There's a phrase in Acts 11:23 that I find both inspiring and challenging. The background is that persecution against the church has scattered believers from Jerusalem all across the region, with the ironic result that the Gospel now is reaching out to all sorts of places it never had before. At the same time, Cornelius, a non-Jewish centurion, has recently converted to the Faith, demonstrating to the church in Jerusalem that the Gospel’s for non-Jewish people as well (up to this point the church has been exclusively Jewish). At this point in the story, the Gospel’s reached as far as Antioch (in northern Syria), and the church has been growing there with Greek believers in particular; so the Church in Jerusalem sends a delegation led by Barnabas, up to Antioch to investigate.
And here’s the striking line. Because when Barnabas sees “the evidence of the grace of God” among the Greeks in Antioch, he is glad and he “encourages them all to remain true to the Lord with all their hearts.” That’s how my NIV phrases it, but in the original it’s a bit more vivid. Literally he tells them to “continue with the Lord” (the verb is prosmenō, to remain in, to continue with, to abide in), and to do it with “purpose of heart” (the noun is prosthesis, a purpose or intention).
In other words, Barnabas tells these brand new believers:“set an intention in your hearts to stick with the Lord.” It struck me because, on the one hand, Barnabas knows these Christians are likely to face persecution (it was persecution, after all, that brought the Gospel to them in the first place); and on the other hand, these believers are brand-spanking new in the faith, full of (presumably) untried, untested enthusiasm for Jesus.
What do new believers need especially to do, after they’ve come to the Lord and the sheen of conversion is starting to fade? Especially if and when following Jesus is going to mean sacrifices large and small? And what should pastors like Barnabas encourage them to do, well before buyer’s remorse sets in? Determine in your hearts—set it as a clear, conscious intention—that you’ll stick with Him, come what may, thick or thin. Such intentions won't make it any easier, maybe, when thick does get thin (or vice versa), but they certainly increase the likelihood that we'll get through the thin (or the thick) with our grip holding as firmly to the Lord as the hour we first believed.
Thick or Thin, a devotional thought
Out of the Comfort Zone, a devotional thought
In Acts 9:43 we’re told that while Peter was on an itinerant ministry tour, he stayed for “many days” in Joppa with a tanner (i.e. someone who tanned hides and prepared them into leather), a tanner named Simon. This is just an offhand line, but it’s really interesting to me, because a tanner, of course, handled animal carcasses (which is where the hides came from), and according to Jewish Law at the time, anyone who handled a dead body was unclean; and so culturally, and traditionally, being a tanner was considered an unclean profession. We know from 10:14 that Peter is quite particular about Jewish cleanliness laws (nothing unclean has ever passed his lips, he says), and yet here we see him lodging at the home of an unclean tanner, of all people. God, of course, is about to explode his whole notion of cleanliness and uncleanness, by sending (gasp) some non-Jewish Gentiles to him, requesting an audience, but in a way, this has already begun when he came under Simon the Tanner’s roof. God, it turns out, does not share our concerns when it comes to keeping ourselves safely in our comfort zones, is my point. As uncomfortable as it may have made Peter to be surrounded by so much “ritual uncleanness” (according to Jewish tradition), this is precisely where serving God has brought him, his own hang ups about human defined comfort zones be damned. Where might we find ourselves serving God, if we shared the same indifference about our comfort zones, I wonder?
To the Rabble Rousers, a devotional thought
There’s this interesting line in Acts 9, just an offhand comment, but it gets me thinking. It’s in the middle of the story about Paul’s early ministry, just after he encountered the Lord Jesus and had the scales fall from his eyes, and two themes stand out sharply in these early days. 1) All the Christians are kind of afraid of him. Up till now, he’s developed quite a reputation as a persecutor of the church, so it’s maybe understandable that, now he’s converted, they’re all a little gun shy. And 2) all the non-Christians want to kill him. From the sounds of things he’s as zealous now for Jesus as he previously was against him. Everywhere he goes he’s getting in arguments and debates and trouble, “speaking out boldly in the name of Jesus.” He’s in Damascus until the Damascenes hatch a plan to kill him, so he moves to Jerusalem, until the Greeks try to kill him, so he moves on to Caesarea. Eventually, it says, the disciples “sent him away to Tarsus.”
