Dear Friends,

I wrote this message under the conviction of the Holy Spirit. I hesitated before sending it out. It contains the kind of discussion that can be misconstrued as political. That’s something I work hard not to do in the Word of Grace messages.

Politics have interested me my whole life. I have definite opinions on the issues of the day. However, I believe that it trivializes God to address the Deity as the god of my country, the god of my political persuasion, the god of my economic interests, the god of my ethnicity etc. Surely God should inform and guide our decisions in all of these areas as the Sovereign over our life, but it is idolatry to reduce God to these points of concern.

We talk about Jesus Christ as “our Lord.” If we are serious about giving Christ that position as Lord, than he has all authority, power and control over our decisions. Our life is literally in his hands and we live to satisfy him. It is in that spirit that I wrote this week’s message.

.  .  .

Calling people “children of God,” as in “We are all children of God”, is very convenient. It allows us to lay-off the responsibility on God when we think about people whose characteristics we don’t appreciate.

We think, “We are all children of God, but I am glad that I don’t have to deal with them . . . work with them . . . live next door to them . . . take care of them . . . worship with them.” In this age of tolerance and political correctness, we may keep such thoughts mostly to ourselves, but don’t tell me that you never think them. There is “them”, and then there is “us.”

If nothing else, the desire for efficiency and self-sufficiency creates an ethical challenge for some of us.  People who aren’t like us require extra time and effort to understand and help. What we don’t understand seems so messy. Doesn’t “mess-avoidance” rank high on the list of virtues for many of us?

When I was in law school, I answered an advertisement for volunteers at a legal aid clinic for the poor in Salem, Oregon. I confess that I wasn’t there a day before I realized that many of those without higher education or employment, did not have the same priorities of time and schedule that I did. The practical challenges of working with the poor and the hopeless laid bare my lack of patience and acceptance.

I had never thought of myself as “privileged”, coming from a blue-collar family that lived paycheck to paycheck. But those paychecks paid my private school tuition and bought me opportunities like education and employment and responsibilities such as deadlines and work schedules. Without those paychecks, time loses the elasticity of hope.

Sayings like “God helps those who help themselves” and “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” always had a smug logic for me, but they sounded hollow and cruel when applied to the economic fall-out and social disruption of the depressed Oregon timber industry in the 1970s.

It’s easy to relegate the issues of poverty to politicians and the spiritual issues to God. That’s the wrong response from persons of faith. The Apostle James laid it out for us with a question — “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? (Js 2:15-16).

James’ reference to a “brother or sister” takes the question out of the realm of the academic and theoretical and into the reality of our reaction to the encounters of daily life. What if that brother or sister has a different skin color, gender, sexual orientation, language, ethnicity, physical ability, economic status, or neighborhood than you and I do?

It is derelict and shameful to yield our moral values and social ethics to the current trends and emotions of popular culture instead of seeking God’s will and living faithfully by his revealed Word. It is no less derelict and shameful to hide from those questions by cloaking our personal biases in a reactive, rigid, pious legalism.

Jesus’ parable of “The Good Samaritan” tells us that our first obligation is to our relationship with God and our second and similar obligation is to our relationship with each other, but both obligations are always love (Luke 10:25-37). Love, it seems, is God’s policy — love that always wants the best for the other regardless of merit or gratitude (1 Cor 13:4-8).

How are we doing with that? The problems are huge, but we have to start somewhere. I decry the ethnic genocide in Rwanda and the Congo, but what do I do when a church school client’s administrator says about a qualified African-American applicant, “Please don’t make me interview her. You know I don’t like working with those people”?

How do I respond when a physician client generously funds and leads short-term mission trips for church youth groups to Africa and Mexico, but reveals to me a scheme to sharply limit the available office appointments for patients from zip codes that cover primarily poor African-American and Latino neighborhoods?

When female colleagues advance ideas in meetings that are ignored until I raise the same point later on to approval and acceptance, do I give credit where credit is due? When a female leader is derided as a “radical feminist” by a “good ol’ boy” male search committee member simply because of the strength of her leadership, do I laugh or do I take him on?

When a pastor cuts off all contact with a long-time mutual friend and co-worker who has come out as a lesbian and insists that I have a Christian duty to do the same thing, how do I react?  When a gay couple contacts me for representation after their Christian landlord’s children yelled slurs at them and scrawled graffiti on their front door, and they were evicted for complaining, do I take their case or pass it on?

Executives of a faith-based institutional client once asked a colleague and me to help with a strategy to limit the access of persons of a certain class and color to the client’s facility and services in the interests of ” attracting the customers we really want.” My colleague and I protested the inappropriateness and injustice of the question in strong, unequivocal terms. The executives are self-identified political liberals. One of them asked us sarcastically, “Are you sure that the two of you aren’t the real liberals here?” “No, we’re not, I replied, “but I hope that we are Christians.”

We all begin with the perceptual set of our time, upbringing, class and culture, but in the end, it is the revelation and conviction of the Holy Spirit in agreement with the Word of God that must rule in the life of the Christ-follower (John 16:7-15). We are idolaters, not disciples, if the call of Christ on our thoughts and actions does not rank above family, politics, patriotism, friendships, economics, and religion (Luke 14:25-33). In the end, “We must obey God rather than any human authority” (Acts 5:29).

Like the lawyer who questioned Jesus about neighborliness, no matter how hard I try, I can’t get around or above God’s command of love regarding the people that confront and discomfort me (Luke 10:37). My Lord’s unrelenting mercy puts demands on my faith, love, honesty and transparency that I cannot begin to bear without prayer, immersion in God’s Word, and an unconditional surrender to the supervening wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

I tend to firm convictions and strong opinions. That means I must be careful to listen for God’s voice in my prayer and study of his Word. As Karl Barth said, “God is not man shouted louder.” I want to be obedient to the Lord’s leading and not confuse his leading with human agendas.

Of this much I am sure– I cannot yield to the real temptation to become the elder son in Jesus’ parable of “The Prodigal Son.” You remember him, the driven achiever who refused to yield his self-righteousness to the father’s generous love. He went down the route of “everyone’s a child of God, but . . . . ”

He spat out to the father,  “But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him.”

The father was having none of it. He would not let his eldest son treat his youngest as merely another child of the father. They were not only his sons, but brothers to each other. The father said, “Son, you are always with me and all that I have is yours, but we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and now is found” (Luke 15:30-32, emphasis added).

Parents and children have mutual obligations of love and respect, but brothers and sisters also owe one another these obligations. This needful truth of relationship was the final observation in Jesus’ parable — grace and mercy to one, is grace and mercy for all because that is the Father’s will for his family. There is a place under the covering of the Father’s grace and mercy for anyone who can stand to be there Sadly, some can’t accept that covering for what it says about them.

This truth has all the fierceness of the final judgment. It is a terrible thing to refuse to enter the Father’s house because of who else is in there with him. It is to choose darkness over light; to insist on the will of the flesh and the will of man over the power and authority of God  (John 1:1-13).

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Psalm 34:8).

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

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The Lord is the strength of his people;