Don Friesen
I've always liked one-liners, perhaps because I'm better at one-liners than I am at reasoned discourse. I take special delight in political slogans. Some of them are inspiring, others are crafted so as to do a lot of damage to one's opponent. The Ontario election campaign is still in its infancy, and perhaps that's why I've had trouble finding the slogans the various parties are using to convey their respective messages. The Ontario Liberals have been muttering something about "Forward Together," the Conservatives have made vague references to bringing change to Ontario, and the New Democrats are talking about a new era of respect. All three are disappointing from a sloganeering point of view. They're just as vacuous as the only federal campaign slogan I remember, which is Pierre Elliot Trudeau's 1972 theme, "The Land is Strong," whatever that meant!
For more interesting slogans you have to go to the United States, where political debate is more spirited and sloganeering is an art! For example, Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign slogan was, "In Your Heart, You Know He's Right," which his political opponents skewered with "In Your Guts, You Know He's Nuts". George W. Bush used Abraham Lincoln's 1864 slogan, "Don't swap horses in midstream," but his detractors countered with, "Don't change horsemen in mid-apocalypse."
Politicians are not alone in resorting to slogans. Religious people are also fond of them. Some slogans are lame, like "Jesus turns frowns upside down," or: "If your life is rusty, your Bible is dusty," while others are downright vindictive, like "Try Jesus! If you don't like him, Satan will always take you back!" Atheists, not to be outdone, have also come up with nasty slogans, like "I refuse to believe in any god that endorses war, murder, or Pat Robertson," and "So many right-wing Christians, so few lions!"
Some slogans are sobering, like the one that appeared over the main gates of a number of Nazi concentration camps: "Arbeit Macht Frei," meaning "Work sets you free." It's particularly distressing when an entire culture begin to express a legacy of hopelessness, like the Haitian proverb, "Behind the mountains, more mountains," or . "The little fellow does what he can; the big fellow does what he wants." ("Proverbs from a troubled land, The Marketplace, Nov/Dec, 1993, page 21)
Slogans have their shortcomings. You cannot solve a complex problem with a clever one-liner. You cannot capture the depth of our faith on a bumper sticker! Following Christ is not captured in a few catch phrases! Jingles for Jesus is insufficient to express the nobility of our spiritual heritage.
Tweets, Titles, and Taglines
On the other hand, we live in the age of Twitter, which, say what you will, disciplines you to express your thoughts succinctly, limited as you are to 140 characters. Our first youth minister, Gord Driedger, thought that most sermon titles are either boring or cheap. I disagreed, and presented him with a hundred other adjectives to describe sermon titles; they can be scintillating, captivating, clever, provocative yet substantive, and so on. Sermon titles should also be succinct, yet fair to the content that follows.
It's a challenge to craft a good title. Bill Janzen has been agonizing over the titles of the presentations for the Days of Worship and Reflection in January, because you want a title to grab people's attention without being too cutesy always a danger for Bill. Perhaps we should have enlisted the help of Jan Schroeder and Chris Wiebe, whose article on farmer sausage has just been published in the National Geographic travel publication. Their title? "A couple's quest for the perfect prairie sausage". Good, but their alternate title is even better "Quest for Sausage: A he-said, she-said pan-prairie pork pilgrimage". (http://travelclub.canadiangeographic.ca/blogs/feature_articles/archive/2011/09/09/quest-for-sausage.aspx#)
Titles and taglines. That's my theme for September. Taglines are those bits of wisdom or nonsense often tagged on to the end of emails, but more generally they represent short phrases that communicate your most important message in an evocative manner. Living in a twittering-and-tagline world, I thought it might be a good discipline to try and capture the essence of a biblical passage in a simple slogan or tagline. And while I imagine that none of my taglines will go viral, I'm going to try and come up with a few taglines this month that convey, succinctly, truths about the kingdom of God.
