GETTING IT RIGHT: OBEDIENCE IN THE REAL WORLD

My last blog was on “Getting It Wrong” when reading a parable. This time is “Getting It Right.” The first in this intended series (Lord willing) is

On Eating and Drinking

In the June issue of Christianity Today, a friend from my church published an article called “The Case for an Alcohol Free Life.” In this article she describes how that while many Evangelicals today do not share the aversion to alcohol that a previous generation experienced, she has become a total abstainer for the sake of her ministry to a community where alcoholism is rampant and demonic. What I find so fascinating is the fact that a generation ago, I made the opposite decision, but for almost identically the same reason, when my witness was among a different group of people.

In 1966 while on a flight to South America with a musical group from Wheaton College, I drank only water when the other forty-nine of my fellow tee totaling Wheaton students requested cokes with their dinner. The reason I chose water was the panic I noticed on the faces of the people serving us as they ran out of cokes. All of us had signed “the pledge” to not drink alcohol while enrolled at the school, and wine normally came with the in flight dinner. I wondered whether the people who served us would remember us to be an attractive Christian group or as just a strange nuisance.

Later in 1969 while on a short term teaching assignment I began performing French horn and trumpet with the Nairobi Orchestra in Kenya (There were only two of us on high brass in the city). At the first rehearsal a lanky bassoonist from England walked up to me with hand outstretched and said, “I have made a vow that the first French hornist who comes to Nairobi will enjoy champagne and dinner with me and my wife at my house.”    It wasn’t long before I had concluded that in this place with these people, I not only needed to “eat what was set before me (1 Co. 10:27)” but also to share a drink to avoid creating a social barrier to my witness.

My friend and I, each in a different situation, made an ethical choice completely opposite from each other, but both for the same reason. Both sought to build relationships in the most effective way for the maximum result in advancing the work of God’s kingdom.

Effectively being the world, but not of it requires both knowledge of scripture and reliance on the Holy Spirit. Still often we come up short. Sometimes trial and error is the only way to learn the proper ethical response.  Anabaptist tradition includes congregational discernment. The assumption is that after all members have prayerfully grappled with an issue and participated in the discussion, and then after a reasonable consensus has emerged, only then can we claim, and still often tentatively, to know the mind of Christ on an issue. I’ll have more on this next time.

“Then never let anyone criticize you for what you eat or drink, or about observance of annual festivals, New Moon or Sabbaths. These are only a shadow of what was coming: the reality is the body of Christ. Do not be cheated of your prize by anyone who chooses to grovel to angels and worship them, pinning every hope on visions received, vainly puffed up by a human way of thinking; such a person has no connection to the Head, by which the whole body, given all that it needs and held together by its joints and sinews, grows with the growth given by God.

If you have really died with Christ to the principles of this world, why do you still let rules dictate to you, as though you were still living in the world?—Do not pick up this, do not eat that, do not touch the other, and all about things which perish even while they are being used…” (Colossians 2:18-22 New Jerusalem Bible).