High Calling Magazine

The official publication of The Francis Asbury Society

Communicating to a World That Does Not Understand
BY DR. DENNIS KINLAW

Scripture Reference: Matthew 10:16-40

Matthew 10:16-40 is the first time that anyone was ever sent out by Jesus to preach the kingdom of God. And we can sense immediately that it was not going to be easy. It was going to be a matter of conflict. Jesus said, "You see, I send you out like sheep before wolves. You will be dragged before governors and kings. And brother will betray brother and father will betray his own child. So do not think that the work to which I have called you is a lark."

Paul found that was true of his ministry as well. In I Corinthians Paul pointed out that he had a word for the world, but the world did not know what to do with it. In fact, the disciples had a message that was the very wisdom of God, but when they preached the wisdom of God, the world that listened to them considered it pure foolishness. It did not make sense and it did not fit. That is what Paul had to say about the preaching of the cross and the message of the Gospel of Christ. Both Jesus and Paul indicate that it can actually get hostile when you preach God's word in God's world. In fact, it can become hostile enough that one like Jesus ends up on a cross and one like Paul ends up in chains in a Roman dungeon. But you will remember that they both said that does not mean that you and I should run. As far as Jesus is concerned and as far as Paul is concerned, there are no monasteries for the men and no nunneries for the women. Our business is engagement with a world that does not understand us. Our business is to communicate to a world that has few categories for our message.

When I was younger I read an article in the Reader's Digest that fascinated me. It was the story of some American scientists that were interested in doing research in the north Polar Regions. They went up into the Arctic Circle and committed themselves to stay for a while. In order to survive in that alien environment, they needed the help of the nationals who were there, and in the course of their living together, the scientists became very fond of some of the Eskimos. When they got ready to return to the States, they knew that they should do something to express their gratitude. There was one Eskimo to whom they had felt particularly obligated, so they decided to do something very unusual for him-they brought him to New York City. After showing him the City, they took him back to the Arctic Circle, never knowing that they had doomed him for the rest of his life to social ostracism. For the rest of his life he was known as the "crazy fool." The other Eskimos knew he was crazy because when he told them what he had seen in New York City, they said, "He's crazy." And they called him a fool because he acted as if he fully expected them to believe his stories, but they knew that he was talking about something that could not exist.

I've often thought about that in connection with the preaching of the Gospel in our present world. The worldly person who has never met Christ and does not know that He is alive, or who does not know the work of the Holy Spirit in a person's inner life, or does not know the basic Biblical categories, for him what we have to say is totally alien. So how do you communicate it to a world that does not understand? Back in the early days, those who did not understand were far away, so you could forget about them. Now the person who does not understand is not in the Arctic Circle; he lives next door. He is in the business office where you work, and he is in the living room in a TV set. It may be that in your children you will find the one who says, "This just doesn't make sense." How do you communicate this mystery of the Gospel, the mystery of redemption, the mystery of the truth of God, to a world that does not have the categories to understand it?


One of the things that has been a surprise to me across my life is the greatest points of tension between those who understand and those who do not. One would think that in a world where everyone is religious-even the atheist-that our religious differences would not be as much of a problem for other people. But the interesting thing is that the greatest problem is communicating to people in the area of religion. Do you remember the attack that George Bush received when he just simply answered a question about the greatest influence on him? He simply said, "Jesus." I was reading a work by a professor of the history of religions in which she discussed Jesus as he is presented in John 14. Her comment about him was that what is presented there is dangerous, destructive, and degrading; but worst of all, it is inhumanitarian-not appropriate for people, human beings like you and me.


The other place where the message does not fit and where one gets the greatest tension is in terms of human sexuality-our maleness and our femaleness. Some evidences of that come to us rather strikingly. The Wall Street Journal editorials and articles on American culture are the best I can find. The other day I was surprised to find an article on human sexuality and the problem that it is now. Sexual experimentation is not at the college level, nor even at the high school level, but at the level of ages 10, 11, 12, and 13. The social scientists are deeply concerned about what this is going to do to the future of us all. It is interesting that their point of view, and ours, is a little different.


One of the things you cannot escape in this country is Oscar night. I did not watch the show, but how could you miss the glitz? If you listen to the news, you have to hear about it before it comes and after it has happened. As I walked through the airport I noticed on the front cover of most of the magazines there was a representation of it. As I noticed all the "hype" this year, something came to my mind. To the world of which we are a part-the center of our culture-a female is nothing more than a shapely doll for designers to dress up. Something inside me said, "A woman is more than a body and she ought to be treated as more than a sex object because she is neither an animal, nor a thing, nor an object-she is, from a Christian point of view-a person. I wonder what a Christian would do in terms of dress designing. I think the emphasis would be the presentation of the person's face as the central thing about that person. The face is the one thing that you possess that is absolutely unique.


