Likeness and Dominion

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Genesis 1: 26 ESV

The meaning of these few words is heavily dependent upon how one views God. Personally, I hold that God is the creator of all that is, that He knew all of what we would call history before any of it was set into motion, that He exists in three distinct yet inseparable persons, and that everything that takes place in our world is ultimately used by God for the completion of His purposes. There is more to my theology than these ideas, but they suffice for the purposes of a brief discussion of this verse. God created humanity in a unique manner among all that He devised. People are made in something that is referred to as being in God’s image or likeness, and that would seem to be intended to include all of the very complex nature that is shaped and formed by God’s three person identity.

Much has happened over the course of our existence on earth. Humanity has rebelled against our Creator, we have turned away from His will for us and lived as if we know all of the better answers for life. The word for that departure from God is sin, and we all have engaged in it to the degree that we have become highly skilled at its practice. Although we do what God granted us the authority and the responsibility to do by  way of having dominion over all that makes up this world where we reside, this rebellious nature, our sinfulness, has driven us to do it more than less of the time in a manner that is filled with arrogance, violence, and very poor stewardship of it all. Humanity does not deal with itself, with the creatures of this earth, or with the earth itself in the loving and care-filled manner that God’s image bearing would dictate.

There is a note of hopelessness in this, for it would seem that we are headed along a road that leads to the destruction of all that might be dear to us in this world. Yet, there is an answer, and it already exists within the scope of our knowing. It came to fruition on a cross on a knoll in Judea, and as a resurrection miracle took place three days later, it was empowered to defeat the sin-fueled evil of this world. I believe in the God of Creation, and I believe in the reality of the earthly crucifixion death of the Son, Jesus; so, I also believe in the historical truth of His resurrection to life and into a position of sovereign reign over this world.

All of that means to me that as I believe in Jesus, I also must take responsibility for loving my fellow humans without exception, and I need to care about and care for the world that God created for me to so steward. These are not impossible ideas, for the empowerment to do all of this is found in the presence of the Spirit of God in me and in all people who know Jesus, and so, know God. The sacrifice that Jesus made on that cross has restored to humanity the ability and the needed resources to engage fully in loving this world and all that inhabit it in the same deep and total manner that God does and that He envisioned in granting dominion over it all to humans.      

Father forgive them

 And when they came to the place that is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And they cast lots to divide his garments. And the people stood by, watching, but the rulers scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!”

Luke 23: 33-35 ESV

It would seem that this scene on that unremarkable hill outside of Jerusalem on an early Spring day during those first years of what we now know as the 1st century A.D. was not much different from what we encounter in our world today. People were rude, disrespectful, angry, and either indifferent to the suffering before them or were seeming to gain pleasure from its severity. These characteristics that gave common flavor to the crowd that was watching that day’s spectacle of torture and death, are found in us still. Yes, we might be less overt, so more subtle; yet, we are not so much different. Our rhetoric is too often angry, dismissive, or belittling. We attack with the same sort of intended outcome as was that of the scourging that had taken flesh from the bone of Jesus’ back.

Our elected officials pass laws that protect the privileged and grant greater power to them while ignoring basic care for the weak and the disadvantaged. We dismiss entire segments of the world’s population with language that casts them in a subhuman light while we delight in the worldly majesty of leaders that speak these ungodly words. We build bombs and spend obscene amounts of our God given wealth on the means to exert violent control over others while refusing to spend pennies on feeding hungry children.

This is the world where we find ourselves in these highly evolved days of the 21st Century A.D. It would seem that in our eyes and more importantly in our hearts that in this Easter season we have Jesus right where we want Him to be. That is, He is still on that cross, our hard driven nails hold Him fixed to the wood so that we are not bound to follow His edict to love others without regard to their status, race, gender, or political value and to seek to be peacemakers above all else. Yet, Jesus has a different view of who we can be and of how we get to that place.

