Building Together

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger, and today we’re talking about syncretism. What’s syncretism, you may ask.

“What’s syncretism?”

Syncretism is a blending together of religions in which they are both destroyed. Neither of them exist anymore because you’ve made something that is neither one nor the other. You’ve just made one gross thing. Accurate? Fair?

“Isn’t it the same God we worship?”

Who’s ‘we’?

“Well, all of us. I mean isn’t that the point of religion class, to help you find the one God revealed in every religion to some extent, but in none to any great full extent.”

Well, would you like me to describe the God that I worship?

“Yes. Who is the God you worship?”

The God that I worship made everything, meaning he is not made of the same stuff as everything else. He’s different and he upholds everything. He holds it together. He made it, he owns it, and he has a son named Jesus Christ who came to earth, was born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate…now I’m running into the creed. But Jesus became a man, and he’s God and man at once, completely God, completely man, and he paid for all my sins on the cross. Then he rose from the dead, and after I die I will also rise from the dead because I am in Jesus, because I believe in him and I’m united to him by faith. Is that the God that you worship?

“Well, I’m sure if we talk long enough we would find some common ground in there. Surely not all of those details are that important, are they?”

They really are.

“I think you’re being divisive and judgmental here.”

That’s a mean thing to say.

“Oh, ow, ahh.”

Role-play over.

There you go. That’s kind of what we’re going to be talking about tonight. Our setting again is the restoration era. After the fame and report of the laying of the foundation slab had settled into the outlying communities and their neighbors and their neighbors, some people showed up from outside Israel, some people we know as Samaritans.

They said, “Hi. We worship the same God you do. Let us help.” Here’s what the text says –

Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the children of the captivity builded the temple unto the LORD God of Israel, then they came to Zerubbabel and to the chief of the fathers and said unto them, Let us build with you, for we seek your God, as ye do; and we do sacrifice unto him since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assur, which brought us up hither.

But Zerubbabel and Jeshua and the rest of the chief of the fathers of Israel said unto them, Ye have nothing to do with us to build an house unto our God; but we ourselves together will build unto the LORD God of Israel, as king Cyrus the king of Persia hath commanded us.

Then the people of the land weakened the hands of the people of Judah and troubled them in building a nd hired counsellers against them to frustrate their purpose, all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius king of Persia.

We see an exchange of letters in the rest of the chapter that eventually brings the building of the city to a halt and, as a consequence, the building of the temple to a halt, although the king’s decrees never actually told them to stop building the temple. They did that on their own in the face of opposition, but that’s maybe for another podcast.

The point here that we want to talk about is what happens when people show up and say, “We worship the same God you do. Let us help with your ministry.”

If you lived in the 1920s and ‘30s and were part of any denomination of any size or any name, with any degree of financial assets – seminaries and colleges and orphanages and schools and church buildings – this was not an unlikely scenario. A bunch of nicely-dressed men in suits and with briefcases would show up and say, “We want to talk merger, because after all this splintering of the body of Christ into endless denominations is a poor testimony to the world. Think how much more we could get done if we were all together as part of one organization. After all, don’t we confess the one holy catholic church? The distinctions between us are minor. You don’t have to give yours up. Let’s just all join together organizationally to get more done and to show the world the love of Christ.”

The sad thing is that perhaps the majority of American denominations sometime in there gave in to that. It sounded like a good idea – the appeal to unity and love and cooperation on huge projects, like the evangelization of the world. It just seemed like that was a good thing, and did we really need to fuss about details?

You can see the argument. The multiplication of denominations is not a happy thing. It’s easier to get things done when you pool resources together. You can do a lot more.

“Yeah, so let’s just start finding ways to merge/fuse our various denominations. We’ll even throw away our own individual names. We’ll pick some bigger name like United Church of Christ or something that signifies how united we are in all of this.”

The more conservative members of these churches, the more conservative pastors and the people who fill the pews, found out after 10, 20, or 30 years that what they were used to hearing of the gospel was becoming thinner and thinner. They were hearing a lot about the universal love of God, the universal fatherhood of God, the universal brotherhood of man, how to be nice, how to be good, how to be a good neighbor, how to participate in the American system in a way to bring about liberty and justice and all that. But except as a name and a content-less banner, the word Jesus, the word trinity, words like justification and sanctification began to slip away. They just weren’t there anymore.

