St. John Studies

“The lifestyle of waking up to God, to the work of God in the world and living that way—holds out hope that the love and justice of our hearts can come to mirror the love and justice of God’s heart”. [Labberton, 121]*

There it was…for the second time…uncontrollable…it just popped up.

There they were. I guess it had been forty-five or fifty years since I had felt them but they suddenly returned.

My hand popped up and the chills returned.

Is my heart being transformed? Pastor Labberton writes that the transformation of our hearts occurs through personal and public worship. Worship “recalibrates” how we live. Worship can “rewrite” what is in our hearts with a message different “from the one imprinted by our nurture and experience.”

I have been a church-goer for many years but I have had precious few experiences in what I would call a charismatic worship environment, where emotion can be expressed as part of the worship experience. Thoughtful and reverent would be the words I would use to describe most of my times in the house of the Lord. I have been moved several times due to my worship but I never really expressed what I was feeling, keeping my feelings to myself and if I did respond, I would wipe tears and suppress what was going on because all those around me were suppressing.

Then I joined the choir at my church and after a while, we hired a new choir director who wants to bring feeling into the musical worship experience. She described the music we sing so well: “Older hymns often sing about God; we want to sing to God.”

Her music selections are quite a departure from what we used to sing and I think something is happening to me.

My wife will tell you that I am a “closet” musician. I have had a keyboard for many years, an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, even a harmonica and a couple of tin whistles. At my core, I want to make music but I won’t let myself. I won’t cut loose and just try.

When I was in high-school, I experienced the greatest ebb of my “musical career” in band. I was a trumpet player who was good enough to be first chair in our small marching and concert band.

That is where the first chills came from. I recall when the notes all sounded “perfect;” the strangest sensation would happen to my body. The best way to describe it was chills running up and down my spine. It was the result of our instruments working together to create something beautiful. I knew it. I did not have to say it. I felt it.

I felt like a musician…at the core of my being, I knew I loved making beautiful music.

Then came the long hiatus. I did not pursue music in college. My college band sent me a letter trying to recruit me but I tossed it in the garbage.

Now things are happening to me. We are singing choir music that is touching my heart, reaching down into the very core of who I am, who I want to be…dragging the closet musician out of the closet. I have never really seen myself as a singer but now I find myself wanting to sing to The Lord.

Some selections that our director has picked just touch me so much and I can’t get them out of my mind. At our Christmas program we sang a song which was so beautiful that my hand lifted toward God as we sang it. It was not a plan. In fact, in our church it is hard to do this because it is so rare for anyone to lift their hands in praise. I did not think about my environment…my hand just went up. It had to. I lost control. This past Sunday, we were singing the very beautiful praise song “Good, Good Father.” I love the song so much that I was singing it in my mind for days before Sunday worship service. When our choir got to the lyrics “Because you are perfect in all of your ways…You are perfect in all of your ways…You are perfect in all of your ways to us” my hand lifted skyward and the chills returned.

What is happening?

Pastor Labberton writes about “being rightly named means being truly known. It changes our lives…Embedded in our words and actions are the names we give and receive from others.”

What is personal and public worship but our efforts to try to grow closer to God? Labberton writes every time we gather in worship, we bring our names into the service: “Inadequate, failure, bad parent, fat, sinner through commission or sinner through omission.” Are these names accurate or are they misnames? What can we do to combat the name we carry around, the misname?

Worship… “A lifestyle of worship is God’s antidote.” [123].

Is God giving me a new name?

Singer….

From Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor

What does it mean to claim the name “Christian?”

Does it mean saved? Does it mean sanctified? Does it mean redeemed? Does it mean that you have repented from your sin?

Well it could mean all of those…

It certainly does not mean the word perfect.

It does mean that you are making the effort to live a life that is consistent with the “name.”

It is not easy. We all “fall short of the glory of God.” Even though that is a reality, it does mean that you should never lose hope. Pastor Labberton says it is hope that “hangs on an unlikely promise. The hope is that God’s word and God’s act will be the same. The birth of Jesus renews the idea that the messianic promise will be fulfilled in the birth of a baby to be named Jesus Christ.” He came to save us from our sins.

Because we are not perfect.

What does God expect? He expects us to try. When we say one thing and do another, when we practice religion and have severe character flaws, when we are all form and no substance, when we take the name and we are Christian in name only and when we judge others and don’t examine ourselves…

We are not making a strong enough effort.

