stop dreaming and love your neighbor
In a commencement address in 1987, comedian and educator Bill Cosby took aim at the usual hype that has become the staple of such events. “You’re not going to change the world, so don’t try.” The best thing you can do is to live each day with integrity and responsibility, he advised, as laughter turned to nervous chuckles and shifting in the seats. Stop being narcissistic about your “dream,” getting everyone else to fit into it, Cosby also told Temple University grads in 2012. “You’ve got plenty of time, but don’t dream through it. Wake up!”97
From childhood we’re told that we can be anything we want to be, do anything we want to do, make of ourselves whatever we dream. We often miss the trees for the forest, looking for ambitious causes instead of actual people God has sent into our lives that moment, hour, day, or year.
Meant to inspire us, this constant message can actually paralyze us with anxiety. This chapter focuses on the importance of staying at our posts to which God has called us: as children, parents, extended family, neighbors, coworkers, and citizens. We need to stop looking for extraordinary callings to give meaning to our lives, which often encourage us to think of others as tools in our self-crafting. It’s not “the needy” who need us, but particular people — many of whom we come across every day. Our neighbor is right in front of us. Recall that closing line I’ve mentioned in chapter 8 from George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
You Go, Girl!
The intensity of the prepping for adult success, especially by Boomer and Buster parents, has caused a lot of stress for boys, but girls may be a larger casualty. We are ambivalent about the role of women — in the home, in the church, and in society. This tension gets transferred to children, especially girls. On the one hand, they’re expected to be preparing for Proverbs 31 wifehood/motherhood. That’s pressure enough. But on the other hand, they’re also encouraged on many hands to be everything a boy can be, to do everything boys can do. Schizophrenic ourselves on these questions, we may even place both of these contradictory and unlivable expectations on our girls.
Trying to live up to their own dreams and those that society and parents have placed on them, many young women are putting off marriage and especially children. In many cases, these come along at just the wrong time: when young professional women are in full swing with their career. The women who get squeezed out as slackers are those who decide at the outset that they want to be a wife and mother. They have to brace themselves for the response at high school or college reunions when they say that they’re “a stay-at-home mom.” “Seriously, though,” the former roommate’s face reads even if the words don’t come out, “don’t you have a job?” And this is what they often hear from fellow believers!
I want to be careful here. I am not one of those guys who wants his daughter to live on a prairie making her own butter. Especially since World War II, when women helped achieve victory by their heroic labor in factories and even in various roles in the armed forces, an entire sector of the economy has been driven toward timesaving technologies for the home. Part of the rationale at least was that women could be liberated from domestic toil to pursue other interests and even vocations. I could not have gone to college without my mom’s work outside the home. Wives work tirelessly outside the home to put their husbands through the seminary where I teach. Unlike previous eras, churches assume far less of a burden for their young aspirants to the holy office. So they are hardly in a position to make these dedicated spouses feel more guilty for picking up the slack.
Women do have callings outside the home. They are not only wives and mothers, but also friends and neighbors cultivating culture at the most local level in countless ways. Many also have additional callings for which they have been educated and trained. Like their male counterparts, they have student debt and expectations of making good use of their education. Avoiding legalism and antinomianism, we need wisdom. Each case will differ from others. It is for single women and couples themselves to decide what is best in their case, drawing on biblical principles and the specifics of their own situation.
But what I do want to challenge is the particular stress of being “superwoman.” I have already addressed the more cross-gender issues of ambition and restlessness. These characteristics pressure both men and women to make their work an idol. In reaction against this danger, many parents are expected to focus on the family, but with extraordinary expectations. Often, fathers are stressed out as they try to balance foreign and domestic vocations. They have to be warlords, raising Daniels and Deborahs in the Lord’s army. However, much of this expectation falls especially on mothers. Now the family can become an idol, even if you work full-time at home. So in addition to being a cab driver, shuttling the kids between various activities, Mom has to be a pastor, teacher (expert on everything), volunteer, social worker, and chef. In a high-risk world, it’s all up to Supermom. Conservatives and progressives have different ways of substituting ambitions of greatness for attentiveness to the ordinary.