What came out of this was a movement that was more friendly to creating a secular Utopia by political methods using churchgoers’ money than it was to worship the God of the Bible, or really acknowledging much of anything in the Bible except some very general commands about loving one another and human value and worth and a few things like that.

The surprising thing, however, for the people who managed to effect these mergers was that after a generation or so people began to wonder why they were going to church at all. It didn’t seem to be about God and Christ, so some of these very pastors and theologians who had pushed so hard for union found themselves out of a job, because no one wanted to pay them for doing something that obviously wasn’t very important.

These big church’s membership began to dwindle in numbers until only a few old folks were there and, as they died, nobody young was coming and filling the pews, because what these churches were presenting was not particularly distinguishable from TV or a good novel or some other thing that encouraged you to be a nice person.

Rotary Club?

Yeah, Rotary Club, Elks, Moose, whatever. So for a while it looked like the liberals had won, and in a sense they did. In another sense they captured something that they saw as a cash cow, and it did not continue to be that because came to church to worship God and they gave their money to worship God and to evangelize so that others could come to Christ and go to heaven when they died.

Even when the theology was very weak and deluded, still there was a sense that there is something here that does not happen in any other institution in the world. When even that little bit was gone, nobody cared a whole lot anymore. The money was gone.

Now, of course, people still spent money in other directions, often on material goods and things to make themselves happy but, as you say, Rotary Club and other kinds of institutions began to pick up money, and more politicized causes began to call for financial support.

It was a time of horrible reckoning in the American church. My own denomination was very large in those days. It had schools and colleges and hospitals and orphanages and the whole thing. No one even recognizes the name anymore. It was Reformed Church in the United States. No one’s even heard of it now, because by the time that the mergers were done there was one small classis centered in the Dakotas that fought to keep the title, Reformed Church in the United States, while the rest of the denomination went into a merger.

And although there may be a few very old people who remember the old days, there aren’t many, and the denomination as a whole, as it was, was submerged in very liberal theology. There’s a whole story in all of that. There’s also a whole story in how the liberals pulled it off, but that’s for another day.

What we’re doing here then is looking at this thing. What happens when people who say they believe in your God come and they want to help you? To what degree do you say, “Oh great, we need that kind of help,” and to what degree do we follow Jeshua and Zerubbabel and say, “You have neither part nor lot in this matter”?

I think first we should probably look at who these people who worship your God just as you do – who they actually were. From the New Testament we’re vaguely familiar with the Samaritans. We remember the woman at the well and one or two other times when Jesus encounters Samaritans.

The few Samaritans we meet in the New Testament generally are very positive figures.

You think of the good Samaritan. We even have churches and hospitals named after him.

And he didn’t even exist. He was a fictional character.

Possibly. He may actually have been a real person, because I kind of think the Pharisees would have called Jesus on that. “Wait a minute, you made that up. There’s no such person. Tell us one guy who actually was like that.”

It’s a rhetorical point, though. His point stands.

If…but they didn’t challenge him. I think like the story of the rich man and Lazarus, this may have been one where Jesus was recounting something that actually happened. In any case, when you come into the New Testament, and even if you’ve read the old, you may wonder, “Wait, who are these people? Why are they here? Why are they called Samaritans? And why do the Jews hate them so much? What do they hate the Jews, for that matter?”

It's in the book of 2 Kings 17 that we get something of their background. Assyria has descended upon Israel. They’ve destroyed their cities and their capital. They’ve taken their people captive and spread them out through their own cities, leaving the land, you would think, unoccupied. But in fact, Assyria’s practice of maintaining a one-world order was to move all kinds of people about. Israel was not an exception or something unusual. So as they moved Israel out, they moved other people in, all sorts of people, people from various nations who worshiped various gods.

