I’ve had a cold for a few days that’s gotten much worse due to the vog drifting over to Oahu from the volcano at Kilauea. It’s uglier here than it is on the smoggiest summer day in Beijing, which I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing firsthand. The hills in the picture above are less than a mile away from my house, but they’re slowly becoming invisible.
As I’ve done a little reading on vog, though, I’ve been surprised to discover that it’s not the smog-like haze in the air that’s the most dangerous. It’s the invisible sulfur dioxide that’s also spewed from the volcano that can cause permanent pulmonary damage.
Here comes the inevitable spiritual metaphor: Christians tend to focus our attention on the visible problems in the world around us. We (rightfully) react in disgust toward abortion, sexual immorality, blatant denials of God’s existence, and many other obvious sins. But is it possible we’re ignoring and thus breathing in things from our culture that are invisible but potentially more dangerous to us?
I can think of a few:
Superficiality
A decade ago, Mark Noll wrote The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, in which he said that the scandal is that there isn’t much of an evangelical mind. That’s still true, but not because we’re any less intellectual than everyone else. We’ve simply taken the vacuous celebrity-worshipping-and-sound-bite-loving mentality prevalent in our society and Christianized it. Understanding the complex line of reasoning in one of Paul’s epistles is way too much work… we’d rather just focus on the verses that are easy to put on a coffee mug or a quilt. And yes, there’s a big log in my own eye: I’d much rather read a dozen magazine articles or (even better) a hundred blog posts than sit down to read a real book.
Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.
I am a sojourner on the earth; hide not your commandments from me!
My soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times. (Psalm 119:18-20)
Emphasis on Comfort
This is one that God’s shaken up a little bit over the last few weeks. Suddenly people who never would have imagined themselves wearing secondhand clothes are shopping at garage sales and Salvation Army stores. Still, this is probably a temporary blip. Most of us believe things will be better a year from now, so we’ll quickly go back to our old habits at the first signs of improvement.
Like the people around us, most Christians tend to think life is mostly about carving out a comfortable existence and planning for a comfortable retirement. We detest inconvenience and boredom, so we fill our lives with things that will soothe and entertain us. I’m not immune to this one either: I have a Netflix queue that’s never empty.
I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. (and here comes the coffee-mug verse!) I can do all things through him who strengthens me. (Philippians 4:11-13)
Individualistic Isolation
I can’t put it any better than Tod Bolsinger does in his book, It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian:
More than any before us, an American today believes “I must write the script of my own life.” The thought that such a script must be subordinated to the grand narrative of the Bible is a foreign one. Still more alarming is the idea that this surrender of our personal story to God’s story must be mediated by a community of fallen people we frankly don’t want getting in our way and meddling in our own hopes and dreams.
We want friends, but not the kind who might actually point out things in our lives that don’t seem right. I like to tell people that I’m open to criticism, but the truth is that I sometimes get downright defensive when someone points out something I need to work on. I forget that I’m dependent on others in the process of becoming God’s temple:
You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:19-22)