Heroism. Its complicated. www.bruceleesmith.co

28. August 2011 by BruceSmith.

Heroism.  Its Complicated.

Listen or read much of what comes from motivational talks or too many pulpits and Christian books these days and you might think, “Wow, I’m a few easy steps away from a big heroic Christian life”.  Well, not so fast.  Its complicated.

Oh, its certainly worth the effort, but that’s the reality, its effort.  It has been said that the problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but rather, its been found hard and left untried.  And so it is.  The easy-belief Jesus portrayal by many a preacher and writer is not the Jesus of the Bible.  

Jesus had many hard things to say, “Take up your cross and follow me”.  A cross?  Not the shiny sweet thing on that chain around your neck, my dear.  The cross he spoke of is a murder tool, a sacrificial slaughter, cruel, painful, and chosen.  “Let the dead bury the dead, …you follow me” he told one man who merely asked that he bury his dead father before he went on to follow Jesus.  “Who are your family?” Jesus said to another.  The idea behind that statement is far different from our modern romantic idea that family is everything and can save the world if its kept together at any cost, an idea over-sold in some Christian circles.  Jesus’ comment was a question of allegiance and commitment.  Jesus, The Truth, pointed out that those most desiring of following him, those most actually doing that, are your true family…the implications here are profound. Blood, his blood, is thicker than…even familial blood.

So, how exactly, do we find the heroic life of faith offered us in a world gone mad?  How do we live the radically, faith-based, healthy life Jesus calls us to?  And why are there so many counter-heroic examples out there?  In a world surrounded by those who would kill our faith, how do we stand strong and live bigger lives?  Well, yes, you guessed it, “Its complicated”, but, it can be done.

Roll the tape…

I saw two movies this weekend.  As I always do, I allowed the larger metaphors to speak to me about my life, those close to me, and our culture in general.  The movies, both about enduring oppression and violence done to innocent people, could not have offered more contrasting views of how we get to the heroic ideal as human beings.

The first movie, Columbiana, is about a gruesome crime and the catastrophic denial of God’s call for forgiveness and sanity found only in him.  The second movie, The Help, itself about violence and mistreatment as well, offers a better way forward toward the call and mission of justice and peace in our world.

Let’s look at the two, and I think we can find a few clues amidst this complicated thing we call living, as we seek to live more full lives.

In the first movie, Columbiana, we are offered the tagline early on in the film, “Vengeance is beautiful”.  The heroine certainly is physically beautiful, yet, in her pain, fear, raging revenge, and violence, she is anything but beautiful in reality.  This little girl, just a grade-schooler, unquestionably witnessed an event which would affect anyone for life.  Her parents were ruthlessly murdered by a gang of drug kingpin thugs.  Her father, making his living in the wrong world, has the full effects of his own sin and inner carnage come home in a horrible way.  As she stands there, witnessing the brutality of life in 3D clarity, this little girl buries the pain and misery deep within her and then cultivates it for years to come.  Early on, she “figures out”, she must fight pain with pain, violence with violence, and she commits herself to hunting, killing, and sadistically massacring anyone associated with her parents killing.  She becomes a beautiful, intelligent, and demonic killer.  Everything and everyone in life take a backseat to this pursuit.  

You are probably asking right now, “OK? Its a movie, and I certainly don’t have a rap sheet like that, so what’s the point?”  Well, think again.  The same reality can set up shop in each of us if we are not careful.  We label it differently, we have our excuses, and we tell others of our justification, but the reality is the same.  Its the same demonic inspiration that drives Ghadafi, the now de-throned ruler of Libya. 

The Ghadafi-delusion, the Columbiana syndrome, is alive and well in suburban America, and in many pews today.  If you could pull back the layers in many “pretty” lives around you, you very well would find Columbiana and Libya fully alive and growing.  It may be in your own home.  It could be in you.  

What we have found, now, as we have toppled Ghadafi, is that the rumors of his underground city were true.  Beneath the facade of power, charisma, and the charade of authority, lay a testimony to what was really alive within the false leader, the anti-hero.  Ghadi, driven by fear, a lust for self-preservation, and an addiction to self-promotion, built an entire other-world to attempt to sustain his dysfunction.  Know anyone like that?  Every met a man or woman, beautiful and powerful on the outside, who had every manner of rage, lies, and deceit down below?  They are there.  Ever known some who, despite obvious appearance to everyone else, was utterly committed to reconstructing reality in their own mind and for the ears of others?  Ever known someone who blamed others for all manner of dysfunction in their own lives?

In Columbiana, and perhaps for Ghadafi as well, the cancer began early on in life.  Crimes against the would-be heroine or hero, dealt with in the flesh, rather than the grace of God, became a trap unto a life of retaliation, and an unquenchable thirst to be noticed, affirmed, even worshipped.  So many, in our day, live this reality.  The “parent” who only parents for selfish reasons.  The spouse who resents their husband or wife’s success and opportunity.  The son or daughter who turn against an imperfect parent in destructive ways.  We so obsess over our hurt and loss that we carry it into every moment forward.  The past, despite the Gospel’s power to redeem and make new, is held on to and brought into the present.  The unfolding peril is all too similar to that which has gone on in Libya for over forty years.  Captivity, oppression, madness, rage, pain, fear, jealousy, lust, abuse, poverty of soul, …its all there.

