One thing that I've observed over the years and more recently came back up in a much more tangible way is the social expectations that are placed on people sometimes to be accepted into a group. Some of these groups are peopled with those who consider themselves "cool" and have certain standards (unwritten and unspoken, of course) that make up part of the group. It is, unfortunately, very high-schoolish and reminds me of the cliques that we were supposed to grow out of when we became adults. C.S. Lewis writes an excellent essay called
The Inner Ring, which I would encourage you to read in full, but quoted in part here:
I believe that in all men's lives at certain periods, and in many men's lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside... I mean, in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that particular Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly understood that "Society," in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside.
The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it.
I want to simply state that behavior or attitudes within a group that makes them feel superior, better than others, or more socially poised or acceptable, is wrong and is un-Christlike. Please consider just a few things Christ did in His time that wasn't considered "acceptable" or "socially cool" by His culture:
- Eating with a tax collector
- Making disciples of tax collectors
- Talking with a Samaritan woman
- Washing his disciple's feet.
- Touching women (for healing)
- Allowing a woman anoint his feet with perfume and wipe them off with her tears
- Calling attention to children, saying we need to be like them
- Eating with "sinners".
- Hanging naked on the cross ("cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree"), cursed and rejected by God and man.
- Healing people on the Sabbath.
- Touching lepers.
If we look to Christ for an example of what our behavior should be like, what we will see is that He is more about loving people than he is about meeting some social, cultural, or religious standard of what is acceptable behavior or practice. He is about people more than practice and relationship more than rules. Christ went after the religious leaders of the day who were so obsessed with following culturally acceptable standards of behavior and the letter of the law that they completely missed the living God in the flesh when He came down and stood before them.
Jewish men in Jesus' time used to pray: "I thank you God that I am not a Gentile, a slave or a woman." Yet Paul writes that "in Christ Jesus there is no Jew or Gentile, there is no slave or free man, there is no male or female." (Gal. 3:28) Christ came to destroy social norms, to wipe away barriers, to make it possible for anyone, of any race, color, creed, gender, social or anti-social, shy or outgoing, "weird" or "normal", cheesy or cool, to come to Him, to be accepted by Him, to be loved by Him, and to be in His family and called His child.
Paul tells us that Peter made the same mistake, in Galatians 2, when he fell for the "cool group" and started distancing himself from certain groups of people:
When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, "You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? ... [A] man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. (Gal. 2:11-16)
Peter stopped eating with a certain group of people because another group of people didn't approve, didn't think it was "cool" or "acceptable" and he fell in the trap of the group mentality. Paul called him out on it, in front of everyone, and strongly rebuked him for going against the gospel. Christ doesn't care, and neither should you or I!
Is our behavior in any of these "cool" groups one that reflects who we are authentically and genuinely? Paul called himself the "chief of sinners", Peter denied Christ three times, the writers of the New Testament (and for that matter, Old) presented themselves as broken, forgiven, followers of Jesus Christ. What are we doing trying to appear "cool" and "together", when in truth we are just as broken as anyone else? How will one who is a non-believer come to Christ if he sees Christians acting the same way as non-Christians -- having cliques, "cool-kids groups", and looking down on other people?
How do you know if you're in a group like this? Do you find yourself being different in the group versus in private? Do you find yourself looking with disapproval at others who do things that you don't find acceptable in the group? Is your behavior extreme in its perfection or presentation? Do you find that the group size rarely changes and in fact stays relatively the same -- not a lot of new people remain? Have you received feedback from a person or people that has indicated that a group you are a part of is this way? Do you label or look down at other people outside the group ("they aren't as cool...")? There is no excuse here -- when you or I act and think in this way, when we live to please others, when we set ourselves as standards,
we are wrong. Period.
I want to close with what Paul writes in Romans 14:4:
Who are you to judge someone else's servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.
Who are you or I, indeed?!
