Hello, friends.
Welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Welcome back to this ongoing Sunday night series
as we engage with some of the things that we’ve learned
over the course of the past year and in the midst
of some strange and challenging circumstances.
This week, we’re turning our attention
to the idea of sides,
us versus them, talking a little bit about what tribalism looks like
in our experience of this year and,
you know, I think this is challenging ground.
I think it is difficult ground to walk in a time
in which we are hyper-focused on the things
that do make us different.
The differences that are natural to being human
have, in many ways in this time,
been places
where we have sort of lost our footing
and in lots of cases fallen into some pits.
So I’m interested,
Clint, as we begin this discussion,
to sort of frame our intention in that.
So as you and I talked, Michael,
and we tried to come up with what
are the themes that we would wrestle
with during Lent in this series?
What are the things that we think
were a universal experience that we think
were worthy of some significant reflection
and trying to put some serious thought
into how they’ve impacted and affected us?
This was one that came up,
I think, relatively easily, the idea of dividedness,
the idea that I suspect almost every person
in America over the last year has experienced
one of two experiences in regard to this division.
Either you find yourself on a team in a group
thinking about the others,
the ones who you disagree with,
on either side,
or you perhaps,
and I think this has maybe been more indicative of my experience,
you find yourself in the middle
listening to these groups argue back and forth,
which is exhausting in its own way.
So I think everyone has probably experienced
some version of this kind of divisive rhetoric,
this kind of tribalism that has happened,
even if you’ve not been in a tribe.
And so we thought it would be worth thinking about
what does that do to us,
and how do we as Christians
evaluate that and navigate that in a way that
we hope brings some thought and faith into the process? One of the preceding questions is,
to what extent can we talk about the divisiveness
of these times as being unique or in some way
set apart from the divisiveness that existed before?
I think there’s a good argument to be had
that we underestimated the divisiveness
that existed before this time.
In other words, that we can’t talk or act as if
this is a brand new reality that just sort of
poofed into existence.
We have to confess on some level that we are
amplifying patterns,
practices,
orientations towards one another that existed prior to the pressure
that has been put on by certainly pandemic and the response
and the fact that it was an election season
and all these things that we’re going to talk about.
I think that an argument should be made from the outset
that on some level, this isn’t different.
On some level, this is the reality of human brokenness
working itself out in our human experience.
And as people of faith,
especially as reformed people,
we would be amiss if we would act surprised
that people behave as people,
that the sinfulness of the heart doesn’t drive us to find places
of difference and disagreement.
And even as a reformed body,
we would have to confess
even conflict.
We’re driven into that extreme place because of brokenness,
because of sin.
And it is that recognition then that I think we must confess,
you know, we’re not in this position that is substantially
different than the one that came before.
But that shouldn’t foreclose on an important conversation
about what is different in this time and the nature
of this conflict.
I’ve had many conversations with lots of different people from different vantages.
And a theme that tends to fall in those conversations
is that this feels different.
Now,
feelings are tricky,
and identifying what is substantial
versus what is maybe simply our perspective on a thing
can be nearly impossible to tease out.
But there is a sense that the moment in which we are living
as a kind of opposition or maybe an amplitude of opposition
that feels like it is different.
And to what extent can we identify that?
And as people of faith,
can we begin to interact
with some of the whys and some of the possible implications of that?
I think that people are very good at dividing up,
to borrow some language from sociologists,
what could be called tribalism.
We’re good at making tribes.
Our own story, the Christian story, is full of that.
Israelite versus Canaanite, Jew versus Gentile,
Protestant versus Catholic,
Southern Baptists versus Northern Baptists.
I mean, we are just naturally able to separate from one another
as we live our life in many ways.
And to some extent,
tribalism is helpful.
I mean, one of the things we do as Christians is look for things
that define us as different from the world around us.
We go to church.
We give our tithe the way that we talk,
the things that we won’t do,
that we won’t participate in.
And those tribal boundaries have a beneficial aspect to them.
And yet,
in the midst of times when there is a deep benefit
in coming together and finding consensus,
that tribalism can have a very negative impact.
And I think,
perhaps, as that has been increasingly on display
over these last 12 months,
that people are reacting to that, Michael.
As we’ve lost some of the tribes that we belong to
outside of our homes and in our community,
and as we have increasingly engaged in these online discussions
and political discussions or politically charged discussions,
I think it has increased and heightened the awareness of
our differences.