God commands a life where we do what we say. We know we are supposed to be transformed. Fellow sinners become our brothers and sisters, not outcasts. Harlots are our sisters. Tax collectors are our friends. Gentile dogs are all our brothers and sisters. Drunkards are friends and neighbors. Lepers may be disciples. Beggars are our fellow human beings, who just happen to need a hand up.

Matthew 2:5 tells us that those who actually feed, clothe and serve their brother and sister rightly, as Jesus did, are a serious contrast to those who don’t see Jesus in those brothers and sisters. Those who are acting as Jesus are reflecting the love and character of God. Matthew 15:11 says “It is not what goes into a man, but what comes out.” That tells what type of Christian a person really is.

Don’t get me wrong, there is no condemnation for those who cannot be consistent; they take the name but they don’t act the part. Maybe they will grow in their Christianity in the future. That is God’s hope. Labberton writes that there is “a multiplying effect of the inward change, when a Christian is saved and all things are made new, in which we take every thought captive to Christ, in which we are transformed by the renewing of our minds out of true worship, leading to a new way of seeing, naming and living in the world.”

This past Sunday, I taught a lesson in my adult Sunday school class on John 1. We spent the whole time discussing the Holy Spirit. We talked about the Christian who is baptized as a child. This happens with the anticipation that the child will grow into an identity that will be labeled “Christian”. The adult who is baptized accepts the idea that The Father and the Holy Spirit will begin to act on their life and they will be transformed from death to life.

Sadly, the child baptism is no guarantee that the child will really take the name Christian and live the Christian life. Sadly, the adult may be baptized and saved but that is it. Too many have the attitude that I have professed my faith. That is enough. I don’t have to do any more. They take the name Christian but they live any way they want.

What Pastor Labberton is looking for [and if I may be so bold], what I think God is looking for is for people who say they are Christian trying to act like Christians. Again, that does not mean that we are perfect. We all have that penchant to sin. That is part of our makeup. But sincere repentance of our sins can help us grow closer to God.
When we take the name Christian, are we saved?

Of course we are.

When we take the name Christian, are we sanctified?

We have that chance if we respond to the Holy Spirit who is drawing us closer to God.

When we take the name Christian are we redeemed?

You bet we are. That is what Jesus did for us. We don’t deserve it but He came to save us.

When we take the name Christian, do we need to repent?

Well, I don’t know about you, but I have a ways to go and my road to The Lord is paved with my repentance. He knows me, He knows my weaknesses, He knows my strengths. I am bound to mess up. He knows I am not perfect.

He loves me anyway.

Praise God…

When you have been married to someone for forty-three years, it is an amazing thing to experience seeing your spouse change. Of course you change too. However in most marriages, some things don’t change, feelings about personal important ideas, positions you take regarding society, you know, big ideas that reflect a person’s core values. I have long ago discovered that it is not my job to try to influence my spouse into becoming more like me, adopting my core values. The position I have adopted is to appreciate her as she is and enjoy the great good she offers and forget miniscule disagreements and learn to live with larger differences.∗

We don’t spend a lot of time talking about this, but we know we both have different ideas about freedom. Her contention is that people in our society have too much freedom, that this just leads us to abuse our rights. In essence, people can’t handle that much freedom; she feels the news every day is full of people who don’t know how to stop before they damage themselves or others. I, on the other hand, have an opinion that freedom is a necessity in our society. We all have a right to exercise our will and if we overstep, individuals who overstep will face consequences. I would not curb freedom; I just [naively she thinks] feel it is our right to make our mistakes in life even though our errors may make life difficult for others.

I begin this post with this personal revelation for a reason. The book that I comment on** has an attitude that God’s promises to make and bless Israel should make Israel accountable to God. If Israel is not accountable, they are subject to God’s judgement. It is a clear cut case. Pastor Labberton says it is all about that Covenant made with Abraham, you will have a son, your offspring will be as numerous as the stars, and your descendants will be given the Promised Land.

If…[and here is the catch]…

We live God’s way, meaning living under God’s law, enacting the character of God. The more man can do that, the more man can live the life that God intended all of us to live. It all hinges on putting God first.

Does my wife’s view on freedom fit well into God’s Old Testament plan?

Let’s explore…

What were the Ten Commandments but statements designed to get us to put God first, avoid the worship of other God’s and consider our neighbors. Labberton says The Commandments instructed the Israelites to avoid overreaching, pointing to “covetousness, adultery, murder as putting the sinner’s name above God and others”. Yahweh seeks a people who reflect His name in how they act in the world. Over and over, God’s people broke the commandments and they suffered at God’s hand.

