My coat is at school.
Children have a way of wording a statement to avoid responsibility. The proper subject of the sentence, of course, is “I”.
Accepting responsibility, the child would say, “I broke the toy” or “I left my coat at school.”
How many times do we as adults do the same thing?
“The work is not finished, because he didn’t …”
“The conversation did not happen.”
A subtle change in language leads to major change in attitude.
“I didn’t…,” “I failed to…,” “I accept responsibility for…”
“How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire.” James the Apostle
How can you lose billions of dollars of assets?
I have heard many times, “I’m an American. I have a right to my opinion.”
My readings in literature and history teach that having an opinion is the human condition. Opinions are easy. Thought is hard. Informed opinions thoughtfully expressed are rare as a gem in the desert.
You can say whatever pops into your mind. On social media it is easy to just pop off something. And then you live with that forest fire that James warns us.
You can say what you want, but there are consequences. Not everyone will agree. Many will vehemently disagree. There is no rule that you will not suffer consequences from saying stupid or inflammatory things.
These thoughts sprang from thinking about Elon Musk, agreeing publicly with a white supremacist X post then seeing companies bail out of advertising with his company. He can say what he wants, but others need not agree.
“I’ve got a right to say what I want.” Yes, but that’s not always the responsible thing to do.
And again James teaches, “No one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison.”
Your tongue, or your social media post, can create a whirlwind of emotions. Taking a breath before hitting the enter key asking if this is the responsible thing to do works wonders.
Amazing that 2,600-year-old teaching remains as relevant today as when originally uttered.
The teacher gave the same instruction to all of us, and it was up to each student to absorb, digest, and develop the teaching within themselves.
A small group of would-be engineers in the lecture hall of our college chemistry class sat there during lecture making up some sort of obscene religion. I have no idea how well they did. The curve in the 700-person class was brutal. I remember an A on the mid-term and C as final grade. They didn’t pick up anything, I’m sure.
The word is responsibility. Many people want to be able to say whatever spouts out of their mind without assuming responsibility for repercussions. Many (or many parents) seem to think there is either osmosis or privilege that should get a student through. Who is responsible? The student! (That’s us.)
If a disciple is excessively emotional or if their mind is very rigid, good teachings will be distorted and the teacher’s wisdom will not be assimilated.
If we approach learning, or any conversation, with a mind cluttered with either chaos of emotions or rigidity of belief, we will fail to absorb the message and waste an opportunity to learn and grow.
How many people do you know who think they are beyond the law? Maybe you are one?
Maybe it is driving your car faster than the posted speed limit? Perhaps thinking Stop signs are merely a suggestion? Maybe more serious than that, such as, cheating on income tax or stealing something from your company or organization? I’ve seen people stealing time—being paid for doing something and collecting the money without doing the work. This even extends to physical or emotional abuse, sexual activities, or worse.
Paul the Apostle liked to write about freedom from the Law. His life had been devoted to learning about and following the Jewish Law. One day he experienced blindness, an event that completely shook his foundations. Then God got his attention. He discovered a life filled with the spirit. That life was beyond the Law.
He preached that and wrote about it. The problem was that these early (and many later) Christ Followers were confused. They said, “Hallelujah! We don’t have to follow the law. We can do whatever we want!”
Paul said, “Whoa, guys. Not so fast.”
It’s not about ignoring the law. Life in the spirit means we don’t focus on the law because life in the spirit naturally does the intent of the laws.
Freedom doesn’t mean that we are above the law like a rebellious teenager. Freedom means that we don’t have to worry about it continuously. It means living in the spirit we will behave responsibly because that is what people in the spirit do.
I think Paul went to his grave trying to explain that. Even today we have people who miss the freedom part and read Paul for a list of new laws. Or we have people who, like the early Christians in Corinth, absorbed the freedom part without the responsibility part.
What a balancing act we must perform while living in the spirit. Freedom and responsibility.
People want to be able to say anything that comes to mind. Unfounded opinions expressed to a friend at the coffee shop is one thing. Amplifying those comments through social media is a leap.
Words have consequences. You may offend one friend. Or, you may stir a hornet’s nest of reaction. And you may be surprised at consequences—lost friends, lost job opportunities, lost position.
Yes, we can say whatever we want. But there are consequences. We cannot avoid responsibility for what we say. Indeed, we need to assume responsibility. “Free speech” without assuming responsibility is merely the behavior of a toddler. A 2-year-old, or a 4-year-old, or even a 17-year-old. But an adult—they should be aware that what they say has consequences and sometimes we are advised by Wisdom to keep our mouths closed and our fingers still.
If it’s not right, don’t do it;
If it’s not true, don’t say it.
Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor and Stoic
Preacher and teacher Andy Stanley teaches this simple thought, “Pay attention to the tension.”
There is a moment, often fleeting, between the impulse to do something and the action.Sometimes in that moment there arises a tension within us. This may not be the right thing to do. How often we ignore that tension, do the deed, then regret it.
If it is not right, do not do it. How, by paying attention to the tension.
The Apostle James teaches how the tongue is the mightiest muscle in the body. Just like a small rudder steers a great ship, the small tongue guides us causing all manner of mischief. Sometimes just before we hit “post” on social media when we are passing along something we heard, Stanley’s tension pulls at the back of our mind. If we pause before we post, we can save ourselves grief.
If it is not true, do not say it. Or post it on social media.
A long time ago in a galaxy far away I found myself in Louisiana researching freedom in graduate school thinking I’d earn a PhD in political philosophy and write on that topic. Many bad choices there. I watched the professors and decided I didn’t want to be one of them. Then there was the fact that the department discontinued the graduate program when I was at the half-way mark of courses toward an MA.