And I think in the midst of that,
it feels like something new.
It is, at very least, a new expression of something old,
but it feels different to us.
It feels more heated.
It feels, I think, in some ways uglier.
It feels more intense.
And I think that has left people with this sense of, “Boy,
everybody is fighting with everybody all the time.” You know,
in the conversation that preceded our recording today,
we’re talking a little bit about how,
really,
we’re not qualified to talk about the philosophical nature of what a tribe is.
Are tribes innately conflictual?
Are they, by definition,
going to come in opposition with other tribes?
You know, there’s philosophers,
sociologists, lots of people who have studied that,
and it would be interesting to read and to engage with some of those conversations.
I’m not entirely certain that one can make an argument
that just because you’re defined by a shared reality
or by a shared worldview or some marker that the tribe forms around,
that that means that you must, by definition,
be against another tribe.
I mean, there’s a sense in which we have lots of different organizations
and groups who exist around a certain thing.
I mean, if you’re part of a snowmobilers club,
you aren’t against the ice skaters club.
I mean, right, there’s nothing that would mean
that you’re inherently going to be in opposition with another group.
But then we know that there are times when we are driven by opposing values,
that those things do come into conflict.
And I wonder if one of the things that sits underneath the tribes
that have always existed,
we’ve always had Southern Baptists and Northern Baptists,
or we have had the same historically in the Presbyterian family.
We’ve also had Republicans and Democrats.
That’s gone by different names throughout history,
but we’ve had those political differences.
We’ve also had different groups within those that are aligned in different values.
And though they’ve always been in conflict,
I wonder if we live in a moment in which a lot of these tribes
are driven by fear and anxiety in a way that they haven’t necessarily always been.
I wonder if there’s this sense of lack that has existed,
that there’s not enough.
And in fact, we know that in the beginning of the pandemic,
there was literally a sense of lack.
There might not be toilet paper in the store.
Will there be food on the shelf?
I remember some of those very early questions about,
we may all be vulnerable in this moment because of this massive thing that has happened.
And in the midst of vulnerability,
I do think we are often driven by not our best instinct.
We become defensive in nature and orientation,
so that we need to take care of only ourselves,
and we fail to recognize that the care for the other is not only a Christian calling,
it’s not only what we are called to do,
but actually there are senses in which that is good for the rest of the whole,
that ultimately if we overprotect,
we actually begin to break down the defenses of the whole,
and therefore we lose the protection that we’re seeking.
And I wonder if there’s not some motivational difference that’s happening
that does potentially add to that intensity that I hear you talking about.
There may be, you know,
we like to think of ourselves as unique and enlightened in this modern,
postmodern world.
But I read a very fascinating article about the navigation efforts in the early 1900s
with the 1918 flu outbreak and that epidemic,
and the difficulty they had getting people to stay indoors,
and the fights that were happening politically about,
we don’t want people scared,
we want them out doing their thing,
we don’t want them upset with us.
And it is interesting how much of that seems to have come back,
and how in many ways we repeated some of those very patterns,
and some would say mistakes,
others would perhaps not use that language.
But we are slow learners in many regards as people.
And when we are in times of stress,
you know, we often are moved in those times
to maybe perhaps pay less attention to the good within our own tribe
and more likely to begin taking shots at other tribes who we believe have it wrong.
And I think, you know,
disappointingly, it was very quickly that we moved.
And I suppose that’s natural at the point where legislation starts,
and there are rules about closing businesses
or not, you know, being able to have all of the same freedoms that we would like to enjoy.
I suppose in those moments when things get mandated,
it’s inevitable that there’s going to be some pushback,
and I think natural and maybe even healthy,
because that keeps us from, you know,
being bullied by organizations
or governments or whatever.
But it makes for a very,
it makes for a very interesting atmosphere.
And I think,
unfortunately,
looking back,
it feels like, and I couldn’t verify this with that,
so keep that in mind,
it feels like it had made it at times almost impossible
to have real and meaningful conversations about our experience
and about what the data and the trends and the things mean.
And I say that on both sides.
This isn’t to criticize this team or that team.
I don’t much care about that.
But it affects our allegiance to our camp,
can affect our ability to process information
and to receive new information.
