Grace and Truth: A word from pastors

I am a Doctor Who fan. For those benighted few who don’t know, Doctor Who is a long-running British science fiction TV series produced by the BBC. The Doctor is a 900-year-old alien who travels through time and space with a human companion. They have adventures and meet scary things, and they run away. There is a lot of running away. And, inevitably, the human companion falls in love with the Doctor.

The Doctor is immortal—at least from a human perspective. This means his companions grow older while he does not. And sooner or later, the companions get left behind on earth. The Doctor cannot bear to watch them age and die.

Some companions welcome the return to a normal life. Others never recover from the loss. After traveling the stars, life on earth seems dull and colorless. For those companions, being left behind means a permanently broken heart. Most say, though, that despite the pain, they’d not change a thing. They’d not trade their time with the Doctor for anything. As one older and wiser companion said to her younger counterpart, “Some things are worth getting your heart broken for.” Things like the Doctor.

Her advice may be bad grammatically, but it’s great theologically. Some things are worth getting your heart broken for. Like the gospel.

What sets us apart from our culture, or ought to, is our refusal to ignore the injustice in our society. The dominant message these days is that those who suffer deserve it. The poor are not poor because of unjust economics. They are lazy. The uninsured should just get better jobs. The homeless are in that mess because of dissolute living. The undocumented should head back over the border. And wasn’t life better when everyone knew their place?

It used to be you had to listen to right-wing radio to get this kind of social analysis. Now it’s everywhere. The clever couch it in the language of deficits and tough choices and austerity. The less clever shout their bigotry from the rooftops. And the sad truth is, much of this analysis is endorsed by people claiming to follow Jesus.

I worry that Christians in the United States have become so domesticated that we can’t tell the difference between the gospel and the marketplace. I worry that we confuse our faith in Christ with our faith in democracy and capitalism. I worry that we are becoming more adept at justifying our silence through a false humility and our complicity through a self-serving distaste for partisan politics. I worry that we’ve chosen the broad path of complacency over the narrow road of the prophetic.

Doesn’t Jesus call us to lives of service? To lives given over to the needs of others? Aren’t we called to name injustice and to tell the truth about its consequences? Isn’t that the same prophetic stance that got Jesus killed?

If we answer yes, we will find ourselves at odds with our society. Following Jesus means no more business as usual. It means preaching good news to the poor. It means speaking truth to the powers of this world. It means risking a broken heart.

While the world grows colder and more hardhearted, the reign of God remains a place of sacrifice and love, of justice and peace and inexhaustible mercy. We are called to inhabit that reign and reveal it by living out the gospel of Jesus.

It won’t be easy. We’ve become so comfortable with our society’s celebration of individualism and greed that it’s going to hurt us to step away. We may see things that frighten us. We may want to run away. Right-thinking folks will ostracize us. Good Christian folks will condemn us. The powerful will ignore us. Politicians will seek to co-opt us. Our calling is not easy, but it is ours.

If we take that calling seriously, we will find ourselves outside the gates of the city, cut off from much that we’ve come to call the real world. That’s going to hurt. It may even break our hearts. But then, some things are worth getting our hearts broken for. Like following Jesus.

Ron Adams is pastor of Madison (Wis.) Mennonite Church.