Robin and Me and You

He was Mork and Popeye. He was the professor Sean Maguire, the teacher John Keating, and the doctor Patch Adams. He was Jack, he was Nanny, he was Genie.

We can still hear his voice:

Good morning, Vietnam!

Ten-thousand years will give you such a crick in the neck!

Bangarang!

There was seemingly no role Robin Williams couldn't play. James Lipton, host of Inside the Actors Studio, claims to have counted the number of distinct characters Williams' Genie portrayed in only a three-minute segment of Aladdin. That number?

Fifty-two. Fifty-two!

The range of his work is remarkable. The amount of characters he played, staggering. But Robin Williams was also me. And he was you. There was darkness just beneath the surface of Williams' life. There was pain buried under the spot-on impressions and genius comedic riffs. And we are no different.

Some of us struggle with clinical depression. Some of us are inflicted with this sickness of the brain, which is just as real and harmful as sickness of the heart or the lungs or any other organ.

Some of us have substance abuse problems. Some of us use drugs and alcohol to numb the pain we feel. Some of us use other things.

Some of us have had the desire to take our own lives. Some of us have tried.

All of us live with darkness and pain lurking just below our well-manicured appearances. And yet the Deceiver whispers to us that we're the only ones with a problem. The question is whether we will listen to his outrageous lie, or be vulnerable enough to expose what's beneath our surface.

And how we answer that question is always a matter of life or death.

I Don't Want to Be a Radical Christian

"Ordinary people who faithfully, diligently, and consistently do simple things that are right before God will bring forth extraordinary results."  - David A. Bednar

Over the past few years, a chorus of prominent Christian voices has told me I need to amp up my discipleship. Shane Claiborne says I need to join an "irresistible revolution" and live as an "ordinary radical." Kyle Idleman tells me I need to quit being a fan of Jesus and decide to really be a follower. Francis Chan tells me I need to be in wild and "crazy love" with God and people. And David Platt says I need to cast off my comfortable lifestyle and become more "radical."

I think I'll pass.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not categorically throwing all these guys and their ministries and their books under the bus. The Holy Spirit has used their voices to challenge complacency--to shake us awake!--and call Christians toward bolder and more sacrificial and more committed discipleship. They are leading us to do BIG things in God's Kingdom.

But what about the small things? What about those everyday, ordinary, and mundane acts of obedience? Because let's face it. Most of us aren't going to do something BIG for the Kingdom. We're not going to start non-profits, move to impoverished neighborhoods, live in third-world countries, write books, or go on speaking tours. While the movers, shakers, and world-changers undertake these projects, the rest of us will go on living our normal, boring lives.

So who's going to talk about doing normal for the glory of God? Who wants to weigh in on being boring for the cause of Christ? There is probably not a big market for these messages. But it's what most of us need to hear. We don't need inspiration to go BIG. We need encouragement to do a lifetime's worth of small things faithfully and well.

Jesus was sometimes about big and radical. He fed thousands of people and preached to thousands more. But he was just as much about small. He spent only three short years in ministry. He poured much of that time into a tiny band of misfits we call apostles. He only wrote something once that we know about, and that was with his finger in the sand before an adulterous woman and an angry mob with stones in hand. (And we don't even know what it was he wrote.) Jesus changed the world, yes, but through smallness.

I'm talking about the Jesus who says, "She has put in more than everyone else" when he sees a woman giving a tiny amount of money out of her poverty (Mark 12:41-44).

This is the Jesus who tells the story of a neighbor who is good, not because he moves his family to a third-world country but because he stops and helps someone as he travels along (Luke 10:25-37).

This is the Jesus who allows a woman to anoint him with oil, a small private gesture of her love for him. Some sneered at this--the money she spent on the expensive oil should have been given to the poor, they said. But Jesus rebukes them: "Why do you trouble her? This woman has done a beautiful thing for me. She has done what she could" (Mark 14:3-9).

"She has done what she could." Not a very exciting book title, is it? "Do what you can for Jesus" is not a line a rock-star Christian speaker uses to fire up a crowd at a conference. Yet we must hear, loudly and clearly, what Jesus is saying:

Don't devalue the small and ordinary things that my followers do for Me.

This is a timely message for a Christian culture that prefers the big, public act of discipleship over the small, private gesture of love and devotion to Jesus. This is a reminder that the little things we do out of faith are not done in vain. This is encouragement to carry on with the ordinary--being kind and patient with our spouses and children, checking on our neighbors, speaking an encouraging word to a struggling friend, giving to the local church quietly and regularly.

As a youth minister, I want to exalt the small and ordinary in the minds of young people. It's more important for me to prepare my students for a lifetime of ordinary obedience rather than prime them for doing something BIG for God. Jim Rayburn, the founder of Young Life, famously said, "It's a sin to bore a kid with the gospel." But Laura Larsen provides a vital critique to this: "while it's a sin to bore a kid with the gospel, it's equally devastating to teach students that the Christian life is always exciting." Living for Jesus is less about doing the most radical and exciting thing we can think of and more about constant faithfulness in the small, everyday stuff of life.