And I think that is a real challenge for society,
because in those moments,
now we’re running by something other than information.
And when that happens,
I think we’re all at risk.
And I don’t mean from the,
from COVID, I just mean in general,
we’re on a bad path.
It is not only an engagement with information.
It is the potential of deepened or a greater sort of desert of relationship.
And I think that is unbelievably important and hard to overestimate
how important being in the space and presence with other human beings actually is.
And I think what is fascinating is we see that when we go into physical distance,
when we’re separate from other people,
we turn to other mediums and modes to find connection.
Humans are connectional people by nature.
I think biologically we seek that.
And so as we turn to find where we can have those,
we turn to these mediums,
a lot of them social media,
a lot of them technological.
But this isn’t just Facebook and Twitter.
This is also Zoom.
It applies in the TV shows that you watch,
the magazines that you subscribe to,
however that stuff comes.
I think we sometimes have a far too siloed understanding of these human connections that we have.
What we’ve discovered is when you’re not physically with people together in the same room
and you’re having the conversation with those folks,
it’s easy to just let some of those relationships drift while you find deeper and closer relationships,
more airtime, more conversations with people who agree with you in some fundamental ways.
And what we miss is where your agreement may start here,
together that whole group may journey without the connection to others who were moderating forces,
you know, people who you respected,
but you just disagreed with,
you didn’t see it differently.
But you recognized, hey, I know and trust them.
They’re good people.
They want what’s good.
We just see it differently.
But the less and less we talked to those people,
the more and more we became convinced that those folks were the enemy.
And I think that the lack of relationship has a significant way of coloring the information that we view.
And we’re going to talk about social media in a more sustained way because I do think it’s significant.
That’ll happen in another conversation.
But what is relevant to this conversation is it’s not just the information that we have.
It actually has changed in shape because our group begins to talk about and engage with different ideas
in absence with the people who may represent the opposite of those ideas by difference.
And what ends up happening then is we begin to think of the other defensively.
We’re no longer able to talk with them as people would talk about differences of perspective.
We begin to see them as a threat to our way of being.
And that seems to get closer,
in my estimation,
to that feeling of intensity that we have.
We feel more and more at threat by the other than maybe we did before this thing.
Yeah, particularly I think this is true for those who try or would consider themselves in the middle.
In other words, those who rather than say,
“I’m in this camp or this camp medically,
politically,” however you want to say that,
“I’m in the middle trying to sort that out,”
it begins to feel like the way that information is disseminated to you is to bring you into the camp.
It would be a very interesting experience.
I think if we ran 10 headlines for people,
I bet most people could guess with pretty significant accuracy
what sources they came from.
But within the tribe,
I take the headline as neutral.
But if I’m not,
then I think, “Hmm, that’s an interesting way to put out that information.”
And one of the things I think,
and I look forward to the social media conversation,
Michael, because you bring a great deal to that,
and I do think social media has played an enormous role
in our collective societal experience over the last month.
But one of the difficulties of social media and the internet platform is that it’s big enough
for me to find whatever I want to believe.
I don’t need data.
I can find someone who interprets the way that my tribe wants it to be,
and then that allows me to hold that up as proof of what I already concluded.
Rather than to look at something and have to wrestle with its implications,
the internet does that for me.
Not only does it do it for me,
it then gives me 500 choices with which to pick the one that I like the best.
When things are going well and that has to do with something out there,
probably not a big deal.
When you’re talking about matters of national economy and national security and national health,
that becomes an interesting environment.
I think what we’ve spoken of at some length already in this conversation is the experience
and the struggle with being in the middle.
That’s a tough place to be to watch sides that seem to be more and more diametrically opposed to one another.
The kind of conversation that seems to be tolerated by the different teams seems to us
to be very, very hard to stand in the middle of.
There’s another sense in which I wonder if there’s some who might be part of this conversation,
who might admit you put your hand in the air and say,
“I find it offensive that you’re talking about teams.”
Because there’s a reality that when you stand in a place,
especially a place that you believe, it’s ideological,
it’s deeply connected to who you believe you are,
which is a significant conversation in our present society.
This idea of identity is one that would be important to tease out.
There’s also a sense in which we want to say,
“No, I believe what I believe because it is right,
because it is true.”
And so I’m finding myself in this oppositional stance because I believe the other is a real threat to our existence.
