When Jesus Mixes the Drinks (John 2:1-11)

John 2:1-11

MP3

Just one more week.  Seriously, one week from tomorrow morning, this freeking election will be over, and maybe, just maybe I can open my facebook for a few months without it making me sad…without my liberal friends and my conservative friends saying terrible things about each other…

I mean is anyone else ready for this to be over.  I was hanging out with several work friends the day after one of the debates and one of them told us that he had watched the whole thing all the way through.  Another one of my friends kind of looked at him weird and asked: “On purpose?  How did you pull that off?” 

His answer…”Gin, lots and lots of gin.” 

(Yeah, you know you’re old when your friends don’t drink PBR anymore but drink sophisticated stuff like gin).

But it turns out a lot of people have been mixing politics and alcohol.  A few weeks a debate drinking game meme popped up on my feed…where you drink every time the candidates use catch words or signature phrases like “let me be clear” or “obamacare”.  [1]

But when I tried to google it I found out that there were so many of these that Time ran a feature called “Which Presidential Drinking Game is Right for You”, [2] where they featured no fewer than 9 attempts to translate the debates into liver damage and brain cell loss. 

My Personal Favorite Rule?

“Drink and dance Gangnam Style if any candidate mentions gun control.”

Actually, sometimes I feel like College life would make a pretty fun drinking game

…every time Ryan says ‘Dude’…drink

…every time Zach illustrates a talk with a 49ers story…drink

…every time Stanford creatively re-imagines the pronunciation of one of these words (Question, Christian, Egypt)…drink

…every time Stanford has laughs at one of his own jokes…drink…and if he’s the only one…drink again 

…or Dan says “Now what is the point?”…drink…and if he also moves his hand like he’s knighting someone in the front row while he’s saying it…bottom’s up. 

Anyway, ‘Now what’s the point?’ (hand motion)… From Jim Belushi to Hank the Tank, alcohol is part of the College narrative.   

And part of Christian discipleship on a campus has to include figuring out how to interact with an alcohol fueled culture.  It is a complicated question that a lot of Christians wrestle with…and then we turn to John chapter 2…and Jesus does not appear to be particularly helpful…

Because, there Jesus is, making wine.  And not just a glass…he makes 50-55 gallons…which in a unit of measure you might find more intuitive, works out to ~3.5 kegs. 

And I feel like this whole story poses an obvious question…WHAT?  Seriously, What?  What the heck is going on here? What is the deal?  I have so many questions...but I feel like the obvious question that emerges reading this story in general is something like:

How do the Scriptures in general and this passage in particular help us negotiate the alcohol soaked culture we find ourselves in?  Well tonight I want to look at three ideas from this text and the scriptures in general offer to help us think about our relationship to campus drinking culture:

First, you need to recognize that :

I.                Jesus is neither a Prude nor a Libertine

You see, there are a few passages of the Scriptures that people who don’t read the bible like to cite[3]…and this is one of them. [4]

The simplistic theological deduction people make when they invoke this narrative goes something like this:

Jesus made wine = Bring on the Jell-O Shots (QED)

But the really surprising thing about John chapter 2 is that Jesus turns out to be neither a prude nor a libertine.

You see the chapter opens with a picture of Jesus and his friends at a party.  It’s a pleasant, gregarious scene.  And then, they run out of wine, which would have been deeply humiliating to the family…and as Dan pointed out to me would have complicated the groom’s relationship with his new in-laws for years to come.  And Jesus has compassion on this guy’s social predicament and makes a bunch of wine…really good wine. 

But chapter 2 is really interesting, because there is a really stark jump cut between this gregarious compassionate scene to what comes next…look back a chapter 2 with me as I read just a bit further (starting in verse 9):

9 When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom 10 and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” 11 This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.

12 After this he went down to Capernaum, with his mother and his brothers and his disciples, and they stayed there for a few days.

13 The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. 15 And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables.

Just as we catch Jesus making wine, just as we make the point that he is no prude, just as we are ready to suspect him a libertine…some sort of pot smoking Berkley hippy who wears Birkenstocks and one of those knit caps that covers his balding ponytail and listens to a lot of Grateful Dead…and is really into Jonathan Livingston Seagull or the Fountainhead, depending on what kind of libertine he is (it’s election season, I need to give equal time to both kinds of crazy), John does a hard jump cut to a very different picture.  To the point that I thought about titling this talk…

The incredible thing about these two narratives that John juxtaposes in his second chapter is that it is as if he is saying…whatever little picture you have of Jesus in your mind…whether it is the mild mannered miracle worker or the virulent champion of justice…that little picture you have of Jesus…it is going to need to get a lot bigger.  Whatever you think he is…he’s more than that.

