Paradox

How do you make sense of the problem of pain and the wonder of beauty occurring in the same world? If you’ve ever had the privilege of visiting the Louvre in Paris, you probably braved the crowds to get a glimpse of the statue of Venus de Milo.

Millions have been captivated by the woman’s physical beauty displayed in stunningly smooth marble. They’ve also been disturbed by seeing her arms broken off. Somehow the damage done to her arms doesn’t destroy the aesthetic pleasure of viewing the sculpture as a whole. But it does cause a conflicted experience—such beauty, marred by such violence.

I doubt if anyone has ever stood in front of that masterpiece and asked, “Why did the sculptor break off the arms?” More likely, everyone concludes the beautiful parts are the work of a master artist and the broken parts are the results of someone or something else—either a destructive criminal or a natural catastrophe.

We need a unified perspective on created beauty and marred ugliness that can make sense of both. The Christian faith provides that. It points to a good God who made a beautiful world with pleasures for people to enjoy. But it also recognizes damage caused by sinful people. Ultimately, it points to a process of restoration that has already begun and will continue forever.

According to Business Insider, a big turn off for Gen-Z workers is what workplace experts call “a double bind.” Jeanie Chang is an expert on mental health in the workplace, and she defines it as “giving two or more contradictory messages at the same time.”

For example, claiming to value work-life balance by insisting workers are off their computers by 6pm, while at the same time supervisors routinely send messages after hours. Or when a job advertises unlimited paid time off, but workers are routinely denied PTO requests. Chang says that many Gen-Z workers use another name to describe the practice: “corporate gaslighting.”

As a member of Generation X, Chang doesn’t exactly blame managers for their double-bind habits. She thinks that many of them had the same practices modeled for them in their younger years, and just assumed that’s how work has to be. “People my age and up didn’t talk about mental health,” said Chang. She said that many of her coworkers adopted a survivalist mindset in order to battle burnout and fatigue, but they didn’t understand what was happening since they didn’t have the same common language to describe it.

By contrast, many Gen-Z workers adopt what Chang calls “a thriving mindset.” If they perceive that the company is an impediment to their happiness, many of them will quit, even without a backup plan in place.

“At the end of the day, you can't blame those older folks because they don't know what that is. So, it's a learning curve, but all sides have to be open. No one generation is better than the next.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Business; Church Staff; Volunteer Recruitment; Volunteers - Whether managing people in an office, or working with volunteers in a church, leadership must be clear about their expectations and open about the amount of time and effort that is expected and not take advantage of workers.

In an issue of CT magazine blogger and church planter Chris Ridgeway writes:

The digital voice assistant from Amazon hears me shoulder my way into the kitchen back door, arms loaded with bags. “Alexa, turn on the lights!” I command with a little desperation. “Thanks, Alexa,” I think as the lights blink on and I avoid a stumble with my gallon of milk. I don’t say it aloud—it’s a little crazy to thank your digital assistant, right? Plus, there’s that little question of who might be listening.

I don’t actually picture a headphoned FBI operative in a van outside. Yet once the lights are on, I sometimes wonder. As of 2020, there were 4.2 billion digital voice assistants being used in devices around the world. Forecasts suggest that by 2024, the number of digital voice assistants will reach 8.4 billion. These nearly universal microphones have started a new wave of discomfort about what or who might hear what we say in our living room or kitchen. What more private moments are these microphones capturing?

Perhaps the best starting place for a Christian view of privacy is to ask: Does anyone have privacy in the presence of an all-knowing God? In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve run among the trees of the garden in shame when they hear their Creator walking through the Garden. God asks, “Who told you that you were naked?” Before their transgression, before the curse, Adam and Eve were “naked and felt no shame.” Now they wear clothes and hide

It starts with: “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open.” If digital adopters worry that someone might be watching, believers know for certain Someone is and they know that Someone can be trusted even when authorities cannot be. Life as a believer starts with the truth that God does hear all and see all. The glowing Alexa in our kitchen becomes a digital icon of a greater spiritual reality.

Terrifying? Reassuring? It’s relational! If God is on our fringes, we feel violated. If he’s at the center, his presence feels like salvation itself. Salvation is a God who hears—who hears the weeping of lost Hagar, the celebration of humble Mary, the secret denial of scared Peter. Salvation is a God who knows our intimacy paradox—the simultaneous longing and fear of being known.