King David is an Old Testament example of a man who tries to be consistent; after all, he is a “man after God’s own heart.” Yet what does he do? He commits adultery with Bathsheba, arranges the killing of Uriah and fails to own up to both acts. What happens to Israel is decay and dissolution before David confesses his sin before God.

The prophets in the Old Testament are charged with telling the Israelites about their sin, yet they fail in their practice of righteousness; they have Sabbath festivals [that God hates] and they can’t keep their people from intermingling with other cultures.

The Old Testament is full of man’s failure to honor God. In fact, Labberton states “When Israel’s words and acts were inconsistent as those of the alien and stranger, Israel always faced a crisis.” The inability to follow God got so bad that God’s people were sent into exile, they were given a new language, a new culture, a new pressure to assimilate.

What was God trying to tell them? Show Me you belong to Me…

Ok, you knew it was coming.

Maybe my wife may be right, human beings do need some guard rails. Maybe freedom does not need to be taken away totally, but we need parameters. Total freedom is an ideal but is it practical? I have to admit that when one goes to the Old Testament, the Israelites don’t handle their freedom very successfully.

When God took away their freedom as they endured captivity, they should have learned something and they did. The Babylonian captivity had one very significant impact on the nation of Israel when they returned to their land—they would never again be corrupted by the idolatry and false gods of the surrounding nations.

Did they learn this by having unlimited freedom or did they learn this due to less freedom.

I leave it for you to decide.

I think you know…

*My wife is my editor. I never post anything without her careful reading. Just one example of the great good she does for me all the time.
**Mark Labberton The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor

“Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field” [Genesis 2: 19-20].

In the book, The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor, Pastor Mark Labberton spends many pages describing the power of words. In Genesis [as we see in the opening quote], God gives Adam the power to create words as he names the livestock, birds and beasts of the earth. Labberton makes a good case that in everyday life, naming is important. What we call things can draw us closer or repel us. What we call things can help us to take action or walk away. What we call things can build bridges between people or create barriers between people.

Then he continues commenting on the Old Testament and develops his thesis that God has always taken naming [or use of words] very seriously. “The faithfulness of God (hesed) means that what God says and what God does are one. The reliability between God’s word and deed, between God’s promise and action, forms the origin and potential for being human in speech as well as action” [Labberton, 113].

God intends us to “say what we mean and mean what we say” but do we?

You know the answer: oftentimes we don’t.

With the entrance of sin into life [of course via Adam and Eve], the breakdown of a close connection between word and deed began to happen. We have the freedom to sin, the freedom to choose, the freedom to misname, the freedom to misuse our words. How we use our words reveals how much of a separation there is between man and God. Early in the Bible [in Genesis 4], the word “brother” becomes a mere label. Man destroys the Godly meaning of the word through the behavior of Cain and Abel. In their brotherly relationship, love was not of utmost concern and certainly the idea of being my brother’s keeper did not apply to their situation.

Turning to the Tower of Babel, Labberton points to the fact that man was overreaching. Man wanted to make a name for himself. But his pride got the best of him. “Come let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we can make a name for ourselves” [Genesis 11: 4]. God’s response to this effort was to cause the people to stop building the city and tower and He confused the language of the whole world. In one fell swoop, God erected barriers to understanding throughout the world [and we still suffer from those language barriers today].

God explained to Abram that the hope of the world hangs on the covenant. You will have a son, your offspring will be as numerous as the stars, your descendants will be given the Promised Land. What God said, He did. However, Abraham and Sarah scheme with Hagar because they doubted God’s word, but God was faithful. God said what He meant and meant what He said. Not trusting Abram, God tested him with his only son. How far would Abram go in obeying God’s commands? The way Abram responds results in a name change and the beginning of the nation of Israel.

After Abraham, man still did not get it so God has to help man understand. With Moses, God remembers His promise to His people. When they are in bondage, He states “I am the One who is and who will be there for you.” Moses had a ministry only because he lived and served in the name of the Lord. When he uttered the words “let my people go” he did so under the authority of God. Those words from God [via Moses] were so powerful that Pharaoh’s hold over the Israelites was moot. God’s desire for their freedom overpowered the mighty Egyptians and swallowed the power of mighty Pharaoh’s army .