You see, Jesus may be the life of the party, but he does not lack moral seriousness.  He is the image of God, and so we find in him, side by side in these two stories, enjoyment of creation and people and anger at those who distort his creation intent.

And so the picture we see in John 2 is that Jesus is neither a prude nor a libertine…and with respect to alcohol in particular he neither condemns wine nor does he unreservedly permit it…Which puts him in line with the rest of the scriptures:   Which leads us to our second big idea:

II.            The Scriptures paint a Tensioned Picture of Alcohol Characterized by Celebration and Caution

To put Jesus’ action in context we need to do a very brief biblical theology of alcohol.  There are no fewer than 240 references to wine alone in the Scriptures…not to mention references to beer, fermented drink, and drunkenness.  And they can all roughly be organized into two overarching categories:  Celebration and Caution. 

First, there are several types of references to alcohol that celebrate it as a good gift from God.

First: Celebration

1. First, there are dozens of verses that list wine as one of the things God gives as part of agricultural blessing.  This is actually the primary context in which the Scriptures refer to alcohol.  Check out Psalm 104:

Psalm 104:14-16

14 He makes grass grow for the cattle,

    and plants for people to cultivate—

    bringing forth food from the earth:

15 wine that gladdens human hearts,

    oil to make their faces shine,

    and bread that sustains their hearts.

Second:

In other words, you were supposed to share with the religious professionals

Deuteronomy 15:14

Supply them liberally from your flock, your threshing floor and your winepress. Give to them as the LORD your God has blessed you.”

3. Alcohol was an accepted part of mandated religious festivals:

Deuteronomy 14:26

“Use the silver to buy whatever you like: cattle, sheep, wine or other fermented drink, or anything you wish. Then you and your household shall eat there in the presence of the Yahweh your God and rejoice.”

One of the things I feel like people miss out on in the pedantic detail of the Old Testament is that a lot of those pages describe the festival character of Yahweh worship.  Israel’s God mandated huge and frequent parties.  Even a cursory reading of the Hebrew Scriptures reveals that Yahwehism was pretty freeking fun. 

4. Jesus

But wine wasn’t just part of first testament mandated religious observance…it is also central to Christian symbology and worship.[5.5]  What is the central worship event Jesus left his missional community…hint, it wasn’t singing.  It was a corporate sacred meal that included bread and…wait for it…wine.

When you superimpose this reality with John 2 and the well known gospel references that Jesus hung out with drunks…and ate in their houses…we see that Jesus wasn’t afraid of a little fermentation.

But, that is not the whole story.  There is a second category of passages that deal with alcohol in the Scriptures.  And these urge:

Caution

1. Narratives of drunkenness gone very badly:

Noah – Genesis 9:21  “When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent”

Now you have to respect Noah’s commitment to drinking.  It’s not like he could just go down to the 7-11 post flood an pick up a couple 40’s.  The text said he planted a vineyard.  That is some advanced planning for getting drunk.[6]

Listen…in our undergrad you could live in the dorm all 4 years…and I did.  So I am acquainted with drinking stories.  (public service announcement, if you are going to get so drunk you puke, please DON’T EAT CORN…my least favorite part of getting up early to study on Saturdays was the floating corn kernels in the sink…every Freeking Saturday for 4 years…there were corn kernels floating in my sink while I brushed my teeth.) And I’ve seen and heard bad drinking stories…stories of personal injury and humiliation.  I had one written [7] and I cut it because it was just too crass…even for me.  But I’m sorry, you are just not going to one-up the bible on bad drinking stories.  You see, Noah is not as bad as it gets.

Lot - Genesis 19:32 “Let’s get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father.”

You see, this is one of the ways the scriptures instructs: by narrative counter example.  For example, there is no law against polygamy…but every where it occurs in the scriptures it goes catastrophically poorly.  Same thing with alcohol:

And in this way, the Scriptures treat drinks like wives.  One is a great thing…but too many and things start to get complicated. [8]

2. Alcohol can undermine relationships and productivity.  (Wisdom Lit)

Proverbs 20:1

“Wine is a mocker and beer a brawler; whoever is led astray by them is not wise.”