Nowhere is the ordinary more important to culture and yet less valuable in our society than in relation to motherhood. I’m not saying anything pro or con here about women working outside the home. I’m only suggesting that the burdens we place on women — even from childhood — make them anxious about life and drive them to expect dissatisfaction with the normal and everyday aspects of life that are so crucial for the development of deep roots, wisdom, and nurture for the whole family.
Many of the things that mothers do in the home are not even measurable, much less stupendously satisfying on a daily basis. Much of it can be tedious, repetitive, and devoid of the intellectual stimulation found in adult company. In a myriad of ways, the daily calling of dying to self is felt more acutely by mothers. What they need is fewer guilt trips and expectations and more encouragement as they invest in ordinary tasks that yield long-term dividends.
In other vocations, we can often follow best practices, with the general expectation of successes that can be evident to us and to others. Yet there is no promotion in motherhood. Successes are measured in years, not days or even months, and you can never be quite sure of all the things you did each day that made a difference. Mothers stand at the core of that gift exchange as it radiates into ever-wider concentric circles, from the home to the neighborhood and church, and to society at large. Precisely because they are gifts and not commodities, domestic labors sustain communities that cannot be measured or valued in the marketplace. That is their strength, not their weakness.
Everything that I have said about motherhood has obvious applications to fathers as well. Ambition encourages us to make two mistakes. First, we become consumed with our work. Second, we try to make up for it by “quality time”: major investments in family vacations. We need to take the pressure off of both parents, let them take a breath, and, resting in God’s grace, let them revel in the ordinary chat in the car, the normal conversation over family devotions, and the countless moments that add up. Our families, including us, do not need more quality time, but more quantity time. That’s when most of the best things happen. We think that such events are spontaneous — and to a certain extent they are. But they are really the things that bubble up when people are living ordinary lives together.
I have already quoted the first answer of the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” It’s sometimes easier for us to glorify God (or try to) than to enjoy him. Even with the best motives and intentions, we can become so busy seeking to bring praise to God through what we do for him that we don’t delight in him for who he is and for what he has given us.
The same goes for our neighbors. We can be so caught up in doing things for our neighbors that we use them as service projects. Their needs — even misfortune — provide an opportunity for us to tweak our self-image and “grow as a person.” These aren’t wrong in themselves as by-products, but there is a danger of turning other people into instruments for our own selfish ends.
Do we enjoy our neighbor? It’s a lot easier to serve a neighbor than to enjoy him or her. It’s a lot easier to see me and my service as a gift to someone less fortunate, without seeing a “needy” person as a gift to me. In addition, it’s a lot easier to enjoy the “neighbor” I’ll serve in the soup line — whom I’ll probably not see again, at least for more than five or ten minutes at a time — than the one who actually lives next door and wakes me up after midnight with wild parties. It’s easier to pour myself into a service project for the needy than it is to give a little more to my wife and kids. That’s ordinary. I can’t see the impact of the dozen or so little conversations, corrections, laughs, and tasks that happen in a day — or even a week, month, perhaps even a year. I can’t measure the ordinary stuff. But I can measure (supposedly) how many souls were saved or how many people were fed or how much money came in for a special project.
We look at the work of someone like Mother Theresa from the end point, as the Nobel Prize-winning figure who founded an order of nuns spread across India and around the world to serve the poor. However, she described her own life in terms of countless decisions and actions that hardly seem revolutionary on a daily scale. She learned to help the person she was with at the moment — actual neighbors, not “the poor” in general, but people created in God’s image who needed something particular that she had to give.