We had identical twin daughters, and now we have identical twin granddaughters. What fascinates me is that there are moments that you cannot tell them apart. You see one separated and you think it is the other one. But then when you get them together, you are aware that God never repeats Himself in a human face. Your face is the absolutely unique thing in existence. And it is the greatest thing about you that is an expression of who you are. It's with that face that you speak; and people have something to say. Animals may not, and objects may not, but people have something to say and they ought to be heard. Not only does the face have lips and a mouth with which to speak, a face has eyes. You never know what is going on in another person if you can't see their eyes because it is the eyes that show the deep profound hurt that cannot be concealed. It's the eyes that show the exquisite joy that no language can ever express. You know who a person is when you know his or her eyes. It is the face that smiles, and with a smile you know that you've been recognized and been acknowledged as another human being. It is with a smile that you are welcomed, and it is with a smile that you share what the other person shares. You see, it is the face, not the body, which reveals who you are.


Do you know what the word "person" originally meant? "Persona" in Latin, "prosopan" in Greek, meant "face." We got the word "person"-personhood, personality-from the answer to the question in the second, third, and fourth century of the Christian Church as to whom Jesus was. They said, "He is the face of God and when you have seen Him you have seen God." He is the window to the inner being of God. But our world places a premium on other things, and it does not understand the nobility and the greatness of a person. The scriptures tell us that when God created man, he created him in his own image, male and female, created he them. Pope John Paul commented on the fact that in the Genesis story it says that Adam was alone. And his solitude was simply the fact that he was neither God nor an animal. In his aloneness, God gave another to him. This being was like unto himself but one in whose difference he was to find his fulfillment, and in his difference from her, she was to find her fulfillment. Genesis speaks of this as the image of God. It is surprising that a world that does not know God does not know what to do with human sexuality. So we, as Christians, have an obligation to share the greatness and the beauty.


If you've got to communicate with a world that does not seem to have the categories to understand you, how do you do it? The greatest cross-cultural communication story in human history is the story of Jesus. He came from heaven to talk to earthlings who did not know what heaven was. He came from an eternal world to talk to creatures of time that had no comprehension of eternity. And he came to a finite world to communicate to them what infinity really is. How did he accomplish that? In the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John you begin to see how Jesus did it-the story of the woman at the well. She was a Samaritan. He was a Jew. She knew that as a Samaritan, as far as he was concerned she was beneath his dignity. She knew that she didn't have to pay one bit of attention to him because he was not going to pay one bit of attention to her. She didn't count on his world being different from her own. Imagine her shock when she heard a male voice saying, "Would you give me something to drink?" And in absolute astonishment she turned and said, "Sir, you want me to give you something to drink? You are a Jew. You drink water out of my jug and you have defiled yourself. You will have to go to a priest to become clean again. What do you mean asking me for water?" Jesus told the woman that if she knew who it was that was talking to her that He would give her living water so that she would never thirst again.


I used to teach grammar. I looked at that verse in Scripture and thought that what he was saying to her was, "Woman, you know there's water with a little 'w' and there's water with a capital 'W'. If you drink this water with a little 'w', you've got to come back tomorrow and get more. But if you ever drink the water with a capital 'W' that I've got to give you, it will satisfy something in you that you will never want a replacement for it."


In the sixth chapter of John there are the people who went to Jesus to question why he ran away after he fed them. They wanted to crown him king. And Jesus explained that they missed the point. What they didn't understand was that there is bread with a little 'b' and there is bread with a capital 'B'. If he gave them more of the bread that he gave them before, the next day they will need more. Jesus came to give them Bread that, if they ever tasted it, they would know that in that is their fulfillment and their life.


The eighth chapter points out that there is light with a little 'l' and light with a capital 'L'. Jesus says that he is the Light. In the tenth chapter we find that there are doors and then there is a Door. I tried to think how many doors I had been through already that day. Was every door I had walked through a witness to Christ? A door is the way that you get from where you are to where you need to be. And that is exactly who Jesus is. This One who came from heaven, from an eternal and infinite world, into our world of time and space with its finiteness and its temporality, obviously found it extremely compatible for his pedagogical needs. It is almost as if he can start anywhere with anything and move from this world to the eternal one. It is almost as if the world were made for him, which is interesting, because He made it. Is that the reason it is so analogous? The world is not the same for me now and that hymn is different for me now: "This is my Father's world. O rest me in the thought…" And everything in it, if I have the eyes to see, point me to Jesus.


