Little Talks

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'Cause though the truth may vary,

this ship will carry our bodies safe to shore.

-Of Monsters and Men

Evangelism is active listening. It is not colonialism. It is not sharing my faith. It is hearing the God-story unfold in another person's life. That's what I'm learning this semester in my required-for-the-ordination-that-I-may-or-may-not-pursue-someday Evangelism course.

Active listening, no matter how active, can sneak up on you when you least expect it.

Today, as I prepared to leave work (of the nannying variety), I talked to my employer and a colleague of hers.

"This is so funny," the colleague said, as our conversation came to a close. "In the car on the way over here this morning, I was just thinking, 'I don't know if I believe in God anymore.' And now here I am, telling you about all this."

I can't blame this one squarely on occupational hazard; our chat had been just about as far as can be from the topic of God.

But one bit of conversation had led to another, and before long, the colleague recounted for us some stories about her sister who died of cancer some time ago.

The two sisters were extraordinarily linked. Numbers Eight and Nine of nine children in the family, they were raised more like twins. They shared so much - everything from sleeping spaces to daily routines.

Our storyteller described a time that she went on vacation as a young adult. While there, she had an inexplicable urge to buy her sister a pair of socks with a silly design to them. As she and her husband wandered the store, she mused frequently about how the socks reminded her of her sister. Her husband teased her for this sudden obsession with socks - the sort of gift that she had never given to her sister before - but never tried to talk her out of the strange souvenir.

Then, when they reached the cash register, she set them aside. Her husband was shocked that, after all that, she wasn't buying them.

When they returned from the trip, her family had difficult news that they hadn't wanted to share across the distance. Her sister, Kathy, had survived a car accident but had lost both of her feet. Both of her legs had been amputated just below the knees.

The same night that Kathy had been through hours of surgery, her sister, still away and unaware, did not sleep at all. This was strange to her at the time - so uncharacteristic of her. She liked to think she could sleep on a picket fence if need be. But as Kathy struggled through the accident and the aftermath, her sister kept vigil for her without even knowing it.

It was years later that Kathy was diagnosed with cancer, which eventually took her life. One day, as her sister was driving home, she thought again of her twin-soul. She didn't know whether or not Kathy had believed in God, or whether or not that should matter in what awaited her spirit, or whether or not Kathy was at peace. It bothered her - the not-knowing.

It was then that she came to a traffic light and stopped. She glanced to the side and saw a shipyard that she often saw while on this drive, many times before and many times after this day. But this was the one and only day that she saw a particular boat's name scrawled in paint along its stern:

Kathy's Fine

She is.

The Cost of Grace

by Hilary Rhodes, contributor

Today, I’d like to expand on Kim’s last post about “deceptive Christian tippers,” and to do so through the lens of my current muse: Dietrich Bonhoeffer.


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Bonhoeffer, as you may know, was a German Lutheran pastor who died a martyr – he was hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp in April 1945, days before it was liberated by the Allies – for his single-minded, incredibly courageous, uncompromising efforts to resist Hitler and the Nazis. Thus, his writings (Cost of Discipleship, Christ the Center, Ethics, and more) are uniquely positioned to speak to us on the true role of a Christian in the savage twentieth and twenty-first centuries, our call to social activism, and how – in his case – to reconcile it with the bluntly pacifist message of Jesus, who famously instructs us to turn the other cheek and not resist an evil man.

CHEAP GRACE

As I read Kim’s post about Christian diners who leave come-to-Jesus tracts for their restaurant servers in place of cash tips, it occurred to me that this was a great way to explore Bonhoeffer’s conceptions of “cheap” and “costly” grace, almost literally. The diners may feel that by leaving an instruction manual on how to obtain “eternal life,” they are doing their waiter or waitress a much greater and lasting service than if they’d merely left them a temporal, worldly gift of money. But the questions raised are twofold:

1) How can this anonymous, tight-fisted, downright pharisaical method of drive-by evangelism possibly communicate the life-changing, radical, and completely counterculture nature of the Gospels?