Living God’s way means living under God’s law, enacting the character of God. The more man can do that, the more man can live the life that God intended all of us to live.

The trick [if I may be so bold to use such words] is that God intends all Christians to put Him first. If we do that, all the other aspects of life will fall into place [ourselves, our neighbors, our world]. The problem is that too often we don’t put God first. Our desires take center stage. Our need to sin overwhelms our need to obey God. Our weakness leads us astray and we moan like the Israelites.

We fail to mean what we say and say what we mean. And when we have a chance to get the power of God to help us, we forget to ask the One who says “I am the One who is and who will be there for you”…

We just don’t use the right words; we just don’t say: “Please help me Lord.”

Growing up, I listened to a lot of different music: rock, pop, jazz, classical etc. I remember a quirky piece of music that caught my attention, a song that I thought was out of character for the artist, “A Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash. The song was popular in 1969; it was written by the poet Shel Silverstein and debuted by Cash in a concert at San Quentin State Prison.

It was a long song that told a story of a tortured young man who was “misnamed” and the effect the name had on his life. After naming his son Sue, Sue’s father leaves home, leaving the boy to grow up getting teased about his name and having countless fights over the years to defend his honor. To avenge this injustice, the young man decides to track down his father, eventually finding him in a bar in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Upon greeting one another, they have a tremendous fight which ends with father and son pulling guns on each other. The son beats his father to the draw and then the father explains why he called his son Sue: “if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough, and I knew I wouldn’t be there to help ya along, so I give ya that name and I said goodbye, I knew you’d have to get tough or die, and it’s the name that helped to make you strong.” The son accepts the explanation and does not kill his father but he is still not happy about being Sue, and vows that if he ever has a son he will call him “Bill or George! Anything but Sue! I still hate that name!”

Describing this song makes me think about the effect that labels can have on people. Pastor Labberton* writes that labels help us “manage the world around us. We name what we see in terms that reflect value, meaning, position, relationship, affinity” [112]. Sue’s father may have had a plan in mind when he gave his son a female name but the father’s label shaped the way others saw the son. Communication research on labels states that names not only shape the way others see us, but they also impact how we act. Adler and Procter** write that people with unusual names “suffer everything from psychological and emotions disturbance to failure in college….Names are one way to shape and reinforce a child’s personal identity.”

Of course names are usually bestowed on children by parents but it doesn’t stop there. All of us “name” people in our world; we have to find words to share experiences so we are all in the business of labeling people, places and things in our world. Problems arise in misnaming or the use of negative labels. We should be very careful about the words we use but often we are not.

Pastor Labberton points to the labels we use as a chief reason that Christians don’t get involved with issues that really need our attention. For example, we hear endless statistics about children being sold into sex trafficking each year. These words don’t seem to be getting a reaction from the Christian community.

Maybe we should hear the words “commodity”, “transaction” or “slave” applied to the children who are trafficked. Would that elicit a response? Maybe not if you don’t have any way to relate to the people who are being trafficked.

How about Mitali?

Mitali is a thirteen year-old who now belongs to her pimp. She has a mother but she hated living with her. One day she felt she could not stand her life anymore so she ran away and started trying to live on the street. With no marketable skill to earn a living and absolutely no support from any family member, a sex trafficker was her only way to stay alive. She became a commodity, a transaction, a slave.

Of course in the opening story about “Sue,” his life is made more difficult because of a label but Labberton thinks the labels we use spur us on to learn more about a problem that needs to be fixed or they repel us and we create distance between us and a serious need. Are the words we use bridges or barriers?

We have to use words; they contain our thoughts. They convey our messages. Yes, they can inspire us to do what needs to be done to change the world or maybe words can be used to distance us from problems that need our serious attention.

Think about it. When we hear words about people who need our help…

Are the words that you hear bridges to action; do we want to get to know the people with problems and do we want to know what we can do to help them?

Or are the words barriers to action; we distance ourselves from people with needs by using vague language? We shrink from their presence and their problems. The words allow us to be apathetic. Here is how it works. We use words so that responsibility is passed on to nameless others.

“Someone should do something for them.”

That someone is not me…

*Author of The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor
**Authors of Looking Out, Looking In

What is worship?

For many years I spent an hour in church on Sunday and if I had a good Sunday school teacher, maybe two hours. That was it. Honestly, at times it seemed like it was a duty. Like many kids, for many years I went to church out of this need to satisfy my parents. Then after I left their home to start a family of my own, I was very sporadic in attendance. After having a child, I started attending worship services more regularly for the child, to give him a good “upbringing.” Most of the time I spent in worship, my heart was not in it, much less my mind. I was not really sure why I was there, other than to fulfill some need to please others.

