ONE
The Moment
I turned on the radio. It was about eight o’clock in the morning on Sunday, June 12, 2016. My drive into the city was the same as most Sundays at eight in the morning: empty sidewalks and no traffic. NPR was reporting on a shooting that had occurred in the early morning hours at a nightclub in Orlando. The facts were just emerging on my drive in, but in the hours and days that followed, details would come to light revealing that this was an event of mass proportion.
Omar Mateen walked into the Pulse nightclub and in a savage attack killed forty-nine people and wounded fifty-eight others. The Pulse was a gay nightclub, it was Latin night, and most of the victims were Latino. Mateen reportedly frequented the club, though the FBI and the CIA found no evidence of this. On his 911 call, Mateen swore allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The shooting became one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history, the deadliest terrorist attack since September 11, 2001, the deadliest incident of violence against the LGBTQ community, and an unspeakable act of violence against Latin American people. Mateen told a negotiator that his actions were retaliation for the American-led interventions in Iraq and Syria.
At church we held a moment of silence for the victims and their families, though the details were still sketchy. In the early hours of Sunday, June 12, so many facets of American society collided in an act of horrendous evil: sexuality, racism, gun control, Islamic fundamentalism, and a global war on terror that was proving to be incredibly complex with victory almost impossible to define. In our moment of silence, a fog filled my head. How would those families recover? What were our gay friends and neighbors thinking and feeling right now? Why? How? What the . . . ?
How do people who follow Jesus respond in moments like this?
Driving home from church, my radio still tuned to NPR, I listened to an interview of a local pastor in Orlando. The reporter summarized the tension with poignancy and firmness in one profound question: “How do evangelicals respond to this crisis when it is very clear politically that evangelicals are antigay and pro-gun?” That question rocked me. The pastor was stumped. I wondered how I would answer the reporter if she were to ask me the same question.
The gospel that was meant to be good news for all people was being translated by this reporter for American society, communicating that followers of Jesus were somehow aligned with the shooter’s beliefs. While not suggesting that Christians are pro-murder, this journalist was unearthing what no one wants to talk about: essentially, that it is hard for Christians to show compassion to victims and families of the Orlando nightclub shooting when certain streams within the church have sent the wrong message to the culture around us. What the reporter had heard the church communicate was that Mateen had the right to bear arms and that his denouncement of the LGBTQ community was compatible with the right way to think and vote. She assumed that this is the way Jesus’s followers think and vote. While I felt the pushback internally, I had to admit that this is how Christians are widely perceived.
Her point was made on me, and I could imagine countless people who don’t follow Jesus nodding their heads along with her. Now when we should be declaring, “The God of all comfort is full of mercy,” our voices are muted because our society has heard, “Our God likes guns and hates gay people.” This is a biblical and theological misrepresentation, but it is hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube once it’s out.
Sixteen months later Donald Trump became our forty-fifth president. The election was one of the most divisive in the last fifty years, and depending on where you live, it may have left you dumbfounded, as it did the newscasters who were reporting on the election. Most channels showed men and women at a loss for words, and yet clearly a good portion of the country had voted for Trump. The next morning it seemed as if the moderate voices had been raptured overnight, and our country was split like a great chasm, right down the middle. Reports showed that 80 percent of evangelicals had voted for Trump. The question the NPR reporter had asked that pastor in Orlando came flooding back to me.
This book is not about how a Christian should vote. I believe that Christians should vote, and they should vote their consciences. I am not writing to endorse a candidate or a political party. I am asking myself and you as well, What is the church as a whole telling the world about Jesus? This seems like an impossible question to answer, because there is a vast spectrum of churches filled with a multitude of opinions concerning theology and social issues. Who are we even talking about when we talk about the people of God?
The spectrum of churches contains many denominations and theological traditions, and some, if not most, would not be happy to be associated with the others. But a spectrum of theological views and social opinions exists for a reason, each group believing it is closer to the intentions of Christ and the application of Scripture than the others.
To the world at large, this spectrum is very confusing. Most people who don’t follow Jesus or attend church are unaware of how detailed and complex our differences are. The watching world often lumps us together into one group. This means that telling someone we believe in and follow Jesus may bring to their mind Appalachian snake handlers; the militant, antigay hate speech of Westboro Baptist; an experience they had with a Southern Baptist; or a preacher they saw on TV. They may think we speak in tongues and shake on the ground, or they may think we despise scientific knowledge and reject evolution.