2) In fact, can there be any benefit to it besides the fact that it makes the diner feel as if they’ve “done their part”? Or is it just a low-risk, cop-out, “don’t look at me” method of proselytizing that indeed sets the public perception of Christianity back still further?

Bonhoeffer would characterize it as the latter. In The Cost of Discipleship, which I am currently reading, he opens with an admonishment to the Christian community to take a hard-eyed look at their methods of preaching, and judge whether this leads people to the actual Word of God, or is intended instead to protect the “look but don’t touch” insular country-club nature of many churches. He then examines his own Protestant heritage, and how Martin Luther kicked off the sixteenth-century Reformation with the radical idea that not good works but rather grace alone is sufficient to redeem an individual.

There’s many a theological discussion to be had about Luther and his message, not least his rabid anti-Semitism. But Bonhoeffer’s focus for exploration – and mine – is how the concept of grace, and its function in Christian life, has become grossly misunderstood and devalued. Luther’s proposition that God alone confers salvation has led, as Bonhoeffer points out, to a sense among many contemporary Christians that they can live a life identical to their secular counterparts in nearly every respect. Save for going to church on Sundays, certain taboos in vocabulary, and, yes, leaving evangelical tracts in place of tips, they can live essentially as they did before, confident that grace has been put to work to wipe out the rest of their transgressions. It becomes “the justification of sin, rather than the justification of the sinner in the world.”

Bonhoeffer calls this “cheap grace,” and characterizes it as the greatest threat, bar none, to a real, vital Christian calling in this day and age. When Christianity is lax, lazy, and easy, when it demands nothing from us and is palatable to the suburban everyman leery of scary words like “sacrifice” and “suffering,” it completely loses the radical quality on which it was founded. It becomes Christianity without Christ.

So what’s the answer? How can we maintain a distinctively Christian identity? Or will this build the exclusionary walls even higher, if Christianity has an entrance exam harder than Harvard’s?

COSTLY GRACE

The commandments of Jesus are deceptively simple. “Sell all you have, give to the poor, and come, follow Me.” When asked how to obtain eternal life, he doesn’t break out a phonebook-sized manual of rules and regulations. He merely affirms the Commandments first given to Charlton Heston Moses: Don’t kill. Don’t steal. Don’t commit adultery. Honor your father and mother. Love God with all your heart, soul, body, and mind. And love your neighbor as you love yourself.

I’ve written several entries at my own blog dealing with the nature of these commandments, and how we (present company no exception) so often fail at putting them into practice in daily life. But the other thing to keep in mind is that Jesus is always, uncompromisingly, and brutally honest about what the cost of discipleship entails. When He calls you, you can’t stop to bury your father or say goodbye to your loved ones. You can’t set your terms and then follow. You can’t follow when the stock market’s doing well. You drop everything, and follow. Period.

This is also the hardest thing we can ever do. Bonhoeffer puts it just as frighteningly: “When Christ calls a man, he calls him to come and die.”

Because in fact, we do die. Maybe not in actual martyrdom, as Bonhoeffer did, but in everything we were before, our old habits and neurotic fixations and judgments and beliefs and cop-outs. We burn away. We do sell everything, whether physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, or otherwise. And in stripping ourselves of these worldly accoutrements, we are thrown into a new life where we are forced to rely completely on the Divine Mercy.

And in so doing, we don’t give up everything and get nothing for our trouble. We receive the Pearl of Great Price. We receive, in this utterly necessary, transcendent sacrifice, the gift of costly grace. Our life is no longer our own, and has been bought on a heavenly account we can never pay back – and don’t have to. That story has already been told. The story of how love overcomes evil, the truth of all human reality. The power of death, and our own death, has been broken forever.

It’s done. It’s been done for a while. On a beautiful spring morning almost two thousand years ago, two women in Jerusalem met a man they thought was the gardener. And it ended.

It’s not about blood and guts. It never was.

Hollywood’s never figured that out.

