Reclaiming the Gift

Have you ever stopped to seriously consider the question: "What is a gift?" The New Oxford American Dictionary defines "gift" this way: a thing given willingly to someone without payment. I think that's a pretty good definition, but probably not for the reasons employed by the editors of the The New Oxford American Dictionary.

How should gifts be viewed by Christians? Have you ever thought much about that? I think we need to reform our understanding of what a gift is, because our culture's definition of "gift" is, in actuality, nothing like the dictionary definition and undermines the very thing Christmas is about - the stunning incarnational wonder of the gospel.

In our society, gift giving at Christmas is generally viewed through the lens of social obligation. We each have a carefully crafted list of recipients. Then we create sublists of gift ideas for each recipient. These sublists contain things we hope our recipients will enjoy. Alongside each entry on the sublist, in invisible ink, is our anxiety estimate. We rate each idea not only in terms of how much we think the recipient will enjoy the gift, but we also take note of how much anxiety each idea gives us, should that particular gift idea be received poorly by the recipient. Ultimately, what we choose as a gift for a particular recipient will hopefully maximize the enjoyment of the recipient, while minimizing our perceived anxiety should the gift, for whatever reason, be rejected.

We are, of course, able to judge whether a gift recipient has enjoyed our selection almost instantly based on verbal and nonverbal cues which are, frankly, impossible to conceal. How we formulate our gracious, socially acceptable gift rejection cues will have to wait for another blog post.

In my view, we have largely lost the meaning of the word "gift" in our culture. We actually kill off the wonder of giving gifts because we have become a people consumed with meeting all of the social norms and requirements for a proper "gift exchange." Note that "gift exchange" is a contradiction in terms, at least if you accept the dictionary definition of gift that I cited earlier.

As a result, Christmas can become an insufferable pot of anxiety. We spend weeks worrying about making others happy (which are really worries about making ourselves happy). In fact, gift giving has become, as everything has in contemporary culture, ultimately about “me.” The exchange of gifts has taken on attributes of the contract - both parties must benefit. And that's the opposite of what it means to actually give a gift, because a gift is given without regard to mutual beneficence.

This point was made apparent to me in a recent Wall Street Journal article "The Science Behind Gifting." That word "science" in the headline is a giveaway. The premise of the article is that gift giving can be reduced into measurable categories regarding our perception of the recipient's satisfaction with our gift, as well as our own feelings of warmth and closeness with the recipient. In short, "gifting" as science makes it about the giver rather than the receiver!

This explains why we are always at a loss, and feel guilty, whenever we receive an actual gift. Real gifts give us the heebie jeebies because we are stuck in the only model too many people know - the gift exchange. When we receive an actual gift, what is our response? Part of it is usually spot on: Heck, I didn't deserve this! You shouldn't have! Amen! That's why it's a gift! But then what happens right after that? Guilt drives us back to the model we know ("But, I didn't get you anything"), which gets us plotting a quick response that will somehow get us square with the one who so audaciously broke the social conventions of the gift exchange.

Isn't this an exhausting way to live? How can we ever recover the wonder and joy associated with gifts that are given the way the dictionary, and the Bible, describes?

There is only one way to reclaim our understanding of a gift, and it is cruciform. Christian, you have received the perfect gift (the Father), by the perfect purchaser (the crucifixion of the Son), by means of the perfect giver (the Holy Spirit). We are the utterly undeserving recipients who can in no way reciprocate. The wonder of the incarnational gift of God is that we are cornered and left with only one possible response - joyous praise and worship.

Gospel means good news, and here it is: The utterly unworthy and undeserving have received the perfect gift, God, from God, for the glory of God. Once you understand and believe that, then your own giving will be freed from slavery to social duty and pride, and your receiving will be freed from guilt and inadequacy. Doesn't that sound like more fun than the treadmill of the exchange?

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. (Romans 3:23-25 ESV)

Our Desperate Need for the Father

The New York Times recently ran an astonishing story with the headline "For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage."

As it happens, this week I'm called upon to preach Matthew 6:9-15, Jesus' gift of prayer to the church. During my preparation, I ran into this quote from Dale Bruner in his terrific commentary where he says this about Matthew 6:9b and the words "Our Father"

The modern "Our Parent" or the politically correct "Our Father and Mother God" will not do. The first reason for keeping "Our Father" is simply Jesus' command, "Pray like this: Our Father." But another reason is the desperate need in modern culture for the return of the father. In a book that stirred Europe, A. Mitscherlich's Auf dem Weg zur vaterlosen Gesellschaft (1982) ("On the Way to the Fatherless Society"), a world is described in which fathers appear in children's life only late at night as ghost figures or in "progressive" American entertainment as mainly parodies (Gnilka, 1:231). And for those who have even more lamentably experienced their fathers as unspeakable horrors, it can be argued that the remedy for a bad father is not the still greater removal of any father figure at all; it is the gift of a finally good Father. The Lord's Prayer gives this gift.

