After writing an essay about research indicating that childless people are happier than parents, I began to ponder the modern celebration of endless adolescence. There are websites devoted to deliberate childlessness, for example, as well as organizations that affirm intentional singlehood (and not in the monastic sense, for which, at least, there is some precedent in the early Church). There are websites for adult video gamers, for crying out loud, and of course every professional and college sports team has at least one website haunted by fanatics.

Some time ago I saw survey evidence regarding the milestones of adulthood, which researchers defined as: 1) leaving home, 2) finishing one’s schooling, 3) getting a job, 4) getting married, and 5) having children. Whereas in 1960, 65 percent of American males had passed these milestones by age 30, in 2000 only 31 percent had done so. The data for females was little different. Here we have an immediate casualty of America’s burgeoning inability to grow up — the fact that we have to use the clinical terms “male” and “female” more frequently, because “man” and “woman” must be applied with greater selectivity.

We are, it seems, a nation in regression. At least in the past we might have had the cold comfort of shame, but now it seems that the new mood is to proclaim childishness as a virtue. In general, however, I side with the writer at Happily Childfree, who proclaims: “If you don’t want those kids, it’s better to not have them.” I certainly don’t want to persuade any of that organization’s adherents to change their minds; we have enough self-centered people raising children already.

I have a friend in the Orthodox Church who tells me that the Church will not marry couples who express the desire to remain childless. The communion that yields life is so central to the Christian’s journey to godliness, in other words, that those who are unwilling to commit themselves to striving for it are judged unfit for marriage. It’s an idea that’s old-fashioned and revolutionary at the same time, and I think I like it.

At the core of this embrace of the Culture of Me, as I’ve written elsewhere, is the mistaken notion that individual happiness is the heart of human purpose. Hence the gleeful trotting out of research purporting to show that childless people are happier, or that marriage yields no real gain in happiness. These claims may well be true, but the people who bandy them about fail to discern that happiness is transient and shallow, whereas joy is deep and abiding. Joy is won — and here is the real bummer, for the permanent adolescent — by walking a path of suffering. This is why some people nod when they hear C.S. Lewis’s notion that the Christian life is sorrowful joy and joyful sorrow, while others shake their heads in puzzlement.

In my last two posts I’ve taken issue with a theology of work predominant in Protestant circles (and arguably in Catholic circles, though that would entail a longer and more complicated treatment). Many preachers and teachers diminish or even ignore the product of our labor. The work becomes incidental to our sanctification and evangelism, with Reformed and Arminian sects stressing one or the other as might be expected.

And yet we know that God the Creator fashioned us in His image. Further, He gave the first man work, and not just for his sanctification, and certainly not for evangelism. The beginning of man’s history is a story of participation in God’s creative order. How then have we come to the place where we teach, in effect and sometimes even literally, that any old job will do?

I’ve found several thinkers helpful in the face of this puzzle. The first is Dorothy Sayers, who argued that we have to consider: “whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being.” Given that we are fashioned in the image of God, in other words, we ought to consider whether that has relevance for the nature of the work we undertake. Perhaps one reason John Eldredge has sold so many books is because too many men are trapped in jobs that require no creativity, and which yield no meaningful value.

We can quibble, of course, over the phrase “meaningful value” (and in such an argument I would suggest we begin by scrutinizing “products” like high-fructose corn syrup, mindless video games, and more than a few contemporary Christian music albums). Yet many of us know people working in jobs that hold no meaning for them other than to pay the bills. In response to this malaise, a great many pastors say, in effect: Grin and bear it, and be sure to pass out some tracts while you’re there. Eldredge has been a huge hit in part because he tells men that it’s okay to feel like there has to be something more than this, and further, that “something more” isn’t just going to church and being a good boy.

Theologian N.T. Wright, meanwhile, writes in Surprised by Joy that Christians are called to participate in God’s creative and redemptive work. While many Christians — Protestants in particular — harbor a Gnostic view of creation, wherein physical things are suspect and of little value, Wright believes that the work we do for God here will have eternal consequences — in a very real physical sense:

“What you do in the present-by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself-will last into God’s future.”