THE CROSS

Like many Christians, I like to wear a cross necklace. It’s another easy and low-risk way of displaying religious conviction – that is, when it isn’t just a throwaway fashion statement. But for Bonhoeffer, it’s a reminder of nothing more or less than our own absolute commitment to follow Jesus’ path, even unto its uttermost end.

We each have our own crosses to bear. Starting out on a spiritual journey will, I promise, show yours to you pretty darn quick. And it’s a scary proposition. It explicitly includes suffering, and that death I mentioned above. So why would we, as creatures who are naturally averse to pain, choose to do that to ourselves?

What if our cross to carry was to humbly accept the unconditional love and mercy of God, for ourselves and for everyone we meet? To yield ourselves into the arms of a Divine who is so deeply in love with us that He did not consider the life of His Son too high a price to pay for our redemption?

Does that sound so terrible? So dangerous, so exclusionary? So self-righteous, so bloodstained, so many of the adjectives that are (sadly, and truly) used to characterize the exploits of many people who have called themselves Christian throughout the centuries?

For Bonhoeffer, this was the ultimate core of his call to resist the Nazis. He understood that Jesus was not preaching a message of passive acceptance, the life of cheap grace, to sit back and let the most evil dictator of the twentieth century – perhaps in all of history – seize control of his beloved home country.

To turn the other cheek didn’t mean to become collaborators, either active or complicit. What it was, was a call not to fight the Nazis on their terms. They wouldn’t be brought down by Bonhoeffer and his fellows becoming them.

Because the Sermon on the Mount, possibly the most gloriously counter-intuitive message in all of human history, is a call to action. To demonstrate, to create, to live the Kingdom of Heaven, and the perfect love of God. Here. Now. Forever.


Hilary Rhodes has recently launched her own blog at Woman at the Well, where she ruminates on issues of social justice, courageous faith, the creative life, and more. Although Sarah Lawrence College is regularly cited as one of the least religious schools in America, it was there that she rediscovered, and fell in love with, her lost childhood faith – except on a hundred orders of magnitude more, in depths of experience and mercy that she never, ever thought were possible. For more on that, keep tabs on WATW.

Deceptive Christian Tippers

First, check out this article about customers who have left phony $10 bills marked with religious tidbits in place of monetary tips for their wait staff.

I'll wait.

...I know, right? I bet you're squirming with indignance, even if you've never worked as a server before, and/or you're concerned about the non-complimentary angle from which this piece serves up the Christian faith. Mmm, self-righteous deception for the glory of God. Delicious.

So let me begin (is it too late now to begin?) by saying that I think there's more to this than a critical view of Christianity. Some of Jesus' most controversial points were his criticisms of hypocrites and those who considered themselves most righteous. Today, this doesn't mean that we need to avoid Christianity or gathering as a faith community, but we do need to keep reimagining what it means to be a Christian while searching the core of Jesus' movement.

The article points out that not all Christians are poor tippers deceptive tippers, but the truth is, some are. So how do Christians reconcile that? How do we act, as Christians, knowing that this is the image of Christianity that some people - religious and nonreligious - have been given? How do we express what we believe and how we live without alienating or betraying people or being condescending to them? (Whichever "them." All of them.)

Instead of presuming to answer questions like these (since I think these are the sorts of questions best answered via actions), I'm going to highlight further what I consider a few important issues in the described scenario.

THE ISSUE OF DECEPTION

Do the people who do this think it's fitting that their religious intervention takes the form of fake money? What are they trying to convey, and what are they conveying instead?

If their message is that there are things in life more important than money, are they making that point by getting a hard worker's hopes up, thinking they've received a good tip, just to fool them?

Why not just leave a message on a card or paper instead; why go through the trouble of using fake money? Which brings us to...


THE REAL, HUMAN CONCERNS OF THE STAFF

As written in James, faith without good works is dead, and it does little good to give someone spiritual guidance if their basic needs are ignored (very Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, about 1800 years in advance).

