Learning from a Foreigner

We Americans think we’re so smart. While non-Americans often love the idea of America, they’re not so wild about Americans. They consider us loud and arrogant. You know why? Because Americans tend to be loud and arrogant. God has blessed me with the opportunity to see various places in the world. It’s usually easy to pick out the Americans that are there. They’re the loud ones. They’re the ones who seem to carry a sense of entitlement to whatever they want: attention, service, a better bargain, respect, deferential treatment, an expectation that the whole world should speak English. Nothing personal here, but compared to others in the world, Americans do tend to be loud and arrogant.

And that’s a shame because there is so much we could learn if we’d shut the heck up and listen to those outside of our culture and our country. Travel to Latin America or Africa, and if you’re paying attention you’ll learn that time should be our servant rather than our master. That’s a hard lesson to learn for those of us who live by the clock, on the clock, and with a clock on our wrist when we’re awake and by our bed when we’re asleep. But instead of learning such a helpful truth, we Americans tend to categorize the non-time-conscious as lazy or unfocused or ignorant. And we arrogantly pronounce that judgment as we pop a couple of heart pills and swig our ulcer medicine. We can learn a thing or two from foreigners.

Just yesterday, one of my Russian friends preached in the church that I serve. His name is Pavel Ruseev. He’s really good at Russian but barely speaks a lick of English. He’s a pastor in Russia with a great vision to plant churches in a nation that doesn’t have a church on every corner or even in every town. I met him a couple of years ago in Russia and bonded with him immediately. He’s young, he’s passionate, he’s entrepreneurial, and he’s trying to do God’s work in a culture that’s blowing a 100 mph wind in his face no matter which direction he turns. I don’t see how he does this and keeps his sanity at the same time. Must be God’s grace. Anyway, he preached a very fine sermon yesterday on Jesus’ great commandment to love God and love others. But I don’t want to talk about his sermon; I want to talk about the three things he said that have stood out to him about American culture in the month or so he’s been here.

Pavel said he is amazed at the size of food portions in our restaurants. In Russia, a little dab will do you. In America, load up the plate—“Can you use a bigger serving spoon, please?” “Super-size that for me, would you?” My first thought was that he wouldn’t be quite so surprised about the size of food portions in America if he would just look at the size of so many Americans. We don’t miss many meals and we usually go back for seconds. Geez … who knows what Pavel might have thought had he visited an all-you-can-eat buffet! So many in the world are hungry, and we keep piling it on the plate. Pavel didn’t seem offended by this, more amazed really. But it kind of offended me. We Americans could do better, you know. I could do better. Eat a little less, share a little more, care about the hungry and find ways to help.

Here’s a second thing that stood out to Pavel: Americans do so much of life without having to get out of the car. He said, “You go to a restaurant, and you don’t have to get out of your car to get your food. You go to the bank, and you don’t have to get out of the car to do your business. In Fayetteville, I went to a movie and didn’t have to get out of the car to see it. I was in Arkansas a week-and-a-half before I took my first walk.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that there are a few places in America he could even go to church without getting out of the car. Pavel’s right, you know. He lives in a culture that relies on public transportation and shoe leather. Only the more well-to-do can afford a personal car; everybody else walks or takes the bus. And if you take a bus you’ve still got to walk some distance to the bus stop. He talked about his grandmother who used to walk to the nearest church every weekend. It was 45 miles away. She left on Saturday and returned home late Sunday evening. “You do everything from your car,” he said. I’m just glad he didn’t ride with somebody who drove around a Walmart parking lot for ten minutes just trying to get the spot closest to the door. Even though getting plenty of exercise is not a problem for me, his comments made me want to use my body more and my machine less.

Pavel then said that the third thing that stuck out to him about American culture is this: so many, many churches. He had no idea. Oh, he knew America was far more churched than Russia, but he had no idea that there really was a church on almost every corner. This observation struck me at a deep level. On the one hand, I was grieved for Russia and the need for more gospel witness, more churches, more communities of faith for a people so in need of Christ. On the other hand, I was grieved for America: so many churches, so little gospel witness; so many churches, so few devoted disciples of Jesus; so many churches, so little impact on our culture, so little assistance to the poor and those in need—and why? Maybe it’s because we’re more about glitz than God’s glory, more about entertainment than worship, more about self than others, more about “our church” than God’s kingdom. Most American Christians see the church as an organization they can use to make their life a little better rather than as the bride and body of Christ which forms me as a disciple of Jesus and sends me into the world in His name and for His glory. How else can you explain the disparity between the number of churches and the lack of influence? Pavel’s words stirred in me a desire to be a better pastor, to love and serve Christ’s church more deeply and encourage others to do the same.

