Walk in His Ways

The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 2:1-5.

I was watching a series of programs in which the host interviewed people who had come out of various cults, religious and non-religious. And the host asked them about the red flags that indicate a group is a cult. Some were obvious: a charismatic leader who can never be criticized, an “Us vs. Them” attitude, etc. But one woman said something that really struck me. The red flag that she had personally seen in the religious cult in which she was raised was “when you see something wrong and nobody does anything about it.”

That's one of the things that has always puzzled me: how people who call themselves Christian can tolerate objectively evil things going on in their group and not see it as such. David Koresh slept with many women in his cult, regardless of whether they were married to others or not, and fathered multiple children. He took over the cult from a rival in a shootout. That's right in line with Jesus, who told his followers to put up their swords rather than keep him from being arrested! Jim Jones started out as a very progressive pastor. He began to sleep with both male and female followers and eventually denounced Christianity and declared himself to be God. Because of what Jesus said about false messiahs, you'd think that any real followers of Christ would leave that church. But when some tried to defect and leave with a congressman who came to the Jonestown compound, Jones had them and the congressman gunned down. So much for loving one's enemies!

You cannot follow Jesus and adopt an ethic of “the end justifies the means.” What you do to achieve a goal is as important as the goal itself. In sports we call scoring by breaking the rules cheating. Jesus denounced deceit, anger, sexual immorality, murder, greed, and arrogance, which disqualifies all cult leaders. (Mark 7:21-22, Matthew 5-7) On the contrary, these are the characteristics of those who killed Jesus. If you follow someone regardless of their immorality, your allegiance is not to Jesus, who embodied love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

Our reading from Isaiah says, “Many peoples shall come and say, 'Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.'” The attraction for these Gentile nations is God's ways. And the ultimate result is “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” It is the peaceful ways of God that they wish to learn and follow.

People do not need to go anywhere to learn how to make war, nor how to destroy peace. Injustice is a breeze to master, as is inequity. No one needs to study up on being impatient. Dividing people is easy. Losing control is a snap. Being harsh is not hard. But all of us could use a master class in being kind and gentle and in exercising self-control and especially in loving our enemies.

I don't know about you but what attracted me to Jesus was precisely the qualities that he had which most people lacked. Jesus helped the weak and stood up to bullies. Jesus spoke of love and reconciliation. He said that outward religious behavior was not that accurate a sign of whether people were in touch with God but how they lived their lives was. (Matthew 7:15-23)

God's values are often the opposite of what humans actually value. Jesus said the meek and humble were blessed, whereas the world prefers the self-promoting. Jesus pronounced a blessing on the merciful, whereas the world really roots for the ruthless. Jesus encouraged us to be peacemakers, whereas people only like the peace that comes from their side utterly defeating the other side. What is amazing is that people never seem to realize that these methods are not sustainable. Ruthlessness and combativeness and egotism contain the seeds of their own destruction. The satirical film The Death of Stalin shows what a dog-eat-dog society is like. It also shows the chaos that ensues when a cult-like leader dies.

Yet oddly enough Christianity didn't really start growing until the death of Jesus. His resurrection had a lot to do with that, of course. But also his teachings. Instead of the capricious pagan gods, who really didn't care about humans and who behaved no better than men and in some ways worse, fighting each other and molesting any female they fancied, Jesus is a God who loves us. He did not side with the rich over the poor, or the powerful over the powerless. Jesus healed women and slaves and children. He touched lepers and ate with sinners. He spoke the truth to those in power and, as one would expect, he paid the price for that. But he overcame death and shared his eternal life with all who were willing to trust and follow him. Jesus is God for us.

After Jesus ascended, the typical problems a cult encounters did not emerge. Peter, the most obvious successor to Jesus, did not take a title like head of the church but worked as a missionary. James, Jesus' brother, led the church in Jerusalem but he did not have the kind of universal power that the relative of a cult leader often takes on. When a dispute arises over whether Gentiles could become Christians without first being circumcised like Jews, the church calls a council. The resulting letter from both apostles and elders does not come down on the side of strict discipline, as one sees in a cult, but a decision not to make becoming a Christian any more of a burden than necessary. (Acts 15:23-30) Cults usually demand control over the body, such as forced labor, sleep deprivation and, in the NXIVM sex cult, branding.

But the apostles carried forward the very same ethics of Jesus, the ethics of love. In contrast a cult strives for total control of the person. Former cult member and now cult expert Steve Hassan has summarized how a cult controls every aspect of its members' lives with what he calls the BITE model. They control Behavior, through rules for everything you do and wear and eat and where and with whom you live. They control Information, by restricting its source to the cult leaders alone and by lying. They control Thoughts, by instilling an “Us vs. Them, Good vs. Evil” paradigm, and by teaching you to shut down critical thinking. They control Emotions, by instilling irrational fears of leaving or even questioning the group and by promoting guilt and shame, especially about having certain feelings.