Sadly, few would think that we are rational people with a deep and abiding sense of the grace of Jesus and that we possess the heart and the will to love and serve the world in his name. The fact is that the loudest and strangest beliefs and practices on the spectrum make the news, while hundreds of thousands of believers who are actually living as salt and light in the world do not make the prime-time news shows or go viral on the web.
The world around us is not aware of the intricacies of theological debate, and the lack of unity in the church continues to cause confusion for those on the outside looking in.
The moment in which we live is not cut-and-dry. There are no easy answers to the problems of the world, and bumper-sticker opinions won’t solve the deep-seated issues that we face. Sexuality, racism, immigration, terror, religion, war, wealth and poverty, truth and lies are all on the table now, and we can’t assume that having the right political stripe will make everything clear. We are a society that is messy and complicated, and it appears that Christians, whose voices have been drowned out by misrepresentation and misunderstanding, have little to say about the things that matter most to the world.
Many people who follow Jesus protest the statistics, insisting that not all Christians vote or think like the stereotypes. But if we are being honest, we would admit that Christians who stand on the other side of the fence are guilty of similar compromises on different issues. You may be against building a wall along the border of Mexico, but are you willing to fight for the rights of the unborn? Where does someone go who doesn’t fit into the given political and social boxes? What do you do if you are serious about your faith in Jesus but feel more and more that the speech and actions being used by certain Christians don’t accurately reflect what you believe?
The question that keeps gnawing at me and that I am desperate to try to answer is this: What does it mean to be the people of God now? That’s the question that drives this book. What I am excited about is this: we are not unique in this moment; God’s people have been in moments like ours. They have survived times of being marginalized and misunderstood. They have come through times when they were disciplined by God for unfaithfulness and found redemption in his mercy. Most encouraging is that, throughout history, God’s people have found a way to be faithful, prophetic, and imaginative as they discovered fresh ways to announce that Jesus is still Lord of all things, even in moments like this.
Christians are facing a crisis right now. The crisis comes from a sense of loss in three distinct areas: identity, place, and practice.
The Loss of Identity
Once upon a time in America, the majority of the population shared Judeo-Christian values. The average American was somewhat familiar with the biblical faith in Jesus and more than likely had attended some type of Christian church at some point in their life. Society held to values that today we call traditional, that aligned somewhat with what Christians at the time considered biblical norms. It appeared that God, and specifically the God of the Bible, was blessing America.
Back then people who followed Jesus had an identity that fit well within American society. Pastors were respected, church attendance was far greater than it is today, and debates in the public square took into consideration what God or the church had to say on the matter. That day has long since passed. For followers of Jesus, our identity within the culture has become marginalized as society has grown more pluralistic and secular. Today hundreds of beliefs and worldviews compete for the attention of the hearts and minds of people.
This plurality of voices and opinions has marginalized the voice of faith at best and shown disdain for it at worst. The ethics of Judeo-Christian America have been replaced with the ethics of generic spirituality, which demands only that we be nice to other people and allow them to do whatever they want. In the world of pluralism, Jesus’s claim to be the exclusive way to the Father doesn’t come off as good news but instead sounds oppressive and arrogant. Which means that a young person in an urban center today feels more apologetic than proud for being a Christian.
Christians who once felt their faith had a home in America are realizing that they are increasingly a minority group. This is especially true for white Christians. The African American church and other churches of color have a long history of living out their faith while being marginalized by the majority culture. For white Christians, not fitting in and being marginalized is an entirely new experience and has led to a loss of identity within the culture.
The Loss of Place
The loss of identity leads to the second loss: the loss of place. Christian voices have receded to the margins within society, and this marginalization has been growing for several decades. The loss of place creates uneasiness, particularly for white evangelicals, whose privilege within society is being threatened for the first time in their religious memory. This uneasiness has led many to scramble for security, running to politics to seek salvation.
