Fruit of the Poisonous Tree: Week 2.
“If it wasn’t clear that the timeless Catholic values are hated by many, it is now… The more I’ve talked about what I value most, which is my Catholic faith, the more polarizing I have become. It’s a decision I’ve consciously made, and one I do not regret at all,” Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker remarked (as quoted in Today), referencing his now infamous commencement address at Benedictine College.
It’s a familiar argument, and a familiar public relations crisis for American Christianity. Harison Butker, and his entire so-called controversy, is glaringly unremarkable. Offensive and brash Christians being unapologetic for their wounding is becoming disappointingly quotidian. Rather than continue to support or deride Butker’s speech, I’d like to zoom us out a bit and see how we as a culture, and more importantly, as a Church have gotten to this moment in time.
The focus of my annual silent retreat this year was “The Names of God.” Over a Friday night and Saturday morning, I studied into 15 names of God given or stated throughout the Bible. As the clock sped towards noon on Saturday, I dove into Jehovah Shalom – The LORD is Peace. God offers up this name in Judges 6, a passage I’ve discussed before. God charges an anxious Gideon with leading the Israelites into victory over the oppressive Midianites. Craving certainty, Gideon asks the LORD for multiple signs to assure his victory. In one of the signs, Gideon prepares a sacrifice for the LORD of meat and unleavened cakes. The angel of the LORD comes upon his staff and burns up the sacrifice in a glorious display of power. Gideon panics, having been face to face with the power that has killed others before him. In response, the LORD instructs him “Do not fear, you shall not die.” To acknowledge God’s mercy and character, Gideon builds an altar he names Jehovah Shalom, or the LORD is peace, tacking on the Hebrew word for “peace with God and others” to God’s formal name. When I read Alexander MacLaren’s commentary on this passage, I realized there was so much more depth that I had missed. The turn of the century preacher said,
I believe that, in the case of the vast majority of men, the first living, real apprehension of a real, living God is accompanied with a shock, and has mingled with it something of awe, and even of terror. Were there no sin there would be no fear, and pure hearts would open in silent blessedness and yield their sweetest fragrance of love and adoration, when shone on by Him, as flowers do to the kiss of the sunbeams. But, taking into account the sad and universal fact of sin, it is inevitable that men should shrink from the Light which reveals their evil, and that the consciousness of God’s presence should strike a chill. It is sad that it should be so. But it is sadder still when it is not so, but when, as is sometimes the case, the sight of God produces no sense of sin, and no consciousness of discord, or foreboding of judgment. For, only through that valley of the shadow of death lies the path to the happy confidence of peace with God, and unless there has been trembling at the beginning, there will be no firm and reasonable trust afterwards.
For Gideon’s terror opened the way for the gracious proclamation, which would have been needless but for it-’Peace be unto thee; fear not, thou shalt not die.’ The sight of God passes from being a fear to a joy, from being a fountain of death to a spring of life, Terror is turned to tranquil trust. The narrow and rough path of conscious unworthiness leads to the large place of happy peace. The divine word fits Gideon’s condition, and corresponds to his then deepest necessity; and so he drinks it in as the thirsty ground drinks in the water; and in the rapture of the discovery that the Name, that had come down from his fathers to him, was the Name of a real Person, with whom he stood in real relationships, and those of simple friendship and pure amity, he piles up the rough stones of the place, and makes the name of his altar the echo of the divine voice. It is as if he had said with rapture of surprise, ‘Then Jehovah is peace; which I never dreamed of before.
Our sin, originally seeded in the garden, makes God terrifying to us at first. But as Pastor MacLaren notes, even worse than that terror is no terror at all. To die in ignorance of our sin is to die totally. Truth, then, matters. Butker’s truth, God’s truth, Christian truth. Yet, here is the key difference with how we often implement truth versus how God does.
God does not leave us in the starkness of truth; God carries us through to love. In his letter to the church in Ephesus, Paul writes, “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.” Christian truth, then, does two things principally: 1) speaks in love and 2) grows into Christ’s truth, resistant of the crafty and deceitful doctrine of people.
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Every morning I say the Lord’s Prayer, one of the lines of which is “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” But as the old hymn famously reminds us, “Christ has no body now but yours.” We are to become, as James writes, the embodiment of our prayers:
What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
– James 2:14-17 NRSVue
To pray a Christian prayer is not to whisper to a dead or genie-like God asking Him to move, it’s asking a living God dwelling within us to move. Prayer is participatory as much as it is intercessory. “Here I am, Lord” as the young Smauel says.
God’s kingdom is fundamentally different than the earthly one we inhabit now. It’s a paradigm shift, and one we have to work supernaturally to make. Christianity is a young religion; its theology is new. As such, we have growing pains, ancestral and contemporary.
