The Sorensens

Now for a (related) tangent. Should we be “thinking beyond salvation” when sharing God’s good news? How should we be “selling” Christianity? In my context, we (the church) seem to be selling salvation. Focusing on the classic “You have sinned and will face judgement when you die, but Jesus has died for you so if you believe in him God won’t be mad at you anymore and you will go to heaven when you die”. I have to be careful looking back on this line to make sure I am not making the position too farcical (I suspect I’ve failed). Now these statements are pretty much true, and sometimes they might even be the right thing to say. I recently saw a poster that embodies the idea of selling life salvation. It read something like “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ…and you shall be saved. Instant Life Insurance!” This disturbs me somehow; let me see if I can put this in more every day terms and highlight what concerns me.

Say you are a young man, pretty normal, a few years out of college. Your working a vanilla job, and some new girl just got hired a couple weeks ago and you were talking over lunch. During the conversation the topic of relationships come up and she starts to ask you if you are seeing anyone, etc., etc. You admit that you are single, and this person starts to speculate about why. “Maybe it is your temper”, or “yeah, I noticed you are late to things pretty often, sloppy, etc…” I suspect your hackles would rise, and you would write off what they said, and probably make an effort not to take lunch at the same time anymore. A person probably would not change themselves based upon such a conversation. Contrast this to a different scenario. Take the same young man, a few months later. Your life has suddenly got interesting because you have met the girl of your dreams. But, the more you get to know her, you begin to realize that she is just a step beyond you. Dang it, she is smarter, nicer, and better looking. She seems to spend more time thinking about other people than herself. You know she loves you better than you love her and that is confusing. The more you think about it, the more you want to be a better person just for her sake. You want to shed your bad habits, work on those character flaws and generally improve yourself.

So what is the difference? I think it is relationship. We don’t go to much effort to please strangers, we rarely care what random people think about us. “I will never see them again anyway”. But, it is vitally important to us that the people close to us think well of us. We want our family, our spouse, our closest friends to think well of us. It is a bitter twist to find out that someone you care about dislikes some part of you.

Surely this should play a part in how we tell people about Jesus. Telling people they need to shape up for God doesn’t carry much weight until people understand how much God loves them, and they start to love God themselves. When we “peddle” Jesus, surely the main point is not that when we die we go here or there. Is not the biggest news that the greatest lover the world has ever known loves me, even though he knows all the flaws in my past? And better yet, he loves me knowing how I am going to continue to mess up in the future? Isn’t salvation just the icing on the cake, not the substance?

For the past week or so I have been trying to “think beyond salvation”. Some verses from Matthew (25:31-46) keep popping up, stirring my thoughts. I will ruthlessly paraphrase. When Jesus returns everyone will be brought before him, and he will divide people to his left and his right. In the passage, the criteria for where you fall is the truth of this statement: “I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” The words are pretty strong, so strong that I am almost uncomfortable to put them up, but here is how it ends just the same “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

When confronted with such a bald statement connecting actions (caring for the hungry, the poor, the prisoners) to salvation one can imagine the church saying “but we are saved by grace, you know!” While without a doubt we are saved through the grace of God rather than through our own actions, my concern is with the implicit conclusion that since we are not saved by “works” that they are then unimportant. So when I say “thinking beyond salvation” I mean that we should avoid debating issues like this, as such debate ties our hands and feet. If I try to distill God’s commands down to the things I need to do to be “saved” then I am going to naturally try to make that list small, and it is going to escape the whole point. My mindset shouldn’t be “what is the minimum I can do to be saved”, but rather, “how can I please my Father?”. You can think of it in terms of marriage (or any relationship for that matter). What odds would you lay on a relationship where one party spends most of its time trying to clearly lay out the requirements for the relationship rather than loving and pleasing the other?

Now it is possible to go too far in this direction. It is important to understand relationships, to know what makes them tick. In christianity we should know what we believe. But it is my opinion that both myself and the church today falls a bit heavily on the side of legality. As christians we should be thinking further than minimum requirements. As a church, don’t you think most would agree with little difficulty that we should be feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty? If we know it would please our Father, we should jump right in on it together.

~haakon

Benjamin Franklin said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. ” Sometimes, though, a retry is exactly what you need. You may need to call something that is not reliable. Maybe it is a network connection that might be down temporarily. How often have you built retry logic around a bit of code that just might fail on occasion? This snippet takes care of that situation nicely.

class Fixnum
  def tries(message)
    current_try_num = 1
    begin
      yield current_try_num
    rescue => e
      if current_try_num >= self
        raise
      else
        puts "Try #{current_try_num} failed (#{message}): #{e}"
        current_try_num = current_try_num.next
        retry
      end
    end
  end
end

10.tries('doing work') do
  raise 'network connection failed' if rand() < 0.7
  puts 'success'
end

output:
>ruby tries.rb
Try 1 failed (doing work): network connection failed
Try 2 failed (doing work): network connection failed
success

Update! 2007-06-01

This is now available as a ruby gem! To install:

sudo gem install retry

http://retry.rubyforge.org