Actions Speak Louder than Words
A young man spoke to me not long ago and said that he was taking a break from church. He stressed that he loves God but feels that too many church people are more concerned with who wins elections than who comes to church. I tried to persuade him to hang in there, that churches are comprised of all kinds of people, and sometimes we encounter people with an axe to grind. Only time will tell if my words had any effect.
Sadly, many people are not finding spiritual fulfillment within the church. Young people, especially, are seeking other avenues to fulfill their spiritual hunger, not because they have given up on God—they have not—but they have grown tired of a church that doesn’t practice what it preaches, that doesn’t live out what it says it believes.
I wish I could write that this is an aberration. I wish I could tell you that the church through the centuries has been a model of godly behavior and action, but I can’t. Late in the 2nd century, according to the early Church Father Tertullian, the church had already acquired an unsavory reputation as “the leprous bride of Christ.” A century later when Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire things went from bad to worse.
The Crusades, the Inquisition, the religious wars in the 17th century that killed up to one third of the European population, the genocidal treatment of Native Americans, in which the church was all too often complicit, and the church’s justification of slavery have all left leprous scabs on the church. The adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely describes, unfortunately, much of church history. Historically, whenever the church gains political power, the church abdicates spiritual power.
But the church has not always been held in such low esteem in the public’s eye. In the 150 years or so after Jesus, the church earned a reputation as a caring and benevolent body of people who gave willingly of their resources to help the poor and care for the sick. The followers of Jesus lived simple and moral lives. They welcomed the stranger and made room for the outsider in their homes. They entered into plague invested cities to care for the infected and dying at the risk of their lives. The early church had no political power, in fact, their religion was deemed illegal by the ruling empire, and yet their selfless actions demonstrated the reality of God in their lives. In the century after Jesus the church was at its height of spiritual power, changing the world through acts of love, even though it had no political power at all.
After almost 40 years of serving the church as a pastor, I still don’t know of a better way to share faith and change the world than to be kind and loving toward all people. Like most ministers I have had my share of conversations with skeptics, atheists and disgruntled church members. Early in my ministry I would try to overwhelm these people who struggled with faith for one reason or another with a barrage of finely tuned explanations or apologetics. I would argue and debate with them. Not anymore. God’s love can’t be proven by arguments. After a lifetime of listening to people in pain, seeing inexplicable tragedies and an assortment of other ills, I have learned to sympathize with those who aren’t able to negotiate the distance between unbelief and belief. It is a short distance, really, but I have found that it can only be traversed through acts of love.
The church is called to do one thing really well—the church exists to convey the love of God in tangible and spiritually meaningful ways. People are not interested in what we have to say until they know how much we care.
Years ago a woman who was facing a serious surgery asked me to visit and befriend her husband. She wept as she told me of their deep love for one another, but she was concerned that he expressed no appetite for God. His life had been one of skepticism and spiritual apathy.
In the aftermath of the surgery the woman went from bad to worse. She never left the hospital, and eventually was moved to hospice care where she died quietly one evening, surrounded by church members and her husband. In the three or four weeks of her hospital and hospice stay, her husband hardly left her side and throughout that experience people from the church came by to offer assistance. They sat with the dying woman and broken-hearted husband for hours. They brought him beverages to drink, magazines to read and offered words of encouragement and hope. When he was exhausted and went home to sleep for a few fitful hours, women stayed with his wife so she would not be alone.
After the funeral service I escorted the husband back to the family car. He was a tall man with broad shoulders, but he was visibly stooped as we made our way to the waiting sedan. He said nothing for a long time but as we neared the black limousine, he turned to me and said, “Michael, I’ve never really believed in God. There just was no evidence that made sense to me—until now. Over the last few weeks I have felt something within me that I have never felt before. Maybe I’m just tired or maybe my emotions are too raw. I don’t know. But maybe God is trying to speak to me.”
The grieving husband became open to the possibility of God and that openness was brought about through the unconditional love of other people. For this deeply distressed man acts of kindness and love brought near the presence of God. Just ordinary human beings, fulfilling their purpose as God’s image in the world, gave the stricken husband a sense of divine presence.
God’s presence is never more clearly revealed than when we love each other. The beloved disciple penned these words, “No one has ever seen God; but if we love each other, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” (1 Jn. 4:12).
We can say we believe in God and quote Bible passages all day long, but that’s not what makes our belief valid. Only when our words and our actions help us to build a better world, a world where violence and hatred give way to peace and understanding, will the world know that the church represents divine presence on earth.
We cannot see God but we can see each other. And it is the person we see who challenges the authenticity of our faith. For it is much easier to love an unseen God than it is to love the neighbor who allows his trash to blow into our yard!
