Love, Service, Yoga Pants, and Spandex

Today I read a random article here on Buzzfeed about a Christian woman who decided to stop wearing yoga pants and leggings as pants.  More specifically, she decided not to wear them out of the house in order to honor the truth that her backside is for her husband's enjoyment and not for that of every guy on the street.  Also contributing to her decision was a good desire to try not to entice men to lust after her body, which is not for them to enjoy in the flesh or in their fleshly imaginations.  It seemed to me like a pretty non-controversial and cool decision.  Nevertheless, according to the article I read, her decision has people falling all over themselves with shrill objections.  The comments section following the article was oozing with self-righteous disgust for her decision and especially for her going public with it.  This surprised me and got me thinking.  As I considered the dynamic behind the angry response, I was reminded of an issue I have been wanting to write about.  So here we go: Love, service, yoga pants, and spandex. 

The Bible teaches us that Jesus came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.  This is the heart of love: disadvantaging ourselves in order to advantage another.  Dying, so that others may live.  This is beautiful, and it is what Jesus did for us.  He is teaching and shaping his people to imperfectly imitate him in it.  

When we learn and practice this in our families, churches, and neighborhoods it is beautiful.  This happens as we learn to rest in Jesus' loving sacrifice for us, and our hearts are captured by it to the extent that they are transformed into some small living approximation of it.  But sometimes we get this all confused and turned around.  We read that Christ came to serve, and that we are to love one another, and we start looking around at specific ways in which others need to serve and sacrifice for us.  We get a feeling of entitlement to be served by all, and don't feel a compulsion to sacrifice for and serve others.  This gets applied in all sorts of ways, and all of them are ugly.

The spandex situation shows that not only do we struggle to love as we ought, but many even struggle to see this kind of love as a good or beautiful thing at all.

The girl who quit wearing yoga pants and spandex did it with at least three goals in mind.  One was to honor her husband by not taking her body, which belongs to him (as his belongs to her), and flaunt it before other men.  The other was to do her best to help other men not to lust after her.  The third which underlies both of those is to honor her God through love.

The underlying goal is to delight so much in God's love for her in Christ that she looks for ways to imitate it in her life.

The first goal seems clearly motivated by imitating that love for her husband.  She wants to honor him.  She wants to make it clear that her body is exclusively for his enjoyment.  She is limiting her clothing choices in order to honor her husband, to show him how exclusively loved he is by her.  Her concern is not her "right" to wear spandex.  Her concern is for the good of her husband.  Her concern is to honor Christ by loving others for his sake.  Beautiful.

The second goal seems clearly motivated by imitating the love of Christ for others.  She knows that lust is destructive to people's souls, that burning for another man's wife is an expression of self-centered desire to use another person for their own pleasure (the opposite of love).  So she limits her clothing choices in order to help sinful men.  Her concern is not first for her "right" to rock her tight pants around town, but her concern is first for the purity of people she doesn't even know.  Beautiful.

This is not an expression of her slavery to others.  This is an expression of her freedom to love others because she has been loved by Christ.

So why all the hate?  Why the accusations of "slut-shaming?"  Accusations which themselves could be labeled "love-shaming."  People can't see the beauty of her decision to love others, because they can only see entitlement as good.  They want her to insist on her right to wear whatever she wants.  They want her to insist on her own way, not knowing that "love... does not insist on its own way."  They are furious that she would take responsibility for the lust of other men, not understanding that she does so not because she feels guilty for it, but because she genuinely loves them and wants their good.     

But it isn't true that this is just a problem for the haters in the blog comments.  This is a problem for all of us.  We all get to feeling entitled.  We all get to thinking that others should sacrifice for us.  This is primarily because we forget that God already has sacrificed everything for us when we absolutely did not deserve it.  If you trust in Christ, you have been sacrificed for; loved so perfectly that you are free from demanding the sacrifice of others.  You are free to sacrifice yourself for others, even if the watching world doesn't like it.

Where do you struggle with this?  Where do you need to remember that you have already been perfectly loved and served?  Where can you love today?

Racial Issues and the Trinity

We have racial issues.

Demonstrations and marches continue in Ferguson today on Martin Luther King Day.

I don't want to wade into the specifics of the Ferguson issue right now, maybe in another post.  I do want to talk about racism, different cultures, and the Trinity.

What does the Trinity have to do with these issues?  I suspect, it shows us the way forward.

The Trinity is not an obscure, irrelevant reality, only for the Leslie Knope's of theology.  Understanding God as triune, as one God eternally existing in three persons, illuminates everything else.   

There are two basic things to be sure we know at this point about the doctrine of the Trinity:

1. There is one God.  The Father is fully God.  He is not one third of God, nor one manifestation of God, but he is fully God.  So is the Son.  So is the Holy Spirit.  There is perfect, unchecked unity in the person of God.

