The Outward Appearance

Y’all, I just wanted to send a quick note. First, if you want to get tickets to the Not Safe For Radio Show, you can do so here.

Second, I couldn’t make radio yesterday because I got on my Delta flight home at 6:30 am in Oklahoma City and the plane had a hydraulic leak. They took us off the plane, fixed the leak, put us back on the plane, pushed back, and all the hydraulic fluid poured out.

I got on a 1pm flight home (2pm ET), which took off at 2:15pm central time, and my original flight landed in Atlanta some time around 1 o’clock this morning. No reason to get mad at Delta — they did what they could and I’m glad I made it home on a differently flight before yesterday’s sun set. But radio was impossible.

Third — and my reason for writing —

This week, I did a tour of stations in Oklahoma. I did a listener event in Tulsa on Wednesday, Oklahoma City on Thursday (and tried to find that German guy Freddy), and the home Friday.

In Tulsa, on Wednesday, a 27 year old guy and his friend were there. They drive a trash truck together and listen to the show. The 27 year old asks a simple question: what advice do I have to try to stem the tide of young people who are increasingly embracing political violence as the solution to their problems?

I want to see if I can pare down my rather lengthy answer for you guys.

Thousands of years ago, God gave the Israelites the law. In the law were some curious prohibitions like not eating shellfish or wearing mixed fabric clothing or having tattoos. Those laws were there to set God’s people apart from the surrounding tribes.

You can get the sense that surrounding the Israelites were these tattooed people who ate shrimp and dressed in wool and horse hair — basically God’s people were surrounded by Cajuns.

But the purpose of the law was to set God’s people apart. They had the outward appearance of something inward. They were set apart and you could visibly see it.

Fast forward to the New Testament and Christ ends those laws. Now, you can eat the shrimp, wear the polyester and cotton blend, and get the tattoo. You almost cannot be a youth pastor in America without flannel and tattoos.

The outward manifestation of being set apart now no longer comes from physical appearance, but behavior. We show we are God’s people not by what we wear, but what we do. We love God and we love our neighbors. No one else has to, but we do, even when our neighbors do not love us back.

That is a profoundly revolutionary concept. In the Roman Empire, the Christians were used to light the streets of Rome — their bodies on crosses and lit up at night. They were fed to lions and driven out of cities. But people kept converting because the Christians behaved in ways others wanted to behave.

The first hospitals grew because Christians would go to the sick and diseased instead of fleeing them. The first orphanages grew because Christians would rescue the cast out children placed on the trash heaps to die. The first movement for women’s rights grew because Christian scripture taught that standing before God there was neither male nor female — everyone was equal.

The poor and the slave converted because Christianity gave them hope for a better tomorrow. The rich who got tired of keeping up with the Flavias and the Claudias converted because they found peace in communing with God.

Paul told the early Christians to not be litigious. Litigation was a form of entertainment for Romans. The Christians did not sue. Jesus told the Christians to love their neighbors. The Romans were not very neighborly. And when the Roman citizenry turned on the Christian and led them to the gallows, the Christian loved them, prayed for them, and helped them all the way to the grave. It pricked the conscience of an Empire long before Constantine.

Here in the twenty-first century, Christians are really good at being Christians on Sunday for an hour or two, then Republicans and Democrats, or just generally Americans, the rest of the week. It is far less common these days to recognize someone is a Christian from their outward behaviors and engagements with the world.

We send our kids to the beach in Mexico to help an orphanage, not to a food bank in our own cities to box up meals for the poor. We are gossips and slanderers and cruel with our tongues toward partisans. We think basic empathy is pejorative instead of trying to at least see the world through someone else’s eyes to understand them. And secularists, if we show empathy, then pressure us towards accepting the others. We are under extraordinary pressure to conform. Tolerance is king, and, from our pulpits, we often do not learn the skills to navigate the American Empire the way Christians learned to navigate the Roman Empire.

In it all, as more and more people fall away from the church they revert to the pagan ways of the Roman Empire. Might makes right. Violence can be used to settle political issues.

We are not in new times. We are in old times. As the God of all creation recedes from the consciousness of society, the old gods sneak back in to fill the void.

Now, in Christianity, we have a group of people who call themselves Christian Nationalists who do not want to use Christianity to save souls, but to save the nation. They are the modern equivalent of the progressive Christian movement that, over time, morphed into the social gospel. Just as those progressive denominations are in decline, the conservative congregations that turn the gospel into a political instrument will do the same. Something that neither the progressive church nor the Christian nationalist church understands is that the social change comes as a byproduct of the gospel, not as the product of the gospel.

So that leaves you and me and our local church community.

If you want to turn the nation back, be present as a Christian in your community. Love your neighbors, even the difficult ones, the partisan ones, and the pagan ones. Seek the welfare of your community and pray for it. Don’t be so worked up about Washington, D.C. that you neglect your backyard. Don’t be so committed to a party or a political movement that for six days a week you’re known more as the partisan than the Christian.

Be the salt and the light.

There is no quick fix to what ails our society. It has left God behind and the old gods and pagan ways have crept back in. The solution to what is a spiritual problem is not political. We cannot seize the means of political power and wield spiritual power through a political system to fix what is wrong.

What we can do is be present in our local communities, taking our families to church on Sunday to be with God’s people, grounding our children in the Word, then all of us going out into the world the rest of the week to reflect God to the world.

To quote Jeremiah, “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” (Jeremiah 29:5–7, ESV)

If you want to change the country and turn the young away from political violence, you’ve got to put God first and reflect Him back to the world. No political movement is going to change where we are. But you will, in small ways, that with others, will ripple through society, turning hearts and minds.