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A case for being Christian in the workplace. This is from an episode of “Boston Legal”, maybe a little cheesy using a television show, it does give a perspective into the legal and corporate world.
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“This isn’t the time to be anti-American”, quoting a lawyer on Boston Legal, yea, I know it’s a television show, but is it really hard to imagine that this is the mind set of most people in the business world, in the legal world, in government? It’s interesting that the opposing lawyer, rather dramatically pointed out what anyone who has an inkling of knowledge of American history, that we are, have been a very Christian nation, right from the beginning.
Jimmy Carter born again Christian, Ronald Reagan said his favorite book was the Bible, “We are guided by a power higher than ourselves,” – George W Bush. “I say a prayer before I pitch” – Curt Schilling.
The young lawyer points out: “With the Enrons, Worldcoms, stealing from their investors, what is wrong with today’s business leaders introduce a little spirituality into the workplace?” He goes on to say: “We are a Christian nation … when Martin Luther King said “Free at last”, it was “God almighty free at last”. This is who we are, we are a Christian nation…”
It really is bizarre, the antagonist lawyer was trying to make a case that introducing Christianity in the workplace was somehow oppressive and that his client was being oppressed. The man being sued, the owner of the company, made the case as to why he wanted to bring some Christian ethics into the workplace, that being the company that he owned. “I began to notice that many of our employees were engaged in borderline unethical conduct- nondisclosure, conflict of interest. I didn’t like it. Add to that there seemed to be some evidence of moral decay.” “Moral decay” the opposing attorney asks with an air of condescension, this is the tired old nonsense that “non-Christians” like to trot out, “who are you to decide ‘moral decay’?” Basically saying you’re just supposed to be stupid and ignore immorality in your own business. The businessman explains that “moral decay” was adultery going on in the office.
I’ve been in workplaces where that has happened, and it was known. You want to find a way to undermine office discipline and morale, that’s a good way of doing it. Aggrieved spouses become part of the workplace, people take sides, it’s ridiculous. This man was trying to find a pro-active way of stopping this, not to mention potential legal action against him. Let’s face it in this litigation happy society, having any part in something like that makes you vulnerable.
He goes on to say “there just seemed to be a bankruptcy of values in the workplace.” No really? The attorney says that it is anti-American to be Christian! What?! The American system of government is based on Christianity, the original states of the union were founded by Christians, because of their Christianity and to perpetuate their Christianity. People you assume to be educated, who either are liars, or presume to talk about what they don’t know, continue to try to make the case that the United States and by extension the workplace are supposed to be atheistic. In this scenario, a man is making a pro- active attempt to introduce ethical behavior, based on our Judeo Christian ethic, which should be applauded in a society that has become so corrupt in business, the legal system, government, really every institution. This was one man who was trying to turn back the tide, in at least his little sphere of influence. Imagine if we all took that initiative?
This program was produced before the 2008 economic meltdown which is still being untangled and was so directly associated with abuse and illegalities throughout our banking/finance system. Trying to exclude Christianity, from what was founded and perpetuated as a Judeo-Christian society is simply a naked attempt to reduce our society to a Darwinian world, where the only thing that matters is survival of the fittest. In today’s world to be the “fittest” is to control the most assets and power and there are people in the world who will not let things like ethics, our personal relationship with Jesus, those who are trying to live ethical, Christ-centered lives get in the way of their grasping for power. For those of us who are Christians, who are from a spiritual line of people who have sacrificed so much for 2,000 years, don’t we owe it to those who went before us and our children to stand up for Christ in every part of our life?
Worship, the continuing discussion.
Liturgical worship
U.S. suicide rates rise sharply article by Tara Parker-Pope New York Times May 2, 2013 as quoted in Leadership Journal Summer 2013
This article really hit home with me because what of suicide means to me as a Christian and especially in terms of the fact that the group most affected, is becoming most likely to commit suicide are men in their 50s, like me.
So what’s the difference? Clearly as a Christian, as a pastor, I see suicide as the final act of those who are hopeless, who see nothing else left to live for and so chose to stop.