In this worldview, the content of one’s work is no longer negligible. Consider the accountant pushing paper in a bureaucratic corporation that only survives by dint of government subsidies and trade restrictions. Or the salesman hawking products that are overpriced and clearly inferior to their competitors. Or the HR functionary required to deliver training that he knows is ineffective and doesn’t address the real problems of his company. Our modern theology of work is incapable of speaking an important truth to us, which is that perhaps these are jobs that Christians should not hold. Perhaps we are called, with our hands and minds, to something higher than eeking out a living in purposeless drudgery. And falling back on the “All things work together for good” verse to justify our apathy is a cop-out.

The content of our work matters very much, but a great many pastors, when teaching about work, neglect this. The end result is that the average churchgoer is left with the impression that it is employment that matters (”if a man will not work, neither shall he eat”), and one’s behavior in the employment (”whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord”), but not so much the end product of what one does.

I’m not arguing that we should draw up a list — as the Puritans did — of approved and unapproved vocations. But we should listen more closely to the God-sent internal and external voices that call us toward (and away from) various forms of work. It was Frederick Buechner who wrote that your vocation is “where your deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need,” and I think we ought to maintain some of that reverence — and relevance — as we consider what work we will do with our hands and minds. Some work, in other words, matters more than other work, and we should stop pretending otherwise. And we should expect more from pastors who seem content to tell us to be content, as if the fruit of our labor has no bearing on the kingdom of God so long as we are evangelizing and obeying the rules. That view, in my opinion, diminishes man and God.

Click the following links to read Tony’s first two posts in this series:

“Theologies of work, Part I”

“Theologies of work, Part II”

In my last post I claimed that many pastors neglect, when teaching about the role of work in the Christian’s life, the content and product of work. We are enjoined against work that is illegal or unethical, of course, but the actual result of our labor is strangely absent. It is the Christian’s behavior in his work that is of much greater concern to the modern Protestant pastor. John Piper, who may well be — after Luther, Calvin, and the Almighty Himself — the most oft-cited writer among Reformed pastors, gives this advice to young people: “Devote yourself to [sanctification] with all your heart, and take whatever job you want.” As for those already in the workforce, he falls back on predestination to sanction occupational apathy: “You are where you are by divine assignment, even if you got there by fraud.”

A broad sampling of Protestant pastors on this topic will reveal that a great many concur with Piper either tacitly or explicitly (though the Arminians downplay the predestination angle, of course). Search “work” at Charles Stanley’s In Touch Ministries and you’ll find lessons that focus on the Christian’s attitude and diligence, not the content of his work. The same is true at Billy Graham’s ministry.

The predominant teaching by modern Protestant pastors regarding work is that the Christian is to do his work diligently unto the Lord, and respect his superiors, and be a shining light in the workplace. His primary goal is sanctification and evangelism, for which most any (legal) job will do. Work heartily unto the Lord, and be confident that you are where He has placed you for a reason. There is the occasional mention of matching a job to one’s talents, but this is rare, and not connected to the question of what one is producing, but again, to one’s diligence and competence.

These messages are especially welcomed, in my experience, by wives who are economically vulnerable to stupid decisions by their husbands. The last thing many wives want is for their husbands to start looking for “meaningful” work, because we’ve all seen men in mid-life crises make ridiculous job decisions in search of that elusive goal. The last thing a good many church budgets could stand, likewise, is for wide swaths of men to begin trading income for purpose. Thus not only do there appear to be good biblical reasons for occupational apathy, but a substantial portion of the church membership has an interest in deterring men from questioning their professions. And somebody has got to pay for all these fancy new church buildings we keep throwing up. I doubt many pastors deliberately shape their sermonizing on work in order to maximize their revenue, but they certainly don’t have much incentive to rock the boat in that domain — especially when it is easy to string together scriptures so that practical (as opposed to spiritual) purpose in work is diminished.

