Christians, Rudeness, and lack of witness

I am cross posting the following quote from InternetMonk who got it from the blog Prayer Pilgrimage.

My daughter, taking a break from her pursuit of a graduate degree, is a server at the Chili’s a few miles down from our house. Like many others her age she is already pretty critical of the church and its obvious hypocrisies. Her cynicism, that to say, is neither atypcial nor incomprehensible. Nor does this kind of thing help–her or others.

A group of six church-goers came in last night after their evening services and sat down, not in her area but in another server’s. When the girl came to greet them and take their drink order, one of them said, “We want to tell you up front that we will not be tipping you tonight because…”

Are you ready?

“…we do not believe in people working on Sunday.”

The girl was taken full-aback, stammered out something that sounded like “I wouldn’t have to work on Sunday if so many church people didn’t come in,” or some such. She was furious. So was the manager of the restaurant whom she summoned to deal with them. I think he should have tossed the people out on their…uh…Bibles. To his credit, and demonstrating something like agape all around, he did say to them, “Well, we don’t believe in making our people work for nothing, so I will be serving you tonight.” And he did. God bless him.

After reading the above, I wrote what was a very strong reply for me:

If you read about Christian social work in 19th century England and the USA, you will come across the concept of the “deserving poor.” The idea was that help was only given to those of the poor who had done what they could but fell short. Often it included the idea that they were either churchgoers or very moral.

Unfortunately, that attitude has remained rampant until today. I am not surprised that people have begun to argue about justification and works-righteousness. Those are handy categories to use when either we wish to disassociate ourselves from Christians behaving badly (they are not really Christian) or our failure to be engaged in social action (gasp, we are in danger of thinking that we can earn our salvation). Frankly, I would rather have more Christians be in danger of thinking they can earn their salvation if, and only if, this resulted in vastly increased services for those in our nation who are in dire need.

The category of the deserving poor also comes in handy when we wish to avoid our social responsibilities. The waitress had not done her part by refusing to work on Sunday. Therefore, she was not really deserving of a tip.

You find the category of the deserving poor in arguments about welfare, or any type of organized social response that allows us to deal with those among us who are in need. If we give too much child aid, we will simply get mothers who get pregnant more often, for instance.

But, once you notice how every one of these arguments becomes a reason to not be involved with “those” people, once you notice how few churchgoers have ever visited a church-run social work (it is better to give money at a distance and feel righteous about yourself), once you realize that your pastor also is unlikely to know a pastor who ministers in a poor area, then you can begin to realize just how far we are from anything resembling the Early Church’s involvement with the poor, the widow (Acts 6), the orphans, etc.

iMonk, you did a three part series on the coming hard times of evangelicalism. You forgot to mention that the coming hard times may simply come from God as a result of our terrible blindness.

Yes, this is one of those very rare times when I engage in a full-scale rant.

 However, this ended up being the topic for my sermon today. Today is the Sunday of the woman of Tyre and Sidon in the Orthodox lectionary. And, the disciples said to the Lord that he should send her away because she was bothering them. And, so I read my congregation the original posting and then compared that attitude to the attitude of the disciples. I could see several people flinch as I read the account and some of the replies. I suspect that some of them thought twice when they went to their after service lunch at a restaurant. At least, I hope so. May our Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on us all.