Real love cannot be coerced; it has to come freely. Real love does not try to control everything you do. Rather real love only warns you from doing things that harm yourself or others, as Jesus did when Peter drew his sword to stop Christ's arrest. (Matthew 26:51-52)

Real love does not control your access to information, because it is not insecure about the truth of what the person who loves you is saying to you or to others. Rather real love wants you to be as knowledgeable as possible, as Jesus did when he encouraged people to check what he said and did against the scriptures. (John 5:39)

Real love does not control your thoughts; it allows you to ask questions or voice criticism. Rather real love answers questions and explains things honestly, as Jesus did with his disciples, even letting people walk away from following him if they didn't like what they heard. (John 6:60-67)

Real love does not control your emotions, telling you that you are not feeling what you are feeling. Real love empathizes with you and helps you deal with those feelings, as Jesus did with Mary and Martha as they mourned their brother. (John 11:32-35)

What wise people will flock to hear is the way of love, which Jesus teaches. People have tried the ways of hate and coercion and violence and suppression. Those are never permanent solutions. The hated and hurt will retaliate in kind. The oppressed will rise up. The French revolution, the Russian revolution, and the slave uprisings were predictable to those who watched conditions and read history. Empires and dictators fall. Cult leaders do too, some, like Jim Jones and David Koresh, taking their followers with them. Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, offered himself to the authorities provided they let his followers go. (John 18:7-8) Love, Paul wrote, is not self-seeking. Jesus, who is divine love incarnate, sought the good of those he loved at the price of his own life.

But is it realistic to live by his ways? Yes. Last year there was a documentary called Won't You Be My Neighbor? about Mr. Rogers, the children's show host. This year Tom Hanks is playing Mr. Rogers in a film called A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. It's based on an article by a reporter who was profoundly affected by him. People seem surprised to learn that Fred Rogers was in real life the same person they saw on TV. He was tremendously empathetic. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Fred saw TV as his ministry to children. Debuting in 1968, a tumultuous time in this country, he did programs that dealt with divorce, feelings, making mistakes, art, when things get broken, dance, reading, sharing and even death. When public pools were excluding blacks, Mr. Rogers invited Officer Clemmons, a black man, to cool his feet in a small plastic pool with him. In his measured, caring way he guided children through the good and bad things in life with curiosity, compassion and quiet joy. And not only children but even adults are drawn to him for the way in which he acted. I think of him as a kind of modern day St. Francis of Assisi, a person through whom the love of Jesus can clearly be seen.

That's what we are called to be. We can't all adopt Mr. Rogers' style. Even Tom Hanks, generally considered the nicest guy in Hollywood, had to bring his energy way down to portray the calm and unhurried Fred Rogers. But we can use the unique gifts the Spirit of God has given each of us to show God's love to others.

One thing cults do is strive for uniformity. But that's not what we see in God's creation. Animals, plants, and local environments are wildly different. Yet they work together and balance each other out. Things get out of balance when we make extreme changes to the systems in which we live and especially changes that benefit us without considering anything or anyone else.

In healthcare we call it homeostasis, an organism's internal balance. Paul brilliantly used the metaphor of the body of Christ to illustrate how very different parts of it make a whole and help one another. And sure enough the eye and the gallbladder look and function very differently but each is vital to optimal health. In the same way, different Christians with different roles and skills are nevertheless equally important to helping us express God's love to various people in various ways. A pediatric nurse, a professional athlete, a lawyer, a mechanic and a TV show host can all follow Jesus in ways that make different contributions to the kingdom of God. What should be the same is that they are, like Jesus, honest, compassionate, and scrupulously ethical.

When an infection or injury throws the body's homeostasis completely off, the body fights back. It ramps up its temperature to cook the germs with fever. It fills the injured area with fluids to immobilize it and flood it with leukocytes and other cellular components that eat bacteria and remove damaged cells. But if a fever is too high, it can cause brain damage. If inflammation becomes chronic it can lead to various autoimmune diseases. Doctors and nurses often work to fight such overreactions on the part of the body. As Christians we are called to heal a world that is infected by evil and which fights the infection often by making things worse.

Jesus reveals a middle path, the way of love. It requires cultivating the calmness of peace, which is spiritual well-being. It requires patience, which gives us time to think and to heal. It requires kindness, a quality sorely lacking in today's polarized world. It requires generosity, born out of a trust that we need not hoard because God will supply our needs. It requires gentleness, because people who have been hurt get supersensitive and hypervigilant. It requires faithfulness, because if we want people to trust us we need to show that we are trustworthy. And it requires self-control, because when emotions are high, we need to keep our cool. And it sure helps if we have joy, because there is a dearth of that in a despairing and self-destructive world.

If we demonstrate such qualities, which Paul dubs the fruit of the Spirit, people will take notice and want to come and learn those ways. Love can triumph even over those whose minds were controlled by cults of hate. Megan Phelps-Roper, the grand-daughter of Fred Phelps, the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, grew up in that cult and was often its public voice. She left it about 7 years ago after bloggers engaged her in dialogue that did not vilify her but got her to examine her beliefs and especially how they contradicted what Jesus said about love. But more surprising is her explanation of why her grandfather, Fred Phelps, was excommunicated by the Westboro Baptist Church before his death. A group bought a house opposite the church and painted it in rainbow colors. They countered the church's hate speech with love. And, according to Megan, Fred walked onto their lawn one day and told them they were good people. Advocating kindness got him excommunicated from his own cult!

The world says, “Fight fire with fire.” The Bible says, “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” (Proverbs 15:1) Paul says, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:21) Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.” (Matthew 5:9) The way of Jesus is the way of love and peace. As Isaiah says, “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”