Community Accountability

Yesterday, we looked at how one man's actions can be a curse on the entire community of God, particularly a man who is arrogant and doesn't think his actions have any consequences because he "believes" in God and even professes as much. 

A lot of Christians think that means that we should be super-concerned with what everyone else is doing, to the extent that it's necessary for us to codify Christian ethics into cultural law. We push for the same law for everyone, a law that honors God, to protect ourselves, but that's not at all what that means. 

The people of God have never been held accountable for what the secular culture does; they have only been held to their own actions. 

The surrounding nations were sacrificing their children by fire, but God never told Israel they had to pay for that sin. Rather, He said they were not to engage in it themselves. The capturing nations ate unclean foods, but Daniel and his friends were not punished for what others ate; they were only accountable for what they ate, so they asked for a special diet that pleased their God. 

Lot lived in wicked Sodom, and God was bent on destroying that city for its sins. But He did not destroy Lot, even though Lot lived there, because Lot did not participate in the sins of that city. Rather, God warned Lot about what was going to happen to that place and gave him both ample time and express directions to get out of there before the fire rained down. 

Over and over again, it's clear: God's people are responsible for what God's people do, not for what the world does. So legislating our morality doesn't bring us any closer to what God desires from us. What He desires from us is that we choose for ourselves to live holy, righteous lives. 

It puts us at odds sometimes with our world, increasingly more as we get into more and more secular times. Just look at what happened when the United Methodist Church recently changed its stance on homosexuality/the LGBTQ community within the church. There was a huge outcry, although it's important to know that they weren't just making that decision for the church in America; it was a decision for the church worldwide, including in many places that don't have the same cultural pressure as we do. 

But even though the church made this decision for itself, it did not then try to change the world in which it lives. It did not go out protesting and writing legislators and working to get any laws (or lack thereof) changed. What it did was declare its own position for its own accountability before God. 

And it's a reminder for all of us, because we need to keep in mind how much we let our culture guide us. It was the world outside of America that led the UMC toward this decision, a world where beliefs are different. Where laws are different. Where culture is different. It reminds us what we're beholden to and what we aren't when we remember that others don't live in the same world that we do, but they're trying to live with the same faith. This helps us shape our faith boldly, accountable truly to God and not to our secular pressures. 

Because what's holy...is what's holy. It's not holy here or there, not in this place or that, but in every place. It's the right thing because it's the right thing. It's God-honoring because it's God-honoring. It doesn't depend upon culture or what's happening outside the walls of our churches; it rests solely upon what is in our hearts. 

And what should be in our hearts is living a life pleasing to the Lord. For this alone, we are accountable. No matter what the rest of the world does. 

Sin of Sin

We live in an interesting time as Christians, a time where we are torn between having a private faith that guides our personal actions and still feeling pulled to the community of the people of God as one body. We're stuck between a world that says what you believe, and how you act based upon those beliefs, is your own personal choice and a church that cries out as one body, as children of God. 

It's easy for us to take the world's view on this one, far too easy. It's easy for us to think that how we live our lives is really up to us, and if we choose to live them on account of God's love, well, then, that's our choice. But what is most scary about this is that we can choose for ourselves the world's wisdom at the cost of the church, and we don't even realize what's happening.

You see, there are many among us (heartbreakingly many) who believe in the promises of God. They believe in His commandments. They believe in His covenant. They will tell you full out that God pours out His blessings on His faithful people and that the height of the Christian life is living in obedience. And at the very same time, they hold the belief that what they personally do, how they personally live, doesn't actually matter all that much. That they don't have to live a faithful, obedient life. That God's not really expecting that from them, and that whatever consequences might come from that only affect them. 

But not really because, you know, God is love. And such.

But the truth is that the church suffers more from this kind of person than she does from anyone outside of the faith, and she always has. The most detrimental person to the people of God is the man who believes that what he does doesn't matter to the community. 

The actions of individuals within God's people always has, and still does, have massive implications for all of them. 

We've seen this again and again in the Old Testament, when men sinned and no one knew about it, but Israel lost battles anyway. Famously, we might think of Achan, who took contraband and buried it in his own house. Israel lost a very important battle that they were sure the Lord had promised them to win, and they couldn't figure it out. When push came to shove, it turns out that Achan was to blame for the entire people's defeat. One man. One man who didn't think his actions mattered to anyone but himself (and therefore thought he could profit off of them without any repercussions). 

Deuteronomy 29 is clear about this, as well. Moses walks Israel through the covenant one more time, and he talks in very plain terms about men who confirm the covenant and agree to it, but then think, "I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way." (v. 19) After all, they affirm everything about God they are supposed to affirm...they just don't live it. They believe in the covenant and avow it; they just don't live it. Surely, God will commend them for their belief, no matter what their actions. 

But Deuteronomy says not only is that man curse, but his tribe is cursed. His people will suffer defeat. The curses of God will come down upon them, upon all of them, because of the sin of this one man. Because of the arrogance of this one man. Because of the mockery this one man makes of what it means to believe in God. 