The aforementioned pastors are certainly on solid ground as far as they tread. I don’t think any Christian would dispute that God is sovereign, or that sanctification and evangelism are important, or that doing one’s work heartily unto the Lord is an important goal. But the question remains: does our knowledge of God, and of His creation, tell us anything further about what work should entail? Should we really tell young people to take whatever job they want, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the sanctification process? Next time I’ll offer thoughts from other theologians who suggest that what we do — not just how we do it — is of much greater significance than many modern pastors allow.

To read Tony’s “Theologies of work, Part I,” click here.

“Work,” explained Adam Smith, “is a necessary evil.” Faced with the Catholic teaching that only priests and monks were engaged in spiritually significant work, however, Martin Luther suggested otherwise, proclaiming: “It is more spiritual for a cobbler to use good leather and a strong stitch than it is to pass out tracts.” Even mundane work, in other words, can glorify God.

Oddly enough, many contemporary pastors seem to blend Smith with Luther, yielding a curious mixture. Work is going to be difficult and unpleasant, they teach, because of the Fall. But work is also a beautiful thing, so long as the Christian does it with diligence while evangelizing in the workplace.

Writing at Bible.org, for example, Pastor Bob Deffinbaugh offers a coherent summary of this doctrine. “Any honorable occupation,” he writes, is a ministry where one can “serve men and glorify God.” Writing for Campus Crusade for Christ, meanwhile, Bob Thune lists ways that our work glorifies God, such as working hard and honoring our superiors. Yes, work is hard, they tell us. But it can also be rewarding, in the spiritual sense.

Both writers — exemplary of many pastors in this domain — are remarkable for what they leave out, namely: that our labor should reflect the fact that we are formed in the image of the great Creator. The modern theology of work seems to be that you can dig ditches and fill them back in all day long, so long as you do it with a smile and invite co-workers to your small group.

Faced with the question of what work Christians ought to do, in other words, many pastors seem to believe that the content of the work — so long as it is legal — is irrelevant, and that what matters is one’s attitude, and one’s effort to evangelize within it. No wonder Concordia University’s Center for Faith and Business is so blunt in the 10th of its Commandments for the Workplace: “Be satisfied with what you have.” The modern Christian theology of work, schizophrenic to the core, can say little else.

So is all honest, legal employment that one might take on equal, so long as one is diligent about it, and one evangelizes? Friday I’m going to argue absolutely not, and that our modern theology of work, such as one can tease it out of our pastors, is woefully inadequate. But I’m curious about your conception of work. How is its purpose for the Christian different than for the pagan?

An article in the June 30 issue of The American Conservative asks the question many of us sympathetic to Rod Dreher’s crunchy conservatism have been asking, which is why more conservatives don’t embrace the healthy food/local agriculture movement. (See also Harrison Scott Key’s post on this.)

Author John Schwenkler explains, as has food writer Michael Pollan, how government intervenes on behalf of agribusiness to both subsidize processed foods while simultaneously raising the regulatory cost to organic farmers and non-drug oriented ranchers. The benefit of intensive chemical operations is that a handful of farmers can feed the nation. The downside is that food has less taste and less healthfulness, and Americans have less connection to one another or to Creation.

Many conservatives dispute this, calling Dreher and crew Luddites, and extolling a biochemical revolution that helped increase farm yields worldwide. They have a point, but the fact that extensive pesticide and antibiotic use means more third-world people can afford BLT’s is no justification for continuing to buy chemical-laden, second-rate bacon when one doesn’t have to.

I get the sense that many conservatives — especially the free-marketeers — feel compelled to defend agribusiness and modern industrial farming because, well, these are businesses, and we’re supposed to be on the side of business. Thus there is a cottage industry in the free-market movement of writers devoted to talking about how very safe a McDonald’s cheeseburger really is, and browbeating anyone who questions how the cow was treated, and whether that orange square on top is really cheese, and why the burger tastes so very unlike how good beef is supposed to taste. The McDonald’s cheeseburger has to be good, because the alternative is that the market has, in this case, produced some pretty bad long-term outcomes. Which violates the Gospel of Markets as revealed to St. Friedman.

