On the Road to a Gospel Culture
If you’ve ever driven a vehicle on a dirt road after it has rained, been driven over, then dried up, then you know what it’s like to drive in deep tracks. Tires dig out deep ruts like ditches that are hard to avoid. When you drive near these deep ruts, you have to fight with the steering wheel to stay out of them, otherwise they guide the tires. Lately, this is what it has felt like as a community of Christians in a world like ours; fighting to keep ourselves from falling back into well-worn ruts. How can we resist them guiding our lives if we don’t have a clear sense that we’re heading somewhere else?
This is one of the reasons we decided to preach our series, “What is the Good News?” I felt the need to carefully reconsider the Lord’s announcement about what He is doing in the world. I felt the question pressing in my own life and witness: how can I resist falling into the ruts that the world lays all around me, and live in favor of the Kingdom? I want to offer a few reflections that I think might help orient us to the Good News of the Kingdom in a world full of ruts.
Set your course by the Gospel. Like sailors navigating by stars (I know I’m mixing metaphors!) Christians look to the heavens to navigate by the cosmic announcement of Jesus Christ, the Messiah-King. He lays out for us a radically different course of where God is taking things. We must attune our imaginations, our sense of direction, our sense of history and where it is all heading according to one headline: “the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom is at hand, repent and believe the good news” (Mark 1:14). This announcement sets our course, it gives us a better handle on reality even when we’re navigating the muddy tracks of daily life. (Colossians. 3:2, Philippians 3:20).
Utilize your access to the “mind of Christ” and breathe in the peace of God’s Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:16, John 20:22). As long as our imaginations are colonized by the world’s deeply laid tracks, as long as that is our starting point, Christian witness will be exhausted in aimless culture wars, bickering, infighting, and social media soapboxes. Instead, remind yourself of the peace you have access to in the Holy Spirit, and practice paying attention to it. Let this be the starting point for your engagements with others. You can take the posture of a servant and student, assume positive intent in others, treat them with dignity and respect. Spend unhurried time observing Jesus and his teaching in the Gospels, listen carefully to sermons, pray with others, pay attention during the liturgy. These are just a few ways you can invite the Spirit’s work of filling you with God’s imagination.
Practice making sense of issues in terms of God’s Kingdom. Don’t let “ruts” set the terms of issues. Instead, try naming them when you experience them and pay attention to the false choices they often present. These ruts are everywhere: conservative or liberal, mask or hoax, black folks or cops, right to worship or at-home for the love of neighbor, witness against racism or resist divisiveness, social action or spiritual renewal, speak up on social media or opt-out of a manipulated platform, corrupt leaders or allegiance to a side, despair or anger, and on and on. These false dichotomies function by issuing grossly oversimplified (and most often false) terms. You don’t have to accept them or fit into them. In fact, I’d encourage you to make a habit of resisting those terms by asking “How does the Kingdom of God approach and reframe these questions?”
Learn to speak with a Kingdom-voice. There is real pressure to cancel or uncritically adopt voices. But with God’s Kingdom as our overarching reality, we have available to us a much better and more true way of talking about things. You know how you can tell where people might be from by their accent? Being with Jesus (by the Spirit, in scripture, prayer, sacraments, fellowship, etc.) puts an accent on our tongue, and teaches us the dialect of God’s way of doing things (see the Lord’s Prayer). However, that’s not to say that the church has nothing to learn from voices in society. (It’s called general revelation.) Of course, these voices should never call the shots for the church, but we would be naive to think we have nothing to learn from them. St. Augustine wrote “wherever truth may be found, it belongs to his Master” (On Christian Doctrine, II.18). So, on the one hand, all truth in the world belongs to God and needs to be discerned with the Spirit. It should be no surprise that the world speaks up when the church neglects or misfires its prophetic voice or action. On the other hand, we must not uncritically adopt talking points of this or that “side.” For example, we can say that “black lives matter” without espousing everything that the social movement stands for. We can lean conservative or liberal without adopting an entire worldview. How? Because we are guided by different aims in the Kingdom. You will feel the steering wheel tugging you into these deep grooves: being fearful or cheerleading the world’s aims. But learning to talk from a Kingdom perspective helps us resist the “ruts” and imagine the Kingdom. Lastly, don’t confuse this for Christianese, or “church talk” with “thees and thous.” That’s just old english, and I’m talking about learning to plainly speak about the aims and ways of Jesus.
Focus locally and practically on what God is doing. Consider taking a long, long, long, break from social media. And with that time, think of the people who you neighbor with, the folks at Rez, and the friends and family that make up your daily life. Start by investing in those relationships, and practice a faithful witness there first. For instance, if you’re telling the world how things should be on social media but are not being actively discipled yourself, consider prioritizing your formation. If you think the world is going to hell in style but have never met your neighbors, consider making them a friend. If you are frustrated by the way elected leaders or organizations mishandle things but don’t pray for them, consider making that a new practice. Discipline yourself to focus on the real place that God’s providence has put you in and learn to be present with Jesus right there.
These are just a few thoughts I’ve been chewing on. I’m sure there are many more, but I hope these spark some introspection in you just as they have in me.
I’m still convinced that the announcement that Jesus is King gives us a different account of reality than what we often hear or experience in daily life. But if we choose to begin with Jesus in these few ways, I think we stand a good shot at cultivating a Gospel culture: carrying on as if the announcement that “Jesus is King” is actually true. It makes all the difference that God has already said that this is who we are (1 Peter 2:9-10), and that he has given us His own Spirit to empower us to actually pull it off. So now it’s only a matter of faith, trusting God will help us, and cooperating with his leading.
Rez, if I’ve ever known a church community that is up for cooperating with God’s kingdom, it’s you. Let’s tend to this call and courageously bear witness to the Kingdom in our lives. May God continue to call out to us and show us the way in a world worn with misleading ruts and tracks, that we might be a sign and foretaste of God’s Kingdom to our neighbors, friends, family, and community in South Austin.
Fr. Shawn McCain