Despite what we think and how we act, Jesus still says,

“Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

In Christ we all have forgiveness for even the most despicable, ungodly thoughts and actions. Yet, in order to enter into the rest that forgiveness grants, we must repent. That is, we must turn from the ways that we have been acting and reject those leaders to whom we have granted license to establish policies and practices that are contrary to Jesus’ teaching and His practice of living. Godly repentance means rejection of anger, disrespect, power seeking, and concern for self above care for others. It also means aggressively rejecting the leadership of people that will not join in the worship of the one and only true risen King, Jesus. He and He alone is our Savior. So, proclaim the risen Jesus as Lord and establish that fact as the core truth of your life!     

Trust? NOW? You must be crazy?

I trust in you, O Lord;
    I say, “You are my God.”
 My times are in your hand;
    rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my persecutors!

Psalm 31: 14, 15

The walls were closing in. David could feel the hot and abrasive breath of the hounds of destruction that were relentlessly pursuing him. Enemies on the one side and back stabbing friends on the other. Life was grim, and death’s approach was surely imminent.

It is not possible to live for very long and to not find oneself in situations and circumstances that cause uncertainty, fear, anguish, and even terror to surround our days. This world provides a harsh environment in which we dwell. Death is a certainty; so, we hope that it won’t come too soon and that its pain isn’t beyond manageable. Yet, God wants to reassure us of certain fundamental truths, and He uses the experiences and the words of His chief poet to share them with us.

There is strength and comfort to be found in the simple comprehension of faith,

“I trust in you, O Lord”.

On this day and in my current situation, I can lean back, place the full weight of my burden upon You, and trust in Your loving and gracious nature to enfold me in a firm and unwavering embrace. You’ve got me, and You’ve got it in hand.

I know this truth;

“You are my God.”

The Lord of the universe rules my life. I am not subject to any of the gods of this world. Doctors, lawyers, politicians, and well-intentioned friends do not provide me with ultimate truth and eternal wisdom, for You, O Lord, are my great and enduring counselor and the lover of my soul.

Today was good or today was hard; yet, the clock that governs all is expressed thus;

“My times are in your hand.”

Time can be a relentless foe when there are challenges to face and decisions to be made. Yet, it is amazing how much more of it there seems to be when I turn my anxiety over to the Lord and allow His calm counsel space to influence my frazzled heart and mind. Then, when the day is done and I settle into reflection on the course that my life has taken, I see that each of my days has been set out by God for His purposes and that all of the days that are to come are granted as His blessed gift to me.

So, my final plea, in light of God’s loving care and provision;

“Rescue me!”

This is the ultimate expression of faith, trust, and hope. I can stop striving and seeking after the perfect answer to all that is confronting me. My racing heart is made calm, and my worried mind is granted rest. This does not mean that I stop engaging with the problems before me, but it does mean that I can do so in the sure knowledge that there are answers and that the burden for their provision rests in the hands and upon the shoulders of my loving Almighty Lord.  

Comfort in Conflict

Tension. Discomfort. Unease. These are words that describe feelings that typically involve some form of conflict, and frankly, most people work hard to avoid having these feelings. We don’t like to be in a state where we are uncomfortable, for that condition also implies a lack of control over one’s personal environment. No one likes to be out of control, especially when it comes to those few inches of air that closely surround us so that we can call it our own.

Avoidance is what happens, for the most part, when we are made sufficiently uncomfortable. We diffuse, disassociate, or deny that there is any real need for engagement in the subjects or the relationships that form the point of irritation. Push back and deferral are tactics that are used to gain time and space away from the potential confrontation, and these are frequently employed in the hopes that the issue or concern will either self-resolve or that it will become buried beneath other more current urgencies. This is all too human a set of behaviors, and it almost always leads to a worsening of the situation at hand through damage done to relationships and by stagnation of even regression in the state of being in the life of families, friendship groups, and entities corporate.

The most significant challenge that is to be faced when confronted with high tension situations is found in overcoming the resistance to attempts at direct resolution that will be encountered from people that are also participants in the objective events and, perhaps most troubling, from people that one might look to for objective advise and wisdom. Simply stated, people do not like to engage in hard conversations, and they also do not like to witness others doing so. All of this makes entering into a proactive or planned process of such engagement very difficult to accomplish.