A fellow used to pass a massive construction site on his way to work. One day he stopped and asked people what they were doing. One worker answered, “Hauling dirt.” Another replied, “Cutting stones.” Standing up straight, a third man replied cheerfully, “I’m building a cathedral.” The goal was extraordinary and it was this that motivated what seemed on the surface to be nothing more than dull routine. We need to think like that. We do not need to be Michelangelo to take delight in helping build the scaffold that he used to paint the Sistine Chapel. Not only in the ministry, but in all vocations, some plant, some water, but the Lord gives the increase.
Two Kinds of Sacrifice
The Old Testament law provided for two distinct types of sacrifice: thanksgiving and guilt. The first was natural to our creaturely condition: tribute offering brought to the Great King. In Romans 1, Paul says that the first evidence of our fall in Adam was that we were no longer thankful. After the fall, something else was needed: a guilt offering, a sacrifice to take away sins.
It’s amazing how this idea of falling short and the gods being angry with us permeates the world’s religions. That’s why they threw kids into volcanoes as they offered an annual sacrifice of a person, and created elaborate schemes to appease the gods or the forces of nature. “If we just do x, then god or the gods will do y.” This law-logic is evident even in Christianity; it’s our natural religion, our default setting.
Yet the good news is that God provides the sacrifice for guilt. After the fall in Genesis 3, God clothed Adam and Eve with sacrificial skins, pointing to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. God wasn’t bound in any way to do this. It’s a sheer act of free mercy on his part. The whole sacrificial system of the Old Testament pointed forward to the moment when God the Son, in our flesh, would bear the curse for our sin and bring an end to all sacrifices.
Now we live in a grace economy, not a debt economy. At last we are free to be thankful, to offer ourselves as “living sacrifices” of praise rather than dead sacrifices of guilt. We’re on the receiving end of everything. We’re not building a kingdom, but receiving one. We’re not appeasing God, but receiving his gift of righteousness in his Son.
As recipient of this covenantal exchange between the Father and the incarnate Son, the church lives in an economy of gratitude rather than either sacrifice or as an extension of Christ’s atoning work. We are passive receivers of the gift of salvation, but we are thereby rendered active worshipers in a life of thanksgiving that is exhibited chiefly in loving service to our neighbors.
Especially when we gather for corporate worship, we are reminded again that beneath all of the contracts we have conducted throughout the week, reality is fundamentally ordered by God’s covenantal faithfulness. God speaks and we respond with thanksgiving. Here the logic of the market (debt) is disrupted by the doxological logic of grace (gift).
Christ is both the fully satisfying thank offering (a life well-pleasing to God on our behalf) and guilt offering (substitute for our sins). Notice especially the two crucial points made in 2 Corinthians 1:19 – 20: “For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you . . . was not Yes and No, but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory.” By fulfilling our debts, he makes our lives thank offerings to God. He puts a new economy in its place, so that “through him” we can “say Amen to God for his glory.” The Gift has been given; therefore, we are free to give: thanks to God, and our good works to our neighbor.
Until people are persuaded that God is the fountain of all of our good, Calvin insists, “they will never devote themselves wholly, truly, and sincerely to him.”98 Grace inspires gratitude. “There is . . . an exact parallel in this respect between piety and faith,” notes Calvin scholar Brian Gerrish. Only because of the forgiveness of sins that comes from Christ can the uneasy conscience ever be assured that God is indeed good and the source of all good.99
From God alone, therefore, all good and perfect gifts come to the world and are then distributed by us for the feast. The church is the place where sinners are receivers, yet it is also the people who are scattered to fulfill their common callings. In the latter, the church has no dominion. It cannot command the covenant community to embrace particular political ideologies, policies, parties, or politicians. It can only witness to the kingdom of grace, not inaugurate the kingdom of glory. Hence, Calvin as well as Luther refers to “two kingdoms” that must be kept distinct in the present age, although the believer participates in both.100
Gustav Wingren nicely summarizes Luther’s concern with the neighbor as the recipient of the believer’s good works. Instead of living in monasteries, committing their lives in service to themselves and their own salvation, or living in castles, commanding the world to mirror the kingdom of Christ, Luther argues, believers should love and serve their neighbors through their vocations in the world, where their neighbors need them.101 “God does not need our good works, but our neighbor does.”102 When we offer our works to God, we simultaneously “attempt to depose Christ from his throne” and neglect our neighbor, since these works “have clearly been done, not for the sake of [our] neighbor, but to parade before God.”103 God descends to serve humanity through our vocations, so instead of seeing good works as our works for God, they are now to be seen as God’s work for our neighbor, which God performs through us. That is why both orders are upset when we seek to present good works to God as if he needed them. In contrast, when we are overwhelmed by the superabundance of God’s gracious gift, we express our gratitude in horizontal works of love and service to the neighbor.