I looked into a couple of other graduate programs and was accepted into one, but I had lost interest in the system. I’m much happier studying on my own.
I explored two sides of freedom. There is freedom from constraints–think John Locke. There is freedom for fulfilling worthwhile ends–think Jean-Jacques Rousseau. An eminent philosopher had studied this paradox. Isaiah Berlin wrote Liberty exploring these topics.
A couple of thousand years before Berlin, some Eastern Mediterranean religious thinkers and leaders also pondered freedom. One was Jesus of Nazareth who lived out that freedom. Another was his disciple Paul. Others also touched on these topics including James and Peter and John.
A contemporary leader and preacher striving mightily to capture the interest of the younger generations globally, John Fischer (at Catch John Fischer), recently summarized the essence of this liberty argument.
Freedom operates alongside other qualities, most of them more important that freedom itself. We are not set free so we can enslave others; we are set free to serve. We are not set free to break the law, but to follow it. We are not set free to indulge ourselves, but to consider others as more important than ourselves.
Many think freedom means I can do whatever I want whenever I want to whomever I want. That sounds more like a 2-year-old than an adult to me. The Apostle Paul tried in several of his letters to explain freedom. Maybe it was just the way you wrote in ancient Greek and then got translated into modern English. I don’t think he was as successful as he wished getting the point across clearly.
Yes, I have certain freedom from constraints. Yet, I also have the responsibility to use that freedom for good.
In the year 2525
If man is still alive
If woman can survive
They may find
Zager and Evans
My wife tunes her car radio to Sirius XM 60s on 6. (Except I’ve been driving it lately and switched to Margaritaville. A little Parrot Head music will be good for her.) They played In the Year 2525 the other day. I remembered that era. About the same time Barry McGuire sang PF Sloan’s Eve of Destruction. People thought things in the world looked pretty bleak. It’s been 52 years, what goes around, comes around. We’ve been through bust and boom and now people thing things look bleak.
Yesterday’s post was my number 2525. Coincidences are interesting. I started thinking about the song.
In the year 9595
I’m kinda wondering if man is gonna be alive
He’s taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain’t put back nothing, woah, woah
Zager and Evans
We read prophecy–maybe the Hebrew prophets or Nostradamus or some contemporary wannabe prophet. Rather, we often misread them. Usually they are using if-then-else logic. “If you keep doing this, then this bad thing will happen, else changing your ways will bring better things.”
That last verse I quoted has many meanings. It hits (the old church word is “convicts”) each of us. How much do we take every day? How much do we give back?
Do we take love without giving back? Do we accept gifts without ever giving?
This idea is worth pausing for reflection. And maybe changing our ways, woah, woah.
I don’t ignore the news. That is hard to accomplish and probably not wise. However, I don’t immerse myself in it. That, also, would not be wise.
The easy thing for a Christian is to pretend to be an ancient Hebrew prophet and expound on hypocrisy and godlessness and the evil of people who disagree with me.
But that is merely ego-centric.
The news and pictures I’ve seen coming from India regarding the impact of the failure of the government to tackle the Covid crisis with the resulting deaths have moved me to deep sadness. And that is repeated with perhaps less drama in some other populous countries.
As an adolescent student and young man, I harbored a great dislike for the writings of the Apostle Paul. Later, I discovered that it wasn’t Paul himself, but the way people went through his writing and picked out parts they liked and build legal frameworks around them.
So, as a civil rights and anti-war person, I totally misunderstood what Paul wrote in the 13th chapter of Romans. Here, he expounds a view, not that the government is always right (and I wondered what he’d have written had he been living under Nero at the time), but that government is placed here by God to bring order and justice and the like to society.
We can see throughout this pandemic the differences in political leadership and the various impacts upon the societies. Leadership in the government is important. All the leaders made mistakes–just some learned and adjusted and some, well, failed.
But I’m not here to be an ancient Hebrew prophet predicting God’s judgement upon them all.
Instead, what is the response I can make when I learn about all this immense suffering. I cannot write a check with enough zeros to provide vaccines and healthcare for the world. But I can write a check. And I can encourage those I meet. And I can support good leaders.
Living in the dominion of the heavens that Jesus had announced doesn’t mean that I change the whole world. I can change me and influence those around me. And so can you.
It’s kind of like Arlo Guthrie singing at the end of Alice’s Restaurant—and it’s a movement, yes the Alice’s Restaurant Massacre movement. We can participate in the share the kingdom of heaven movement and learn from Jesus’ story of the good Samaritan. Help where we can.
The thing about a good story, whether fact or fiction, is that it harbors truth in many layers.
When the first disciples of Jesus began telling the stories of this last week–the march into Jerusalem, the Passover dinner, the prayer in the garden, the arrest, trial, conviction, execution, and later the resurrection–there were of course many layers to the stories.
One layer begins with Jesus last command. Remember? Once he answered a scholar about the greatest command from God, and Jesus told him there were two. This time Jesus says, oh yes, I’m giving you one last command. Love one another as I have loved you.
In a bit, he goes to the garden to pray and takes a few guys with him. They are armed. We know for sure, at least, that Peter was. When the armed patrol comes to arrest Jesus, Peter draws his sword and cuts off the ear of one.
Jesus rebukes him. He heals the severed ear. He lets himself be arrested without a fight. He says he lays down his life for them.
Setting aside theology and looking just at the story–Jesus did lay down his life for them. Had he told them to fight their way out of it, they would all have died on that hilltop.
Then they looked at the story and we look at the story, and we put it all together.
Jesus gave a command. Then he lived it by example. And there it is for all who call themselves followers. Can you love one anther even as Jesus did? Even up to giving up your life so that they may live?
Gary Mintchell
Faith Venture 