But if some of the
branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among
them and became partaker with them of the rich root of the olive tree, do not
be arrogant toward the branches; but if you are arrogant, remember that it is
not you who supports the root, but the root supports you. You will say then,
‘Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.’ Quite right, they
were broken off for their unbelief, but you stand by your faith. Do not be
conceited, but fear; for if God did not spare the natural branches, neither
will He spare you. Romans 11:17-21
I’ve never seen an olive tree, but I know the nature of
vines. I had a gorgeous grape vine wrapping around the back of my house for a
few years, before I decided that I was fed up and exhausted with managing wild
and unruly things. We cut it down but left a long stump, just in case, because
wild and unruly can be all kinds of awesome, and because it is just not a good reason
to kill. That thing looks dead – deader than dead – but,
wow, does it know how to grow.
When I look at that vine, I always think spiritual. I always think about how Jesus is the vine and of these verses
from Romans, Paul’s words to the church in Rome about their place in the order
of things. Do not be conceited, but fear
– you are not the tree, you are not the
root. You are a branch, and a branch can be broken off. I look at that
church in Rome now, how it contrasts with my own, and I know Church has never stopped being a
hodgepodge of long, twisting branches seeking the Light and Living Water in a
thousand different directions.
I believe the Church has a gross addiction to religion. Sometimes I am afraid of being
a part of a branch about to be lopped off.
I wonder how you can tell whether or not you yourself have finally just been shut up in disobedience. I have a
miserable penchant for disobedience.
We Christians can be more than a little arrogant – a little
wild and unruly, a little we are the world,
a little let’s take over. We have a long,
documented history of devastating people in the name of God and righteousness.
We also have a long history of saying, But
those weren’t real Christians. I’m
sure I don’t know how to draw lines around who constitutes a real Christian.
Jesus said it like this – You will know them by their fruits. Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord,
Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of My Father
who is in heaven. (Matthew 7:20-21).
The saving right arm of God, His Word in the form of flesh, said,
Therefore, however you want people to
treat you, so treat them, for this is the Law and the Prophets. (7:12)
The Prince of Peace and Son of Righteousness said, Do not judge lest you be judged. For in the
way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be
measured to you. (7:2)
I don’t think these verses are out of context for talking
about our response as Christians to Bill 18. I know that we praise God that we
live in a free country, that we are
able to be our whole selves openly, to worship God fully and freely without any
fear from our government, with the full support of our government when we are
infringed upon. We are grateful to God that we have the legal right in every public
school in our country to start up a prayer group, or a Bible study, or any kind
of Christian Alliance. We embrace the law, we give thanks to God for its
covering, because it really is our supporter.
I think we are like this with God’s Law, sometimes. We love
to have it humble before us and washing our feet, but we really don’t like it
to convict us. We really don’t like it to boss us around, or to bring us down
to our knees before somebody else who is dirty.
Law is a servant to us, but it is not our Servant – it only ever kneels before us in
order to teach us the way. God’s Law
peers straight into the heart leaving
no table unturned, no stone unrolled – and the heart can be a desperately wicked
place. Cleansing that temple can get more than a little messy.
I have little doubt that Christians could crucify Jesus all
over again, if given half the chance. What he asked people to do really
offended their understanding of righteousness.
Jesus really upset people’s ideas about how to please God. Jesus had contempt
for religion.
Jesus did not come in any way to abolish His Law, he came to
fulfill it. He came to demonstrate it. He came to satisfy it. In every interaction
he had with people, he fulfilled the Spirit of the Law – he was the Law of God
in action – and he said, This is how you
do it. You love the Lord your God with all your heart, and you love your neighbour
as you love yourself. It isn’t complicated – it’s just really hard
sometimes. It doesn’t leave any room for self-righteous.
You don’t get a gold star for doing what’s right.
You don’t get a gold star for loving.
Years ago I came across a beautiful Star of David necklace
and decided I wanted to wear it. People wear crosses all the time as jewelry – why should it be any different,
I reasoned. It wasn’t meant to be a conversation piece. Jesus was a Jew, I
loved Jesus, the necklace was beautiful – at the time, I couldn’t really see
the problem. I hadn’t had a lesson in appropriating.
Sitting outside of a gymnastics class one evening, a blonde
haired boy of not more than nine (with whom I happened to be playing a game of Go Fish, and who happened to be the
gymnastics instructor’s son), looked at my necklace, recognized it and spoke
words to me that I will never, ever forget – Are you a Jew? I hate Jews. I looked at him, shocked, as his face blushed
a confused contempt even he did not understand. I scanned the faces of the other
women seated on the floor, as I was, with their backs against the wall. They
all looked stunned and embarrassed, but nobody said a thing.
In that moment, all that was running through my mind was, God. They all think I’m a Jew – and they are
all totally watching me be hated on by a CHILD – and nobody is saying ANYTHING –
and I don’t know what to DO. I had never, ever in my life experienced
racism before. Judging by the epidemic of I
don’t know what to do, I doubt anyone within hearing had ever felt or witnessed
it in quite that way before, from such an innocent, with such an absence of
shame. I think it was like watching somebody get hit by a bus, and suddenly not
knowing what number to call for an ambulance.