If the relationship between the participants is intimate and personal, there are special challenges and concerns at work in the engagement. Yet, these are the sorts of situations where natural need and proximal pressures may work to force engagement even if they cannot require resolution. When the concern surrounds the relationships among larger and more corporate groups, deferral and denial of need are most easily practiced. In these situations, there is often a hierarchy of authority that can either choose to embrace the process of resolution or it can decide to quash subordinate’s drive for it. Leadership courage is the characteristic that most profoundly influences this choice.

That is not to say that deferral is a cowardly choice in all circumstances. In fact, it can be the boldest thing that can be done in some situations; yet, when deferral is selected, it requires a very special form and intensity of leadership so that all of the parties are made fully aware of the fact that whatever was causal for the tension is still to be faced into and to be dealt with by all of the parties involved. Additionally, a time line and a preliminary plan for this process need to be communicated, agreed upon, and follow through must be actively managed. On the other hand, denial is never an appropriate reaction. If people are feeling relational or topical tension, discomfort, or unease, those feelings must be treated as real as they are addressed. Should denial be the response that is received, it needs to be challenged and rejected as an invalid response. If denial is one’s own initial response, it should be set aside in favor of a more open and engaged approach to the concerns at hand.

More often than not it is important and appropriate to begin the process of engagement as soon as the conflict has been identified. The first step in all of this is usually a simple recognition of the fact that there are issues to be faced into. From there the parties involved can establish and identify the concerns and the topics that are to be engaged during the process to follow. When this is happening with a larger or a more corporate group, leadership will be challenged to remain open to the stated and the unspoken concerns that others may hold. It is easy to exercise leadership authority in a manner that frames decisions as wisdom when they are, in fact, primarily driven by the need for control that leads to a pre-contrived desired outcome or that attempts to conclude the matter with everyone feeling good yet not accomplishing anything substantive by way of growth or transition.

Times of conflict are a part of the way that God has designed His people to engage with our world with its brokenness. In our world today, we struggle to relate in a healthy and a loving manner as we disagree on many subjects and about the ways that we live out our understanding of God’s desire for the conduct of our lives. Yet, we are not designed by our Creator to settle into and remain in this state of tension and relational discord. Instead, God desires that we would work toward using the existence of  these differences as opportunities for gaining in understanding of others and for strengthening the bonds of our love in Christ as we set aside dogmatic adherence to personal ideas, thoughts, and opinions for the sake of reaching a place of mutual respect.

This leads us back to the concept of leadership courage. Truly bold leadership is also humble in its openness and its willingness to be found lacking or misguided in some of what it has held as true or best. These leaders are risk takers in the realm of relationships. They are able to trust that God has their back when it comes to stepping out into the unknown in order to resolve conflict and to release tension so that their people can grow and thrive in their service to the Kingdom. Relational tensions, whether caused by personal actions, by cultural concerns, or by other issues, are among the most significant causes of affliction and suffering in our world and in the church today. God has promised to bring us His comfort in these situations. We must trust Him to be true to His word in these matters; so, we need to face into these challenges as they come before us and engage in the honest and open dialogue that is the Lord’s path to transformative resolution and to the more abundant life that follows.

For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ.      

2 Corinthians 1: 5   

Midterm Elections

In case someone might have missed it, mid-term elections were held in the US last week. These involve the selection of people to govern and to lead virtually every element of government other than the presidency. Held every four years, it seems that every time they are conducted, the intensity, the grandeur, and the expenses escalate to levels never previously contemplated.

We live in times when the language we use has taken ever-deepening turns for the worse. I am not suggesting that civility and grace have ever been centric to American campaign rhetoric, but outright incivility, half-truths, and outright lies have become our modern norm. It does not seem to matter what perspective is claimed, which party is represented, or what sorts of beliefs the candidate may state as foundational. At first glance, I may be most concerned at this, but there is more. Something deeper.

