spirituality: “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” (verses 6-7, NIV). Adventist spirituality tends to be of the personal variety:


studying the Bible and Sabbath School lesson, praying, paying tithe, attending church, eating the right foods, and for the most devoted, bringing new people into the faith; surely these are all good things. But Isaiah’s vision is so much more expansive: Set the people of the world free from bondage! Tat includes financial bondage, spiritual bondage, and even the bondage of religion itself. It’s not by accident that Jesus recaps these works of mercy in his picture of the judgment recorded in Matthew 25, where he says that when you’ve fed and clothed the poor and visited criminals in prison, you have literally done it for him.


A new Adventism will seek out God’s big intentions: doing justice, loving mercy, being humble, taking care of the widows and orphans and children, showing charity and kindness, and living in peace in our congregations and towns.


Principled, Consistent Some of us, even while living out our faith, have gotten entangled in the kudzu. We do good things—rather small, easy ones—but inconsistently. Years ago, I had a church member whose reputation for


cheating business owners in his small town was so bad that I nearly got beat up when, as a young pastor, I was told to do Harvest Ingathering there, and people recognized me as coming from his church. Yet, with not a little pride, this man kept reminding us that he had never let a bit of pork pass his lips. I


22 AD VENTIS T T OD A Y


also remember a woman who, although rather loose with both her morals and the truth, bragged to me that for her entire life she’d never placed any book on top of the Bible. I suppose that eschewing pork and protecting Bible covers are


both good things, but they describe a decidedly weak spiritual ethic. I am remembering how the Pharisees—well-educated scholars who, according to Jesus, had figured out how to legally steal money from the poor, were willing to stone women they themselves had corrupted, and refused support to their aged parents—would also punctiliously divide their small crops of mint, sage, and dill into 10 piles before dropping off one of those piles at the temple (Luke 11:42)! Again, being right doesn’t make us like Jesus.


The Main Thing I am finding myself increasingly motivated by the desire, as an old cliché goes, to make the main thing the main thing. We Adventists have many things that we think are important. But when nothing is especially important, we risk becoming self-righteous book stackers and vegetarians. Rather than sorting through all of the possible small things we can distill from the Bible and Ellen White, a new Adventism will seek out God’s big intentions: doing justice, loving mercy, being humble, taking care of the widows and orphans and children, showing charity and kindness, and living in peace in our congregations and towns. I love the apostle Paul’s odd and unexpected conclusion to


his list of the fruits of the Spirit: “Against such there is no law.” Tere is a note of intentional irony here; who would suppose goodness to be illegal? Yet, Paul meant something more: the most important virtues can be neither imposed nor regulated. Tey are not doctrines. Tey are not rules. Tey spring naturally from a heart right with God. Jeremiah said (31:33), and Hebrews repeated (8:10), that the most valuable kind of faith is written on the heart. It becomes, under the Spirit’s influence, intrinsic to one’s personality—“hard wired,” in engineering terms. Tis is so powerful, says Paul, that even unbelievers “show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them” (Rom. 2:14-15, NIV). Astonishing! People outside the church, who have never read


a word of Scripture, can be more “Christian” than Christians themselves! Here is where a new Adventism must find itself: it must—it


cannot otherwise—deemphasize doctrines and rules in favor of simple Christian goodness.


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