Little Drummer Boy

Come, they told me.

Well, I had to come. All my life, I’d had to come and go when those in authority commanded. When I’d finally escaped my master – never mind how – and joined this caravan, I knew I’d have to go along with whatever I was told. At least these people didn’t beat me, and made sure I had enough to eat – far better than an unwanted orphan could expect from most adults. Still, I never knew if that would change… so for now if they said jump I would jump. I could at least play for their entertainment, play my drum. My drum. My one thing that made me useful and my one solace. My drum, the only way I’d ever been allowed to express my needs, my desires, my feelings, my hurt and abandonment.

Our finest gifts we bring, to lay before our King.

Gifts. What would it be like to receive a gift? What would it be like to have parents who love you and want you, and even strangers who are so glad you exist that they would make a long and dangerous journey to give you something? What would it be like to be given something, and nothing expected in return? Who was this child, and why did he inspire this in people?

I have no gift to bring.

The wise men probably had valuable things – they were dressed in simple traveling clothes to make themselves less tempting to thieves, but I’d seen a glimpse of their packs, and they had the purple clothes that only rich people can afford. To my surprise, I wasn’t jealous. Good for the baby. A baby ought to have a beautiful birthday present to make him smile. I never had, but this child should. But what could I give him?

And when the first wise man dropped to one knee and held out his gold to the Child:

The baby glanced at it briefly, as if the shine and luster were old news to him. He seemed as unimpressed as if he had spent an eternity in a place of such unimaginable splendor that gold was worthless, fit only for such menial functions as paving the streets.

And when the second wise man dropped to one knee and held out his frankincense to the Child:

The baby again seemed unimpressed, as if incense had been offered to him for as long as human beings had known that there was something greater than themselves, and that they ought to offer something beautiful and unique to it as tribute.

And when the third wise man dropped to one knee and held out his myrrh to the Child:

The baby took one sniff and looked somber beyond his years, as if he knew that myrrh is used to anoint the dead. He wept, not as babies weep, but with the solemn, silent tears of a man who knows what he weeps for.

It was wrong, it was wrong, it was wrong, the baby should not be given things that make him weep, no child so young and helpless should be made to weep as I have wept.

Shall I play for you?

The words came unbidden, and I immediately felt ashamed. Why would a crying baby want to hear me banging out pa-rum-pa-pum-pum? But…

Mary nodded.

And maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to me that the animals themselves, the stable itself, the world itself, set me a tempo, the very rocks crying out that he should be given all we could give. So…

I played my drum for him.

I played my best for Him.

 

 

I played Him my love and my pain, for they were all I had to offer.

 

 

And as I played, I seemed to be taken elsewhere. I seemed to see the child grown into a man. I saw him with the long, unkempt hair of a man who lives wherever he can – hair like mine. I saw him alone, like me. I saw him unwanted like me, I saw him in pain like me. I saw when the king finally was crowned – but the crown was wrong, the spikes turned inward against Him. I saw when He was finally raised up for the nation to see, His kingly title posted above Him – but it was wrong. I saw a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief like me, forsaken and abandoned like me. For me.

And I heard His voice, and He embraced me, saying:

 

 

Child, I give you My love and My pain, for they are all I have to offer.

 

 

And I was back in the stable, sobbing as I dropped to one knee and held out the drum to Him.

 

Then he smiled at me. Me and my drum.

 

 

 

© John M. Munzer

When faith becomes an idol

Note to people who didn't grow up as Evangelical Christians:

You probably won't get this blog post if you read it. No more than someone outside your family would get why your folks have been fighting for three generations over What Aunt Jane Said To Cousin Jimmy. Church is like a family - both the wonderful things and the dysfunctional things that happen in families, and often difficult for people to understand if they weren't raised in it. But you're welcome to read on anyway - maybe it'll help you understand some things about Evangelical Christianity.

To those who did grow up Evangelical:
For the love of all that is holy, let's start being the kind of family that Our Father wants us to be.

Over the past few days, I've seen posts about a tenured professor at Wheaton College (my alma mater) who is facing disciplinary action and placed on administrative leave. This professor (Dr. Larycia Hawkins) has been wearing a hijab during Advent in solidarity with Muslims who have been treated... well, everyone knows how Muslims are being treated right now in the USA. That wasn't what triggered the disciplinary action... Dr. Hawkins' statement on Facebook describing why she's doing it included a single sentence to which the College authorities object:

“I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book,” she wrote in a Facebook post on December 10. “And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”

To someone who wasn't raised in the Evangelical Christian sub-culture, and didn't attend Wheaton College, this must be baffling. Why would anyone object to that statement at all, let alone object strongly enough to suspend a long-term employee in good standing simply for making the statement?  And how does a Christian college decide that a statement quoting the POPE is so un-Christian that the person making the statement can no longer be allowed to teach young Christians?

