I certainly wasn’t looking for a plastic Saint Francis birdfeeder, but there it was on sale. The minimal price convinced me the tall saint holding a small bowl brimming with birdseed would look nice among the pink rose bushes in my front yard.

Besides, I’m an animal lover, too, just like Francis. The birds would appreciate another feeder, I thought. Shortly after I installed Francis in the yard and filled his bowl with birdseed, I was rewarded by the sight of a small club of LBJs (little brown jobbies: sparrows or starlings or something) happily devouring my offering.

Some months later, I realized I hadn’t seen Saint Francis lately. Had someone stolen my bargain lawn ornament? No, I found the saint lying on the lawn, decapitated. Water had seeped inside the statue and frozen, breaking Saint Francis at his narrowest part—his neck. I stood up the broken body and placed the severed head in the bowl. For a moment, I considered renaming the statue "Saint John the Baptist," but quickly realized that that would be unsatisfactory.

Cloud of Witnesses by Jim Wallis and Joyce Hollyday was one of the first books I pulled off my shelves in preparation for researching and writing about "Living the New Life." In the foreword to the revised edition of 2004, Robert Ellsberg, editor-in-chief of Orbis Books, writes,

For those who question the meaning of discipleship in our time, the stories and interviews assembled in this book present an excellent starting point. Here is a collection of peacemakers, prophets, martyrs, servants of the poor, holy misfits, and other disturbers of the false peace—in short, people of the Beatitudes—who expand the common definition of human love and courage. Some of them are famous; others obscure. All of them have given proof that the gospel can be lived.1

Have you given proof to your family, your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers—to all around you—that the gospel can be lived? Have I? I asked you first!

Back in the 1950s, we used to sing song no.134 in Singing Youth, "Can the World See Jesus in You?"2 Its author and composer, Mrs. C. H. Morris, seemed to think our fellow earthlings could, or at least, should. "Do we live so close to the Lord today, / Passing to and fro on life’s busy way, / That the world in us can a likeness see/ To the Man of Calvary?"

We don’t sing that song anymore. I hope it’s because the last line of the chorus crescendos to a high F: "Can the WORLD see Jesus in you?" I fear that is because it asks questions we don’t want to answer today. "Does your love to Him ring true, and your life and service, too?" At this point, Mrs. Morris has gone from preaching to meddling. I will too, and suggest it might be more instructive to ask in the twenty-first century, "Can Jesus see the world in you?" "Can we see it in ourselves?"

We’ve tamed Christianity in the United States. It’s now a mix of politically correct words and actions. We’ve reduced it to its lowest common denominator, a public religion made up of a couple of issues we can get hot over, and electing people who think like we do. You don’t have to risk much or give up much, just rail piously against the sins you don’t commit (if you can find one!). I think that’s half the reason for conservative Christian men’s obsession with abortion. They know they’ll never have to worry about being accused of that one.

We’ve tamed the heroes of the faith, too.

In the first chapter in Cloud of Witnesses, Jim Wallis, executive director of Sojourners, makes this statement: "Saint Francis of the birdbath [or birdfeeder?] endures as one of the worst caricatures of history."3

His introduction to Francis came at a one-dollar showing of Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon. He left the theater "stunned and speechless," and "overcome by emotion." On the way home in his car, he began to weep quietly. He explains:

Never before had I encountered a life so consumed with the gospel, a man so on fire with the love of God, a disciple so single-mindedly focused on following after Jesus, a spirit so joyful in abandoning everything to serve his Lord.…I immediately began to question everything about my life.…

It’s so easy to be a "radical Christian" in America. Here the church is so affluent, so comfortable, so lukewarm, that the most basic kind of discipleship,…living what should be just an ordinary Christian life is enough to be designated radical by a spiritually impoverished church. It is a constant temptation to accept the designation and, worse yet, to allow the American church to become the standard by which we measure ourselves. For Francis, the standard was always Christ and Christ alone.4

Ronald J. Sider, professor of theology at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and president of Evangelicals for Social Action, asserts that "scandalous behavior is rapidly destroying American Christianity. By their daily activity, most ’Christians’ regularly commit treason. With their mouths they claim that Jesus is Lord, but with their actions they demonstrate allegiance to money, sex, and self-fulfillment."5

In a national survey in August 2001, a poll conducted by George Barna found no statistically significant difference in the divorce rate for born-again Christians and the American population as a whole.6 In 2002, he discovered that only 6 percent of born-again Christian adults tithed—a 50 percent decline from just two years before.7 Christians living in the richest nation in the world ignore both the poor and needy among them, and, instead of giving more to their churches, they give less as their treasures increase. Our culture assures us it is more important to double the size of our houses, garages, and investments than to care for the poor or to spread the gospel.

Oh, yeah, we’ve tamed the gospel, too. We treat the gospel as if it were a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card we carry in our wallet for emergencies. We want Jesus to save us from our sins, but that’s all we want him to do in our lives. We are handling the rest quite well, or so we think.

We can’t have this world and the next one, too. We cannot love Jesus as Savior and neglect him as Lord. Sider points out that in the New Testament, Jesus is called "Savior" only 16 times, whereas he is called "Lord" 420 times.8 If we neglect the transforming power of "Christ in us, the hope of glory," we will not be changed into his likeness, and no matter how many times we call out "Lord, Lord," and commend ourselves, we will hear the awful words "Depart from me, I do not know you."

Adventists believe in evangelism. Never before have so many American Adventists been able to participate in evangelism at home and abroad. We have baptized impressive numbers of people. But do we have the love and the power of the Holy Spirit to retain those members? Or will we make our converts carbon copies of our own weak selves, keeping busy with many things—churches, schools, administrative offices, hospitals, and publishing houses, but ignoring the one thing that is needful—to draw near to the Lord and to listen to his voice until we know it by heart and obey?

Sometimes we Adventists get too hung-up on our prophecy charts and our taboos. I remember watching a child from an Adventist elementary school on the Art Linkletter program many years ago. When Art asked her what Seventh-day Adventists believed, she responded cheerfully, "We don’t eat meat and we hate the Catholics!" That has to be one of the worst caricatures of Adventism in our history. I don’t think anyone saw Jesus in that!

We put great emphasis on correct doctrine. Little can shake the calm assurance of a Seventh-day Adventist with all of his texts in a row. But from the birth of Christianity, no one has ever been saved by their doctrines. It is Christ alone who has saved us.

The devil doesn’t care on which side we err. Once we were legalists strong on behavior, weak on grace. Now we’re the opposite. "There is simply no biblical justification for saying that the glorious truth of justification by faith alone is more important than the astonishing reality that the Risen Lord now lives in his disciples, transforming them day by day into his very likeness."9 When we accept Jesus as our Savior and Lord, we will see Jesus in one another and the world will, too.

Notes and References

1. Jim Wallis and Joyce Hollyday, Cloud of Witnesses (Washington D. C.: Sojourners magazine and Orbis Books, 2005), ix.
2. General Conference Missionary Volunteer Department, Singing Youth (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald, 1953), song 134.
3. Wallis and Hollyday, Cloud of Witnesses, 3.
4. Ibid., 4.
5. Ronald J. Sider, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2005), 12, 13.
6. Ibid., 18.
7. Ibid., 19.
8. Ibid., 66, 67.
9. Ibid., 59

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