In the fall, I spend my free moments on Saturdays and Sundays watching football. That hardly sets me apart from most Texan males, but it has occasionally earned me a stinging rebuke from my daughter. Last season, she would merely cry every time I switched the television from cartoons to pigskin and say, "I hate football."
This season, she is a year older and bit more observant. In fact, for a moment, I thought I had peaked some interest in her for the game this past Saturday. She sat in my lap and I explained lines of scrimmage, first downs, and tackling. As I described tackling, the player who was being tackled remained on the ground writhing and he had to be helped off of the field where he was tended to by trainers. "I don't like football, Daddy," she said, "It's a mean game." I suppose she has a point. I did not, however, shut off the television. Mean game or no, few things get my competitive juices, as vicariously as they may be, flowing like a good football game. There is some-thing about my team versus your team, my state versus your state, my favorite players versus yours. Plus, I figure that as barbaric as football can be, it's far more civilized than warfare, gladiatorial matches, and church in-fighting. Okay, so I snuck up on you with that last one, but it's true. Church conflict is a mean game.
Perhaps it is because we perceive that so much is at stake. Perhaps it is because we misunderstand the people we perceive to be our adversaries. Perhaps it is because we are human and we humans are notorious for getting crossways over insignificant minutiae. Whatever the initial reasons for conflict were, they seldom matter for long. Once conflicts escalate, they cease to be as much about what as they are about who.
Paul, in writing to the church in Philippi, ad-dresses a conflict from what seems to be two prominent women within the congregation: Euodia and Syntyche. Paul never addresses the issue. The issue no longer mattered. The conflict was past who was wrong and who was right. Both sides had be-come wrong because they had forgotten something more important than whatever they were fighting about: they were sisters in Christ.
Paul, like a therapist giving an assignment to a quarreling couple, gives these women (and any-one who, as so often hap-pens in church conflicts, might have become em-broiled in this conflict themselves) a homework assignment. We quote his instructions often, but we seldom remember that they are addressing a real life instance of church conflict. Paul challenges them, "whatever is true, whatever is noble, what-ever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."
Before we hurt a brother or sister and leave them writhing on the field of play after a vicious hit in a mean game, Paul challenges to see more in our brothers and sisters than the adversaries in a conflict they themselves have come to represent. We're not to dwell on our differences of approach or opinion. We're to think about anything we can find that is excellent and praiseworthy, because if we look, we will find that which God is carrying forward to completion in them and such a realization should, no, must change our hearts.
Read more...
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori and Ram Brafman
Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer
