John Crist, Jesus Christ, and me, too

Tuesday morning I got an email I’d been waiting for: the pre-sale code to buy tickets for John Crist’s upcoming comedy tour in which he was finally spending a few days in the Pacific Northwest. Between my family and my in-laws, seven of us had plans to see him live. Within a few clicks I’d secured our tickets.

The next evening I got a completely unexpected email: “In an effort to focus on his health, John Crist has made the decision to postpone his 2020 tour dates.”

A quick Google search painted the rest of the picture for me.

I am heartbroken.

Heartbroken to hear of yet more women who were treated like playthings instead of people. Heartbroken to hear of yet another well-known Christian desecrating the name of Christ. Heartbroken to know that the world has more ammunition to hurl at the “hypocrites” that claim to follow Jesus, and heartbroken to know that so many Christians are simply feeding that ammunition into their hands by openly shaming a sinner while preaching grace.

If there’s one thing I know about the Church (and perhaps this could be broadened to Western culture on the whole) right now, it’s that there are acceptable sins and unacceptable sins. There are the sinners we shun and there are the sinners we seek. There are testimonies we don’t want to hear and salvation stories we’d rather silence because their content teeters toward what we consider “not okay.” Leave your sinful addictions out of it, please, until you’re completely cured - we don’t want to hear about how God is transforming you right now, it’s the finished product we care about!

But any of us who are being self-aware on this walk with Jesus know that there are no finished products this side of the Kingdom of Heaven. There are only ugly, clumsy, moment-by-moment transformations that happen with three steps forward and two steps back.

I am grieved over John Crist’s sin. But I am hopeful for the opportunity the Church has, right now, to paint a portrait of Jesus with her response. We have a choice at this crossroads: We can respond in bitter unforgiveness and total abandonment of this man and drive deep-seated shame even deeper into the watching men and women whose sins also fall under the category of “not okay,” or we can respond with the same love and grace we ourselves have received from Jesus through no merit of our own, and watch opportunities for true healing arise.

I know that we fear being seen as licentious, permissive, or dismissive of the evils that have been committed. I feel very deeply the responsibility to honor God’s holiness by taking sin seriously. But taking sin seriously does not have to mean shaming someone for what they’ve done. It is not shame that transforms people - it is forgiveness. Shame may, for a short time, inspire them to try harder to fight their sin, but Jesus didn’t come and die so that we could try harder; He came to utterly annihilate the power of sin and death on our behalf with the power of grace. There is now, therefore, NO CONDEMNATION for those who are in Christ Jesus.

One day, Jesus was dining in the home of a Pharisee named Simon - an upright and God-fearing man - when a disreputable woman came in off the streets of the city. She wasn’t invited - she wasn’t the kind of person this Pharisee would ever have wanted in his home, lest she defile his pure standing before God and render him ineligible to participate in Temple worship. But she had heard Jesus was there, and she wanted the opportunity to bless Him with a gift.

Simon could only look on in horror while this disgusting sinner defiled Jesus with her touch, her tears, her hair. The heavy scent of the perfume she used to anoint His feet couldn’t mask the odor of her sinfulness. This Man could hardly be a prophet, the Pharisee mused, or He would know this woman was a sinner.

Jesus answered Simon’s smug thought with a question: “A moneylender had two debtors: one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they were unable to repay, he graciously forgave them both. So which of them will love him more?”

Simon answered, “I suppose the one whom he forgave more.”

[Jesus] said to him, “You have judged correctly.” Turning toward the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave Me no water for My feet, but she has wet My feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss; but she, since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss My feet. You did not anoint My head with oil, but she anointed My feet with perfume. For this reason I say to you, her sins, which are many, have been forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, the same loves little.” Then he said to her, “Your sins have been forgiven.” Those who were reclining at the table with Him began to say to themselves, “Who is this man who even forgives sins?” And He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

Luke 7:43b-50

The woman in this story was unacceptable. Her many sins were on the list of “not okay” - they were the kind that made people not even want to associate with her, lest she taint them in the eyes of others or the standing of God. And yet it was not being shamed and avoided by the religious that transformed her; it was being loved and forgiven by Jesus. He responded to the holy aloofness of Simon the Pharisee with the rebuttal: “NO CONDEMNATION.”

No one took sin as seriously as Jesus: it cost Him everything. And yet no one consistently refused to shame sinners the way Jesus did, either.

When a shamed and sinful woman is offered the redemptive power of a gracious love, she transforms into a beautiful vessel of that gracious love toward others. And we have the opportunity to see this same transformation in the lives around us if only we will respond to brokenness like Jesus does.