As they settled there and got used to it - “Well, this is our new homeland, I guess. Don’t know any of these people. Don’t know those people. That guy sounds like he’s from Egypt. He’s from who knows where, and he’s from Persia. I don’t know. Well, we’ve got one thing going for us; we’re all citizens of the Assyrian empire, yay,” – they began to notice something strange.

Out beyond the city walls, lions began making people into lion chow, and it wasn’t one or two times. It kept happening to the point where people said, “This is the hand of God. Whatever god owns this land is not happy with us. We don’t know the god who owns this land. We were thrust into his land by this usurping power, these Assyrians. Mr. Assyrian official, could you send word up the chain to your king and say we’re going to die a lot unless we find out how to placate the god of the land. Could he send us like a priest, somebody who knows about this god, so that we can do whatever it takes to not die?”

Interestingly enough, the Assyrian emperor agreed and he sent them a priest. We’re not told exactly who the priest was, but since it’s in Israel and a priest, he almost has to be a priest of the golden calves, which means in his own mind he worships Jehovah Yahweh, worships the Lord, and he knows something of the rituals and the required ceremonies and rites and the details of the ceremonial law. What he knows beyond that is anybody’s guess, but he begins to teach these people about Jehovah. The writer of Kings begins to wax very eloquent and sarcastic in describing this.

“So they feared the Lord and they worshiped their idols. So they feared the Lord and worshiped whatever they wanted to do. So they feared the Lord and did all these crazy things,” and it continues that way until, “Now they fear not the Lord.” Having said they fear the Lord like three times, he turns around and says, “No, they didn’t.”

They thought they did. They were going through the motions. They convinced themselves they were Jehovah-fearers because of what this priest told them, but what they had really done was syncretism. They had taken their own religions (plural) and fused them with what they learned of Jehovah worship, which had already been watered down through the worship of the golden calves, and they created this wonderful cultural family national religion, and they convinced themselves this was the true worship of Yahweh.

So when Israel came back, it was sort of like Jehovah’s Witnesses looking at a new Christian church in town and saying, “Well, they say they worship Jehovah, but I bet they’re another one of these Jesus people groups. Let’s go find out and see what’s going on, because obviously we are the true tradition. We are the ones who really know what’s going on here.”

So they show up and they figure the best way to control the situation is to get involved with it, and so they make an offer. “We worship your God just as you do. We’ve done so ever since the Assyrians brought us here.”

Zerubbabel and Jeshua had probably read 2 Kings by now and they know who these people are and where they came from, and they say, “Uh, no. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to do it ourselves, just as Cyrus told us.”

Now, here’s the interesting thing in all of this. They refuse the help of these outsiders because in their minds they’re pagans, but Cyrus at least had been a pagan. If he had come to faith, and he may well have, it was fairly recent. He was certainly a Gentile, and all the people who worked under Cyrus were Gentiles, and few if any of them would have been God-fearers. In the years that follow with the next few kings, they didn’t seem to evidence any faith in the God of Israel until perhaps Darius runs into Nehemiah and Esther.

Zerubbabel and Jeshua and the other elders were making business deals with the men of Tyre and Sidon, buying wood from them, so the question becomes – and it’s a valid question – how far can you cooperate in a project with unbelievers without compromising the faith?

There are some believers who would say you can’t do it at all because of the slippery slope. You let the camel get his nose in the door and pretty soon it’s all going to be there. So if you’re building a church, a Christian school, or starting a missionary project you don’t want any unbelievers anywhere there on the site or involved at any level, because their sin will affect you. You will become compromised sooner or later. If not in the very act of hanging out with them, you will be compromised.

Others are more of the mind of, “Well, you know, if they have skills we can use them,” but then sometimes they’re not so careful as to where you can use them. It’s one thing to have an unbeliever, say, mow the church lawn. It’s another thing to have him help with taking meals to widows. It’s a very different thing to have him teaching Sunday School.

So as we look at this, this story of Zerubbabel, Jeshua, and the elders refusing help is very at odds with how many wanna-be Christians think today. We want to be inclusive. We want to embrace everybody. We want the universal brotherhood of man, the universal fatherhood of God. We want to let everybody in, because otherwise we’re being judgmental, bigoted, hatemongers, fascists, and you can keep going down the list.

