Need
Breaking News. How often is that coming up on your phone these days? Breaking news used to be reserved for wars or catastrophes. Now it pops up when a barely-known celebrity missteps, a sports team wins a game or a politician says something ridiculous. Breaking news has become yet another way to try and grab our attention. Often we are encouraged to elevate something small to the status of gargantuan. The very term “Breaking News” has been distorted and overused so much it has lost much of its meaning.
As a pastor and a person, I’m finding my vocabulary being diminished on a regular basis. This is not just the ebb and flow of ongoing development of the English language. It is more about intentional efforts to distort or obscure things that matter. For example, evangelical was a key word for Christians for many decades, describing a spiritual movement that spanned many denominations of the Church. Evangelical classically meant a large group of followers of Jesus emphasizing a high view of scripture, the need for personal salvation, the call to take the gospel into the world and then living out that gospel in serving the needs of people. Mostly, it doesn’t mean any of that anymore. Instead, it references a conservative political voting bloc which in the U.S. is mainly white and vocal, with intimate connections to leaders who wield power. Some people immersed in evangelical politics don’t even pretend to have anything to do with the Christian faith at all. I don’t know if “evangelical” is an utterly ruined word, but it takes careful parsing to discern how it is being used.
The deterioration of our vocabulary doesn’t stop there. Sin has been viewed for some time as a word too harsh and judgmental. It implies that human beings are in trouble and need help, rather than the more popular “we’re just doing the best we can.” Substitutionary atonement for some is no longer acceptable as one of the main descriptions of what Christ did on the cross. The late Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong’s re-writing of the major tenants of the faith have been taken to heart: “The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.”
The problem is not that words are changing and that we need to simply get used to new ones to say the same things. It is that we are not saying the same things. The meaning itself is changing. And in the age-old swinging of the pendulum, human beings are doing everything possible to avoid this naked truth: we are people in deep need. It’s a tired story, but we keep finding new ways to skirt that core issue. When Eugene Peterson talked about the “sound teaching” mentioned in Ephesians, he noted that the Greek word for “sound” is hygien, where we get “hygiene” from. Eugene said what Timothy was tasked with in Ephesus was to teach sound truth, with honest, healthy, clean, gospel words…because words matter.
I’m often drawn back to a little novel from 1994 called Life After God by Douglas Coupland. He’s the same guy who long ago coined the phrase “Generation X” to describe those of you born from the mid-sixties on into the late seventies (ahem…not me!). Coupland is not a Christian. The novel includes a fairly frustrating story of a man who tries everything–job, girlfriend, philosophy, people–to find meaning in his life. Finally, after all the searching and frustration, in desperation, at the very end of the book he reveals this:
Now- here is my secret. I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God– that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.
Those words feel healthy, or at least refreshing and honest. All Coupland could do was express the longing, but the gospel provides the means of fulfillment.
Breaking News: Human Being Realizes He Needs God.
More Breaking News: Need Met in the Person of Jesus.
Peace of Christ,
Dan Baumgartner
Dan Baumgartner is the senior pastor at The Covein Santa Rosa CA and currently serves on The Fellowship Community Board.
These are the expressed views of Dan Baumgartner and not necessarily broader views of The Fellowship Community.