Monday, March 25, 2013

Safety is an Illusion

There is no safety in this world. I must confess I find it odd that so many Christians seem to advocate for safety over all other aims.

They argue against gun control. They want to arm teachers in schools. They are the first to call for greater defense spending to make America "safe," even though this nation can blow the world up several times over at this point. They push for economic liberties and economic opportunities, but I wonder if they have examined their motives in all of this. As a mere observer, it seems that the standing motivation in all this clamor for a safer world is almost wholly worldly. The purpose is simply to carve out a safe place in this uncertain world. Other places may be dangerous, but we must ensure that this place is protected.

They despise taxes and inefficiency because it costs them, and any cost to them is a threat to safety. Their children should be involved in various activities, provided they are safe. They seek out safe relationships, safe gated neighborhoods, safe investments, safe churches, and, well, safe products of all kinds. If they were honest, safety has become a god to them, or, more to the point, their God is a god who guarantees safety, or perhaps the advantages that leverage safety.

Perhaps the myth of safety is connected to the myth of control. We really do think we can manage our way, manipulate the circumstances of life so as to settle comfortably into a protected niche. Foolishness! Even if we could be successful at controlling the race of man, presumably behind citadels far from the unpredictability of our fellow man, we cannot control nature and we certainly cannot control God. The pretentious nature of man reveals itself in this scientific age. We think that we can make a utopian society, cure psychological damage and that we will find a way to preserve our biological lives forever against disease and misfortune. Can it be that God is so patient with our hubris as to allow us to carry on in such a state of arrogant delusion?

You and I cannot control the next breath we breathe. We would do well to remind ourselves of the questions God poses to Job at the end of that great book. "Where were you when I stretched out the heavens? Can you command the morning? Have you set the stars in their course?" We control nothing! We only respond, as flowers fortuitous enough to be planted near sources hospitable to them. All our glory is reflective glory and all our suffering is folded into God's higher plan.

The curious thing is that if anyone can expect safety in the world, surely the child of God cannot be counted among them. God nowhere promises that he will place us in a position to pass through the dangers of the world unscathed. He will plunge us deeply into those dangers and lead us through to resurrection on the other side of crucifixion, and He will give us abiding joy and peace along the way. We are not safe in His hands. Everything about us and our world is in peril!

I am tempted as a father to pray for the safety of my little girls. But then God reminds me that He wants them transformed into holy kingdom people in the midst of a damned and fallen world. He is decidedly uninterested in giving them some position of privilege in the world. He may call one of them to be a missionary to the Muslim world. He may call one to be a missionary to New York. Hostility towards Christianity abounds, at least when that Christianity is expressed. In fact, if safety is my primary goal for them, then I should discourage them from ever becoming Christians.

So many Christians walk through life dreading that the world will be taken from them. How unlike the early Christians our experience is. For them, the world was already lost, and they walked about as martyrs already within it. They lived their days expecting one misery after another, and in that misery the martyred God would minister his blessings. Our modern Christianity in America often feels like little more than a treasured heirloom, an accessory on display for our ongoing but distant admiration.

We welcome Christ as visitor into our homes so long as he has something to add to our experience. But if it ever becomes unsafe to entertain him, if the world should ever come to threaten those who welcome him, then we must ask him to leave. After all, even he would not want to compromise the safety of our little ones. Jesus' ethic surely begins and ends with safety for all his beloved followers.

In all of this the problem of nationalistic Christianity is apparent. Christians in America would sooner kill and die to protect the safety of America than proclaim the foolish safety of the cross and resurrection. Tangible earthly safety, not the cross, is the first goal. Once safety is assured, then we will have some space in the world to talk about the cross and how it makes us safe later on. Of course, this has led to the most perilous state of all--namely, the false peace we all feel. The peace we seek is the peace of earthly barricades against the tide of never ending evil. More than that, we deceive ourselves into thinking that it can be sustained. And yet over and over again we see that it is fragile. Why do we never learn? We erect this peace, failing to embrace the peace already purchased for us at the cross, and in the end cannot even secure our impoverished form of peace. We love the things that destroy us. Jesus said he gives us the "peace that surpasses all understanding," but that is probably the reason we reject it. We would rather have the peace we understand.