Things you'll never say

I sometimes run a little thought experiment with myself. It goes like this:

You get to the Pearly Gates of heaven and St. Peter gives you a chance to look back over your life. He encourages you to particularly note those things you are glad you did, as well as the things you wish you hadn't done. And this exercise is not so much about the single events in your life so much as the patterns of your life. He wants you to think about how you devoted the hours of your life to habits and activities, day in and day out.

Asking myself that was one of the reasons I decided to stop watching television earlier this year. As I wrote in a previous post, my wife and I have given up TV. Not that television is inherently bad, mind you. But when you think of all the more productive things you could do with your time, it is a shame that so many of us allow our lives to be taken up by staring into that screen. For the most part, we've been very happy with our decision. It has allowed us to do a little bit of what John Wesley called "redeeming the time" (though he was talking about waking up earlier each day!).

I sometimes think about this kind of reflection by asking myself, "What are the things you would never, ever say to St. Peter?" As in, I would never look back over my life and say, "Gee, I wish I had watched more TV." Or, "Man, I wish I had argued with my wife more." Or, "You know, I wish I had spent more time worrying about material things."

It reminds me of a line from George Eliot's novel, Adam Bede. I listened to an unabridged audio version of this wonderful book a few years ago, so I know I won't get the quote exactly right. But at the end of one of the chapters, Eliot writes something to the effect, "When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity."

Isn't that great? To me, it says everything about how we choose to go about spending the precious time that we have in this life.

John Howard Yoder has a profound statement in his book, The Original Revolution, where he writes, "We are not marching to Zion because we think that by our own momentum we can get there. But that is still where we are going. We are marching to Zion because, when God lets down from heaven the new Jerusalem prepared for us, we want to be the kind of persons and the kind of community that will not feel strange there."

That statement by Yoder comes in the context of a book on pacifism, and he is referring to the calling to live a nonviolent life. We might also think about how it relates to the more mundane, day-to-day decisions about how we live our lives. If, as Christians, we are called to live in a way that anticipates our lives in the kingdom of God, then it matters a great deal how we spend the hours of our day. We ought to want to live as the kind of people whose commitments of time and talent are holy, meaning that they are oriented towards the love we know in Jesus Christ.

For most of us, today will look a lot like yesterday. We live in the same house, drive to the same places, and do many of the same things. Our lives tend toward the routine. And since that's the case, it means that what makes up the routine is of a great deal of importance. Are you spending the hours of your life doing things you'll later regret?

And if you look back on your life from the perspective of the Pearly Gates, considering all the things you've done and the things you've left undone, will you find that you devoted a huge chunk of your time to habits and activities that could have been used to a much greater purpose?

Yoder on the Church

I'm serving as a graduate assistant in a Christian Ethics course this semester, and the instructor (Dean Sam Wells) has got perhaps the best reading list I've ever seen for a survey course. It's going to be a great semester.

One of the theologians we'll be dipping into is John Howard Yoder, who I studied in a seminar with Stanley Hauerwas a couple of summers ago. [If you'd like to read Hauerwas' eulogy to Yoder after his death in First Things, click here.] I've been pulling my Yoder texts of the shelf, and it hasn't taken me long to remember why I love reading him so much - I don't know of another theologian who challenges me down to my core while filling me with an almost inexpressible hope at the same time.

If you ever want to be reminded why the church is centrally important to history, read Yoder. Describing the societal temptation toward Constantinianism in The Original Revolution, he writes:

"All [the] efforts to defend the cause of the church before the bar of secular analysis have in common the same basic axiom. This is then what is really important; the true meaning of history, the true locus of salvation, is in the cosmos and not in the church. Then what God is really doing He is doing through the framework of society as a whole and not in the Christian community" (p.146).

As Yoder could point out with an insight few others have possessed, the Constantinian tendency we all have is exactly that we place our trust in Caesar rather than in Christ, in the governments of nation-states rather than in the church. After all, governments have power while the church is weak - right? Yoder counters:

"Why then is it reasonable that we should continue to obey in a world which we do not control? Because that is the shape of the work of Christ" (p.155).