To try to maintain Christian values, Christian politicians and political organizations have created bills, hoping to exclude the people and the things that threaten to destabilize their ways of being Americans. The goal is to prevent ideas and practices that are unfamiliar to them and to preserve the ones in which they find security. From gay marriage to gun control, these efforts have all but backfired. In seeking to retain a voice within society and to hold on to a place in the public square, Christians have tried to retain a beachhead in the perceived war against them. But the beach has eroded, and it appears that political and cultural power has eroded with it. The lingering result of the culture wars is the lasting impression that Christians, and particularly evangelical Christians, are more of a political party than a movement of believers committed to following Jesus and sharing his gospel.
Christians who are embarrassed to admit to the designation are not ashamed of Jesus but are afraid that their peers will assume that following Jesus requires them to join the political forces that seem to speak for Jesus in ways that Jesus himself never spoke. The result is Christians who love Jesus but find themselves confused by who they are now and where their place in society might be.
The Loss of Practice
The last loss Christians are facing is the loss of practice. They no longer understand what it means to practice their faith. This came home to me a few years ago while I was driving down a street in downtown Portland. A Muslim man with a long beard was standing at a bus stop with two young children. He wore a prayer cap and a long tunic, his daughter’s head was covered with a hijab, and his son was dressed like him. He was standing in the middle of hipster central dressed as if he were going for tea in Afghanistan. What struck me was how clear it was that he was practicing his faith. His dress, as a visible symbol of his faith, laid out for himself and displayed for others when he worshiped, how he worshiped, the words he prayed, and the exact time he prayed them.
By contrast, the faith I was introduced into when I was eighteen was primarily a private experience. I did most of my praying and reading by myself. Outside of Sunday worship there was a Bible study or a service project or some door knocking to do, but no clear path existed concerning what these practices were supposed to look like. Rather than instructing me in how to pray, read Scripture, and love my neighbor, the pastors seemed primarily concerned with my sex life and how much alcohol I was consuming. I learned what not to do but not really what I was supposed to do.
Practicing the Christian faith in public and in private can mean everything and nothing to some extent. Such practice can be anything from picketing an abortion clinic to voting for a candidate to having a quiet time. Because there is such a wide spectrum of belief, anything goes. Ironically, Christian practice tends to get reduced to being nice, not bothering anyone, and not taking the faith too seriously or causing a scene. The radical, cross-bearing faith of Peter, James, and John is inspiring to read about but seemingly impossible to replicate.
The problem as I see it is that, for most Christians, their current practice does not distinguish them from the greater society, nor does it necessarily form them to be salt and light in the world. Many Christians don’t really know what it means to practice their faith today.
Who Should We Blame?
As a result of these losses, Christians across the wide spectrum of belief are increasingly finding it difficult to answer the question, What does it mean to be the people of God now? As with any loss, the losses Christians are experiencing are disorienting. Questions arise on how to remedy the situation, but answers are difficult to find. Almost all seek first to blame, pointing fingers at the culture at large or portions of the faith community in which they live. Liberals blame conservatives, and conservatives blame liberals. People often find it far easier to fight over issues they disagree on than to hear the demands of the gospel concerning how they should spend their time and their money and whom they should invite to their tables. When blaming dies down, people may make a grab for power, seeking to regain the influence they once had. In grabbing for some sort of stabilizing security, however, they end up empty-handed. The efforts to reconstruct their former way of life fail.
The divisions caused by liberal and conservative agendas are not the only explanation for this failure. The failure has come from something far more serious for all Christ followers, liberal and conservative. Because we have all marinated in American culture for so long, we have become enculturated. We have grown comfortable with the cultural air that we breathe and have been radically affected by it. We are all consumers, we are all shaped by the desire for affluence, we are all highly connected to the technology that both entertains us and shapes the narrative of our lives, and we all depend on national security and class divides to protect our way of life. These aspects of life are not tied to any biblical doctrine we believe or church we attend. We are swimming in the stream of culture, shaped by the same realities as everyone else, and rarely if ever do we stop to question our participation in this way of life. Therefore, on the one hand, we Christians are increasingly being marginalized by society for our beliefs. On the other hand, we are simultaneously becoming more and more enculturated by the forces of American society so that we are no different from the rest of society in many ways.
These forces appear to affect everyone on the wide spectrum of Christian belief, from liberal, progressive Christians to more conservative believers. Enculturation is a by-product of living in American society. No one is exempt from the forces of American culture, and as a result, the claims of Christ and his gospel have been drowned out by the white noise of buying more stuff, making more money, consuming more information and entertainment, and following the twenty-four-hour news cycles that tell us if it’s safe to go outside.
