Ripping the Scabs Away
This is a rough sketch of a brief speech I gave this morning in Pauline Epistles. I was introducing the subject of "The Psychology of Paul and How it Affected His Message." People always tend to preach the things which are most important to him. The tension of belonging or being left outside has mattered to me for a long time, and so it was a natural subject for me to address.The Apostle Paul lived in a society where belonging mattered. People defined themselves—they derived their sense of identity—from what gender, family, city, race, or religion they belonged to rather than who they were. A man was only as valuable as the family from which he came. A woman had only as much value as the husband to whom she belonged. A slave had no protection or social status at all apart from the good will and protection of his master. All individual identity was derived from belonging.
In the modern world, the opposite is true. Identity is defined by the degree to which a man can distinguish himself from the pack. Self-sufficiency is seen as the key to successful living, and personal autonomy is the god on whose altar the society’s sacrifices are burnt. The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson captured well the spirit of the age over a hundred years ago with the following words: “Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string. Discontent is the want of self-reliance. It is infirmity of will.”
As our society has stressed the importance of personal autonomy, we have seen a corresponding loss of any sense of personal responsibility. No one belongs to anyone, and so no one is indebted to anyone, either. We see this spirit at work as fathers choose to abandon their families; mothers choose to abort their children; children choose rebel against their parents. Even the elderly are now demanding the right to be euthanized rather than be abandoned to dependence upon strangers at a nursing home by relatives who feel no sense of responsibility to care for those who once cared for them.
The Bible paints a quite different picture for society to follow. Self-reliance is seen as foolishness (Prov. 3:5-6). To place one’s hope and trust in the Lord is wisdom. Autonomy is also seen as foolish—when Jesus came, he was moved with deep compassion for those who were like sheep without a shepherd. The self-made man in God’s eyes is no more than an easy mark for a wolf on the hillside. To belong to no one is not to be free, but to be estranged from the natural order. Even Christ belongs to God, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians. Man can certainly stand no higher than his master. He must belong to someone, and that someone, Paul writes in the same passage, is Christ.
And so, as we study the psychology of Paul, we study a man who had found in Christ an answer to the question of belonging. This answer strips away all dividing distinctions within humanity, uniting it in broken forgiveness at the foot of His cross. Let us take the time to ask ourselves what petty and worthless things we are allowing to define us, what worthless things we are allowing to scab over the wounds in our lives. And, like Paul, let us be brave and allow Christ to gleefully rip them away. Let them bleed anew, and let God soothe them with the healing balm of his Holy Spirit, assuring us from the inside that we belong to Christ and teaching our spirits to cry, “Abba! Father!”
A Hard Goodbye
Learning difficult truths for the first timeThe first cat I ever owned was a gray tabby with white-mitten paws. I think he was a gift from someone in the church who felt that the pastor’s family needed to own a cat. (People think the pastor’s family need to own all sorts of things—the people in my church were always offering us puppies or kittens or billy-goats or roosters.) At the time our kitty was given to us, I was about seven years old and just learning how to read French out of my songbook at church. I decided to name the kitty the first phrase that my little-boy mind could think of:
enfant de Dieu, which is French meaning, “Child of God.”
Apparently, God has strange children. Enfant de Dieu would squeeze his way through our wrought-iron door late at night after we had returned from one of our evening services. Curling his back and looking up at us with a wild desperation in his eyes, he would scratch things and meow loudly and make Olympic-sized jumps up onto the counter to try and finagle some tuna from my mom as soon as she’d open the can.
Enfant wasn’t only a thief, however. He was also a prowler—dragging in rats the size of footballs from the yard outside, and grinning proudly over his catch as my mother shrieked in horror at the sight and smell. Oftentimes, Enfant could be heard from outside on the short wall that marked off our property from the neighbor’s, expressing his affection via a painful-sounding ballad to every female within earshot.
“MOW-WOWWWW!” he would sing to anyone who would listen. Even though I’m not sure he ever actually scored with anything (he was an ugly kitty with no social skills), after singing his heart out, he would swagger back inside with the cocksure look of a heavyweight wrestling champion.
Yeah, his kitty-face would smirk.
And there’s more where that came from, too, baby. Enfant was a cocky cat.
Most of the time, however, Enfant was more crazy than cocky. Even though he was a thief, a pest, and terrible as a brass band out of tune once he got into his nightly serenades, the whole home eventually grew to love him, with the exception of a few well-placed kicks in the ribs when he’d try to swipe tuna. The only part of the family that didn’t love him was our dog, Kayanm, who despised Enfant because he would taunt her whenever she was leashed behind the house. Swiping at her nose from the safety of a wall just high enough to avoid her leap, he would mock her with his mow-wows as she barked in outrage at his insolence and tried in vain to bite him as she jumped into the air.
One day, Enfant was outside performing his regular taunting bit, when my seven-year-old decided that Enfant had had too much fun—that it was time to give Kayanm a bit of an unfair advantage since she had never before won any of her shouting matches with Enfant. As Kayanm growled and lunged in the air, I pushed Enfant a bit further down the wall than he had intended to go. Bewildered, he lost his nerve and his footing, and it turned out to be just the edge Kayanm had needed.
Before I could think, Enfant had tumbled off the wall and was flailing his limbs and trying desperately to get out from under the weight of Kayanm’s furious attack. After a few moments of hissing and spitting and swiping and bleeding, Enfant was out, but he looked visibly different. He was shaking like he had the jitters and he stumbled around, his tail in the air like his antenna was up and he was trying to find the frequency that would tell him the way home. Being seven, I didn’t think any more about it.
A couple of hours later, however, I pranced into our living room, only to find Enfant sprawled out behind one of our living room chairs. I thought at first that he might just be enjoying a nap on the cool concrete tile-floor, but when I pulled back the chair, I immediately noticed that his face had a limp, vacant expression. His streaked fur was matted and stiff, and drool was running from the corner of his gaping mouth. The sight grew worse—he had apparently lost control of his bowel movements, with all the feces and urine that had been within his system lined up in a neat trail behind him. Behind the waste, his tail stuck out straight and rigid.
I screamed and called for my mother to come. She hurried into the living room, immediately catching sight of Enfant lying limp and listless on the living room floor. She called for our watchman to come, and he quickly scooped Enfant onto a piece of cardboard, took him outside, and buried him. I was not allowed to watch as he was buried; I was told to wait in the kitchen. My heart grew heavy as night fell.
Later that evening, as the sky grew dark and the kerosene lamp in our living room flickered, I munched on animal crackers as my mother explained to me what this strange thing called death was and why it had chosen to happen to Enfant. I told my mother about shoving Enfant within Kayanm’s reach, and I can still remember vividly the guilty feeling I had about it all. If only I had left the poor cat alone, I thought, he would still be alive. All of this is my fault.
Kindly, my mom explained to me that it was not my fault—that this was all part of a curse tripped into effect long ago by a man named Adam and a woman named Eve.
Stupid Adam, stupid Eve, I thought, and the words came out exactly the same. Munching animal crackers by firelight, my mind turned to heavier thoughts. I sighed and hoped there was a kitty heaven, where God’s special child could sing awful, off-key ballads to high heaven in a place where no evil dog—or evil boy—could ever reach him.