To embrace his ecclesiology is madness, on the surface of things. But it is also to place one's full faith that Jesus is who he says he is, and that God's promises will surely be brought to fulfillment. There is hope in this, brothers and sisters, and Yoder gives it to you:

"We are not marching to Zion because we think that by our own momentum we can get there. But that is still where we are going. We are marching to Zion because, when God lets down from heaven the new Jerusalem prepared for us, we want to be the kind of persons and the kind of community that will not feel strange there" (p.159).

Those are beautiful words. And they're words of hope.

Veni, Domine Iesu!

What (or who) is driving history?

The presidential campaign season has become an all-consuming affair for many in this country (and particularly for the national media). We were distracted by the Beijing Olympics for awhile, but now that those have passed and the Democratic and Republican National Conventions have redirected our attention, it seems that all eyes are trained on the issue of who our next president will be.

I have friends who are wholehearted Obama supporters and friends who are wholehearted McCain supporters. My own column work and blogging makes me interested in the genre of op-ed writing, so I read a lot of columnists from both the liberal and conservative persuasions as well. (Come to think of it, that would make for an interesting blog post in and of itself: Who are the best op-ed columnists out there?). Inevitably, as we draw closer to the election, the extremist tendency in everyone's views seems to get dialed up.

And here's what gets me about the points of view that I hear in person and read in print -- in the polarized atmosphere of the campaign season, people on both the left and the right tend to view their own party's candidate through rose-colored glasses while seeing the other's side's guy as a laughable, almost-inconceivably bad choice for president. In the process, the Democrats think a President Obama would restore dignity to the Oval Office, repair our damaged reputation overseas, bring in universal healthcare, balance the budget, end the war, and rewrite the tax code to be more just. Meanwhile, Republicans thing a President McCain would reform the damaged Republican party, enable true bipartisan legislative work, protect us from Islamic extremism, face down a resurgent Russia, keep spending low and taxes lower, and make government less intrusive. As the expectations of each side for its candidate get higher, the demonization of the other side gets more intense.

I had a conversation with a good friend today who reminded me of a frequent refrain in the work of John Howard Yoder: The real force driving the world is not the United States of America; it is not freedom & democracy; it is not capitalism; and it is certainly not Barack Obama or John McCain. It is, rather, Jesus Christ. And the body politic that Jesus leads is no nation-state. It is the church.

I don't want to suggest that your vote is not important. And I don't think it is inconsequential that Obama might make a serious difference in the healthcare crisis in this country, or that a McCain appointment to the Supreme Court might bring us one step closer to ending the abortion holocaust in this country. But it is vitally necessary that Christians put this presidential campaign into the proper perspective.

In He Came Preaching Peace (1985), Yoder writes,

"[T]he primacy of Christians' loyalty will show in our sense of ultimate values. In the minds of many serious people, what really matters about human history is the creation of institutions which will create and distribute material abundance, and will guarantee human rights. This is what we read about in the history books. These things do matter. And generally Christians do much to help achieve them. But what matters most, the real reason that God lets time go on, is his calling together of his own people through the witness of the gospel. Not buildlng and protecting a bigger and better democracy, but building the church is God's purpose; not the defeat of communism, or of hunger, but the proclamation of his kingdom and the welding of all kinds of men and women into one new body is what we are here for. Kings and empires have come and gone in times past and shall continue to come and go until the day of Christ's appearing. For Christians to seek any government's interest - even the security and power of peaceable and freedom-loving democracy - at the cost of the lives and security of our brothers and sisters around the world, would be selfishness and idolatry, however much glorified by patriotic preachers and poets.

"Not only in Abraham's time was it a testing of faith to be called by God to abandon all else out of loyalty to that 'city whose builder and maker is God' (Hebrews 11:10). Even more today, when nationalism has become a religion for millions, will the true depth and reality of the Christian profession of church people be tested when they must choose between their earthly and their eternal loyalties.

"What is our allegiance? It is to that people 'elect from every nation, yet one o'er all the earth.' Our nationality? Christian."

Reading Yoder

This summer I am reading John Howard Yoder with some friends. We are only a couple of weeks into it, but it has been a tremendous experience so far. I had not read a line of Yoder before, not even his famous book, The Politics of Jesus.

I want to blog about Yoder from time to time over the course of the summer. But first I'd like to ask the readers of this blog if you all have read Yoder before, and if so, what your experience with him has been like.