Niccolò Machiavelli was a Renaissance era philosopher, politician, and writer. His writings greatly influenced modern political science. The following is an edited excerpt from The School of Life’s YouTube video on his views.

Machiavelli believed that to be effective, political leaders needed to be ruthless and tyrannical, not empathetic and just. His book, The Prince, is a short manual of advice for princes on how not to finish last. And the answer was never to be overly devoted to acting nicely. and to know how to borrow every single trick employed by the most dastardly, unscrupulous and nastiest people who have ever lived.

Machiavelli knew where our counter-productive obsession with acting nicely originated from: the West was brought up on the Christian story of Jesus of Nazareth. (He was) the very nice man from Galilee who always treated people well.

But Machiavelli pointed out an inconvenient detail to this sentimental tale of the triumph of goodness through meekness. From a practical perspective, Jesus’ life was an outright disaster. This gentle soul was trampled upon and humiliated, disregarded and mocked. Judged in his lifetime and outside of any divine assistance, he was one of history’s greatest losers.

Possible Preaching Angle:

What Machiavelli (and so many others) fail to take into account is that the gentle Lamb becomes a Lion. After the seeming “defeat” of the Cross, our resurrected Lord will return in great power and glory to reign over the earth. He was exalted by the Father because of his willingness to humble himself and take on the form of a servant.

Sandra McCracken writes in CT magazine:

A few years ago, I sat on the front porch of an old farmhouse in Vermont … with two friends. Above us, at the corner of the house, hung a hummingbird feeder. Tiny winged visitors stopped by intermittently to eavesdrop while sipping nectar from the glass globe.

Hummingbird wings move at about 50 beats per second. But when they (hover), hummingbirds can appear completely motionless. A miracle of fitness and form, God made these creatures to be a delicate display of paradox: They are still and active at the same time.

These birds are a moving metaphor for the kind of trust that God outlines in Isaiah 30:15: “You will be delivered by returning and resting; your strength will lie in quiet confidence” (CSB). When I think of God’s grace at play in my own life, my most successful moments happen when I hold steady at the center. Confidence is not found in productivity, but in quietness of heart.

Our plans are not like his plans. As the hummingbird moves, his wings are invisible to us. So too the work of God is often hard to see in the moment, but nevertheless something remarkable is happening. This is what the Lord says: “Look, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Do you not see it?” (Isa. 43:19).

Rick Warren, the former pastor of Saddleback Church and the author of The Purpose Driven Life, together with his wife, Kay, went through a devastating loss when their twenty-seven-year-old son Matthew took his own life after battling depression and mental illness for years.

About a year after this tragedy, Rick said, "I've often been asked, 'How have you made it? How have you kept going in your pain?' And I've often replied, 'The answer is Easter.'

"You see, the death and the burial and the resurrection of Jesus happened over three days. Friday was the day of suffering and pain and agony. Saturday was the day of doubt and confusion and misery. But Easter—that Sunday—was the day of hope and joy and victory.

"And here's the fact of life: you will face these three days over and over and over in your lifetime. And when you do, you'll find yourself asking—as I did—three fundamental questions. Number one, 'What do I do in my days of pain?' Two, 'How do I get through my days of doubt and confusion?' Three, 'How do I get to the days of joy and victory?'

"The answer is Easter. The answer … is Easter."

Our Lord came down from life to suffer death; the Bread came down, to hunger; the Way came down, on the way to weariness; the Fount came down, to thirst. —Augustine, Sermon 78

He so loved us that, for our sake, He was made man in time, although through him all times were made. He was made man, who made man. He was created of a mother whom he created. He was carried by hands that he formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy, he the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute. —Augustine, Sermon 188, 2

"The deeper we get into reality, the more numerous will be the questions we cannot answer."

—Author and theologian Baron Von Hugel (1852-1925)

"Much of the history of Christianity has been devoted to domesticating Jesus—to reducing that elusive, enigmatic, paradoxical person to dimensions we can comprehend, understand, and convert to our own purposes. So far it hasn't worked."

We have not advanced very far in our spiritual lives if we have not encountered the basic paradox of freedom, to the effect that we are most free when we are bound. But not just any way of being bound will suffice; what matters is the character of our binding.

The one who would like to be an athlete, but who is unwilling to discipline his body by regular exercise and by abstinence, is not free to excel on the field or the tracks. His failure to train rigorously and to live abstemiously denies him the freedom to go over the bar at the desired height, or to run with the desired speed and endurance.