So forgive me, God, for being an arrogant American who thinks I know more than folks from other cultures. And thank you, Pavel, for teaching me a thing or two about my own culture. I’ve always wanted to be a lifelong learner—even when that learning comes through a foreigner.

We Don't Speak Christian Anymore

It comes as no surprise that our culture is post-Christian. Some would argue that it was never “Christian” to begin with. Ask the American Indian about our Christian culture. Ask black Americans how Christian our culture was to them. Maybe we never were all that Christian as a culture, but we leaned that direction in some ways. There are still vestiges of something of a Christian culture lingering here and there—like describing an athletic mismatch as “David vs. Goliath” or hearing someone talk of a hardship as their "cross to bear." But for the most part, any Christian culture we once had has been swallowed up by secularity. Some say it started with Madelyn Murray O’Hair’s victorious lawsuit to get state-sponsored prayer out of the public schools. Others will point to the repeal of the so called “blue laws” that required all but essential businesses (drugstores, for example) to close their doors on Sunday, in a sort of tip of the hat to the Sabbath and to free up employees to attend church if they so chose. All of this is old news.

But I was reminded of still more leakage of Christian culture in the last few days when New York Congressman Anthony Weiner was caught with his tweets pulled down. Apparently, he tweeted some pictures of himself in his undies to some ladies (who were not his wife). As is always the case there was the typical denial and “we don’t have enough information to comment at this time.” But that didn’t last for long. Soon the word and the pictures were out, and, like Amazon piranhas, the media-types were chewing him alive. It reminded me a good bit of the Tiger Woods mess a couple of years ago and of the John Edwards and Arnold Schwarzenegger soap operas that have been in the news more recently.

I’m not reflecting on this to throw another stone at Anthony Weiner. He’s a big boy, and like all big boys he’s going to have to man-up and face the consequences of his actions both personally and professionally. The reason this caught my attention was the way this is talked about in the media. His behavior is viewed as some kind of “sickness” for which he needs some kind of “treatment.” And would anyone be all that surprised in the months to come if we don’t find out that poor Mr. Weiner had some kind of trauma or disappointment in his childhood that led to this behavior? In other words, Mr. Weiner may not be a culprit here after all; he may be a sad victim of a parent’s neglect or a broken home or some event bringing on these latent tendencies in his life.

That’s the way our culture talks about these kinds of things. Do you notice that the Christian language of sin and guilt and personal responsibility is rarely mentioned in our post-Christian culture? We don’t speak Christian anymore. And that’s too bad. It’s precisely Christian language that gets at the heart of such behavior. Sin speaks of our behavior on a level that words like mistake and miscalculation and screw-up and bad judgment and moral failure just can’t reach. Those terms have a self-orientation. The word sin gives our behavior a God-orientation and points us to the only One who can truly repair what’s broken in our lives.

A good dose of Psalm 51 would do us a lot of good. You remember that psalm? That’s a psalm of King David. That’s his prayer and reflection after the prophet Nathan exposed what David thought was a pretty clever cover-up of his adultery with Bathsheba and his sort of murder of Bathsheba’s husband Uriah (by intentionally ordering him to the frontline of battle). But when David was confronted with this behavior, he didn’t dodge it, he didn’t deny it, he didn’t justify it. He didn’t talk about the pressures of office or the pressures of being a celebrity. He didn’t blame it on being the baby of his family or on the inattention of his father. He didn’t blame Bathsheba either. David called his behavior exactly what it was: sin—sin against Bathsheba and Uriah and God. David took full responsibility for his behavior. He confessed. He repented. He accepted the consequences, and he asked God to clean up his life and help him do better. Then, as God is so quick to do, He forgave David and restored him to full fellowship once again. I really think David recovered from this fiasco because he was dealing with reality: his deceitful heart and his sin. David reminds us that we can’t decisively or effectively deal with our sin without dealing with God.