And then comes the interesting line: then, it says, “the church throughout Galilee and Samaria enjoyed peace.” I say it gets me thinking, because Paul’s clearly a rabble-rouser for Jesus, and once they finally ship him off to Tarsus, that’s when the church experiences peace. But, of course, Paul’s more than just a rabble-rouser, he’s also a world-shaker for Jesus, and though his ministry might ruffle feathers (even some of his fellow Christian feathers), God intends to rock the foundations of the Roman Empire through him.
I’m pointing that out because sometimes in church life (or even our own individual discipleship), the people who disrupt our peace are the ones God most uses to move us, shake us and form us. We need the rabble rousers, is my point, even though it’s not always fun to have the rabble roused; and sometimes the worst thing we can do is to rest in a false, complacent kind of peace. And as difficult as it sometimes is, still I'm thankful to God for the rabble-rousers he’s used in my life and ministry, and even (tremulously) praying that he’ll send more my way.
The Theology of Bruce Springsteen (Part 5): A Sense of Place
The Face of a Martyr, a devotional thought
The other day I was reading the story of Stephen in the book of Acts, and I was struck by the description of Stephen at his trial before the Sanhedrin. Stephen is famous among Bible Trivia buffs for being the first believer to be martyred for his faith, and in Act 6:15, he’s about to give the incendiary sermon that will lead to his summary execution. But right before he speaks, it says, “All who were sitting [there] looked intently at Stephen, and they saw that his face was like the face of an angel.” Such a strange and yet powerful image: in giving his testimony for Jesus—the testimony that will cost him his life—Stephen was so filled with the glory of God that it shone in his face. Shone so clearly, mind you, that it was like the face of an angel to his interrogators. It got me thinking: does my witness for Jesus—my testimony to his love, his grace, his mercy, his truth—does it shine in my face with anywhere even near that kind of a heavenly radiance, when I’m sharing it? And how can I be so filled with His Spirit, like Stephen, that it might?
On Book-Smarts and Being with Jesus, a devotional thought
There’s an interesting line in Acts 4:13, where the Sanhedrin is interrogating Peter and John, who’ve recently caused a stir by healing a lame man in Jesus’ name. We’re told: “when the Sanhedrin saw their confidence and understood that they were uneducated and untrained, they were amazed, and took note that they had been with Jesus.” It’s an interesting juxtaposition—doubly interesting for someone like me, who is starting to gear up for another semester working on my doctorate, which starts in two weeks. The Sanhedrin are flummoxed at the spiritual depth and insight of these two uneducated fishermen, who don’t have any letters behind their name or diplomas on their wall, and the only thing they can credit it to is the fact that they had been with Jesus.
Don’t get me wrong. I place a high value on life-long learning, and think that careful scholarship is of crucial importance to the mission of the church (I did just get back from a two-week stint studying for my doctorate...) but Acts 4:13 seems to suggest that there is a kind of learning, and knowing, that goes beyond the best that any 1st Century Rabbinical school (or its 21st Century equivalent) can offer: a deep, careful formation at the feet of Jesus. Without this, all the book-learning in the world is just so much chasing after the wind; and it’s only with this—with a life-lived in the presence of Jesus—that academic scholarship can be what it was meant to be: a precious gift to the church, to the glory of God.
The Theology of Bruce Springsteen (Part 4): In the Shoes of a Stranger
One of the hidden gems on Springsteen’s classic Born to Run album is “Meeting Across the River.” The song tells the story of an amateur street thug and his friend Eddie, who are scraping together the cash for a vague and ominous-sounding meeting with a man “across the river.” From the details, we gather that the narrator is down to his last chance in the criminal underworld, that he and Eddie are in way over their heads, and that all their hopes for redemption are riding on whatever deal it is they’re planning to make with the man on the other side of the river.
