I'm Kind of a Big Deal

At last we come to the end: Act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly. Now for the “walk humbly” part.

It would be hard to argue the fact that Will Ferrell’s supreme gift is his ability to create  characters that are big, loud, dumb - yet somehow lovable - horse’s rear ends. In so doing, he exposes the tendency in us all to think a little more highly of ourselves than our actual greatness merits. The prima facie case, of course, is his ass-ertion in “Anchor Man”:

“I’m not sure how to say this, but I’m kind of a big deal.”

I think most of the time I’m painfully aware of my own weaknesses and shortcomings. But there are days. Days when it’s easy to believe you are the sharpest crayon in your little box. Which reminds me of a North Dakotan joke (we tell those in Montana): What do you call a North Dakotan with half a brain? A genius. You see what I mean? Now I’ve isolated my North Dakotan readership with arrogant presumption and derision of their mental proficiencies. If they have finally gotten the Internet there, I’m hosed!

And God asks us to walk humbly with Him. Which leads the finite logical mind to start down a road of self-justification. We ask:

“Why does God care if we are humble? If He’s so great and we’re so..not great, what’s He trying to prove? Does He need us to grovel to feel good about Himself? Does He just want us constantly reminded we are less than navel lint? Is He that insecure?”

There’s a whole school of thought in Christianity that focuses squarely on one core truth, first and foremost: all of humanity is sinful, fallen, broken, perverted, lost, and incapable of even the slightest shred of decency. This fact is driven home with endless lists of why, how, and for which of our acts we are eternally fallen beyond all repair. Jonathan Edwards delivered the master thesis on the subject, and though many others have followed, few have matched his rhetorical sound and fury. Here’s a fun quote:

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: ’tis a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the damned in hell; you hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.

The thing is, Edwards and his ilk are totally right. We are scum. And outside of life in Jesus, incapable of any goodness of our own. But this is not the core message of the Gospel. Else wise (to use the olde English) it is not that great of news. It’s like having your death sentence commuted to life in solitary confinement. You’ve escaped death, but to live what kind of life?

Even Edwards did not focus entirely on God’s wrath (though he and the other Awakening chaps seemed a bit obsessed with the subject). The insanely good news the Gospel represents, as we have said before, is that we are freed from death to life. Real, complete, and full life. In redeeming us from our sins, God is acting to set the world right – to operate as He intended, in relationship with us.

So back to walking humbly. I think it’s about balance (surprise, surprise). Our focus is not on how sinful and hopeless our nature is (though we agree it is). Jesus died for our sins so we can be free from them and their guilt. But our eyes are also not fixed squarely on just how special we are because we have been brought to the truth. We are no better in and of ourselves, but we also no longer rely on our own goodness alone.

On the other end of things from those who flog their congregations weekly with just how rotten they are (not a hard hypothesis to support) are the equally imbalanced Christian Tony Robbinses (is that the plural of Robbins?) who tout the greatness of themselves, their church, their teachings, and so on.

Not long ago I saw a TV commercial for a church showing good looking, young, suburban hipsters sitting at church together and having many good times reading the Bible. The voice over was a pastor saying how the people of the church were “cool, and smart, and good looking.”  I am not making this up. Translation: Jesus makes your teeth whiter and your clothes hipper and your IQ higher. As if. And monkeys might…

The grunge / indie / urban / emergent / emerging /  new skool / postmodern – whatever you call the Christians with their finger on the pulse of American culture (I can’t keep the names straight) – dudes now have an even newer twist on this old trend: putting together websites to critique the ridiculousness and excesses of other Christians, or even rate their churches. Translation: the idiots we write about are lame, but we know they are, so we are not lame. We are cool Christian people who are hip and with the times. You know – like all the guys back in high school who had to tell you they were cool and / or not lame. Those guys rocked!

And here I am blogging about how much better I am than them, because I have seen their hypocrisy. Oops.

You see the problem, right? Both ends suffer from a Ron Burgandy brand of narcissism. “I’m kind of a big deal.” And God reminds us to walk humbly – to remember that we are capable of excess, and capable of excessively critiquing the excesses of others. To recall the state we were rescued from, and to remember that apart from God’s grace we’d slide right back into it. And to put our sin in its place – not as the center of our every conversation, but nailed to the Cross.

 And nothing rings more true in my own soul than this great truth: “In Him we live, and move, and have our being.” That is, everything on earth draws its life and breath and existence from God Himself. And in realizing that I am utterly dependent on Him, not only for salvation, but for my daily existence, I find the most profound peace and comfort. I am not a big deal. But I know someone who is. And for now, He covers me.

It’s pretty easy for me to think I’m a big deal. It’s also pretty easy for me to become obsessed with my own shortcomings, replaying my own “fail blog” in my my head in the darkest hours of the night. But God invites me to walk humbly with Him. Not on my own with my issues, not full of my own greatness. With Him. And I really like that idea.