Why men in their 50’s? Parker-Pope points out factors such as economic, availability of prescription painkillers. That might accelerate the process, but, in my opinion, that’s not the core issue. As a Christian my faith is in the promises of our Lord Jesus Christ, my hope is in Him only, not in the economy, my expectations, what other people think etc. She does go on to point out that “…it hinted that deeper issues like failed expectations and a loss of hope might be a root cause.” She quotes “Dr Julie Philips, a researcher from Rutgers: ‘The boomers had great expectations for what their life would look like, but … It hasn’t turned out that way.'” She goes on to say that future generations will be facing the same situation.
I can certainly speak as being part of that demographic and can relate. Twenty five years ago I finally finished my business degree working for Motorola and there was no doubt in my mind that I was finally on my way to at least being a CFO for, at least, a mid-cap company. If you had told me that I would be a Lutheran pastor in York, Pa., I would probably have suggested that they might cut out smoking, drinking whatever was messing with their mind.
Middle aged men today have become all about their job, achievements, their house, their car, well you get it. That’s it, their total investment is in how they amass money/ things. I hear it constantly from men “oh yeah, I don’t need church, blah, blah,” and they will spout some inane nonsense about how they know it all, don’t need none of that, again blah, blah. The more they talk, the more obvious they don’t know what they’re talking about. But hey I will concede that the church has gone out of it’s way to make itself less relevant to men. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s all about the job, making money etc.
In addition to not needing church, don’t need government, because they’re all crooks, doesn’t make a difference, again blah, blah. Men aren’t getting educations because it doesn’t make a difference, the only thing that makes a difference is how much money, the quality of their possessions. Men in their 50’s are statistically supposed to be at the peak of their earning, on their way to having a nice easy retirement etc, etc. The reality is that most are finding that is not going to be the case, that they haven’t achieved what they thought they were supposed to and everything that they’ve pinned their hope on is simply not going to happen. Their hope is gone, the supposed promise of the American Dream is simply not going to happen.
Let’s cut to the chase, yes of course each of us is responsible for running our life, but we need to realize that it’s not about what we ultimately do, it’s what God guides us to do. I had a certain set of expectations, but I was clearly led by God to be where I am now and there’s no doubt in my mind that there’s much more to come. It may be where I’m at, or something entirely new, but when I look back on my life I have no doubt as to who was guiding it. I’m not saying that I’m somehow “chosen” I’m not saying that I’m any kind of special case at all. I am saying that if more people, not just men, trusted in what God was doing and quit trying to live by their own expectations, they would find life to be a more of an adventure, a lot more fulfilling, more authentic and in the end? Maybe not the big bank account, big house etc. But knowing that they have lived according to God’s will, they’ve lived the life that God guided them in and in terms of living their true life, in the resurrection, they will be blessed and yes, the building treasure in heaven that Jesus makes many references to.
Space and inclination don’t permit me to get into a discussion of suicide, but it’s God who gives us life and it’s His decision what happens and when He decides to call us home, suicide is never the solution in any respect. Pride, anger, disappointment are not acceptable, but in a society where we have this idea that it’s all about us and we can do what we want, when we want, well God is simply not going to bless that.
It’s way past time for us all to follow the Holy Spirit’s leading and trust in the hope and promises of the Bible, God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are responsible for the conduct of our life, but that responsibility is realized when we trust in what God is doing in our life and not our own desires and expectations.
Prayer, its many forms
Prayer, its many forms
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I have a good fifty-cent word for you – “Hesychasm”. No it’s not a new Japanese steak house.
According to Thomas Von Hagel in his book Christians Through the Century pp 192, 223 – 224 it has “been an integral component of the Eastern Church. It was kindled in the New Testament, fanned in the Early Church and burned brightly throughout the history of Orthodoxy.”
“Hesychasm” is defined as silent and inner prayer. It often repeats a short phrase such as a psalm verse. Most commonly, it utilizes the Jesus Prayer: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner’ or some variation thereof. This prayer is repeated over and over until it is no longer spoken with the mouth, but ceaselessly recited in the heart. Hesychasts were not required to be hermits, but to recite the Jesus Prayer while they ate, conversed, worked and slept.”
