“It’s Happy Slappy Time!”

Whose character do we reveal by what we do and say?

This post is an assigned response to “Blessed are the meek”—not those who are easily provoked”, by Paul Louis Metzger.

"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." (Matthew 5:5)

When thinking about an example of someone who doesn’t demonstrate the kingdom characteristic of meekness I was reminded of Happy Slappy, the pathetic clown villain in the original Air Bud (1997) movie. Some people are nothing but bad clowns, oblivious to how pathetic their selfishness and their blaming others for their unhappiness looks to those on the outside. In a movie, they usually get what is coming to them, in fact, it is expected. Yet we all know that life is more complicated than that. Very few people are as absurd as Happy Slappy, but there is a more subtle, more socially acceptable, and ironically more oppressive manifestation of anti-meekness found in the habitual demanding of our own rights. It is just as out of place in the kingdom of heaven as Happy Slappy at a birthday party.

Unfortunately, in the Western church,  instead of experiencing the blessing of meekness we too often substitute leadership, echoing the lament of ancient Israel, “No! But there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.” (1 Samuel 8:19-20)

In the context of the Beatitudes, we learn that the true disciple, being a citizen of Christ’s kingdom is meek. But what does it mean to be meek? Are Christians supposed to be like mice, or perhaps like doormats?  No, that is not the meaning of "meek" at all. 

The Greek word (praus) translated as "meek" implies the aspect of control. It refers to living under God's control, as a well-trained horse might respond to its master.  Meekness is not being wimpy.  It is instead the gentleness of strength as seen in the spiritual fruit of self-control.

Church Steeple toppled in
Columbus Day Storm, 1962

I have heard this "power-under-control" aspect of meekness illustrated in several ways.  It has been said that medicine is valuable and has great healing potential, but uncontrolled it can be deadly.  Similarly, animals such as horses, oxen, or even dogs can be quite helpful yet they must be under control to prevent collateral damage.  Thirdly, during a hot summer afternoon, a cool breeze is refreshing while a hurricane or a tornado can be devastating. In fact, we have governmental agencies dedicated to controlling or monitoring all of these areas.

Jesus’ power was always under control. Though he could confront the hypocrisy and social injustice in the legalism of the Pharisees, though he drove the abusive and dishonest “stock” traders from the temple on more than one occasion, he was also gentle and would not defend himself against detractors. The prophecy of Isaiah 42 is seen fulfilled by Jesus in Matthew 12:19-21,

He will not quarrel or cry aloud,
    nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets;
a bruised reed he will not break,
    and a smoldering wick he will not quench,
until he brings justice to victory;
    and in his name the Gentiles will hope.”

As followers of Jesus, we have been empowered to fulfill the mission of God, just as he was, and like our Lord, we need to use God's power meekly. To be meek means that while the true disciple is not defensive when harassed or attacked by others, he is willing to lay down his life in defense of others and the mission of the Lord his King.  The meek disciple does not take back control from the Lord when their circumstances get tough but merely trusts more fully. As followers of Jesus, we should never be pretentious or haughty in relating to others. The prevailing wind of the Spirit Jesus has given us moves us to show gentleness, patience, and peacefulness, generously—even joyfully—in love. If we are meek we will hold no hatred or malice in our hearts, no insults in our mouths, and no vengeance in our hands.

If the church is to be effective in addressing the great issues of our day, there needs to be a revival of meekness that issues forth in an overcoming love.  Dr. Metzger’s blog captured the power of meek love in a quote from one of Martin Luther King's sermons,

“To our most bitter opponents, we say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half-dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.”[1]

While I don’t think I have lived up to this one very well, Dr. Metzger’s quote from Andrew Young as portrayed in Selma strikes a chord with me.

The movie Selma shows King’s colleague Andrew Young explaining to someone wishing to react violently to their oppressors that the people would not have stood a chance if they had resorted to guns and violence against the unjust authorities at Selma; their only chance to win rights was to operate in a non-violent manner. Above and beyond the strategic wisdom of this approach in contending against an overwhelming unjust force, King grounded the movement and approach in Jesus’ love ethic.

I can relate to this train of thought because when I was in seventh grade I witnessed a gang of boys stealing a fellow student’s bike and told them to stop. They warned me that if I reported it they would beat me up. So I did what any boy who cut his teeth reading old Hardy Boys books would do… I reported them to Chief Collig (OK it was actually the school authorities). They also did what they said that they would do…every chance they got for the next year and a half; insulting, punching, and trying anything to provoke a violent response on my part. Outnumbered and overmatched, I knew well that the only way I could win was not to fight in the first place. Halfway through 8^th grade, the ringleader of my tormentors was expelled from the school and my life got much easier. I saw him again about six years later and almost didn’t recognize him—he was thin and pale from wasting his life with drugs. He didn’t recognize me either since I had been lifting weights for a few years—and the time had come and I knew I could finally get revenge. And just as quickly as I considered taking him down, two thoughts crossed my mind. The first thought was one of pity for this former tormentor that took me by surprise. The second thought was that after “winning” by not giving in to violence during those miserable months I didn’t want to lose now by stooping to vengeance. Through that time of persecution, the Lord had been doing something in my heart and I didn’t know it until that moment in the Plaid Pantry. I am glad that I didn’t short-circuit that process by taking matters into my own hands though I wanted to do so at the time.