Prov 23:19

“Listen, my son, and be wise,

    and set your heart on the right path:

20 Do not join those who drink too much wine

    or gorge themselves on meat,

21 for drunkards and gluttons become poor,

    and drowsiness clothes them in rags.”

3. There appear to be some ways to serve God that do not mix well with drinking:

A voluntary, temporary vow of association with a special ministry team…most famous example: Samuel (Jud 13:14)

Numbers 6:20

‘If a man or woman wants to make a special vow…as a Nazirite, ³ they must abstain from wine and other fermented drink…”

4. Pauline ethic:

Ephesians 5:17-19

17 Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. 18 Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit,

Alcohol makes us more of what we are…the question is, is more of you a good idea?  Part of the Christian quest involves working really hard to combat our darker tendencies and make more room for the spirit to expand places for love and kindness and other things that don’t come real naturally to us.  Sure you might not be in a ton of danger or making really bad choices with your safety or sexuality (or not)…but you could also choose incautious words that could wound people and complicate relationships.

Romans 14:21

“It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother or sister to fall.”

I don’t have time to go into Paul’s full theology of Christian freedom.  But Dan and I were exchanging e-mails about this last week and he summarized it pretty well:

“Scriptures allow for wise enjoyment. But again, for any enjoyment to be wise means that it has taken the spiritual well-being of other people with deadly seriousness.”

You see, alcohol isn’t a special kind of thing…it’s just a thing, like any other thing, like romantic affection, visual media, facebook, politics, string cheese or gamma functions…it is not forbidden not unreservedly permitted. 

It is good but has weird negative feedbacks with our brokenness…it is a gift that we can distort and transform into something thin and sad by exploitation and use outside of wise protective boundaries.

And so a Christian theology of alcohol is precisely the same as a Christian theology of all things that are good…but potentially damaging.  There isn’t really an easy answer of total restriction or total license…Jesus is neither a prude nor a libertine…and you shouldn’t be either.  The Christian ethic for all things is wise freedom.  You get to exercise freedom in proportion to your wisdom.  And you enjoy good things within the boundaries that they were meant to be enjoyed.

Let me wrap up this point by telling you about one of my closest friends, Tyler Thomas.  OR for our purposes lets pull a Don Miller and call him, my friend Tyler the winemaker.  I met Tyler several years ago while he was getting his second graduate degree here at UCD’s Viticulture program which is perennially the #1 wine making program in the nation.  He made these little  grape sensors that measured the pressure exerted by a growing grape…which is the first thing I thought of when I saw this:

Anyway, my friend Tyler the winemaker, lives in Napa now and is a big shot winemaker (cool picture) adding to the list of my friends that are way cooler than me…oh, well, at least there is Dan.  And actually, he is kind of a big deal…recently, out of the blue, a shoe maker liked his wine so much, they named a shoe after him.  That’s right, a shoe: 

http://www.fluevog.com/code/?w%5B0%5D=item%3Atyler_thomas&p=1&view=detail&colourID=3630

Now Tyler is a smart dude into the hard scientists, but he is also something of an artist.  When I asked him why he got into winemaking because it requires a unique mix of scientific and art…technical craft and artistic endeavor…so he thinks it makes perfect sense for the first public act of the creator of the universe that to dramatically make something useful and beautiful..something that brims with both scientific wonder and aesthetic wonder.  It is the perfect first fruit or appetizer of a new creation that is just starting to break through.

Anyway, Tyler loves wine.  To him, wine is craft and agriculture and art.  And as part of his job and passion, he goes to a lot of work functions were people are totally smashed.  But he’s not.  And that is of the ways he declares the Kingdom is to enjoy the good that God gives without slipping into distortion.  He inhabits a drinking culture as neither a prude nor a libertine…but with wise enjoyment.

This is like the relationship talks…students want me to spell out a bunch of rules…and I can’t, because God doesn’t.  Christianity doesn’t work that way.  Following rules for their own sake is useless in our worldview.  But the scriptures do offer guidance to craft a wise life of love and worship…like, hey, getting drunk is a pretty terrible idea.  Jesus offers the principle of wise enjoyment with a measure of self skepticism.  Personally, I have a one drink policy.  I think my work buddies appreciate that I will have a beer with them when we play poker or go out after a soccer game.  It is an act of care. 