What the beautiful killer in Columbiana refused to see, what she could not see, was that she was the one she was killing each time she pulled the trigger or buried the dagger in another.  With each death, dozens of them over the years, her death became deeper and deeper.  Unwilling to let go of her own pain, unwilling to own her own heart and her own response, she just lived a life of reactive horror until everyone who cared for her was either dead or gone.  Her physical beauty was not nearly enough to make up for the ugliness within.  Those that saw past her physicality ran for the hills.  People close to her saw the end long before it ever came.  She refused to see the writing on the wall.  Eventually, she was reduced, even after every enemy was killed off, to a pathetic puddle of misery and tears.  Her rage brought more rage.  Her unrelenting grip on her pain only brought deeper pain.  Her vengeance stole her potential beauty and turned her into a living breathing tragedy.  Not seeing what was happening, all of the unfolding of the story and all the outcomes were all justified in her eyes.

As Ghadafi now scrambles to evade those seeking him out, those underground bunkers have become his very prison.  In reality, long before he was toppled, and whether he is ever caught or not, he has lived in inner captivity most of his life.  The women, the wealth, the power, none of it has ever been enough.  He is mad with deception.

Back to us.  Our culture is spiraling toward this same state of being.  Take note of what is unfolding around us and within us.  As we justify our present response to others and to life, and as we abandon God’s call to a different way of living, our inner lives, our personal lives, and our society crumble.  Abandoning truth, grace, mercy, and all manner of loveliness, we are descending, too quickly, into a state of intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and cultural decay.  As he spoke it to others, Jesus now speaks to us, “Take up your cross, and follow me.  Now”.  Now is the day of salvation from our  madness.  Now is the day to stop the warring.  Now is the day to drop your weapons of personal and relational destruction.  Now is the day for a new start.  If you keep killing off your “enemies” and if anyone who does not grant you your wishes becomes your “enemy”, eventually, you will be left standing alone.  

Jesus said, “Come to me all who are weary and I will you rest”.  A similar comment, made toward the end of The Help, as a more compassionate, and truth-telling heroine, confronts a suburban wife gone made with manipulation, lies, and abuse of others, strikes this chord accurately.  Looking the self-absorbed, beautifully ugly, house-wife in the eye, as she is accusing the compassionate heroine in ways false and profoundly nasty, the heroine simply says, “Aren’t you tired?”

That is the question for us, my friends.  “Aren’t you tired?”  Tired of living a false reality?  Tired of warring with those who love you?  Tired of hurting back because someone hurt you when you were young?  Tired of the patterns that have ruined marriage after marriage, relationship after relationship?  Tired of rage?  Tired of re-constructing reality in order that people will buy into your version of reality?  Tired of wrecking your home?  Tired of harbouring hate for your ex?  Tired of getting back at your ex through your current spouse or loved one?  Tired of trying to find inner peace through external and even unnatural beauty?  Tired of building your heart through building an empire?  Tired of trying to get your name on a trophy instead of in God’s roster for life? Tired of trying to capture the love of your father through ways that will never accomplish that?  

Aren’t you tired?

What are you tired of?  Put it down.  Walk away from it.  Drop your weapons of mass destruction.  Find your way to Jesus and take up the cross.  It is in the cross, the marker for health and wholeness, that we see our inner world come together.  Yes, life will continue to be painful, and others will continue to hurt us.  Yet, at the cross, by the power of God, we find a better way forward.  At the cross, the emblem of true love, we find ourselves loved and we find the power to love amidst the complicated realities of this life.

This is the backdrop of The Help.  The Help, as the group of racially and socially oppressed maids were often called, found an intelligent, truthful, creative, and ultimately life-giving way forward.  What The Help affirms, and it is so true, is that truth must be told, people must be confronted, AND grace must win the day.

We are too tempted to believe that Jesus’ way is a way to be run over.  That is not true.  Jesus, Love defined, spoke the truth without reservation.  It was often hard and direct.  Love requires that at some point.  Love does not ignore reality or allow others to continually to wack us with their false ways of living.  Love extends grace, moves toward persuasion of those off track, and directly confronts when needed.  It is loving to grab hold of someone and wake them up to a reality that is killing them and others around them.

Dr. Henry Cloud speaks of this in his book on Necessary Endings.  He addresses this other places as well.  Those off track in the workplace, family, and other networks, must be told the truth.  Those who are truly living lives of Christ-inspired grace want, even crave to know when they are off track.  Therefore, bringing truth to them helps them and others.  They are thankful for it.  You can see it in their eyes.  They say, “Lead me, input in my life, let me have it!”  

Those who talk the lingo of faith, family, and team, and yet respond in rage, shut-down tactics, and aggression, and who wear all of this on their faces when you go to them, even in love, are playing the anti-heroic role of the fool, defined biblically.  Sometimes the fool can be saved, but it takes a direct hard confrontation.  Other times you just have to share reality with them and leave it at that and see if over a defined period of time they address the carnage that is destroying them and others.  Then, finally, if the “fool” does not respond and only continues in the patterns of destruction, its time for an ending to take place.  Attaching ourselves in business, family, teams, and ministry to those who, like Ghadafi and Columbiana, refuse to deal with the bunkers below, only kills the life of God in you and destroys the mission God has given you for the long haul.

Yes, the heroic life of God in us can be thwarted by pain and abuse.  But it does not have to be so.  Jesus, Love incarnate, was abused, abandoned, ridiculed, beaten, and killed by those he gave himself to.  Yet, his response, unlike that of the would-be heroine in Columbiana, was truly beautiful, “Forgive them…they know not what they do”.

If you want the uncomplicated life of rest beyond reason, grace unending, peace beyond circumstance, and love beyond degree, you will not find it playing captive to your pain.  Like Christ, you must lay down your weapons, you must lay your very self down, and allow God to be God in and though you.  This is a supernatural life.  This is a life seldom seen, infrequently pursued, and rarely mastered.  This is the life of Christ-like heroes.  

Bruce Smith

www.bruceleesmith.co

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