Then I found Jesus.

In the midst of a world-shaking crisis [for me], I quit just knowing about Jesus; I began to know Jesus. I needed Him and He became my Savior. It became a personal relationship.

Worship service then took on a new meaning. I was in love with the Son of God and I had a hunger to find out all I could about Him. I thought about Him constantly; He was the key to dealing with my problems. He was there to help me. Church was where I found information about Him; it was there where I found much needed aid.

I was beginning to transform. Transformation comes in many forms. Sometimes it comes due to a traumatic event, but that is not always the case. God is in the business of changing us one heart at a time and even though God sees us and all that we do, we never really see Him. First Corinthians 13:12 says “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” I stated that I began to know Jesus. I saw evidence of His power in my life as things began to turn around, as I felt His peace in the midst of the storm, as I saw hope for the future when I thought at the time that all hope was lost.

For me life became hope, hope that one day I would see Him face to face. We all have “to resist the presumption that to name what we think we see when we ought to be clear that to do so requires wisdom we do not have” [Labberton, 102]. It is humbling to admit how dim our vision of God really is but it is part of staying open to what God would have us do in our lives. We need to “look again, to see anew, to pay attention, and to name the truth”[Labberton, 102].

The effort to see what we cannot see may begin with more meaningful worship, but it continues with faith.

A good friend of mine told me that he wakes up in bed every morning and asks God the same question every day: “What would you have me do today Lord?” This is a very open-ended approach to life because one never knows what God has in store for the day. Another friend goes even further; he told me he prays several times throughout his day the simple prayer “God just use me.”

About a mile from my home is a church that sits on a hill. Church-goers have to drive up the hill to get to the parking lot. When worship service is over, they drive back down the hill where they are confronted by a large sign. “You are now entering the mission field.” The point I am trying to make is that corporate worship serves a purpose, but as Labberton says, it welcomes us, forgives and heals us, calls us and then sends us to love out our worship in our lives throughout the week. We live in a world that needs work, lots of work, and to think that sitting in a pew is all that worship calls us to do is robbing you of the full effect of God’s transforming power.

Pastor Labberton’s book* is all about helping our neighbors and part of growing in Christ is seeing the need in the world, the great pain that is in the world. After beginning to see that, the next step is feeling an urgency to do something about it. If we say we cannot see God, it may be more relaxing because we can kid ourselves that work does not have to be done. There is no impetus to make our world a better place. “To see better, even if it is still dimly, is essential to changing the way I live….Especially if I want to live [by] loving God and my neighbor” [Labberton, 103].

What is real worship?

One word answer…

Transformation…

Commenting on a group discussion he and other pastors had with African-American men and women, “We saw that night how little and how shallowly we see. Deep pain can be caused by our shallow vision of others.” Pastor Labberton writes about how we don’t often see the “real” person.* When you don’t see the “real” person, you are not likely to understand them and therefore help them. Many times he writes about how we as humans lack empathy. Often times lack of empathy is the root of a lot of misunderstanding and inaction. He says empathy is “our capacity to perceive and at least partially enter into someone else’s reality”[97].

Since my trade is human communication, I want to offer some keys to developing empathy. Maybe this post will shine some light on what can be done to connect people. Maybe in the middle of Labberton’s discussion about what we lack, we can explore what we can have, if we try.

You have to see value in knowing another’s perspective. Certainly people who study communication place a premium value on empathy. Ron Adler and Russell Proctor report that researchers label empathy as the most important aspect of communication competence.**

But what are the foundations of empathy?

Believe it or not, sharing your ideas with others is a basic foundation. To understand someone else, you have to exchange ideas. Someone who is introverted will find it harder to develop relationships with others. Maybe for them sharing is too hard; they don’t think there is value in their thoughts and feelings or they just lack confidence that they can express themselves. But communication researchers have found that sharing begets sharing.

We have found that if information is appropriate [not too personal or private] others will receive it and respond back with information of their own. If the person you are sharing with is someone you admire or desire to have a friendship or relationship with, the sharing you have with them will bond you, a so called unwritten pact will develop between you and them. The information you share could be more private as you continue your relationship. Certainly if you receive personal information from another, it is essential to not share that information if you want to have a continuing relationship. How you handle shared private information is a key to building trust between you and others and we know that trust is a cornerstone to a healthy relationship. Over time, a close relationship will yield more private information as people feel free to put down some of their public façade. The more you bond with someone else, the more you will get to know them on a deeper level.

