A Thief, A Cute Princess Ring, and Our Trivialization of Jesus

Aria has a cute, princess toy ring that she loves. It's in a little box that she carries around. She carries it more than she wears it, but that's okay. She loves it.

The bad thing for Aria is that Eli realizes that she loves it. He has this tendency to take it away from her to get a rise out of her. On Wednesday, he was trying to take it away by squeezing her arm. He must figure that if he squeezed hard enough, she will drop it. Aria started crying and yelled, "Bad Eli." Eli, while still squeezing her arm and attempting to get the ring declared, "Aria, 'bad' is a mean word." He was right; we teach them not to call anyone "bad." But his actions were much worse than than Aria's words. Eli knows what is right, but he refused to do it while still keeping the moral high ground of teaching what is right. Although that is behavior that needs correction, it is pretty typical of a five year old.

It is very unbecoming of an adult. To teach the truth while not living it is not an action that God looks favorably on.

"Practice and observe whatever they [the Scribes and Pharisees] tell you— but not what they do. For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger" Matt 23:3-4 (ESV).

In 2006, Al Gore, at one of his three houses, a twenty room house with eight baths, consumed twenty times the amount of energy that an average American consumes.

In a 2007 interview between ABC news and the Tennessee Center for Policy Research's President, the center stated, "If this were any other person with $30,000-a-year in utility bills, I wouldn't care. But he tells other people how to live and he's not following his own rules."

He jets around the world teaching us to take steps to curb our energy consumption and our carbon footprint. That's great. But like the Scribes and Pharisees, do as Al Gore teaches, not as he does.

Like Al Gore has done with his stance on environmentalism, we have this tendency to just want to intellectualize our faith and not allow it to change our lives. We lie to ourselves and say, "If we think the right thoughts, if we believe the right doctrine, if we have participated in the right religious rituals, then our life is right." That just is not the case. If our thoughts do not transform who we are at the core of our being, then we turn being imitators of Jesus into a sham of Bible Trivial Pursuit. It might be a fun game for some, but it will be empty of any fruit that God wants to bless those around us with.

Francis Schaeffer wrote:

“Ideas are the stock of the thought-world, and from the ideas burst forth all the external things—painting, music, building, the love and the hating of men in practice, and equally the results of loving God or rebellion against God in the external world….The preaching of the gospel is ideas, flaming ideas brought to men, as God has revealed them to us in Scripture. It is not a contentless experience internally received, but it is contentful ideas internally acted upon that make the difference. So when we state our doctrines, they must be ideas and not just phrases. We cannot use doctrines as though they were mechanical pieces to a puzzle. True doctrine is an idea revealed by God in the Bible and an idea that fits properly into the external world as it is, and as God made it, and to man as he is as God made him, and can be fed back through man’s body into his thought-world and there acted upon. The battle for man is centrally in the world of thought.”

In simpler words, "Thoughts, without corresponding actions, are worthless although they are usually necessary to produce those proper actions."

Let's not just say the right words; let's live the life God wants us to live.

Mother Teresa's Feet and Sacrificial Giving

An excerpt from Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical (167-168).

There’s an old story from the desert fathers and mothers, people of deep faith who found it necessary to go into the desert to find God. They lived in little clusters of communities (much the way many of our communities now live, only our desert is the inner cities and abandoned places of the empire). Someone had brought one of the communities a bundle of grapes as a gift. That was quite a delicacy, maybe sort of like giving someone chocolate truffles today. They got so excited, and what happened next is fascinating. Rather than devour them all, they didn’t eat a single one. They passed them on to the next community to enjoy. And that community did the same thing. And eventually, those grapes made it through every community and back to the first community without being eaten. Everyone simply wanted the others to experience the joy of the gift. I’m not sure what ever ended up happening with those grapes. I think maybe they had a big party, or maybe they made some wine. But no doubt God was happy. One of the quotes on my wall reminds me of this daily: “The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them away.”

Mother Teresa was one of those people who sacrificed great privilege because she encountered such great need. People often ask me what Mother Teresa was like. Sometimes it’s like they wonder if she glowed in the dark or had a halo. She was short, wrinkled, and precious, maybe even a little ornery, like a beautiful wise old granny. But there is one thing I will never forget—her feet. Her feet were deformed. Each morning in Mass, I would stare at them. I wondered if she had contracted leprosy. But I wasn’t going to ask, of course. “Hey Mother, what’s wrong with your feet?” One day a sister said to us, “Have you noticed her feet?” We nodded, curious. She said, “Her feet are deformed because we get just enough donated shoes for everyone, and Mother does not want anyone to get stuck with the worst pair, so she digs through and finds them. And years of doing that have deformed her feet.” Years of loving her neighbor as herself deformed her feet.

The Satellite Sheik "Ahmad al-Shugairi" - On Fundamentalism

Although he claims to not be a sheik, Ahmad al-Shugairi teaches religion over the Arab networks. His show attempts to express moderate Islamic views to the fundamentalist culture in the Middle East. The glimpse that he gives us into the struggle between the moderate and fundamentalist Muslims sounds very similar to the struggle within Christianity.

For his fifth season, all of the episodes have been filmed in Japan. He wants to show the Arab world that the Japanese "are implementing a lot of the things that we are just preaching." He claims that the Muslim culture focuses only on "alcohol and sexual issues." If they abstain from impropriety in those two areas, then they think they think are right with Allah. Beyond that, they are not focusing on the teachings of Islam. It sounds a lot like the problem facing many American Christians. Focus on a few true points and lift those up to the place where your adherence to them makes you presume you are right with God. Forget that God desires your whole heart and not just a handful of actions and abstentions.

Here is a portion of the On The Media interview between Brooke Gladstone and Ahmad al-Shugairi:

I'm just trying to make the Arab world feel jealous from the Japanese streets. I mean, I ask the Arab world, if the Prophet Muhammad came today, who will he see implementing his teachings more, the Japanese or the Muslim world? A big question mark.

And I say that, by the way, also about the U.S. Most of the prophetic teachings are practiced in the U.S. much more than they are in the Islamic world. Our problem is we focus on two major things and we just shove everything else aside. We focus on alcohol and sexual issues.

So we see the U.S. — they're open in these two arenas, so we say we're better than them because we don't have those. However, we forget that these are two out of a hundred. Barack Obama’s presidency is a great implementation of a human virtue that Prophet Muhammad and Jesus before him promoted, which is all humans are created equal.

When you see an African American leading the most powerful country in the world, out of election, not out of force, and this cannot be implemented anywhere else in the world, anywhere else, this needs to be acknowledged.

This made me examine myself, the church I am in, and Christianity as a whole. Are we living out the gospel more than those who do not even claim to be part of Jesus' Kingdom? Do we just cling to a few practices, albeit true practices, and claim that those practices or abstentions make us right with God? Do we preach doctrines so often that they become hollow and meaningless? Are we living out life as the body of Christ here and now; are we Jesus' hands and feet in this world?