Today's church suffers the same. Today's church struggles under the weight of too many Christians who sing Amazing Grace but don't live by it, who affirm God's promises but don't believe in them, who quote God's commands but don't follow them. Too many Christians who believe that what they decide to do with their lives doesn't matter to anyone but them. 

The truth is, it matters to all of us. We are cursed by those who have made faith empty, who have made it too easy to call themselves Christians and live in no such way. Who make a mockery of Christian love by making it cheap, and grace and mercy and forgiveness, too. 

What we need is a generation that rises up, that comes into covenant together and that knows that what we do in our own homes matters. Not just to ourselves, not just to our own families, but to our community, to our brothers and sisters everywhere and in every time, to the church universal and all that she stands for. Or rather, all that she kneels for and falls prostrate before God for. Because it does matter. 

No matter what the world says. 

Uncut Stones

Throughout the Old Testament, Israel built a lot of altars. This is particularly true before the establishment of the Temple, when Israel was looking for ways to mark her history with God in remembrance and worship. And one of the rules for building altars was that you had to use uncut stones; you couldn't shape the altar any old way you wanted to.

And this is true, too, when Moses climbs the mountain to receive the commandments from the Lord. He famously took two stone tablets with him, and when he shattered those tablets in frustration at Israel's sin, he took two more. Most of the time that we see these tablets in modern Christianity, they are beautiful to look at. Curved on the top, usually. Polished. Well-shaped. But the Scriptures tell us that these, too, were uncut stones. They were raw tablets with rough edges and natural shapes. 

The principle here is pretty simple: you don't have to worry about making things pretty when God makes them beautiful. 

A second principle just as simple: God shapes the holy things, not you. 

This is really the essence of it all, and it has to be. We are a people prone to worship beauty, to want things that are carefully crafted and made in just a certain way. And it's not that God doesn't care about these things; He does. You need look no further than the exquisite detail of the Tabernacle and the Temple to see that. He absolutely cares about them.

But He also understands our inclination to worship beautiful things instead of what those beautiful things are meant to draw us to. We might worship the tablets over the Lawgiver, the altar over the remembrance of the Lord. If we make things beautiful, we become more invested in them - in the things. But if we have raw things that the Lord has made beautiful for us, we are most invested in the Lord's beauty and gift. 

It goes back to one of the commands inscribed on that stone - you shall not make idols. You shall not labor to make beautiful things that will take your worship away from the Lord, and that includes beautiful things you think will draw you closer to Him. You will not fashion with your own hands anything that would cause you to worship it, that would have you more invested in the thing you made than in the reason you made it. 

And we do this all the time, right? It's so easy. Especially as we have gotten away from this command and entered into a culture that loves the beautiful. We sing beautiful songs with the radio, and we think, oh, what a beautiful song; how I love this beautiful song. But we get so busy singing the beautiful song that we don't even connect with the beautiful Lord it is meant to worship. Or we buy fancy new Bibles with beautiful covers and elegant type, and we think, Oh, what a beautiful Bible. And then we take great care not to mark or to mar it in any way, keeping it well-protected from our lives because it is such a beautiful Bible. And that keeps us from messily engaging with the beautiful God revealed in its pages. 

We build our churches with beautiful entrances and shining altars and all the latest and the best that technology has to offer us, and then we promote our churches for our programs and services and buildings...and not our God. When was the last time you saw a church say, "Come join us! We love Jesus here!" No, you're far more likely to see, "Convenient service times! Free coffee! Casual dress code! Multimedia available! And here's a picture of our beautiful building!" 

That's precisely why God made this rule. It's why He is so insistent about it. When you build things for God, when you make things for the Lord, you make them raw. Natural. Ugly. You let them be whatever they are, you bring them as they come - uncut. You let God make them beautiful, lest they draw your heart away from Him. 

There is simply no other way. 

An Unclean Community

Perhaps one of the harshest commands of the Lord pertains to the cleanness or uncleanness of a man. As important as community is to God, as essential as it is that His people live and work and love together as one, He has quite a few rules about who can be part of that community and who can't, and when those who are a part of that community have to step out and stop being part of it for some time.

Read through these rules, and you start to wonder who was actually in the community of Israel at any given time. Women were cut off from it for at least two weeks a month, one week for their period and one week for cleansing afterward. Men were cut off every time they had an emission, including nocturnal emissions, which are not at all uncommon. Anyone who came upon a dead body or had someone die near them was cut off, so every time someone in your family died, if you tended to them, you were cut off. 

If you got a cut or a scratch or a sore that even halfway looked like a skin disease, you were cut off until it could be proven that it was just a cut or a scratch. If you were balding in a weird pattern, you were cut off until you were actually totally bald. If your house had mildew in it, you had to move out of it for at least a week and all your stuff was unclean. That leaves you with not a lot of places to go. 

