Three Things That are More Important than Hotness: Selecting and Attracting a Great Life Partner

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What if you were walking on the quad one day and met a wizard. You can picture it however you’d like. Imagine this wizard offered you a ten minute glimpse into your life twenty years from now. What would you want to see? When I was in college, I can tell you what my top two questions would have been:

“Who am I married to? and
“Do we hate each other?”

You see, my parent’s marriage and the cultural narrative I had uncritically adopted had not exactly made me optimistic about marriage. When I was in college, it seemed that the question of how to select that person that we will spend the rest of our lives with seems to occupy a disproportionate fraction of what we thought about and what we talked about. And its’ spending some time on, because there are crazy ideas out there about how this thing is supposed to work.


 I mean, the whole process can just get pretty discouraging:

Lets face it, not all of us the sheer magnetism of our pastor: [1]

You laugh, but no one ever asked me to couples skate.

Even the Scriptures suggest that there is an aspect of this whole process that is just mystifying:

“There are three things that are too amazing for me
four things I do not understand
the way of the eagle in the sky,
the way of a snake on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man and a maiden.” Prov 30:18-19

Why is this question SO compelling…it is because it is so hard. Essentially, Dan has asked me to tell you how to predict the future. How do you know which person will augment rather than detract from your life and your service of God?

Actually, it turns out to be even more difficult than it seems. Predicting our future happiness turns out to be something humans are pretty bad at. I mean, it sounds hard enough, but brain scientists actually tell us that predicting what will make us happy is something the human brain does especially badly.

In his book Stumbling on Happiness Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert wrote

“we so often mispredict our emotional response to future events…It is difficult to escape the focus of our own attention – difficult to consider what it is we may not be considering – and this is one of the reasons why we so often mispredict our emotional responses to future events.” 103

“When imagination paints a picture of the future, many of the details are necessarily missing, and imagination solves this problem by filling in the gaps with details that it borrows from the present.” 226

He calls this the problem of presentism – we use the emotional furniture of our present to predict what our emotional reaction to a future event will be – and this turns out to be a really bad method of prediction.

“No one can imagine every feature and consequence of a future event, hence we must consider some and fail to consider others. The problem is that the features and consequences we fail to consider are often quite important.” 225
He goes on to conclude, citing a wide range of scientific studies, that our imaginations are poor predictive mechanisms to determine what our emotional response will be to future events.. The problem, Gilbert says is that we overestimate the extent to which we are special. We tend to think that our experience of early love is qualitatively different than everyone else. Like Wesley and Buttercup, our love is a unique precious snowflake will burn and sustain for decades…even though that does not seem to be the experience of most of the mature marriages we observe. Now I don’t want to trivialize the sublime beauty of what I will simply call early love, because it is really one of life’s gifts. Early love is fantastic.

But we can become so intoxicated by the experience of early love that we fail to accept that every crappy marriage that makes us sad and every failed marriage we watch disintegrate before our eyes started out with the same kind of intensely magical 18 months. The great lie is that the intensity of your emotions towards someone right now is an accurate predictor of the quality of your relationship in twenty years. The movies say ‘trust your heart.’ But the bible tells us that our hearts are pathological liars. We suffer from what psychologists call confirmation bias. We really want this person to be the one, and so we over weight the evidence in their favor and under weight the evidence that says, ‘don’t walk…run.’

The scriptures say:
“He who trusts in himself is a fool,
but he who walks in wisdom is kept safe.” Prov 28:26

So, if we can’t trust our emotional connection to someone to be an accurate predictor of the long term quality of the relationship…if accurate prediction of our emotional future is something that our brains do really poorly, how do we go about making such a hugely important choice? Tonight I want to offer you two basic approaches to this decision (and bear with me with the terminology a bit, I will explain):

I. The Empirical Approach: Where is it working well? (And how can I copy that?)
This is what scientists call inductive reasoning – where we move from observation to principal – we observe and listen to as many good marriages as possible, collecting all the data we can about what makes them work. Then we use this data to guide our choice.

II. The Theoretical Approach: How was it engineered to work?
This is what scientists call deductive reasoning. We start with central principles and move to observation and predictions. For Christians, this will be the question, ‘What resouces can we get from the scriptures that will help us predict how this relationship is likely to hold up in the long term.’

So lets start with the empirical approach:

I. The Empirical Approach: Where is it working well?

The empirical approach is not the special property of Christians. It is part of common grace. Gilbert actually recommends it. He calls it ‘surrogation’. He claims that the results of experimental brain science demonstrate that accounts of others that have been through a particular event that we are about to go through are better predictors of our emotional response to that event than our personal imagination of what it will be like. This, incidentally, why arranged marriage works way better than it seems like it should. And so, Dan and I decided that what you really need is just for someone who has been through this to make this decision for you…so we spent 20 hours this weekend matching you all up and are just going to reveal these pairings and give you the rest of the evening to get to know each other…

…so lets start with the winner of the Adam Darbone sweepstakes…

Obviously, I’m being silly…but Gilbert’s idea of ‘surrogation’ is pretty cool…particularly because it is what the Bible taught us thousands of years ago. The scriptures teach both, skepticism of our own hearts and they teach us to seek out the counsel of those who have faced the decisions we face and, it has gone well for them as part of the program for perusing wisdom, the Scriptures recommend surrounding yourself with wisdom…tenaciously seeking out people who have what you want and finding out how they got it. Here is what the Bible says about wisdom:

i. It may be the most valuable commodity you can accumulate
ii. It is difficult to acquire

‘Wisdom is supreme;
therefore get wisdom.
Though it costs all you have,
get understanding.” Prov 4:7
One complication here is that people often mistake cleverness for wisdom.[1.5] And sice married people are perceived as dull, unmarried people get a disproportionate amount of their marriage and dating advice from people who are not married. Spend time with married people and get their feedback on your relationships. This is actually as special feature of college life among the campus ministries – as a church based ministry we have a wealth of married people that you could seek out on this topic. But be sure to pursue the wise and not just the clever.

And let me say this, Dan’s talk included a disclaimer that went something like (‘you might not agree with everything I say, and you don’t have to.) He said that because when we venture from what the Scriptures teach, when we offer advice from our experiences and the experiences of others we need to be cautious of legalism. But I agree with everything he said. While what we are offering you is not all directly from the Scripture, so we have to deliver it cautiously, I would argue that if you want to develop wisdom on this issue in time for it to influence your life choices that you would not dismiss it lightly. So before I move to what the Bible has to say, let me offer you two observations I have made about successful marriages.

First – Choose the parent you want your children to have. I feel like most of us chose our life partners for the relatively brief newly wed stage. Amanda and I protracted that stage longer than anyone I know. We were married for 9.5 years before we had kids. But, we will still have kids in our house for more than twice as long as that. On the whole, couples tend to be married 2 to 4 years before they have kids. But they base their decision of who to marry on what that relatively breif years will be like.[2] They don’t think about it on the right time scale. They are choosing a roommate instead of the parent of their children.

Second – Sexual purity matters. While I was planning this talk I asked several of my married friends, ‘What do you wish you had heard in a talk like this in college?’ The #1 response went something like “I wish someone had gotten in our faces about sexual purity.” I have yet to meet the person who said, ‘you know, we took it too slow physically.’ Keep your cloths on until your are married and don’t do stuff that would really just be much more convenient if you were naked.

“Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” Proverbs 4:23

II. The Theoretical Approach: How is it meant to work

But, there is a more fundamental way to acquire wisdom. As Christians we believe that the one who made us let us in on some of the inner workings of how he intended the whole thing to work. We call it the doctrine of revelation…the belief that God opened a small window of self disclosure through the Scriptures, that not only let us know who he fundamentally is, but who we fundamentally are.

Now the scriptures can seem a little annoying in this respect. Sometimes it seems like they have very little to say on this topic so many people are so interested in. But it may be because we are looking for the wrong things. We are looking for a formula or an algorithm for choosing a wife or husband…but the scriptures want to lead us in the way of wisdom…the Scriptures want to tell us what kind of person we should be…and by extension, they tell us what kind of person we should be looking for.

