a thorny issue

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Ps. 119:25-48; Isa. 44:24-45:7; Eph. 5:1-14; Mark 4:1-20

And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. (Mark 4:18-19)

Last night, while discussing the last sections of Matthew 10 (Jesus' "Discourse on Mission" where he sends out the 12 and tells them they will be handed over to courts, persecuted, killed... families will be divided...). Georgi brought up the fact that in our world Christians pretty much don't look any different than the world around us. That's a sad fact, and there's much to say about it - but not today.

I thought of that when I read the parable of the four soils. I think here we see one reason for Western christians' blending in with the world around us. The "cares of the world," the "deceitfulness of riches," and the "desires for other things" enter in and choke the word of the gospel, and so the good news does not bear fruit in our lives.

I am just beginning Walter Wink's second volume on "The Powers," titled Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence. In the forward he writes that "materialism itself is terminally ill, and, let us hope, in process of replacement by a worldview capable of honoring the lasting values of modern science without succumbing to its reductionism. In that emergent worldview, spirituality will be perceived as the interiority of material, organic, and social entities, as I have suggested in volume 1 of "The Powers" (Naming the Powers)."

Now, Wink is pointing to more than consumerism; he speaks of a whole worldview that perceives reduces reality to what can be touched, tasted, studied, disected, and finally controlled by us humans... But what the thorns represent in the third soil, falls in this category, I think. It is the air we have breathed, the water we have drunk, the whole matrix in which we have been raised.

Left to ourselves, it is inevitable. But the Father owns it all, let us pray for mercy - that he would till the soil, and pull those thornbushes (or at least give us discernment that we may "put them off", per Ephesians 4). Those thorns are insidious. In my yard, they may yield blackberries (O deceitful desire), but I just cannot get rid of them, they keep popping up even though I try to pull them up by the roots!

But my new nature is not essentially "thorny" (though that stuff keeps popping up in my old nature). Paul writes, "Once we were darkness, but now we are light in the Lord" - not "in" darkness, not "in" the light (Eph. 5:8-9) - our very nature has been transformed, penetrated and permeated by the seed and life of the good news. We are now children of a Father, not workers for a tyrant, or in a desperate win-lose battle with evil. So Paul says:
Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord.

Lastly, I need my brothers and sisters. Me and the TV hidden away by ourselves are just not going to bear the fruit of light. I need be out in that field with all the other seedlings, not in my own private greenhouse trying to make it on my own. Part of looking different from the world around us, part of perceiving the seduction/deception of our culture of materialism, lies in the new community, the band of disciples, the family around the table. When a whole Christian community begins looking different that the community in which it lives and works and plays... then the fruit-bearing really can be more toward that one-hundredfold. We need each other.