I think that if that person won,
whatever the context of winning,
I think most of us might think politically,
but it’s far more than that.
It’s the extent that I should be able to be free to do this or that.
The extent to which I should be able to have financial resources given to me,
this or that, right?
There’s a sense in which,
to whatever extent we say,
if that other person on the opposing side won,
it would be a threat to our existence because I believe that I am right.
What is interesting, I think, is if you recognize that ultimately we have come to that conclusion not just independently.
I think it’s important that, especially as Christians,
we confess that our own sinful nature gives us a kind of bubble
that we must always practice humility within or we will become trapped by the assumptions that we make.
None of us wants to think that we look at the world around us and that we get it wrong.
But as a Christian,
I think there is a faith-compelling reason to recognize that because of this blinder of sin that we wear,
we must always recognize that the only glimmer of truth that we see is through the mirror,
the literal lens of Jesus Christ.
The gift,
the grace of God is the thing that enables us to see the thing that is true and ultimately we always see that through the Savior.
Anything else has to be subject to that great human confession,
“I might be wrong.”
But what happens in the team is we become confident.
We become confident, well, there’s a thousand people,
there’s a million people,
there’s a hundred million people that believe this,
we couldn’t possibly be wrong and that is,
I think, a fundamental error in not just reasoning but in living.
Because the way that we make our way closer and closer to the truth of Christ is always in the midst of relationship.
When we gather in church community,
that’s not just an idea,
that’s a physical reality of real people who are seeking to be faithful
and Christ is big enough to draw that whole body,
even, yes, those people who are on the other team who we might see as being opposed to the values that we bring.
Yes, I want to make sure that people understand what we’re not saying is that all views are equal or all views are inherently right or inherently wrong.
There are opinions that are better than other opinions.
There are actions that are better than other actions.
There are solutions that are far better than other solutions.
And as Christians,
we should be seeking them actively,
whether they be political,
whether they be medical,
whether they be communal,
whether they be missional.
We should be engaged in the search for the best ideas,
the best data,
the best resources, and the best application of those things in whatever area that we find ourselves to be called.
What we’re saying is that when I use my affiliation with A,
B, or C as a barrier to process new information,
as a barrier to be challenged,
when I use my tribe as a shield against thinking that challenges me in new direction,
I have to exercise caution because at that moment I’m making new learning very difficult.
And when I sit down day after day in front of a screen that is designed to give me more and more and more of what I already believe to be true,
I have to at least recognize that it’s possible that that may be keeping me from expanding my ideas because,
Michael, you’ve said it really well.
The fundamental conviction of the Christian faith is that I know I cannot be completely right.
I’m not capable of having all the answers.
I’m not capable of making all the right choices.
There is something within the human that is broken.
And while I strive to know the truth,
I do not possess all of it.
And I cannot assume that what I believe to be true is,
in fact, 100 percent correct.
There is always more to the story than that,
and that’s why we use words like humility and grace as we seek to incorporate to the best of our ability everything that is available to us,
ability.
I think for most of us,
especially the fact that we’ve experienced this in the midst of an election year,
we find it hard to separate the oppositional nature of our different teams or tribes or wherever we find ourselves and the reality of political discourse of this or that,
which is history.
That’s part of our American history.
I find it helpful to actually frame this not through the lens of politics,
which I think there’s so much emotion vested in right now.
It’s actually hard to find those conversational, translatable talking points.
I think we can actually look to our own Christian history and the learnings that we’ve had over the thousands of years of trying to be disciples of how easy it is to get on the wrong path.
There are just hundreds and thousands of examples in Christian history of where Christians became convinced this is the way it is going to be.
And we’ve created zealots.
We’ve created moments in time where people have done heinous things to minorities,
to women,
to other races.
Christians have done some horrible things in the name of Christ,
and it’s not a thing that we wear well.
It is a deeply humbling reality that we have taken the cross of Jesus Christ and used it as a weapon against others.
And that is, I think, a fundamental warning sign.
That is the lighthouse that stands on the rocky shore that reminds us the only way to truth is by following the Savior,
is to recognize that the path to resurrection goes through the valley of darkness and death.
And that is the model and practice that we see in Paul’s writing to the early churches.
We see Jesus teach it himself.
We see this constant reminder from the Savior when he says,
don’t be looking to pull specs out of other people’s eye when there’s planks in your own.