But I pass on the second round…and the third…and, well, you get the idea.  Some of the older students in this community decided that the Scriptures’ call to respect the laws of your land (as long as they do not violate your conscience or the gospel) meant they didn’t drink until they were 21.  I think there is a lot of wisdom in that. 

So what do the scriptures teach about Alcohol?  A tension between celebration and caution that should manifest as wise, cautious, enjoyment.  But back to the passage, there is one more detail that I’d like to linger over to round our reflection. 

You see, finally, this story unsubtly asserts that when it comes right down to it…it really is in our interest to, as Mary says in v 5:

III.         “Do Whatever He Tells You.”

Note: I totally re-wrote this point just before the talk.  see the MP3 if you are interested.

You see this passage taps into my experience of every party I’ve ever been to.

The way Tim Keller puts it: The wine always runs out…the party is almost always disappointing. 

This passage taps into a fundamental human experience things we look to for happiness and fulfillment whether secular or religious never really deliver…with one exception.  Jesus! 

For those in the know, those who understood what happened…the quality of the wine was not the point.  The story moves the attention away from the wine to the wine maker.  No one in the know just goes on drinking.  Because for those who know what just happened, the fact that great wine was served to drunk people was not the most interesting thing that just happened.

And that is really the heart of a Christian theology of alcohol…or anything really.  If you are looking to excuse self interested behavior, you’ll be able to.  But Jesus isn’t about rule following for its own sake.  The way Christianity works is that Jesus gets our attention…and suddenly, 3.5 kegs of great wine aren’t the point.  And this is what Christian’s call ‘faith’…something the text says that the disciples began to experience that day when it say “And the disciples believed in him.”  It is to realize that Jesus understands reality and me more intimately and more exhaustively than I do.  And if that is the case, Mary’s comment [10] starts to make sense

2:5 “Do whatever he tells you”

Once you start to come to terms with who Jesus is…once you, in the language of this passage, “believe in him”…It fundamentally changes the alcohol question…and every other question of human behavior.  I want in on this thing he’s doing.  Jesus is more interesting, more beautiful, more compelling than any of the good things I could over use to try to find meaning or diversion.  And so, when it comes to behavior details like if and how much I’ll drink…I’m inclined to ‘do whatever he tells me.’

____________

[1] Seriously, how could they have foreseen, “Big Bird”, “Binder of Women” or “Every time Obama looks like he is about to fall asleep.”

[2] http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/10/03/obama-vs-romney-which-presidential-debate-drinking-game-is-right-for-you/

[3] Brother’s K Passage

[4] Others include “don’t judge” and the shellfish passage in Leviticus.

[5] I was talking to a friend who is planning to go into the ministry about this…and his response was…dude, when I’m done with school, I need to go to a church that is Biblical.

[5.5] Where it is a symbol both of joy and of wrath. 

[6] This is a Driscoll bit.

[7] …my friend found one of his friends passed out buck naked in a bathroom stall one morning with the contents of his stomach and bowels still in toilet….with his arm…

[8] Ester trusted God, but she also waited for Xerxes to ‘have a few’.

[9] I hated cutting this, but it just didn’t fit.

Mary has so much confidence in this young man’s resourcefulness (despite a total lack of resources) that she tells the servants ‘trust this guy, he’ll fix your problem.’

…which means that Mary treats Jesus like he’s the wolf in Pulp Fiction.  You have no idea how he’s going to fix your problem…but you have total confidence that he will.  You’ve got to believe that having the creator of the universe come around on the Sabbath for dinner had become pretty useful.  You can almost see the list waiting for him on the table.

You see, after the wolf showed that he can handle stuff…Vincent was willing to do what he said…they believed in him.  They trusted that he knew what he was talking about and that they would do what he said even if it was counter intuitive.

[10] One of the confusing aspects of the English translation is when Jesus calls his mother ‘woman.”  Bruce – “The English word ‘woman’, used thus in the vocative, carries with it the flavor of disrespect which is not present in the original.”  Suggests something like ‘dear woman’ or If he was from the south it would be ‘madam’ and if he was old English ‘my lady’[1] – it is a strange thing to call his mother, but not a pejorative or dismissive term – the point is that that if she wants him to do something ‘messianic’ that she needs to recognize the complexity of their relationship – she is not drawing on the relational capitol that comes from her being his mother, but from him being her creator

What is College For? (Part 3): Living in Grace and Truth in your Relationships

MP3

 

From Deconstruction to derivation you have to deal with a lot in college that is hugely complicated. 

