success?.m4a transcript

I was just thinking a little bit about the idea of success and victory.

Not in terms of personal success and victory, but in terms of a movement or society.

I think that sometimes, if we’re talking about Christian renewal, we have the wrong vision of what success looks like.

Because success, total and complete success and victory is a dead man on a tree.

We’re talking about God Himself, God Himself, who’s all-powerful, knows everything.

The way He achieved total and complete victory is by being tortured and killed in the most shameful, horrific, painful way, humanly possible.

Maybe you want to quibble with me about humanly possible, and maybe you want to come up with some other examples of what could be more terrible than the cross.

Well, I would say that first, take a closer look at what crucifixion actually was during Jesus’ time.

And second, if you have a more terrible way to die that you can imagine, let’s start using that as another way to talk about what Jesus endured.

Because we need to shock ourselves out of our anesthesia out of our complacency about the cross, because the cross is the center of our faith.

And the center of our faith is a man who was executed by the state, egged on by religion, and that was the great victory.

And so I think when it comes to ministry, for example, I mean, if you talk about business or, you know, trying to make a living in the world, you know, you’re trying to talk about, you know, how to somehow thread the needle of being a Christian and a father who has to make a living, that’s a good discussion.

It’s not as complex as one might think, but that’s another discussion.

But I think when you’re talking about pure ministry, pure kingdom work, our model is, by the world standards, a complete and utter failure of the worst type.

You couldn’t have failed any more than Jesus failed from a worldly perspective.

But, and I think that, you know, some people talk about, you know, is St. Paul discontinuous, or kind of a different trajectory, or is there a discontinuity between St. Paul and Jesus?

And I say, hell no.

And I’ll leave it to the academics to squabble.

But to me, St. Paul, what he does is he takes the crucifixion, where Jesus is already dead, and then he takes it further.

So Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection, however you conceive of those things, that is the key to reality, that is how we understand reality, is through the life of Christ.

And what St. Paul does, he comes along and picks up where Jesus left off, and interprets the crucifixion.

And I think St. Paul’s writing is kind of a double espresso of the Gospel.

I think that St. Paul distills the Gospel into its most potent, concentrated form.

And that’s why I love St. Paul, but it took me a long time to get there.

But anyway, I think that if we’re talking about building a ministry, or a movement, and we’re going to be successful, we’re going to have to say if we’re bringing lots of people in, if lots of people are responding and are thinking that we’re great, I think that should be a warning sign.

As I say, being crucified by the world doesn’t surprise me, doesn’t scare me, because I’ve found peace in Christ.

Not being crucified by the world, that scares me, because as Jesus says, a servant is not greater than his master.

And if they crucified Jesus, they’re going to crucify us too.

And so if we’re talking about building a movement, building a coalition, if anybody out there is listening, I think that we should expect to be crucified.

And I’m not saying go hire a publicist and get into meaningless squabbles on television.

I’m talking about in our own lives, our day-to-day lives.

We will be crucified.

And as Jesus says, every day has enough trouble of its own.

We don’t need to worry about the details.

And we don’t have to worry about what the quote-unquote impact will be.

We just need to follow our dead man on a tree and get in tune with the Holy Spirit and move forward as the Spirit directs.

And as Saint Charbel, an Eastern Catholic monk, taught me, I don’t know if it was directly or indirectly or both.

And other people have taught me the same thing too.

The world and the world’s success is empty, but ministry’s success is also empty.

The only thing that matters at the end of the day is, are we going to be told, well done, good and faithful servant?

Or are we going to be told, you buried your coin in a napkin and put it in the ground or somewhere in the middle?

And it’s very tempting to say, hey, I want to be a big shot.

I want people to like me.

I want to have a big name.

I want to have lots and lots of people join this movement.

And by this movement, I mean whatever movement, I mean the little movement I’m trying to articulate or whoever, whatever, I think that if people are telling us, hey, great job, you’re really doing a good job, I really get a lot out of what you’re saying, congratulations on your growth, can you come speak at my conference?

I think that should be horrifying.

That should be horrifying.

That is exactly what Jesus turned down.

Jesus was given a chance to have all the kingdoms of the world, if he would just bow down to the dollar bill or bow down to whatever, you know.

Obviously, it was in the scriptures, he turned down Satan, but Satan has a lot of different offerings, you know, and if we’re going to be successful by the world’s standards, then that is horrifying.

And if you think about St. James, he talks about teachers being judged more strictly, and that makes it double horrifying, and so, you know, the important thing is that we have interior peace and freedom, that is what matters.