Those who know a bit about Islam must also be baffled. After all, my understanding (based on what I learned in a history class at Wheaton, mind you) is that Muslims believe that they worship the same God that Christians do - they just believe we're doing it wrong because we don't believe that Mohammed is His greatest prophet. Muslims even believe in Jesus (though they don't believe he was God, they do believe he was sent from God, and the Q'uran even refers to him as the Messiah.) Muslims refer to Christians and Jews as "People of the Book" - meaning the Bible, which Muslims also take to be Scripture. And most Muslims believe that good Christians and Jews will be saved. The basic sense is "Well, their theology is incorrect, but if they're doing the best they can to follow God given the information they have, that matters more to God than their theology". Which is pretty much what most Christians believe about Muslims.

But Evangelical Christianity isn't "most Christians". It's a very specific sub-culture, with a very specific view of what it means to be a Christian.

I grew up in that sub-culture, lived and breathed it, loved God and my church with such zeal that I nearly decided to become a pastor, and went to Wheaton with that possibility in mind. I only decided against it because I felt I wasn't a good enough Christian to be a leader of Christians. And the thing that made me decide I wasn't a good enough Christian was that I didn't feel I believed enough. If I really believed in God, I'd never have any doubts about His goodness, I'd know with rock-hard certainty what His will for my life is, I'd be seeing miracles happen - because if I had even the faith of a mustard seed, I should be moving mountains. No mountains moving = no faith.

See, that's the focus in Evangelical Christianity. Christianity, to them, is primarily about faith, and faith is primarily about belief. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. Trust in the Lord with all of your heart, lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall straighten thy paths. Sola Fide. If ye have faith as this mustard seed. O ye of little faith, why did ye not believe?

So right belief is all-important to Evangelicals. Teachers are held to a higher standard than anyone else, according to Scripture, so teaching right belief is even more important than having it. On that point, the actions of Wheaton College leadership here are the only way they know to be consistent with their beliefs. They don't object to the professor donning the hijab, and Wheaton actively opposes the insanity coming from other Evangelicals about arming yourselves to stop the Muslims... but they can't condone someone at their college teaching something that they believe to be untrue about God.

I think they really do believe they're doing the right thing. (Even if they don't notice how their actions might be getting influenced by the current cultural pressures to be anti-Muslim; or notice the fact that these same old conservative white dudes said pretty similar things about the commonalities between Christianity and Islam a few years ago but are now prepared to fire a liberal black woman for saying them...) I still think they really believe they're doing the right thing for the right reasons.

The insidious thing that happens to the Evangelical way of thinking is this: We are saved by faith. Faith means belief. That means we have to believe the right things in order to go to Heaven. And that means we must give unswerving intellectual assent to correct doctrine. People who don't believe that Jesus is God will not be saved. People who don't believe the Scriptures will not be saved. (And that, to an Evangelical, often comes to mean that people must agree that every word of Scripture was dictated directly by God to the writers, and that every word is meant to be taken as literally true, and that every word must be interpreted in the specific way that Evangelicals interpret it... otherwise they aren't really saved.) And at the end of that line of thinking, people come out feeling "God doesn't want me unless I think the right things about Him."

I grew up in a church that believed Catholics were going to Hell because they ask the saints to pray for them (when Scripture says there is no mediator between God and man but Jesus). I grew up in a church that believed other branches of Evangelical Christians were going to Hell because they believe incorrectly about whether the bread and wine at Communion are literally the body and blood of Christ, or only symbolically, or somewhere in between (those who partake unworthily of the bread and wine eat and drink damnation unto themselves). I grew up in a church where your Christianity was in doubt if you answered questions correctly on a biology test, because that meant agreeing with evolution (God made the world in exactly seven 24-hour days, thank you very much, no symbolism could possibly have been intended in a story that is immediately followed by a story about a talking snake and fruit trees that bring knowledge or eternal life). There are different branches of THE SAME EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN DENOMINATION that would consider each other excommunicate, except that's a suspiciously Catholic-sounding word so they just consider each other "not really Christians" because they believe different things about whether Jesus will come to reign for a millennium before or after the Rapture. Or, Heaven forbid, disagree about whether there will BE a Rapture.

When faith itself becomes an idol, this is what happens to something that began with "God showed up in person to tell us He loves us and wants us to love each other."

When faith itself becomes an idol, people enter the frame of mind that creates Inquisitions and Jihads to make sure everyone is worshipping God the right way. After all, it's for the good of their souls.