And we so very quickly move from hearing that gospel to doing the thing that Jesus tells us not to do.
And I really don’t think that we need beat up over it.
I think we just need to confess,
yeah, that is to be human.
That is our innate temptation.
But if we can confess that,
then we can start to recognize when we do it.
And I do think there’s important truth in recognizing that humility is not just a practice that is good sometimes.
It is an essential nature of human experience,
because fundamentally, as Christians, we believe the only truth that we know and see is truth given by grace.
And that should shape how we see other people who occupy different places and spaces who might be on the different team.
And yet we could recognize and say,
grace has been offered to them.
And if I can’t recognize that as a possibility,
I may not be in a good place to see what Christ is doing.
I think it’s very humbling when you recognize that the world,
and by world, I mean political structures,
economic structures,
media structures,
the world around us has a vested interest in helping us be afraid and divided.
It creates market.
It creates news.
It creates interest.
It creates passion.
I think, though, that we have to remember that the gospel has a vested interest in calling us out of division and into unity,
into relationship with one another.
And therein, I think, is an important difference, Michael.
You know,
as you and I serve the church together,
we may have moments that we don’t agree on something.
It happens all the time.
But for me to then say,
rather than,
“Well, I know Michael.
I trust him.
I know that Michael wants what’s best for the church.
I know that Michael is striving to be faithful,
and yet he and I disagree with this.”
And I may think 100 percent he’s got the wrong answer,
and for whatever reasons,
it’s not going to be good for the congregation.
I’m not going to use that personally.
I’m not going to allow myself to then turn that into,
“Michael’s trying to destroy this church.
Michael’s trying to turn this into his own place.
Michael wants his own way.
Michael,
Michael, Michael.” And that, I think, is something inherently important in the conversation.
Is there trust?
It is one thing to sit with somebody of a different opinion or a different perspective and say,
“Tell me about why you think what you think.
And what about this?
Let’s exchange our ideas in the hope that we can both find in them whatever the best answer is.”
That’s very different than to lob insults back and forth at each other and never really meet to have an engagement.
I only talk about you as him or they,
and never as a person whom I’m trying to be in relationship with.
And that, I think, is really outside the bounds of the Christian faith.
In the cross, we are called to humanize one another and never the opposite.
And I don’t think at a national level,
media and all the rest,
I don’t think we’re being set a very good example of that right now.
And I think that is an inherent opportunity for the people of Jesus Christ to model a better way forward.
One of the things that has been incredibly interesting to me,
and if I am going to be honest,
a very personally challenging,
has been as we sought to teach and preach and navigate these waters with everyone else.
We’re all in these currents.
I’ve been struck by how,
when we talk about the gospel and the reality of how it calls us to community, to service,
to humility,
how quick and easy it is for all of us,
I’m including myself in this,
how easy it is for all of us to nod our head,
to say,
“Yes,
preach it.” And then to immediately turn and lob that as weapon against other.
If only they would hear this.
If only they would do this.
And I don’t think we give scripture credit.
I think scripture looks at humanity,
teaches us with a more clear vision than we give it credit.
Remember what happened in Genesis with Adam and Eve?
I have in my mind’s eye,
I imagine as the text tells the story,
that God shows up and Adam’s holding this fruit behind his back,
like the kid who got caught with the cookie,
and God says,
“Well,
what happened?” And the first thing that Adam does is he points with the fruit in the hand and he says,
“This woman gave it to me.”
That is ultimately the human experience.
We think that we can off-put our own personal responsibility for the sinfulness that is in our nature to someone else.
And we know that the only way beyond that is the one who made the sacrifice of his own agency.
Jesus is the one who was willing to take responsibility for sinfulness that was not his own.
That ultimately he was willing to bear on himself the finger-pointing that we continually levy against the other.
And what we find,
I think, is that it is so easy to say these words.
It is so easy to come and talk about unity and the recognition we need to be humble.
We need to practice a worldview that sees grace for the other.
It is entirely other to say that that starts with me.
And the confession that says,
“I find my own brokenness when I am unable to do it.”
When I’m unable to look at another and see them through the lens of the Savior who died for them,
I only see them as enemy or representative of an idea that will destroy something that’s valuable to me.
Or they’re a threat to my existence in the world.