2. There are three distinct persons.  The Father is not the Son.  The Son is not the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is not the Father.  They are real, distinct, and genuinely individual persons.

The unity in the Trinity is not a limiting factor of the distinctness of the three persons.

The distinctness of the three persons of the Trinity is not a limiting factor of the unity.

These are the dynamics of the Perfect One.  The one place where nothing could be improved functions and exists eternally in this way.  The real-ideal society of God is made up of 1 and 3, unity and diversity.  With respect to unity and diversity, the Triune God is not either-or, but both-and.  Not war, but peace.  Not reductive, but expansive.  Not or, but and.  Not no, but yes.

So what does this have to do with racial issues?

Our racial and cultural struggles involve at the heart a lack of unity, a lack of oneness.  The problem of racism is a problem of diversity at the cost of unity.  Racial problems, racial tensions are results of unity being sacrificed because of diversity.  We are different, we look different, we do things differently.  We conclude from this that we are not, or cannot be united.  The dream is that "one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood."  The root problem is that not everyone is welcome at the table.  Racial tension between black and white in America is the result of real, historical injustice.  Real, bloody, lack of unity, flowing from a lack of the unifying power of the Trinity and all the universe: love.

In response to racism and racial tension, we often swerve towards one of two solutions:

1. Exalt the differences over the unity.  We think that multiculturalism means saying that everything every culture does is good and right.  So we rot out any possible ground for moving towards genuine unity.  Or we exalt the differences by giving up on the unity, retreating from one another, each clutching our own distinctives, or by going to war with each other.   

2. Exalt the unity over the differences.  Here we try to ignore the real differences that exist.  We think unity means acting like, or pretending that we are no different.  So we rot out the beauty of racial and cultural diversity, and try to smooth it all over.  The problem is that differences do exist, they run rather deep, and to work for unity by pretending they are not there is like throwing another tablecloth over the pile of dishes on the table and believing that you have cleared the table for the next meal.

But what we learn from the Triune God is that it is possible to hold real, genuine, distinct differences together in a perfect, unbroken unity without compromising either the unity or the diversity.  This is not easy to do, as anyone who has had more than casual relationships across cultures (or sexes) can testify.  But it is what God is bringing about in his kingdom.  

What stands in the way of perfect unity among different people is not our created differences, but our sin.  We are not good at distinguishing between those two things, but the gospel can teach us.  Through the gospel of Jesus, God has made atonement for our sin, so that we can freely confess and turn away from it.  He has showed us what love looks like: to get our eyes off ourselves, our own advantage, our own privilege, to prize and value others, even at cost to ourselves.  And he has given us a basis for genuine unity: truth and righteousness.  In Christ who is our righteousness, a people from every tribe, tongue, and nation are being brought together.  And they are being brought together into a body which has many diverse members, all of which serve one another, and together serve the Head of the body.  This is God's plan and his project.  We have failed to be united in love apart from him, but his parade marches forward, and he calls all people everywhere to come and join.    

"With all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  There is one body and one Spirit--just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call--one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.  But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ's gift." Ephesians 4:2-7

Dualisms and Where We Duel

The Western world is bulging with dualisms, dichotomies, and divisions that distract us from where we really should be dueling.  We need to duel.  I am not warning against fighting and resisting, I am trying to draw our attention to the fact that much of our fighting amounts to waving our swords at windmills, or even worse, at friends.

If you are getting uncomfortable with all the talk of duels and sword shaking, you can reassure yourself that I do keep in mind that we are not waging war according to the flesh and that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood.  But this does not mean that we don't wage war.  "The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds  We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete."

In this real battle over truth I am afraid we are, as I said, often fighting in the wrong direction.  This brings us back to the dualisms and dichotomies.  We often separate the world into this-and-not-that.  Natural and not supernatural.  Intellect and not emotion.  Emotion and not intellect.  Nice and not mean.  Individualism and not communalism.  Objective and not subjective.  Building up and not tearing down.  Laughing and not weeping.  

Too often we choose a side and we fight the opposition with our words.  We side with nice and go to war against mean.  We side with spiritual and reject all things natural.  We side with intellect and cast aside emotion.  We side with objective, and throw away subjective.  So what is the problem?  The problem is that in these examples we are pitting two created goods against one another.  We are stirring up a fight among friends.  