“It became an ascetic model that was practiced by a holy few, but idealized among the vast majority. Hesychasm very much reveals the mystical nature of Eastern Church as her faithful unite with Jesus through continuous prayer…”
According to Professor Von Hagel the Biblical justification for this practice is “…the apostolic command, ‘prayer without ceasing’ (1 Thess 5:17). He read his Bible and noted that the apostle Paul said one should be ‘praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication’ (Eph 6:18)”
A ‘Staret’ [an elder in the Russian Orthodox Church] would direct a pilgrim on his spiritual quest. In the first week, the pilgrim studied and practiced prayer. His initial results were good, but by the end of the week, he failed miserable by allowing mundane thoughts and lethargy to thwart his prayer. Rather than reprimanding the pilgrim, the starets explained that this was a good thing: Satan did not approve of such prayer and was attacking him. The pilgrim was then given a prayer rope and instructed to pray the Jesus Prayer 3,000 times a day… then 6,000 times each day … finally 12,000 times per day. Initially his mouth tired and his hands ached from manipulating the prayer rope. One morning, his mouth prayed the prayer of itself…he prayed when awake and in his sleep.”
Don’t mistake this with some concept of eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism) idea of a “mantra”. Which means repeating over and over an otherwise meaningless phrase in order to “clear the mind”. The idea in Christian prayer is to always bring us into the presence of the Father, to always remember who our Savior Jesus Christ is and what He has done for us, that He is Lord of our Life and He who paid the price for our sin, that we are sinners in need of a Savior.
Granted this is would be a little difficult to achieve in the normal day to day hubbub of western life, but it is a goal to strive for and certainly fulfills biblical guidance.
Is it being happy or being in Jesus?
Is it being happy or being in Jesus?
Bet you wouldn’t have seen this coming, according to a study by Ed Diener of the University of Illinois and Shigehiro Ioshi of the University of Virginia “discovered that people from every corner of the globe rated happiness as being more important than other highly desirable personal outcomes, such as having meaning in life, becoming rich and getting into heaven.” (quoted from Psychology Today July/August 2013 pp 52 – 59)
We really have become such a glib society. Our life is wrapped up in fifteen second sound bytes, slogans, mottoes, quick fixes, pop a pill. We are superficial, frankly straight out phoney. We say things like love, happiness, we really don’t know what either means, we assign our own personal meaning that is glib, superficial, phoney and then we wonder why we can’t find love, we just aren’t happy. Did you ever think that your own personal definition of these terms is uninformed, unfounded, based on nothing but your own petty, superficial notions and not on reality? And because you think that of course you are the captain of your own ship, the master of your own fate, then you should determine what “happiness” is, what “love” is and well that’s reality.
Of course we are all adults, we are going to make up our own minds, but when are we going to start doing it in a smart, informed, thoughtful, way that truly thinks about the bigger things in life and of course the biggest? I am a Christian pastor, I have a great testimony about how God led me and guided me. This wasn’t based on what I “liked”, didn’t “like”, if I felt “good”, “bad”. It was clear what was going on. Not some subjective feeling, but I can objectively lead anyone who is interested through the sequence. And yes, that would be for anyone, but again, we are Americans, the master of our own destiny, captains of our own ship. I served in the Coast Guard reserve for 29 years, I have over 1700 hours of underway time on 41 foot, 44 foot and 47 foot boats as well as time on a cutter and a USNS ship. I think I know a little about being a captain (albeit very little), but a captain of a ship for a 41 footer to a 900 plus foot USNS vessel knows what he’s doing. He/she sure doesn’t make it up, doesn’t go by her/his feelings, help me out here, why in the wide, wide world of sports would you trust your soul, your eternal destiny to your feelings, what makes you “happy”, what’s good/bad?