This view of vocation had numerous implications for social life. “In his Treatise on Christian Liberty, the main thought is that a Christian lives in Christ through faith and in his neighbor through love.”104
In faith, which accepts the gift, man finds that it is not only “heaven that is pure with its stars, where Christ reigns in his work,” but the earth too is clean “with its trees and its grass, where we are at home with all that is ours.” There is nothing more delightful and lovable on earth than one’s neighbor. Love does not think about doing works, it finds joy in people; and when something good is done for others, that does not appear to love as works but simply as gifts which flow naturally from love.105
Under the law, in Adam, one is trapped in the cycle of sin and death, resentment and despair, self-righteousness and self-condemnation. Yet under grace, in Christ, one is not only justified apart from the law but is able for the first time to respond to that law of love that calls from the deepest recesses of our being as covenantally constituted creatures. It is not the law itself that changes, but our relation to it, that makes all the difference.
In an economy of grace, there is enough to go around. The Father’s love and generosity are not scarce. His table is brimming with luxurious fare. That is why we invite those who cannot repay us. After all, it is not our table, but his. It is Christ who speaks to us today in the words of the prophet:
Come, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and he who has no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food. (Isa 55:1 – 2)
God’s liberal hand is open to us and opens us up to the others seated with us. We begin to delight not only in God but in our neighbor. We’re no longer modern masters, or postmodern tourists, but forgiven pilgrims on our way to the city God has built, as he spreads a table in the wilderness for us on our way.
Just as the gospel directs us outside of ourselves to the divine stranger who meets us in peace and reconciliation, it frees us for an extroverted piety that is no longer obsessed with either self-condemnation or self-justification. It enables us to concentrate not on the inward process of infused habits and our own moral progress, but to turn our attention outward to the fellow strangers all around us. The gospel makes us extrospective, turning our gaze upward to God in faith and outward to our neighbor in love. This is true freedom — freedom from sin’s guilt and tyranny, so that we can actually love people as gifts instead of debts.
Entering God’s Rest
The Lord’s Day is not another treadmill, but a day of resting from our works as we bask in his marvelous provision for our salvation and temporal needs (Heb 4:1 – 5). After all, “the earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof” (Ps 24:1). On this holy day, we rest in God’s care for our temporal welfare. But even more than that, we rest in him alone for everlasting life. It is the opportunity to receive a kingdom rather than to build one; to be beneficiaries rather than benefactors; to be heirs rather than employees; to be on the receiving end once again of “the Son of Man [who] came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt 20:28). We can be still and know that Yahweh is God (Ps 46:10).
This rest is not a cessation from all activity, however. It’s joining our Lord in his conquest over death and hell, receiving and dispensing the spoils of his victory. It’s opening the windows to the beams radiating from the age to come, where Christ reigns in grace, anticipating together that day when he returns to reign in glory. Filled with the intensity of such sovereign grace, the Lord’s Day becomes a beachhead for the transformation of our whole lives, so that every day is warmed by its light.