Will we be able to live with loving meekness, not merely so that we will survive like I did, but so that we might overcome evil with love like MLK espoused? Jesus said that the spiritual reality of those who are truly meek is that they will "inherit the earth."

“It is the meek who own the earth now, for when their life is free from the tyranny of “just a little bit more,” when a gentle spirit caresses their approach to their rights, then they possess all.”[2]

What we inherit from God—now and in the future—is far better than anything we might grasp and claim to possess in the barns of our own building.

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[1] Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Christmas, 1957)

[2] R. Kent Hughes, The Sermon on the Mount, Crossway, 37.

"Mourning Has Broken": Living in the Blessed Sorrow and Joy of Jesus

This post is an assigned response to “Blessed are those who mourn”—not those who are spiritually comfortable by Paul Louis Metzger.

Comfy?

The second beatitude, “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted” continues Jesus’ highly counter-cultural teaching about the values of the kingdom of heaven. Unfortunately this beatitude, according to Dr. Metzger, “often devolves in our present context to read, ‘Blessed are the comfortable, for they will never mourn.’ If we are honest, many of us—including me—are tempted to prize consumer comfort in the religious and secular domain over most anything.”

Cemetery on Mount of Olives
(Photo: Vikki Dueker)

It is true that in the world we don’t like to mourn. Rarely do people show up early for funerals (unless it is for a celebrity) where they are sure to be confronted with mourning. But as followers of Jesus, we are to be among those who mourn—joyful and settled in the hope we have in Christ—yet we do mourn. So what do we mourn as we follow Christ?

• Human suffering and loss are experienced personally and within our community.
• Sin—both our own sin and the sins of others. We are sorry to have been faithless in our relationship with God.
•  We also mourn over how our own sin has impacted the lives of others at every level.
• Societal and systemic injustices in the world grieve us as we enter into the suffering of others.

These kinds of mourning are woven into the life of a disciple of Jesus. In fact, we are used to going to our own funerals. It is not like we are trying to be Tom Sawyer and attend our own funeral in order to hear what people say about us, but rather in order to say something about our Savior. Let me explain…

We die once in baptism. Baptism is like a funeral service for our "old nature" which died with Christ on the cross and now in the sacrament of baptism, we are holding the funeral service as the "old nature" goes down into the water, symbolizing our burial with Christ (Romans 6:3-4; Colossians 2:11-15). In baptism, we are declaring that we are dead to sin and alive to Christ.  We are making public our decision to submit to Christ and to leave behind the sinful things of the past.  We are saying that we have determined that because of Christ's work on the cross; we will no longer allow sin to reign over us but instead will submit our lives to Christ, actively living for him.

We also die daily…as Jesus' followers in many different ways as we consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God (Romans 6:11; 1 Cor. 15:31). We overcome by living a crucified life not by living a comfortable life.

We enter into the heart of mourning, the emotional suffering, of Christ for lost and hurting people. Each time the world rejects the love of Christ offered through us, we mourn for their sake. They may even celebrate when our lives and ministries are ended [I am reminded of the passage in Revelation where the world celebrates the death of the two witnesses.] but even as we mourn their missed opportunities we trust the loving plan of God, and it is there that we find comfort (2 Cor. 1:5).

Jesus the Messiah was a man of sorrows (Isaiah 53:3), for he saw the human condition more completely than anyone else ever has. Yet, he is also described as one anointed with the oil of gladness more than all his brothers (Psalm 45:7; Hebrews 1:9). How can this be? It is possible because he was in perfect union with his Heavenly Father. Those early morning conversations alone with the Father and filled with the Holy Spirit charged him with joy unspeakable which spilled over into unmatched gladness.

Just as Jesus could reverse the normal flow of uncleanness, touching even the lepers and healing them, so too he could touch the world, dwelling in our midst, and mourn over our stubborn blindness, our pain, and even death itself, without becoming morose. His pervasive good humor and full humanity reverse the flow and bring healing and comfort to those who mourn—even today. His very message is one of gladness (Isaiah 61:3) to those who mourn. Our own comfort, true comfort, is not found in avoiding the suffering and grief-filled world, but in joining Jesus as he engages with it. As Dr. Metzger noted in his post, “The rest Jesus promises is the rest of sharing in his burden, carrying his yoke. It is indeed rest, for when Christ is Lord in their place he bears the brunt of the burden (See Matthew 11:28-30).”

Photo: Greg Dueker

 If I finish by borrowing a metaphor or two, there are times when mourning seems to break forth in overwhelming waves of sorrow that seem to turn our respective worlds upside-down, and yet in the very midst of grief when we come to the end of our own resources, we get a glimpse of eternity and see that in the suffering of Christ, mourning has broken. 

There is a morning after our mourning.

