Pastor's Page: May 13, 2008

May 13, 2008

Three cheers for Wheaton College firing Professor Kent Gramm for refusing to talk about his divorce.

He's not getting fired for divorcing his wife, or being divorced by her. He's being fired for refusing to divulge details to college administrators. Wheaton has a policy that professors sign saying that they will abide by certain standards of Christian conduct, including marital conduct. You can divorce your spouse if you have biblical justification for it - but you have to explain yourself. Gramm refuses to explain himself. He believes he should not be held accountable to the conduct code that he signed, and that the college has no business asking him about it. Now he has taken his case to the media. "I think it's wrong to have to discuss your personal life with your employer," he told the Chicago Tribune. He even dares to frame his case as an example for his students: "I feel that it's important for [the students] to know that they're not somehow rejected by God for having more or less normal lives and for having lives that didn't work out the way they intended them to turn out," he said.

Hey Gramm, got news for you. Christians aren't supposed to lead "more or less normal lives." We're supposed to be holy (1 Peter 1:16). Divorce isn't holy. God says he hates it (Malachi 2:16).

As a divorced man myself, I am blessed with an inside perspective here. When my wife renounced her faith and left me and divorced me against my will, I was eager for the spotlight of investigation. I made plain to all (and still do): "Ask me anything. And don't take my word for anything - here's her phone number and email and address; ask her anything about me. Ask my children about me. I have nothing to hide. I despise this putrid monstrosity of divorce - even as I despise rape and torture and genocide and all manner of evils that provoke the wrath of the Almighty. I have no part in this sin."

When charged, the innocent welcome investigation to clear their name while the guilty hide in the darkness of privacy. Jesus said, "[M]en loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed." (John 3:19-20). Wickedness fears exposure even as innocence longs for vindication.

Suppose for example we find out that a man was present at a Nazi concentration camp, but it is unclear whether he was one of the guards who incinerated bodies or one of the Jews who struggled to survive. So we ask him about it. He responds, "I think that's a personal question. It is really none of your business. Look, Auschwitz was messy and unfortunate and sometimes life just does not turn out the way you expect. The important thing is that God loves us all no matter what." That is not what a victim says. The persecuted Jew rolls up his sleeve and shows you the number tattooed on his arm.

We should look at divorce the way we do a dead body hanging from a noose. It is ugly and awful and we hope we never see it. But if we do see a hanged corpse, and have no other information, we can only conclude that a terrible sin has been committed. We don't necessarily know what it is or who committed it. Maybe the dead man was guilty of evil and justly hanged by duly appointed authorities. Maybe he was innocent but set upon by murderous thugs. Maybe he was guilty but hanged by a lynch mob contemptuous of due process, so there was wrongdoing on both sides. Maybe he committed suicide. There are all kinds of possibilities, ranging from 0 to 100 percent guilt on the part of the hanged man. While we don't know where the guilt lies or to what degree, we do know that somewhere, somehow, a moral outrage has been committed.

The one thing that passersby may not say when observing that body twisting in the wind is, "Well, that's certainly none of my business. These things happen. We live in a fallen world. Let's all agree not to talk about it. (Hey, I might want to lynch somebody myself some day, and the last thing I want is nosy people asking me questions about it.)" And if a possibly suspicious character near the body tries to shoo us away saying, "Move along! There's nothing to see here. This has nothing to do with you," then we have a duty to stand right there unmoved and insist, "I'm not going anywhere. I've got some questions first."

Pastor's Page: May 6, 2008

"How are you doing spiritually? Do you feel you are making spiritual progress?"

These were the questions that my pastor would ask during a yearly home visit when I was young, and they would always annoy my mother. She never knew how to answer. How do you gauge your spiritual progress, and is it appropriate to do so? Do you respond, "Well, last year I prayed about 15 minutes a day but now I pray 20; and there were some occasions when I resisted my husband's leadership, but recently I haven't done that, so I'd say that while I used to be a 7, spiritually speaking, now I'm about an 8"? Mom found the practice of grading yourself in the things of the Lord to be distasteful.

All saints do. Their focus is on Christ, not on themselves and how well they are following Christ.

I have learned to distrust self-evaluation, having seen good people bemoan their depravity and bad people pat themselves on their spiritual backs. Forty-one years ago my father saw the church that we were attending utterly fail to respond in a godly way to a crisis in its midst, and he said, "This church will die." He was right, it did. He could perceive the spiritual decay, but the decaying ones could not see it in themselves. They were like the ghosts in M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense: they did not know they were dead.