One of the ironic things about Wheaton's stance is this: Wheaton College as an institution LOVES C.S. Lewis - they've got a little museum dedicated to him, Tolkien, and a couple of other Christian authors, and they even have The Wardrobe from Lewis' house. (I tried to get in once, just on the off chance. No luck, and no fauns.) And yet they wouldn't let old Jack teach there these days, because several times in his writings Lewis implies that people who follow other religions can be saved, that even if they believe wrong things about God or have never heard the name of Jesus they can still be saved through Jesus. In The Last Battle (Chronicles of Narnia), a man whose race and religion were clearly meant to be analogous to a Middle Eastern Muslim is accepted into Heaven by Aslan, even though just minutes earlier he'd been killing the people of Aslan in the name of his god Tash. Aslan does clarify that Tash is not the same as Aslan... but that good deeds done in the service of Tash, are taken in credit as service to Aslan (while evil deeds done in the name of Aslan really serve Tash). What the prince believes about Aslan doesn't matter to Aslan... how the prince behaves towards other human beings is what matters.

It's even more ironic to see a black woman suspended for showing solidarity with a mistreated minority - at an institution that was initially founded for the purpose of being a stop on the Underground Railroad. In those days, most mainstream Christians believed that Scripture supported slavery - after all, Saint Paul commanded slaves to obey their masters. But the founders of Wheaton knew that it was more Christ-like to set the captives free, than to go with the literal interpretation of Scripture that allowed people to continue shutting out those who were marginalized.

It's also frustrating to see that Evangelicals - who REALLY, REALLY love Jesus - if you know them as I know them, you know that is beyond question - seem to consistently forget that Jesus Himself considered our actions towards others to be far more important than our theology. When someone asks Jesus what it takes to inherit eternal life, Jesus fires back with a question: "You know the Law, what does it say?" The heckler says "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself". Jesus says "Do this and you shall live". The heckler then, to justify himself, says "Who is my neighbor?"... and Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. The people whose theology was correct - the priest, the Levite - fall short. The Samaritan - the person whose beliefs are wrong, whose ethnicity is wrong, whose language is wrong, who the Jews dislike even more than the Romans - that guy puts his own safety and his own money on the line to obey the two great commandments. That's the guy Jesus holds up as an example - "Go thou and do likewise."

Again, in the parable of the sheep and the goats, Jesus says the nations shall be judged by how we treated the people who are hurting and marginalized: "For I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me a drink, sick and you ministered unto me, in prison and you visited me." He never says "For I expected you to affirm the Nicene Creed, and to clearly articulate the difference between the Christian Trinity and the Muslim view of monotheism." The final exam for admission into God's Kingdom is not a theology test; it's a practical exam.

In fact, over and over throughout Scripture, Jesus does not appear to be very interested in our beliefs about God. He seems to only be really interested in our behavior towards people. Particularly towards those who are hurting, or outcast, or otherwise marginalized. The woman caught in adultery heard no harsh words from Jesus, but the upright religious people prepared to condemn her were warned off for their own sins. The money-changers in the Temple - doing a legitimate business, with the blessing of the priests, to allow the faithful to perform the sacrifices demanded in Scripture, all consistent with orthodox belief - are the only people that Mr. Blessed-Are-The-Peacemakers ever PHYSICALLY ATTACKED (because they were ripping people off in the holy place). The Pharisees and Sadducees - all good, well-meaning religious leaders who spent a lifetime of study to make sure they understood Scripture correctly - had Jesus killed because He wouldn't stop calling them out for their failure to act on their beliefs. Jesus was killed by the guardians of religious orthodoxy, for sending the message that behavior matters more than belief, and people matter more than principles.

Evangelicals often ask "What would Jesus do?" The answers I kept finding in Scripture were what led me to not be able to buy into the Evangelical way of thinking about God anymore.

I have no animosity towards Evangelicals, mind you. They love Him with a fiery intensity that I admire and miss. I think of the countless hours I spent praying with Evangelicals, hearing them weep because they felt they'd failed Him, hearing them beg Him "Lord, increase our faith", "Lord, cast out our doubts", "Lord, give us boldness to reach the lost so they may know your love for them", "Lord, forgive us our sins, give us strength to do better" ... they love Him with absolute sincerity and commitment.

But: they are convinced that He demands correct belief as a condition of salvation - and don't seem to realize that means they believe in a God who demands that we think in exactly the right way, as a condition of His love. Yet the Bible speaks of faith not as adhering to dogma, but as a pattern of behavior that naturally springs from following Jesus: "Faith without works is dead. Show me your faith without works, and I will show you my faith by my works."

Faith is a vital part of following Jesus. It is not an idol to be placed ahead of obeying His commandments about how we treat other people, particularly those who are already being mistreated.

We were warned to beware of idols, because idols mean exalting our image and idea of God above God Himself. And because the first thing an idol demands is human sacrifice.

I hope that Wheaton College reconsiders sacrificing the witness of a professor who's trying to live out the love of Christ to hurting people. Make an official statement disagreeing with her theology if you like, but also give her credit for trying to heal a division, trying to embody peace and love and unity with a group that our society is pushing us to treat as enemies... because THAT is what matters to God far more than having letter-perfect theology.

Let us not place our faith in idols, not even the idol of faith itself.

Let us place our faith instead in the God who calls us to reach out to those who are different, even to enemies, and to bring peace where there was strife.