That sort of attitude wants to deny there being an in and an out. I’m thinking of the little Sunday School song from way back when – “One door and only one, and yet its sides are two. I’m on the inside, on which side are you?” Do you know that song?

I do not know that song, no. That’s interesting.

That’s all I know. I don’t know if there’s more that actually develops any of those ideas, because it doesn’t say very much on its own, but it teaches an idea that Jesus taught, that is there are those who are his sheep and there are those who are not his sheep. There is a fundamental divide.

In our pluralistic sort of community-centered world today we want to say, “Come all and welcome,” but there are limits to that, inherent limits. You don’t say that about your family. You might say that about your house if you’re a very hospitable person, and that’s wonderful, until someone comes in with the intent to murder your family, and then you say, “No, you don’t have the right to be here. You are going to have to leave.”

With your house there is an outside, and there are people who are not allowed to be in it. Your family is even more limited. No matter how much you love your friends, they are not your family. And yet we want to deny Jesus that same right of determination of who is in his family, who gets to come into his house, who his bride is, yet we want that privilege for ourselves. We just don’t like Jesus saying those things.

Because when Jesus says it, it’s rather absolute and eternal. We’re going to be talking before too long about walls, because Nehemiah is coming to rebuild the walls of the city.

I’d like you to find out more about that children’s song you just sang. I have never heard of it before and I would like to know if there are more verses and what its original orientation and setting might have been. I can see how it would be very obnoxious to modern Christians, but when Nehemiah comes to build the wall, I’m reminded of Frost’s poem:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Walls, as you say, put people on the outside, and even in the New Jerusalem when we get to the end of the Bible, there are those who are outside. Some of the people who are said to be outside are people that would make modern Christians kind of tremble like, “Why should they be out? That’s just an alternate lifestyle. That’s just a spiritual weakness. In fact, that’s just your interpretation.” And yet the Bible draws lines very clearly and very harshly.

“Doesn’t forgiveness of sins cover all that?” Maybe that’s what we need to talk about for a minute, the nature of forgiveness and of justification. I’m going to propound something to you and I want you to tell me your reaction and how you would respond to this.

Let us say that I’ve done some terrible sin, and in fact I admit it’s a terrible sin. I admit it’s a sin and that it’s wrong and I’m sorry for it. I tell you, “But I’ve talked to God. I haven’t talked to my elders, haven’t talked to my pastor, haven’t talked to my wife or anybody else, but I’ve talked to God and he’s forgiven me, so it’s all right. Let’s just go on from here, because that’s how forgiveness works, right? There shouldn’t be any consequences or hard feelings or excluding or discipline. As long as I know that was wrong and I’ve asked God for forgiveness, we can just go on, right?”

Not always. When there’s a sin that has external consequences, it’s affected people, there are already consequences. You created them when you committed the sin, and forgiveness does not mean that those consequences go away. It means that the person who’s forgiven you is not harboring any desire for revenge, but it doesn’t excuse you from the consequences of your actions. There might be something that needs to be addressed and repaired. Often there’s trust that has to be rebuilt. That’s not automatic. That takes work and effort and it takes humility to ask for that to happen.

Along a slightly different line, but not by much, how about, “Well, I have these feelings but I’ve never really acted on them. I’ve always managed to control them. I know they’re wrong and I’ve asked God to deliver me and to forgive me, but they come back fairly frequently. But as long as I don’t act on them and as long as I acknowledge their sinfulness, that’s all right. I shouldn’t really have to worry or tell anybody or abstain from the Lord’s Supper. I mean I have a pastor, not a priest. I’m not required to go make a confession or anything.” What do you think about that?

The desire to sin is itself sinful. The desire to treat God as not God is in itself not treating God as the one who has the right to be treated as God.

But don’t we all do that all the time? Where’s the line here?

The line between what? What are you asking?

Between say you and the person I was just describing. I think we would both freely confess that we sin in thought life a lot. Do we always go to our pastor? Do we always tell our spouse, for instance, everything we’ve done wrong or thought wrong? Maybe you’re holier than I am.

The question is one of frequency, I think, frequency of confession. The Christian life is one of constant repentance, and it’s a question of fighting to the last inch.

