DO YOU LOVE ME?
A Haunting Question for a Busy Church
John 21:15-17 and Deuteronomy 5:12-15
I love my wife Linda. I do.
Now, to be honest, there are times that I do not enjoy being with her. But I do love her.
To be painfully honest, she’s not a very exciting person for me to talk. There are lots of people I’d rather talk to. Usually, I probably talk to her more out of duty than desire. Or, more likely, I talk to her when I need something or want something, or it serve some useful purpose in my life and work.
But I love my wife Linda. I do.
It’s just that I find her company less than enthralling. Sometimes I go days without talking to her, except maybe briefly at meals.
But I love my wife Linda. I do.
When I do talk to her, I find my mind wanders rather easily. Five or ten minutes, and I’m thinking about my job, or the kids, or mowing the lawn, sorting socks, or something else. I have a hard time focusing on her, you know? She seems so far away.
It’s not like she’s really part of my everyday life. Oh, once a week I gather together with other husbands and we sing songs about our wives and talk to them publicly, and even hear a homiletic discourse about how wonderful they are. In fact, I regularly stand up and lead in those discourses. I’ve been known to give some stirring ones that even got people crying. That’s pretty good, you know.
Why, I teach at an institution dedicated to such skills. I regularly teach people what a worthy wife she is, and quiz them regularly on certain events in her life that depict her love for me.
I just don’t really care to be with her very much.
"Simon, son of John, do you love me?"
Jesus. His message of love was rejected by a world in search of power and efficiency and control. He stood by a few friends along the Lake of Galilee and simply asked, "Do you love me."
The question was not, How many people take you seriously? How many lives have you touched? How much are you going to accomplish? But, are you really in love with Jesus?
Henri Nouwen, who gave up his teaching post at Harvard to work and live in a home for mentally retarded adults in Toronto, writes that it is not enough to us to be moral, ethical, religious, effective, efficient, well trained and well talented. That is not the heart of Christian leadership.
The central question is: are the leaders of the future truly men and women of God, people with an ardent desire to dwell in God’s presence, to listen to God’s voice, to look at God’s beauty, to touch God’s incarnate Word and to taste fully God’s infinite goodness?
But that is a question most of you will never be asked by a church, a board, an eldership or another minister. You will be asked about results, efficiency, work schedules and time budgeting. But you will never be asked about intimacy with God. Eugene Peterson says that ours is the easiest job to fake. You can be highly successful in American Christian work and be totally unconnected to God.
Dr. Os Guiness in The Gravediggers File writes:
Reliance on the computer is fast replacing reliance on the Holy Spirit. Personal development is a growing substitute for conversion. . . . Results have ousted fruit as the yardstick of success, and the matrix of action is no longer worship and fellowship. Instead, a self perpetuating series of conventions, consultations and committees is orbiting the Christian world.
In our idolatry of busyness, we even recast our Biblical heroes to make them busy, driven, efficient first century Americans.
We portray Jesus as hurrying from need to need, from town to town, in an exhausting three year frenzy of doing-something-now-ness. Gone is the unhurried sense of movement in the gospels. Of the three years of Christ’s public minister, we can account for less than one actual month of time. We simply miss the nights spent in prayer, which were probably followed by long afternoon naps in the warm sunshine. We miss his frequent escapes from the crowds, just to be with his friends, just to enjoy them, and to enjoy life, and to enjoy God.
We refashion the Apostle Paul into the world’s most effective, efficient and prodigious missionary. Yet the reality is somewhat less than that. Paul spent fully half of his Christian life doing nothing public or well known. When he did start traveling he started less than two dozen churches in nearly fourteen years of full time work. Most of those churches were small and struggling and a number of them did not make it. Of the truly large, dynamic, successful and effective congregations of the first or second centuries, (Antioch, Ephesus, Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem) not one of them was started by Paul. But he couldn’t be our hero unless he was the epitome of competent effectiveness -- unless he could produce a bottom line that outshines the competition.
We think in terms of results. People will ask you how many calls you made, how many concerts you’ve given, how many miles you’ve traveled, how many baptisms you’ve reported, how many churches you’ve started, how many hospital visits you’ve made -- but in twenty years of ministry in music groups in located churches, not one person has ever asked me how much pray.
And, to increase the idolatry, when we finally are persuaded to pray, we are often motivated because we are led to believe prayer will increase our productivity, enhance our effectiveness, increase our results. Prayer is sold as industrially worthwhile because, given a" connected plugged-into-power prayer life," you can be even more effective than you are now! Prayer simply as non-productive intimacy is unthinkable. Or, if thinkable, then it is unattractive.
When a neighbor jokes, "Boy, I wish I could do what you do for a living! Imagine, getting paid to travel around and sing or preach. What a life!" We answer him by pulling out our schedules, our time charts, our agendas and showing him that we are just as busy as he is, just as busy as any driven, self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-motivated, self-disciplined atheist.
Psalms was once the central book of Christian study. But Psalms is, so . . . so impractical. And so very unorganized. Intimacy always is, you know. You never fully regulate lovemaking, even with God.
Psalms has been replaced by Proverbs and self help psychology as the central study of Christians. Many people in our churches have read far more of Swindoll or Joyce Landorf than they have of Paul or John. They listen more to Larry Burkett than to the inefficient music of David.
William Willimon from Duke University writes that the number one cause of burnout among Christian works is that the work of the church is never done. There is always more to do and people who are disappointed that you didn’t do enough.
The entire pressure to succeed seduces us to adopt the same workaholic addiction as our materialistic neighbors, and then to put God’s endorsement on it! The church, filled with equally busy and materialistic people, not only allows this. They virtually demand it. The "Luther," the "Calvin," the "Alexander Campbell," who would spend endless hours in study; or the "Wesley" or the "Menno Simons" who would spend hours in prayer; with so much to be done and so little time to do it, would be fired in a month.
We’ve even renamed where the Minister works. Its no longer the Minister’s Study, its now the Minister’s Office. A study is where inefficient study, reflection and long hours of non-activity take place. An office is the hub of a vast network of activities, administered by a master of delegation and managerial effectiveness. First we change the name and then the name changes us.
"I’d rather wear out than rust out," we say.
And when our lives don’t seem to be "clicking" we naturally assume the answer is in a little more effort, more effective time management, more efficient use of relationships, more . . . more . . . more of everything except God Himself.
"Do you love me?" Jesus whispers.
"I love working for you," we answer.
Only one of the Ten Commandments is given with an accompanying reason. Actually, two reasons. The reasons change from the Exodus version of the Decalogue to the one in Deuteronomy. That is the command to set aside a Sabbath.
In Exodus 20:8-11 we are told the reason we should set aside a Sabbath is because God kept a Sabbath. If God sets aside one day to rest, so should we. In Deuteronomy we are (Deuteronomy 5:15) that the reason we should set aside a Sabbath is because the Jews in Egypt worked 400 years without a vacation! Never a day off. The consequence, they were no longer human beings. They were simply equipment. They were equipment for building pyramids. The moment we tend to think of people primarily in terms of what they DO instead of WHO THEY ARE, we begin wearing the garb of Pharaohs who knew not Joseph. To prevent this degrading of humanity, God planned for us to run headfirst into the Sabbath.
The word Sabbath means to stop, to cease, to call it to halt. But in our pragmatic, industrious, activity-addicted Christianity we hardly have time for Sabbath. Oh, we may take a "day off" every now and then and call it a Sabbath. A "day off" is what Eugene Peterson calls a "bastard Sabbath." We take a day off to feel better, to rest up for another week of work, to sleep in one morning a week, to improve our overall efficiency or just because we are so burned out we can’t go on another day. That’s not without benefit, but it’s not a Sabbath.