...the desperate need in modern culture for the return of the father. Indeed. The epidemic of producing fatherless children will prove to be a disaster, unless the Holy Spirit grants to us a true revival that, in turn, produces a renewed love for God and His precious and holy Word.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. (Matthew 6:9b-13).

Dynamite Eugene Peterson Interview

Bob Abernethy recently did an interview with Eugene Peterson for the PBS program Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.

Abernathy asked Peterson to share his thoughts on the so-called prosperity gospel:

Well, I think it’s a lie. I think it’s just a downright rotten lie. It’s nowhere in Christian tradition, so how does this get going in our culture? It’s greed is what it is. It’s greed given a spiritual name: God will bless you. I want to ask these prosperity gospel people, do your people ever die? Do the people in your church ever die? What do you do when they die? Where’s the prosperity in that? I don’t have much patience with them, to tell you the truth, because I think they’re defrauding people.

Peterson was also asked to share his thoughts on the ethos of mega-churches:

The minute the church and pastors start saying what do people want and then giving it to them, we betray our calling. We’re called to have people follow Jesus. We’re called to have people learn how to forgive their enemies. We’re called to show people that there is a way of life which has meaning beyond their salary or beyond how good they look.

The interview runs 6:48. You will want to watch the whole thing.

Watch the full episode. See more Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Issues watching the video? Try the source link here.

What Do You Think? Interested?

The cultural subtext runs thick in this story about an over-the-top home in New York City:

Needed: "Intimacy Hedges"

Douglas Wilson is the pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho.  He's a wonderful writer and thinker, and he has gifted us this New Year with a very insightful blog post entitled "Priests with Spears."  In summary, this is a post contra the culture's tendency toward what Wilson calls, rightly, "Oprahfication."  Wilson argues that unhindered "sharing" actually destroys trust and inhibits healthy communication amongst the faithful. What's the solution? Here's an excerpt:

This standard could be called an intimacy hedge. Outsiders are not privileged to share in certain things that do not belong to them. The same standard, adjusted in accordance with the situation, applied to our kids growing up. Outside the family, you just don't talk about certain things. I am not talking about a hypocrisy wall; I am talking about an intimacy hedge. A family full of sin that "keeps up appearances" is no good either. This realm of intimacy means that you protect something in order to give to your wife and family, and it is known by them to be precious because you refuse to share it with anybody else. When the walls of the vineyard are broken down, the wild boars cannot be wished away (Ps. 80:12-13). If you lament the state of your vineyard, one thing to check would be the fences.

All pastors and parishioners should read the whole thing.

The Big Issues - How Can the Church Prepare?

via thegospelcoalition.org

Tim Keller has penned an excellent analysis of what the church ought to be doing to address the huge challenges it currently faces. One of his recommendations stands out in my mind - a renewal of apologetics in the church. Keller believes that the contemporary church's laxity in this area reflects a larger hole in western thinking. Keller cites two primary reasons for renewed Christian apologetics:

First, Christians in the West will finally be facing what missionaries around the world have faced for years — how to communicate the gospel to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and adherents of various folk religions. All young church leaders should take courses in and read the texts of the other major world religions. They should also study the gospel presentations written by missionaries engaging those religions. Loving community will be extremely important, as it always is, to reach out to neighbors of other faiths, but if they are going to come into the church, they will have many questions that church leaders today need to be able to answer.

Second, there a real vacuum in western secular thought. When Derrida died I was surprised how many of his former students admitted that High Theory (what evangelicals call ‘post-modernism’) is seen as a dead end, mainly because it is so relativistic that it provides no basis for political action. And a leading British intellectual like Terry Eagleton in recent lectures at Yale (published as Religion, Faith, and Revolution by Yale Press) savaged the older scientific atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens as equally bankrupt. Eagleton points out that the Enlightenment’s optimism about science and human progress is dead. Serious western thought is not going back to that, no matter how popular Dawkins’ books get. But postmodernism cannot produce a basis for human rights or justice either.

Emphasis added.  I think this analysis is spot-on. If you are interested in apologetics, I can recommend a wonderful starter book called the Holman QuickSource Guide to Christian Apologetics by Doug Powell.

Please note that if you elect to purchase the book through the above link, I will receive a small percentage of the sale price.

Posted via web from The Central Point