I knew that I was feeling very, very mad, and when I am very, very mad I don’t generally control my
tongue – but I knew in this moment that I had
to. I had just been painted with a wide, ugly brush, and now I was representing
a people. It’s a huge reality check when
you discover that you have inadvertently taken it upon yourself to impersonate
someone else, to a room full of people who don’t have your back. But I knew
that whatever I was going to say, the only one thing I absolutely did not feel like saying was, No, I’m not a Jew.
So I said simply, That
is called ‘racism’ – and he said, sincerely confused, What is? We had a brief but meaningful one-sided conversation, in
which I explained to him what that word means and exactly why it is not ok.
Then I had the conversation again with his mother. She was apologetic and
horrified and said something harsh to her son in another language that made
tears well in his eyes and made his face red with shame. Important things are
missed when you can’t translate, but one thing that doesn’t need language for
you to hear it is fear – whatever she
said to him, it didn’t sound much like I
am not raising you to be a racist, and did sound a whole lot like maybe, you’re going to get me fired.
Sometimes there are things that we just simply don’t see,
unless we can actually step out of our own shoes and into another person’s for
an hour. I saw racism like I had never seen racism before – because that child was talking about me. He hated me, and he didn’t even know me – and it could not have mattered
less that I wasn’t even what he thought I was. That was the whole point –
he didn’t know a single thing about me other than that I had played Go Fish with him while he waited in
boredom for his mom, but he was prepared to hate me anyway. Whether
intentionally, or inadvertently, he had been taught to hate me.
As worried as the Church tends to get sometimes about being persecuted, that has never once
been part of my own life or faith experience – never once, until I was somebody else. I would not have been
surprised to hear that that little blonde boy was a Christian.
Maybe it is time – maybe it is long past time for the Church
to feel again what it means to truly be on the outside, what it feels like to suffer indignity and abuse from the
mouths of children, and to learn what exactly it means that the servant is not above the Master.
Maybe this is a really good time for us to weigh out carefully our neighbour’s need for respect, rights and
freedoms, and to value it as more important than our own. We clearly don’t know
what to do with ours.
I don’t think that Bill 18 is a shining example of the
excellence of law and, honestly, I just don’t think it is going to work. It
does little more than illustrate, on paper and in conversation, how completely
insufficient Law is when it comes to transforming us into better people. Law
cannot save us where we truly need saving – only Love can do that. You can make
concerted efforts to expose and to educate, but you can’t legislate against fear and people are always going to be mean.
I know there are layers to the conversation, and that the
split ground appears to fall between the sanctity of human dignity and the
sanctity of the words of the One who made us. There are a lot of very
meaningful and important conversations that need to take place around those issues,
inside the Church.
There has been a lot of concern expressed over the wording
of Bill 18, and there are rumblings in some places about how it is one in a
series of steps towards full-on persecution of the Church. This really, really bugs
me. While it may be an example of legal incompetence, I do believe it is a
sincere attempt to do away with breeding grounds for hate, subtle and overt, and
to set a standard of respect and support to a wide spectrum of people who are right now, today persecuted, disenfranchised,
attacked and made to feel in a thousand ways, both subtle and overt, like they
are somehow less than.
Nobody is asking anyone to understand or to approve –
what is required of us all is simply respect
as equal citizens under the law in a free country. As Christians, we could be at
the forefront of that effort. If we were at all doing our job as Christians,
Bill 18 would not even be necessary – because, supposedly, there are billions of us. We are not loving the
way Jesus said to love – we are not always treating people the way we want to
be treated. We say ‘Lord, Lord’, but we are not always doing the will of our
Father.
Things we fear we will be subject to should we begin to lose
pieces of our Religious Rights and
Freedoms, other people already live with every day. In Synagogues in this
country, police officers routinely roam the building during Passover services
because of threats of violence against gathered God-worshippers. I’m not sure
why we think we should be exempt from that as a life experience. I’m not sure
why we aren’t joining forces and up in arms about that. Why do we only grow teeth when it’s about us and our values? Isn’t countering hate one of our values?
To my mind, there is just something so unbecoming about the
Church in North America fighting for its
rights. We’ve been indulged past the point of bloating with rights and freedoms. Perhaps it’s the
pacifist in me, maybe I’m a little too much lay
down and die, but it deeply offends my conscience. But of all things to get
fretful about, why would the Church – any church – engage in a fight
for Freedom of Religion?
We are not even supposed to have religion. We are always so quick to say how much God hates
religion.
The question I have to ask myself, and the one I want to ask
my brothers and sisters in Christ, is this: if your Religious Freedom is infringed upon, what necessary thing won’t
you still be free to do? What power
or principality can stop us from doing what is good and what God requires of us
– to do justly, to love mercy and to walk
humbly with God?
What if by some remarkable series of end-times events the Church did actually become the persecuted, and what if
Christ-followers were reduced to this: They
will know we are Christians by the love we have one for another. It’s the
old question they used to ask us in Youth Group – would there even be enough
evidence to convict you?
What if by some predestined series of events Christians began
to suffer great violations, indignities, were treated unjustly, had threats
made against their lives, were made fun of, beat up, refused service, feared
and hated by children, marginalized, stripped down and reduced only to this: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace,
forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Is that
fruit actually growing in your life?
Because, the thing is – Against such things there is no law.
Do nothing from selfishness
or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another
as more important than himself; do not merely look out for your own personal
interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in
yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form
of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied
Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of
men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient
to the point of death, even death on the cross. ~Philippians 2:3-8