A Sabbath is a time, an uncluttered time, where we can distance ourself from our own busyness and see what God is doing in our lives. All the moral, Christian, church-working, soul-saving sweat pouring off our brows blinds us to hand of God moving across our lives. To see His work we sometimes need to pause in our work.
The Jews began their days by sleeping. Think of that. In Hebrew thinking there is first evening, then morning and that forms one day. They began at sunset. Day begins by going to bed! Day begins with them not working and with God working. By the time they get up in the morning, day is half over and the God has long been at work. A devout Jew get up to join into tasks that God started long before he arrived on the scene.
In Western thinking our days begin at dawn with a feeling that it’s all up to me. The day arrives new and my activity begins it. At night I go to bed with half a day still to go. Unfinished jobs, uncompleted tasks, unfulfilled expectations all waiting for my attention; which I finally am too tired to give.
"Work as though it all depends upon you and pray as though it all depended on God." This requires the dexterity to live life as an atheist and a Christian at the same time. And, for many of us, we keep trying to attain that elusive and, perhaps, spiritually suicidal goal.
We can work. We should work. I am not suggesting a life of slothful laziness. There are tasks given to us and lives to be touched. But we dare not ever work as though it all depended on us! That is vocational blasphemy.
We work because, at last partly, that is our identity. That is who we are. We are the WORK-FOR-GOD people. We are the PREACHING people, the SINGING people, the WRITING people. What we do and how well we do it IS who we are.
"Do you love me"
"Jesus, look at me. I’m exhausted doing your work for you. I love helping people for you. I love speaking about you. I love singing about you. Like I said, I love your work."
"Be still and know that I am God."
"But I have to redeem the time."
"Come, and lay down here in these green meadows, beside these still waters."
"What? Are you crazy. There are people dying. There is so much to do. There are all these expectations to fulfill. I can’t waste time in meadows and daisies. I have to be urgent in season and out of season."
In the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 7:21-23 Jesus talks about people who bring him the gifts of efficient and productive service. "Many will say to Me on that day, ’Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in your name cast out demons, and in your name perform many miracles." "Lord, look at our effective and efficient we were in your work!"
And Jesus will say, "Depart from me, I never knew you."
Perhaps He could just as easily said, "Depart from me, you never really took to time to get to know me."
Sabbath times are times of becoming acquainted. Sabbath times can be any day (except Sunday for those of us who labor in this peculiar work. Sunday can never be our Sabbath.).
Sabbath times are days where we separate ourselves from the people who are clinging to us, from the schedules we are clinging to for our identity. Letting go.
Sabbath times are also times of frivolous play. Play and prayer are not so far apart, you see. Both are assertions of being that are nonproductive. Both are time spent living rather than producing results. Both see relationships as a joy, and not as means for some end.
Play time. Prayer time. There is an etching by Rembrandt that shows Jesus teaching a group of adults on prayer, and in the corner is a child playing with a string and a top. Sabbath times. Times when you prove nothing to anyone about how relevant and needed you are. You just enjoy life from God, with God and in God.
What is it that we desire, ultimately? Do we desire to accomplish great things for God, or do we desire God? Do we desire to work for Christ, or do we hunger for Jesus Himself? And are we honest enough to look deep into our driving motivation and see where we use His work to stroke our fragile egos and serve the ends of building up our feeble identity? Do we love Him, or do we just love to use Him, use His work to fulfill our craving to be needed, to be relevant, to be significant to someone by what we do.
"Do you love me?"
"I love your work. I love your music. I love your people. I love to be needed. I love to be worn out, tired, admired, exhausted and efficient.
"Do you love me?"
"I love to sing, to preach, to worship in an exciting church, to . . ."
"Do you love me?"
"No. I’m not even sure I really know who are you."
"Then now, at last, we can begin, my child. Come over here and lay for a while among the daisies and I will teach you again how to love, and how to live."