Those who are spiritually alive, on the other hand, may be only vaguely aware of that life. The less aware the better. It is like playing basketball. A point guard who thinks, "I'm playing well now! Seven assists and two steals and even a blocked shot!" is more likely to commit a turnover in the next minute than the one who is simply focused on his job running the offense and listening to his coach's instructions.

Having carried with me all these years my mother's suspicion about the value of grading one's walk with God, imagine my delight the other day on finding the same thought beautifully expressed in a letter by C. S. Lewis. He wrote to his young friend and protégé Walter Hooper:

We should, I believe, distrust states of mind which turn our attention upon ourselves. Even at our sins we should look no longer than is necessary to know and to repent them: and our virtues or progress (if any) are certainly a dangerous object of contemplation. When the sun is vertically above a man he casts no shadow: similarly when we have come to the Divine meridian our spiritual shadow (that is, our consciousness of self) will vanish. One will thus in a sense be almost nothing: a room to be filled by God and our blessed fellow creatures, who in their turn are rooms we help to fill. But how far one is from this at present!

Indeed, we are far from this at present. But maybe, by looking to Christ and not ourselves, we'll inch ever closer to it.

Pastor's Page: April 29, 2008

Recently I received the following question from a ministry colleague:

I lead a small DivorceCare group. In my group there is a sweet, godly woman (Anne) who leads a preschool program at a Baptist Church. She divorced her philandering husband after twenty years while he was in his fourth affair. He has a PhD in Psychology but is an arrogant bully. She receives relatively little support and only has the kids half the time. She read and liked my book "The Prayer of Revenge," and has been confident that God would accomplish justice on her behalf.
I just found out that the bed-hopping 40-something ex-husband dropped dead last night - somehow related to diabetes. The kids heard a crash in his bedroom, but ignored it, and found him this morning.
She's probably going to ask me: was this an act of God's judgment?
How would you answer her?
And here is my answer.
Interesting!
My short answer is no.
I think that unless we are prophets legitimately claiming inspiration from God, it is simply too difficult to make the connections between "misfortune" (including illness, suffering, poverty, death) and behavior. Job was good but had it bad while the evildoers of Psalm 73 enjoyed all the good luck in the world. Righteous Jim Elliot died at 28; the evangelist of atheism (and serial adulterer) Bertrand Russell lived to 99. (For that matter, Hugh Hefner is still going strong in his 80s! Why on earth doesn't he get judged?)
I gave up long ago trying to figure out what God is doing or what message he is sending when he grants long or short lifespans to people. A few weeks after we arrived in Colombia we were told point-blank by an Ika leader that the tribe would never accept our translating the Bible: we could stay there only if we never translated. Within a year this man was kidnapped by paramilitares, tortured and killed. I thought at the time that God was clearing away the obstacles so that his Word could reach the Ika people. But then this leader was replaced by another who was even more adamantly opposed to our mission! My prophetic guesswork about God's judgment was proven false.
Jesus said that the Galileans whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices, and the 18 who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them, were not worse sinners than any others (Luke 13:1-4). My opinion is that the 40-something bed-hopper was probably no worse than millions of other bed-hoppers who have all gone where bed-hoppers go (see Revelation 21:8: "the sexually immoral... - their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur"). Ironically, the philanderer's early demise may actually have been a mercy from God, because he was by death prevented from piling on another 50 years or so of sin which would only have raised the temperature of his personal hell.
I have a serious practical concern for those who are inclined to draw connections between things like death (or any other seeming misfortune) and the judgment of God. My fear is that they'll become very discouraged - or even doubt their faith - when things turn out the opposite of what they were led to expect. Painful as it might be for someone like Anne to hear, it must be said at some point: There is nothing in our understanding of God that would make it impossible for Anne to be the one who drops dead in her 40s (or worse, comes down with paralysis or a degenerative nerve disease), while her son-of-hell ex-husband lives a long healthy happy life! It is not till the life after this one when all wrongs will be set right, and justice (tempered with mercy) will be done, and many of the last shall be first and the first last. This requires perseverance on the part of the saints.
At the same time, I'm very happy for Anne (assuming the recent events are not disturbing to her!), and if you would, please pass along my greetings and best wishes. I don't know what her state of mind is, but I know a Christian man who confided in me, "If my ex-wife passed away now I don't think I'd feel any grief. All my grieving went on during the years she became a denier of God and a hater of me." A painful sentiment, but an understandable one. My prayers will be with Anne as she (perhaps very quietly) rejoices, even as her children grieve, and as she figures out how to manage with them on her own.

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