But stuff like this, while tough, will probably not be the most complicated thing you will negotiate in college…or the most rewarding.  The most complicated thing you will negotiate in college will almost certainly be your relationships.  Because people are REALLY complicated:

Today we are taking up the question “What is college for? One more time…

...If you remember the answer we proposed from John 1…”college is a time to grow in grace and truth.”  And we are going to zero in on growing in grace and truth in a second specific arena …moving from your studies to your relationships

No that is a huge topic, so tonight we are going to zero in on three spheres of human relatedness:

1. Friendship

2. Community

3. Romance

And it will shock you to learn that I have a lot to say about these…so we are going to get right to work.  Let’s start with friendship:

1.   Friendship

Interestingly the big findings in the recent psychological and sociological research on friendship are seemingly incongruous.  The first finding is that the value of friendship is grossly underestimated in our culture.  And John Green – my favorite vlogger agrees.   Check out this clip from his thoughts on Valentine’s day. 

(0:44 – 1:30)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma9AnIfaE30

I’m convinced that one of reasons that long term romantic relationships struggle is not because multi-decadal monogamy is impossible, improbable, or disappointing …it is that we expect our romantic relationships to carry too much relational freight in our culture.  The bottom line of a lot of the recent research is that friendship really matters.

Recently researchers at Virginia Tech recruited a bunch of students and fitted them with weighted backpacks at the base of a steep hill. 

(OK, first of all…Seriously?  I mean, I love the hard sciences…but sometimes I feel like social scientists have more fun…hey, here’s a heavy backpack, go climb a hill)

Anyway, they asked the students who were wearing the heavy packs to estimate the steepness of the hill…but here was the variable…some of them stood alone and others simply had a close friend standing next to them. Listen to how they reported the results: 

The students who stood with friends gave lower estimates of the steepness of the hill. And the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep the hill appeared.    

When Dr Karen Roberto, the director of the center that conducted this study was asked about the results here’s what she said: “Friendship is an undervalued resource. The consistent message of these studies is that friends make your life better.”

So, friendship matters.  Now I don’t think that’s a really controversial hypothesis.   I’m not sure it takes a ton of peer reviewed research to convince you of that.  But if it is self evident that friendship makes your life better, it is a little hard to make sense of the second big finding on friendship in recent research in the social sciences.  And that is that friendship is on the decline.  Recent studies [1] in both the US and France demonstrate that we have fewer, less substantial relationships than they use to.  Now why is that, if friendship does, as Dr. Roberto claims, make your life better why is our culture characterized by a decline of friendship?

Well, it’s because real friendship with real people with real drama turns out to be hard…because, if you recall, people are really complicated.  And while college is supposed to be a really easy place to make friends, it might not be as easy as it seems.

College is set up for disposable relationships.  You will get a new set of beautiful, interesting people in your life every 10 weeks…so relationships can become expendable, especially if they get just a little hard…instead seeing a little friction as an opportunity to grow in grace, you can just trade in a growing friendship for a new acquaintance.  And so college can become a series of …”single serving friends”

And so, friendships that last, that have the chance to do the work in your life that they were intended for, have got to be characterized by Grace and Truth. 

Grace for the other and truth about yourself.  In particular, Jesus offers us two resources to help us forge our friendships in grace and truth:  Self Skepticism and Shared Purpose:

The first resource Jesus offers to help you forge friendship in grace and truth (and frankly the one I’ve found most helpful self skepticism. 

Because a little self skepticism is the only way we can really get at self knowledge in with so much self interest swirling about us. 

And that is why Philippians 2 is one of the texts I have found most helpful in building long term friendships: 

³Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. ⁴Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

We are predisposed to prioritize our own significance and our own interests…but becoming a good friend requires the active practice of being skeptical about both our significance and our interests to try to clearly see the interests and significance of our friends.

And so the active cultivation of forgiveness, generosity and repentance (which are the tools of relational grace and which emerge out of holding loosely to our own interests and significance) are the only real way to cut through the drama that erodes friendship…and they are the only real tools to move friendships from disposable alliances of mutual convenience to long term enriching fixtures in your life.