So with the remainder of my time I want to look at three criteria from the Scriptures that will help you make this choice…I like to call this part of the talk, three things that are more important than hotness. Now don’t get me wrong. I think physical attraction matters. I’ve been married for 12 years and am still totally into my wife. But the success of marriage is more strongly correlated to character, than hotness. Most of the marriages I respect are based on these three Biblical principles

1. Contentment/Joy
2. Industry/Discipline
3. Forgiveness/Repentance
Why these three things. Well I have a couple of thoughts.

i) These aspects of a peron’s will correlate more strongly with your future happiness (not to mention your effectiveness as an agent of God’s kingdom) than the physical beauty of the person you marry.

ii) They are too fundamental to hide. When you are dating, you tend to be on your best behavior, so it can be difficult to evaluate if someone …but these are three things tend to leak out of a person’s heart through their words and actions. And I am going to offer you several diagnostic tests for each one to help you evaluate a potential love interest.

1. Contentment/Joy

‘Godliness with contentment is great gain.’ 1Tim 6
You do not want to bear the weight of their future happiness. If they are not fundamentally satisfied with their life now, it is unlikely that marriage will fundamentally change that. You will expend all of your energy chasing their happiness when it turns out, they do not need a husband or wife, they need a savior.[3] You will not make him or her happy. Either they are a content person with self generated joy or they are not. It is a function of their character, not of what you can do for them.

Prov 15: 13 A happy heart makes the face cheerful,
but heartache crushes the spirit.
Dan and I were talking about this, and he said ‘Contentment is such an important criteria because discontent is symptomatic of so many spiritual sicknesses.’

If the purpose of the relationiship is investigative, then you need diagnostics. I am offering you three big ideas with respect to how to evaluate a potential partner, but how do these manifest as particular behaviors. In other words, what specific criteria should you use to evaluate these things. Well, I am going to offer you diagnostics on each topic:

Diagnostics: gossip, blame shifting, complaining, joy

21:19 25:24
Better to live in a desert/corner of a roof
than share a house with a quarrelsome and ill-tempered wife

26: 21 As charcoal to embers and wood to fire,
so is a quarlesome man for kindling strife.[4]

10:19 When words are many, sin is not absent,
but he who holds his tongue is wise.

11: 22 Like a gold ring in a pig's snout
is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion.
2. Industry/Discipline

14: 23 hard work brings a profit,
but mere talk leads only to poverty.[5]

25:28 Like a city whose walls are broken down
is a man who lacks self control.

31: 10, 11, 18
“A wife of noble character who can find?
She is worth far more than rubies.
Her husband has full confidence in her
and lacks nothing of value…
She sees that her trading is profitable
and her lamp does not go out at night
This seems about as unsexy as possible. This sounds just plain boaring. But, in the long term, discipline and industry are just about the sexyest things possible. Let me make this case with a digression I will call: 3 reasons discipline is super sexy

i.) Future hotness is a function of discipline. You are probably sexier now than you will ever be again. When you get married, you vow to choose to love the person you marry regardless of what happens to their mind or body….but, in marriages I respect both partners work hard to maintain their physical appearance to make themselves as lovable as possible. Fighting the decline takes discipline. I mean, there is technically more than one way to get a six pack, but the way of discipline is unquestionably superior:

ii.) Discipline makes you more interesting. But being lovable in the long term is not just a function of physical upkeep. It is also an issue of growing spiritually and making generate respect for family contribution. People, on the whole, get uglier. But there is a providiental grace that accompanies that. As people get uglier, they also get more interesting…if they cultivate disciplines that make them interesting.

iii.) Discipline Fundamentally Means More Romance and More Sex: But here is the thing. In most married couples I know about the guy wishes there was more sex and the woman wishes there was more romance. And they are both fundamental to the relationship. Ten years into a marriage sex and romance are things you have to work at. So I am not saying that you should choose discipline and character instead of sex and romance. I would argue that choosing discipline and character is one of the best possible predictors of the quality of your future sex and romance. If you marry someone who is lazy…there will not be much sex…just a lot of late night television.

Also, dicipline is the engine of fidelity. It is the evidence of ordered affections.

Diagnostics - how does she approach her studies, how does he manage his time, amount of time spent playing video games, sexual availability

When I think about the women I considered dating in college, there is a high correlation between women who were conscientious about their studies, and not necessarily good at school, but disciplined and industrious in their vocation as students. Money and sex might be the top two things married couples fight over, but laziness has got to be top three.

In fact, my brother likes to say that the woman who doesn’t have sex with you now is the one who is more likely to have regular sex with you after you’ve been married 20 years. She is the type of woman who does the hard thing now. If she is sexually available now, it is unlikely that she has the discipline to be sexually available in twenty years. And if he is sexually aggressive now, if he cannot do the hard work of self control and respecting your body, he may not have what it takes to do the hard work of romance or, even, faithfulness in the long term. This isn’t a perfect predictor, but it does fit the category of ‘too fundamental to hide.’

Proverbs 20: 6

Many a man claims to have unfailing love,
but a faithful man who can find?
In Joss Wheadon’s latest show, the villan accused one of the heros of being in love with the central character. Listen to the evidence he offered:

“You shared one room for months and you never slept with her, you could have but you didn’t, that’s love…” Alpha

3. Forgiveness/Repentance
‘Love keeps no record of wrongs.’ – 1Cor 13
Forgiveness and repentance are the survival skills of relationship. Christian theology provides a couple insights into humanness that give you an advantage going into marriage. Every marriage is the union of two fundamentally valuable but broken people. Broken people injure those close to them. We can’t help it. It happens. This is why repentance and forgiveness were so central to the teachings of Jesus. In the decades you are married[6] you will do some phenomenally selfish things, and so will your partner. And, selfishness is a feedback mechanism. Often, selfishness of one begets selfishness of the other.[7] There are only two things that actually break this cycle: repentance and forgiveness.

Repentance and forgiveness make up the basic tool kit for marital disagreement. If one or both of you have not developed these skills, you are in for trouble. This is actually related to the discipline point, because the vast majority of arguments Amanda and I have are not resolved as part of the argument, but when one of us sits down alone to spend time with God. Healthy spiritual disciplines are the stop loss of marital friction. It is almost impossible to maintain self righteousness for long if you are regular experiencing of the presence and correction of a Holy God.

Going into marriage without the ability to recognize your own fault and the willingness to let go the fault of your partner is a like going to war without your gun.

Diagnostics: Grudges, broken relationships, roommate relationships, closeness to family,

Post Script (Coda): How to Attract a Great Life Partner

So this talk was supposed to be on how to select and attract a great life partner. And I spent 99% of the time on the choose question how to select a life partner. But we have already done all the work on the attraction question. A person of character, who has the characteristics likely to lead to a successful marriage, is going to be looking for the same things. You want to attract a really great life partner?

1. Cultivate joy and contentment. If you are fundamentally discontent, it doesn’t matter who you marry. You will find him or her wanting. You will begin to focus on their weekensses rather than revel in their strengths.

2. Cultivate industry and discipline. Learn to apply yourself to your vocation…which right now, is your studies. Develop self control and practice it in the context of the physical components of your romantic relationships.

3. Cultivate repentance and forgiveness. Practice on your family and roommates. Develop a regular devotional wife where you examine your actions and motivations (especially in the context of conflicts you are having) and allow the presence of a holy God to unravel the self righteousness that threatens to undo your relationships.

Your character will not only attract someone with character, it will affect your experience of marriage, because how you feel about you husband or wife in twenty years has more to do with

Let me close by quoting my wife: ‘If you want a girl who reads her Bible, prays and goes to the gym…um…guess what she wants?”

[8]

______________
[1] “Many Bothans died to bring us this information” – Admiral Ackbar
[1.5] I think I owe this language to Mark Driscoll...by way of Bronwyn.

[2] I remember that I left most relationship talks I ever listened to, disappointed. I wanted 5 easy steps to …essentially, I wanted an algorithm that would minimize the risk in an inherently risky choice. But you don’t need a flow chart, an algorithm, a 5 step plan or a method…what you need is to become wise…and that is not something we can give you in 90 minutes of relationship talks. Part of the wisdom Dan and I are trying to offer you is that of emphasis from the other side. If you wish we were focusing these talks on other things…maybe the value of these talks is that we just don’t think those are the important things.