If any of you are heartbroken by the news about John Crist, as I am, I beg you to consider a few things as you respond:

• Shame drives sin deeper into secret. When we publicly shame John Crist’s conduct, we do not solve the evil or prevent anyone else from struggling with the same sins - we simply communicate that if they ever dare to be honest, we will condemn and disown them. Their sins, instead of coming into the healing light of community and forgiveness, sink deeper into the dark where they can fester and grow. Do we want to see our brothers and sisters and selves transformed and made whole, or are we more comfortable sitting here in whitewashed tombs full of rot and death, as long as the outside looks nice?

• How you respond to this distant celebrity figure is training wheels for your response when the sinner is someone close to you. And one day, no matter how well-cushioned your Christian bubble, it WILL BE someone close to you. It’s very easy to drop a fallen celebrity like a hot potato and think nothing of it, but what about when it’s your child? Your sibling? Your spouse? Every person in your life is a sinner with ugly stuff in their past and present. Grace is something to start practicing NOW.

• Every testimony is a testimony-in-progress. Yours. Mine. John Crist’s. When we leap over one hurdle, another is only a few strides away. This race is life-long, and if we’re waiting for the finish line to celebrate God’s work, we’ll miss out on it completely! God is working NOW, in me, in you, and in John Crist. Testimonies don’t have to be wrapped up in bows with a “happily ever after” to be testimonies - and in fact, God’s magnificence usually shines brightest when we are at our smallest. If we are faithless, He remains faithful. That is a testimony.

• Remember what kind of characters make up the pages of your Bible. You need not think hard to find examples of many believers and instruments of God who had heinous sins on their record. We may be quick to throw John Crist under the bus and yet somehow manage to see men like Abraham (who sold his wife twice to save his own skin and raped his maid) and David (who abused his power in order to commit adultery with Bathsheba and then had her husband murdered to make himself look better) as heroes of the faith. The point is that no one is righteous. Were these crimes despicable? Yes. Were these men loved by God? Also yes. The same paradox is true for all of us, and this is the heart and soul of the Good News! We come with no goodness to recommend us and yet He loves us anyway, even to death.

None of this is to minimize or dismiss the pain that John Crist’s actions have inflicted. The human beings his sin has harmed matter deeply, and they too need to be received with love and care. Unfortunately, the harm done to these specific women is but one piece of what has been revealed to be a deep and far-reaching cultural wound. It touches all of us in some way, and so we cry out for God’s comfort and abundant grace.

Are you a woman who has been objectified, belittled, or used? Me, too.

Are you a person who has been disillusioned with religion because of the rampant hypocrisy you see? Me, too.

Are you a sinner who fears that not a soul would be left by your side if they “really knew”? Me, too.

Are you a Christian who has been let down by a person of faith you looked up to? Me, too.

Are you a broken human taking three steps forward and two steps back every day on a testimony-in-progress that sometimes seems like purposeless wilderness wanderings? Me, too.

Are you left with no one to hope in but Jesus, the One who already bought your victory and has declared NO CONDEMNATION over you? Me, too.

delighting in the names of Jesus

A few of you may remember the Advent devotional I created a couple of years ago called “Christ the Lord.” It included twenty-four short devotionals and their corresponding Bible readings regarding twenty-four different titles of the Messiah used in the Scriptures.

It was a joy to meditate on the significance of some of the many, many names used to describe my Jesus as I wrote that study. Then, this past February, I spent two lovely weeks meditating on Him in the very places He walked in the Holy Land. It’s so easy to get caught up in the distractions and overwhelm of everyday life, but these short times of simply delighting in Jesus have been oases of spiritual riches in a couple of rather difficult years.

Those oases inspired me to create something that, maybe, can recapture a taste of those riches and bring us back toward that rest. I’ve bound all twenty-four studies on all twenty-four names of Jesus into a beautiful softcover photo book filled with some of my favorite photographs of the Holy Land - just in time for another journey into the Advent season, but also perfect for any time you need to re-center yourself on who Jesus is and what He has done. It would make a lovely gift, too. In the back, there’s a directory of exactly where in Israel each photograph was taken so that you can take a miniature tour of the Land within these pages.

If you’d like to have one, you can purchase your copy here. I hope it blesses you.

Note: Any proceeds from this devotional will be attributed to the costs involved with keeping this blog up and running.

half the church

I typically read only a handful of books each year. I prefer to take in information through podcasts, because I find that I learn and retain best when I am listening to something while I work with my hands. But invariably, the podcasts I listen to will give recommended reading that deep-dives into what they’re discussing, and so I frequently end up with more books in my library queue than I will ever realistically read.

One of this year’s handful that caught my interest was Carolyn Custis James’s Half the Church: Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women. I finished it this week, and found its message to be all too relevant in light of the shaking the American church is currently experiencing and the resistance that shaking has met in some quarters.

In the first chapter, James shares how another book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, forced her to see beyond her own experience and realize “the world’s dark and largely forgotten underbelly where the misery and abuse of women and girls break the scales of human suffering.” Half the Sky became the jumping-off point from which she began to write Half the Church.