I corresponded about this with a student who recently graduated a couple weeks ago…listen to what he said: My living situation sophomore year and was awful for this reason exactly. There was no grace, whatsoever.  So everyone kept score, “selfless” acts were only really attempts to get ahead and strong arm someone into cleaning the dishes the next time, or something like that.  By contrast, my living situation junior and senior year was fantastic because there was grace and forgiveness when people messed up and also real acts of selfless love.

So to grow in grace and truth in our friendship we need to cultivate a little self skepticism and actively seek the interests of our friend…and secondly we have to realize really significant friendships have to be built on something bigger than the desire to have friends.  Friendship has to be built on a shared purpose:

CS Lewis tackles this idea in his book: The Four Loves “That is why those pathetic people who simply “want friends” can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends…(Otherwise) there would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice…Those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travelers.”

In college most people try to build friendship based on Affinity - am I like or do I Iike this person…do they seem likely to make my life better.  But robust, meaningful friendships tend to be built on common Purpose – the way this works out practically is that you will end up with friends you might not have chosen.  A relationship built on shared purpose can generate affection and affinity pretty quickly, but the opposite isn’t nearly as true.

And that is why war buddies have more enduring friendships than drinking buddies…

And that is why, if you belong to Jesus, your most meaningful friendships will emerge from:

2.   Community

Community is mostly an association of purposeful friendship…friendship oriented in the same direction…

 [3]

The topics of friendship and community overlap but not entirely.  You will have friends who are not part of your Christian Community and there will be members of your Christian community that matter to you but aren’t really friends. [4]  But it is that middle area, where purpose and affinity converge…that will be the building ground of the relationships that will define your life.

Jesus following is irreducibly corporate.  Now I could have gone a number of places to demonstrate this in the Scriptures

 “they continued to meet together” Acts 2:46… But actually, it is silly to proof text this principle.  Because the truth is that every meaningful expression of Jesus following in the NT is in community.  Jesus following is irreducibly corporate.

Dan, Laeya and I have done this long enough that we can tell you with real confidence, that the quality of your college experience will be correlated with how soon you integrate into a Christian community and how committed you are to it.  The benefits of Christian community to you are numerous.  I say this all the time and I don’t intend to stop saying it any time soon: “If you spend your time here on the margins of Christian community, you are ripping yourself off.”  Getting into a Christian community is in your self interest.  But here’s the thing.  That the social and spiritual benefits you will accrue by being part of a Christian community in college are not the best reason to do it. 

The best reason is more fundamental…

When you join a Christian community, you are not just signing up for a club that will enrich your life…you are enlisting in a cosmic mission.

A Campus Christian community is an extension of Church…which is more than just a few socially awkward people going into an ideological bunker to escape the scary secular world…it is an outpost of Jesus’ kingodm…think about that…we are more than just a few people struggling to figure out calculus and chemistry who meet in a cold lecture hall after hours to sing a few songs and listen to some dude who has too many degrees and appears to cheer for an unlikable east coast bb team…we are an colony of Jesus’ kingdom…an outpost of God’s purposes. 

Christian community is about more than making friends or fitting in or meeting your felt needs…it’s about being in on the mission. 

Growing in grace and truth in community begins with understanding the theological reality of what Christian community is…and having grace for the broken people that God uses to cobble together that grand reality.

 “Soon or later those of us who follow Jesus find ourselves in the company of men and women who also want to get in on it.  But it doesn’t take long to realize that many of these fellow volunteers and workers aren’t much to our liking, and some of them we actively dislike….Jesus doesn’t seem to be very discriminating in the children he lets into his kitchen to help with the cooking….I often found myself preferring…the company of my sovereign self.  But I soon found that my preferences were honored by neither Scripture nor Jesus.  I didn’t come to this conviction easily, but finally there was no getting around it:  there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart from an immersion and embrace of community.  I am not myself by myself.” (“Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places” 226)  [5]

But here’s the thing, it is going to take a little tenacity.  Communities have an intrinsic paradox… More valuable social circles are more difficult to penetrate.  Shallow social networks with loose connections are easy to get into but do not have the pay off.  So if you are new to CL (or maybe you’ve been around for a little while, but still don’t feel like you belong here)…I want to make you a deal. 

We are committed to try to make room for you in our lives…but you have to be a little tenacious about finding that room.

And the most important aspect of that tenacity is to join a SMALL GROUP.  It is not too late.  Pick up a list in the back and just take the risk to show up this week. 

Which brings me to a question…what is the difference between a Clique and a Community.  Clique is a pejorative…but surely a small network of close relationships isn’t a bad thing…so what is the difference between a clique and a community…a community is a clique with open doors.