[3] “We need to demystify this thing. I could be married to another woman and be thriving…I am crazy about (my wife)…but she is not my savior. She does not complete me.” Matt Chandler
[4] See also Prov 11:16-17, 14:29 and 27:15
[5] See also Prov 10:4, 20:6
[6] though, disproportionately in your early years.
[7] Fortunately, I have found that the opposite is true. Selflessnes begets selflessness. It is a feedback mechanism in both directions.
[8] This image didn’t make it into my talk, but I wanted to include it anyway.

Something Else Entirely: The Story of Cornelius and Peter

Dan and I are constantly saying that our hope for this gathering is that it would be genuinely helpful for two kinds of people. We hope that it will be a place that is helpful for people who have made some sort of commitment to Jesus and are exploring the implications of that. But we also hope that it is a safe place for the spiritually curious, for those of you that are interested in Jesus and are looking for a place to check him out.

One of the cool things about today’s passage is that it is a story about precisely these two kinds of people. It is about one guy who is committed to Jesus but like most of still hasn’t totally figured out what that means yet. And it is about another guy who is not remotely committed to Jesus…but is honestly and earnestly searching for something transcendent…something he knows is out there but can’t quite identify yet.

First we have Peter. So most of you know we have been looking at the book of Acts, which is the story of what happened in the years immediately after the death and resurrection of Jesus. The disciples were on the steep learning curve all the way through the book of Acts. But I feel like there is this unhelpful Sunday school picture of the disciples that they were clueless until Jesus raised and the Holy Spirit fell on them and they go through this mystical transformation and suddenly have everything figured out. I ran into this perspective in an unexpected place this summer. I am in this reading group with Dan and a couple other guys and we read a little novel that I love, The Catcher in the Rye. Holden, the narrator, protagonist says this…

“Finally, though, I got undressed and got in bed. I tried to pray, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t always pray when I feel like it. In the first place, I’m sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but don’t care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while he was alive, they were about as much use to him as a hole in the head….If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him about ten times as much as the Disciples.” Catcher in the Rye.

Holdon is not what you would call a fan of the disciples. Yet even one of the disciple’s biggest detractors has this sense that they magically and totally changed the instant Jesus turned things over to them. Personally, I would find it really frustrating if that were true, because that has not been my experience. Very little suddenly changed when I turned my life over to Jesus. But that is not what happened at all. The disciples remain very human and very much ‘under construction’ by God throughout the book of Acts. The Bible does not whitewash its characters. We are about to find out that the great leader of the early church had latent racist tendencies that were based in his self righteous moralism and that God was not OK with this. It is tempting for Christians to simply see this as the story of how Jesus used Peter to respond to Cornelius’ spiritual longings without realizing that it is also the story of Jesus using Cornelius to confront Peter’s dark and broken religious impulses.

Cornelius, on the other hand, is a full on pagan. He is a Roman Soldier, which is everything that Peter as a good religious Hebrew had been raised to despise. But Cornelius seems to be a really good guy with a vague, unidentified spiritual hunger. He didn’t know why or who, but he knew that there was a personal force behind the universe that deserved reverence and could even be talked to.

But what this story teaches is that both Peter and Cornelius have flawed spiritual apparatus. The cool thing is that they receive the same prescription. The flawed Christian and the sincere seeker are both offered the gospel for their need. Acts 10 teaches that when Jesus’ invites us to follow him it is not an invitation to the morality of religion or to the vague spirituality of pluralism…but to something else entirely. The gospel

So we are just going to look at these two guys and see how Jesus skillfully subverts a couple common misconceptions about what he requires.

1. God Challenges Peter’s Self Righteous Religion

So Peter went to the roof where the Joppa view must have been breathtaking.

Ships were likely coming and going as he found a moment’s peace above the bustle of one of the area’s busiest maritime ports. And then 2 things happen (1) he gets hungry and (2) has a really wacky vision.

Ok, a brief aside…College life had a hugely successful Halloween party a couple of weeks ago.

There were a bunch of people who just walked in because it seemed like such a fun event. But I hear of one particular group who joined in but asked a number of people ‘Hey man, great party, but where’s the weed?’ I am glad to report that they did not find any and eventually they left. But I can’t help but feel like this passage has something to offer our friends the Halloween weed seekers. I might put it something like this:

‘Enjoy psychedelic visions and the munchies…try prayer.”

God essentially lays a buffet out before Peter full of all of the stuff he would least consider eating. These were all the foods that people like Peter considered themselves too good to eat and Peter was deferential because he was unexpectedly talking to God…but he held his ground. ‘Not me’ he says ‘I don’t do that kind of thing.’ Part of Peter’s self evaluation, part of criteria which he used to convince himself that he was a good and righteous person, was that he didn’t eat these kinds of foods. Other people did that sort of thing. I’m not like those pagans…I’m different. I’m better and the way I know it is that I don’t do the things they do.

It seems like our hearts so desperately long for significance that they latch onto almost any criteria to tell us we are special, valuable, good or righteous. And they usually do so by comparison because, as we all know:

“If everyone is special, then no one is.”

In Peter’s life (as is probably the case in most of ours) Religion was still the enemy of the gospel. You see, religion goes like this:

“I obey so I am accepted.” Where the gospel is the exact opposite: “I am accepted so I obey”

But that is the really radical thing about the gospel. God’s approval of us is based on the things HE has done. So any self-righteousness that I claim apart from the work of Christ is illicit. In the first half of this story we see that even though Peter was a Christian, fully committed to Jesus, God was exposing areas in his life in which he was still just a self-righteous, religious moralist…and not really tapping into the implications of the gospel. There were still corners of Peter’s heart where he was trying to earn God affection though his efforts.

This is one of the really astounding things about the gospel. The message of absolutely free and totally undeserved reconciliation with God through Jesus is as much for those of us who have made a commitment to follow Jesus as it is for those outside the church. There is a temptation to believe that God’s offer of free grace is a one time gift basket we get upon entering the Church, but after that, you better behave if you want him to love you. But the gospel never stops being the story of God’s undeserved grace towards you and we never stop needing it. It obliterates the value of the little rules we set up to make us feel better than other people. And it is still challenging to me years after my conversion. Shoot, Peter is THE prototypical Jesus follower, but he still has trouble getting a hold of the idea that God’s grace is offered 100% free. He still tries to earn God’s favor by performing morally.

What you need to see from the first half of Acts 10 is that the gospel isn’t just for those who don’t believe. It is still the power of God to set Christians free

Here is an example of how this has worked out in my life. When Amanda and I got married we decided to go without a television for a year to get the most out of being newly weds. We thought it would force us to take walks and communicate and come up with creative cheap dates. And it did all those things. I highly recommend it. We were enjoying ourselves so much that several years passed and it never occurred to us to get one. But somewhere along the line this behavior took a dark turn. It started to become part of my identity. At some point I started feeling self righteous and self assured and began feeling more spiritual than people who had TVs. My heart was so desperate for significance that it had taken something helpful and valuable and turned it into something ugly and dark…it had bought into religion. But any righteousness that I claim apart from the work of Christ is illicit. The solution is to let the gospel wriggle its way into the corners of your heart where you hold out those little idols of performance based significance and allow them to be replaced with the extravagant, undeserved love of Jesus.

The evidence that this has gone poorly in your heart is that you find yourself feeling all superior or condescending to some other sub-culture. For example, if you harbor substantial resentment or self righteousness towards, say ‘liberals’ or ‘agnostics’ or the homosexual community, or maybe another denomination or someone in the church, that is evidence that there is a corner of your where the gospel hasn’t fully taken hold yet.

So God Challenges Peter’s Self Righteous Religion and he challenges ours. He confronts the Christian and reminds him that he needs the gospel. But then he turns to the seeker who is not committed to the Christian story, and offers the same thing – the totally undeserved, totally free work of Jesus.

2. God Challenges Cornelius’ Moral Spiritualism

The first thing we notice about Cornelius is that he is a really remarkable guy. Caesarea is an important Roman port – so he was probably an accomplished soldier and leader. He was generous, kind, and seems like a devoutly spiritual guy.

Actually, I love the detail that we get here. We find out that he is ‘of the Italian regiment’ and that he is there ‘with his whole family’. It is as if the next line was:

‘And God was about to make him an offer he could not refuse.’

It makes you think, that maybe he looked a little like this:

Apparently he was not only moral and spiritual but disconcertingly handsome.

