A sermon by Noel Anderson for First Presbyterian Church of Upland, Jan 3, 2021
Text: Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8
THE NOBLE LIFE
Today we conclude our Learning to Fly series. From the start, we have looked at the paradoxes running through Scripture and concluded that these paradoxes’ unresolved tensions contain the truth better than either side of the equation can by itself. We need two wings to fly, and the unresolved tensions inherent in so many aspects of Christian spirituality are the very thing that helps us get off the ground and see things from a new and superior perspective.
I thought I’d share a couple more paradoxes that might have been developed in a more extended series.
Conversion: Our action or an act of God?
This is another unresolved tension with excellent scriptural support for both sides. We experience coming to faith as a significant decision, yet we affirm that faith is a gift from God, not a work of the will.
Salvation: Christ’s sacrifice for all or just for some?
Again, we find verses affirming that Christ’s suffering was sufficient to save all flesh, but also many verses limiting the scope to God’s elect.
Holiness: God requires it, and it is humanly impossible.
The Bible maintains God’s calling to holiness, even as it tells the story of humankind’s propensity for sin. We are called to be holy, but we can’t be holy. We live in that tension. One more:
Virtue: Is it a personal responsibility or a spiritual gift?
Spiritual discipline is our constant effort to live out of love—also to embody faith, hope, peace, patience, kindness, self-control, and other gifts—but gifts they are, and we only attain them when given them by the Holy Spirit. So, though we work on being virtuous, we can’t succeed in virtue. Unless God gives us such a gift, we will not have it.
I mention these because the series never ends. We should all be vigilant in identifying the paradoxical nature of most things in life—especially spiritual things. There is no realm of human thought or action which, once you get out of the shallow water into the deeper water, isn’t underlaid with paradoxes. We do well to seek them out and to identify them as we can. Then, we seek to live with an eye to balance, acknowledging the two wings required to get us off the ground.
Our take-home truth in this is acknowledging that the noble life—the most excellent Christian life—lives with some unresolved tensions and unanswered questions. There are some things we simply will not know. That can be a source of anxiety for some, and that anxiety can drive people to extremes.
It’s okay not to know everything, and it is a sign of maturity to be okay with unresolved tensions. We can and should tolerate paradoxes. Doing so is a healthier—and more accurate—perspective than that of the barnyard, the bubble, and the echo chamber of party ideologies.
We can observe this in America’s political scene with great accuracy.
EXTREMES AND IMMORALITY
If we think of American politics on a bell curve, we see that most people are neither far left or far right, but somewhere closer to moderate. This is the normal distribution and any issue or hot topic as well. Most people are somewhere around the middle ground, but the press is devoted to the extreme voices—the radicals, revolutionaries, and purists of the more extreme right and left.
The more news we watch, the more we are aware of our division. News used to speak from the moderate center; now, most stations—and the few remaining newspapers—can be easily plotted on the spectrum. Most of them have abandoned the kind of journalism that speaks from the center, though they all like to think of themselves as being fair, balanced, and reasonably objective.
But here’s the thing I’ve noticed with the extremes—both the extreme right and extreme left: the further you move toward an extreme, the more likely you are to turn a blind eye to your own side’s faults. The further you move toward an extreme, the more you are willing to tolerate immorality.
It’s the same on both sides. Left-wing news sources applauded and encouraged protests and even rioting through the past year. The anger, rage, and violence were met not with condemnation but sympathy and understanding. “This anger is justified because of injustice!” they would say.
And on the right, the same people who were outraged by Bill Clinton’s indiscretions—the same people crying out that “character matters!”—somehow were able to overlook Donald Trump’s infidelities (he actually brags about adultery in one of his books), his egotism, narcissism, and patent incapacity to repent of sins or even admit mistakes. Immorality was tolerated, overlooked, or just devalued in light of other priorities. This happens at both extremes and even on the way toward the extremes.
With the increase of tolerance of immorality comes the rise of hypocrisy as well. One side blames the other for the exact thing they do themselves.
Quiz: Which party spokespeople said: “They’re going to try to steal the election!” Both sides.
“This rioting is unacceptable!” Both sides.
“We’re the party of the working men and women!” Both.
“They (the other party) have fumbled this Covid crisis!” Again, both.
Why do the extremes come to tolerate immorality? Because they lose sight of their own. They have logs in their eyes as they try to pick specks out of the eyes of others. Because they love themselves and their cause, they despise those who disagree and demonize their opponents.
