Museum Pieces
What are a couple of Southern Baptists doing among the Liberals?
Voltaire is credited with,
One hundred years from my day, there will not be a Bible on earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity-seeker.
Google the quote and it appears in different forms but with the same sense. I first encountered the reference to the French philosopher’s speculation quite a few years ago. It may have been in a sermon on the Bible and its enduring truthfulness. “The Bible outlasted Voltaire’s prediction, silly human being,” being the implication. But silliness is not limited to French materialist philosophers.
Last weekend I attended and spoke at a small conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. During the Friday evening dinner, the group at our table made introductions. One couple began asking our table mates how we became aware of the group putting on the conference, Mockingbird Ministries. One by one those around the table described what about Mockingbird interested them. I was the only Baptist, Southern Baptist, at the table. In fact, I thought at that moment I was maybe the only Southern Baptist at the event. I have been at other small conferences where that has been the case.
In a look most earnest, the wife of the couple that had initiated the conversation asked,
“How does the message of grace, emphasized by Mockingbird, fit with your Southern Baptist theology?”
Had the reputation of the SBC fallen such that a denomination whose children learn Ephesians 2:8-9 as memory verses would be perceived as anti-grace?
How silly of us to make much ado about those skeptical of the Bible’s future when our practices cast a shadow on the very message we proclaim.
Stunned at the thought, I remarked that I grew up hearing quite a bit about grace. I added that we Southern Baptists seem adept at moving quickly to a new law, using our freedom to enslave ourselves again. (Galatians 5) Just then Tim, a young Episcopal pastor, stopped to say, “Hello.” He reported that he was sitting at the table with another Southern Baptist pastor. Stunned again.
I would later meet Phillip.
Deciding how to pitch my breakout session the next morning, I thought about Phillip and me.
“Since I am only one of two Southern Baptist pastors at this event, maybe you would like to come to listen to a museum piece talk about pastoring, Ted Lasso and grace,” I announced to not a few laughs.
When did emphasizing grace make someone a Liberal?
Yesterday a couple of trolls on Twitter took after my friend Marty. Rather than interact with a blog post he wrote, they decided to discredit Marty as a person. We learn this habit on the playground. It is easier to call names than actually engage the person with whom you may disagree with a view to understanding.
Sigh.
These interactions reveal that Twitter may be an adult playground for the immature. Examples of this habit abound. So much for human progress. The practice is ad hominem, a logical fallacy.
Those attacking Marty? Christians, or so they claim.
These trolls labeled Marty a progressive-leftist-Mainline Christian. Anyone who knows Marty is aware that such an opinion requires mind-altering drugs or a fundamentalist-addled mind. And even if Marty were part of a Mainline congregation, does that really equal Liberal?
Taken together, these two events, the question I received in Tulsa and Marty’s trolls, led me to reformulate Voltaire’s speculation regarding Southern Baptists.
“One hundred years from my day, there will not be a Southern Baptist on earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity-seeker.”
Museum pieces.
If we cannot get on with radical grace, rooted in God-revealed-in-Jesus, then let’s fund the exhibit ourselves. Let’s not wait 100 years. Put another way, I will take a seat with anyone declaring the one-way love of God who graciously gives Godself to us in self-giving, other-directed love, whether or not a Twitter troll thinks them, or me, Liberal.
Frankly, I would rather my tribe not become a museum piece. When I think back upon my childhood experiences as a Southern Baptist, I recall examples of sacrifice for others, investment in children and youth with love, care for the grieving, announcements of the grace of God in Jesus, and an interest to share that Good News far and wide.
Can we talk?