What is, therefore, the task of the preacher (or the church) today?
Shall I answer: “Faith, hope and love”?
That sounds beautiful.
But I would say - Courage.
No, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth.
Our task today is recklessness.
For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature,
we lack a holy rage.
The recklessness that comes from the knowledge of God and humanity.
The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets …
and when the lie rages across the face of the earth -
a holy anger about things that are wrong in the world.
To rage against the ravaging of God’s earth,and the destruction of God’s world.
To rage when little children must die of hunger, when the tables of the rich are sagging with food.
To rage at the senseless killing of so many, and against the madness of militaries.
To rage at the lie that calls the threat of death and the strategy of destruction - Peace.
To rage against complacency.
To restlessly seek that recklessness that will challenge and seek to change human history until it confirms with the norms of the Kingdom of God.
And remember the signs of the Christian Church has always been - the Lion, the Lamb, the Dove, and the Fish …
but never the chameleon.
Kaj Munk (Danish Pastor) in Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture by Michael Frost, pp 20-21
“..but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperence, against such there is no law.” Paul to the Galatians, chapter 5.
I think we have enough ‘holy rage’ in the middle east right now. Demonstrate rage and recklessness in the name of Christianity, and you give non-Christians more reasons to remain non-Christians. By all means, be zealous, but please, for the sake of the Kingdom and the Church, and your own testimony (as well as mine), be zealous according to knowledge. Ignorant zeal gives us truck-loads of error, heresy, blood, death, and murder.
Learn from the Islamic example.
Yet Jesus himself showed a Holy Anger when faced with the ‘den of thieves’ that the Temple had become.
We as Christian’s are called to become more and more like Christ, and a consistent theme of the Bible is God’s intense feelings about injustice. If we ignore the fact that God is a God of wrath as well as of love, we lose an important element of our faith.
As for ignorance well I have an understanding of both recklessness and rage that are not limited to the violent type of response that you seem to feel they are. The passage I quoted talks about a recklessness that is prepared to put aside the reputations that come about when all speak well of us. We in the west are living comfortable lives of relative peace and security, whilst around us God’s children are dying when there is sufficient food for all.
It talks of a rage that indicates a burning desire, a passion, to see this world reflect heaven. It’s something we pray almost flippantly at times, not understanding the depth of what we are asking, what we are committing ourselves to.
It’s a perverse world indeed that seeks peace through the continuation of violence, the very reverse of what Jesus taught.
As for my testimony, well I want to stand before the Lord knowing that I fought (in a non-violent way) with passion due to having God’s heart for His children. All His children and if that means I have a reputation as a dangerous trouble maker, then fine, because that’s the reputation that Jesus has amongst the Pharisees!
I agree with you! I call it ‘Angry Love’. Where you are angry about injustice, angry enough to do something. To love both the oppressed and the oppressers. To hate the sin, yet love the sinner! Jesus had ‘Angry Love’ and that was passion which should drive us all if we bear the name of Christ!!
Fancy you qouting a Danish Pastor, I am impressed! To get the qoute into context it might be useful to know the Kaj Munk was executed by the Nazi occupation forces in Denmark and was one of the voices that spoke out against Nazism.
Quite interesting too, that he can be qouted in a book with the title “Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture “, maybe the world has not changed that much at all!
Thanks for the comments! Clare you make a good point there, but I think that it should spread further than injustice issues. I think we should also consider how the resources of the world are being treated and do something about it!
Henrik, you must have missed by Kierkegaard quote back in October. What was it about Danish thinkers that put them so far ahead of their peers?