Consider the story in Acts in which a young church is learning to make this shift. Historically, salvation and redemption was available to one nation. With the coming of Christ, the path remained narrow, but the gates opened. This is to say that salvation is selective (truthful) but not exclusive (loving). If we are not careful, and indeed we need be, our list of who cannot receive the gospel of Christ will inevitably include us.
Mr. Butker’s speech was but one of thousands of examples of Christians feigning persecution while worshiping on the shrine of divisional, political idolatry that cheapens the image of Christ into a tribal deity who belongs only to a homogenous sect, an ancestral legacy that comes to the early Church the same as it comes to us. Meanwhile, members of our global Body are facing bloodied persecution for the simple act of saying the name of Jesus.
Wars are raging claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents. The American church is dying as millions of young people flee our institutions. In other words, the Christians posting conspiracy theories about the eclipse were partially right – there is an end to the world, and it is coming. While it’s on the way, the Enemy is trying to claim as many souls as he can. Our divisive and reckless rhetoric is his number one tool. To truly make an enemy crumble, you can hit them with the strongest weapons or the most strategic attack. But you have already won if they start killing each other before you arrive on the battlefield. We are being orchestrated by the Enemy and we’re too busy yelling at each other to notice the puppet strings.
The difficult truth, my sibling, is that these spectacles of Christian-sponsored inhumanity, Christian nationalism, and political idolatry, will continue and worsen until the time at which we decide that our families, our local church, our church conference, will not harbor a reckless hatred of the souls we are trying to save.
These messages of disdain and division are being preached from our pulpits.
They are gaining traction in our small groups.
They find refuge and bolstering in our histories of murder and crusades fought against “enemy” denominations.
They are raised in our homes and they eat at our dinner tables.
The death of the American church is homegrown and range fed.
The moment the Enemy will unclench the Body of Christ is when his foot decides to kick him off. The time has long since passed for our petty ultimatums on issues of uncritical importance. The time has long since passed to pseudosimplify complicated issues by saying the person on the other side of the political, ideological, or theological idea is “just an idiot.” The time has long since passed for an infantile, half-asleep American church to suckle onto the teat of any liquid and pray with violence that it is milk. We need to get out of the political sphere and get back to reading our Bibles with the ferocity of a solider at war, not with the culture or with unbelievers, but with the Devil himself. We need to pray for our enemies louder than we need to deride them on national television. We need to hold our pastors and elders accountable for the idolatry and nationalism of their congregants.
You have a choice right now, today, to decide if every face you see reflects the holy and sanctified image of God and if you will commit yourself wholly to the unity and evangelism of the Body of Christ to free sinners from shame and welcome them into the love and intimacy of Christ.
Or, you can continue to judge every face, and decide its worthiness for salvation and love based on occupation, gender, orientation, political party, health status, and whatever else you have in your mind is of the utmost critical importance. If it’s the latter, I hope when you arrive at a heaven with exceedingly more empty rooms than filled, a lifetime of dedication to the fickle divisions of this life feel, like a worthy god to have been devoted to.
I wonder if, before we are wives or working women, we might principally be people who go and make disciples of all nations. Our families and our careers can quickly become idols, distractions to us from the gospel.
I wonder what the world could look like if we centered our homegrown citizens on evangelism over tribalism, and truth in love over truth at any cost.
This post has primarily focused on our erring too far on the side of truth. This is because every atheist I speak to on a daily basis (and there are a lot) have never once told me they have found Christians too loving. Nevertheless, it is absolutely worth mentioning that we can err too far on the side of love as well, painting Christ to be a deity who prioritizes our happiness over our sanctification. Rarely has the task of carrying your own heavy cross to your own execution sparked glee. Although there has been immense joy amidst suffering for the Christ follower, and indeed there always is, there is also suffering amidst joy.
I am also increasingly certain that, for me at least, to walk closer with Jesus means walking further from certainty. This does not mean, as my critics have suggested, that walking without certainty is the same as walking without truth. Rather, in my developing view, truth becomes less calcified. Truth is not dependent on my view of it, but rather my allegiance to the truth teller. In other words, truth is a person not an idea.
What would it look like for the church to follow this person who embodies truth and love over following the ideas of what truth and love is? What would it look like to speak the truth in love?
Bryce Van Vleet is the #1 selling author of Tired Pages and Before We All Die Let’s Have One Last Chat by the Fireside. He also hosts the podcast Death in Dakota, sells poetry art here, and masquerades as the spoken word artist Liihey. You can support him by clicking through blog posts or donating (scroll to the bottom of the page).
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