Repentance and "Cultural Drek"

Brennan Manning in Abba's Child gives us my favorite quotation concerning politics and Christianity:

"The anything-goes passiveness of the religious and political Left is matched by the preachy moralism of the religious and political Right. The person who uncritically embraces any party line is guilty of an idolatrous surrender of their core identity as Abba’s Child. Neither liberal fairy dust nor conservative hardball addresses our ragged human dignity.

"Abba’s children seek a third option, guided first of all by God’s Word. All religious and political systems, Right as much as Left, are the work of human beings. Abba’s children will not sell out to conservatives or liberals. They cling to their freedom in Christ to live the gospel –uncontaminated by cultural drek, political debris, and the fancy footwork of bullying religion."

While I personally find myself making friends with many flaming liberal idealists, they frustrate me at the same time that they edify me, for exactly the reasons one of my commenters described- their cliche and oversimplification consistently fail to address the real issue. I wouldn't for a minute join their political camp. But while the Church is God's tool for bringing the Kingdom on earth, that did not stop God from transferring his anointing from Jews to gentiles and heathens under the New Covenant. A Church that continues en masse on the path of materialism and condemnation wouldn't surprise me if it ended up not being the Church anymore("Did we not prophesy in your name?...). Granola-eating pantheists, on the other hand, who consistently entertain principles of death to self, might just wake up one day to find themselves the heirs of the Kingdom as they breathe the words "Jesus is Lord."

I have called these people non-conformists. It is true in one sense and untrue in another. Like all human beings, they have fallen into pride and applied human solution after human solution to a spiritual problem. But subjective though my point of view is, in my experience the extreme political left has not bought the "cultural drek" that is regularly hawked by the entertainment industry, institutionalized religion, and American self-sufficiency. What they have done incorrectly is addressed (ad nauseum) in Christian and conservative circles, and it's for that reason that I don't feel the need to address it here.

I don't believe that attacking a culture of greed, which I'm prone to doing, is to attack the rich, or to elevate a life of simplicity over other lifestyles. I will never criticize the rich for being rich. Phariseeism knows no social class. But are Christians in this country elevating poverty to an idol? Not to my knowledge. My aim in Moving Out of Suburbia was to list corporate changes that could be made by American Christians to address sin issues that seem more pervasive here than anywhere else in the world, many related to wealth. I don't expect Christians to cease ownership of property. I do expect Christians to measure their lifestyles against the Biblical standard (not the American standard), and humbly ask for God to change them however he will. People who do this will eventually find themselves living heavenward and not retirement-ward.

When I say "you're not spiritual...rich...[or] talented," I'm once again preaching one side of a coin. The prodigious instrumentalist or singer is of course worthy of thanks and praise for his/her gift. Taking a "don't thank me, thank God" attitude is indeed drivel. Ascetism and self-denial for its own sake are neither humble nor spiritual. But in a culture that says "personal worth is not intrinsic to humanness, it's achieved and merited through works," I don't really seeing many people with an asceticism problem. Instead I'm seeing a self-indulgent culture(and Church) that think they own it all and they earned it all. My problem is not that people get credit for acting prudently, or nurturing skill, or accumulating wealth by honest means. But I do have a problem when Christians forsake the following "order of operations":

#1. Admit you are poor, sick, and in need.
#2. Admit there is nothing you can do to change this.
#3. God, by grace, bestows upon you forgiveness, salvation, and all that I have both material and immaterial.
#4. Now I am rich, spiritual, talented. I was blind, but now I see. But not until I've wept at the foot of the cross over the shackles of sin and the poverty of spirit that afflict me.

What we have in many of our churches is a cheap grace and a cheap Pentecost. This cheap grace places step #4 before step #1, even rejecting #1 and #2 altogether. This is in fact no grace at all, because this kind of self-reliance is equal to God-refusal. Lip service to grace tumbles from our mouths at the same time that we scramble to earn our worth in the Kingdom by walking in the gifts, studying the Bible more, and conspicuously "not sinning." My nearly offensive statement that "if you think you earned anything, I guess God's grace is not for you" is meant to speak to the works-orientation that, in many of our minds, qualifies us for citizenship in the Kingdom. Our intrinsic value rests in God's love for us, and this precludes us from deriving fundmental value from anything else in Creation. When we perceive that our righteousness depends on personal merit or actions, we have "already received our reward in full." God does not save people who don't want to be saved. Likewise, he does not bestow the righteousness born of his own holy nature upon those who have sought righteousness elsewhere. These are "the proud" that God opposes in Proverbs 3:34.

The cost of discipleship, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer found out in a very literal way, is your life. The nature of God's bountiful grace and provision is that a certain response is required of me. It's a response of humility and repentance. It's a response that is not required only at the moment of salvation, but every moment from then until my time on earth ends.