When that is how we view the other,
I think we are dangerously close to pointing at Eve and saying, “Well,
you’re the one who gave me this woman.”
And I think we,
as people of faith,
should be challenged to practice the thing that we’ve been taught
when it’s so easy to just turn that back into a good idea that we point at others.
One of my frustrations with our national discourse has been the number of times
that when someone is called to accountability for an idea or an action,
the response is, “Well, they did that.” Or, “They already said this.”
I don’t know what it is at the adult level,
but this is what your children do when you ask one,
“Did you hit your sister?” And say, “Well,
yeah, but she made a faith at me.”
When we answer for our actions or words,
essentially justifying them because of someone else’s actions or words,
we’re having a different conversation than what has Christ called me to in this moment.
And I think that’s a sure sign.
If we find ourselves doing that,
and it’s easy to do,
we’ve all done it,
when we find ourselves doing that,
I think that’s a moment to pause and a moment to reflect on,
“Am I embodying the gospel right now in what I say,
in what I do?
Am I engaging a person as a child of God?
Or am I using their behavior?
Am I using something wrong to justify my being wrong?”
And if I’m doing that,
then I think it’s a moment for confession.
It’s a moment for repentance.
It’s a moment of seeking a better way.
And, you know,
again,
we’ve all been guilty of it,
but it is not a good path forward for people of faith.
One of the problems that exists in divisive times is the lack of nuance,
and therefore the lack of honesty.
We sometimes look at others and we see one thing that appears to be true,
and then we allow that to define everything else.
And the honest truth is that we would all do well to have a little bit more nuanced understandings
of the people and things and times that surround us.
In other words,
instead of just thinking, “Well,
I’m personally compelled by this vision of what it would mean to be a country
and what it would mean to be governed well.”
And so therefore,
anyone who criticizes that is therefore wrong-headed and unthoughtful,
and quite frankly, not patriotic,
instead of getting to the point where we need to defend the people within our camp,
and we could admit, “You know what?
Yeah, that thing that was said,
that wasn’t of good character.
The way in which that person behaved in that circumstance,
that wouldn’t rise to the level of Christian honesty and graciousness.”
If we could say that about those who are within our own circle,
I think that would go a very long ways to helping us also humanize those in the other circle.
To say, “I substantially disagree with how you view this.
I actually think it would be a wrong-headed solution
that would hurt more people than it would help.
I fundamentally believe on a truth claim, you’re wrong.
But I believe that there’s good in you,
and that you attempt good,
and that you do good,
and that our kids can play on the same team,
or that our kids could go to the same college
and both engage it with one another in significant,
substantial ways, because there’s real trust for one another.”
That is a thing that I think is not just something that we need to demand in public discourse.
It’s a standard we should hold ourselves to, because ultimately,
we have more influence than we believe we do.
When we go and say things online,
when we engage in conversations with friends over coffee,
we are shaping one another’s perspective.
And I do think there’s a kind of courage required in a moment of great divisiveness
when it’s tempting to find one side that becomes the sole interpreter of everything that we see, read,
hear, understand,
that we do offer some real pushback of nuance to say, “You know,
I just have a hard time believing that another person
would be innately bad,
that what they were seeking to do would be to upend everything.”
I wonder if there’s more to that story than what we see.
That inquisitive question may carry us a long ways.
Yeah, I recently read a fascinating study,
or I read about a study.
They brought people in,
and the basic premise of the story was they divided groups.
There were farmers and bakers,
and they had individuals come in,
and the first group,
they said,
“Okay, there are farmers and bakers,
and they have disputes over costs and supply and stuff.”
And they walked them through a series of disputes,
and they asked them to make a judgment on who would be right in that situation.
And it ran — I’m making some of this up — but it ran somewhere in the neighborhood of 50/50.
So the person comes in,
half the time they agree with the farmer,
half the time they agree with the baker.
The next group they brought in and said, “Okay,
you are a baker.”
And the bakers and the farmers work in these ways together,
and they walk them through the same disputes.
And then they did with a third group,
they said, “Okay, now you are farmers,
and the farmers and bakers have these relationships,
and they have these squabbles.”
And what they found is simply by identifying the person involved with a label,
they would,
about two-thirds of the time or more,
side with their “team,” their label, their tribe.
For no other reason than they believed they were one of them.
They had this idea that that’s my people.
