Valuing Our Differences

Valuing our Differences

by John V. Upton, Executive Director,Kingdom Advance
I think there is an important question that needs to be addressed in church life today.  It’s an uncomfortable question but one which forces itself on us whether we like it or not.  The question is:  Do people with strong differing commitments and styles need each other for balance and completion?
What I’ve learned is the answer to that question is “yes”.  One group needs the other because the other group has qualities that the first group lacks and needs to learn from; and without vital relationship between the two, each group succumbs to its worst tendencies and becomes a distortion.
I also know there are limits.  Differing commitments don’t always allow for relationship.  What could a committed humanitarian learn from a committed Nazi?  No real partnerships are possible between people whose differences are total and virulent.  And by other means, too, we may find that certain ways of being different can cancel the possibility of constructive relationship.  Would you mind me admitting on behalf of all of us that some folk are just plain crazy in ways that make meaningful relationship impossible?  So I’m not about to make a romantic case that all our differences are potentially helpful – they’re not – or that we all can be friends – we can’t.
But that point is as minor as it is obvious.  The larger point that we keep missing is how so many of the bewildering and sometimes maddening differences between us are indispensable for our good.
That’s what I think Paul meant in I Corinthians 12: 1-11.  If you were to ask the members of that church to describe the issue they would answer:  “Incompatibility!  We’ve got serious differences of opinion and commitment and styles here that are tearing us apart.”  But ask that same question of Paul and he answers, “No. Your problem is not that you differ, but that you fail to regard your differences as mutual gifts.”
Paul’s response is both gentle and relentless.  Your differences, he says, are actually gifts from God.  Your diversity is not a problem, it’s a bonanza!”  What else would you expect from a God who creates giraffes and humpback whales and amoebas and rose-breasted grosbeaks, and who paints the world in unnecessary colors?  The Creator irrepressibly diversifies.  God just endlessly spins out beauty and boggling variety.  And it shows up on us.
Here is what I know.  Each gift God gives is linked to a particular kind of personality.  Whatever gift the Spirit can grow in any of us will not be unconnected from our essential way of being in the world.  Which means that whoever has a gift very different from mine will generally have a personality and disposition very different from mine.  And there, as they say, is the rub.  That’s what makes it hard – that the differing attributes scripture celebrates as spiritual gifts are invariably attached to differing personalities that, when they rub against each other, cause friction.  And who wants friction?  So we cluster to our types, avoid sustained relationship with our opposites, and hang out with the occupants of our comfort zones.  And why not?
Well, Paul insists that these differences have a purpose; they are gifts given for “the common good” (v. 7).  They are not for isolation but for integration.  These differences are necessary for you to learn from and to be completed by and to balance what you bring.  They are necessary for growing us up.  Apart from honest, vulnerable interaction with people unlike ourselves, we will never know the meaning of community or the real meaning of family; and we lose our chance to become a whole human being.
Many of us who marry come to realize through the years that this was the ultimate point of the partnership we made.  Apparently we unconsciously knew that the spouse we found was different from us in precisely such a way that we would have to learn from them and find balance in them and grow by them, or just go crazy.  On some days our differences are our dismay.  Understanding our differences as bearing life-changing gifts, they become and remain our delight.
This, according to Paul, is largely the meaning of being a church or a state convention.  Don’t wish for a church where we’re all alike and we all vote the same and believe the same and apply our convictions the same.  If you’re looking for lockstep, try looking in hell.  If you’re looking for the Spirit, head for the people who are willing to be various together, people who bring differing notes and who lean toward each other and listen to each other and work at making it a harmony.  A church is a people who for love of Christ learn not to tolerate each other’s differences but who celebrate them because they are being forged to wholeness as the body of Christ.
In writing this I found myself embarrassed.  I am recalling feelings of judgment against people whose way and whose gifts differ from my own.  I am embarrassed and am working at my repentance.  If you have, like me, disparaged the necessary differences in people around you, may I invite you also to be embarrassed, and to make your own repentance by thanking God for what they give that you cannot.  While you’re at it, thank God for what you and only you can bring to them from the same irrepressibly generous Spirit.

Used with permission.

Kingdon Advance

Holy Week:  Dying Words

There wasn’t one cross, there were three. All the gospels make a point of saying that it was a group execution. Jesus is not even given the distinction of a spot-lighted solo death; he’s inserted to make a party of three, a last-minute addition to someone else’s execution.