There are two really important things to notice about Cornelius: The persistence and sincerity of his search for God and the insufficiency of his religion.

The picture Luke is painting here of Cornelius is here is that of a really good guy. He is generous and noble and is a person of faith. I suspect that makes him a lot like many of you who are with us today…but there is still a fundamental incompleteness to his search.

The angel comes to Cornelius and essentially recites his resume back to him. You are a good guy, you pray, you are generous; on the whole you are a remarkable specimen of humanity. So what he says next is really unexpected to a reader steeped in religious pluralism. We would expect the angel to say something like “So we just wanted to say ‘keep up the good work’ and we’ll see you on the other side.” But he doesn’t. He tells this important, generous, prayerful Roman soldier to send for a Racist Hebrew fisherman and to listen carefully to what he has to say.

And here we find out something fundamental about Cornelius’ spiritual seeking. It’s the real deal. You see, he totally could have been a poser. It could have been totally possible that he was just spiritual because it was trendy or convenient (for example, helping him to deal with the Jewish population in Caesarea). And, honestly, I feel like a lot of spiritual seeking is like that these days. It is trendy. Being vaguely spiritual makes you appear cool and insightful. But Cornelius wasn’t just spiritual because it was convenient or trendy. He was really after God. This is the sign of legitimate spiritual vitality. Are you really after God?

"An open mind, like an open mouth, does have a purpose: and that is to close it upon something solid. Otherwise, it could end up like a city sewer, rejecting nothing."
G. K. Chesterton - Autobiography

Cornelius is still lacking something, and he knows it because he sends for Peter and asks him to explain the Jesus thing.

So Peter immediately takes the 30 mile trip to Caesarea and when he arrives Cornelius gathers his family and asks Peter ‘what do I need to know.”

Peter proceeds to summarizes Christianity into three basic ideas:

1. We are all the same – we are uniformly loved and beautiful in our reflection of the image of God yet also united in our common brokenness and desperate need of grace.

2. Jesus is Lord of ALL – a divine King who claims total authority and total allegiance – but the result of that allegiance is shalom – peace, with God and a path to the redemption of all forms of brokenness within you and between us

3. An invitation to reconciliation with God and others – as a result of accepting Christ’s Lordship and trusting in his death and resurrection on our behalf “everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” (v43)

It is important to recognize that this passage rejects religious pluralism. Cornelius was not ‘ok’ just the way he was. Being a descent, generous and religious guy was not enough. God honored his earnest and sincere search with the message of the gospel. He needed to repent accept Jesus as king and appropriate the forgiveness made available through the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus.


I think there are two really interesting implications in this text for the spiritually curious:

1. The main point of this story in its original context is that Cornelius did not have to adopt Peter’s cultural identity to follow Jesus. He did not have to accept Jewish culture to become a Christian. Now, I did not grow up in the Christian sub-culture so let me just say what many of you may be thinking…some of the stuff Christians do is freeking weird. I get it. But you do not have to adopt the Christian sub-culture to become a Christian. Here is the good news, you do not have to give up your environmentalism, your feminism or become a Republican. But here is the bad news that is actually great news: you will have to give up the feelings of value and moral superiority you felt by accepting these things. They may be true and worth pursuing, and if they are they will be even more if you are a Christian, but they do not make you good or valuable. Only Jesus does that.

2. Are you willing to accept a message from God even if he uses a deeply flawed messenger? Cornelius, for all his searching, had to do the surprising and humbling thing and learn truth from a racist, Hebrew fisherman. You will probably also find substantial flaws in the people you have heard speak about Jesus, be they College life students or speakers, maybe me in particular….but maybe God is answering your search in the same way he responded to Cornelius…by asking "are you willing to hear the incredible message of total freedom from your self righteousness from a flawed, self righteous, individual who is still in the midst of undergoing that transition themselves?"

And another cool thing about this text is that God will use you to challenge us. Keller “Isn’t it great to be part of a faith where not only the (Christian) converts the converts but the convert converts the (Christian)…If you get involved with people very different than you culturally, they will show you parts of your life where the gospel has not come.”
Which leads me, very briefly, to the last thing I want to mention about this passage.

3. God Challenges Homogeneous Christianity

So, I cut most of this point. I am going to talk much more about this when we look at the church in Antioch next quarter, but I at least have to mention it. Here is the interesting thing about the gospel. By challenging the stuff that we hold on to that makes us feel superior to those around us, God’s community becomes a really promising place to find unity in really dramatic diversity. This turns out to be one of the major themes of this passage as well as the book of Acts. John Stott says:

“It is difficult for us to grasp the impassable gulf which yawned in those days between the Jews on the one hand and the Gentiles on the other.” -Stott

But we begin to see that God’s hope for the Church is that we would actively subvert the bitterest, most deeply held cultural divisions that plague the surrounding society.

So this passage has something for both groups of people we hope come to CL. It tells the Christians to get over themselves…to recognize that their status is based totally on their acceptance of God’s free grace and not on the little rules we make to make ourselves feel better than those around us. And it says to those of you who are sincerely and earnestly seeking the truth, that God is really bad at hiding, he will be found by the earnest, sincere seeker…but that being “a good person” and/or spiritual is not enough. You need to give yourself to Jesus as your leader and appropriate the forgiveness that he made possible through the cross. And this radical message gives us unparalleled resources to transcend some of our culture’s most deeply held social divisions.

‘A Dangerous Sense of Holiness’: The Story of Ananias and Sapphira

(The Death of Sapphira - by Amanda Gibson)

Acts 5: 1-11

So, as you may have already noticed, tonight we are going to tackle what many consider the most difficult passage in Acts. In chapter 5 a decidedly inspiring narrative takes what seems like an inexplicably dark turn. Since we are only doing ~22 talks in Acts, we could have easily skipped it. Most do, because, frankly, on the face of it, this is, at best a difficult text and, at worst, an embarrassing text. On the other hand, skeptics love texts like this. Take for example, the guy who runs the ‘Brick Testament’ site a web page clearly dedicated to highlighting the sex, violence, and what he sees as potentially embarrassing texts in the Bible in an attempt to undermine its authority.

You can bet he won’t overlook this text. So Dan and I decided that (a) If we skipped it we’d be total ‘chicken bleep’ and (b) it is in the Bible for a reason and, like the rest of Holy Scripture and the dramatic story of the church, has theological and practical implications for our lives.

Before we deal with this passage, I want to increase the degree of difficulty, and introduce a very similar passage from the Hebrew Scriptures.

1David again brought together out of Israel chosen men, thirty thousand in all. 2 He and all his men set out from Baalah of Judah to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the Name, the name of the LORD Almighty, who is enthroned between the cherubim that are on the ark. 3 They set the ark of God on a new cart and brought it from the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, sons of Abinadab, were guiding the new cart 4 with the ark of God on it, and Ahio was walking in front of it. 5 David and the whole house of Israel were celebrating with all their might before the LORD, with songs and with harps, lyres, tambourines, sistrums and cymbals.

6 When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out and took hold of the ark of God, because the oxen stumbled. 7 The LORD's anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent act; therefore God struck him down and he died there beside the ark of God.

8 Then David was angry because the LORD's wrath had broken out against Uzzah, and to this day that place is called Perez Uzzah.

9 David was afraid of the LORD that day and said, "How can the ark of the LORD ever come to me?" 10 He was not willing to take the ark of the LORD to be with him in the City of David. Instead, he took it aside to the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite.
2 Samuel 6

There are a couple of things that these passages (and a couple others like them) have in common. They bother us. They strike us as arbitrary and disproportionate. God’s action seems completely out of proportion to the offense. The Bible is full of people who have done horrible things and seem to get away with it. David nails Bathsheba and then murders her husband when she turns up pregnant but Uzzah gets obliterated for steadying the ark. In the first century people across the Roman Empire are watching slaves kill each other for fun but A&S get snuffed out for telling a white lie during an act of generosity.

We strain to understand what it was that was so bad that Uzzah, Anaias and Sapphira did that deserved this unusually severe punishment. I am going to argue that that is precisely the wrong question. But first, lets look at where we are going.