In the Book of John, I found that there were two metaphors that Jesus used that were different from the others. He does not start with something in our world, in time and space, to speak about a reality in eternity. He begins with an eternal reality and brings it down into time and reverses the process. One of them is the family and the other is human sexuality. You cannot understand the fatherhood of God by looking at your father; you understand your father's fatherhood by looking at the fatherhood of God because God was the first Father. Adam and Eve did not have the first family. In the bosom of eternity one member of the Holy Trinity was the Father, and another member was the Son. Eternal means there was never a time when God was not the Father. There was a time when I was not a father, but there was never a time when God was not a Father. He is also the eternal Son, which means that there was never a time when there was not a Son to that Father.

The interesting thing is that God put us together the way that he is put together. How did he make people work and relate? The Father and the Son said, ""Let us make them like us." So everyone you have ever met has parents and everyone you have ever met is a child of someone else. Everyone that you have ever met is a parable of the very nature of God. The family is not just a sociological institution. The family is primarily a theological institute. That is rooted in the nature of the eternal Deity.


The second metaphor is our sexuality. God is neither male nor female, but both males and females are made in his image. It takes two for a complete image. Therefore, whatever is in me that is different from what is in my wife, and whatever is in my wife that is different from what is in me, are put together to project a reflection of the image of the God whom we worship. God wants everyone to be born into his family. The concept of our relationship to the first person of the Trinity is as a child. But the concept to the eternal Son is that of a spouse. Because before the foundation of the world, he was slain, his blood was shed to redeem for himself a bride, and our relationship to him is the pattern on which the maleness and femaleness of man and woman was designed. That is sacred and we should pay heavy attention to it. I repeated the Apostles Creed for fifty years before I realized the first thing it says about God. I had always thought He is the Sovereign Lord, God, omnipotent…but the early church said in its creed, "I believe in God the Father…" and the almightiness is a secondary category. Fatherhood is his nature. There is something very similar when it comes to human sexuality. The climax of the creation was when he made a female. Male is one who is not complete. There is something in his very nature and structure that says there needs to be another. The same can be said about the female because there is something in her very nature that says she was made for someone different from her and her fulfillment will be there. That is a parable.


I was fascinated to find out what Pope John Paul, a celibate priest, says about that. He says that the male-female relationship in a Christian marriage is an icon on the very inner nature of the living God, of the Triune Godhead, because it is a case of self-giving love where one gives oneself to another and the other gives in return. The difference between the Pope's point of view and the world's point of view is that the world just turns it around. The world believes that the relationship is where one receives and you hope that maybe the other receives as well. But the biblical point of view is that like God, it is first of all, a giving in respect of the other's personhood. The other person, you trust, will give himself or herself to you as well. The nature of that giving is to be a parable of our relationship to Christ. God made me a male so I would know how I was to relate to him, and God made my wife a female so she would know how she was to relate to Christ. That relationship is to be an exclusive relationship. He made one man for one woman, one woman for one man. And that is the great tragedy of 13-year olds experimenting with sexuality. It has been reduced to animal biology and the theology and the soul are gone, and the human spirit has been raped. There is supposed to be one Lord in my life. And there is one woman in my life, like there is one Lord. If a spouse dies, that is a different matter. But while the two live, it is one for one. And she is to retain herself for him, and he is to retain himself for her. It is not only supposed to be exclusive, it is supposed to be total.


I love the teaching on entire sanctification because all it is saying is that you are not supposed to keep a thumb on your own life. You are supposed to let God be Lord of it all. Marriage is the parable of the reality. I owe her all of me. She has reminded me of that, not only by what she has said, but much more by her attitude and that look in her eyes. The most distressing thing that could ever come to her is the thought that there is something reserved in me that she doesn't own. That is the same way I feel about her. Our marriage is to be unconditional, which means it is forever-exclusive, total, and until death do us part.


Christianity is tough, and Jesus was tough on people who violated their faith. The last text in the Bible about the separation of those on the inside and the outside says that on the outside of the kingdom are the adulterers because their lives are a lie to reality. Why would God shut someone out for something like that-for just simply a little biology? After all, a man can sit down and eat with another man's wife, under certain circumstances, why shouldn't he be able to sleep with her? God makes it clear that eating does not have the theology in it that human sexuality has in it. You can put your hand in a woman's hand and not have a problem, under the right circumstance. It is more a matter of the eternal purposes of God. And God says there is enough falsehood and deception, enough blindness in our world, enough darkness that we need a light to shine on the place where the answer to our fulfillment can be found. It is in an exclusive, total, unconditional relationship with Jesus Christ, and a lost world needs some witnesses so people can say, "I've seen it at the human level; I know what I need at the divine level."


If you enjoyed this article, please e-mail us your mailing information to receive a complementary copy of the complete HIGH CALLING magazine.
 

top

Return to Article Index