And for those of you who might be trying to break into this or another community, realize that if the first couple people you run into doesn’t have open sites on their relational lego, it doesn’t necessarily make this community cliquish or unwelcoming.  [6]

There are a lot of great Christian communities on campus.  We would love it if you chose to make college life your home.  But frankly, IV, Cru, and a number of others are fantastic.  I know I said this a couple weeks ago, but I’ll say it again.  What you need to know, is that more important than which one you choose is how committed you are to the process of belonging.  Really get in there.  Join a small group…and and you will find that you will not only get in on one of the outposts of God’s kingdoms…but before long, you will make some of the best friends in your life…which leads me to:

3.   Romance

When I was talking to my wife about this talk and about how much ground I needed to cover, she said: “Come on, there’s really only one thing they want you to talk about in a ‘relationship’ talk.”  So let’s get on with it:

Romance is a special instance of friendship and community.  To think it is a totally separate category is to miss the point of it all together.  It is in the deepest part of the overlap of friendship and community…of shared purpose and shared affinity that you should be looking for romance. 

The problem is, that that is not where most students look:

And we are not getting a lot of help thinking about this well from our pre-eminent cultural story tellers:

And our campus culture isn’t really helping either.

As part of her PhD research a few years ago Donna Fritas surveyed >1000 college students from 7 different institutions and conducted >100 face to face interviews to collect their thoughts about love sex and romance on campus.  She recently published the results through Oxford Press in a book she called “Sex and the Soul”.  And here is one of her big findings:[7]

“In public, women maintain a lax attitude about no-strings-attached hookups, but in private, they express ambivalence and even dismay that they allow themselves to be pressure into sexual behaviors that often make them feel used an unhappy.” 99

“When pressed, few students express a desire to hook up randomly on a regular basis – though most accept that hookups are the most likely way to find a long-term romantic partner…and even greater number wish for more respect and awe about sex from their peers.” 156

It turns out that when left alone with a journal or one-on-one with a researcher, the vast majority of students are dissatisfied with the sexual economy on our campuses. 

But they play along…because they are afraid to be left behind…and because there isn’t really an alternate script.

Back to the original question “What is college for?” which I argued is just a sub question of “what are you for?”  Let me suggest…not for that.  How do we do our romantic relationships as part of our pursuit of growing in grace and truth…well, we have to start by saying “not like that.”[8]

And our text is pretty emphatic about this:

“But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people.” Eph 5:3

…in other words, that is not what you are for…and despite all the messages you will hear from peers and mentors in this place…that is not what college is for.

But just because we know how not to do it doesn’t mean that a Christian approach to romance is self evident.  In fact the more Dan and I watch Christian romance play out the more we have come to believe while a few students do figure it out, our movement on the whole has no idea how to do this.  And it can lead to some awkwardness…which has been recently captured in the website: Hey Christian Girl.

I was talking about this with a good friend recently who is closer to your age than mine …and we agreed that this is hilarious and kind of gets at the weirdness of Christian dating.  But we also felt like it only told half the story.  So we decided to start a website of our own…one that collected Christian break-up lines.  We are calling it “Good Bye, Christian Boy.”  Here the first post we worked up:

Now I don’t have time to do romance justice in 7 minutes – in the back there are CD’s with the last two talks I’ve given on this topic and the MP3’s are at the link in your handout (http://stanfordmp3.blogspot.com/).  But let me just give you two big ideas and if you’d like to hear me make the full case for these you can grab the cd’s or go get the mp3’s online.

If I was going to condense the 120 minutes or so of talks I’ve done on this topic in the last few years into a couple ideas I’d go with these two:

-Romance is the means by which we transform a friendship into a missional community.

Now, I realize that this is a huge departure from the sitcom/romcom model we were raised on.  But Dan and I really believe that the best building ground for a romantic relationship is a friendship that is characterized by a shared driving purpose and mutual affinity In that order…

Second

-Major on the friendship (don’t be in a hurry to label it – or kiss it)

The healthiest relationships Dan and I have observed over our years in college ministry are the ones who prolonged the friendship stage of the relationship and postponed labels and physical exploration.