“God rested on the seventh day from all his works” (Heb 4:4). Yet Israel, like Adam, failed the test and therefore forfeited the Sabbath rest. As Paul says in Romans 10, ironically, Israel pursued it by works but didn’t attain it, while those who didn’t pursue it by works but received it by faith did attain it. Unlike all of the high priests of the old covenant, “we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God” (4:14). Taking his throne at the Father’s right hand, he has claimed it as our throne together with him in everlasting glory. “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (4:16).
So again there is another “today”: the space in history to enter the everlasting Sabbath day with God by resting from our works because Christ has fulfilled all of our daily labors on our behalf. He calls us not to toil for that rest by our guarding, subduing, and keeping, but simply to enter his rest through faith behind the conquering King.
Unstoppable?
“You are all going to die.” It’s not the message that college grads are used to hearing, which may be why the 2012 commencement speech by screenwriter Joss Whedon created so much media buzz. In our youth culture, even mature adults are encouraged to recover their inner teenager. “I may be old, but I’ll never grow up,” I read just yesterday on a vanity plate.
But there is no denying that it’s harder to keep up with expectations. The most taboo topic in our society is death. At least in California, people don’t die; they just “pass away” — or better yet, live on in their legacy and the memories they leave behind. Make no mistake about it: death stalks us and eventually stops us in our tracks. Wisdom calls us to use this fact as a trigger to reorient us to the things that really matter. As it turns out, they’re the everyday things.
The truth is that each of us is stoppable. In fact, we all stop. Our heart stops beating, we stop moving, and we stop breathing. As Whedon pointed out in his commencement address, we even start winding down just as our ambitions are all wound up.
The Stoic in all of us imagines that we are independent of God and each other, until we’re not. In The Little Way of Ruth Leming, Rod Dreher reflects:
Contemporary culture encourages us to make islands of ourselves for the sake of self-fulfillment, of career advancement, of entertainment, of diversion, and all the demands of the sovereign self. When suffering and death come for you — and it will — you want to be in a place where you know, and are known. You want — no, you need — to be able to say, as Mike did, “We’re leaning, but we’re leaning on each other.”106
Dreher’s sister, Ruth, never left the small Louisiana town where they were raised, but lived an ordinary life of loving service in her community. When she contracted cancer, he moved back home, leaving the dazzling heights of New York journalism. A friend tells him, “ ‘Everything I’ve done has been for career advancement. Go for the money, the good jobs. And we have done well. But we are alone in the world,’ he said. ‘Almost everybody I know is like that. My family is all over the country. My kids only call if they want something . . . when we get old, our kids can’t move back to take care of us if they wanted to because we all go off to some golf resort to retire. This is the world we have made for ourselves. I envy you that you can escape it.’ ”107 Dreher adds:
Never would I have imagined that I would spend the morning of my little sister’s forty-third birthday in the graveyard, watching workmen heave her tombstone into place. But nobody ever thinks about these things when they’re young. Nobody thinks about limits, and how much we need each other. But if you live long enough, you see suffering. It comes close to you. It shatters the illusion, so dear to us, of self-sufficiency, of autonomy, of control. Look, a wife and mother, a good woman in the prime of her life, dying from cancer. It doesn’t just happen to other people. It happens to your family. What do you do then?108
“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Ps 90:12). When we do that, we shrink a little bit, but God and his world grow much larger. And whenever that happens, we are ready to make the most of the ordinary.
1. How are women especially, even from childhood, given expectations that can be overwhelming, confusing, and impossible?
2. Do you tend sometimes to treat people as projects? Why do we do this and how should we view them?
3. What are the two different types of sacrifice in the Old Testament? How does Christ fulfill both and what does that mean for our lives today?
4. Do you draw strength for your active life of faith from an ultimate place of resting in Christ? What are the challenges to this in our daily lives?
5. Consider/discuss the youth-dominated emphasis on being “unstoppable.” How does our outlook change as we grow older? (This one is especially good to discuss in a group with varying ages.)