Hope for Tomorrow
Photo: Greg Dueker

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:3-4)

"Blessed are the poor in spirit" and Psalm 26 (King David vs. Jesus?)

This post is an assigned response to Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit—Not Those with Spiritual Bravado, by Paul Louis Metzger.

Let’s start by considering two very different passages of scripture, one from the Old Testament written by a king, and the other from the New Testament proclaimed as the message of the kingdom of heaven.

Psalm 26:1-3

¹ Vindicate me, O Lord,
    for I have walked in my integrity,
    and I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.
² Prove me, O Lord, and try me;
    test my heart and my mind.
³ For your steadfast love is before my eyes,
    and I walk in your faithfulness.

Matthew 5:1-3

“Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain,

and when he sat down, his disciples came to him.

And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’”

How can we walk as King David claimed “in our integrity” and still be blessed as the “poor in spirit” or the “spiritually bankrupt” at the same time? Is it even possible for both to be true in us, or are these attitudes mutually exclusive? Or perhaps we just chalk it up to the differences due to progressive revelation from the mid-Old Testament to the early New Testament as is so often done and walk on by such issues.

Let’s be honest, sometimes King David’s claims in the Psalms seem almost arrogant and self-righteous at first glance…especially given our knowledge of his own personal and public failures. Certainly, he was gifted with a completely honest approach to communicating with God, and thus some of his statements may offend our more nuanced religious sensibilities. But before we are too hard on David, we need to get the log of self-promotion out of at least one of our own eyes. How often do we mentally make the same argument as David…that we deserve better? That we are not like “them”? That we have integrity in ourselves?

Let me say, in a stage-whisper aside, that it is in our corrupted nature to compare ourselves favorably with others. [Even those who despise themselves and compare themselves unfavorably to others do so with the thought that they should be better or have better in a kind of backward pride—for if they really despised themselves then they would be happy that their life is miserable.]

We often don’t really feel the deep need for God to vindicate and redeem us because we either see no need for vindication and redemption, or we are committed to vindicating ourselves. We think we are Superman rescuing our own lives from the gutters of both personal failures and religious superstitions. If God exists, then he must certainly accept us…but more often than not the spiritually confident live as though God answered to them rather than the other way around.

David’s request for God to “vindicate” him was actually a statement of humility. It demonstrates that he knew that he needed to be vindicated (to justify, maintain, support, defend, uphold, prove correct or right) and couldn't deliver himself.

In the Expositors’ Bible Commentary Vol. 5, Willem A. VanGemeren writes, “Vindication is where the act of God whereby he declares his servant to be innocent and avenges himself of the wicked (false accusers, enemies).”[1] Note that vindication here is “the act of God” not the act of self-righteous humanity.

The integrity, to which David clung, was faithfully dependent upon the steadfast love and mercy of God (v.3). His integrity is seen in the coherence between his inner life of faith and his outward walk of faithfulness. He shunned everything that smacked of a lie or deceitfulness. He chooses not to enjoy the temporal benefits of those who oppress others. He has weighed the cost of following the Lord and does so with equal parts enthusiastic abandon and steadfast endurance. So we see that to “walk in integrity” demands not perfection, but requires the honesty and humility to admit that we desperately need a gracious redeemer!

It has been said that “a life of faith” serves a dream/mission so big that it requires God to miraculously bring it to pass or it is not a life of faith. If, in our integrity, we know that we need God to vindicate and redeem us and we put our whole-hearted hope in his doing so, then perhaps we are living by faith indeed as the “poor in spirit”.

Psalm 26, from which these verses are taken, is described as a psalm of entrance…that might have been used by the worshipper entering into the temple complex seeking both the clean hands and pure heart necessary to come before the presence of the Lord. The psalmist asked God to search and test him, not because of an elevated sense of self-righteousness, but from the response of a heart captured by the steadfast love of the Lord! He wanted to be able to stand in the presence of God.

He consciously distanced himself from the oppressor and drew near to God in whom true freedom was found. For, as Jesus said, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” (Matthew 6:24)  This psalm testifies that the psalmist was a “one master” kind of guy. To quote VanGemeren again, “The psalmist's concern with integrity, acts of devotion, and words of praise flows out of a heart filled with love for the Lord and for God's house. It is motivated by a zeal for the Lord.”[2] 

So can I say the same thing about myself? A couple of years ago, in commenting on this same passage, I wrote,

I hope that one day I will be able to look back and say with the psalmist that “I have trusted the Lord without wavering.” Yet I am not so sure that I want to ask the questions of God that David asked in verse two. But I wonder if it is possible to experience unwavering trust (v.1) without asking God to test us (v.2). Maybe the key is in verse 3…where I keep God’s steadfast love before my eyes (which makes it a lot easier to trust) and I live in his perfect faithfulness (not my own).

So we see that David’s integrity caused him to cry out to the Lord for redemption, vindication, and relational access to the Lord. Perhaps David is actually a pretty good case study in the blessedness of being poor in spirit.

What do you think?

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[1] Expositors Bible Commentary Vol. 8

[2] Ibid.