If we believe that God created the world good, then we should see a fundamental unity, a basic agreement and friendship among all the things that are created good.  Paul teaches us that everything God made is good and is to be received with thanksgiving.  This introduces one basic dichotomy that should be kept in mind, though it is a friendly dichotomy.  There is a fundamental distinction between the Creator and the creation.  That is important to maintain, lest we be forced to the conclusion that God contains in himself all the evils of the world, or that within God himself is an eternal balance of good and evil.  That view of the world means no end to the fight, no triumph of good.  Once we establish a fundamental distinction between God and the world, we can then recognize another real dualism in the world itself.  On one hand you have created good, and on the other hand you have sinful evil.  This is the dualism to duel over.  "Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh which wage war against your soul."  "Sin is crouching at the door.  Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it." 

The problem is first in ourselves.  The place to duel is against sin.  Adam was tempted immediately to shift the blame and fight a created good, although he didn't really fool anyone but himself.  "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate."  How does Adam frame the problem?  It is the woman, she is other, she is the problem.  Thousands of years later we still haven't stopped that foolishness. 

Let me give a few more examples to make all of this a bit more clear.  We see the problems of greed, hunger, poverty, etc. and we think the answer is to feel guilty about our stuff, or to turn against stuff in general.  Here is the problem: stuff is not bad.  Giving away your stuff won't stop your greed (see Colossians 2:20-23).  I have seen greed living under a bridge.  I have seen generosity living among a wealth of things.  And I have seen envy thriving next door to a pile of things.  Am I saying it is wrong to give stuff away?  Of course not!  The person who rejoices in God's generosity to him will give away more than anyone because he is a person who loves generosity.  The person who rejects the good things given to him will give only as much as it takes to make the nagging guilt go away.  And it isn't about how big the pile is, because the little old widow who gave away her last coin understood God's generosity all the way down to the little details.  I suspect she gave that coin away because she was thankful to God for it, not because she felt guilty for having it.  In other words, she saw her enemy as covetousness and greed, not the coin. If the coin itself were truly the enemy, why give it to anyone?

On a larger scale, think about the intellectual climate we live in today.  We carry out our lives on a bridge between the land of modernism and the land of postmodernism.  The modernists of the Enlightenment want everything boiled down to mathematically representable propositions.  With these objective truths they will solve the problems of the world.  And bah-humbug to subjective sentiments and feelings, intuition, faith, hope, and love.  The postmodernists feel nauseated by the cold and sterile world created by all of this rationalism and want a universe that is alive and warm.  And so they march forward in the light of their hopes and dreams, their intuitions and feelings, casting aside that cold, stainless steel intellectual stuff.  And so they duel.  And we are caught up in the duel.  But in the good world God made, the intellect and mathematics are good and true and beautiful.  In the good world God made, intuition, feelings, romance, and faith are gifts to be delighted in.  To pit them against each other is a waste of time, and it is a manifestation of unthankfulness.  

Maybe one more quick one.  Most Westerners are still raving individualists.  We tend to be suspicious of group-think.  We tend to define ourselves by what makes us unique, and feel embarrassed about what ties us to family and community.  We want to be individuals but not members.  Lately there seems to be a movement towards a more communal identity.  I think it is good movement because that is the direction we need to go.  However, community should not be embraced apart from the individual.  That merely trades one side of the dichotomy for the other.  Notice Paul, "Now you are the body of Christ (communal) and individually members of it (individual)."

This post is getting long enough as it is.  There is much more I want to say.  If there are holes that keep the overall point from being clear, hopefully they will be filled in through discussion or further posts.  I will tie it together by saying again that this is not a relativistic call to embrace everything, as though good and evil are all the same, as though truth and lies have no distinction.  Evil is evil, lies are deadly, and this is where we duel.  We must bring the fight in the right direction: not against created goods, but against rebellious sin; first in ourselves, and only then in others.  It should be assumed, but probably shouldn't be, that this fight is made possible through the death and resurrection of Christ, received by faith.  Apart from the atonement that brings, we can't let ourselves see the problem for what it really is, because we are too busy trying to shift our personal guilt and shame somewhere else where it won't stick.  

It might be a good idea to let Solomon the wise have the last word for now.

"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. 
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a tim to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace."

Holiness As Devotion to the Good

It is the first week of 2015, did you start a plan to read through the Bible in a year?  I have set out to do it many times, but have never followed through all the way.  I have read the whole Bible within the span of a year, but never by following a plan.  If you have tried one of these plans, you have probably noticed that some reading plans bounce you around the Bible like a game of pong, while others jog straight through from the beginning.  It is an almost universal experience that those who set out to read straight through the Bible push hard through Genesis and Exodus, but the plan crashes to pieces on the bloody pages of Leviticus.  And this is understandable, because Leviticus is exhausting.  I believe that the exhausting nature of Leviticus is part of the point of the book.  When you finish Leviticus, you should be worn out from all the blood and the sacrifice and the ritual.  But why?    