First I am going to make a few general observations about the text, that I feel are just begging to be made, but then, I am going to try to explain these strange texts by taking a step back and looking at 2 contexts:

1. The Immediate Contexts: Good Times and Momentum for God’s People
2. The Larger Context: Human Brokenness and a Just God

First, let’s just make a few preliminary observations about these texts.

1. The Myth of Testament Specific Deities

People sometimes like to say, in an effort to undermine the plausibility of the Christian worldview, that the god of the OT and the NT are dramatically different deities. The OT god is a god of wrath and the NT god is a god of love. The most creative take I have heard on this is that: ‘The reason that 500 years elapse between the end of the OT and the beginning of the NT is because god went to counseling to learn how to handle his anger issues.

This may sound wise or clever but it is really just evidence that the individual hasn’t spent much time with the text. The God of the Bible is one of dangerous holiness on one hand and ridiculously extravagant grace on the other. The story of A&S demonstrates that the wrath that proceeds from the purity of his justice arises in both testaments. Jesus himself talks about hell more than anyone else in the Bible. Conversely, the OT overflows with declarations of God’s care and love and grace and mercy:

Check out these verses.

16 On that day they will say to Jerusalem,
"Do not fear, O Zion;
do not let your hands hang limp.

17 The LORD your God is with you,
he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing."

18 "The sorrows for the appointed feasts
I will remove from you;
they are a burden and a reproach to you. Zeph 3:16-18

or

I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house of Israel?' Ez 10:11

Or even one of the darkest books in the whole OT, Hoseah ends like this:

1 Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God.

Your sins have been your downfall!

2 Take words with you and return to the LORD.

Say to him: "Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously,

that we may offer the fruit of our lips.

3 Assyria cannot save us; we will not mount war-horses.

We will never again say 'Our gods' to what our own hands have made,

for in you the fatherless find compassion."

4 "I will heal their waywardness and love them freely,

for my anger has turned away from them.

5 I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like a lily.

Like a cedar of Lebanon he will send down his roots;
6 his young shoots will grow.

His splendor will be like an olive tree,

his fragrance like a cedar of Lebanon.

7 Men will dwell again in his shade.

He will flourish like the grain.

He will blossom like a vine, and his fame

will be like the wine from Lebanon. Hosea 14

2. Difficult passage argues for the veracity of the text

The portions of the text that we find potentially embarrassing are some of the best evidence for its historical reliability. It would have been pretty easy for Luke to leave this story out and, essentially say, the early church was such an evidence of the resurrection that everyone loved each other and no one lied as if it were the embodiment of a poorly written Nickleback song). But after he describes the compelling closeness of the early church in chapter 2, a miraculous healing in chapter 3, and the ridiculous generosity in chapter 4, he essentially says in chapter 5, ‘but not everything was great.’ Potentially embarrassing texts demonstrate the historicity of the text and establish Luke’s historical street cred.

3. Lying is a Reality Fail

Second, NT Wright says that this passage “puts down a very clear marker about lying…[2]Lying is, ultimately, a way of declaring that we don’t like the world the way it is and we will pretend that it is somehow more the way we want it to be.” Essentially, lying is a reality fail, and a demonstration that me, and what someone else thinks of me is more important than the fabric of reality.

4. Neither of these acts are as Innocent as they Seem

Before I argue that these acts are not judged because they are particularly wicked, we also have to establish that neither of these events are as innocent as they seem. In the Acts passage, they were not under compulsion to give. So why did they lie. They were using God and his community. They were using God to build their reputation. Their actions made it obvious they didn’t know who they were dealing with.

And in the Samuel passage, the Ark is being carted around carelessly instead of the clear Levitical command that it should be carefully carried wherever it goes. There is a sense in which the same thing is going on. David is going to use the Ark to demonstrate to everyone how God is on his side. He is going to use God to build his reputation. And at the end of the passage David is pissed because he knows that Uzzah was collateral damage of his own triumphalism. Both these stories are acconts of someone wh belongs to God, using God for his or her own ends. This makes God angry. But, on the other hand, it is probobly something I do every day...and I'm still breathing.

Fundamentally, I think it is a mistake to look for something especially bad that the characters in these stories did to deserve a particularly hard treatment from God. It is a mistake to read these passages and say, well I want to avoid those particular actions or God will come down especially hard on me. These events need to be understood in the context of the stories being told and in the context of the greater story of Scripture to make sense.

First - The Immediate Contexts: Good Times and Momentum for God’s People

I think it is really helpful, in trying to understand these passages, to ask what similarities are their in their historical contexts. We find that both of these events happen at the inception of a new beginning for God’s people when things are going particularly well.

In 2 Samuel 5 David is made king after decades of an ineffective leader who, at the end of his life was certifiably insane. It is a time of optimism and hope. Everyone is psyched. David immediately wins two of the most important victories in Israel’s history. First he wins back Jerusalem from the Jebusites and then he wins back the Ark of the covenant from the Philistines. And that is the context of 2 Samuel 6. After years of humiliation and national disgrace, the Hebrews suddenly had a charismatic young leader, they were back in their home city and the most important symbol of their corporate worship had been recovered. It was a very good time. They probably felt indestructible and certainly believed that God was unreservedly on their side. So David ignored the Levitical law that the Ark should only be carried by people and never be touched. He carelessly threw the thing up in a cart and headed to Jerusalem, looking very much forward to the hero’s welcome awaited him.

Similarly, the first weeks of the fledgling church are going very well. You are going to see in the coming months that hard times and broken leaders are going to take their toll on the new community of Jesus’ people in the years that follow, but so far, there are thousands of new believers, they are all caring for each other, miracles seem to be everywhere, people are getting healed, new believers from diverse backgrounds are getting along and caring for each other’s physical needs…things are going very well.

Both of these events occur when things are going particularly well for the people of God.

Both of these events happen at the beginning[3] of a new chapter in the story of the people of God. It seems like you might expect this kind of extreme punitive action from God when things were going particularly poorly…when people were turning away from God and chasing idols (which is most of the time in the Bible and in our lives since each of our hearts is a compulsive little idol maker). But these events happen just as things are starting to go very well. These events happen at the beginning of the rare very good chapters of the story of God’s people.

So why do the authors include these stories?
The story of Ananias and Sapphira laces the triumphal story of the success and expansion of the early church with a dangerous sense of holiness[4]. It reminds them of who they are representing and that he will not be used. It appears that God feels that in the midst of these exciting times, his people need to be reminded, in the words of CS Lewis, that 'he is good, but he is not safe.' Particularly in good times, when God is doing remarkable things in his communities, he will act in extraordinary ways to establish a dangerous sense of his holiness which provides his people with perspective and humility.

So the imidiate context gives us clues to what this passage is trying to teach...but we are still not quite there yet. To really get a hold of it, we need to ask 'how does this story fit in with the bigger themes of Scripture?'

Second - The Larger Context: Human Brokenness and a Just God

On the whole, the picture of God we get in the scriptures is of unnatural and extravagant patience. He says again and again that he is not quick to anger. He pleads with those who are oppressing the poor and worshiping idols to turn from their wickedness.

It can cause us to forget what it means that he is the cosmic source of pure Justice. But from time to time in the Biblical text we are startled to encounter actual, pure, unmitigated, justice face to face and it is horrifying. Lots of people like to talk about justice. We talk about economic justice, environmental justice, justice for the poor, justice for the oppressed. We cry out to God and political leaders for justice…for all to be set right…for evil at last to be obliterated…not realizing that total pure justice would, ultimately obliterate us too.

One of the most common questions skeptics and Christians alike will ask as they probe Christianity’s credibility: How could a just God allow evil?

Calvin and Hobbes: 'It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.'

In other words, why doesn't God just do something about bad people.

I do not mean to minimize this question. It is an important one with difficult complex answers. But what the questioners usually seem to miss, is that if God was to make a total end of evil in the world, he would not only make an end of the evils that offend our moral sensibilities but those we ourselves propagate. MY indifference to the poor. MY addictions. MY dark heart.

God does not put an end to bad people because I am bad people...and so are you.

And so here is my Thesis (which I have counterintuitively put at the end of my talk): The interesting thing about this passage is not that A&S were destroyed for their rebellion, it is that we aren't .