I’m not going to end here, but in case I begin to lose you, I want you to promise me that you will take one thing away from this, PRAY, just PRAY. Can you do that? Can you just sit and stop and forget all your subjective “happiness” and superficial bupkus and really lay it on the line with God? Can you, can you really? Can you for once just stop and forget what everyone else thinks, what nonsense someone told you in high school or worse some pretentious bore in college (ya, ya I know, look who’s talking about being pretentious). But we listen to way too many people who are just as uninformed and superficial as we are, but we buy their prattle. Hey I could go on and on about baseball, but my actual on field experience you could fit into a thimble. Sort of that way when we talk about being a Christian. “Well I think…”, “Well I feel…” Sound familiar and of course the usual glib cliches that have no foundation in reality in any way shape or manner, but we still buy it because it sounds “nice” (yea another one of those words. “Well all roads lead to heaven” – ah no, they don’t. Show me where you are getting this. God just wants us to be happy (I say with my cheesey Joel Osteen accent). Where oh where does anyone see this, where is this written? Oh yeah it’s not. God’s love is not a pampering love, it is a perfecting love. God makes us perfect in Jesus. Am I Jim Driskell “perfect”, not to the human eye, but I am to God’s eye, because He sees me in Jesus, I am in Jesus’ perfection, not mine. Why? Because Jim Driskell will never, ever, not in a million, billion, septzillion years be perfect, and neither will you be, mi amigo. God is perfect, holy, all knowing and when we decided to do it our way and shove God out, and He allowed us to go, and then we wonder why everything is a mess, why we aren’t “happy”, why we don’t “like” things, why nobody “loves” us. (You ever notice that most people don’t even know how they want to be “loved”, they just want to be????) “We’re all God’s children.” No we’re not, we are certainly His creation, but only those who are in Christ are adopted children, new creations, the new man in the spirit, saved in Christ, then you are a child of God. Then my all time favorite “God helps those who help themselves”, this is usually said in a very patronizing way by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, but they think they do. When challenged to find that quote in the Bible they can’t, why? It’s not there, it’s a quote from Benjamin Franklin, not known by any stretch of the imagination for his theological acumen.
Ok, God is also merciful and loving, He is, but He’s also serious, righteous and just. Maybe He has in His omnipotence (all powerful) He has some way to save people outside of Jesus. I know one thing for sure in Jesus I am saved and God is the One who does it all and I can follow His much smarter, much more creative way, then any human being, or do it myself. I’m going with the sure bet, in Christ I’m saved and as an adopted child of God, He will make my life more of an adventure then I could ever imagine, He already has.
Back to my article: “Recent scholarship documenting the unique habits of those who are happiest in life … activities that lead us to feel uncertainty, discomfort and even a dash of guilt are associated with some of the most memorable and enjoyable experiences of people’s lives. Happy people, it seems, engage in a wide range of counter-intuitive habits that seem, well, downright unhappy.” (p 52).
Uh-huh. As has been stated, I am not perfect. In Jesus I am perfect. In myself? Ya, right. So there are times where there’s probably more then a “dash of guilt”. OK, I’m not going to belabor it, but suffice to say that becoming a Christian instantly turns you into some kind of perfect, goody two-shoes, is total nonsense. I’m sure there are those in the congregation that I pastor who wish I was a little more that way, but none of us are and that’s probably one way the church has been shooting itself in the foot for years, but trying to get people to believe that the pastor is perfect, beyond any possibility of only the tiniest/venal sins.
But I wanted to camp on the “uncertainty, discomfort” aspect. As much as I’d like to tell you that being a Christian means just being in lock-step certainty, perfectly aligned with every good thing, and having no doubt whatsoever in life, hey I’m a Christian that means everything just proceeds hunkey-dorey. Yeah, forgive me a moment while I suppress a giggle. Yea a quick read of the Bible will show that there were plenty of people described who were not always the most morally scrupulous. King David was called a “man after God’s own heart”, but boy did he ever step over the line a few times. The Christian life is all about uncertainty, discomfort, stretching boundaries, pushing the envelope, being completely counter-intuitive. Trusting in the unseen is completely counter-intuitive, totally outside any person’s comfort zone and so hence, what really does push us, challenge us, fulfill us, make us happy.