I think that a good summary verse of the book is in chapter 10, after God has struck down Aaron's sons for offering up their own DIY recipe as a sacrifice: "And Moses said to Aaron, 'This is what the Lord spoke, saying: 'By those who come near me I must be regarded as holy; and before all the people I must be glorified.' '  So Aaron held his peace" (Lev. 10:3 NKJV).  It is the biggest thing for sinners to come into the presence of the God of holiness.  We are told in Hebrews to come boldly into the presence of the Father in Christ, and so we should.  Leviticus reminds us of why it takes so much boldness.  The Bible is full of this kind of thing, if we look; "I will make him draw near, and he shall approach me, for who would dare of himself to approach me?  Declares the Lord" (Jer. 30:21b). Or, "...Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire" (Heb. 12:28b-29). When Leviticus foreshadows the work of Christ to enable us to draw near to God, it gives exhaustive instructions.  This is because the gulf between sinful people and the holy God that is being crossed is greater than we ever let ourselves imagine.  By those who will dare to draw near, God must be regarded as holy!

If we are going to regard him as holy, we need a basic understanding of what that means.  There is obviously much that could be said here, but I want to motion towards a few important things.  While we generally gloss the word "holy" with the phrase "set apart," my brilliant Old Testament professor Peter Gentry regularly made a big deal of saying that a better gloss is "devoted."  As I have considered that over the years, it has born fruit in my thinking.  I encourage you to do the same.  God is devoted to his righteousness, devoted to his glory, devoted to his covenant.  For us, holiness means being devoted to God.

This leads to the related point that we should view God's holiness as primarily active rather than reactive.  Let me explain.  Imagine God in eternity past, before the creation of the heavens and the earth.  Was he holy?  What did that holiness look like before the heavens and the earth were brought into being, before sin?  Whatever it looked like (and we should admit we can get only a tiny glimpse at best), I don't think it was defined reactively, against sin.  When we commonly think of the word "holiness," we often think about a lack of sin, about not sinning.  This is true and accurate, but it makes sin the reference point.  But since there is no sin in God, and God has been holy for all eternity, the reference point for holiness should not be sin, but righteousness and love and glory.   Holiness has been around much longer than sin has.  God is the ultimate reference point.

This sheds light on the understanding of holiness as devotion.  It is not merely a set-apartness, defined by what God is not; but it is a devotion to who and what God is.  God's holiness is his devotion to all that is good, it is his passionate, fierce love among the members of the Trinity, delighting in what they see in one another, rejoicing in truth goodness, and beauty.  This will include a hatred for sin, but is far bigger and more exciting than that.

One staggering implication of all of this is that when he justifies us and declares us to be righteous in Christ, his holiness is directed towards us.  This may be different than what we think when we gloss "holy" with "set apart."  If we think of God's holiness as his being set apart, his being "other," then we think of it primarily in regards to his distance from us.  If his holiness is his devotion to all that is good and righteous, and if we are righteous in Christ, then his passionate, burning devotion is aimed squarely at us.  It is no wonder that Paul says that the love of Christ surpasses knowledge.

God is holy.  Let us draw near boldly in Christ.

Why?

As you may have noticed, I am starting a blog.  This is not a new year's resolution; it has been a year or two in the making.  Since it is not a new year's resolution I figure it has a chance of lasting longer than a month.  At first I plan to post once a week, probably on Mondays or Tuesdays.  I am so excited about it that I considered calling it A Blog Agog.

I have been asked whether I think blogging is a waste of time.  I have considered that question seriously.  Writing and reading blogs surely can be a waste of time, but in spite of that possibility I have decided to fly my sign for a few reasons.

1. Blogs are a way to enter into a larger conversation.  I love to read because I think it is massively important to be incited and challenged by the thinking of people that are varyingly like me and not like me.  I enjoy going where the gadflies bite.  After enough bites a guy begins to slowly and groggily wake up.  After several cups of coffee he may even want to say a few things himself.  This will be my attempt to do that.  It will only work if others read and talk back, so I hope to incite you to engage.

2. I have a litter of ideas that keep asking to be let out.  My regular studies often give life to lots of young ideas that grow through conversation to the age that they start noticing there is a whole wide world to explore.  They continue to multiply and want to go outside and play.  This blog is me opening the door, hoping they won't go out and taunt the neighbor's dog.

3.  I want to take every opportunity I have to lift up the light of truth.  Hence the blog title.  The title comes from a newsletter I started and edited in college, which had a short and fruitful life.  The image comes primarily from the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  The lamppost there marks the entrance into another realm, and the way back home.  I am not the light, but I consider it my life to bear witness to the Light.  If this blog can lift up a glimmer of the Light of truth in Christ for others to see, if it can signal the presence of another world, if it can help point the way home, it will be only by the pure grace of God.

I hope to see you in the comments section.

Tom