Day 22: On Being Peace Ambassadors

Christendom, which I will define as Christian culture (or Christian-ish culture) in alliance with the kingdoms of this world, tends to spend much of its intellectual and moral capital defending those worldly kingdoms, rationalizing their wars, and taking sides in their internal power struggles. Christendom produces Christians (or at least claimants to that title) who devote more energy to espousing debate-points and circulating memes that scorch the libs than they do to representing the kingdom of God. It is truly the very essence of what Jesus was referring to when he said, "You cannot serve two masters."

These types are attracted to political power like moths to a porch light. They have leaders, think tanks, authors, radio-talkers, all devoted to propping up some kingdom of this world, rather than representing the kingdom that is to come. Their arguments in favor of war are always entirely pragmatic and worldly. They have forgotten their true allegiance and calling, which to be an ambassador to this world's kingdoms from the kingdom that is to come, which is a kingdom of peace.

Peace, of course, is a fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22), and an earnest or downpayment of that kingdom to come. That means that the indwelling Spirit of God is producing in the believer, among other fruits, the fruit of peace. It is the historic teaching of Christianity that this process of spiritual fruit-production advances throughout the lifetime of a devoted follower of Jesus. With time they become, in other words, more loving, more joyful, more devoted to peace, more patient, etc. It seems difficult to imagine such a person espousing war or justifying war. But people who call themselves Christians often do espouse war, justify war, provide pseudo-spiritual arguments in favor of war,  and seem to notice no spiritual conflict whatsoever welling up in their souls.

The Apostle Paul called the followers of Jesus "ambassadors." They were ambassadors of God's kingdom. They have been sent, as ambassadors are always sent, into a foreign kingdom to represent there the kingdom of God. Their message is peace and reconciliation, because they represent a kingdom of peace; and not only that, but of peace everlasting. In other words, their kingdom is a superior kingdom that will one day replace all the kingdoms of this world, including America. As ambassadors of that victorious kingdom, their offer to one and all is to transfer their allegiance from whatever kingdom of this world to which they now bend the knee, to the kingdom of God, whose king is called "the Prince of Peace."

Reasons given for war, or for warlike gestures and provocations (sanctions, blockades, etc.), are always essentially pragmatic. However much these arguments may be "gussied up" with emotional language or even spiritual language (see, for example, the Battle Hymn of the Republic), they are actually mostly tactical and pragmatic. War with such-and-such country right now is just inevitable, they tell us. Said country has gone too far. They must be resisted, or else the world will get the wrong message, etc. [Also, never fear, the war will be over by Christmas!]

But it should be mentioned that we do not represent a pragmatic kingdom. Our arguments are based on the revelation of God, not on what works (or seems to work, or makes sense to us because it defends our national interests). Keeping with the metaphor of ambassadorship, it is a sort of treason for an ambassador of a kingdom of peace to espouse war. It should be as shocking to us to hear a Christian defend America's wars as it is to hear one excuse or rationalize pornography. Our true purpose, which is to make disciples of King Jesus, is essentially set aside, put on the shelf, whenever we take up the cause of war. Peace is from above. War is from below. We dare not align ourselves with such death-dealing.

Brothers, we are not pragmatists. Our position looks like foolishness to much of the world. So be it. Let us then be fools for the Prince of Peace. We are ambassadors of a kingdom that is to come, that is coming, and that we ourselves represent by the nature of our very lives, bearing the fruit of the Spirit along the way. How then can we turn from this our true calling to become servants of the powers of this world?

Asking for a friend.

The Kingdom Way

Lately my pastors have been preaching through the Gospel of Luke. They've just got through the "sermon on the plain" in chapter 6. Here's where Jesus says things like:

• love your enemies
• do good to those who hate you
• bless those who curse you
• to one who strikes you on the cheek, invite him to strike the other also
• and when someone wants to take some of your stuff, offer him even more stuff.

Oh yes, and

• give to anyone who begs from you
• don't demand back what someone has borrowed

And finally,

• treat other people (all of them) the way you would want them to treat you.

