That it may go well with you...

Had a decent chat with a friend lately who is recovering from a hard case of evangelical kitsch.  He was talking about going to see Passion as a sociological experiment.  I asked whether he thought he could still see God at work in Passion.  He has concluded that the entire evangelical shibboleth of identifying God's movement (e.g. "God really moved" at this service, "God is really doing cool stuff at this church," etc...) is to be abandoned posthaste.

For evangelicals, this sight has all the cultural
currency of high-waisted jeans and tucked in v-necks

I found myself thinking of the Biblical command to honor one's parents (Ex 20:12).  Paul glosses this in Ephesians with the note that it is "the first command with a promise."  It is never said that the honor commanded is conditional, as in "honor them if they're good enough."  No:  the honor of one's children is a means of God's grace to parents in a way analogous to the love, affirmation, and blessing of parents for their children.  It is by our honor of our parents that we come to maturity and fulfillment of what God calls people to be.  In this way, to dishonor one's parents is to tie oneself in unhealthy ways to them and (ironically) to the failures that we despise in the first place.  Each act of dishonor yokes us closer to the things we dislike.  In the divine economy, one grows past the failures of the previous generation by honoring them, by receiving the gifts that have come down through them, and forgiving as many mistakes as there may be.

Oh yeah, we're hip like that.

None of this, it should be said, precludes telling the truth about one's parents.  My father abused and beat me for most of my life.  The command to honor one's parents does not prevent me from saying he did this.  Nor does the fact that he did, however, determine my ability to honor him.  By God's grace, I have won through to a place where I can be grateful for the gifts that are mine because I am my father's son, even if he did not cooperate in the gift of them to me.

I believe that it is my grateful receipt of these gifts to me that honors an undeserving father.  In the same way, what I wanted to counsel my friend was that we only grow greater than our parents in our honor of them.  Evangelicalism's excesses are so obvious to my friend.  Its historical amnesia, its unawareness of its own role in perpetuating some of our culture's injustices, and its unwillingness to be challenged by the wider church, for many former evangelicals, give the lie to its sense of the felt nearness of God.  But we grow past these things not by our disdain but by our honor.  Things I have received from evangelicalism:  1)  a love for and devotion to the Scriptures; 2)  a sense that God's work in the world should create a here-and-now community (this is the evangelical ecclesiology; Catholicism for all its insistence upon the visible Church has an actual life together that repeatedly challenges evangelicals when they convert);  3)  a robust sense of the summons to proclaim the Gospel in the world; and 4) an expectation that the God to whom we pray is a God from whom we can expect action.  I have seen the finger of God miraculously at work; it was evangelicals who taught me to ask for that and expect that I might see it.  These are precious gifts–the kind of thing one should be grateful to receive.  A mature child loves and cherishes her parents for the gifts they have been to her without legitimizing their failures.  So, friend, disdain your heritage if you will, but all you are doing is lashing yourself to the things you despise; if Genesis is a faithful witness, failure to honor one's parents pretty much dooms one to repeat their mistakes in another key.  Honor an undeserving parent, and you not only grow beyond your father's gates, but you become part of how God redeems your father's old age.  Thus, by God's good grace, it goes well with you in the land you inherit from your father.