A second foundational idea is the communication skill of listening. This means giving careful and thoughtful attention to the messages we receive. It is the act of decoding the meaning of others using our minds. The focus is often on the words we hear but that will only get you partial meaning. How a person delivers their message is important too, the tone of voice and their body language.

Too often people get confused about listening; they think that hearing a message is good enough, it is not. It is an old communication adage that people can hear without listening; they do it all the time. To really communicate with someone, you have to put all your mental faculties into the process of understanding another’s message.

This means that a good listener has to fight the tendency to be distracted by internal or external factors. We all have concerns or worries and if we are trying to listen, those thoughts can overpower the message coming from someone else. Sometimes we have messages we want to say back and we practice those messages while we are listening to others. This can interfere with comprehending what another person is saying to us. Environmental distractions can easily take us away from attending to a message, a colorful sight, a powerful smell or a loud sound can interrupt listening. Too often people who don’t know much about communication will say that listening is no big deal; anyone can do it. That is not the case. Many people are horrible listeners, only getting parts of a message, or maybe not any of it at all. One of my feelings about listening is that really trying to listen to someone’s message is one of the best gifts you can give them.

Earlier I wrote you have to see value in knowing another’s perspective. I would go further than that. To have empathy you have to value other people. If you don’t value other people you won’t have empathy because you don’t care about them. Too often in our world we see someone who has no money and dresses in a shabby manner and we discount their value. For some it is skin color. We can’t get past the fact that there are people who have different skin tones. Some devalue certain people based on race. Ethnocentrism is common in our world, the idea that our culture is much better than others. This is a major negative factor as people from other cultures have ideas to express but they are worth little; they are not from “here.”

Certainly, sharing ideas and feelings is essential to getting to know others. Listening means so much to the communication process because the act of listening means messages are being decoded and ideas are being exchanged.

But the real cornerstone of empathy may be the value you place on your fellow human beings. If you value others, you will share your ideas and you will allow others to share their ideas with you. If you value others, you will listen to them, valuing their message enough to work at understanding it.

Pastor Labberton spends so many pages writing about our need to help the poor and indeed the scripture to support his thesis is there.

“He who oppresses the poor taunts his Maker, but he who is gracious to the needy honors Him.”

Certainly getting to know the poor will help you fill their needs. It can be done with sharing, listening, valuing and respecting, all leading to empathy.

*The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor
**Looking Out Looking In

We all come to understand the world from our own worldview which is greatly shaped by our culture. Of course the range of cultural differences is greatly varied. When I studied intercultural communication in college, I was struck by how people from different parts of the world view something we all take for granted: communication. For instance, Middle Eastern people in conversation depend on personal scent to facilitate communication. Arabs stand very close to others when they talk so they can get an olfactory sense of who the other person is [very different from America, the culture of mouthwash and underarm deodorant]. Asian cultures discourage the expression of thoughts and feelings. In Japan and China, silence is valued. A common saying is “In much talk is great weariness.” Again, this is very different from our expressive American culture.

When I was given my final degree, I was not sure what I would do in my career but soon after returning to my community college, I knew I could make the most impact in the classroom. However, I thought the chances of encountering many cultural differences would be rare in this small western Kentucky city, unlike the larger city where I went to the university.

Then I encountered Reuben. I was supposed to be his teacher but I think I was his student. You see, Reuben was from Mexico and he was in my interpersonal communications class. When I first saw him in class, I was not sure of his origin but he began to come up after class to talk to me and told me of his home country.
Reuben tried to mix with the other students. He had achieved American citizenship and his English was better than many American students. You could still detect the Mexican accent in his voice.

I remember the first after class conversation we had. He said he was confused by the American students who did not seem interested in doing well on the group activity I gave them. Of course Reuben was in a group with four American students. He described them as “not caring.” He told me he wanted to do the group activity but the other students were not interested in completing it at all. He felt pressure to conform, but Reuben did not like conforming. Reuben was what I called a “go-getter.”

From time to time, we had other conversations and one day he dropped by the office. I could tell he was upset. This was his first semester in college and he seemed to need to talk out a problem so I made time for him. Also I was interested in getting to know his cultural perspective so I listened to his story. Turns out, he was from an extremely poor family. As a child he had four brothers and sisters and a Mother but his Father was gone most of time. His Father was in America working on farms to make money for his family.

