We have a friend who never liked bread crust as a child. She
would eat out the center of a slice of bread, nibbling away up to the edge of
the crust, which she would leave on her plate. Her mother told her to eat it,
but she refused. She simply didn’t like the crust. Sandwiches, dinner rolls,
and toast would all be carefully deconstructed, the bread eaten, the crust left
behind. Her mother told her that God watches us all the time, every moment, and
saw everything. God saw her refusing to eat her crust. Every time she left a
crust, God knew it, and added that crust to a house he was building for her in
heaven. When she got there, she would find herself inside that house of crusts.
She would have to eat her way out before she could be with Jesus. Our friend
grew up to discover her mother’s oft-repeated fabled house of crusts was a lie
even though she still isn’t fond of crusts.
Stories like that can shape our view of God, grace, and
heaven.
When I fidgeted in church as a child, I was told that not
liking worship meant I didn’t love God sufficiently. Was I reading my Bible
regularly? Was there something I had done wrong that I hadn’t confessed? Worship
in heaven was continuous, unceasing—and that was the standard for what is best—which
I took to mean that heaven was one never-ending worship service. That struck me
as so mind numbingly boring, so hopelessly dreadful I feared going to heaven. I
didn’t want to go to hell of course, but the idea of heaven-as-worship-service
almost made me ill.
Whatever else we may say about them, such stories told to
get children to behave are a form of legalism.
Let me define that term so there is (hopefully) no misunderstanding. Legalism is anything that suggests we can
earn redemption, achieve or add to our own righteousness, or by accomplishing
something (doing or not doing something) gain increased favor with God, or when
rules are added to maintain conformity to some tradition. It is using the
law to try to change someone, even though true change is always the work of
grace. It is forgetting that law can never solve the deepest problems of the
human heart. Whatever the motivation, such stories help children to see God
primarily in terms of judgment and the faith primarily in terms of duty. We may
get over the stories easily but find the subtle shaping of our hearts and
imaginations much harder to leave behind.
This past summer a mother I know gave her 7-year old son a
haircut. Short for the hot weather and ease of care, but sort of Mohawk style
instead of the more common buzz cut all his friends were sporting. It wasn’t
radical, just different, though the men at the prayer meeting of their
fundamentalist church didn’t see it that way. They teased him mercilessly, all
supposedly in good fun, and so relentlessly the boy finally cried. One of the
brethren said to the boy’s father, laughing, that the boy would be careful
about haircuts the rest of his life—a good lesson for a child to learn.
I find such abusive behavior appalling. For one thing, the
haircut was the mother’s choice and they undercut her authority in a way that
is stunning in its cruelty. For another, a buzz-cut is not more spiritual than
a Mohawk. To maintain conformity by shunning and manipulating shame and guilt
is practically speaking to be dismissive of grace. To imply that his haircut
made him less welcome in and by the church is to forget the meaning of the
gospel.
I tell these stories as illustrative of legalism, a plague
that infects evangelical Christianity. God’s law is a true “delight” as David
said (Psalm 1), but when rules proliferate and when law replaces grace legalism
is the result and it is deadly.
Do you have stories of legalism? I’d love to have you leave
them as comments in this conversation.
This entry was posted
at Monday, December 06, 2010
and is filed under
Christian faith,
Grace,
Law,
Legalism
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