ReFocused or not, here I come. . .

Jonah 4:11 (NIV)

“. . . Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?”

 I suppose my interest in the city has come to a finer point since I have recently assumed a pastorate in one. Of moderate size and immoderate spiritual hunger, this city is virtually glutted with religious information. After all, we live in the “buckle of ‘the Bible Belt’”. There are churches (predominately evangelical in flavor) on many street corners and seemingly everybody goes to church.

But there is little sign of God in my city. Not if you were to remove the steeples and spires and tuck the church signs (with the cute messages) behind the well-tended shrubs that stand like silent sentries around the houses of worship. No. If you take away the signs with their words and the buildings and other physical property, you’d look a while before you’d notice God in this nice little town I’m from.

But let me tell what I can see from my study window (safe within my fortress-church). We’ll have about thirty or forty “winos” and “junkies” wander over our lawn on their way to buy liquor or turn a trick today. (Hey, I’m not making a rash judgment or a baseless assumption about some of these people, the ‘Police Blotter’ of the local paper backs me up on this). At night, if I sit out on the back steps, I can hear any number of my neighbors — some under the influence, some perhaps not — fighting and cussing and breaking up their already broken up houses. . . their small, frightened children screaming out a kind of tortured chorus of terror as though they were a choir on loan from Hell. It’s worship of a type, I guess. Devotion to the “gods” they truly fear.

The women will cry, (sobs broken only by curses better-practiced than our cantatas), and the men will wear themselves out until they fall down insensible on the floor . . . their empty souls no longer able to goad them to the kind of rage fear alone can generate.

The cop cars will cycle endlessly through the nighborhood. Sometimes they move with lights off down darkened streets. They search the shadows for something – someone who is where they ought not be, doing what they ought not do. A siren will break the silence, signal that life is changing for somebody nearby. . . somebody without a face or name, at least for me.

And the night will hide this work of Hell from my willingly blinded eyes. Hide a great part of the evil that pulses through these Christian streets and past these Christian churches. And, when the sun and I arise, I will go off to my Christian city to do my Christian duty — and never have to look into the eyes of those children who are damaged from the previous night’s ugly toil or wonder why that woman has such lifeless eyes or where her man has gotten himself off to.

Come Sunday I will thank my God for every blessing sent . . . but never wonder where my neighbors went.

. . .  

But there is Someone who is concerned about the city. He said so, right there in Jonah 4:11… “Should I not be concerned about that great city?” I reckon He is, too. Concerned about each person in it, of whatever economic status, or race, or even religion. God loves each one (John 3:16) and intends to bless and redeem each one who comes to Him through His Son, Jesus Christ.

But there’s a problem. God has only one way to get that message to my neighbors. . . and that’s through me. Can it be that while I have been grumbling about crime and criminals, poverty and poor-folk, un-Christian lifestyles and religions, and “them” (whoever “they” may be), God has been grumbling about a certain slow-minded, bigoted, unevangelistic Evangelical in my town who refuses to be of any use whatever to the Kingdom of Light, Love and Hope? How is it possible that a person of normal intelligence, such as myself, who stopped believing in fairytales long, long ago, still acts as if my town will be evangelized by ‘the Great Evangelization Fairy’ some night while I’m safely tucked in my bed?

It was at the turn of the 19th Century that a certain Methodist preacher (named E. M. Bounds) said bluntly:  “[People] are God’s method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better [people].”

If the city God cares about so deeply is to be touched and transformed then I must be engaged in that process from beginning to end. I must be willing to get as dirty as the things that pollute the lives my neighbors around me in order to help them to the ‘Fountain opened for Sin and Uncleanness’ (Zechariah 13:1). If the hopeless are ever to discover hope I must climb down into the pit of their dark despair and help to lift them to the ‘light of life’ (John 8:12). If they could make it by themselves they would have made it long ago. If they could find Jesus without our involvement, why did Jesus send us? (Matthew 28:19, 20; Mark 16:15, 16; Luke 24:47, 48; Acts 1:8 )

So, tonight, I will begin to pray a brand-new prayer. It goes something like this . . .

“Lord, Lay some soul upon my heart. And love that soul through me.

And may I ever do my part to win that soul to Thee.”

(What’s that? That’s an old song?) Well, you’re right. It is an old song.

But if I would really mean those words, and if God would really help me to live that way. . . it wouldn’t be an old thing; it would be something brand-new for most of the people of my city to behold.

 Save the city, Lord . . . and let me help.