Despite his Father’s efforts, life in Reuben’s home was precarious. Many days there was not enough food for the family and Reuben went to bed hungry. His Mom and Dad loved him but Reuben longed for a more secure life, one where he did not have to worry about the necessities of life. This was in the 90’s and immigration was not on the news as it is today. Reuben came to America and his goal was to assimilate. He told me he had a good business sense, making enough money to buy several rental properties and was the proud owner of a nice car. He was amazed at the opportunity afforded everyone in this country and eventually saw college as the next step to improve his life.

However Reuben was in college to study, to learn, to achieve. He was not there to “mess around.” He wanted a better life.

And he just could not understand American students who did not care.

His perspective gave me pause. This young man was so poor growing up and his worldview had shaped him to see our country, our college and my class as a stepping stone to a better life.

By the end of the semester he changed my perspective. I tried really hard not to stereotype but I knew many people who had less-than-flattering words for our neighbors to the south, even in the 1990’s, words like free-loaders, drug dealers, common criminals. Spending time with Reuben would have caused them to question their worldview of people from the Mexican culture.

Ethnocentrism can make working with others difficult and I see it more and more every day in 2018, the idea that our American culture is superior to others.

Yes, culture shapes us. We cannot deny that; sometimes it can close us off to the value of other ways of life, other people who come from different places. We fail to see that another person’s culture can inspire them to achieve. That was the case with Reuben. I have not followed him over the years but I know he graduated with his degree. I remember hearing the Academic Dean at my college calling his name, seeing him walk across the stage to get his diploma [really it was a run rather than a walk]. Reuben was smiling from ear to ear, clutching it like it was the most important document in the world.

To Reuben, it was. I was Reuben’s teacher or maybe it was the other way around.

Maybe Reuben was mine.

Raising kids is so problematic. We hear it all the time; children don’t come with instruction manuals. Most certainly, I did not have an instruction manual.

I was a tough kid to handle; scrawny would be the best word to describe me. I did not like food very much and my poor mother would employ all kinds of strategies to get me to eat. She loved me and did not want me to “wither away.” As I sit at my desk writing this, I am very close to an item she used to encourage me to eat, a Davy Crockett bowl. When I was a kid, Davy was extremely popular among the younger set. Fess Parker was Davy and in the bottom of my cereal bowl there he was with his coonskin cap, killing a bear. Mom would say, “Eat your cereal David and you will see Davy Crockett in the bottom of your bowl”. If that did not work, she would throw out the old saw “we will just have to pack up your food and send it to the starving kids in China.” The idea behind this was I obviously did not appreciate the food; so we will send it to kids who do. I was such a picky eater, I know I would have gladly helped her offer, helping her pack it up and take it to the post office.

I never really seriously considered if kids were starving in China. They were so far away. I just thought it was a persuasive strategy, but really there are starving kids everywhere, kids that really appreciate food. The most common place we see them are those gut-wrenching commercials for programs like “Feed the Children.” You know those kids who stare at the camera, looking very thin and often they are obviously dirty. A person doing voice-overs tells of the plight of the children and how for a ridiculously small amount of money you can save a child’s life. You can buy these children some food.

Pastor Labberton writes about the average American who is employed, housed and well-fed. The images on the television are so far away. In some cases they really are. The kids are in Africa, the Middle East or maybe Asia. Have you wondered what you would do if you were face to face with those kids? Labberton writes about traveling to Africa and India and the first impression he had when he encountered starving children. In India, he met them right off the airplane: “No longer mythic, no longer television images. Here were real children in tangible need. It was no guise. I knew, of course that these ones who had staked out the territory of the airport might be pimped, if not enslaved….in any case, they were real children, in real need.”

Right in his face…

There was no television screen between him and the kids, a screen where he could take the remote control and change to another channel. Labberton admitted that even though he could see them, “I could not emotionally access these children all that easily either.” He could not really understand their world. In other words, he could not feel their pain or relate to their situation. Immediately he also realized that they could not understand him: “someone with my skin color, without the wear of the sun, who arrived from somewhere and landed on their terrain like a visitor from space.”

He could give them money but that seemed to be too easy. Those kids needed more than just a handout. That would help their immediate need but for them to have a good life, they needed more and he knew it.