Now here are some rules to live by that virtually no modern self-improvement books will repeat (if there is a section in the bookstore for self-forgetful books, it might be in there). When I first heard this passage preached in my early days as a Christian, the preacher simply said (in essence), no, Jesus didn't really mean you should live this way, because of course you can't live this way, it's a ridiculous suggestion. All Jesus wanted to do was to drive you to your knees in repentance by showing you what a self-focused person you are and always will be.

That was bad exegesis, and consequently bad preaching, but not uncommon. I cut my teeth in a church tradition that was incessantly wary of what they called "works righteousness," and they saw every portion of Scripture in light of that wariness. They mistrusted any talk of good-deed-doing as inevitably leading to, you guessed it, salvation-earning works righteousness. Consequently, all discussion of passages like the Sermon on the Mount (and the Sermon on the Plain) were essentially acts of concentrated avoidance of the obvious.

Anyway, there remains the obvious, right where it has always been. Jesus' ministry starts with an announcement of the kingdom of God (see Luke 4:18-21, for example, and also 4:43), and the appropriate reaction to that is a celebration. The bridegroom has come! (see Luke 5:34) 

Probably all of Jesus' imperatives should be predicated on this thought: the kingdom has come! That seems to be the order of things in the Gospels. Jesus comes announcing the kingdom, and then he gets down to teaching what that's going to mean for people who follow in the Jesus way. It's going to look like, well, loving your enemies. Oh yes, and then he lives it out, even to the bitter end.

As I see it, this is Big Truth. The whole rest of the NT, from The Acts of the Apostles to The Revelation, is the ongoing working out of this Big Truth in all its implications. We will have to keep reading in order to understand all this better. What is more, we will need the Helper in all this. There is no blueprint for how to love your enemy, only the moment of truth when you have to decide whether you're going to love them or not love them. And in that moment, just like the Apostles in Luke's sequel, you're going to need the help of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 1:4,5). 

It would be Paul who would one day write, "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." Then he said, "If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit." I don't think we can even begin to think about leading the life that Jesus prescribes in Luke 6 until we have begun to see that it is also the Spirit-led life that Paul is telling the Galatians about (Gal. 5:22).

Have hope, for the King has come, overthrown all your enemies, and he's given you his Spirit to guide you in the Kingdom Way.

"Ain't gonna study war no more"

The Olivetree Bible app, which I highly recommend, includes a lot of different daily reading plans. One of them is a 14-day "teachings of Jesus" plan, which I started yesterday. The first entry is chapter 1 of Luke.

Luke 1 ends with Zechariah's song. He sings about his newborn son, John, and about the one who will follow John, the one for whom John "prepares the way." It is John who will bring to his people an understanding that salvation is available through the coming on. That coming one, called the "Dayspring from on high" in the KJV, will "give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death." (v.78a)

This is pretty great, is it not? This is a promise of relief from the ultimate curse.

The years of our life are seventy,
    or even by reason of strength eighty;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
    they are soon gone, and we fly away. (Ps. 90:10)

This wonderful promise of God is not the end, though. The promise comes with a purpose. There is a reason God wants to save his children from "the shadow of death." It comes at the last, and it is a momentary vision of the restored kingdom of God, given to Zechariah at that moment when his tongue was loosed after months of enforced muteness.

. . . to guide our feet into the way of peace. (Luke 1:78b)

I repeat:

. . . to guide our feet into the way of peace. (Luke 1:78b)

I take this to mean a comprehensive kind of peace: peace with God and peace with one another (both of which were broken and lost at the Fall). So then, the word "peace" is nutshell summation of the restored creation. The peace of the Garden was lost, but will be restored. In this nutshell insight into the nature of the restored kingdom, it is the concept of peace that Zechariah chooses to highlight.

In chapter 2 of Luke the angels who come to the shepherds in their fields sing a blessing of peace as they announce the birth of a savior. And what does Simeon say when Joseph and Mary bring Jesus to the Temple?

