepting everyone. Pros: social justice, physical health, environmental awareness, racial diversity, opportunity. Cons: exclusive inclusion, socioeconomic/educational homogeneity, anxiety/stress, lack of contentment, burn-out, gentrification

We then tried to identify the world view, or “master narrative,” of our culture by asking three questions: how are things supposed to be? (purpose) What is the main problem with things as they are? (problem) What is the solution and how can it be realized? (solution) 

For Silicon Valley, the purpose is that we control our own destiny. Human potential should be limitless. We should have informed, rational decision-making; we should be anything we want. The problems are intolerance, lack of connectivity, unequal starting points, and lack of information. The solution is technology, education, and inclusion.

For the gospel, the purpose is to be in relationship with God. The problems are sin, idolatry, fractured relationships, pride. The solution is Jesus, grace, redemption, restoration, repentance, reconciliation, hope.

This was just what our group came up with at that point in time. What would you add or change? Do you see evidence of these cultural idols or worldviews around you? 

Seeking Solitude

“Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up on the mountain by himself to pray.” – Matthew 14:22-23

“If you don’t come apart for a while, you will come apart after a while.” – Dallas Willard

This word “made” here is Greek anagkazo, “to constrain, to compel,” from a root word that means “necessity.” For Jesus at that moment, solitude was a necessity. And some compulsion was required to gain it: tensions and feelings were running high. Herod had just beheaded John the Baptist and was likely on the lookout for Jesus. A remarkably large crowd was present, likely because it was around the time of Passover. Jesus had just finished feeding them, the only miracle recorded in all four gospels, and they wanted to make him king, a prospect his disciples probably relished. Who knows what Jesus was feeling at that moment—the temptation of earthly glory? Tides of public and political momentum? Weariness? Unprocessed grief? All of the above? 

This was a time when it would have made no natural or logistical sense to seek solitude. Yet Jesus insists on it immediately, dismissing the crowds despite the fervor of their adulation, dismissing the disciples despite the fact that it left him geographically stranded. He spent an extended portion of the night praying alone on a mountain.

When was the last time you were alone, really alone? When was the last time you went into the wilderness? David Brooks writes of the wilderness: “life is stripped of distractions. It is quiet. The topography demands discipline, simplicity, and fierce attention.” 

There were certainly times (like nine verses ago) when Jesus gave up solitude to serve others. But he also goes to great lengths to seek it. How attune am I to promptings for retreat? How intentionally do I respond to that inner invitation or impulse? 

Meekness

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” – Matthew 5:5

Does anyone else find the list of traits Jesus chooses for the beatitudes mystifying? If we, here in the Bay Area, were to choose ten or fewer traits that we felt would most describe people who are happy, would we choose any of the ones Jesus does?

Meekness is not something most of us talk or think much about. David Brooks points out that one of the assumptions in our culture is “the centrality of accomplishment”: we are not measured by conforming to a code, or the “thickness” of our relationships, but by what we have individually achieved. It’s okay to be self-oriented, to promote the self. “The meritocracy,” he writes, “is the most self-confidant moral system in the world today… it subliminally sends the message that those who are smarter and more accomplished are actually worth more than those who are not.” Coupled with this is a sense of entitlement, and all of it is insidious. On some level, it’s very hard not to believe that I am worth more, that I deserve more, because I achieved more. 

But that is not the moral economy of the kingdom of Christ. Those who will inherit the earth, who will gain it all, are the meek. Lloyd-Jones writes, “Meekness is essentially a true view of oneself, expressing itself in attitude and conduct with respect to others… when I have that true view of myself in terms of poverty of spirit, and mourning because of my sinfulness, I am led on to see that there must be an absence of pride. The meek man is not proud of himself, he does not in any sense glory in himself… he does not assert himself… does not demand anything for himself… The man who is truly meek is the one who is amazed that God and man can think of him as well as they do and treat him as well as they do.” In demeanor and behavior, a meek man is mild, lowly, of a quiet spirit, patient and long-suffering, without a spirit of retaliation, ready to listen and learn with a teachable spirit.

