Here’s a quick question. Should a church have a doctrinal statement?
If not, why not?
If so, what should be on it?
Should a church have a doctrinal statement?
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The One Thing the Church Must Be
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In case you didn’t read it, this was posted over TheOoze.com last week. Hardly anyone ever comments over there, so now that a 48-hour waiting period is up, I am reposting the article here. It is similar in content to my post from yesterday.
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As I have read and thought, written and talked about the church over the past few years, I have come to realize that the purpose of the church includes something the world gets nowhere else. The church must be a humanizer.
If there is one thing the world, sin, and the devil does to people, it is dehumanize them. In this world, we become numbers, statistics, projects, targets, customers, consumers, and victims. We are told to sit down, shut up, and let the powers have their way. We are reminded that the majority rules and while individuals have a say, it is only money that talks.
The church has the chance to step into all of this, look a person in the eye—a person who has been beaten, battered, and trampled by the world—and say to them, “You matter. I hear you. I love you.” Remember how Jesus responded to the leper in Luke 5? By most accounts, this leper was no longer part of the human race. He was less than human, treated worse than a dog. He was dead, but simply didn’t know it yet. When he shouted at others, they threw rocks at him, and told him to get away. But when he shouted at Jesus, Jesus not only heard him, but walked up to him, and embraced him. In that one little touch, which was not so little, Jesus humanized the leper.
This is what the church must do. We are called to humanize. It doesn’t take much. A touch here. A smile there. A word of encouragement where criticism is the norm. Treat people like the image of God that they are, even if that image is buried beneath months of unwashed grime and the smell of urine. It’s not about preaching the gospel to crowds of thousands or inviting people to church. A gentle word or a generous tip are better than any gospel tract.
Who can you humanize today?
I’m a Leper
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How would you respond if you heard that the lady down the street who spreads gossip about you slipped on some ice and is in the hospital?
What would your thoughts be if you heard that the national spokesman for the gay rights movement died of AIDS in the hospital?
How would you react if you heard that an abortion doctor discovered a bomb in his Mercedes Benz as he was leaving for the airport for a vacation in Palm Springs?
Some people might silently cheer and think “serves them right,” and believe that God was punishing these people for their behavior. Though I am ashamed to admit it, I used to think that way.
But no longer.
What brought about this shift? One thing: Up until about five years ago, I thought I had my life pretty much figured out. I was doing pretty well in my Christian walk. I knew a lot about the Bible. But then, through a long series of events (some of which you can read over at Oh Me of Little Faith, I came to see that I was actually a leper.
We often hear that since Jesus loved lepers, we should find the outcast and rejected in our own society, and love them like Jesus. I don’t disagree. But I believe that before we can love other lepers, we need to recognize that we ourselves are lepers also. Only after we see ourselves as lepers do we then have the right perspective to go and spend time with other lepers. We do not go as healthy and holy members of society to minister to the sick and dying sinners.
No, it is only from the stance of a leper can we follow Jesus to touch and minister to other lepers, learning to love the unlovable, and touch the untouchable.
So, are you a leper?
This post is based on the Grace Commentary for Luke 5:12-16.
Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night
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Do you ever feel like you are losing your faith? You are not alone.
I encountered the following poem in NT Wright’s book, The Challenge of Jesus, and was so struck by the last stanza that this poem became my second favorite poem of all time.
It seems to describe his tumultuous struggle with faith, and the sadness, loneliness, and fear this caused. In the last line, what armies do you think he is talking about? Literal armies of governments and nations, or figurative armies of faith and religion? What is his solution? Is he right?
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DOVER BEACH
By Matthew Arnold
1867
The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Call Someone a Fool and Go to Hell?
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Jason was one of my best friends in Junior High and High School. He and I played a lot of tennis, listened to a lot of rap, and played a lot of Nintendo. I still remember when we beat Mega Man 2 in one day.
In our Sophomore year of High School, one of his favorite sayings was, “You Fool!” When Mega Man died, he would shout at the TV, “You fool!” When I aced him in tennis (he was better than me so it rarely happened), he would shout across the net, “You fool!” When we were learning to drive and someone cut him off in traffic, he would shout at them, “You fool!” He said it in jest (most of the time), and it became his signature saying.
Until one day our Sunday School teacher at church read Matthew 5:21-22. The last part really got Jason’s attention: “Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be in danger of hell fire.” When our teacher read that, everyone laughed and looked right at Jason as he squirmed in his seat and looked abashedly at the floor.
After that, I never heard him say, “You fool” again.
What did Jesus really say?
In my “core group” today, we read and discussed this passage. Not surprisingly, they were shocked at what Jesus said. How can he say that simply for calling someone a fool, they will go to hell? That’s impossible! Too difficult! Jesus is crazy!
We had a long, spirited discussion about this, and some of them remembered what we discussed last week. In the end, I had to bring in some Greek and Jewish background information (I have a love-hate relationship with doing this, which maybe I will write about someday).
I personally don’t think this passage (or the next one about adultery) has anything whatsoever to do with burning forever and ever in a lake of fire while Satan and his minions poke you with pitchforks to see if you’re done yet (“Nope? Note done yet. Put him back on the flames for another million years! Bwah-ha-ha-ha-hahahahaaa!”). Jason will be pleased to hear this.
The word that Jesus uses in 5:22, 29, 30 is gehenna. It refers to the Valley of Gehinnom outside of the city of Jerusalem which, in the days of Jesus, was the garbage dump. People dumped all their refuse and waste out there. It was probably full of rats. Lepers might have scrounged through there. And every once in a while, to try to remove some of the stench, someone would light it on fire, and it would burn and smolder with acrid smoke for months on end. It was a wasteland, a garbage heap, a pile of burning filth.
Jesus is saying that when you call someone a fool, when you look lustfully at women, it destroys your life. While such actions, if they are followed to their logical end, may lead to murder and adultery, by the time you get there, you will have done so much other damage to your life, your friends, your relationship, your spouse, your job, your children, your health, your finances, and everything else in life, that you life will basically be a gehenna. A burning wasteland of filth. Or, to quote one of the other guys from today, a $#!+hole.
Don’t put your life in the dump
We all know it’s true. What happens in your marriage when you call your spouse a fool? Or how does your boss like it? How about your children? Your friends? That’s right. Life goes down the toilet real fast.
You treat people like they are only objects to be used, stepped on, objectified, abused, slandered, cheated, lied to, and then discarded, and eventually, you look around, and find that you are the one who has been discarded. You are the one in the wasteland. You are the one in gehenna. You are in a living hell.
So I know some are going to disagree with me on this. That’s okay. But if you think Jesus is really talking about a literal torment in flames for all eternity for calling someone a fool, just be careful what you say when you disagree.
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