In the world of governance and the realm of politics, what constitutes “absolute” is generally granted to be the province of individual choice and design. So, what I hold as right is what informs my morality and decides my ethics. What I believe, my personal faith, is dictated and shaped by the causes that I support. Whatever I contemplate as holy writ is interpreted by whatever rules and laws I desire to see enacted. There is something fundamentally misdirected in all of this. If one holds that there is a supreme being,  a divine power, God at the head of it all, then the appointment of oneself as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong truly turns the world on its head. Yet, vast numbers of people support exactly this approach to setting the course for our various units of government. We like strong minded people who express big ideas that have little to no depth to them. These are essentially loud noises, great gusts of wind, and powerful statements made with absolutely no concern for the actual impact or effect of carrying them out.

Death or disenfranchisement might follow behind a new rule or law much as the wake of a ship follows its passage; yet, those lost in these churning seas are viewed by lawmakers and by their acolytes as being of no consequence, for they are the meaningless ones that exist on the fringes of productive society. They are of no greater consequence than are the pieces of debris that constitute the flotsam and jetsam left bobbing in that important ship’s wake. I recognize that this is a merciless world. Yet I fear that our rhetoric is, in fact, a symptom of a deep and lingering illness of the soul. It is a disease that defies cure not so much due to its persistence but more so because we rather like the way that its fevers make us feel. There is power in the rush of heat. We find control in the boiling frenzy that drives the timid and the weak to seek cover and to stop protesting that which starts to appear to be inevitable. 

All of this is so contrary to the way of Christ as to seem impossible to reconcile within the context of the Lord’s church or among people claiming to be Christian. Yet still, there are large numbers within those spaces that identify most directly and with great certainty with various forms and expressions of what is known as Christian Nationalism. Their fealty is pledged firstly and most prominently to politicians, to political parties, and to their stated values. All of this is expressed as being focused upon a desire to see a nation returned to its so called “Christian roots and heritage.” It is hard to imagine that Jesus would have agreed with most of these ideas, or that He would have granted blessing to the ready dismissal of people that differ in perspective from that of those seeking to make the rules for our lives.

Jesus held people as being foremost in His view of what mattered. Those He cared for were extraordinarily diverse. They were ordinary people, poor ones, sick individuals, women, children, and even the powerful rulers of His day. His mission was simple and very explicit. Jesus came to save the lost—which is all of us—and He was intent upon providing the way to eliminate the chasm that separates all sinful people from our Creator God. Jesus engaged with people in the harsh reality of where they were living. He was willing to look deep into hearts and gaze with love into the darkest recesses of souls. He provided comfort and healing for real situations and circumstances as He cured illness, fixed broken limbs, and drove out demons from the minds and hearts of suffering people. All of this was accomplished while remaining focused upon leading each of them to understand and to accept the need for a Savior and for an on-going relationship with God.

So, I wonder if in a world where we hold that rule making is somehow a form of spiritual victory over evil and wherein political control is held out as the answer to all that is broken in our society, if we are not straying ever further away from Christ’s calling to “Follow Me.” This is not to say that there are not legislative and law making victories to be achieved for the sake of what is holy and just. There  certainly are those areas where our society can and should respond to that which is wrong and broken in our world. However, we do need to be careful about claiming such victories and celebrating them while ignoring multitudes of people that are left damaged, struggling, and feeling disenfranchised by our often partially though out and ill-constructed legislation and laws.

We are far too quick to demonize those that see things differently from us. We are ready to proclaim victory or to mourn loss when neither of these concepts looks forward to how we work in unison to move our world even a small amount toward being a just and a holy place for the next generations to dwell. This zero sum approach to how we view our process of human, secular governance ignores Christ’s fundamental call to His people to be peacemakers and to accomplish this by living out and sharing the Gospel of love, grace, and mercy in all corners of our world. It also tramples upon God’s overarching mandate to His people as expressed in Micah 6:8. 

“I have told you, O man, what is good;

and what does the LORD require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God?”