As much as they tolerate immorality in support of their movement, they also become major league hypocrites. Extremists—left or right—are birds of a feather. Did it strike you as almost funny that several Antifa anarchists managed to slip in with the pro-Trump protesters virtually unnoticed? The problem is that our bell graph is 2-dimensional—flat—but in reality, these extremes meet. You have to fold the ends back together. The extremists have a lot more in common than they would ever admit.
With the increase of extremes comes an increase in hypocrisy. Again, the extremists left and right tend to become mirror images of each other. And far too often, along with that hypocrisy comes a noxious self-righteousness. Intoxicated with their cause, they become—in their own minds—martyrs and saints for good, and their perceptions of reality become increasingly distorted, and moral blindness follows. We hear them justifying their extremism as well, usually in some form of the phrase: “The ends justify the means.”
“Come on,” they say, “you have to be a little extreme to move the needle even to the middle.”
“Sometimes the pendulum doesn’t swing without a bit of force.”
“If you want to gain five yards, you have to shoot for 10 or 20!”
All of these are just synonyms for “the ends justify the means.”
For Christians, let’s be clear on this: The ends never—NEVER—justify the means. The means themselves are the measure of Christian character. The means mean everything. For us, the means are so vital that we would rather sacrifice the ends than morally compromise the means.
Now, if you’re thinking, “What about Martin Luther, or Harriet Tubman, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer? These people did what was conventionally considered illegal for the greater good. Sometimes great people do what is immoral to achieve a more significant outcome, don’t they? To that, I’d say, “Yes! Of course, you’re correct—but you are not Martin Luther, Harriet Tubman, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer—they and their type make up less than zero-point-zero-one percent of the population. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. They were all game-changers—great game changers—and I say that we, too, can be game-changers, but not by rushing in to join in with extremists.
The Bible gives us a different tack.
1 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. (1 Corinthians 13: 1-3).
Noisy gongs, puffed up with knowledge, moving mountains, virtue signaling—that’s all earthly politics in three verses. But Paul lays in the course for correction here as well.
THE PARADOX OF LOVE
The gospel of Jesus Christ turns the world upside down. So what happens if we flip that bell curve over on its head? I’m not too sure, but it does kind of look like it has two wings and could fly (which I like because it fits this series so well), but let’s consider movement on this inverted curve. With the bell inverted, we would move down to something in common. Call it the common good. This opposite movement—away from extremes back toward the center—would serve our unity as a people and as a nation.
In practical terms, we move there by rejecting the extremes. We move by practicing love, and love demands more excellent vision and that higher perspective that can only come when we fly above the barnyard below. That’s politics and flesh.
And so we finish Learning to Fly with the paradox of love.
Romans 5: 8 puts it succinctly:
But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. …While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.
God loves us, God loves His enemies, and God loves our enemies, therefore we, too, should love our enemies. Here is the gospel in a sentence:
God loves us, therefore we should love our enemies.
As God loves us, we should love others, and that means loving our enemies. By the way, there is no safe space on that bell curve. Even if you would park yourself dead center moderate, remember that it is not a line, but a circle—those extremes bend back to meet each other—and extremists both right and left would say that you, Mr. or Mrs. Moderate Peacemaker, are a mediocre, do-nothing, enabler of the evil status quo, and your silence is a vile violence much worse than their impassioned vandalism. Extremists are hand-in-hand on that score.
Everyone has enemies to love, and this is a great gift to us, because it demands that we get off the ground and out of the barnyard and love beyond reason. But this also is the beginning of real flying. It is in loving our enemies that our love leaves the ordinary and approaches something like God’s agape love for us.
There is no justification for hatred. Ever. The ends never justify the means. The means themselves constitute our character. And Jesus tells us that the means are all about love. Love God, love neighbor, love your enemies, and love yourself.
This is the moment to trust God.
Today is the day to respond to God’s love.
We respond to God’s love by re-creating ourselves in the image and likeness of God’s love. The Holy Spirit is God’s gift to guide us in this.
Today—in fact, right now—is the perfect time to abandon the extremes of this world and to abandon the mediocrity of comfort and resolve to live by love instead. The Spirit calls to you that you would be saved. Turn from your former ways of thinking. Take on the new mantle of Christ and surrender yourself to Him entirely. Resolve to follow Him and live by His love. Spread your wings, heed the call—there are angels just overhead.