Lenten Humility: Accepting our World-changing Inability

We are delighted that Bobby Gross, author of Living the Christian Year and who has contributed previous series during Lent and Advent, has agreed to write a new series of Lenten reflections on the theme of humility.

Most of us are just trying to live our lives, do our jobs, love our family and friends, and be good neighbors in the world as it is, with all of its beauty and brokenness, possibility and precarity, hope and heartache. We do our best to navigate the cross-currents with God’s help. Sometimes, we sail along, sometimes we feel adrift, sometimes we are buffeted or even capsize. This is the world we find ourselves in.

But many of us are unwilling to resignedly accept the world as it is. We want to fix it and make it better. We want to change the world. Often passionately!

And rightly so, especially as those who believe in a good and loving Creator, who read the biblical prophets thundering for justice, who follow a Leader who worked miracles in history and taught us to seek the kingdom of God, and who look forward to the renewal of all things at the end of time.

In my own organization, InterVarsity, we publicly articulate an animating vision for why we plant and sustain spiritually-formative, witnessing communities on campus:

To see students and faculty transformed, campuses renewed, and world-changers developed

Wow! What huge aspirations. Arguably grandiose. And arguably unrealistic.

As James Davison Hunter (Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at U of Virginia) affirms on the first page of his seminal book, To Change the World:

In the Christian view, then, human beings are, by divine intent and their very nature, world-makers. . . . People fulfill their individual and collective destiny in the art, music, literature, commerce, law, and scholarship they cultivate, the relationships they build, and in the institutions they develop—the families, churches, associations, and communities they live in and sustain—as they reflect the good of God and his designs for flourishing.

The passion to engage the world, to shape it and finally change it for the better, would seem to be an enduring mark of Christians on the world in which they live.

But two pages later, Hunter declares that the underlying assumptions about culture and cultural change held by most Christians are flawed: “On the basis of this working theory, Christians cannot ‘change the world’ in a way that they, even in their diversity, desire.” [1]

Hunter goes on to offer three extended and sophisticated essays on culture and culture change, power and the politics of the Christian right and left, and a proposal for a more modest yet strategic approach to cultural influence he calls “faithful presence.” His stimulating arguments merit thoughtful attention.[2]

I resonate with this idea of faithful presence. I believe our lives, embedded as they are in families and communities and workplaces and social networks, carry influence and bear witness (for good or for ill). How we raise our children, befriend our neighbors, do our work, participate in our organizations, form our views, speak our minds, cast our votes, spend our money, volunteer our time, and conduct ourselves in public—all of these make a difference in the world.

Consider the surprisingly modest metaphors with which Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God: candlelight, mustard seeds, yeast, salt. These images suggest a kind of humility in how we seek to be part of the healing and flourishing that God wants to bring about in the world: flickering light that gains in brightness, tiny seeds that steadily grow, leaven that invisibly causes the dough to rise, sprinkled grains that add flavor or slow spoilage.

For some years now, fierce campaigns to change American society and culture have been underway. From both the political Left and the political Right, they are being waged, which is a fitting verb given the prevailing frame of culture wars (a designation that entered our discourse with James Davison Hunter’s 1992 book of the same name). Many Christians have joined the fight, as it were, predominantly on the Right it seems. But I don’t detect much world-changing humility on our part. Instead, I perceive a great deal of arrogance and overconfidence.

We think that we can bring about wholesale change by our cultural and political efforts.

We believe our cause is righteous and should be pursued by any means necessary, which means using all the coercive power at our disposal.

We have great confidence in the rightness of our moral convictions—and the wrongness of those of our opponents.

For this final week of Lent, I invite us to examine ourselves with respect to our perceived ability to change the world. What are our hopes? What are our fears? And if we fighting to change things according to our vision for what’s right, are we engaged in ways that align with God’s way of changing the world?

I recently spoke to a conference of graduate students in the Northeast on “Navigating a World in Crisis as a Community of Faith.” The assigned text was 1 Peter 2. Peter refers to his Christian readers as “aliens and exiles” and urges them to “accept the authority of every human institution” (including governing officials) and to “honor everyone” (including the emperor). He then addresses slaves (in that first-century Roman context) and asks them to “accept the authority of [their] masters will all deference” and, if “suffering unjustly,” to emulate Christ who “when abused, did not return abuse.”

This passage makes me uncomfortable, knowing how it has been historically twisted to justify slavery and resist the civil rights movement. It seems to undercut contemporary movements to effect social change and challenge oppressive hierarchies. But I do not think Peter endorses docility here or admits to a despairing resignation. He could quote the prophet Micah as readily as we can: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.” He knew that while Jesus did not advocate the overthrow of the Roman empire, he did subvert its power and prominence in the lives of his followers. Jesus sent them out to publicly proclaim and enact the good news of the kingdom of God. And likewise sends us. But our ambassadorship for the kingdom of God must always comport with the character of its King, who is just, merciful, and humble. We are to be salt and light, seeds and yeast.

Grappling with Peter’s message, I discern a call to practice humility as we seek to bear faithful witness and bring change to the world:

• We must first attend to the spiritual health of our own souls and the integrity of our own character (v. 11)
• We should always conduct ourselves honorably in the public arena, demonstrating honesty, respect, kindness, and patience (v. 12)
• We should value human institutions and their intended (good) purposes and respect the persons leading them (v. 13-14)
• As “servants of God,” we can never use our freedom as a pretext for evil; we are not at liberty to pursue what we believe are good ends by dishonorable or unholy means (v. 16)
• We are never free to dehumanize or demonize our opponents but must respect their image-of-God dignity and even love them, however reprehensible they may seem to us (v. 17)
• We should work responsibly and respectfully under our supervisors, remembering that we ultimately work for God, and beware the impulse to undermine or overthrow (v. 19)
• We must be prepared to endure unjust suffering, modeling ourselves after Jesus who suffered unjustly for us and entrusted himself to God who judges justly (v. 20-23)

The humility implicit in Peter’s counsel suggests a set of affirmations to counter the threefold danger of arrogance mentioned earlier:

We cannot by our collective human effort bring about the kingdom of God for God; rather, we pray for it to come, offering ourselves for God to use as he wills.

We cannot pursue God’s purposes in ways that contradict the way of Jesus, the way of love and grace and self-sacrifice, the way of humility.

We cannot be so sure of our moral judgement that we no longer examine ourselves before God acknowledging that “I could be wrong.” (“Don’t judge,” insisted Jesus,” lest you be judged”).

We exist on our one planet, reside in our many nations, participate in our societies, belong to our people groups, interweave with our family and friends, occupy dwellings in our neighborhoods, and inhabit our unique bodies, and each of these settings is fallen and flawed. So we’re always trying to make things better, for ourselves and for others, but we need to accept that our ability to change the world is limited. Often, we ache and lament and even suffer. But Peter reminds us that we will never be fully at home in this world (“aliens and exiles”). We hold citizenship in a greater realm and cling to a “living hope,” as Peter puts it. A new home awaits us in the fully redeemed world to come.

---

[1] To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 3-5.

[2] I also commend Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (IVP, 2008) and Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power (IVP, 2013).

Previous articles in this series:

Ash Wednesday and the Gift of Lent

Lenten Humility: Remembering our Creaturely Mortality

Lenten Humility: Admitting our Moral Culpability

Lenten Humility: Recognizing our Circumstantial Vulnerability

Lenten Humility: Acknowledging our Intellectual Fallibility