And so the best thing you can do to negotiate romantic relationships with grace and truth is to develop a number of friendships with young men or women that you admire based on shared purpose and shared affinity in that order…and over time…real time…months to years…see if one emerges as unique and reciprocal.  The best romance emerges out of really good friendship.  It takes patient evaluation and gradual self disclosure…don’t short circuit it by prematurely exchanging labels or saliva.

And to pull that off, you are going to have to grow in grace and truth.

____________________________

[1] According to a study documented in the June 2006 issue of the journal American Sociological Review, Americans are thought to be suffering a loss in the quality and quantity of close friendships since at least 1985

[2] Which incidentally why the Scriptures uses the metaphor of family instead of friendship.  Becoming a person of grace and truth requires doing that in the context of others who are doing the same, who can provide us access to truth and opportunities to extend grace.  But that is going to require some self forgetfulness.  It is going to require the active discipline of decentering.

But your life will be enriched on a long enough time scale by the diversity…affinity can be boring and is a personality feedback…by surrounding yourself with people like you, you tend to think that the world is (or at least should be) composed of people like you…Diversity also can challenge you to grow in grace and truth.

[3] In my first version of this diagram I had a typo – under ‘study groups’ was ‘Lap Partners’  - there has got to be a joke there

[4] This includes mentoring on both ends  (finding a mentor and being a mentor).  Mentoring relationships can turn into friendship (which has been one of the unexpected benefits of college ministry for us) but doesn’t have to be valuable. Not all valuable relationships are reciprocal.  Our culture is obsessed with egalitarian relationships..where all relationships are equal partnerships.  But that’s just not always the way it works best.  Some of the most valuable  relationships are asymmetrical…with a clear direction of giving and receiving.  Benefiting from these relationships requires humility and self skepticism.

[5] I actually find Peterson pretty helpful on this topic:

Many Christians find church to be the most difficult aspect of being a Christian.  And many drop out.  There may be more Christians that don’t go to church or go only occasionally than who embrace it warts and all.  And there are certainly plenty of warts…So why church?  The short answer is because the Holy Spirit formed it to be a colony of heaven in the country of death. …Church is the core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing physical presence and human witness to the Jesus inaugurated kingdom of God in this world.  It is not that kingdom complete, but it is a witness to that kingdom.  (Practice Resurection)

Church is difficult.  Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we are going to have to deal with church.  I say sooner…many Christians find church to be the most difficult aspect of being a Christian.  And many drop out.  There may be more Christians that don’t go to church or go only occasionally than who embrace it warts and all.  And there are certainly plenty of warts…So why church?  The short answer is because the Holy Spirit formed it to be a colony of heaven in the country of death…Church is the core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing physical presence and human witness to the Jesus inaugurated kingdom of God in this world.  It is not that kingdom complete, but it is a witness to that kingdom.  But it takes both sustained effort and a determined imagination to understand and embrace church in its entirety.   Casual and superficial experience with church often leaves us with an impression of bloody fights, acrimonious arguments and warring factions.  These are more than regrettable, they are scandalous, but they don’t define church.

Church is an appointed gathering of named people in particular places who practice a life of resurrection in a world in which death gets the best headlines.” (Practice resurrection)

“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.” (229 CPITTP)

[6] Listen, freshman, Jesus doesn’t redshirt.  There are no redshirt freshman in College Life, Cru or InterVarsity.  In the kingdom, freshman play.

I thought of this the other day when I was talking to Ryan Gross.  Ryan is a freshman who grew up in Davis and went to First Baptist in high school.  He got recruited to UCD for soccer and I asked him if he was going to red shirt.  He said…”our coach doesn’t really red shirt”…and it turns out to be a good decision because through four games he was leading the team in points.

And this is not unlike several of the CURRENT freshman…During welcome week there were several new freshman young women who actually got out and pounded pavement with Sarah Johnson. They were among our early season stat leaders.  Because Jesus doesn’t red shirt.  Freshman play.

[7] I wrote an extended piece about this book which is here http://stanford-gibson.blogspot.com/2012/01/relationships-part-4-sexual-snapshot-of.html

[8] When I was young, all the progressive people were saying, ‘Why all this prudery?  Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.’  I was simple minded enough to believe they meant what they said.  I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite.  They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people.  All the others, we admit, have to be bridled.  Absolute obedience to your instinct for self preservation is what we call cowardice, to your acquisitive impulse, avarice.” CS Lewis - We Have no Right to Happiness

[9] One of the best variations on this theme is the one where the hey girl/boy approach is applied to Foccault photos and quotes: