I haven't blogged in over two weeks. I used to think times like this were a sad rarity, but I seem to be doing less and less these days. Thus, I promise to blog at least once weekly... I feel that I truly need the outlet, and this is the best way to stay in touch with some of you who matter greatly to me. As promised, I want to take some time to reflect on my observations of Guatemalan culture from the brief time I was there (one month ago) and then combine that with some of the lessons God has been (re)teaching me of late.
Guatemala is a nation of instability. Culturally, they are an amalgam of Mayan and Spanish cultures. Spanish is the dominant language, but most Quiche (the native term of self-identification) also speak at least one Mayan dialect. Surprisingly (to me at least), none of the Guatemalans complained of any racial tensions. Rather, they to a person affirmed that the greatest tensions were socio-economic. The gap between rural and urban, and to a greater degree, rich and poor, is enormous. An entire subculture of women live in the city dump of Guatemala City, prostituting themselves for food and raising children
in the city dump. The government is almost entirely ineffectual in addressing the myriad social problems, in part because most of the government officials are corrupt (imagine that) and in part because the tiny country boasts over 30 distinct political parties. Their adverts are pasted and painted everywhere, and I can't recall more than a handful that did not libel some opposing party while praising their own candidates. No single party (or even group of parties) enjoys reelection. The citizens feel no party loyalty, tending to vote according to the party that promises what they want. Unfortunately, the terms short, but not nearly so short as the level of cooperation among the parties, so no elected official can manage to accomplish anything while in office. Because no promises were fulfilled, he (always he and never she, I observed) will not be reelected and a new party will step into the vacancy to being anew. Meanwhile, the problems only get worse.
As for religion, I observed four groups. While no Mayan religion exists today, several forms have been synchronized with Catholicism (including one whose crucifix bears a black Christ!) to form the largest group in the country. The largest churches I saw belonged to the Pentecostal churches, and then of course were the Baptists (at whose conference I was speaking), who did not enter into the country until the 1980s. In addition to these three groups are a growing atheistic demographic who find the Church to be increasingly irrelevant. I had the greatest chance to interact with the Baptists (obviously) and I found my time with them to be very instructive.
Many of the ministers with whom I interacted are first- or second-generation native minsters. Their churches are barely 20 years old and they are a small denomination. They have become a part of the national evangelical alliance, which is politically neutral, but well-respected and oft-courted by the various political groups. Many ministers, however, are regularly frustrated by the lack of education and the lack of
value of education. I was surprised at how the churches (and the conflicts in those churches) mirror the churches in which I grew up and with which I occasionally interact still today. Many Quiche churches are clinging to traditions that (for them) are not even a generation old as tenaciously as any tradition-laden Baptist church here in the States. Many of them are afraid or unwilling to try anything that is not like "the way we do it."
And this is really a deeper problem than I think we're willing to admit. John Ortberg has commented that the source of the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees was a fundamental disagreement about how to understand the Law and Prophets [the Bible, if you will (and you should)]. The Pharisees were concerned to maintain the holiness of Israel in the face of Gentile occupation of the Holy Land. They read the Bible as a source of social identity
through social boundary-marking. They used the Law to help them determine who was "in" and who was "out". Jesus, however, wasn't interested in where the borders are drawn, what's around the outside. Jesus was concerned with what's at the center - "Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven and his righteousness, and all these things [about which we worry] will be added to you." Jesus read the Bible, he interacted with the Father (and as a result with those around him) through a lens of love, which is self sacrifice ("Greater love has no one, that that s/he would lay down his/her life for a friend").
As Ortberg comments, "Jesus consistently focused on people's
center: Are they oriented and moving
toward the center of spiritual life (love of God and people), or are they moving
away from it? This is why he shocked people by saying that many religious leaders - who observed all the recognized boundary markers - were in fact outside the kingdom of God. And this si why Jesus could say that "the tax collectors and the prostitutes' who were a million miles away from the religious subculture, but who had turned, converted and oriented themselves toward God and love, were already in the kingdom."
I see a lot of Christians these days who
still insist that being a believer is a matter of what books we read, music we hear, people with whom we associate and on and on and on. While we've roundly rejected the holiness code God gave us in the scriptures, we've had no problem creating one of our own.
But as a wise and beloved friend of mine said, "Jesus told us it's not what goes in that makes us unclean. It's what comes out."
So... what comes out? Is it clean or unclean? Or, perhaps better phrased, does what comes out of us look more like Jesus today than it did yesterday?
Comments (5)
Good thoughts, JR.
Your comments about Mayan religion merging with Catholicism reminded me of my experiences in North Africa. Christianity, suprisingly, has a foothold in just about every country in Africa. But different locales have their own twisted cultural ideologies tied into their faith. For example, in Senegal, we would visit villages where Christianity was perversely mixed in with a sort of voo doo. The people believed in the idea of a Christ but believed that he had spies in the trees that "watched them" for sinful behavior. If someone committed a sin, they were killed (by the local "medicine men") and buried at the base of these trees as a way to appease Christ and atone on behalf of the damned.
As for your question, I think you have to look at it differently than an output/input scenario. I know it is just an example but thinking in those terms has led to woundings in Christians eager to build up their God-credit. It's too easy to slip into "works" mode. I am leaning towards the idea that it is not what we give up or out but how we give in to a scandalous grace that requires nothing but everything.
Generally I agree I really don't have anything to argue with (for once).
I do have some minor differences of opinion. I believe that the major difference between the Pharisees and Jesus is how they interpreted Scripture in that the Pharisees were trying to follow the Law as formulated through man made tradition. On the other hand, Jesus was reading it for what it was without man made traditions. Great example of this is the idea of 'work on the Sabbath' from the Jewish point of view. Some believe that one cannot even turn on a light on the Sabbath because flipping the switch produces an arch of electricity which is 'work'.
That and the clean vs. unclean verse is about handwashing not clean vs. unclean food but that really doesn't have anything to do with this, just something that bothers me.
I wonder how someone from another culture sees American Christianity and the ways we have merged our culture with our religion, adding our gods to our worship of Christ. We have taken the god of busyness and corporateness and mixed it with church to produce what we have. I am not saying whether or not inculturating christianity is bad, because I don't know. I just think that as westerners we have this idea that we started Christianity and so our merging has been historically better than other peoples' merging, which in some cases is probably true.
"From the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks." There is much need to pursue personal holiness so that we are driving out that which is unclean within us. What if we say unclean vs. clean as also being darkness vs. light. Unclean or dark are those things that cover us and hide us, distorting who we are created to be. Clean or Light are those things which illuminate the reality of who we are.
I'm not really sure that my comments are making much sense. My brain is muddy and tired. I read this dense thesis today, which was pretty much fantastic, and may need to let my brain recover since I have not exercised that portion of it for five years.
Here is the question: How do you become a cleansing agent in the world, helping to break down the hierarchical structures and the bondages that they bring? How do you get both yourself and others away from the details and moving toward center. In building a fence around the Torah we also build a fence around God.
My pastor was talking to me about perfectionism and he said, "If you see the sermon on the mount as the baseline, then you are in bondage because you cannot attain it today. But, if you see it as the destination, then every day you are moving toward it, you are making progress." Every day you are moving toward it you are being cleansed. Seek Christ and he will illuminate the dark places and cleans the unclean so that you may be a light in a dark world.
I don't think what comes out is necisarily works based. I could see how you would get there. But it seems more like a balloon to me: under stress, what comes out when you get poked? Or a water glass--if you're empty and bump into people, they don't get a splash of God. That and it's a lot harder to pour into people when you're empty as well. (simplistic thinking perhaps, but word pictuers are good).
Yet again, it is an issue of bounded sets and progressive sets. Christianity was never, ever explained in terms of 'this is the line. now that you are here, you can be a Christian forever, and you'll never have trouble or have to do anything more.' Rather it was, 'Do this everyday, because you are a Christian now.' Which is different than 'Do this everyday so that you can be a Christian.'
you know what I mean.