And what you’re describing,
Michael, people are going to listen to that and say, “Well,
that’s kind of a fantasy.
We have to have — you know,
we can’t just all get along and sing Kumbaya together.”
And we understand, friends,
that this is not easy stuff that we’re called to do.
But it is no small matter that we’ve been called in the name of Jesus Christ to do it.
Yes,
this is brutally difficult to tame my own biases,
to refrain and not lob the attack with my words or my post on social media,
to withhold judgment and criticism until I’ve listened.
Yes,
this is all hard.
Much of being Christian is hard.
But when we allow ourselves to be divided,
when we frame the world in us and them,
and we think we have all the truth and they have none of it,
we are doing something that is not helpful to the path of being Christian.
It is not glorifying to the one who called us to work for oneness and unity.
In fact, who said,
“In me,
you have been made one.”
And that’s the very hard calling that we seek to live out as we navigate,
even crazy, unprecedented times, and as we have to make decisions about what does it mean to have a different opinion.
What does it mean to be asked to do something?
What does it mean to be of different political parties?
This is all hard,
but it is vitally important if we’re going to offer the world a chance to see something other than tribal loyalties and division.
Jesus once talked about the difficulty of finding salvation.
If you were rich,
he said it’s like a camel going through the eye of a needle.
And it speaks to the very substantial challenge that we’re talking about today.
I think that’s a good word,
Clint.
When one talks about unity in the midst of the kind of moment that we inhabit,
one might just be characterized as sheer fool.
That ultimately,
you have no courage.
You have no stand on one side or the other.
You want to be tossed by the waves and sing kumbaya and share sandwiches with friends across the table.
That’s not at all the nature of this conversation.
It’s striking to me that if you look throughout the entire four Gospels, the
people who are most devoted to the idea of line drawing are the people who are closest to the revelation of God.
Jesus’s own people,
the teachers of the law,
the people who are leading worship,
these are the people who are most driven by nature to divide between what is God’s work and what isn’t God’s work.
And interestingly,
they always draw the line so that Jesus is never on God’s side.
And that is, I think,
a significant sort of compelling criticism of the church,
that we must always stand under the cross.
We must always be those willing to confess that we too are tempted to draw the line in such a way that Christ might not be in it.
And that is a,
it is challenging not just because it’s hard when other people don’t do it.
I mean, we’re people who live in a society.
We live in a community.
We care what other people think about what we say and what we do,
obviously.
But it’s difficult at a level even beyond that because it requires of us asking the question,
who are we?
And are we able to be the hero of our own stories?
Are we able to be people who we fundamentally believe are good and trying to do our best in the world?
And also that we might be fundamentally wrong when we draw the line,
that we aren’t called to be judged,
but that is the Savior.
And as someone who sought to continually live under the cross in this season,
Clint, I have found myself personally challenged.
I mean, in some moments beaten down, asking questions,
is this true about who I am?
Did I make this assumption about another person so readily?
Am I judgmental at the level that I didn’t realize?
And the honest truth is,
I am.
That has been bore out by some of my own responses.
And that is sacred ground to walk.
And it is terrifying ground to walk.
But I cannot see any way forward in the Christian faith that does not on some level honor that Jesus Christ carried the cross.
And he said, you too must carry yours.
And if we’re not carrying some deep burden in this moment beyond just pointing at the other,
I fear that we’ve not heard the Gospels call it yet.
Yeah. And the purpose of this conversation,
friends, is not to scold anyone,
nor is it to somehow draw new us and they.
We’re not intending to do that.
What we hope is that as we explore something we think we’ve seen over the last year,
and something that is problematic at best and at worst dangerous,
maybe even unfaithful,
that we call that out and we each,
with heartfelt honesty, ask whether we have participated in it.
And as we do that,
we find a better way forward.
And we appreciate you listening to this conversation in about, oh,
13, 10,
12 minutes or so.
We’re going to continue this conversation with a Zoom call.
You’ll find the link in the video description.
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If you’d like to continue thinking about these things in a live format,
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We appreciate that you’ve listened this far.
And we hope there’s something challenging and helpful for all of us as we reflect on these realities.
Yeah, thanks, everybody, for taking the time,
the effort that it takes to be part of the conversation.
We would love to talk with you more in just a little bit.
Otherwise, we’ll be talking with you again next Sunday.