I wonder, however, if more conservatives might be on the side of healthy food if it had not originally emerged among self-styled liberals. Here we have a story of big government collaborating with big business to substitute corn syrup for sugar, allowing large-scale meat providers to externalize their costs, and engaging in a host of market-rigging schemes to favor some crops over others. Here also is a story of children being preyed upon by multi-million dollar marketing efforts designed to hook them on foods that are terrible for them. And here is a story of patience and effort — two concepts normally extolled by conservatives — being replaced by convenience and sloth, and not so families can spend more time together on other activities, unless one counts television-viewing.

“This is a conservative cause,” writes Schwenkler, “if there ever was one.” If only the liberals hadn’t gotten to it first.

Udo Middelmann writes in The Market-Driven Church about the fragmentation of modern Western life, and makes many Christians complicit:

“Christian schools, sports teams, companies, and publishing houses create their own market for their community. They function almost like a separate country with citizenship in the church. They are like a package of yeast that has no contact with the flour and will never make the whole loaf rise.”

This is a familiar critique of the Christianesque sub-culture, but Middelmann taps into two themes that might be troubling even to Christians who rankle at the foregoing accusation. First, he articulates a problem that perturbs communitarians and crunchy conservatives alike, which is the disposability with which many of us have come to view community. Frequent job changes and accompanying moves, changes in schools, changes in churches — all undermine the development of committed community, or what some think of as covenant community. “Christianity with its universal truth,” Middelmann writes, “is not the same as a church with its tribal truth.”

We’ve certainly seen this trend, and Christians by no means lead the way, though perhaps too many of us fail to distinguish ourselves. Aside from less commitment to community, there are the multiple televisions in each home, cell phones for each member of the family, fewer and fewer meals eaten together, stringent stratification by age (my wife and I chuckle when critics of home-schooling make the socialization argument, as if it’s normal for a child to spend most of his waking hours surrounded by people exactly his age), a dramatic rise in Internet usage — all forces lending themselves to the fragmentation of community.

What I had not considered before is a second theme I took from Middelmann, which is that many churches contribute to this fragmentation not just by marketing themselves to the point that they favor acceptance over truth, but in the way they splinter families with a variety of targeted programs. Many churches offer programs based on age or life status (married, single, divorced, handicapped, adopted), and they all but remove children from the worship service. “Where church used to bring us together from different situations under the teaching and blessing of one God,” writes Middelmann, “church now meets the perceived needs of fragmented people.”

At first I was taken aback. What’s wrong, after all, with tailoring programs to people to meet them where they are? What if some of us prefer to read in a small group, instead of these ubiquitous how-to-make-your-marriage-better books, something by Kierkegaard? Or what about those who have been abused and find strength in sharing their stories with others? And why should children have to sit through a sermon on works versus grace? Isn’t the church, after all, the people of God?

Middelmann has a compelling answer, however, which is that as a culture we have become obsessed with our individual stories as it is:

“We may be focused on our own painful story; yet the Bible places it in the context of history (his story), so that we understand what is the problem of mankind, not just my personal and immediate sensation. Healing comes from God’s work for us, not from feeling better about ourselves.”

Church, in other words, may not be as much about us as we think. I for one need to hear that quite often.

It’s interesting to consider, on a day when we celebrate American independence from England, Peter’s admonition that we “honor the king” by submitting to civil authorities. While most interpret that to allow resistance when obedience would require sin, it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that armed revolt is a Biblical response to irritating taxes, or even to taxation without representation. There was some talk about state funding for Anglican bishops in the colonies, and fear that this might lead to ecclesiastical courts adjudicated by quasi-papists, but the animating factors in our revolt against the king were economic (taxes) and political (rule by a remote Parliament).

This might have been expected from people sturdy enough to found the colonies and firmly Puritan in background; they had already hacked off the head of one king a century before. The British should have known better than to come marching at a bunch of skilled hunters in straight lines, and let’s be honest — anyone dressed in one of those fancy red jackets was just asking to get beat up and have his tea money taken. All in all, being a fan of modern dentistry as well as football played the way the good Lord intended, I’m grateful for that kerfuffle back in the late 18th century.