So are we really opposing the sin or are we drifting along with it until we’re about to go over the waterfall, and then dog-paddling back a little?

Right, are we treating the wild animal like a pet?

I think we have to grant that sometimes there may be some fuzzy lines here, but I think the true believer quickly enough will say, “And I’m not going to let those fuzzy lines deceive me.”

“I’m not going to take refuge in the fuzzy lines.”

Yeah. Other people may look at me at say, “Oh, you’re worrying over nothing.” I need to be the one who says, “I can say that to you. I can’t say that to me. I have to be concerned, lest I let the fuzzy lines become an excuse for yielding, for going deeper into sin, for making excuses, rather than being terrified of sin.”

This is a matter of Christian growth, to be sure, and sometimes it may take us years of walking with Jesus before we begin to say, “Oh, that’s a temptation that I’ve been falling into and I didn’t even see it because I wasn’t on guard.” Once I’ve seen it, I suddenly become a whole lot more accountable even than I was before, and I need to face it.

When we’re looking at someone who claims, “Well, I’m a Christian. Yes, I have homosexual let us say feelings, but I can still be a pastor in your denomination,” probably the answer is, “No, you can’t.” Now, does that mean you’re not a Christian? I don’t know. I can’t read your heart. I know you should be scared like everything, and you should be doing a lot of soul searching, and yes, you need help and accountability. But to blow it off on the same level as, “Well, sometimes I go 70 in a 50 mph zone and thus defy governmental authority,” those are not the same thing.

I think as Christians we need to have our senses tuned enough to know the difference between swallowing an ant and swallowing a camel. They’re not the same thing.

Another example that maybe we can work with a little is couples where either the husband or the wife has a pornography problem. At some times for some couples, having the wife constantly being come to for confession – like the husband is repeatedly – it can be overwhelming and too much to bear, so that she’s kind of spacing out. Have a man work with the husband and be an accountability partner and be able to warn the wife when there’s a big confess coming.

But then at different times for different couples it might work differently. We know that this is a problem. We know that this is a sin that is destroying the marriage. It’s doing harm to it. But how frequently we need to address it might depend on how much it’s taking over their life. If every confession is taking over your life and your whole world stops, you can’t live like that.

No. Something is wrong with how you’re approaching it at that point. We’re back to, “Details matter here.” We could manufacture, as we’ve been doing, imaginary scenarios, but none of them is going to exactly fit any real-life scenario, so this is where wisdom comes in. This is where not simply the letter of scripture but the spirit of all of scripture, which consists of many letters, many words, many instructions, many promises, all of which must be taken literally, but we have to blend them together for this circumstance.

There are going to be times where we will say, “This guy has an attitude issue, but we still want to put him someplace in leadership because we see his overall life and the direction of his life and his family. He’s a godly man and we’re going to help him work through that.” That’s as opposed to, “This man wants to be our pastor and he’s had a problem with pornography on and off for 20-30 years.”

Those are not the same thing. There’s too much a Victorian spirit of nicety to try to blend them into the same.

We are sinners. On the one hand we can’t just say, “Well then, it doesn’t matter, does it? We’re all forgiven. Everybody’s a sinner, everybody’s got a problem, no one should throw a stone or point a figure,” but on the other hand the danger of saying, “Well, you have sinned so I can have no fellowship with you. I can’t invite you over. My kids won’t play with your kids. I can’t even walk into your church, let alone belong to it, because somebody in your church did this thing.”

This blending together is the denial of a difference between a marriage of two sinners, and an abusive marriage. You’re unable then to distinguish between sin, which is by nature abusive, and an unsafe situation.

Yeah, and when you say abusive you can also take that a step further – between abusive and the sense of “Get out of the house now” and “Alright, you probably should move out, separate, begin extensive counseling, because this is a road to divorce.”

If your husband has a gun, if your husband is going into the back room to rape your daughter, you don’t need counseling right then. You need the cops or you need a 45.

Preferably both.

Yeah. It’s the unwillingness to recognize the various shades here that can get us in trouble either direction – until every sin is an end to fellowship, an end to hope, an end to help, or no sin ever is, who are we to throw stones.