What makes “Meeting Across the River” especially compelling is the fact that this story is told in the first person, through the eyes, as it were, of this third-rate hood, desperate to make it big in a world far bigger and far more dangerous than he is. The first person narrative voice creates a deep pathos and a profound empathy for the listener. When the narrator urges Eddies to stuff something in his pocket so it will look like he’s “carrying a friend,” the depth of his naivete and the strong likelihood that this meeting across the river is going to end very badly for them, creeps over us like a vague, looming shadow.
The first time I heard “Meeting Across the River,” it took a second to register for me that the “I” voice in the song was not Springsteen himself, that he was actually playing a role, singing a part. Having been raised on the intensely personal songs of the 80s, be it Glam-Metal’s odes to personal sexual prowess or U2’s spiritual ruminations about finding “what I’m looking for,” I had come to assume that whenever a singer sang in the first person like this, he must be singing about himself, expressing personal hopes and dreams, individual desires, and private disappointments. Part of what makes “Meeting Across the River” so arresting on first listen is the fact that the narrator’s voice is so convincing, so fully conceived and personal, that it takes a while to realize that you’re not really hearing the true confessions of a failed, entry-level street thing; you’re only hearing Springsteen imaging the world as one.
As a song writing technique, this art of assuming the role of a particular character and singing in his or her voice permeates Bruce Springsteen’s songbook. In “Born in the USA” he is a returning veteran of the Vietnamese war. In “Racing in the Streets” he’s a career street racer looking over his life. In “The River,” he’s a teen aged dad watching his dreams go up in smoke in the face of unemployment, adult responsibility, and the Carter recession.
It was “The River,” actually, where he first began experimenting with this approach to writing songs in a serious way. In this brief excerpt from the documentary “The Ties that Bind,” Springsteen talks about the development of first-person storytelling in his music.
“With a very specific narrative story,” he explains, “I would sing in that voice, you know, of the character. And it wasn’t necessarily me, though it was partly me, and partly other people. … ‘The River’ was my touchstone for all that writing that came later, where you simply step into a character’s shoes and try to get your listeners to walk in those shoes for a while.”
Towards the end of the above clip, he talks about the power of this kind of song writing. “You’re laying claim to [a] character’s experience, and you’re trying to do right by it as a song writer, and you’re taking the risk of singing in that voice.” Taking this risk, he says, “is the writer’s job. [It’s to] faithfully imagine the world, and other’s lives in a way that respects them … sort of honours them … and records them in your own way somewhat faithfully.”
What Springsteen is talking about here, I think, is more than just the writer’s job. It’s the well-spring of grace and compassion in the human heart. At least: the ability to imagine the world through the eyes of another human being, and to do it in a way that respects and honours them faithfully, is essential if we are to know true compassion and extend genuine grace to others. To realize what it might mean to be a dying AIDS patient, for instance, longing for brotherhood as he waits out the sunset of his life (as Springsteen tries to do in “Philadelphia”) is to take a step towards true empathy for the lonely dying in our own lives. To realize what it might mean to be young, unemployed, and out of options (as Springsteen does in “Atlantic City”) is to plant seeds of grace in your heart for the hard decisions people in such circumstances need to make every day.
Whenever I see this “faithful imagining of the world through another man’s eyes” happen well in a Springsteen song, it occurs to me that Christians could do worse than take a cue from him on this one. At least, it is certainly what our Lord did for us, on a cosmic scale, when he literally stepped into our shoes—the Son of God become the Son of Man—and walked in them all the way to the cross. "We do not have saviour who is unable to empathize with us in our weakness," says the writer of Hebrews, "but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are, and yet he was without sin." Herein lies the source and power of Christ's grace and compassion for us, that in him, God literally looked through the world through human eyes. "For this reason," the writer of Hebrews says in a different place, "he had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every way, in order that he might become a faithful and merciful high priest in service to God."
And to the extent that his compassion and grace are in fact the currency of the Christian life, this ability to “step into a character’s shoes and walk in them for a while” should come as naturally to us as breathing. If it did, I expect that the “weightier matters of Law”—justice and mercy and faithfulness—would come more naturally, too. To quote a song writer that predated Springsteen by a good 750 years, the Way of Jesus is to seek “not so much to be understood, as to understand … not so much to be loved, as to love with all [our] souls.”