And yet I wonder about the repercussions of founding a country in rebellion. Not only was our nation established by repelling the civil authorities who originally governed it, but our churches, for the most part, were themselves founded on rejection of other church authorities. The Anglicans rejected the Catholics because Henry VIII wanted a divorce, and the Puritans rejected the Anglicans because too many of them behaved like Henry VIII. Dissent continued to be the guiding ethos in the colonies, with talented performers like George Whitefield chasing out less entertaining pastors during the Great Awakening.

In inculcating among ourselves the notion that we are reliable democratic arbiters of our own church governance, we set the stage for continual schism. Even America’s leading theologian of that time, Jonathan Edwards, was eventually judged too tiresome by his own congregation. Today, if you can’t find a church to suit your proclivities, you can just turn on your television and be part of a virtual church. There is a church for everyone, and with the advent of Starbucks even the atheist has a comforting spiritual experience available to him on Sunday mornings.

So we confront in our churches, and in our own spiritual lives, the blessing and danger of liberty, which is that we are entirely free to determine for ourselves how we will be preached at, and by whom, and what books we will read, and what songs we will sing, and precisely what our children will be taught about God. What a glorious freedom, should we choose wisely. But how frightening as well, when one reads in Judges: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

Now that the toothpaste is out of the tube, so to speak, there’s no putting it back. With thousands of denominations, and splits within those denominations, and cliques within those splits, and notions like catechesis, covenant, and church discipline all but lost, we look to be permanently in the position of every one of us doing what is right in his own eyes.

And even if we have discernment and knowledge, we face the temptation to rebel every time the pastor says something we don’t like, or the music director chooses hymns our teenagers don’t relate to, or the first time we are — heaven forbid, in this age of self-affirmation — rebuked or admonished. Anyone on the receiving end of that endangered species — church discipline — has only to pick up the phone and find any number of pastors happy to listen to his half of the story and then welcome him into the fold without so much as a consultation with the pastor he is leaving behind.

So we have the fruit of rebellion: enormous liberty to choose where we will be in communion, and very little guidance about how to do so. There is the Bible, thank God, but one has to be practiced in the craft of reading the thing, after all, and in the interpretation of what one has read, which is precisely where a good Church education can do one some good, but then we have worked ourselves into a circle, where Biblical education is necessary for one to ascertain where he will receive Biblical education.

Viktor Frankl once said that America’s Statue of Liberty should be balanced on the opposite coast by a Statue of Responsibility. I wonder if the same might be said for American Christians. Blessed to live in a land of liberty, the price is that we have been raised as well in a culture founded on rebellion against authority. How can we take advantage of our freedom to choose, without falling into the pit of self-satisfaction? When people who identify themselves as Christians can’t answer even fundamental questions of dogma, what are we to make of the abundance of churches springing up to serve them as if they are customers in search of a good burger? A hungry person knows how to tell a good burger from a bad one, but what of the spiritually hungry, ill-educated Christian? How is he to find a competent church? How is he to find community that is more than just accidental?

A Christian might be forgiven by his peers for praying the following, not just as it pertains to church life, but to life as an American citizen, as well as citizenship in the kingdom of God: Thank you, Lord, for the blessing of liberty, and please hasten to save us from how we use it.

I was recently reminded that the English word person has its origin in the Greek word persona, which was the name given to large masks Greek actors used to wear on stage. How fitting that this is what we call ourselves. In a related moment of epiphany, I recently read a pastor’s account of attending a James Taylor concert. She said that in between songs, someone shouted: “I love you, James!” There was laughter, but then Taylor stepped to the microphone and said: “That’s because you don’t know me.”

And this is one of the reasons why we are these clipped personae calling ourselves persons, because each of us wants to be loved, yet many of us believe that we are, in our truest selves, not all that lovable. Years ago I gave up writing for a time, and when I announced it, my wife was saddest of all. (Let’s be honest; she was probably the only person who was sad about it.) She told me that reading my words helped her see into my heart, a view that I didn’t often afford her.