What Zerubbabel and Jeshua did here, to pull us back to the biblical situation, is they looked at these people and said amongst themselves, if not out loud to them, “These people are idolaters. They fundamentally worship another god. They use the name of our God, but the god they call Yahweh is not like our Yahweh. Creedally and theologically the god is different. Their way of approaching him is different. That means the goal of their life, their work, their ministry, their very national existence is fundamentally at odds with ours, and they want to help us, they want to have a hand in what we’re doing.”

Those two things are both important. If they just wanted to come and listen and observe and be present quietly at our sacrifices, you know what? Zerubbabel and Jeshua probably would have said, “Yeah. You’re excited by this the way we are, and you want to come and watch us sacrifice and celebrate and be in the Gentile court area.” They probably would have said, “Okay,” but the moment they say, “And do we get a seat on the platform, and do we get five minutes to say something?”

“No, you don’t. Now if you want to come and buy and sell, and we hear you have great neckties and sandals and you want to come and sell them, all right, we can do that.”

“Not on the Sabbath, though,” as we’ll find out from Nehemiah.

Yeah. The civil laws were influenced by their ecclesiastical – what our world would call religious -laws. So these Jewish leaders were willing to say, “We’ll buy stuff from Tyre and Sidon,” pagan cities. “We’ll take the king’s money. We hear he’s a God-fearer, but be that so or no, the money is coming without strings attached.”

This isn’t America, where once the government gives you money, we know that later on they’re going to try to regulate you. This comes as a free gift from the king, by prophecy in fact, so we know that whatever Cyrus intends, the money is a gift from God. “We’re going to take the money though it comes from a Gentile, though it comes probably from his raids on other countries.”

There’s an ethical question here of, “Wait, this guy probably got this by conquering other people and taking their stuff and now he’s giving it to us. Should we touch it?” God says you should. There’s such a thing as being too holy, trying to trace back to see whether or not the meat was offered to idols, in Paul’s terms, when sometimes you’re just not supposed to ask. You’re supposed to accept God’s gift. But when it comes down to letting someone who covenantally is serving a false god have a hand in dictating your day-to-day life and practices, especially in religion, especially in worship, somewhere in there is a line.

Just as you wouldn’t let an outsider dictate your romantic and sexual relationship with your own spouse, and ask to be included, there are things that are near the heart. They need covenantal institutions. You should not want someone from the other side having a seat on your war cabinet when the war is beginning. To put it in different terms, you don’t want a mole from the KGB running British intelligence in the Cold War. Oh wait, that happened.

With each covenantal institution there is a point of focus where if we lose that, if we blur that, if we cut it in pieces and stab it in the back, the whole covenantal situation dissolves into something very, very, very different.

With church and worship, it comes very near the question of who is God and, more specifically, who is Jesus. If we can’t agree on that, if we can’t put it in words so that we can rationally discuss it proposition by proposition, then we no longer have the same God.

The God of scripture is a God who speaks to us in words, in sentences, in propositions, that we can lift out of their original verbiage and express in new ways while still retaining the original meaning, and say true things about him.

If people come and say, “Well, we don’t like the way you’re saying that because those words aren’t exactly in the Bible,” we can say, “They say what the Bible says, so your problem is not with the words. Your problem is you don’t like what they’re saying.”

“Well, you don’t need creeds anyway. All you need is…uhhh.”

So a lot of the challenges the church has faced in the last 2,000 years have been exactly from this, people coming and saying, “All we need is the Bible. All we need is Jesus. All we need is love. We don’t need anything else to draw lines. Zerubbabel and Jeshua – it’s the same God. We even have part of your Bible.” Apparently, they didn’t have the prophets, they just had the Pentateuch.

“We have the Torah. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Common territory, common land. We live in the Promised Land and the lions stopped coming, so God must be pleased with us, right? So why can’t we work together?” meaning why can’t we have a hand in dictating policy when it comes to worship, because they were talking about building the temple, not about building a department store or a mall or some kind of business that’s going to employ 100 people.