In the early 70s psychiatrist Karl Menninger noticed this move from Christian language to therapeutic language and wrote a book about it: Whatever Became of Sin? Though sin is just as stylish as it has always been, the term sin is not. Consequently, fallen, broken people don’t take their brokenness to God; they take it to therapists and pharmacists. And while therapists and pharmacists can do a lot of good, therapists and therapy, pharmacists and pharmacy, are not enough for broken, fallen lives. Only God can fix our deeper problem: this deceitful heart with its compunction to sin and cover it up and justify it when its found out. Only God gives us the framework to understand that and make that well. And a simple word like sin gets us oriented toward God and His remedies rather than the remedies of folks who are fallen and broken too. The best therapists can offer is a little reformation. God offers transformation—from the inside out: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new person; old things have passed away, all things become new” (2 Cor. 5:17). That’s why the fact that we are sinners is good news, not bad—it means, as Tim Keller once said, that we’re not the helpless victims of psychological drives or social systems; we’re responsible persons who can take our sins to God and find healing for our souls.

There are things I miss about the Christian culture we once embraced in our country. And there are things our country misses too—not the least of which is a little word called sin because we don’t speak Christian anymore.

Any News?

I guess I’m sick of it. And I’m going to use my blog to vent. Can I just go on record and say I couldn’t care less whether that kid in Connecticut gets to go to his senior prom or not? Apparently, he broke some rule that disqualified him from going to prom, but thanks to modern social media, the outcry against the school administrator for enforcing the rules became so loud that the woman had to relent, say the rule doesn’t really matter after all, and let the kid go to his prom. And this, dear reader, is news? In today’s world, yes it is. Oh, there have to be reports and interviews and opinion polls and discussion ad nauseum by the networks and cable news channels over whether or not this kid gets to go to his prom. Please!!!

There has always been a market for human interest stories. In the small town in which I did some of my growing up, our local, twice-a-week newspaper had a column called “Down DD.” The column was some local yokel's account of what went on down DD highway: who ate dinner with whom, who got a new tractor, who got a letter from their son back east, who put a new coat of paint on their house—that kind of stuff. That’s called human interest, but even as a kid, it seemed to me the only humans interested in reading that drivel were the humans who lived down DD. I don’t think anyone in Connecticut would have had an iota of interest. I’m not sure anyone in our small town did. There’s a reason why that column was never syndicated in say, The Washington Post, The LA Times, or the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. And it’s the same reason Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley never brought it up on the nightly news: nobody cared. And yet we’re all supposed to care about the kid in Connecticut who, save a national outcry, was almost shut out of his prom. That’s national news these days. And it’s been covered with as much detail and manpower as the killing of Usama Bin Laden.

I suppose we just have too much media: 24-hour cable news, four networks, countless internet news sources, Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. With that much opportunity to report news and opine (which means guests interrupt and yell at each other on national TV), I guess you have to find something to fill up the time. Maybe that’s why we have to listen to the ongoing brattish behavior of Lindsey Lohan, the self-destruction of Charlie Sheen, and (dare I say it) the recent royal wedding, as if these things had the gravitas of the war on terror, our national economic struggles, and the powder keg going off in the Arab world. My fear is that our youngest generations may never know the difference between news and trivia, national/international interest and human interest, stories that matter and stories that amuse and entertain.

I enjoy a good human interest story now and then, but by nature I am not a busybody and have no need to know other people’s business. My own business is plenty enough for me to manage. That may help me here, I don’t know. So when I think of real news, I think about things that have an impact on whole communities, the nation, and the world, not on who gets shut out of the prom, who just got divorced, the latest goings-on in the life of some celebrity, or even who shows up on the “police blotter.” I want to know about things that impact on a much larger scale.

Which may be why I love being a preacher. I get to tell the best and most important news of all: that Jesus died for our sins according to the Scripture, that He was buried, and that He was raised from the dead on the third day (1 Cor. 15:3-4). What God did for us in Christ impacts persons, nations, history, and the whole wide world! Christ loves, redeems, transforms, heals, disciplines, and judges on scales large and small. And that, my friend, is news. It’s old news but it always feels new to everyone Christ touches. In fact, the Bible calls it good news. And I get to be a frontline reporter of that news every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

So there, I’ve had my chance to vent. I’m sure I’m overreacting—I do that sometimes. And while I do feel better for getting this off my chest, it certainly doesn’t qualify as news any more than the Connecticut boy and his senior prom. Can we just move on?