“Women comprise at least half the world, and usually more than half the church, but so often Christian teaching to women either fails to move beyond a discussion of roles or assumes a particular economic situation or stage of life. This all but shuts women out from contributing to God’s kingdom as they were designed to do. Furthermore, the plight of women in the Majority World demands a Christian response, a holistic embrace of all that God calls women and men to be in His world.”

- Half the Church (back cover)

One of the first things I discovered when I opened the book and began to read was how much I, too, needed to look beyond my own experiences and realize that questions like “Should women take part in church leadership?” or “Is the wife staying home while the husband works the most Biblical family structure?” are the least of concerns for most women, including most Christian women, across the globe. Half the Church delivers a gracious rebuke to these petty debates (and the infighting they tend to create) that the Western Church desperately needs right now. To speak from my own experience, we have become like the Pharisees - so concerned with the details, obsessing over the interpretations of incredibly difficult passages and upholding centuries of tradition rooted more in culture than in Bible, that we can no longer see the real needs in front of us. Men and women, pastors and laypeople, liberal denominations and conservative denominations entrench ever deeper into their separate roles and rules so that the Church never actually unites to get Kingdom work done.

Image Bearers and Ezer-Warriors

Half the Church calls us all out of our safe, narrow thinking and invites us to explore ideas that may make us uncomfortable. For example, what does it mean for the Church and the world that women are bearers of God’s image and called into all the responsibilities that entails? Genesis 1:26-27 declares that God created all mankind, male and female, in His image and with the calling to “rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth.” It was never in God’s design for male and female to engage in a power struggle over which gender should “Biblically” rule the other, nor was any such struggle predicted or hinted at until after the Fall of Man (Genesis 3:16). Both men and women were created according to the likeness of God and with the inherent calling to rule together, on the same team with one another and with God. This is the dynamic that God blessed and called “very good” (Genesis 1:28, 31).

James also dives deep into the Genesis term ezer-kenegdo, which our Bibles have traditionally translated “helpmeet” or “helper.” The use of these terms, she posits, “has led to the belief that God gave primary roles and responsibilities to men, and secondary, supporting roles to women.” This has been a comfortable belief for many people and in many churches for generations. It keeps the peace and prevents women from trying to overstep their role or getting in the way of men’s ministries. What is much less comfortable is what James uncovers about the uses of the term ezer in the rest of Scripture: nineteen out of its twenty-one uses (in fact, every use that does not refer directly to the woman) are used in the context of military aid or rescue. And in sixteen of those nineteen uses, the warrior-rescuer referred to is God Himself.

This revelation about the word ezer completely shifted my mental image of Genesis 2:18. “I will make him a helper suitable for him” always made me imagine Eve as rather childish, like a toddler “helping” unload the dishwasher - the kind of help that is a nice gesture, but probably could have been accomplished more efficiently without her. It is uncomfortable, in the best kind of way, to have this tame picture replaced by Eve as a warrior doing battle for God’s kingdom alongside Adam - a truly indispensable partner that he is “not good” without.

A Global Vision

One of the things I most appreciated about Carolyn Custis James’s approach to this topic was that she never tried to convince me to become a complementarian or an egalitarian; she never took a stand on whether women should or shouldn’t be pastors. She never spoke down to men or deepened the gender divide. What she did instead was return again and again the the Word of God, to His clear design for women from the beginning and to the example of Jesus as the ultimate equalizer of the genders. She emphasized the glorious vision of what God intended when He put men and women in alliance with one another, and how the dissolution of that alliance breaks God’s heart. Throughout the book, she sets the small-minded Pharisaical debating aside and calls us, instead, to expand our view of the world and reconsider the traditional (often subconscious) beliefs that keep our focus on ourselves instead of on the work God wants to do.

Half the Church is a necessary reminder that women have a vital part to play in God’s story, and it is a part that both precedes and outlasts temporary seasons of our lives like wifehood and motherhood. It is a part that expands well outside the prosperous Western world and reaches into dark, difficult places where the oppression of women far exceeds not being allowed on the elder board. It is a part so important that if we fail to play it, the image of God shatters and His testimony to the world is rendered ineffective and incomplete.

James closes by reminding us of Jesus’ last prayer before He went to the cross: “[I ask] that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent me. . . . that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me” (John 17:21, 23b).

Our effective witness of the Gospel hinges on this. So what will it be: Continue to busy ourselves with sorting people into their appropriate boxes and categories and roles so we don’t have to notice the bleeding Samaritan in the ditch, or set our eyes on Jesus and get to work, even if He leads us across the lines into spaces and relationships that discomfort us? Men, how will you encourage your sisters to take up arms as warriors in the battle and rule as co-regents of the earth? Women, even if that encouragement never comes, are you willing to obey God rather than men?