And the only reason to do anything, whether it’s, you know, getting up out of bed in the morning or starting a ministry or changing a diaper, is because the Holy Spirit told us to do it.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit has to tell us every little thing that we do throughout the day, you know, it’s our intention, our intention to follow Christ, and sometimes, some people get more frequent, more specific directions, other people get nothing, you know, most of us get some of both, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.

But what matters is that we follow Christ, because that’s what matters, and it’s not even just like a, you know, you die and you go to heaven, you get judged, it’s like every moment, if you start trying to chase metrics, you’re just a business, and that’s a fool’s game.

It’s a fool’s game for business, and it’s a fool’s game for the church.

Businesses don’t know any better.

The church should know better.

And so, the only reason to do anything is because the Spirit tells us to do it, and we ought to be listening to the Spirit, praying and discerning and listening, and trying to do what the Spirit says to do.

You know, I think it was Thomas Merton who said, you know, even if we don’t do what God wants us to do, if we were trying, God appreciates that.

And as we talked about in the story of Jonah recently, Jonah was fleeing from his assignment, and God was able to use that, turn that into good.

And of course we talked about St. Paul, I think we talked about St. Paul says, you know, of course we don’t do bad things to make God do more good things with it.

But I think I’ve communicated the point, which is that the only reason to do anything is to follow the Spirit.

And we don’t want to have the Nirvana problem where Kurt Cobain was, as I understand it, I don’t know a whole lot, but my understanding is, setting aside his death and his mental illness, but just the idea of, you know, his being a grunge band and wanting to be authentic and trying to walk the line between selling out and being a big commercial hit versus staying true to the grunge roots, you know.

And for us, we follow a third way, which is the way of the cross.

We’re not trying to split the hairs between happy positive, doing good things versus nihilistic, you know, I don’t know, my metaphor wasn’t very good there.

The point is we discern the Spirit and we let the Spirit coordinate the details and we do the best we can and we try to have peace.

And the only place you’re going to have peace in my view is through being co-crucified with Christ.

And if our path of being co-crucified with Christ means that we become part of a group of other people who are trying to do the same thing, then praise God.

But if we are trying to manufacture a movement, then we’re just another business.

And again, I’ve been in business for many years.

I’ve been in sales and corporate life and businesses are foolish.

They’re completely foolish.

And the sad thing is that in my view, churches are equally foolish, if not more so, because at least businesses know they’re out to make a buck.

You know, they may have some kind of fancy PR team that talks about their philanthropy effort or whatever, but you know, businesses are out to make a buck.

And even if they have, you know, higher intentions, the financial system that we’re in, the global financial system we’re in, that a brilliant Anglican scholar at Yale who, I forgot her name, wrote a good book about it.

But the global financial thing, and I got to be careful because this is not my expertise, but basically the financialization of everything means that a business, if it’s going to survive, it’s got to play these games.

And that’s why you have like, you know, doctors and dentists and plumbers and electricians being financialized.

It’s ridiculous.

So, but if churches are doing the same thing, if churches are doing the same thing, good Lord, I mean, that’s just the stupidest thing I can imagine.

We’re supposed to be stupid, but we’re supposed to be stupid in a way that is faithful to Christ.

We’re supposed to be foolish by the world’s standards.

We’re supposed to be foolish.

But if we’re doing things the way the world is doing things, if we’re mimicking the world, then we’re not doing holy foolishness, we’re doing stupid, ignorant, evil foolishness.

If we’re using the same logic that the world uses, we’re just as bad as they are.

But on top of that, we’re sacramentalizing it.

We’re telling people that this is the way of Jesus.

And that’s just, I mean, that’s not the scandal of the cross.

That’s just a scandal.

And nobody’s talking about it.

Maybe they are, I don’t know.

I don’t get out much.

But St. James gives us a warning.

So, not only is following the world’s way ineffective in terms of the kingdom, it’s also actively deceiving Christ’s beloved sheep.

So don’t take it from me.

Take it from St. James.

Take it from Jesus, who says, better to have a millstone tied around your neck and being thrown into the depths of the sea than to deceive one of these little children.

In a way, we’re all little children, including actual little children.

And I would say that a majority of the clergy don’t have a freaking clue about what the gospel actually is.

Or if they do have a clue, they’re not preaching it.

Which one’s worse?

Total ignorance or active abdication of their kind of catechetical responsibilities.

So, to get back to sum up, our goal is to follow Christ, which looks foolish to the world, which looks like a failure according to the world’s standards.

And if we do anything else, we’re going to lose our spiritual peace.

We’re going to lose our discernment.

And we’re going to have condemnation heaped on us by St. James and Jesus himself.

And that will probably be felt as despair.

Because even if we’re doing the wrong things, God still loves us.

But if we’re doing the wrong things, and we should know better, we’re going to have to face judgment.

Whatever that looks like.