This reminds me of the scammers who will go door-to-door and claim to be from your energy company so that you will show them your bill, so that they can get your information. Having the Samaritans help build the place of worship would be like telling one of them, “Yes, here’s my bill. Go in and install whatever you need to install in my house.”

They have no relationship with you. They are not from your energy company. They have no business being there.

I was just thinking back and we did have a round of those. It’s been a few years now and I’d forgotten about them. We didn’t exactly know the nature of the scam. It didn’t look like it was that dangerous. It was just like, “No, we’re happy with the rates we’re getting. Go away,” and that about ended it. Then after this happened maybe two or three times they stopped coming and I just forgot about it. It’s interesting to know that that was the long-term game there.

The long-term game for the Samaritans was that they wanted to take over and control worship. In fact, the chapter begins, “Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard…” The writer, who was Ezra and who would write in the next generation, but maybe had a chance to talk not directly to Zerubbabel and Jeshua before they died but probably talked to at least some of the elders who were alive at the time, could say in retrospect these were enemies from day one.

They presented themselves as friends, but Zerubbabel and Jeshua nailed it right from the start. “You have no lot or part in this. You are not our friends. You’re not the friends of our God, and therefore we’re not going to be nice. We’re not going to say polite words. We’re going to tell you no. We’ll do it. We don’t need you. Go away.”

Of course, these people immediately set about trying to cause them problems in other directions, because, yes, religiously but primarily commercially they saw this new Jerusalem as a threat. Jerusalem revived, becoming a center of worship, that meant drawing in a lot of money. They knew enough from their history books to know that Jerusalem had been a very important city 100 years back, and did they really want another city like that? Economically and financially, what’s that going to do to their little towns?

They wanted to bring this thing down, and they knew that the easiest way to do this would be to co-op their religion. If it’s just one more town like all the others, worshiping the same sorts of gods, then it has no special claim on anything, including the emperor’s favors. So it’s a nice quiet, simple, private, non-threatening way of ending what God had sent them to do by pretending that they’re on your side. “We can all work together because we all serve the same God.”

In our generation if you say that to people you will be accused of all kinds of horrible things – not being loving or kind, being judgmental, and you can go down the list. It just depends on how vicious people want to be.

I appreciate your comeback at the beginning of all this. What did you say?

It’s a mean thing to say.

Yeah. Why is it okay for you to call me judgmental, but I can’t turn it back on you and say, “Wait, you’re judging me now.”

It’s not a long-term answer, but it’s a point that you have to get past.

No, it’s not a long-term answer except in that it redefines the argument as to what it really is. The issue is not whether we’re being proper, whether we’re dealing in the proprieties of the age, whether or not we’re being civil and accepting. Jesus draws a line. Jesus sets a wall. He’s the door. There’s no other door. There’s no other way. There’s no other name by which we may be saved.

The Jesus who claims these things is the Jesus that scripture defines, so we have to be able to go to the Bible with our so-called friend beside us and say, “Look. In the beginning already was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God.”

Not a god.

Not a god. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.”

“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”

Is this the God, is this the Jesus you’re talking about? And can you say “God from God, light from light, very God of very God, begotten, not made; being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made”?

Are you going to get around that? Do you believe this God, this Jesus? Because there’s no other Savior. Once you say, “Well, no, I don’t believe it the way you do, but you’re making a big deal over nothing.”

No, I’m not making a big deal over nothing. This is the big deal the Bible makes. Now, you’re free in our open society to say, “I don’t believe that.” Great! Now we can have a discussion because we finally are admitting what we do and don’t believe. But as long as you’re pretending you’re one of us, and that we’re being harsh and critical, this conversation is going nowhere.