By this example, should we replace all salaries with advice instead? How do the people leaving these tips support themselves? (And let's not pretend that a waiter's tip is beyond comparison to a wage, particularly if the employee's official salary is otherwise below legal minimum wage.)

Money is not the root of all evil; it has potential to do good, and technically it's just a tool in the extended bartering system of one person's time and labor in exchange for another's. So let's make every effort to make a fair trade.


THE GRATITUDE FACTOR

Traditionally, the amount of a tip is considered to be commensurate with the customer's gratitude and/or a measure of the quality of the service. Wait staff are often paid below minimum wage and depend greatly on their tips; unless stated, it's not included in the bill and the customer chooses the amount. A lack of tip signals extraordinarily bad service and/or extraordinarily ungrateful customers.

If a religious person is inclined to use this occasion to share the Gospel (more on that in a sec), they could do so separately and leave a note with the tip. Might look too much like bribing someone to convert, but tipping is being kind, generous, mindful of the server, and a decent customer. The note is just an additional and probably unsolicited expression of spiritual concern, whatever one's views on that matter. And speaking of which...


EVANGELISM IN ITSELF IS NOT A BAD THING

Mainstream Protestant churches and nonreligious groups sometimes villainize evangelism or proselytism, or else don't know what to do with it and shy away, but passive-aggressive practices like fake-tipping only fuel that fire.

At its best, (Christian) evangelism means sharing the Gospel, the good news - that something amazing has happened in Christ and continues to happen when the Spirit is at work in us. It means believing something so deeply that it simply must be shared; to avoid sharing altogether would imply that there's nothing so great or urgent there in the first place.

But the core of Christianity isn't about dropping a spiritual nugget of wisdom and running. Jesus and biblical writers like Paul emphasize community, unconditional love, and nurturing one another. Actually, these concepts being made reality are all a huge part of the message!

So telling others about Jesus isn't a bad thing, and these customers may genuinely believe that they're appropriately sharing an important message, but they've made no attempt to connect to the person in a truly meaningful way - nothing that demands risk or even much time and energy on their part. Unless they're chatty regulars, they're not around to nurture the server in faith or in general.

(Oh yeah. Sidenote: Casting Crowns touched on the idea of true Christian outreach and active care in the song "If We Are the Body.")

If anything, deceptive tippers teach someone to believe that Christians not only aren't generous but return (presumably) good service with self-righteousness under the guise of giving glory to God. They imply that, if God is actually supposed to work in the world through believers, then God does not provide or heal but only chastizes and counts followers.

Mainly, it's my hope that the religious and non-religious folks who read and reflect on the aforementioned Daily Finance article walk away with something other than a bitterness for Christians and others who seem too "pushy" in sharing faith (as, I admit, I have been prone to feel).

I hope that there is something fortifying and renewing to be found here - perhaps faith-affirming, or at least reconciling.

One of my favorite things about taking Church History classes in seminary (besides inordinate gobs of song parody fodder) has been confronting some of the terrible things that Christians have done, often in God's name.

Being honest about this troubling history - and realizing that "my" church and I are not necessarily much holier - has opened me up to thinking about all the good potential the church still holds and, perhaps most inspirationally, how we as a faith community can grow beyond and despite our mistakes.

Thoughtful, Authentic, Nonviolent Evangelism

A continuation from the previous post, The Gospel is Not a Weapon, this is further discussion on how to approach sharing one's beliefs with thoughtfulness, authenticity, and nonviolence.

As I stated then, I write this from one Christian's perspective, but if you see anything that rings true in other traditions, I hope that you will take it with you.

Be honest about where your faith, religion, or worldview falls short or where you think it could fall short.

Some seem to be afraid that admitting any imperfection, mistake, or unanswered matter on behalf of their belief system is akin to admitting an inadequacy on the part of the divine. Consider carefully where the two are differentiated. In Christianity, for example, let God be God; if I were to serve my religion before God, I would be committing idolatry. But it does not blemish the reputation of God to profess that God is capable of so much more good than a religious community is, or to clarify that religious people are far from perfect even if they believe in a perfect divine. Nor does it discredit or devalue a religion.

