That
seems to be the new American solution to everything. “It’s simple.” After a
Muslim extremist shot up a gay night club in Orlando, there were essentially
three reasons brought up for the carnage. An editorial in The Week noted the three most common: (1) Our failure to keep
weapons of war out of the hands of terrorists (2) President Obama’s refusal to
take ISIS seriously (3) Hatred and intolerance for the LGBT community. The
reductionistic arguments repeated over and over by commentators, and others
like them, became combatant and a bit odd when CNN’s Anderson Cooper went on
the offensive against Florida’s Attorney General because she didn’t Tweet
enough about Gay Pride.
Then
after the unjustified killing of several black men by the police in
Minneapolis, MN and in Banton Rouge, LA and the killing of five police
officers in Dallas during a peaceful protest, the blame game started. “It’s
simple,” we were told, The problem is the Black Lives Matter movement, Donald
Trump, the Democrats, the Republicans, the Church, and so forth and
so on.
I’m
thinking these simplistic solutions to complex problems aren’t helpful. And
they are really unhelpful when they take on religious overtones. But I have my
own simple solution. It’s the human heart. Our hearts are hard. All of our
hearts; not just the hearts of people like the guy shooting up the gay bar in
Orlando or the people shooting up the café’s and dance hall in Paris. And not
just the hearts of right wing conservatives who naively seem to think that our
only real problems are economic and big government and we should become
isolationists to protect ourselves, or left wing liberals who can’t seem to
tolerate anyone who disagrees with them and believe the best rules are no rules
except the rules they want.
Our
hearts are hard. And people do what they do for reasons we are unaware of. In
fact, based on my experience, people do what they do for reasons they
themselves often don’t fully understand! Why? Because their hearts are hard and
its complex. Who can know the human heart?! It’s not really that simple.
As a
follower of Jesus I’ve been struck by how the early church addressed issues
like this. Christianity was birthed, and thrived, in the midst of a cultural
cauldron that didn’t include CNN, smart phones, multiple political parties, and
democracy. The King or Emporer could have a commoner killed for doing virtually
nothing wrong. Work was hard. Oppression of the lower class was rampant. War
and terrorism were common occurances. Violence was the norm. In Greaco Roman
culture, sexual promiscuity was common which included abortion, adultery and long
term gay relationships. And yet over time, over decades actually, the church
thrived and grew and became powerful in the midst of it all. How?
Here’s
a couple of ways I believe that happened: (1) People in the churches loved each
other. Christians were known for their love. (2) They did the politically
incorrect thing in a gracious compelling way. They served and supported those
society rejected. (3) They policed themselves. That is, not everyone who claimed
to be Christians were allowed to call themselves Christians. This separated the
wheat from the chaff and allowed the true church to emerge. (4) They valued
marriage, family, and sexual purity. It set them apart from the culture as a
whole. (5) They sacrificed themselves on behalf of their neighbors and others.
They’d adopt little girls exposed to the elements after birth by the Romans who
didn’t want baby girls. They stayed in cities during the plagues and cared for
the sick at their own risk, when everyone else fled. (6) They valued
everyone—especially women and children, who had little worth in the minds of
many in that day. (7) They rejected the violent entertainment of the day and
didn’t support it.
In
short, they didn’t run away. And best I can tell, they didn’t blame. They
didn’t stop living out their faith every day. They continued to worship. They
fought for the true faith and celebrated everything Christian because Jesus,
the God man, gave everything for them. As Keller puts it somewhere,
Christianity fights the individualistic, autonomous consumerism of modern
culture because Jesus gave himself for his enemies. Shouldn’t we do the same?
The gospel fights the simple reductionistic solutions to difficult problems and
provides us with the tools to live humbly, simply, and generously in cities and
communities that are often troubled. Life is messy. Lets get in the mess and
realize the solutions aren’t simple but they point us to the ultimate
solution—a relationship with Jesus Christ that addresses the hardness of the
human heart by repentance from sin and faith in his work on our behalf. There
is no other world religion like that!