We’ve labored down a long path together since then, and I like to think that I reveal more of myself to her now than I used to. Still, it’s hard for me, having grown up in fear of being vulnerable, to talk to anyone. With this in mind a friend recently suggested that I read what I write to her. He thought it might draw us closer, what with the intimacy of my voice speaking to her the words I only dare offer up because I don’t have to look any of you in the eye when I write them.

I protested that these words aren’t who I really am. I don’t write out the black-hearted parts of me, at least not in non-fiction. I’m much worse, I told him, than what anyone sees of me.

“I know,” he said. “But so is everyone.”

Most of us are personae at least some of the time, and many of the people who believe otherwise are personae to themselves. We hide who we are because we see who we are, and because everyone else is hiding himself. So we can fall into the trap of thinking we are worse than most — less organized, more resentful, more covetous, more easily discouraged.

I suppose the truth is that most of us aren’t any worse than anyone else, but let’s face it: that isn’t saying much. When I think about who I really am — who we really are — I am overwhelmed by God’s word breathed through the lungs of Paul, that we will know just as we have been fully known. We have our personae with one another, but every one of God’s children is fully known, and loved. We are personae with ourselves, seeing in a mirror dimly, but in that day of final homecoming we will be face to face, with ourselves as we were intended to be, and with a loving God who has offered up His life for us in full knowledge of who we are.

It’s a revolutionary idea, if you’ll let it be. It can change how you view yourself, how you view others, how you view God. No matter how low you have fallen, child of God, you are loved in full knowledge of what you are. No matter how lowly you think someone else is, how then can you deny him love, knowing that the perfect God knows him more fully than you, and loves him unto death? And finally, while bad preaching and bad theology can render God a distant, dispassionate entity, how comforting is it to learn that He knows us fully, and that in time He will make himself fully known to us, face to face, as father with child?

The world expects us to wear an acceptable mask, but we know that God sees us as we are. I like to hope, in my better moments, that knowing this will give me the courage to set my mask aside from time to time, if only for a while. Maybe we all can.

The question came up tonight: what are Christians to do with George Tiller, partial-birth abortion profiteer?

It came on the heels of a friend’s account of meeting a member in Tiller’s church, who was struck by what seemed to her the unchristian behavior of abortion protesters who came into the sanctuary during a Sunday service, chanting slogans and snapping pictures of parishioners. What should we tell this woman? That these protesters were indeed unchristian? That they were misguided, but had good cause? That they didn’t go far enough?

It’s an interesting question, though seemingly straightforward. We know Tiller is an unrepentant mass murderer, and so our Bible makes clear that he should be handed over to the Devil, as Paul might say, via excommunication. The problem, of course, is that we Protestants (he goes to a Lutheran church in Wichita) haven’t a Church from which to excommunicate Tiller, only a collection of churches, most of which recognize neither the authority nor the doctrine of the others. Thus Tiller, having finally been tossed out of his previous church, crossed town to another church just as easily as any of us finds a restaurant.

So what are we to do? Perhaps all the Bible-believing pastors and elders in the city could meet with Tiller’s pastor, and once they have her on record, they could go to the governing body above her, and so on, until they formally establish that this entire branch of Lutheranism is rotten. Then perhaps they could formally, ecumenically, excommunicate the whole lot of them. We are, after all, believers in one holy, apostolic, catholic Church, aren’t we?

Ah, but so is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, of which Tiller’s Church, Reformation Lutheran (oh, the irony!), is a member. Very well then, but the ELCA statement on abortion, amidst tortured language that in effect admits the church elders have no dogmatic guidance to provide, offers this reasonably clear statement: “This church opposes ending intrauterine life when a fetus is developed enough to live outside a uterus with the aid of reasonable and necessary technology.”

But that is Tiller’s specialty, executing healthy infants while the tops of their heads remain in the birth canal, justified by the cavernous loophole known as the mother’s “mental well-being.” So it would seem the pastors and elders opposed to this monstrosity in their city might have a clear-cut case to make with the governing body of the ELCA: remove your pastor, for she is offering communion to this unrepentant murderer and violator of your own policy on abortion.