The biblical writers would be comfortable in a twittering, tweeting world, for the Scriptures are full of succinct phrases, many of which are inspirational and have become embedded in the English language, phrases like:
The Apostle Paul's Injunctions on Passing Judgment
The Apostle Paul was skilled at complex discourse, and some of his passages could benefit from taglines. Let's take a look at Romans 14. Paul established and nurtured a number of congregations, so he was no stranger to the inevitable relational tangles of congregational life. Paul didn't have the benefit of Twitter, FaceBook or email, but writing letters in his day was no easy matter. Paul had to be economical in his use of writing materials. He had to be succinct, and in this passage he comes right to the point:
Paul does some fancy foot-work in trying to sort out this issue, but the main principle that emerges is: No judgments! In other words, don't quarrel with your fellow Christians over quirks of belief or practise! Don't mess with your fellow-Mennonites about myopic opinions! Don't "criticize a brother" or condescend to a sister," says Paul. (Romans 14:10, MSG) "After all," writes Paul, "who are you to criticise the servant of somebody else, especially when that somebody else is God?" (14:4, PHL)
Paul's injunction to refrain from judgment makes sense, even for practical reasons. Don't pick at the speck in your neighbour's eye when you've got a huge log sticking out of your own! It's like the story of a rabbi and a Catholic priest who found themselves sitting next to each other at an inter-faith event. Dinner was served and someone thoughtlessly placed a slab of ham on the rabbi's plate. The rabbi didn't make a fuss; he simply began to eat the food on his plate permitted by his faith. The priest leaned over and said. "Rabbi, you and I both know that the dietary laws from the Old Testament were developed at a time when pork was dangerous to eat. No refrigeration and low heat over cooking fires made pork an unhealthy diet. Your ancestors in the faith were right in prohibiting the eating of pork, but those days are gone, Rabbi; pork is safe and there's no reason to cling to outmoded ancient practices. So I ask you, When will you eat your first mouthful of ham?'"
The rabbi paused briefly and then responded, "I will do so at your wedding, Father Maguire. I will do so at your wedding."
No Judgments, but Full Accountability
To refrain from judging one another makes sense simply from a reciprocal point of view, but Paul invokes an even nobler reason. Identifying those who "pass judgment" on those who eat or don't eat, he plays his trump card. "God has welcomed them," he argues. (Romans 14:3) Later on he points out that "all stand before the judgment seat of God" and "each of us will be accountable to God." (14:10, 12) "Each of us must give an account to God for what we do." (14:12, CEV) "It is to God alone that we shall have to answer for our actions." (14:12, PHL)
We may warm to the first part of Paul's principle: No judgments! Some of us are refugees from congregations that excelled in judging, and we crave a congregational life that in which there is little of it! However, for that very reason we may also may be a little uneasy about the portrayal of God as Judge. Judgment and accountability are not the kind of terms that appeal to the modern temperament, but the Scriptures don't share our uneasiness. For example, the ancient philosopher of Ecclesiastes is fairly philosophical about most things, but he says, "God will bring every deed into judgment, including every secret thing, whether good or evil." (Ecclesiastes 12:14) Prophets like Zephaniah warn Israel about the coming "Day of the Lord," a common reference to the day of final reckoning. And the way Zephaniah envisions the Day of the Lord doesn't look too good for those who plundered and got rich at the expense of others. "They have sinned against the Lord," says the prophet, and "neither their silver nor their gold will be able to save them on the day of the Lord's wrath...." (Zephaniah 1:17-18)
While I'm not too excited about accounting for my many shortcomings, I like the idea of really bad people getting their comeuppance. In the biblical scheme of ultimate accountability hypocrites will not fare well. (Matthew 6:2, 5) Those who cheat others will not fare well. (Leviticus 19:35; 25:14, 17) Laggards will not fare well. (2 Thessalonians 3:12) Those who hold back from using their talents in the service of God will not fare well. (Matthew 25:14-30) Oppressors will not fare well. (Isaiah 19:20; Zephaniah 3:19)
Kathleen Norris says that Jesus' parable of the weeds and wheat in Matthew 13 frightened her as a child. She found the idea of being called to account for the way we have lived very solemn, if not terrifying. Her grandmother, on the other hand, loved the biblical passages about judgment. She loved to recount the story of Jesus coming as a thief in the night to destroy the world, "her voice trembling with excitement at the thought of a final harvest, when weeds would be burned by fierce, implacable angels." ("Judgment," Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, pages 316-317)
In studying the parable of the weeds and the wheat as an adult, Norris came to realize that we are incapable of separating the wheat from the weeds in our lives. We always run the risk, in pulling up the weeds, of pulling up the good plants along with them. She found the parable "absurdly freeing, not from responsibility but from the disease of perfectionism". (Amazing Grace, page 317) "I began to see God's fire," she writes, "like a good parent's righteous anger, as something that can flare up, challenge, and even change us, but that does not destroy the essence of who we are. The thought of all my weeds burning off so that only the wheat remains came to seem a good thing."
There is a refining quality to the notion of ultimate judgment and accountability. The hymn, "How Firm a Foundation," expresses it well:
In a world in which religious people often appear to have such a firm and clear idea of exactly what is right and what is wrong especially who is right and who is wrong it is delightful to discover that those who did very well on the day of reckoning are baffled by their good fortune. Their behaviour was so much a part of who they were, or had become, that it never occurred to them that in their unspectacular acts of kindness they had in reality served Jesus! They are surprised, not with the reality of judgment and accountability, but by the shock of grace.
