Not Fond of Tents

Since beginning my practice of observing the Sabbath, this may be the first weekend when I didn’t feel completely prepared for it. Yesterday I beat the garage into shape again, and it would have been great to devote today to other areas in need of organization. I have parts for shelves I haven’t put up. I have a sick pest tree I need to chain to a bumper and rip out of the ground. I also want to try my ant remedy on the bees. I know bees will slurp down sugar water if you give it to them, and I’ve been annihilating ghost ants successfully with a syrup of sugar and boric acid, and I think I would be smart to put a dish of it up where the bees can find it. But it’s Sunday. I have other obligations.

Almost every Sunday, I think a little about things I could be doing. Trips to the gun range. Barbecuing. Fishing. Contacting radio stations about the book. But this weekend is worse than usual. Doesn’t matter; Sunday is Sunday. I’m going to behave.

I’m not sure how strict to be. I’m not bound by all the Jewish commandments. I don’t get hysterical if I find myself running an errand in the car, or buying something I need. But I want the main purpose of the day to be clear.

Sometimes I just plain get tired of reading the Bible and so on, and I do something else for a couple of hours. I don’t think that’s a problem, although I won’t do anything business-related.

I’ve been reading more of Brother Andrew’s books. I’m very impressed by this man, but I can’t help suspecting that his version of Christianity may be too demanding for most believers. Or maybe I misunderstand his message. On the one hand, he talks about giving without reserve, and he encourages former Muslims to stay in countries where they are likely to be martyred (some of them are already dead), and he writes about crossing borders with contraband Bibles in plain view in his car. On the other, he seems to have had a fair number of Christian friends who led normal lives and didn’t live in tents. I can think of more than one who were well-off, although some of them lived modestly in order to support evangelism and charity. And he seems financially secure, personally. His organization has a big, reliable income, as it should. He lives in a house, not a cell. The president of Open Doors makes $135,000 per year, which is a reasonable but substantial salary.

It is possible to be overly proud of your faith, and of the things you do because of it. It is possible to show off, as a Christian, and to hold yourself up as an extreme example for other people to follow, when in reality, they’re probably doing fine already. It’s a danger that has to be considered. You don’t want to be a fat worldly slob who only pretends to believe, and who never denies himself anything. But poverty is bad, and being martyred is only a good thing if God demands it, and the super-righteous can be extremely tiresome and hypercritical.

One of the things that drove me away from the church was the constant repetition of the claim that if Christians didn’t have perfect lives, it was because they weren’t doing it right. TV evangelists said this all the time, and the message made its way into a lot of churches. If you were sick or poor, or if your family was a mess, you weren’t praying enough. Or you weren’t praying the right way. Or you weren’t giving enough. Or you were giving enough, but with the wrong motive. Or you were giving enough, with the right motive, but you were giving it in the wrong way. Or you weren’t claiming what you wanted and “maintaining your confession.” Or there was sin in your life! Apparently, God only helps people who are totally free of sin. When God failed to back the somewhat heretical promises of the TV evangelists, they had more defenses than O.J. Simpson, and they all boiled down to, “It’s your fault.” What they really meant was, “We want to keep taking your money so we can live in luxury beyond Solomon’s wildest dreams, so keep blaming yourselves and writing those checks.”

I have no doubt that some people are called to lead lives of austerity and deprivation, but there were plenty of Jews and Christians in the Bible who had good jobs and lived in nice homes. And you can’t call yourself to be an apostle or a martyr. It doesn’t work that way. And making Christianity overly burdensome discourages other believers, so it’s counterproductive. That’s especially true when the person making religion burdensome is a hypocritical TV evangelist with his own jet. “Keep cutting coupons and patching your kids’ clothes, so my Gulfstream can have a better home theater.”

It’s hard to know where to draw the boundaries. All I know for sure is this: you have to be in the world, but the world shouldn’t be in you. I suppose that if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll know which earthly things pose a danger to you and which don’t. For example, some people can be warped by modest wealth, and others can have millions and be uncorrupted.

I want to be clear; I would never compare Brother Andrew to the TV guys. Not based on what I know now. I started out writing about him, and then I went off on a tangent.

Anyway, the books are good reading.