So the labels ultimately fail, no matter how useful they are from time to time, because the life of Jesus is just that, a life that is lived by people who have oriented their entire lives around being true to Jesus’s teachings.
One of the first things God does in creating the world is separate dark and light. The ancient rabbis say the first thing God does is distinguish between dark and light, and the rest of the scriptures is God teaching people how to distinguish between dark and light. Huge sections of the book of Leviticus are devoted to God teaching people how to discern between life and death, light and dark, clean and unclean. The Ten Commandments are God teaching people how to discern, and how to live well in relationship between right and wrong with their creator. The Bible is filled with stories of God teaching people how to think. How to discern. How to sort and sift and figure out what is true and what isn’t. What is good and what isn’t. What brings life and what brings death.
Being a Christian is about engaging the mind and heart more and more, not shutting them off or letting someone else think for you. The writer Peter urged Christians to be alert.15 Paul tells his listeners in Thessalonica to test everything and hold on to the good.16
The danger of labeling things “Christian” is that it can lead to our blindly consuming things we have been told are safe and acceptable. When we turn off this discernment radar, dangerous things can happen. We have to test everything. I thank God for the many Christians who create and write and film and sing. Anybody anywhere who is doing all they can to point people to the deeper realities of God is doing a beautiful thing. But those writers and artists and thinkers and singers would all tell you to think long and hard about what they are saying and doing and creating. Test it. Probe it.
Do that to this book. Don’t swallow it uncritically. Think about it. Wrestle with it. Just because I’m a Christian and I’m trying to articulate a Christian worldview doesn’t mean I’ve got it nailed. I’m contributing to the discussion. God has spoken, and the rest is commentary, right?
Tour Guides
In the same way that something can be labeled “Christian” and not be true, something can be true and not be labeled Christian. Paul quotes Cretan prophets and Greek poets. He is interested in whether or not what they said is true. Now to be able to quote these prophets and poets, Paul obviously had to read them. And study them. And analyze them. And I’m sure he came across all kinds of things in their writings that he didn’t agree with. So he sifts and sorts and separates the light from the dark and then claims and quotes the parts that are true.
It is as if Paul is a spiritual tour guide and is taking his readers through their world, pointing out the true and the good wherever he sees it. Notice what he does in the book of Acts. He visits the city of Lystra, which hasn’t heard of Jesus or the God Paul believes in, and he tries to figure out how to explain his Christian worldview to them. He tells them, “[God] has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.”17
Paul essentially asks his audience: Have you had enough food? Who do you think it comes from?
Has it rained so your crops could grow? Who do you think did that?
Have you ever laughed? Who do you think made that possible?
Missions then are less about the transportation of God from one place to another and more about the identification of a God who is already there. It is almost as if being a good missionary means having really good eyesight. Or maybe it means teaching people to use their eyes to see things that have always been there; they just didn’t realize it. You see God where others don’t. And then you point him out.
Perhaps we ought to replace the word missionary with tour guide, because we cannot show people something we haven’t seen.
Have you ever heard missionaries say they were going to “take Jesus” to a certain place? What they meant, I assume, was that they had Jesus and they were going to take him to a place like China or India or Chicago where people apparently didn’t have him.
I would ask them if people in China and India and Chicago are eating and laughing and enjoying things and generally being held together? Because if they are, then Jesus, in a way that is difficult to fully articulate, is already present there.
So the issue isn’t so much taking Jesus to people who don’t have him, but going to a place and pointing out to the people there the creative, life-giving God who is already present in their midst.
It is searching for the things they have already affirmed as real and beautiful and true and then telling them who you believe is the source of all that. “I am here to tell you where I think it comes from . . .”
And if you do see yourself carrying God to places, it can be exhausting.
God is really heavy.
Some people actually believe that God is absent from a place until they get there. The problem with this idea is that if God is not there before you get there, then there is no “there” in the first place.
Tour guides are people who see depth and texture and connection where others don’t. That is why the best teachers are masters of the obvious. They see the same things that we do, but they are aware of so much more. And when they point it out, it changes the way we see everything.
In the books of Matthew and Mark, Jesus has dinner with a group of religious leaders and a woman crashes the party, pouring expensive perfume on Jesus’s head. The people Jesus is eating with are mad. This perfume could have been sold and the money used for all sorts of worthy causes. But Jesus defends her. He says, “She has done a beautiful thing to me.”18 Jesus and his dinner companions experience the exact same event, yet they see it from totally different perspectives. Jesus sees another dimension to the events: For him it is a profoundly moving, spiritual, worshipful experience. He points out the beauty of it. The others miss it. He sees it. He is a tour guide. Pointing out the holy and sacred that are present, right here, right now.
Our Story
We claim the beautiful and the good and the true wherever we find it, because all things are ours. Several years ago I was hanging around after one of our church services, and a young woman named Yvette walked up to me and told me she had been listening to me for the last few weeks and hated everything I was saying and totally disagreed with my teachings and the whole time she just wanted to stand up on her chair and yell at me.
I immediately liked her.
She went on to say that she was studying witchcraft and was totally opposed to the things she heard me saying.
I responded, “But you keep coming back.” And then I told her I was thrilled that she kept returning to our gatherings. I hoped that