We Are Forgiven Peacemakers, not Prosecutors on the Prowl
That even God's judgments are acts of grace simply underscores the "No judgments" tagline. And it is also reinforced by our Gospel reading. The Apostle Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" (Matthew 18:21) And Jesus replied, "Not seven times, but ... seventy-seven times." (18:22) Some translations say "seventy times seven!" (PHL) making the Apostle Peter's proposal seem petty.
I think that Peter was expecting praise, not parody. He thought he was being magnanimous. Peter's tradition held that if someone sinned against you once, you were to forgive him. If that person sinned against you a second time, you were to forgive him. And if he or she sinned against you a third time, you were to forgive him. If, however, it happened a fourth time, you had no obligation whatsoever to forgive him. Three strikes and you're out! Seems fair. And perhaps Peter, wanting to show Jesus that he got it, multiplied the maximum by two and added one for good measure.
Jesus' response to Peter indicates that our relationship with God and with one another is beyond quantification. He follows up with a story of an ingrate who was forgiven a great deal, but who himself forgave his debtors nothing! He had learned nothing. He received compassion from his master, but he dealt tyrannically with a fellow servant who owed him very little. As we hear the story we can hear in the background an echo of the Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors". (Matthew 6:12, NKJV)
We are called to be peacemakers, not prosecutors. We are forgiven peacemakers, not prosecutors on the prowl for any infraction, however trivial. Paul warned the Christians in Rome not to look at their fellow believers as convenient combatants for "quarrelling over opinions". (Romans 14:1) We are the Church, and the Church has a nobler purpose.
John Wesley (1703-1791), the founder of the Methodist movement, and George Whitefield (1714-1770), who brought renewal to the Church through the Great Awakening, had much in common, but at one point they had a falling-out. Some sly fellow asked Whitefield whether he expected to see Wesley in heaven. He answered, "No!" as expected. Then he added, "You must understand: Wesley will be so far up near God's throne that I won't get to see him." A gracious spirit, and one that invites us to nurture a similar spirit.
I invite you to start the church year ahead of us by already extending forgiveness for the slights and hurts we will inevitably visit upon one another in the year ahead. Just remember:
There are also less inspirational phrases, but helpful nonetheless, like:
Some of the biblical phrases are not even complete sentences, yet convey so much, phrases like "East of Eden" (Genesis 4:16), "filthy lucre" (1 Timothy 3:3, 8), the "writing on the wall" (Daniel 5:5), "turning the other cheek" (Matthew 5:39), a "thorn in the flesh" (2 Corinthians 12:7), and many, many others.
"Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarrelling over opinions. Some believe in eating anything, while (others) eat only vegetables. Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat.... Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?" (Romans 14:1-4)
There were some in the Roman congregation who did not observe any special food laws or taboos; they ate anything! Many religious groups in the ancient world observed strict food laws, and in among Christians there were some who conscientiously abstained from meat. Those of Hebrew background referred to Leviticus, chapter 11, for a list of the creatures they could eat and those from which they must abstain. There were also associated rules about the preparation of food. In a Roman market you could hardly find a steak or a roast that had not come from some animal slaughtered in a temple of another religion. An animal would be killed as a sacrifice, but as the priests could not possibly consume everything sacrificed in the temples they sold the surplus meat through retail outlets. This was the major source of meat on the market, so the shoppers in the Roman congregation who had scruples about food were faced with a dilemma, and some concluded that their witness for Christ was best shown by simply not eating meat at all. They believed in the rigid observance of the Sabbath and any food laws pertaining thereto. Others had less scruples, saying meat is meat! Whatever! They believed that with their newfound Christian liberty the old taboos were gone! The old food laws were irrelevant!
"The flame shall not hurt you, my only design
It's interesting that one of Jesus' most significant parables of judgment stresses not our dross, but our gold. The parable of the final judgment (Matthew 25:31-46), when the sheep will be separated from the goats may seem harsh, but what distinguishes the two are the most ordinary and mundane of actions toward other people. Nothing too spectacular or dramatic is expected of us. Jesus' parable conveys praise for ordinary acts of kindness food for the hungry, a cup of water for the thirsty, some clothing for those ill-clothed, care for the sick, and a visit with those in prison. (25:35-39) These will inherit the kingdom of God. (25:34)
Your dross to consume and your gold to refine."