Dying To Self

DYING TO SELFby Tabitha ElkinsTake a cursory glance at any Christian bookstore, and you will see a plethora of specialty bibles There is a �women�s Bible�, �teen�s Bible�, �African American Bible�(with all of the disciples depicted as African-Americans), and a �Recovery Bible�. Why so many Bibles? Is one Bible not enough for us? Is one Jesus not enough for us? Years ago, there was one Bible for all of us, and it never occured to us that it needed �fixing�.It seems as though our culture�s obsession with self- identity and individualism have infected our churches. Instead of the joy of community, and revelling in the knowledge of a God who transcends race, class and nationality, we have partitioned God into little boxes. Perhaps we are uncomfortable with so large a God as this, and feel that we need to make Him a bit smaller- �cut him down to size�. Is God too small to be the God of both men and women, both poor and rich, African, European and Asian?When God spoke to Abraham, He said, �Leave your country, your people, and your father�s household�, he was asking Abraham to lay down his �self�- and in that culture, your family and people were your self-image- and follow only Him.Where did the concept of the dying to self go in Christendom? Has our self- obsessed culture eradicated this once-firm belief? Paul taught that we must �lose ourselves in Christ�; meanwhile, we live in a society in which I am told that I must try to �find myself�, not lose myself, or �find God�, as if He were lost, not me. Abraham was told that he had to �leave his country�, but we often see American flags in the church. Does patriotism belong in the church? I was greatly relieved to find that here in Europe, the national flags remain outside the churches- where they belong. There is always a huge danger that, instead of reading world and national events through the lens of Christian belief, we will read Christian belief through the lens of national, ethnic and class prejudice. �Leave your country- I will make you a new nation!�, God calls. Are we willing to listen? Or will we read only what suits us, overlooking the rest? It is easy to distort prophecies so that �our� nation is blessed, while others are cursed. During the cold war, it used to be common to see the former Soviet Union as �the beast�- a convenient interpretation, to be sure, but inaccurate. Nowadays, the USSR is no more, and desperate pseudoChristian idealogues must save face by claming that Israel will be attacked by Russia instead, or that the EU is now the �beast�. These people forget that prophecy is meant to be symbolic, and we can�t simply bend prophecy any way we please, just to deride our government�s �enemies�. We live in an age of nationalism, so we have re-made God into a nationalistic God.Love for country is good, but it must never supersede the love for God- who transcends nationality, geography and time itself. The Church eternal is a reminder that God stands outside our petty nationalistic concerns, and is, above all, concerned with eternal things. The body of Christ itself is the body of Christians worldwide, and encompasses Christians of every Nation and Tribe, who are brought together into Holy commmunion with one another, born into a new worldwide family of sons and daughters of the One True God. Are we willing to embrace all men and women as creatures made in God�s image, and potential brothers and sisters?�Leave your people�, we are told, but in this age, we are race- and class- obsessed to the point that we can�t even bring ourselves to worship together. We get ourselves involved in petty debates over what �race� Jesus was- each group wanting to claim him for their own tribe.Isn�t it enough that he was part of the human race? Christians today are so uncomfortable with the notion of worshipping with others not like themselves that they must have �special outreaches� to poorer Christians or immigrants. In a world in which more and more workplaces are integrated, sadly, few churches are integrated. Are we willing to die to self enough so that we see Jesus� face in the faces of our neighbors, regardless of their skin color, class background or ethnicity?Even our culture itself is at odds with Christian thought. We live in an age of the linear, technological and factual. The Bible, on the other hand, is symbolic, spiritual and transcendent. We are used to recieving information in a factual, orderly fashion. The Bible, however, oftern tells the same tale twice- differently each time. Often, there is symbolic, mystical imagery that has nothing to do with our suit-and-tie, �just the facts� culture. The

standard responses are either to discrdit the Bible entirely- a favored approach of those who are too intellectually lazy to do their research- or to try to make the word of God somehow �fit in� to a literalist, materialist approach. Either approach is disasterous, for the Bible is a spiritual book, and must be approached in a spiritual way. (In this, perhaps our brothers and sisters in Africa and Asia have an advantage, for their cultures are not so firmly entrenched in the material world as ours.) The fundamentalist approach, which sees most if not all of the bible as a literal document, robs the scriptures of their poetry, subtlety and mystery. The book of Genesis, for example, begins not with the beginning itselffor the �earth�, or �land� had already been created. (�Now the earth was formless and void�.) Fundamentalists, however, read this chapter literally, asserting that the story of creation �means� that the universe is 6000 years old. By attempting to turn a spiritual story into a scientific story, the fundamentalists are missing the point entirely. The moral of the story is about good and evil- not the age of the earth, or universe. God is far more concerned with our moral beliefs than our scientific beliefs. Again, this is an example of the modern world view- one in which everything must be factual, verifiable and scientific- running headlong into the middle Eastern culture of the biblical patriarchs, in which great truths were transmitted through poetry, metaphor and songs. To this day, the middle eastern culture celebrates poetry as the highest art form. If we read the bible as a literal, scientific text, we are re-making the bible according to our �nation and people�, trying to make God fit into our agenda, instead of changing our own rigid, pre-set agenda. We belong to a society that worships science, so we want God to be a god of science, just as the ancient Hebrews, herdsmen and shepherds, wanted a god shaped like a golden calf.Feminists were upset that �God� was translated as a �he� and not a �she�, so nowadays, some Bibles use �she� to describe God. Again, this is a misunderstanding of God, who, in the Hebrew language, has both male and female attributes (English, a gender neutral language, has no equivilant). Why, however, would it matter to us? Only because our society, awash in identity politics, cannot worship a God who is not made in our own image. Thus, a feminist must have a feminized God. A good ol� boy must have a macho, �working man� Jesus. A gay man must be allowed to believe that Jesus was gay, or had gay followers. We try to make God into our own images, and when he refuses to fit into our little cubbyholes, we cast Him aside as an unneccesary myth. We are unwilling to �take up our cross and follow Him�- we demand that He follow us. Instead of dying to self, we demand that Jesus be eternally nailed to the cross, dying for us again and again.Paul instructed us, �offer your bodies as living sacrifices�, but many in today�s �modern� church demands that God consecrate that which is unlawful. No physical pleasure is to be denied to us today- premarital sex, promiscuity, adultery, sodomy- these things that were prohibited for Christians in the past are now overlooked. We live in an age of convenience, so we demand that God be a god of convenience. He must be wrapped in cellophane, and packaged in convenient single-serve portions, lest his majesty, omnipotence, and infinity make someone feel uncomfortable. We used to be asked to give ourselves to Jesus, but today, we worship a small God who demands no sacrifice of us except an hour or two each Sunday, and some spare change. The spiritual life is a hard one, often involving suffering, denial and hardship, yet the �modern gospel� teaches us that God is merely a tool for our worldy success and psychological well-being. Instead of a real encounter with the living Creator, we have �feel-good� religion. The idea of losing oneself in Christ should not be merely confined to emotional outbursts during charismatic worship service, then discarded in our day-to-day existence. It should encompass our whole lives, so that, like Teresa of Avila, we can say, �More of you, Lord, less of me.� Unless we are willing to embrace a radical, transformative faith that demands us to give of ourselves, we are ever doomed to find ourselves confined to a petty, small world where our self-created obsessions become our masters and gods.