Meekness is Abraham letting Lot have the first pick of the land, Moses not defending himself before Aaron and Miriam, David not retaliating against Saul’s unjust treatment, Jeremiah allowing unkind things to be said behind his back, Stephen being stoned, Paul’s willingness to suffer and bear disparaging remarks, and Jesus himself, the “meek and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11), who did not regard his equality with God a thing to be grasped (Philippians 2).

This isn’t something we can generate on our own. I think Lloyd-Jones is right in saying it is listed third for a reason: we first have to learn what it means to be poor in spirit, that we have nothing before a holy God, and to mourn, to truly grieve sin—and that can only be a work of the Holy Spirit in us, I think, to open our eyes in those ways. To be meek is then to turn that outwards, before others, to be willing to let them turn the spotlight on us, without the need to defend or assert ourselves.

Meekness is not self-abasement because these things are done in the presence of God, and in his presence we see our high worth. Look at the promises here: while they are promises for the future, they are instantaneous as well. To be spiritually impoverished is to be open to the gospel and the kingdom. To mourn is to repent and be comforted at once with the joy of forgiveness and deliverance. To be meek is to be as Paul, “having nothing, yet possessing everything” (2 Corinthians 6). Meekness is not weakness, but is compatible with great strength, authority, and power. It is so radically counter-cultural that it is worth our attention. What does it mean for me to be meek? Who do I know in my life who is meek? How do I grow in meekness in my life?

Foundations

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.” – Matthew 7:24

David Brooks describes in his book The Second Mountain one of the things that happens when, “from the most structured and supervised childhood in human history, you get spit out after graduation into the least structured young adulthood in human history”—you get “insecure overachievers.” These are people who treat adulthood like a continuation of school, who look for direction through prestigious companies or programs telling them what to do. The term was first coined by Matias Dalsgaard, who wrote: “Such a person must have no stable or solid foundation to build upon, and yet nonetheless tries to build his way out of his problem. It’s an impossible situation. You can’t compensate for having a foundation made of quicksand by building a new story on top. But this person takes no notice and hopes that the problem down in the foundation won’t be found out if only the construction work on top keeps going.”

I see this around me, and I lived it myself to some degree in my early adulthood. You keep thinking you’re going to make it when you “arrive,” but there’s always something else—a house, a house in a better location, a husband, kids, “successful” kids, finishing the degree, getting hired, getting promoted, and on and on. “How do I succeed?” eclipses “Why am I doing this?” Jobs become careers, not vocations. Growth becomes about outward benchmarks, not inward transformation. Life becomes about doing, not being. We think we are free, doing what we want and deciding for ourselves, but really we are following external cues, turning ourselves into the kind of people who work where we work or live where we live, without intentionally considering what that is, or whether it is something that satisfies our souls. 

Several things are implied in this passage: first, we all build our lives on something, whether we are aware of it or not. There is rock or sand; nothing in-between. Second, external stressors are to be expected. They will happen. Third, the most important thing is unseen, subterranean, and in fact, the houses we build may look identical in every other aspect. But a house is only as good as its foundation. As Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes, “Though the difference between the two houses is not obvious, it is nevertheless vital, for ultimately the most important thing about a house is the foundation. This is a truth which is frequently emphasized in the Bible. The foundation, which seems so insignificant and unimportant because it is out of sight, is nevertheless the most vital and important thing of all. If the foundation is wrong, everywhere else must be wrong.”

How do we have the right foundation? Mere belief is not enough. Jesus is speaking here to people who would call themselves believers; his warning is not against non-Christianity but pseudo-Christianity, Pharisaical religiosity. Our foundations are not a matter of intellectual assent, external appearance, or stated ideals: they are what we hear and do, what we are attending to and living out. Our foundation is our faith, true faith, which without works is dead.

This is a challenge to all of us. If workaholism has distracted us from our spiritual lives, it is a challenge to examine what we are building our lives on. If we call ourselves Christian, it is a challenge to examine how well we listen to and live out the sermon on the mount. How well do we know Jesus’ teaching? Does it make a difference in how we live? This is the point on which everything, the entire construction of our lives, is based.