Christian hospitality.

When C.S. Lewis wrote his book The Four Loves—a treatise on four ancient Greek words which mean “love”—he skipped a word, xenía. That’s a particular sort of love people show towards xenós/“[welcome] strangers,” also known as hospitality.

I find it odd he missed it, since it’s kind of a big deal in ancient Greek culture. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, his book of moral myths, he told the story of Baucis and Philemon, an old, poor couple from the town of Phrygia, who were the only folks to take in a pair of strangers. When Baucis noticed her jar of wine wasn’t getting any emptier, she realized the strangers were gods: Zeus and Hermes, actually. (And when Barnabas and Paul visited Lystra and healed someone, the Lystrans freaked out and assumed they were Zeus and Hermes, Ac 14.8-13 ’cause they knew their mythology.) The gods, in gratitude for their hospitality—and in ire at the Phrygians’ rejection—told ’em to run away, for they were gonna flood the town. Yeah, it’s a bit like the Lot story; Ge 19 one has to wonder if there wasn’t some plagiarism involved. But the point is, the Greeks knew better than to dismiss strangers. After all, as the writer of Hebrews warned us Christians, one might be entertaining angels unaware. He 13.2

Or Jesus.

New fruit!

Most Christians know Paul’s list of the “fruit of the Spirit,” those attributes of the Holy Spirit’s character which Christians, when we follow him, ought to produce. The list of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control Ga 5.22-23 isn’t comprehensive, but it’s a start.

Problem is, it’s much easier to indulge in the works of the flesh—our instinctive, self-focused, Spirit-opposing attitudes are as unlike Christ as anything. I’ll quote St. Paul; again, it’s not a comprehensive list.

The works of the flesh are obvious in anyone who is the following: Promiscuous. Unclean. Unethical. Idolatrous. Drug-hooked. Hate-filled. Argumentative. Overzealous. Angry. Partisans. Dividers. Heretics. Envious. A stoner. A partier. And other people like these. I warn you of them just like I warned you before: Those who do such things won’t inherit God’s Kingdom.

—Paul, Galatians 5.19-21 KWL

But for those Christians who want to indulge in these traits—and find cheap grace isn’t as useful an excuse as it once was—our wider Christian culture has invented two new “fruits” to accommodate them.

Why I don’t want to go to church: No freedom.

Bit of a rant today. (Aren’t they all?)

One evening during prayer—when people will pray, but if they want to, they can sing along with the worship leader—we were singing,

Where the Spirit of the Lord is

There is freedom

I lift my hands to Jesus

There is freedom

Certain people in my church are fond of saying we have perfect freedom to worship God in this place. A little too fond of saying it. (What they really mean, I suspect, is they get to sing their favorite songs during the Sunday services.) That evening—partially, I admit, out of pure mischievousness—I decided to test the truth of that saying. I changed the next slide to

I shake my butt for Jesus

There is freedom

’Cause if we have freedom, and the Spirit leads, we can do that. Right?

I very quickly heard about it from the prayer leader. She was outraged. Mainly ’cause of the word “butt.” It wasn’t blasphemy, but it was at least lèse-majesté. Good thing I didn’t use the other word I was considering.

But… freedom! Don’t we have the freedom to shake what your mama done gave ya, for Jesus? Or to at least say so? Don’t we have perfect freedom to worship God?

No we don’t. Not in my church. Nor any church. People have hangups. We shouldn’t, but we do. And our hangups become our churches’ holdups. God is totally pleased with a diversity of worship expressions. We aren’t.

Sin kills. God brings new life.

People are weirded out by death. We avoid talking or thinking about it. Unrealistically, a lot of us don’t make plans for our own deaths, or for the deaths of anyone we know and love. We freak out when our loved ones do die. Heck, we freak out when strangers die in front of us.

That’s because, deep down, everyone knows that human death isn’t normal. We’re not meant to die. Plants and animals die, and that’s just part of the natural circle of life. But we innately understand human death is different. We have to psyche ourselves into believing it’s natural. But our instinctive reaction is closer to the truth: It’s not natural. We shouldn’t die. It’s just wrong. We should keep living, forever. Right?

Right.

Sharing one’s heart.

This month the synchrobloggers are discussing “ordinary courage,” a concept described by Brené Brown in this way.