And do you know what's ironic? Embracing the least radical parts of the Christian life is sometimes the most radical thing you can do. Listen to this stirring account from Tish Harrison Warren:  "I’m a thirty-something with two kids living a more or less ordinary life. And what I’m slowly realizing is that, for me, being in the house all day with a baby and a two-year-old is a lot more scary and a lot harder than being in a war-torn African village. What I need courage for is the ordinary, the daily every-dayness of life. Caring for a homeless kid is a lot more thrilling to me than listening well to the people in my home. Giving away clothes and seeking out edgy Christian communities requires less of me than being kind to my husband on an average Wednesday morning or calling my mother back when I don’t feel like it."

I don't doubt that God has gifted some of his children to do BIG stuff. But he's gifted most of us for smallness. For us, living for Jesus is not about changing the world in one grand, beautiful act. It's about seeing the beauty in the ordinary and obeying God in the mundane-ness of life. It's about smallness. And it's about believing that our small acts of faith combined with the power of a mighty God and the ordinary contributions of fellow believers can bring forth extraordinary results.

While some people want to hear from Jesus, "You have served me in big and bold ways," I'd be satisfied with, "My son, you have done what you could. And it is enough." In a Christian culture where bigger is better, going small truly is radical. And if this is what the idea means, I guess on second thought, I would like to be a radical Christian.

(For more on this theme, read this.)

The Church of Macklemore and Madonna

After spending much of yesterday gathered with my church family, I was surprised to find myself in another church when I came home and turned on the Grammy awards. And this time, it was for the wedding ceremony of thirty-three couples, some straight and some gay. (You can watch it here.)

I know it was a church because there were stained-glass windows, a choir singing and swaying in the background, and multiple individuals leading the service. The rapper Macklemore performed his hit "Same Love" during the ceremony, Queen Latifah served as the spirited officiating minister, and Madonna (bearing a striking resemblance to KFC's Colonel Sanders) serenaded the guests during the reception. It was a touching ceremony for many. The cameras cut to Keith Urban wiping away tears as the newly-married couples happily danced to "Open Your Heart" before the in-house audience and nearly 30 million viewers at home.

There was something different about this church, though. I knew it from some of the first few lines of Macklemore's song, which seeks to debunk the long-held Christian conviction that homosexuality is a sin. Speaking about the source of this conviction, Macklemore says, "We paraphrase a book written 3500 years ago." Carmen Fowler Laberge sums up the importance of his lyric: "In this one simple line, he dismisses the entire corpus of Christian teaching on sexuality."

The book Macklemore references is, of course, the Bible. And he quickly and haphazardly shoves it aside. But there are a few problems here. First, not all of the Bible is as old as he believes. The New Testament is around 2,000 years old, and it also speaks strongly against homosexuality. Second, Macklemore is the latest culprit of believing that just because something is old means it's outdated and irrelevant. He regards himself to be a more reliable source for knowledge than the Bible because he exists in the present day. And third, for many Christians, including me, the Bible is not just an old book. It is the access-point for God's revelation in many times and places throughout human history. It shows us who God is, how He interacts with humanity, and what His will is. And specifically, it shows us what His will is regarding sexuality: He designed sex to be enjoyed within the bonds of monogamous heterosexual marriage. This is the decision of a Holy God, and it is not my place (or Queen Latifah's or Madonna's or Macklemore's) to challenge it. But in their "church," the authority of the Bible is obviously not a foundational belief.

Macklemore's rejection of the God of Scripture continues later in his song: "Whatever god you believe in, We come from the same one, Strip away the fear, Underneath it's all the same love." The concept of "love" to Macklemore seems to mean accepting and surrendering to any desires I have. But once again, this doesn't jive with the God I've come to know through the Bible. My God tells me I am more than what I feel, I am more than what I desire, and what I feel and desire is not always good for me.

Scripture reveals a love that is infinitely better than Macklemore's version. The Bible tells me that I am "God's chosen one, holy and beloved" (Colossians 3:12). Because of God's love for me, He felt compelled to send His Son to the earth to die, bearing my sins in his body on a tree (1 Peter 2:24), so that I don't have to be controlled by my feelings and desires any longer. Now that's love. Because of this love, I can embrace the guidance of God's Spirit which dwells within me and leads me out of unhealthy ways of living and into wholeness and peace and joy.

I'm thankful I don't regularly attend the church of Macklemore and Madonna and Queen Latifah. Because I believe the Bible is more than an old book. Because I believe "God loves all his children" so much that he refuses to leave us stuck in our sinful state. I like what the Bible tells me I am a whole lot more than what Macklemore tells me I am. I may not be able to change on my own, "even if I tried, even if I wanted to," but nothing is impossible for God and his Spirit, who is the great Transformer. The gospel of Macklemore tells me I'm stuck where I am. "Even if I tried," I'm stuck in homosexuality or porn-addiction or adultery or lust or sex before marriage. But the Gospel of Jesus tells me that despite my own inability to change, the Spirit can change me into who I am meant to be.

That's a love worth celebrating.