Strange But Not Weird?

Freak. Extremist. Religious Nut.  If you have been a Christian long enough you have heard the names the unbelieving world gives to believers.  The problem is, sometimes you kind of agree.  There are people that get themselves situated on a street corner with signs and beards and materials that make us cringe.  Is that weird or is that the kind of “strange” the Bible says we are and will be in this world.  We must be different, but how different?  And in what kinds of ways?  When does a good different become a bad weird? 

Our first question must be this: What is normal?  We have to establish a baseline before we can measure what is divergent.  We need what the science community calls a “control.”  So where do we go to establish normalcy for humans?  This actually is a big deal to settle.  It will be the engine of all counseling.  What are you trying to get people to become?   What is a normal human being?  The answer for that is found in one person and one source.  Jesus Christ is the one normal human being.  Only God can tell us what we are designed to be, and he didn’t only tell us, but this same God also became a human to display it for us.  Therefore, what is normal is established by God’s word and displayed to us in Christ. 

Jesus showed us love in action.  It was perfect love because it conformed to the two great commands which are to love God and to love your neighbor.  Let’s remember though, his perfect love was often surprising and counterintuitive.  We see him bringing severe rebukes, teaching hard truths, clearing the temple, and showing compassion in unconventional ways.  Yet all of it was done in loving obedience to the Father, and to bring transformational truth to people.  These same commitments, obeying the Father and loving people in word and deed, must drive us as well.

There are other places in scripture which fill this out, showing us what manner we are to bring the truth in love to our neighbor.  Here are a few key biblical statements that we are going to focus on for answering our question:

1 Corinthians 9:22b I have become all things to all men, so that I may by all means save some.

Titus 3:2 to malign no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing every consideration for all men.

1 Peter 2:12 Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation.

Combining these statements we can form a statement of how a Christian is to live differently: 

A Christian should sacrificially lay aside any feature of personal preference that would hinder gospel witness, looking for every way to accommodate someone in hearing and understanding the truth, all while doing good for the purpose of adorning the doctrine of Christ, yet never compromising with evil either in method or message.

If you accomplish that statement, it will be a biblical “strangeness”.  It is a “strangeness” of personal sacrifice that that the world would never do: a “strangeness” of serving, even in the lowest and hardest ways, instead of being served; a “strangeness” of being dominated by the gospel message; a “strangeness” of drawing lines in the sand regarding life and practice that will be costly.  This is the kind of different that we want.  God is strange in holiness and we must be strange like him.  This is a strangeness that makes the church distinct from the world.  It is the platform for the gospel, and if you are not strange like this then your gospel witness is neutered.

Here is where the problem becomes apparent.  This strangeness is being sought by broken people.  Both of those features, brokenness and humanness, are significant.  First we are humans; a people with a culture.  We are shaped by the likes and dislikes of a certain culture, be it family culture, local culture, national culture, and all of them combined.  This means that one culture will appear weird in the eyes of another culture because their likes and dislikes don’t match.  The other feature is brokenness.  We are sinners and sin permeates from the core of the individual all the way out to the edges of himself and his culture.  Not only is a person sinful, but his culture will have certain sinful components as well.  So when you combine both of those, you have a very complicated issue.  It would seem the best thing for God to do would be to bypass it all and just use Angels to serve people and bring them the truth.  In this way, there would be creatures free from sin and without the additional complicating issue of human culture.  But God hasn’t done that.  In fact, God has a thing about using the lowliest people to promote the highest message.  This is explicitly stated in 1 Corinthians.

1 Corinthians 1:28–29 and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, 29 so that no man may boast before God.

God likes using those whom no one else would think to use.  Why?  Because then, in the heavenly realms and even in this confused world, everyone sees something clearly: God gets all the credit and glory. 

Wouldn’t it be great if all of our strangeness was the biblically driven strangeness of being like Christ?  But even if that was possible, we would still have to deal with our particular family/local/national culture weirdness slipping into the mix. In this sense, even Jesus is weird to us.  Don’t we get a bit uneasy when in John 2:4 he says to his own mother, “Woman, what does this have to do with us?”  How could he speak to his mother like this?  That is culturally weird to us, but not to them.  When he spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well, that is not culturally weird to us, but is was both culturally and biblically strange in that day. 

Weirdness has to do with things we can’t understand or don’t value.  For example, in our culture we have a wide range of hairstyles.  You may like a handful of them and others you don’t prefer but you know many people do.  But when a person likes what almost nobody (in your culture) likes, that is weird.   This gets even more complicated when you throw brain disorders into the mix.  There are people whose brains don’t process information normally and they do things that no culture likes.  This is why, if you don’t understand culture, it is easy to think foreign people are not only weird but plain crazy. 

Therefore, weirdness is never escapable because culture is never escapable.  Find the most normal person you can and somebody somewhere is going to think they do weird things.  The more they cross cultural lines, the quicker they will be found weird.  Throw in an extra unique personality, and the weird train is barreling down the crazy rails.  But when the Spirit of God begins transforming a person to love the people they encounter, then that person develops the one driving purpose: for others to know the truth about the gospel.  When that happens, a person will, in the name of love for God and love for neighbor, suppress his cultural preferences for the spread of the gospel.  The catch is that no one is ever going to do this perfectly, and sometimes there is just too much culture to suppress all at once.  What, then, is our hope?  Our hope is that God is still going to use lowly people, who are seen as strange both for cultural reasons and Christ-like reasons, to get for Him all the glory of being a saving God.    

What is the real danger when it comes to weirdness?  The real danger is found in the pursuit of cultural relevance.  A basic form of relevance is normal, but the more one pursues cultural relevance, the more he will be pulled by the seductive allure of worldliness.  This is a sellout, and it can be seen in two ways.  The first sellout is the shedding of all the strangeness of Christlikeness for the sake of higher and higher cultural relevance.  You surrender all the distinctives of holiness so that the culture s listens to you and accepts you.  Eventually, you have nothing left to say to the culture except what it is already saying to itself.  You are just one more echo in the chamber as it marches to hell, carrying you with it.  The second sellout is the abandonment of the global goal of the gospel to every tribe, tongue, and nation.  What this looks like is surrounding yourself with people just like you.  You will be admired and esteemed, but it is only because you have insulated yourself from different types of people.  You only love those who are easy to love, and who love you back.  You aren’t willing to lay aside your preferences to love people different than you, which means self-love is really at the core of this. 

What are the conclusions to be taken from this?  The first is that you must not lose your biblical strangeness, but realize you cannot lose all of your cultural weirdness.  The second statement is that we do our Spirit-filled best to adorn the doctrine of Christ with good deeds, and we do our Spirit-filled best to prefer the cultural sensitivities of those we are around.  The final statement is that we will never do any of this perfectly and so we must resist being embarrassed over God’s people; we must instead rest and rejoice in the God who shows himself powerful to save by using imperfect tools no one else could or would use.