Mark Driscoll tells a story about an exchange he had in his early days pastoring. He said:

“one night the church phone rang at some godforsaken hour when I’m not even a Christian, like 3 am. I answered it in a stupor, and on the other line was some college guy who was crying. I asked him what was wrong, and he said it was an emergency and he really needed to talk to me. Trying to muster up my inner pastor, I sat down and tried to pretend I was concerned. I asked him what was wrong and he rambled for a while about nothing, which usually means that a guy has sinned and is wasting time with dumb chit chat because he’s ashamed to just get to the point and confess. So I interrupted him blurting out, “It’s 3 am, so stop jerking me around. What have you done?”
“I masturbated,” he said.
“That’s it?” I said.
“Yes,” he replied. “Tonight I watched a porno and masturbated.”
“Is the porno over? I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Was it a good porno?” I asked.
He did not reply.
“Well you’ve already watched the whole porno and tugged your tool, so what am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You are my pastor, so I thought that maybe you could pray for me.”
To be honest, I did not want to pray, so I just said the first thing that came to mind. “Jesus, thank you for not killing him for being a pervert. Amen.” I prayed.
“Alright, well you should sleep good now, so go to bed and don’t call me again tonight because I’m sleeping and you are making me angry,” I said.
“Well what am I supposed to do now?” he asked.
“You need to stop watching porno and crying like a baby afterward and grow up man…A naked lady is good to look at, so get a job, and get a wife, and ask her to get naked, and look at her instead. Alright?” I said.
“Alright. Thanks Pastor Mark,” he said as I hung up.

What reminded me of this story was Mark’s prayer, which, may have been pastorally crass but was theologically perfect. We grow so accustomed to God’s longsuffering that we began to presume upon it. And so at the beginning of these two movements, when things were going well and people were tempted to use God for their own purposes, he opened a small, temporary window to his holy justice to demonstrate what the unmitigated force of that pure justice will do to our sick hearts that are, at best, filled with mixed intentions. For the long term good of the community he let loose what he generally restrains.

I have one more illustration before I wrap up. This is from Razor, which is part of the recent Batlestar Galactica series on Syfy (which, incidentally, was way better than anyone could have predicted). Razor was a side project, a film made between seasons 2 and 3, mostly with auxiliary characters. It told the story of a young military woman who had been involved in shooting civilians and carried that guilt through the entire film. In the end she sacrifices herself for the fleet leading to these exchanges:

Battlestar Galactica clip –


Starbuck: 'Maybe she had it coming.'

Apolo: 'We've all got it coming.’

One of the great empirical realities of our world is that injustice is rampant out there. And whether or not you are a Christian, that should break your heart and we need to be mustering as much strength and as many resources as we can to fight injustice in as many forms as we encounter it. But what this passage, and others like it illustrate, is one of the primary things that the Bible teaches. Injustice isn’t just out there, it is also in here. The first thing you have to understand about the gospel is this. There is a dark shadow over each of our hearts. ‘We've all got it coming.’

In the end God WILL eradicate evil and bring justice and restore the world to full beauty and wholeness. He will do the very thing that we have always wanted him to do. The irony is that we were part of the problem all along. In order to set the world right he will have to come against each one of us and our dark hearts.

The gist of the gospel is that because of the life death and resurrection of Jesus, God has made a way that a way that he can come against the darkness in our hearts, while we ourselves are spared.

The gospel tells the story that because of the events of good Friday and Easter, God has transferred our penalty onto himself. We can be welcomed into his presence and his eternal realm, because through the life, death and resurrection of Christ he has made a way to obliterate the dark injustice that plagues our hearts as it plagues every other nook and crany of our world, without obliterating us. This is the gospel. ‘We all have it coming.’ But as Peter said just days before the events of this passage, we can escape our eventual confrontation with God’s unmitigated and consuming justice through faith in God’s solution…by accepting the work of Christ and submitting to him as our new leader. In the words of Acts: “With many other words he warned them and he pleaded with them, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation’…Repent and be baptized every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins.”

Over the course of this year we are going to get a lot of important things out of the book of acts. We are going to see that God cares about the city and that he cares about the poor and that he pushes his people to challenge ethnic and social barriers, and that the work of his Spirit gives us unexpected spiritual resources…but at the heart of his community then and now is a people who recognize we are no better than anyone else because God is against the persistent stain of injustice in our hearts but has accepted us through his grace.
__________________________
[1] A quote from NT Wright – for a while, the working title for this talk was: ‘we all have it coming’
[2] Wright also says that lying is ‘the opposite of the gift of tongues. Instead of allowing God’s spirit to have free reign through our faculties, so that we praise God’s spirit to have free reign through our faculties…we not only hold heaven and earth apart; we twist each itself, so that it serves our own interests.”
[3] Most commentators (Boyce, Stott, ) see this as the key interpretive context of the story, but I most quote Bruce.
[4] NT Wright Acts for Everyone Volume 1

You are not Yourself by Yourself: Community in the Early Church

Acts 2: 38-47

Acts 4: 32-35

This has been a fun quarter. As some of you know I am on campus more. I turned in my dissertation to my committee for evaluation, and so I am taking the opportunity to bang out some pre-recs for another degree I have my eye on…so I am in freshman bio 2 and 3. Dan has enjoyed my transition from PhD candidate to intro bio student and taken the opportunity to nick name me Benjamin button.

But one of the cool things is that there are no fewer than 7 college lifers in my Bio 2B class. We have Professor Strong for this class who is off the hook. He is passionate and hilarious…often of the unintentional variety. We giggle all the way through that class. In our third class, he put up this slide to talk about latitudinal biodiversity gradients and then told us an anecdote. He said he had a girlfriend in college who had one of these…called a bush baby. The first time he went over to her house, it cautiously greeted him and when he sat on the couch, the bush baby came over, climbed up on his head and proceeded to urinate into its hand – rubbing the collected pea behind professor strong’s ears…thus initiating him into the social group. Kiho flashed that warm but devious grin of his and said, without missing a beat, ‘Cool, a new College Life ice breaker.’

I thought the anecdote marginally related, because today we are going to be talking about community. Jesus and the early church simply assumed that the life of faith would be something done in community…but this turns out to be a radically counter cultural assertion in our particular cultural moment. Let me try to illustrate this with a couple of quotes:

“I have my own spiritual thing, but am not part of an organized religion. I think religion is very special and individual to each person.” - Jessica Alba

“I think I find more strength in faith than I do in organized religion.” - Jon Bon Jovi

“I'm not into organized religion. I'm into believing in a higher source of creation, realizing we're all just part of nature.” -Neil Young

"Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business. I live by the golden rule: Treat others as you'd want them to treat you." - Jesse Ventura

“I believe in a higher being. You can call it what you want. But…I don’t believe in organized religion.” - John Mellencamp

"I don't belong to any organized religion of such, but I'd like to believe in a higher power." James Iha -guitarist for Smashing Pumpkins

“I have always been a spiritual person, but I’ve never really subscribed to an organized religion…”
- Nick Harmer bassist for Death Cab for Cutie

“I don't want to be restricted how I can go about my religion and my life. And I just, again, want to know what's going to make me happy. So I think that (religion is) still part of me, it always will be, but I might not be as public about it.” - NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the teachings of Jesus, but I am suspicious of organized religion.”
- Madonna,

Um, anytime you can get NASCAR dude and Madonna to agree about something, you know that that think is pretty deeply ingrained in our cultural moment. And it is not just platitude spouting celebrities.

Three weeks ago The Economist (a decidedly high brow[1] periodical) made the case that “something people badly want (is) a way to acknowledge faith can be taken seriously as a response to deep human yearnings without needing to subscribe to the formality of organized belief.”[2]

Honestly, this is one of my little pet peeves…when someone says something like this, usually taking the form of “I’m not into organized religion but I am a very spiritual person” they usually think they are being profound or original or at least clever. I’d just like to deconstruct that for a minute. This is about the most clichéd, tired, derivative view of spirituality you can have in our culture. It isn’t rebellious or clever, it is tired and trite. I mean, if you are going to make a comment as inane as this, at least do something unique with it, like…this one I enjoyed:

“I usually lump organized religion, organized labor, and organized crime together. The Mafia gets points for having the best restaurants.” ~Dave Beard

But this obviously antipathy against ‘organized religion’ is a deeply and widely held sentiment in our culture, and it is not without an element of truth or at least of resonance. Anything this widely believed probably has an element of truth to it. Clichés are usually clichés for a reason. And I agree that the human religious impulse is mostly a dark and broken impulse and that religion is, in many cases, is as far away from the message of Jesus as hedonism is. I also think the church has a relatively poor record or representing Jesus.