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Also in that intervening time I have been putting much thought and action into these faith concepts. Since not many people currently read this and no one is dying without new content, I am finding it more important to write something well-crafted than to just write something. But I am also going to try to keep these shorther – people got lives .

All preliminaries out of the way – I have been thinking a lot of how Jesus teaches us to do good things. It seems from the things He says that He is not only interested in what we do, but why and how we do it. Here’s an example:

Matthew 6

Giving to the Needy

 ¹“Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

 ²“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. ³But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, ⁴so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Obviously it’s impossible to do every act of righteousness in complete secrecy. But the intent is clear (from this and many other verses) – Jesus’ command is that we think carefully about our motives for doing the good we do.

This is what makes people of faith so different than other activists. Our primary audience is Jesus, not public opinion. While we are certainly interested in teaching others to participate in the same activities, this is not our primary purpose for doing it. And whether or not someone participates in the same activities does not change our opinion of their importance – we are doing what Jesus told us to, not what we in our infinite wisdom have decided is important.

As such, it becomes very easy to recruit others to the same world-view – it isn’t ours, so we don’t have to be defensive, reactionary, or militant. We simply show by our humble service a better way to live and interact with the world as God intended. And that is not only radical and revolutionary, but also very infectious.

Let me give an example from a completely unrelated field that should bring this into sharp focus. There are three main rivals in the computing platform space – PCs running Windows, PCs running Linux, and Apple computers running the Mac OS. For the sake of argument, let’s leave out the open-source guys and compare the two you have to pay for (oooh – maybe I’ll get flamed by Linux enthusiasts!). Most Windows users use Windows because that’s what the computer came with that they were provided for work or school or from grandma for Christmas. Most Mac users use a Mac very deliberately – they have specifically chosen to spend more on the hardware and software and deal with lack of Mac support in the business space because they want to own and use a Mac.

Both have their reasons, but since Mac folk have made a conscious choice, they tend to be far more opinionated on the subject. This has lead to the birth of many a “Mac Evangelist”, most famously skewered in what is arguably the best Simpsons episode ever. 

I have no issue with Mac. In fact, I have great appreciation for the platform, the hardware, and salivate when I see an iPhone (curse you, two year contract with another cell phone company keeping me and iPhone coolness apart!). I do, however, use PCs exclusively in my work, and do so by choice, even though I work in the graphic design / video production / web world, and two out of three of those worlds are primarily peopled by Mac dudes and dudettes.

I have my reasons. First, I was too broke and too cheap in the beginning of my career to afford Macs. Now that I can, I have too much invested in PC software and gear to switch over (cause I’m still cheap). And in the Web space, which occupies 90% of my time now, there are a lot of things you just can’t do on a Mac (unless you boot it into the evil Windows OS).

These arguments hold no water with the Mac pushers. They openly mock my choices and deride my sad subservience to the evil, monolithic Microsoft Corporation (’cause Apple is far more open-source and non-monopolistic, unless of course you want to use your iPhone on another cell phone service. But I digress). Their scorn of my non Mapple-ness (see Simpsons clip above) does not make me want an Apple more. It makes me want to defend my lack of one. And it leaves a little twinge of unhappiness, cause if I could, I would join the club.

I don’t spend a lot of time trying to evangelize people in the way of the PC. Since you can get one almost for free these days and everybody’s got ‘em, I don’t have to. I also don’t actively look around for Mac users to tell them how silly they are for using a platform I don’t. But if someone observes the work I do, and asks me what I use, and then asks me why, I am glad to give my reasoned defense. And I often have more productive conversations in that scenario than I do trying to defend myself from angry Mac-abees, flaying me with their white iPod earbuds, because a person who asks a question is usually interested in the answer.

I think the reason so many folk think people of faith have a “I’m better than you because of the good stuff I do” attitude is because…well…we sometimes do. Rather than beat people over the head and try to advance our own sense of self-worth by displaying our righteous acts like an iPhone whipped out at a client meeting, the goodness God calls us to is to be evident to everyone, but the main target audience is Jesus Himself. It can’t be hidden, but we also can’t do it just to be seen. In the process of living like Jesus taught us, lots of folk will see it and ask questions. and then we have the chance to have a real conversation with someone who wants to know, not just an innocent PC-toting bystander.

This is of course where the analogy falls a bit short – we are also instructed clearly to purposefully go out and make disciples, which means we have to do more than passively do good and hope someone will ask about it. But most of our evangelizing is wasted on those who aren’t listening, and some attention to soil preparation and tactfully waiting for the right moment wouldn’t hurt our chances – might help quite a bit.

Long way to say a simple thing. But that’s how I roll. Gotta go reinstall Windows on a PC with the blue screen of death now. Stupid PCs.

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