Courage originally meant “to speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.” Over time, this definition has changed, and, today, courage is more synonymous with being heroic. Heroics are important and we certainly need heroes, but I think we’ve lost touch with the idea that speaking honestly and openly about who we are, about what we’re feeling, and about our experiences (good and bad) is the definition of courage. Heroics are often about putting our life on the line. Ordinary courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line.

—Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, pp. 12-13

I’ve heard people describe this sort of thing using the Christianese term “share one’s heart,” as in “I’d like to share my heart on this subject.”

Yeah, Christians use the term, like “my spirit,” to make something sound more spiritual than it actually is. Half the time they just want to vent their spleen. But they want to sound Christian about it.

Sharing from the invisible knapsack.

This month’s synchroblog subject is on the “invisible knapsack.” Anti-racist activist Peggy McIntosh coined the term to refer to the privileges she, as a white person, experiences, didn’t earn, doesn’t necessarily merit, and doesn’t necessarily think about; they’re just resources she has that others don’t. “White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack,” she wrote, “of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.”

Ironically, you can’t really talk about the experience of wearing the invisible knapsack unless you are the beneficiary of white privilege—i.e. you’re white, or pass for white. So I suppose that’s another thing we can tuck into the knapsack, as all the non-white synchrobloggers try to figure out how on earth they’re gonna tackle this subject without coming across as frustrated with clueless white people.

Well, I’m white, so I can talk about my experience at least, and then—since this blog is about following Jesus, after all—tie it together with how any of these revelations might help all of us, white and nonwhite, follow him better.

When Jesus made a funny.

In the gospel of John, the idea that Jesus’s “time has not yet come” repeats a few times. It’s John (and Jesus’s) way of saying the end hasn’t arrived yet: He went to Jerusalem late for Sukkot because it wasn’t yet time, and people couldn’t arrest him when they wished because it wasn’t yet time. When it was time, of course, he’d be arrested and crucified. But not yet.

There’s one other instance of this turn of phrase: When Jesus was at a wedding in Cana, and his mom came to him to tell him they were out of wine. His response? “Dear woman, that’s not our problem. My time has not yet come.”

Undoing the subordination of women.

Women are unequal to men.

This is the biological reality, anyway: Women are physically different from men. Different hormones, different physical characteristics and limitations, different organs, different “plumbing” (as one of my former pastors liked to put it), and different roles in the family unit when it comes to bearing and nursing children. Whether these physical differences are the causes of our cultural differences, is debatable. But there they are.

Human cultures have singled out these differences, and used them as justification for treating women different than men. Usually as inferiors: They’re determined to be physically weaker, emotionally weaker, or intellectually weaker. As a result they’re not entrusted with certain jobs or responsibilities or rights. In some cultures women have no rights: They’re the property of the men of their family. They’re born into slavery.

How does God feel about this issue?

Wealth, Christians, and justice.

This post is part of a synchroblog, a bunch of different Christian bloggers reacting to a common topic. Wanna get in on it? Visit the synchroblog blog.

I’ve been asked, and not just by the Synchroblog leaders, about what Christians ought to think about economic inequality—the fact that the rich in our country have considerably more wealth, and considerably more influence over our society and government, than do the poor. Certainly many protesters don’t think this is right; and certainly many rich people (or people who want to be rich, and hope to someday take advantage of these advantages) don’t want the status quo to change. What does God think of this? What ought Christians think of this?

What is God challenging you to do?

This post is part of a synchroblog, a bunch of different Christian bloggers reacting to a common topic. Wanna get in on it? Visit the synchroblog blog.

This month’s synchroblog topic is “Calling us out of numbness,” and uses at its starting point some questions that we Christians need to ask ourselves on a regular basis. I realize the point of the synchroblog is for me to answer these questions, but I’m gonna start by challenging my readers to answer these questions for themselves.

• What’s stirring up in you?
• What’s God challenging you to consider?
• How does it intersect with your faith and practical experience?

Devilish misinformation.

“All war is based on deception,” begins Sunzi’s famous treatise The Art of War, and that’s likewise true of spiritual war. It’s to the devil’s advantage that people don’t know what it is. Nor what power it commands, or doesn’t. Previously I explained what it is and isn’t. This time around, my emphasis is on why we’re willing to believe—and perpetuate—the myths about the devil.

The most obvious reason is the one I hear immediately after I rebuke one of the devil myths. Essentially it’s, “You underestimate the devil.”