. . . he took [the baby] up in his arms and blessed God and said, "Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word." (Luke 2:29)

And let us not forget Isaiah 9, which lies behind much of this that we read in Luke. Isaiah's prophetic song in that chapter begins, "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light." This sounds familiar, does it not? And a little bit later, speaking the coming savior (the same that Zechariah would later prophesy in song:

For to us a child is born,
    to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
    and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. (Is. 9:6)

The pattern is pretty clear. Jesus, the Christ, is going to be all about the restoration of peace. This simple idea is always among the first thing said about him, whether it is angels speaking, or prophets, or simple Christians testifying about their own salvation.

I'll make a bold statement here: we don't talk enough about peace. Peace is a kingdom attribute. Peace is a fruit of the Spirit. Jesus is the Prince of Peace. Peace is the promise of the Father. Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God," but we live in a world that does not know "the way of peace (see Romans 3:17)." Interpersonal conflict began with Adam and Eve at the Fall (see Gen. 3:16 in particular), and the first generation to be born outside the Garden was marked by interpersonal bloodshed. Click over to any reputable news site, check out the local news from any city or state or nation you like, and you will see that what started between Cain and Abel continues apace.

My point: I pledge to be a seeker of peace. I pledge to dig into the Word for all that God has to teach me about peace, and I will try to be an ambassador for Jesus' coming kingdom of peace.

4 Virtue Points

1. All true virtue is a foretaste of the kingdom of God.
2. The Bible is a handbook for virtue development.
3. By virtue I do not mean the avoidance of sin, but the development of a God-inclined heart, resulting in the virtuous (God-pleasing) life.
4. See Psalm 1 for more details.

Journaling through McKnight's Kingdom Conspiracy

I've just begun reading Scot McKnight's Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church (published this Fall by Brazos Press). I thought as I got about half-way into the opening chapter that this was a book I might want to journal through, keeping track of the main lines of argument. Part of the reason for this is that McKnight is one of our most rewarding authors, whose work is always engaging and challenging. In this first chapter, for example, McKnight challenges some of my own presuppositions with regard to the kingdom of God.

Another reason is more general. I read a fair amount, but sometimes it seems the books just kind of flow by, and a week or month later I couldn't tell you much about them. That's on me, of course. Perhaps it would be helpful to map the argument of the book, to engage the ideas, in a deeper and more consistent way. So that's what I'm going to try to do with McKnight's book.

McKnight opens the book with a series of quotes: one form the Bible, one from poet Christian Wiman, and still others from novelist Marilynne Robinson,theologians Hauerwas and Willimon (from their book, Resident Aliens--one of my favorites), Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Andy Crouch. What you quickly realize, reading these quotes, is that there are apparently two conceptions of kingdom ministry, one that involves the pursuit of justice, redeeming the culture, and another that involves sharing the message of redemption, otherwise known as evangelism.

To start the book McKnight defines this dichotomy and names the two sides according to their sartorial preferences: there is the "skinny jeans" crowd,  for whom kingdom jeans social justice, feeding the hungry, or generally changing the world in a vaguely Jesus-y way. 

This skinny jeans view has little room for the church. In short, kingdom work = social activism. It has nothing to do with the church. Atonement-talk, salvation-talk, these things are reduced to nearly nothing. Kingdom work is simply good deeds. But, as McKnight points out, the word kingdom never has this meaning in the Bible.

So McKnight is not advocating the skinny jeans view. Using Jane Addams as his example, he warns that the moral vision of the New Testament can quickly be drained of its spiritual content. 

Christ becomes a symbol of a way of life, which for Addams was democracy; the ethic of Jesus is reduced to secular analogies, and so doing everything central to Jesus--the cross, the resurrection, atonement, new birth, the church, or judgment--evaporates into happened-also-to-believe-or-not-believe tenets; and culture can be redeemed by the efforts of humans and the political process apart from, and even against, the Christian theology of salvation and new birth. Kingdom work becomes altogether the act of humans. Furthermore, the church plays absolutely no role except insofar as it supports... social activism. The location of God's work is in the world. In essence, the church gets replaced by Washington, DC, and the ethic of Jesus is translated into Western liberalism's noble ideals. Kingdom work, then, is when good people do good deeds in the public sector for the common good.

So much for the skinny jeans view. But the other side of this dichotomy, what McKnight calls the pleated pants view, is also in for a thoughtful critique. That's chapter 2, which I'll try to summarize in my next post.