Nothing can be farther from the truth
than the facile belief that God only manifests himself in progress, in the
improvement of standards of living, in the spread of medicine and the reform of
abuses, in the diffusion of organized Christianity. The reaction from this type of theistic
dilution, which a few years ago had almost completely supplanted the faith of
Moses and Elijah and Jesus among modern Christians, both Protestant and Catholic,
is now sweeping multitudes from their religious moorings. Real spiritual progress can only be achieved
through catastrophe and suffering, reaching new levels after the profound
catharsis which accompanies major upheavals. Every such period of mental and physical agony, while the old is being
swept away and the new is still unborn, yields different social patterns and
deeper spiritual insights. (W.F.
Albright)

It
has become glaringly obvious in my own experience that I cannot seem to attach
myself to any one social cause or endeavor. As a pastor who wants to live with eyes wide open, I see things that
prod my compassion into fight mode. Yet even though I often take steps onto
various battlefields, I find myself once again poling my boat out into the
great river of suffering looking for that one beachhead upon which I am
supposed to sacrifice myself.

I sometimes have found myself eager—if not
desperate—to find this sacrificial ground. The fact that I am willing to die
for the cause of justice and freedom yet have not found the particular cross where
I am to be nailed has caused me no end of grief and self-doubt. I see the need
all around me in a multitude of forms and in agonizing depth, yet the
conviction to sink myself into only one of them is curiously absent. It has
caused me to question my courage and resolve and to wonder if my spiritual
journey has created the deep character-change I long for. I wonder if God is
taking note of all times I float past his broken and beaten body, indwelling the
victims of abuse, in my hunt for some other body of suffering. Some voice in my
head is yelling “JUST PICK ONE DAMMIT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE." 

As I pole along, musing continuously about
the insipid nature of my convictions, I have to work the issue through to find
peace. After much measurement of God’s movement in my life, I’ve concluded that
making a landing of my own choosing and jumping in with guns blazing would be a
mistake. It might make me feel more like a warrior in the world of social
activism and justify myself on some scale of religious commitment, yet it would
not be faith. At the risk of being deemed a quisling to the culture of
indifference by those who do seem to have arrived at their own God given theater
of war, I float on suspecting that Albright just might be onto to something
that I need to pay attention to.

To stay within the metaphor, through our
tortured human experience runs a river that is going somewhere and undermining
the status quo in that inexorable, patient way that only an omniscient lover
could be trusted with. If we cannot trust his heart in this then we truly are
pathetic rats in a cage of Jericho
road experiments ultimately destined to turn us into goats. At the risk of Bible-hustling
to justify my views it seems that Jesus, for all of his miracles and love for
people, ultimately bypassed many social issues and many suffering people to
establish his Kingdom amongst us. It was not that he didn’t care or wouldn’t
have been a grand social-worker, healing every bleeding woman clutching at his
robes, but he seemed to be more concerned about his Father’s business, which
was and still is to cure the illness that makes the fight for social justice
necessary.

The core of our issue has always been pride.
And the river that is his love and his purposes surely and steadily undermines
all that would supplant his Kingdom
with our own. This not only includes that which we would consider evil but also
much of what we consider good. He, after all, did not come to make us good (a
new law would have been able to establish that); he came to make us free. It is only in freedom that love can win and
goodness can survive. 

Here is where I think Albright taps into a
profound truth that true love (God himself), as released in full form through
the death and resurrection of Christ, takes all the territory necessary. He
takes back the ground lost to our own willfulness and pride and makes that
ground wonderfully unable to support pride-life. His love undermines the ground,
making it unable to sustain anything we build on it that is based on human
hierarchy and dominance. His love has created a fault-line underneath us that
topples back into the river anything that is created to rise up and displace his
Kingdom based on love and compassion. This has been true of every castle built
on human pride from communism to dominant economic imperialism to my own
demands for respect and honor. As with all unjust systems, our own dominant
evangelical “Christian” castle that supports economic , religious and political
agendas which crush the poor and weak in this world, will also crumble in on
itself. It is just a matter of time. Pastoring while we try to survive God’s
timing seems to require preparing a remnant of faithful boaters who, when the
breakdown occurs, will be able to see it as God’s blessing and not his curse. 

As I navigate this river as a pastor, I
support those are called ashore. Often I envy their single-minded devotion that
makes the bigger picture unnecessary or irrelevant and I send them off to fight
with my blessing. As I lamented above, I would often like to like to be first
off the landing craft into the machine guns. But if God is not calling me onto
that territory, to do so would come from a prideful heart claiming that I know
best. Some of us are called to pole along this river, ignoring the judgments
that often come back cursing us for not engaging when the need is so great,
looking for the ways his love is bringing the mountains low. There is enough
work to be done among those tossed back into the current when their own
particular idols or causes fail them.

Andy Macpherson
Pastor at Fresh Wind Christian Fellowship
Abbotsford, BC