This is 1 Corinthians where Paul says you don’t expect the world to be like Christians. You don’t expect the world to live as though sin is sin. But when people inside the church start living in sin, that’s when you start saying, “No, that’s not…you’re not…”

“With such a one, know not to eat.” There are times where we draw the lines and say, “All right, you admit this is questionable, that I may not approve of it, that it may skirt the creeds. Let’s come right out and say out you’re not a Christian, because then we can have one sort of conversation. You’re rejecting the faith? You’re rejecting creedal catholic Christianity? Okay, now we can talk. Now that we know that that’s where you stand…”

But the more you continue to insist, “No, I believe exactly what you do, but you’re just being mean,” it’s dishonest, and as long as we yield to it…

You mentioned 1 Corinthians. I would mention 2 Corinthians, “Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.” He’s not talking there primarily about marriage, though marriage is certainly included. He’s talking about this very sort of thing, any kind of bond, any kind of covenantal connection, perhaps even contractual connection that forces you to go along the same road with the unbeliever for any distance, submitting to his idolatries, his unbelief, his sins, whether they’re done in the name of Allah or Vishnu or Jesus.

We’re told not to have those kinds of connections, so we are going to be looked on as outsiders. We’re going to be looked at as troublemakers, as people who build walls, but as I said we’ll come back to talking about wall-building and the door in the next few episodes, I think.

Great. That was a great wrap-up sentence. Let’s wrap up and give some recommendations.

I would like to recommend – based on your mention of Purina lion chow – Secondhand Lions, because it’s a great movie.

I have heard of it. Tell me briefly about it.

Oh, have you not seen it?

No, I haven’t.

It’s about a young boy who’s probably 12 or 13 maybe. His mother drops him off with elderly relatives, who are rumored to be very rich. It’s a pair of uncles who live out in the sticks, sitting on their front porch with their shotguns to make sport with the traveling salesmen. That’s how they amuse themselves, because they are rumored to be incredibly wealthy, so they’re always getting traveling salesmen to come and sell them the latest snake oil or whatever.

This young boy is left there for the summer. He doesn’t really have a choice. He’s pretty uncomfortable, and he gets to know these uncles and where these rumors are coming from and are they true? In the process – I don’t even remember how or why – but they end up with a pet lion. Oh, they were going to shoot it. They thought it would be really fun to shoot a lion, so they order a lion.

The lion is really old and it won’t come out of the box and they’re like, “Well, that’s not very sporting,” so they don’t shoot it in the box. Then it gets into their cornfield and so they have a secondhand lion. It’s a charming movie about storytelling and familial relationships and such.

Very good. I’m going to recommend a writer, of whom I must say I do confess my faults this day in that I have not read her nearly enough, but I’m going to recommend Flannery O’Connor, largely because some of the things you just said for some reason called that up, but also some of the things we were talking about earlier.

Flannery O’Connor was Roman Catholic writing in the last century, writing from the point of view of the world that she knew. She’s not your modern evangelical writer where every chapter begins with a Bible verse and there’s a conversion by Act 3. You read this woman’s writings and you may be hard-pressed at times to say, “This is a Christian? She’s writing about weird stuff and weird people.”

And it’s so morbid.

It is in places very morbid, and was the South really like this? Is America and are people really like this? But in her I think you will find the very kind of thing we’ve been talking about, the realization that people are not perfect. People have a lot of problems, and yet grace is real. Covering yourself with the name of love and forgiveness, the illusion of kindness and acceptance, is no match for the real thing. But the real thing may surprise you as to what it looks like and how it comes about and what circumstances you may be faced with to deal with it.

My wife could give you a better recommendation book by book, short story by short story, but let’s throw that out there and perhaps somebody will come back and say, “Yeah, you should particularly read….” because we’re looking for recommendations and we’re not getting a whole lot from people out there. So somebody should come along and recommend some Flannery O’Connor short stories or such that we should be looking at, and anything else that you want to recommend, because we want to do that special episode before too long.

Yeah, a mailbag episode coming up where we share your recommendations. Send those to [email protected]. That is the best way to get hold of us for anything you’d like to say – questions, comments, snide comments, insults. We’ll take it all. David will read it.

Speaking of David, thank you to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. A big thank you to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling and upgrading our mics from time to time. It makes a big difference. If you don’t believe me, just go back and listen to our very first episode and then you’ll believe me. It makes a big difference.

We were saying we should probably re-record those conversations at some point, just because they sound so awful compared to our fancy equipment and editing software now. In any case, where were we? We were saying goodnight.

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This has been a very long end notes series so I will end it there and say good night. Thank you for listening.