Or we could wait for old age to do Tiller in, and suffer less frustration. Because many pastors and elders want nothing to do with abortion politics, except insofar as they can sideswipe it from the safety of their pulpits when the mood hits. So the ELCA will feel no pressure to remove its heretical pastor, who in turn will feel no pressure to remove the murderer from the midst of her congregation. Not that a visitation from 500 Wichita pastors would be anything to the leadership of the ELCA but a badge of honor. Look at how we stand up for humanity in the face of intolerance. See how we suffer for Christ.

So what are Christians to do? Picket the church service? Distribute pictures of aborted babies, so other people’s children can have nightmares? Pray and wait?

Consider this thought experiment: Suppose 10,000 Christian men stood around Tiller’s clinic, for as long as it took, saying simply: Enough. What would the police do? Would the governor call in the National Guard? And what if another 50,000 joined them? We can get 100,000 men to come blubber all over one another at a Promise Keepers convention, so the logistics aren’t impossible. What would happen then? And what if this band of brothers, after shutting down the city of Wichita until its putatively Christian leaders took action and Tiller was bankrupted, moved on to the next killing field, and the next after that?

Perhaps the federal government would be forced to aggressively combat this peaceful resistance. Perhaps many of us would suffer. Perhaps it would divide political parties, and churches, and even families. Sound familiar?

And just maybe it would make abortion an issue we can’t avoid. For we are, most of us, waiting on someone else to do something, primarily because we are terrified of standing alone. So perhaps the question isn’t: what are Christians to do?, but rather: When will we stand up together and do it?

In The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen considers the well-known parable from the perspective of Rembrandt’s famous painting. In so doing, he notes that while he first identified with the prodigal, a blunt but well-meaning friend suggested that perhaps he had more in common with the resentful son of the story.

It’s always hard, isn’t it, hearing something harsh — because it is painfully true — from a friend? We don’t all have a friend like that, but we should, if only to give voice to what we ignore when it is whispered by the Holy Spirit. The problem is that we also have, many of us, one or two friends who imagine they are that person. You know the type, the let-me-get-in-your-face-so-we-can-get-real person who is more passive aggressive than introspective, but who can’t stop spouting that iron sharpening iron verse.

Obviously, though I have lived much of my life as the prodigal son, the judgmental, withdrawn, irritable son rears his ugly head more often than I care to admit. So as Nouwen describes how the second son resents the attention the returning son has received, I see myself.

I also see the Church, in our more selfish moments. Nouwen writes of the sin often evidenced by the righteous: “It is far more pernicious: something that has attached itself to the underside of my virtue.” Thus do good works lead to frustration when people don’t reform, or piety to pride, or faithfulness to disdain for unchurched heathen who are getting all the attention from the Emergent-Church types these days.

“The parable that Rembrandt painted,” Nouwen says, “might well be called ‘The Parable of the Lost Sons.” I hadn’t thought about it, how one can get lost while dwelling on his own land, or become alienated from a father while living under his roof.

And surely this must be a harder sin to overcome, Nouwen claims: “the hardest conversion to go through is the conversion of the one who stayed home.” It puts me in mind of the scene in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, when the hunted priest is in a prison cell with the dregs of humanity, but also with a pious woman who condemns him when she learns that he is a drunkard:

“God might forgive cowardice and passion, but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety? … salvation could strike like lightning at the evil heart, but the habit of piety excluded everything but the evening prayer…”

No wonder Christ warned that the way is narrow. We can stray onto the path of the prodigal, or worse, dwell on our father’s land doing good works, but let grow up in our hearts the dark cancer of a Pharisee. Why is the latter worse? Consider for whom Christ reserved his harshest words. Or recall that the prodigal realized he was lost. The angry son thought he was in the right. Did he ever go back into his father’s house, to join the feast? We don’t know. And yet, Nouwen says, the encouragement in the story is that the father is always there, ready to welcome his children with open arms, if only they will lay down their pride and rebellion. Which is easier said than done, and usually said about other people, rather than ourselves.