Hill & Light People
I know not everyone shares the same view of what is currently going on in our culture, but from my perspective we are in a full-blown cultural crisis. The evidence accumulates every single day. I’m writing this on October 3rd. By the time you read it, who knows what will have happened? Every day is a new adventure. As of this moment, the U.S. government is in shutdown, with little will to solve the problem. Tariffs are high, compassion is low. Longtime nation friends are abandoned. Longtime enemy leaders are embraced. Immigrants, legal or not, live in terror. People of color and women are depreciating rapidly. Free speech is not free. Violent and derogatory talk appears across all platforms. Healthcare and poverty guardrails are being erased. Blue cities and states and projects are targeted for military intervention and loss of promised funding. This is far beyond politics. Insofar as these things relate to how human beings are treated, these are spiritual issues. Most serious Christians I know are perplexed and asking “What can we do? What can Jesus’ Church do?” If I hear Jesus rightly, I think the answer is: “Be different.”
Two plague epidemics in the 2nd and 3rd centuries wiped out perhaps a third of the Roman Empire. As people of means fled the cities to try to avoid the sickness, the last functioning social network in place was the Church–which gave basic nursing care to Christians and non-Christians alike. And shared a hope that transcended death. Many Christians used their own money to care for people they didn’t know. Others gave their time, and in fact died because they refused to let people around them die alone. Many pagan people were saved because of care they received, and many came to faith because they saw firsthand the kind of people Christians were. That…is being different.
In World War II Germany, Hitler and the Nazis bore down on not just the world, but their own culture. They hijacked the leadership of education, politics, business, the military, arts and entertainment…and the Church. Most Christians and most pastors either supported the authoritarians or passively said nothing. People were afraid to speak the truth. Increasingly, there was no difference between the Church and the State. But there were some, at least a few in the Confessing Church who both recognized the danger and actively resisted. Hundreds of pastors were imprisoned, many paid with their lives. That…is being different.
As the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement in the United States advocated for a non-racist society, Martin Luther King Jr. repeatedly ran into resistance from white Christians, including the group of clergy who admonished him while he was in jail in Birmingham. In photos of various marches and the 1963 gathering on the Mall in Washington DC, a few whites were sprinkled through the crowds. One Jewish rabbi, Abraham Heschel, often is pictured accompanying King at the front of crowds, a rare white male standing with African Americans. That…is being different.
So what does it look like in our cultural moment to follow Jesus’ call to be “a city on a hill” and “the light of the world?” We know it will be swimming upstream. We know it will not be popular. I’m pretty sure it does not mean disengaging from the world to only work on spiritual things. Yet it must surely be different than grasping power unto revenge. It must be different than vilifying or belittling others. It must be active–voting, protesting, marching–while staying nonviolent. It must be prayerful. It must be calm. It must be ready to have conversation with kindness rather than frothing arguments. It must be staying in relationships rather than jettisoning them. It must be caring for the immigrant, the refugee, and the marginalized. It must be the kind of behavior that sticks out like a sore thumb, the way a city built on a hill is visible from every angle or the way even a tiny bit of light utterly changes the entire environment. It must be very…different.
Peace of Christ,
Dan Baumgartner
Dan Baumgartner is the senior pastor at The Cove in Santa Rosa CA and currently serves on The Fellowship Community Advisory Board.