We all know about the placard hung above Jesus’ head: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” This was standard at a crucifixion. Post the name and the crime with the horribly dying body so all who pass by can see. If the other two crosses had placards, the names didn’t survive into the Bible’s accounts; only their crime survives. “Bandits,” we’re told – meaning insurrectionists against Roman rule, guerillas ambushing a convoy here, hitting an outpost there, taking and killing where they could. Luke just calls them both “evildoers.” So there is Jesus, keeping the same kind of company as always. As in his ministry, so now more grimly in his death, he embodies the words of a long-ago prophet: “he … was numbered with the transgressors” (Isaiah53:12)

.Sometimes I think we are too harsh toward the one who reviled Jesus. Maybe he had his reasons. Awful pain had seized him, the panic of dying was in his throat – maybe
for an instant he had dared to entertain some mad hope that this so-called messiah might really pull something off. But then, no, he can plainly see that the so-called messiah is already nearly dead – and isn’t that just like hope, to die before you do! So he screams bitter words at the crucified Jesus. Luke says that the other of the two actually defended Jesus to his comrade, “Do you not fear God?  You and I are guilty. We earned this. But this man did nothing wrong.” And then he does something that no one else in all the gospels ever did. He addressed Jesus simply by his name: “Jesus.” Others called him Teacher, Rabbi, Master, Lord – a very few said, “Jesus, Son of David.”

But in the whole record, no one had ever once just called him by his simple name. Only now does it happen, from someone who is dying. This is how the dying speak: each word simple and earnest as breath. “Jesus.”

“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” That’s the whole of what he said. “Think of me, Jesus. Remember me, Jesus. In your kingdom, Jesus.”

Who knows if, as he spoke, he really thought Jesus in his own death struggle could even hear the words. But the most wonderful thing happens. Jesus lifts his head, the great face turns, and words are given back: “Truly I tell you, today. You will be with me in Paradise.”

Any number of people overhearing such an exchange between two convicts bleeding to death would have no doubt this was delirium talking, just the nonsense of two delusional, dying fools. We might think that ourselves, if we’re just observing this from some safe distance. But I doubt we should assume any distance for ourselves

This is Holy Week, and it involves a dying before it involves a living. I think this story is recorded in such detail for us by all four gospels because we are being asked to imagine our own dying, which comes to us in so many ways. In just a few minutes I’m going to stop by the hospital to visit a young mother who may lose her first-born child today and death is deep and real. In a way, the man talking with Jesus from his own cross is a sign of what Jesus’ death cannot do for us; it cannot deliver us from death or from our own dying. In some ways, that is us up there, our lives draining away, Slowly but steadily, irreversibly.

And some of us can see ourselves in him, not just because we’re dying. Some of us know we have our own guilt, that our lives too have done real damage as well. And we are in no more position to undo any of it than if we were pinned and suspended from the ground like that evildoer.

What a vision of our awful powerlessness he is, fixed like that, and finished, and nothing even left He can ask for, just this simple, dumb request; –“Jesus? Think of me? In your kingdom?”

And like this one, we hear an answer too. Only it’s so far beyond an answer to what he and we actually asked. It’s like a beggar asking a king for a penny, and the king gives him the whole kingdom. Someone with nothing prays, “Remember me when …” And Jesus answers with the whole green garden of God, this very day!!

Isn’t it amazing how silly and how sad we are, hoping somehow to get things right, wishing we knew what we don’t, dreaming of resolving our lives? If we could just get it right and think right. If we could somehow get it prayed right. The dying criminal shows how badly we miss the point. The point is not to get all of it right, or any of it right, not us who have no power but to want and to need and to ask the simplest thing: “Jesus, remember me.”

Sometimes we say these words crudely, often with a sob or a sigh, because we can’t begin to say what we really need. It is then that his ruined hand reaches for the Paradise gate and opens it wide. It is opened not just for those to pass through on some far-off tomorrow. It is also opened for us this very day, to grant us the sweet, abiding company of the One who does indeed remember us and gives us abundantly more than we had known to ask. Isn’t it wonderful we have Holy Week to remind us of this?

John Upton, Executive Director,
BGAV and VBMB

Used with permission.

Kingdom Advance

No Matter What
by John V. Upton, Executive Director, BGAV AND VBMB

These days I find myself wanting to get back to the basics of what faith and church and witness and spiritual nurture are all about. It has been a slow, enjoyable, and painful endeavor because words are strange little things to put to faith. Yet words have the power to create, for evil or good. Take the word “fire.” It’s just one syllable. But by common agreement it stands for something real and quite dangerous. Just saying the word has actual power to create responses and         cause panic. The word “fire” is so dangerous that it is illegal to shout it in a crowded room if the real thing isn’t there.

At the same time, words are very fragile. As powerful as a particular word might be, you can easily drain it completely of all its strength and meaning. All you have to do is repeat it over and over again – fire, fire, fire, fire, fire – and now it’s nothing but meaningless noise. Sadly and inevitably, it happens to some of our very best words. Precisely because certain words stand for the best that we know, we want to say them often, and we unwittingly put them at risk.

One of those words happens to be the cornerstone word of our faith: “love.” And when I want to get back to the basic of what all this faith business is about, it often rings empty and shallow. Love, love, love, love, love – how many times have we heard that word or read it or said it or sung it? In all this usage of the greatest of words, it has cooled, faded, and flattened into a vague and routine sound. It’s an ongoing challenge for us who mean to care to keep on hearing and saying the word “love” in ways that are fresh and real and true.

