It sometimes creates an embarrassed inward chuckle within me when we sing certain songs in worship like, say, ”When the Spirit of the Lord moves within my heart.”
Perhaps it shouldn’t, but it does.
I think it’s because of this line, “When the Spirit of the Lord moves within my heart, I will dance like David danced.” It rings a touch false of course for a staid, khaki-clad, dance-averse, respectable people to be singing something that they’d never in a million years permit of themselves for fear of being foolish. After all, wouldn’t the PWP (Presbyterian Worship Police) burst in immediately with badges and handcuffs if anything like a weird expression of exuberance emanated from us?
Chided by our Inner Decorum Chaperones
Half-dressed King David was of course chided and despised much as our inner-decorum chaperones do us by his respectable wife for his “foolish” enthusiasm in celebrating the return of the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem. He’d disobeyed the demands of couth, according to his jealous wife. David reminds her that being singled out as God’s hand-picked king is no shabby arrangement. He wasn’t prepared to understate his delight at being so favored by God.
He wound up regarded as a man after God’s own heart, and a central hub in the family tree of God’s world-wide restorative intentions.
His shaming bride, we’re told, was punished with infertility until she was no more. Yikes.
It turns out that an unavoidable consequence for a bunch of fickle-faithed folks like us who are privileged with the moniker of “aliens and strangers in the world” is that we will seem, well, alien and strange. And we might just get labeled that way. Should we celebrate with all our might before the One who wed his mercy and might on the Cross on our behalf, we’ll seem like freaks.
Freakish Aliens and Strangers
If we tell our friends in the midst of marital strife, “yes, of course, you should continue to show kindness to your aloof and hurtful husband and even forgive him as you have been forgiven.” They’ll look at us like we are from outer space---loving your enemy, even if it’s your spouse, never makes sense to a world that is always advocating the cut and run strategy from any commitment which no longer proves convenient to keep.
Should we insist that we spend devoted time in the Scriptures and prayer instead of in a frenetic flurry of activity, we will seem weird and irrelevant in a world where important people work their fingers to the bone with messianic pretensions and self-deceived credos that insist that our work is all that matters. If we give away the money we have labored to earn and recklessly share our stuff, but not our bodies, except with our spouses, we’ll seem like Spielberg’s ET, just as we will if we refuse to live above our means and reject consumption, debt, and the cultivation of an acquisitive spirit. “Fanatics”---not living in the “real world”---that will be the perception of our critics who resent the strangeness.
Who knows what we’ll be called if we adopt the babies nobody else wants, spend ourselves on the hopeless cases, work in industries the world-wide as if we were actually Jesus’ presence in those jobs?
You must be willing to stick your neck out...
But of course, if we do seem strange, we’ll be in good company with folks like the undignified but unable to contain himself King David, and “foolish” Apostle Paul whose life seemed to him to be as if a clown on a stage to be made a joke of before a watching world.
And of course there is always Jesus, homeless and economically unambitious, lingering with riff-raff, and shaming the powerful...and so bizarre in some fundamental ways that his opponents could, with a straight face, inquire, “Aren’t we right in saying you are demon-possessed?”
I recently read of a man who came into contact with the healing wonders of the Spirit of Jesus in a way that was active, pervasive, and contemporary as a text-message. He asked his mentor, “How do I serve as a conduit for healing through the Spirit like this?”
The reply, was simultaneously enticing and terrifying. “You must be willing to stick your neck out, and try it---to pray for the sick, the troubled, and the hurting, with expectancy.”
Wearing the Mantle of our Savior’s Strangeness
Oh, if we stick our neck out relationally, economically, socially, prayerfully, to be the peculiar people of God there is a 99.34% chance that we will sometimes appear foolish, and sometimes, awfully foolish. And of course, these days, there’s a live chance we’ll be regarded as bigoted, hateful, narrow, backward, naive or homophobic.
It’s mighty reassuring to consider that the early church, in a similar age as ours, “where each man did what was right in his own eyes” was routinely reckoned as atheist, seditious, and cannibalistic!
Because they worshipped Christ alone as God, and did not recognize the Roman pantheon and idols as, well, anything, they were atheists. And because they wouldn’t say their morning pledge of allegiance to Caesar, instead saving their fealty, obedience and honor for Christ the Lord, they were trying to undermine the government. And then they had the strange practice of participating in their Lord’s life mysteriously through his presence in bread and wine, the body and blood of their Lord and ours. How could that be anything other than cannibalistic! Icky Christians eating the flesh of Jesus!
But those same icky Christians, weird as they were, left an aromatic appeal in their loving, generous, and sacrificial ways.
Similarly, sometimes, when we risk feeling foolish with tears, words, generosity, obedience, praise, prayers--you name it…when we accept the mantle of our Savior’s strangeness, we’ll be privileged to see our inherited strangeness as a gift to the world whose coolness and respectability is a pretentious, self-absorbed sham.
Perhaps we’ll be like Steinbeck’s character, Samuel Hamilton:
“Samuel always kept a foreignness. Perhaps it was in the cadence of his speech, and this had the effect of making men and women too, tell him things that they would not tell to their relatives and closest friends. His slight strangeness set him apart and made him as safe as a repository.”
Refusing to Rust
Perhaps as we refuse to rust in the comfort of prestige and good-report among our peers, but risk instead as apprentices of our Master we’ll find more and more that we have His “slight strangeness” that sets us apart and makes us as safe to the hurting, disoriented, lost and confused as a repository.
In the places where the world has become most dilapidated and confused, it would make sense that the ways of heaven becoming embodied on earth in Jesus’ weird people would be, to some, as distressing as a boot-wearin’ Texan in a Japanese kimono.
Any time the Spirit touches down on this sad planet and begins to bring rehabilitation to lives, it may also seem strange, out of place, but uncannily alluring. What else could you expect though for a people who are riveted and fastened to a Savior who can’t be easily categorized. In our times we frequently discover our love affair with love, but find loving actual people well nigh impossible. We adore weddings and will break the bank to celebrate them, but find the marriages created by them prohibitively expensive to maintain. So we quit as we get more and more of the poison ivy rash of domestic nastiness on our skin and in our relational bloodstream.
Unlike us, though, Jesus enduringly adores actual rotten, despicable people (like me!) despite how disappointingly self-absorbed they prove to be, and promises to beautify them with his strange and sacrificial world-defying allure.
And we who depend on Christ for mercy, are, for some uncanny reason, adored and inhabited by this weird Wonder.
Will it be any wonder if we ourselves seem every bit as strange as His peculiar Lordship increases in our lives?
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Eric Youngblood is the senior pastor at Rock Creek Fellowship (PCA) on Lookout Mountain. Please feel free to contact him at eric@rockcreekfellowship.org.