The speed at which we can access all of the above is immediate, and there is no indication that things will slow down anytime soon. The greatest threat that we Christians face is not the rejection of our values and beliefs in the public square but our own participation in the stream of culture that shapes our identity more powerfully than our faith in Jesus does. Faith becomes one more thing that people consume in a long list of purchases that we hope will make up a meaningful life. The privatization of faith and the marginalization of its purposes in our public lives are evidence that we have lost our deepest identity and compromised our strongest allegiance. Hardly any of this has taken place as an act of defiant rebellion. Slowly and over time, we have passively forgotten the story of which we are a part, our identity as the people of God, and the way of life we have been called to live that runs counter to the aspirations of the empire. So what do we do?
Denial and Despair
How we respond in this moment will shape what our faith will look like in this new world. Denial may be how many of us will respond. Dismissing the facts and denying the realities, we can just keep going on the way we are. But if we do, we will find that we have lost a lot more than religious liberty. Our very souls are at stake. If we hide from the world, we are removing ourselves from the very people Jesus has called us to love in his name.
Another way to respond is to despair. We can close the curtains and bury our noses in the book of Revelation and wait for the rapture to come and take us home. While I don’t deny that Jesus is going to come back and bring his kingdom with him, he never gives us the option of hiding from the world and waiting to be transported off the planet. If we choose despair, we will miss the beauty and redemption that he is bringing into the world—even this world and even in the shape that it is in.
A final option, and one we will explore in this book, is that we can see the possibilities God has for us. When we remember our story, we recognize that the people of God have been here before, and they found their God faithful. We are not alone in our marginal moment. In seeing these possibilities, we can grab hold of the hope that Jesus is still King over all things.
This hope is not without cost. It will require that we rediscover ancient practices that sustained God’s people in conditions like our own. It will demand that we turn from the small gods we have come to depend on for our comfort, security, and identity and turn back to the living God who has bought us with the blood of his beloved Son. Along the way, we will need to imagine new and fresh ways of expressing faithfulness to Jesus, love to our neighbors, and allegiance to the King of heaven and earth who is present in sustaining ways through his Spirit.
This is not the time to be in denial or to give in to despair. This is the time to hope in new possibilities. It is the time to remember that our God has preserved his people throughout history and will do so now as well. The God of the past is the God of the present, and he invites us to discover in new ways what it means to be the people of God now.
The Idea of Exile
God’s people throughout history often found themselves in times and places that were hostile to their faith. They survived moments within history when they were marginalized at best and persecuted at worst. There were also times when God’s people found themselves in powerful cultures, such as that of Babylon, whose wealth and power threatened to enculturate them and turn them away from faithfulness and toward apathy and idolatry. These moments were known as exile.
Exile in Scripture is both a historical reality for the people of Israel in the Old Testament and a metaphor used by New Testament writers to help Christians understand how to faithfully follow Jesus in inhospitable times and places. In this book, I will be arguing that exile is an important way for Christians to understand what it means to be the people of God now. We will discover from the past how to be faithful in the present. Exile is a way of getting our minds and our hearts around understanding how to be faithful to Jesus in the current cultural moment in which we live.
Jesus asks us one thing: Will we be faithful to him as he has been faithful to us? We are all broken and sinful in deep places within us, and we will never follow Jesus perfectly, but I am convinced that there is a deeper faithfulness we can discover. There is a way of living by faith that allows us to be distinct in our world, transformed by our King, and a blessing to all people as we announce the good news that Jesus is Lord of all. At the end of the day, when we stand before Jesus, faithfulness to him and his Word is really the only thing we will answer for. As we look back to the past and see God’s faithfulness to his people in exile and the people’s response to their God, it is my prayer that we will find a way to be faithful to Jesus in our moment of exile.
In the following chapters, we will travel back in time to understand what exile meant for the people of God in the Old Testament, and we will discover what exile means for us today. Then we will look at ways to practice our faith that will lead us to faithfulness to Christ and will preserve our identity in Jesus as we live inside our culture and bear witness to the world around us that Jesus truly is the way, the truth, and the life.