It wasn’t always like this. When I was a young child, it really did mean something to me. I couldn’t define it in words, but I can tell you how it felt. It felt like pleasantness. It was warm like a smile, cheerful like a friend, secure like a pair of arms holding me. This was my experience of how the One who made me cherished me – especially if I had been good! “God is love” and “Jesus loves me” felt like that. Did it feel like that to you? Does it still?

I have to be honest and say that for me it has changed, because my early understanding of God’s love was too simple minded, too innocent, and too small to last. But even as I outgrew my understanding of it, I kept right on saying it, singing it, and hearing it until, sure enough, it flattened into sound that didn’t carry much power. God loves me – well, of course. This wasn’t news. At least most days, it didn’t amaze me or move me, which is to say that like many people, perhaps even you, I had stopped really hearing “God loves.”

What can restore our hearing? Unfortunately, it often takes hardship or grief – the hardship of a failed marriage or a lost job or grief over a dreaded disease, poor choices, the loss of a loved one, or an utterly destroyed illusion of oneself. Something happens to us that eventually open us up again to the words “God loves.”

We discover that God’s love isn’t about pleasantness or innocence. It’s about the way things actually are. We believe the world was created good, but it’s very badly broken now. And I am badly broken and so are you and so are all our families and all our communities and all our countries and our churches. Amidst all that, what can be said about God’s love? I think most of us have assumed that what God really loves is the world as it might be, that God loves us as we still might become, loves us as we fulfill the dreams God had for us. But that kind of thinking is dangerously false because it leads into dangerous naiveté or dangerous expectations of ourselves or dangerous despair.

Here is what I have come to hold as true and what I believe the Bible declares: God, the Creator, who is Holy and perfect good, entirely loves the world exactly as it is and entirely loves us as we actually are – flawed, ignorant, guilty, hopeful, trying, failing, loving, hating, and dying. God is love toward the world as it is and us as we are in whatever good place or bad place we are actually in. God is down in those places with us and suffers those places with us. Fully knowing what the world might have been and might yet become, fully knowing who we might have been and might still become, God loves the actual world and us, suffers the actual world and us, never ceasing, never retreating, never letting go, always embracing, always enduring – always, no matter what, God is love. That is the one power that can change us, and it will.

Shame can’t cut us off. Feeling abandoned or anxious or angry can’t cut us off. Failure and sin can’t cut us off. Confusion and sorrow and weariness can’t cut us off. “So high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get under it, so wide you can’t get around it.” As you are, where you are, you are joined, accepted, borne, forgiven, entirely loved. Let that amaze you and let it move you. Over time it will even change you and me. Now, that’s getting back to the basics.

With Permission

Kingdom Advance by John Upton

A Place at the Table

by John V. Upton, Executive Director, BGAV and VBMB

It was to be a quick visit just before lunch with a home-bound church member named Mrs. Hannah. As I sat in a rose-colored armchair, Mrs. Hannah announced, “You’ll be staying for lunch.” I listed all the things I had to do, trying to excuse myself, but she insisted, “You are too busy. Everyone has to eat. I’ll get the table ready.”

That was that.

“Please don’t go to any trouble,” I insisted. Of course, out came the ancient linen tablecloth. The ritual of preparation had begun. Undisturbed by my chatter, she placed the crystal glasses – rich Irish cut glass, a gift of her wedding day. The china was a pattern of over 60 years of marriage.

“You’ll have to stop talking for now. I’m going in the kitchen for a few minutes; just make yourself at home,” she said, “and don’t follow me into the kitchen. I don’t like people staring at me when I’m cooking gravy.”

“Some small meal,” I thought to myself.

I settled back in the rose-colored chair as she disappeared into the holy of holies to concoct the meal. I could smell the biscuits rising to a golden brown, the ham sizzling in the pan; hear ice cubes tinkling in the glasses. While I waited, a quick glance at the living room spoke volumes about her life. There were the browning pictures of “Mr. Hannah,” as she called him, and a tattered old Bible resting on the coffee table, not for show, but obviously used daily.

Soon Mrs. Hannah burst forth from the kitchen with dishes steaming like incense and announced, “Come to the table.” I sat in a large oak chair with arms. “Mr. Hannah’s chair,” she said. “Give thanks, John.” I did. After a few wonderful mouthfuls and a few inane comments by me about how good everything was, she said to me, “Pastor, perhaps you forgot how difficult it is to eat alone. I never feel alone in my home, except at mealtimes. Mr. Hannah said when we invited company for dinner, which we did often, ‘the Lord never intended us to eat by ourselves.’”

There is a table in most Baptist churches. It is called the communion table, a place where all are welcome in the name of Christ. It is where – in the presence of Christ – we commune as his family. At this table we are reminded that Christ died to make us brothers and sisters. That is why at New Year’s many churches celebrate the new year with a communion service. At this table we open ourselves to be kin with all who are kin to Him – at our local church, here in Virginia, and all over the world. Indeed, “the Lord never intended us to eat by ourselves.”

Happy New Year Virginia Baptists!

Used with permission.