I knew a family who believed in keeping a vegan diet with great conviction and openly advocated it to others. When a mutual friend first became a vegan and was not feeling well, however, they gave her supplementary B-vitamins without telling her what they were. They never explained to her that there was anything her new diet may lack or even what foods she would need to emphasize to get the nutrition she needed. I'm not against veganism or vegetarianism, and though I do not specifically follow these diets there is much in them which better informs my nutrition. But I do take issue with false witness; knowingly failing to be openly honest with this woman was a risk to her health and wellbeing. That simply is not just.


Consider context. Be willing to approach people in different ways, respecting their own experiences and understandings.

A personal testimony may speak volumes to one person, while quietly living out your faith may be all it takes to pique someone else's interest.

I once led a youth group meeting on peer pressure. I wrote down a whole slew of activities, one per slip of paper; these ranged from fairly obvious offenses to morality or self-care (cheat on a test; take prescription drugs that weren't prescribed for you) to the most benign of hobbies (ride a rollercoaster; read a book). I gave the youth the direction to work together to answer this question for each item: "Would you tell a friend to do this?" and to place it beneath one of the signs on each wall of the room: "Yes," "No," "Maybe" (i.e. depends on the situation) and "Don't Know" (i.e. group is not familiar enough with the activity or can't reach a consensus, like a hung jury).

As they worked, it became clear that this exercise was less about whether a particular activity was good or bad and more about whether it was something they would recommend for someone else and under what circumstances. If they had trouble, they could reverse the question to consider: "Would I want someone to tell me to do this?"

They found that even telling a friend to "read a book" - what might seem like the right answer of "something Mom and Dad would want me to say" - actually depended on the book, depended on the friend, depended on the friendship. They knew that they interacted with different people in different ways. In a dualist system with only the option of whether the activity was good or bad, they may have stuck it in the good and wholesome pile and moved on. But they were allowed to consider context; they were even allowed not to know. After some deliberation that bad boy got slapped onto the "Maybe" wall, right up there with "ride a rollercoaster."


Be willing to be honest about your own mistakes and difficulties, past and present, and to discuss issues that often go unspoken or against the grain of public opinion.

What does your faith do for you? How does it change or sustain you? Why does it make any difference to you at all? It is one thing to describe a jailbird conversion - "I did those things then; I follow the law now." That may be very significant and perhaps a powerful crux of your story. But it is another thing to share how you are being shaped, transformed and renewed in everyday life. Consider the effect of your beliefs on aspects of your life that are not neccessarily condemned by society, or are even encouraged and justified in your culture. If you hope to explain why your religion is different from others, you're not going to accomplish much in discussing how its tenets forbid murder and stealing. So does the U.S. government.

That youth group meeting on peer pressure I mentioned? One item was "ride in a car without enough seatbelts for everyone inside," something in the strange position of not being advisable but being widely practiced and socially acceptable. Our discussion on this made an impression on one teen in particular. The next time she was carpooling to a church event, she got someone else to give her a ride rather than get into a crowded vehicle. It was about more than the legality of a seatbelt issue or saying "this is a rule that I follow because I am law-abiding." It was about the consideration of the lives of all of the people traveling that day, a statement that she valued her life and the lives of her family and friends. It's about understanding that "consequences" are not mere punishments for doing something bad, but also the results of actions.

Of course we do things that social consensus considers all right or "just part of being human"; we make mistakes and errors in judgment. But if we don't discuss those that we see cause not to do, especially those that society would be willing to forgive us, then we conspire in creating the illusion that those consequences (results) do not exist - until they happen, and we suffer for it. But sometimes it takes re-evaluating one's own practices and habits to get to the core of belief and avoid hypocrisy.

For another example, I offered my own experience of prejudice toward another person and what it means to me that my faith should not only hold me accountable for that but provide a glimpse of a better model. You can read about it here.