Tim Keller says that ‘all of the arguments against the existence of God are pop guns of doubt compared to…‘If Christ is so great why is the church the way it is?’…There is nothing that can create doubt like that.’ I am going to touch on this just a little bit today, but it is not my topic. I have given whole talks on this question before, as has Keller and Os Guiness, so if this is a significant problem for you, I have thrown the mp3s of all three talks onto a few CD’s and you can get them after the talk.

But something else strikes me about these quotes. Let me go with one more that particularly brings this out.

“I don’t necessarily believe in organized religion. I love my God, my higher power, but it is mine and mine alone, and I create my connection, and I decide how my connection is going to be.” –Will Smith

Now, to be fair, I love Will Smith. He is the biggest movie star in the English speaking world, 7 pounds was probably the best studio film to come out last year, by all accounts a he is descent family man, and dude is disconcertingly handsome…I mean, that is a beautiful specimen of humanity…and I’ve literally grown up with him. Seriously, the first album I ever owned was ‘I’m the DJ, He’s the rapper’ back when no one knew his real name.

But look at that quote again. Of the 36 words in it the words I, my or mine make up 9 of them. That is 25%. And that, I think, gets at the heart of contemporary spirituality. The foundational tenet of contemporary god talk - the litmus of contemporary spiritual ‘orthodoxy’ if you will - is ‘individuality’.

But tonight we are going to look at two of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. The reason I love these passage is that they describes a shocking vision of Christian community. On the one hand, it pitches Jesus-following as irreducibly corporate, something that can only done in tight connection with others. But on the other hand, it paints a picture of ‘organized religion,’ if you will that is so startlingly foreign from the one-dimensional caricature posited and reiterated by these quotes. Let me suggest, as my thesis, that the appropriate response to the evils and ills of ‘organized religion’ is not individualized spirituality but Biblical community.

The talk will divide into 2 parts:

I. The Importance of Community

-I am going to try to deconstruct the idea that following Jesus is something you can do mostly on your own, particularly in college. I will make the case that Christianity is irreducibly corporate and that, far from being a liability, this is one of its most beautiful and helpful features of this world view…despite being entirely counter-cultural.

II. The Elements of Community

-Then we will look at 4 elements of community lifted directly from the account of the earliest church and try to think a little bit about how these could play out in our little community

Essentially I am going to try to answer these two questions

Why is the Church? What is the Church? So let’s dig into it.

I. The Importance of Community

Here is the thing. It is definitionally impossible to follow Jesus by yourself. You can try it. You can pray and read the Bible and try to ‘love your neighbor’ by yourself…and you can have some measure of ‘success’ in achieving these objectives…but as soon as you try to do it alone it is, by definition, not following Jesus. It is something else. Authentic Jesus following can only be done with other people trying to do the same. It is irreducibly corporate.

Look at the text. Verse 2:44 ‘All the believers were together’ and then again in 2:46 ‘they continued to meet together.’ Tim Keller said that these passages and others give the impression that they ‘met together relentlessly’ that ‘they couldn’t seem to get enough of each other.’ The early Christians appear to have an insatiable appetite for being with each other. From the very beginning, normative Jesus following was done together – Christianity can only be done in community.

My sophomore year in HS I took a sculpture class. Art classes weren’t like other classes in High School because you got to talk, the radio was on, it was all very informal. And every art class I ever took worked the same way. The three or four popular seniors in the class would talk about their sexual exploits, either real or imagined, and the rest of us hung on their every word. I wasn’t a Christian yet, and not having experiences to add, I listened attentively. Our teacher Mr. Geller mostly stayed out of it. But I remember one day one of the guys admitted that over the weekend he fell asleep while having sex. This was more than Mr. Geller could bear and he finally jumped in. He said, ‘I’m sorry, if you are falling asleep during sex, you are just not doing it right.’[3]

This story came to mind when I read this passage. It seems to me that if you have the impulse to make your devotion to Jesus a private matter…if you find a personal, individual experience of God more compelling or fulfilling than a corporate, community experience of God…then you just aren’t doing it right. Normative Christianity is typified by people who can’t get enough of each other. If that doesn’t describe your experience, I suspect you are not doing it right.

I really like what Eugene Peterson has to say about this “I often found myself preferring the company of people outside my congregation, men and women who did not follow Jesus. Or worse, preferring the company of my sovereign self. But I soon found that my preferences were honored by neither Scripture nor Jesus. I did not come by the conviction easily, but finally there is not getting around it: there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart form an immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself.” ­–Eugene Peterson – Christ Plays in 10,000 Places[4]

Peterson asserts that to be human is to need other people…that at some level we do not fundamentally experience our fullest personhood when we are alone – but when we are in community. But Christianity in particular is irreducibly for a couple of reasons. Let me briefly pitch 3 theological reasons why Christianity is fundamentally a community experience:

1. At the center of Christianity is an admission of need and incompleteness, we require connection to other Christians.

2. Christianity is irreducibly corporate because God is. At the heart of the Christian faith is one God, who is himself, a community. The Trinity is not just some sort of abstract theological concept, it, among other things, demonstrates that if a God who is fundamentally corporate, creates us in his image. It would be really striking if a God like this created us for a private, individual experience of him. (Pinnoch – the dance)[5]

3. The Beauty is in the mess. This passage seems to assert that while Christian conversion is individual it is only authentic if it leads you into community – which is sure to get messy. Think about the scene here. There were 3,000 brand new Christians joined the community that day. How many crass hypocrites did that include? How many annoying or difficult people? How many with did that include who had serious coolness deficits? Running into difficult people in the church is not evidence that it is broken…it is evidence that it is fulfilling its purpose. The only prerequisite to join the Church is to look to Jesus and say, ‘I am a total mess and can’t fix this myself.’ You put a bunch of people like that together and it WILL get messy. But the mess of Christian community (in addition to its joys) is one of the tools God uses to form us.

This is one of the reasons why repentance and forgiveness are so central to Jesus’ teaching? Because we are broken people slowly healing – it just so happens that the church disproportionately attracts those that are more broken, so it tends to be a messy place that can only be navigated with repentance and forgiveness. After I had been a Christian a couple years, I had a pastor tell me ‘Stan, I don’t think you love the church. I think you love the idea of the Church.’ (as an aside – same for marriage – Derik Webb – every love song ‘you are great and I am great and when we get together it is great’ – every time I write a love song ‘I am a broken mess of a person and you are a broken mess of a person but I’m committed to this thing and by God’s grace we are getting by’)[6]

Honestly, I think people like individualized spirituality because not getting into the lives of other people and not letting them into our most intimate space and ideas means that we don’t really need to get into the difficult business of repentance and forgiveness.

But repentance and forgiveness are not optional add ons to the Christian life. They are central. Biblical community not only provides us with opportunities to experience encouragement but also serves as the ‘lab’ for our ‘book learning’ on repentance and forgiveness. Christianity is a lab class. It is irreducibly corporate. If you are doing it alone, you are just not doing it right. It is actually, probably, something else entirely.

II. The Elements of Community

So in addition to the basic principal that they ‘were together’, there are at least a dozen things we could draw from these passages to help us think about what normative Christian community should look like. We could teach for a whole quarter just on the elements of community from these passages and I’m convinced that it would be a pretty good series. For, example, James Boyce points out that, according to this passage, the early church was an urban, multi-ethnic mega church. Remember who responded to the message in chapter 2:

9Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome 11 Cretans and Arabs

The urban and multi-ethnic nature of the church become major themes in the Book of Acts and I am going to focus on them in future messages – particularly when I talk about Cornelius and the Church in Antioch at the end of this quarter and the beginning of winter quarter - but for now, lets select 4 “elements” of the early Church that could help inform our experience of Christian community.

1. A Learning, Studying Community

It was a learning, studying community. The first thing Luke mentions to describe this new group of Jesus followers is that they were intellectually engaged. Acts 2:42 “They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching.”