Just imagine confronting some of the starving kids of the world. How would you feel?
Here is the cold hard truth. It is too uncomfortable to have dire need right in front of us. What if Mom said “Ok David, we are going to pack up your food and give it to those starving kids in China and we are going to personally take it.”

It would overwhelm me.

Even one child’s needs would overwhelm me, much less a group. Pastor Labberton writes of the Dalit brothers and sisters who due to the Indian caste system are relegated to cleaning latrines for their lifetimes. He writes of the “land grabbers” in Africa who take the land from an HIV positive mother with children because the society there sees her and her children as having no future, no worth. He writes of the “nobodies” of Thailand, tribal people who have been stripped of their legal identity, not having the ability to own land or have police protection. Most have a life of social, political and economic death in their future. I have heard of the plight of children in Thailand due to the Thailand Methodist mission; starvation, drug running, sex exploitation are common for some of the smallest people in this land.

Just thinking of these situations make me feel so helpless, so sad, so unable to effect any change.

The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor is beginning to truly be a dangerous book. It calls for a commitment. It calls for more than just a glace and then a look away. It calls for more than a grab for the remote and a quick channel change.

Taking action, getting involved…truly dangerous.

In The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor, one can easily get lost in the conclusion that all of us have factors in our lives which cause us to suffer distorted outlooks on reality. In essence, we don’t see ourselves as others see us. We all have times when insecurity creeps in, times when we sense we have personal deficiencies. We may try to fill in the gaps, trying to hide what we lack. We may try to project success but we know our façade is not real. Even the person who has the most loving, doting parents will still fall into situations where they lack something they need in life and they will experience nagging feelings of insecurity.

To be honest, most of us may never get over our deficiencies. They may linger for a lifetime.

Is it just part of being human?

Pastor Labberton spends a lot of time writing about our distorted outlook on life, the idea that we view the world through what he calls our “broken mirror”. In Chapter 5 of his book, he turns to the Bible for insight.

At one time, man and woman had no insecurity. The first man and first woman were reflections of God, representatives of God, in control of the Garden of Eden, blessed human beings. They had no shame existing in a world where they had no worries. Their only concern was the choice that God had given them: choose Me or choose autonomy, represented by the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. You must not eat fruit from it.

Of course there was really no reason to eat fruit from the forbidden tree. They had all that anyone would want but Satan arrived in the form of a serpent to prey on their…you guessed it: their insecurity. Basically he convinced them to rebel against God by making them think they lacked something. Knowledge of good and evil would make them on par with God [of course that is not true]. Why would God’s representatives want to be anything more than what they were?

But they did eat it. Satan said “when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” They felt they lacked something. They had a deep-seated insecurity and Satan knew that. The serpent told them that eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil would give them a better life. They believed the lie. They did not believe God.

Thanks to Satan’s words, they suffered from a horrible distortion about their world. Until he entered the picture, they did not have that. After he convinced them to seize autonomy, they immediately began to suffer. Human relationships were less trusting, symbolized in the immediate shame between Adam and Eve. Suddenly they had a desire to cover their bodies. And for the first time ever, they were ashamed to be in God’s presence, they hid from God, knowing they did something very wrong.
Intimacy was lost due to their sin.

It is not much of a stretch to say that their act destroyed mankind’s relationship with God. Labberton says by “looking at the narrative line of Genesis alone, we find the tragic story of how a distorted refraction of our broken humanity is reproduced again and again”.

The story of man continues in the lives ruined by insecurity. Cain and Abel didn’t see themselves as loving brothers. They saw each other as foes, competitors, enemies. Cain was so jealous of Abel that he wanted to murder him. God said do not give into this temptation but he did. Cain was so insecure.

The youngest son Joseph was the apple of Jacob’s eye so his brothers schemed for a way to get rid of him. They were so blinded by their hatred for Jacob’s “favorite” that they put Joseph’s life in danger. Their insecurity caused them to do what was wrong.

One can make a case that a distorted sense of worth may be at the root of many of man’s problems in the Bible as one can cite case after case of fractured relationships, all stemming from the Garden of Eden.

It is interesting that James 1: 22-25 offers hope for all of us who struggle. Read this Scripture carefully: “Be doers of the Word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, ongoing away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.”

Maybe we have a natural insecurity, born of our sin nature. Maybe we all have a tendency to think too much when we should act. Maybe we should be doers and not hearers.

When a need is presented before us, we need to do it before insecurity creeps into our minds.

Maybe it is in the doing that our insecurities may disappear.