Look at St Paul, St Peter, St John, any of the disciples, Christians all through history, Christians in Asian countries and Muslim countries today. There is anything but what we would think of as “happiness”, but there is this joy, this certainty of being in Jesus, being His and that their life is an adventure by any standard. We are pushed to live our life out for Jesus, and to do it in ways that we would often never imagine.
“Truly happy people seem to have an intuitive grasp of the fact that sustained happiness is not just about doing things that you like. It also requires growth and adventuring beyond the boundaries of your comfort zone. Happy people, are, simply put, curious.” (p 53)
I’ve been the pastor of an inner-city church for three years now. OK, that doesn’t make me an expert, but I do see and what I see in the midst of a lot of poverty is this lack of curiosity, of adventure, of going beyond the comfort zone. They’ve been part of this little group, clique, gang, that has told them what to do, how to conform. Right, wrong, indifferent, they don’t care, that’s where they are and where they’ll stay. It’s not limited to low-income, but it’s much more obvious. But hey we’ve seen people at all strata of society, we crave our little thrills; booze, drugs, sex, eating, the big event, and we think “wow this is living” and then when the thrill wears off, or the hangover materializes, we sit there and whine and cry how much life stinks, why does God do this to me? OK, other then the obvious “you did it to yourself, God doesn’t want you snorting cocaine at at Ludicrous concert (and yea I probably did spell it wrong). Yea, it’s fun while you’re there and then not so much the next day; wasted money, brain cells and time, but we think that’s what makes us happy. Or people especially the ones I see, think that happiness is not having to work, watching television all day, trying to wheddle money out of people and booze and sex, and the funny part is that they think they’re being clever about it, because that’s what everyone does and it may actually seem that way. I’m not trying to pick on people, but it is what it is, it’s not everyone to be sure, but it’s certainly at least a representative number. Regardless, the human condition is to stay comfortable, to resist being pushed, not to stretch our boundaries and then wonder why we’re unhappy.
The Christian life has always been a challenge, it’s not me and my gang, it’s me and my God. I certainly have brothers and sisters in Christ and we are all there for each other, but in the end I will be standing before the judgment seat all by myself, but clothed in the righteousness of Jesus. None of the gang will be there, no self-righteous know it all who’s smarter then everyone, just me and so long as I’m in Christ I am saved in Him.
In the meantime, as His disciple and a disciple is a student and a teacher, I am constantly being pushed, being challenged, being put in front of those who the Holy Spirit wants me to present Christ to. To live a life that exemplifies faith in Him, check out my FaceBook or LinkedIn pages, they don’t even tell half the story, my life hasn’t been boring and I know who has guided me where I’ve been. I’m not smart enough to do what I’ve done, He is more than smart enough and He’s put me on a life that is truly an adventure, not sitting around like most people in the world whining and complaining “why does life stink? why does everyone pick on me?” You can tell people who are in the world, they are by far the biggest whiners. There may be plenty of times when I’m not happy about my current situation. But unlike those in the world who will just whine about it, I know that some how, some way, the Holy Spirit is going to be picking me up by the scruff of the neck and pointing me in a new direction.
Despite my sarcasm and maybe snarkiness, I really do feel for those who stubbornly resist the Holy Spirit and stay in the dead world. The tough guys who say “being a Christian is for the weak, I can handle it, I don’t need anyone.” And then you ask them what makes you so tough? A beer can, a joint? What can you really handle? And most of the time I see a little realization sort of cross their face, but too often they manage to fight it off and slip back into their weakness and corruption, because dead people have no strength and they just continue to rot, and back to their whining, “why does everything stink? Why is everyone against me?” It really is sad and I see it over and over again.
The adventure is in Christ, moving out of your comfort zone into the reality of Christ, picking up the armour of God and doing battle against the evil, malicious forces of the world is where it’s at. As I said in the beginning, pray, just pray, find somewhere and get comfortable and start raising all these things up to God, get out a notebook and start writing these things done, be led by God who truly does love you, who truly does want what is best for you and then get in on the adventure and away from the death, destruction and ugliness of the world.
Pastor Jim Driskell 