With one concerted voice the giants of the devotional life apply the same principle for the whole of life with the dictum: Discipline is the price of freedom.

Respect for differing views...provides some defense against the natural desire to probe incessantly the mystery of the gospel. (There are those who would consider it the ultimate intellectual achievement to unravel the hidden counsel of God.) But the pursuit of doctrine for the sake of doctrine can be idolatrous. The gospel will not be demystified. God will not be mocked by the pretensions of those who believe they might fully and certainly know His mind. Was that, after all, not the sin of the Garden?

Peace is the opposite of security.

You become stronger only when you become weaker. When you surrender your will to God, you discover the resources to do what God requires.

A while ago I was trying to fix our garage door. I came to that one screw I had to get loose, and the more I worked to loosen that screw the tighter it seemed to get. A neighbor came over and saw my plight. He looked for a moment or two and said, "Oh, this has a lefthanded thread. It's a reverse screw. You have to tighten or loosen it going in the opposite direction." It took me fifty years to find out how screws work, and now they change the rules.

There's a sense in which all the Bible is kind of a reverse screw. Everything in the culture that seems right, in the Bible comes out wrong. The way up is the way down. The way to spiritual wealth is to acknowledge your spiritual poverty. The way to live is to die. The way to rule is to serve. I mean the screw just doesn't work right. It's just incongruous.

But unless you understand the reverse nature of the screw, you never do anything. The more you try to work it according to the values of the culture, the tighter the screw gets and the less you accomplish.

The whole Bible is that way. Everything is upside down. When you come with the values of the culture and read the New Testament, it seems crazy. You spent fifty years learning how to play the game, and now they change the rules. God's always doing that.

What I am anxious to see in Christian believers is a beautiful paradox. I want to see in them the joy of finding God while at the same time they are blessedly pursuing Him. I want to see in them the great joy of having God yet always wanting Him.

In the spring of 1991, even before the brief coup in August, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev found his authority and leadership tested on all sides. From Baltic states declaring their independence, to conservatives clamoring for a return to old-line communism, to progressives pushing for more economic reforms, the Soviet Union was a nation on the brink.

Things were coming to a head when demonstrators planned a massive march on Thursday, March 28 in Moscow itself to show their opposition to government policy, hoping that 500,000 people would participate. The Kremlin banned demonstrations, issued dire warnings against protesters, and promised a massive show of force if the ban was defied. On everyone's mind was the peaceful January demonstration in Lithuania that was crushed by Soviet tanks and troops, in the process killing 14 people.

On the day of the march 50,000 troops and police crowded Moscow; 100,000 people ignored the ban and marched. Fortunately there were no clashes, but, commentating on short-wave radio, a BBC correspondent described Gorbachev's show of force as "a display of strength that showed considerable weakness." The following day Christians worldwide celebrated Good Friday, the day when Christ voluntarily went to the cross and allowed his own creation to torture and kill him. A display of weakness that showed considerable strength.

We live in a world full of people struggling to be, or at least to appear, strong in order not to be weak; and we follow a gospel which says that when I am weak, then I am strong. And this gospel is the only thing that brings healing.

Although his biography presents many dramatic contrasts, these were in reality only different facets of a common allegiance to a sovereign God. Thus, Edwards both preached ferocious hell-fire sermons and expressed lyrical appreciations of nature because the God who created the world in all its beauty was also perfect in holiness. Edwards combined herculean intellectual labors with child-like piety because he perceived God as both infinitely complex and blissfully simple.

In his Northampton church his consistent exaltation of divine majesty led to very different results--he was first lionized as a great leader and then dismissed from his pulpit. Edwards held that the omnipotent deity required repentance and faith from his human creatures so he proclaimed both the absolute sovereignty of God and the urgent responsibilities of men.

At the elementary school where I teach, we recently had a problem with students throwing rocks. The principal made an announcement over the intercom warning students that anyone caught throwing rocks would be taken home by him personally. Later that day, during afternoon recess, a teacher admonished a kindergartner for throwing a rock.

"Didn't you hear what the principal said this morning?!" the teacher said in disbelief.

"Yeah," replied the proud lad, grinning from ear to ear. "I get to go home in the principal's car!"

We have not advanced very far in our spiritual lives if we have not encountered the basic paradox of freedom, to the effect that we are most free when we are bound.