Now, last week Dan made the case that the early church was typified by a connection and dependence on the Spirit…and I 100% agree. If the work of the Spirit isn’t the main theme of the book of Acts, it is in the top 3. So it seems counter-intuitive that study would be the first mark of such a spirit filled community. But the life of the Spirit and the life of the mind are not competitive but symbiotic. Truth, particularly God’s self disclosure as reveled through the Scriptures, is the catalyst of the Spirit’s activities. Their experiences were grounded in understanding. They took seriously the words of Jesus that the first commandment was to love Jesus with all your ‘Mind, heart, soul and strength.’

My wife spent a semester of undergrad in Texas. She visited churches there where, I kid you not, parishioners checked their concealed fire arms in at the door. The church has been accused of doing the same thing with our brains…and the accusation is not without basis. But we will not ask you to do that here because clearly normative Christian community was intellectually engaged. Deciding how you are going to respond to Jesus is too important a decision to base on a vague feeling, intuition or emotion. You need information. The earliest Christian community was a learning, studying community.

2. A Multi-Scale Community

Second, the earliest Church was a multi-scale community. Look with me at 2:46

46Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,

Their organizational structure included large group meetings where they all met together, formal[7] small group gatherings for prayer and worship and informal meals together. We would really encourage you to do the same during your time here at UCD. The structure of CL or any other of the major college ministries where we have a large group meetings, formal small groups and impromptu times or meals together[8] is not an arbitrary organizational structure but actually has Biblical precedent. We would really encourage you to take advantage of each of these opportunities.

3. A Ridiculously Generous Community

Third, a mark of vibrant Christian community is ridiculously counter-culturally generosity. This is the most obvious theme of the passages[9]…and in many ways, the most shocking theme.

2:44All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.

4:32No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.

4:34There were no needy persons among them[10]. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales 35and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.

First, I’d just like to point out that this is exceptionally ‘organized religion’ and in Chapter 6 it gets even more organized as the apostles delegate tasks like caring for the socially and economically helpless to what essentially amounts to a sub-committee. But I suspect that many of those who object to ‘organized religion’ would be intrigued by a community like this. On the whole, I don’t think the objection is really to ‘organized[11]’ religion at all, but to irrelevant religion.

So we see in the passage that there is a fundamental difference between ‘hanging out’ and ‘community.’ NT Wright says in his commentary on these verses that Christian ‘fellowship is more than friendship but not less.’ It involves a component of taking material responsibility for each other. Biblical community is ridiculously, counter-culturally generous.[12]

4. An Externally Focused Community

Finally, despite their obvious affection for each other and their discipline of gathering together they remained externally focused. Their primary purpose for existing was not for themselves.

The passage says in 2:46 – ‘they the enjoyed ‘the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.’

It would have been easy for them to say, ‘Whoa now. We just experienced a one day growth rate of 2500%, let’s pack it in a little bit and focus on our personal growth. But while the first church couldn’t seem to get enough of each other, they still managed to stay engaged in the larger community and did life together in such a way that others were not only welcome but coming. They interacted with their city in positive ways for the good of all its inhabitants and maintained enough significant relationships outside of the Christian community that

This is the idea behind the growth group kingdom projects. Christian community does not exist only for the good of its members but to be a genuine help and joy to their community.

Let me wrap up with a final story. My first day of undergrad, before my Mom and Dad packed up the Windstar and drove the 200 miles to the school we had chosen, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning and could not go back to sleep. So I got up. It was a foggy, cool, September morning in Northern NY. I was a brand new Christian. Seriously, like 18 months earlier I had been an atheist…though not a particularly good one, since I couldn’t seem to keep myself from praying. Anyway, I had wanted to go to a Christian college but couldn’t afford it. I was, honestly, nervous about what college would do to my new faith. I had recently purchased the NT on tape and so I popped Acts into my walkman. A walkman, for those of you who don’t know is this strange device that we used to put these things called cassettes into and which stored audio information on, I kid you not, strips of magnetic tape…and sound would come out through these ear pieces that were held to your head with a metal band.

Anyway, I went for a long walk in that early morning fog listening to the story of the first days of Christianity. As I listened to the story of the early church unfold in a world hostile to their worldview and in the face of huge uncertainty, I began to get a sense that God was going to see me through it. But he wasn’t going to just see ME through it. He was going to see US through it. I didn’t know who ‘us’ was yet…but God’s plan for me at college was to be part of an us…and let me tell you, almost fifteen years later, I am still extremely close with them. You need to find yourself an ‘us’ to follow Jesus with during your years at UCD. You may not know them yet, but I guarantee you that if you find them, they will be among the closest friends of your life and will be directly responsible for how much ground you gain or loose spiritually during your years here.

I have said it before and will say it again – If you spend these 4 years on the margins of Christian community you are RIPPING YOURSELF OFF. Join a Christian fellowship and stick with it. I don’t care which one it is. IV, Crew, or, College Life. More important than which one you choose is that you dive into it and make it a home. You are only in college for a few years, so don’t waste time bouncing between them.

Connect yourself to a community of Christians that is a vibrant studying and learning community, that experiences Christianity as a multi-scale phenomena (go to a large group meeting, join a small group, hang out regularly with a few close Christian friends), that is counter-culturally generous, but always keeps in mind that Christian community exists for those outside of it. If you have had trouble making connections, come on the retreat coming up. Because Christianity is irreducibly corporate and the solution to organized religion is not individual spirituality but vibrant, dynamic, Biblical community.

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[1] Though far too self important and self assured.
[2] History of Christianity: The Greatest Story or the Trickiest? September 19th, 2009 p95
[3] Now, before I tell you what I think this little anecdote has to do with Acts 2 and 4, I have to take a brief aside. One of the things I love about this story is that it deconstructs the myth that unmarried sex is exciting and fun and married sex is dull and passionless. What you have is a man who has been married for decades, for whom sex has been an effective tool to build lasting intimacy and closeness with a life long partner telling another guy who is essentially just using it for cheap thrills and bragging rights that his experience of the thing is diminished. And let me just say, that we are going to talk more about this. Dan and I have set aside the first 3 weeks of next quarter for a series on sexuality and relationships.
[4] I also loved this quote in that chapter: “People can think correctly and behave rightly and worship politely and still live badly – live anemically, live individualistically self enclosed lives, live bored and insipid and trivial lives.” Christ Plays in 10,000 Places
[5] As Keller has quoted in his talk on Contextualization- we were deformed through community, it only makes sense that restoration would come partly through the context of a community.”
[6] Let me give you one more quote to round out the point. “The Church offers a way forward beyond mere individualism, beyond mere organization. It is a voluntary community of those who have caught some glimmering of what God means in Christ and how Christ unites all who accept the Accepter. Thus in the Church, at its best, there is both the flowering of individuality and also the sense of belonging, of being accepted, of forgiving, of being forgiven, of loving and being loved.” – Chad Walsh
[7] ‘the breaking of bread and the prayers’ – as contemporary evangelicals we read this and we think of eating together and praying for each other’s needs – but that is an anachronism – it probably is an early form of the Lord’s supper and a liturgy of sorts – there are formal and informal aspects to the community life of the early church – but the breaking bread in v 46
[8] Keller - “You are who you eat with.”
[9] Luke gives more attention than any of the other gospel authors to Jesus’ teachings on money and the poor – it is not surprising, therefore, that he would be intrigued by the economic dimension of the early Christian community
[10] No one in need – ref to Deut 15:4 & 11 (direct quote from the LXX)
[11] The alternative to ‘organized religion’ doesn’t have to be disorganized religion. Biblical community is and was ‘organized’ but was still alive and dynamic. Notice that even in the earliest moments, even in its most organic form, the church is a centralized enterprise – not individual to individual but individualàchurchàindividual. There is a centralized administration of the funds – presumably to protect the community from scams – but also so that assistance came not from the individual but from the community. It is in this context that the verse in 1Timothy makes sense about getting the unemployed jobs so they have money to care for the needs of other. It appears that one of the roles of the early church leadership was to move people from recipient status to giving status.
[12] While the issue of generosity makes us think first (and rightly so) about money – I think it is a fair question to ask ‘What is the scarcest resource for UCD students?’ I suspect it would either be time or GPA. I think it is an important question for Christian students to ask, would God call me to sacrifice some time or GPA on someone else’s behalf.