If you really pay attention to this section of the Scripture, you can't help but start to think how often you yourself would even be cut off from the people. And it seems like such a lonely life, living outside the camp. Isolated. Unable to be among your people. 

But that's not exactly the case. 

See, God says you're not allowed in the camp, but He never says you have to be alone. And given the sheer number of Israelites who had to be cut off at any given time, just by nature of being human beings, the truth is that even in your uncleanness, you were probably never alone. You may not be allowed to be among your people, but you're in a new kind of community nonetheless. And these are your people. 

It takes some of the sting out of it, doesn't it? It's terrible to be a woman cut off from her community for at least two weeks a month, but when you realize that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of other women cut off from their community for two weeks a month, you can't help but know you're going to run into each other. You're going to gather water together and cook food together and live in unclean tents together. And not just with yourselves, but with the men who have had emissions and have come to join you. With those who have lost loved ones and who grieve outside the camp because they are unclean. With those who have a potentially contagious skin disease, but even probably not, who have seven days to watch their scars form. 

All of a sudden, "cut off" doesn't seem like such a bad place to be. It's kind of like home, just...different.

And then when you think about Jesus, when you look at the kinds of persons He interacted with most, you see that they mostly belong to this community. They were the unclean, the defective, the rejected. They were the ones least likely to be "in;" most decidedly "out." They were the blind, the deaf, the lame, the demon-possessed. They were the liars, the thieves, the sinners. They were the ones with reputations, and not really good ones. The last ones to be invited to any party, the ones not actually invited at all. 

Yet we spend so much of our time, so much of our energies, creating the "in." Pretending to be the community. Pretending to have it all right, and willingly, violently, firmly cutting off those who don't fit, condemning them by our own decree into a life of isolation. We think. 

But there's always been a second community. Always. There's always been a place, together, for those cut off. There's always been an unclean place teeming with life abundant nonetheless, teeming with grace and mercy. And it's often these "outcasts" that are getting it most right. 

Maybe we could all use to be a little more unclean. I don't know. Maybe we could all use this kind of broken, ugly, discarded, uncertain community, where persons come in and out, come and go, stay and leave, weave themselves in and walk out, but where Jesus, too, walks freely among us. A place teeming with life abundant, even if it looks like death. Teeming with grace and mercy, though it seems to have started in judgment. 

A place where the people of God are getting it right. 

Your Best Life

Throughout the Old Testament, particularly in the early parts of it, God calls His people frequently into battle. They have to fight for everything they have, pushing their way into the Promised Land inch by inch, sword by sword, blood by blood. At several points, He takes a census of the number of fighting men available.

But not all of the fighting men were ever actually available. 

There were a number of reasons that a fighting man may not actually fight with the people. Gideon, for example, sent two divisions of fighting men home - those who were afraid and those who drank water in a certain way - because the Lord told him that his army was too big for the fight, for the Lord to get the glory of it. 

There were also, however, rules on which of the fighting men couldn't fight with Israel on any given day. For example, men who had just gotten married but hadn't had the chance to cement their new bond with their wife were exempt from fighting. They were to go home and lay in the marriage bed and be a family. Also, men who had purchased land but hadn't had the chance to work it were exempt from fighting. Men who had built a home but hadn't moved into it were exempt from fighting, too. 

In other words, if you haven't had a chance yet to live your life, God won't put you at risk of dying. 

And this is contrary to a lot of what it's too easy to think about God. It's too easy for us to have the kind of Christianity that thinks that God is just a lot of rules, that He doesn't want us to have any fun, that He doesn't want us to do anything ever. That God is all about danger, about calling us into difficult places and putting us at risk, asking us to do things that we don't want to do and never would do of our own volition. We think that God is about pushing us harder, calling us deeper, taking us away from everything we've known and loved into a boring, difficult life of something merely called "obedience" that feels like it has so very little to do with us and everything to do with a God that we just don't quite understand. 

It's easy for us to feel a little disconnection from our faith, like God's ways and God's rules aren't relevant to life in today's world. Like He just doesn't "get it," doesn't understand what 2019 requires of us in terms of being a person who lives in a community or being a person who holds onto a privatized faith or...whatever it is that we conceive of in this world. 

What we've lost sight of is the essential nugget of truth that is God's compassion, that is His purpose and intent. It's here in the Old Testament law, even in the midst of almost-constant battle, and it's reiterated again and again, no place better than in the life of Jesus. And that little nugget is this: 

God's primary concern is life, and life abundant. 

Every single one of God's rules and laws was meant to guard your life, not to ruin it. It was meant to enable you to thrive, not to suffocate you. It was intended to give you a way to live, not just offer you a good and holy way to die. 

Somewhere along the way, our Christianity got the idea that our faith is about dying well, but it's just not true. It's not true. The Christian faith, the very essence of everything God has ever said or done for us, is about living. It's about life. 

And if you've built a life but haven't lived it yet, God doesn't call you out to put all of that at risk. Not even in faith. He always, always calls you home. To your best life. To His best life. To life abundant.