To See the World Inverted

When I was a child, my family watched the miniseries Anno Domini on television. I don’t recall actually watching it myself, but I must have been around it at times because I remember a few things from it, flashes really – different scenes and situations. There is one particular scene that I do not remember seeing, but the dialogue has always been with me. It is from the scene when Peter is being sentenced to death, and he requests to die “seeing the world the way the rest of sinning humanity sees it: wrong, twisted, … inverted.” It is Christian tradition that Peter was crucified upside down, and several versions on the story have it that Peter felt himself unworthy to die as Jesus did, but my understanding of his reasoning comes from this television drama from 1985. (Strange, isn’t it? That such a thing would lodge in my memory and have some profound effect on my understanding. Anyway…)

I have often thought of that phrasing: to see the world as the rest of humanity sees it, inverted. We spend so much time trying to explain God’s ways, whys and hows. We labor to justify his value system, like when He chooses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; or when He declares that the poor are actually blessed, that the rich are the ones who are in trouble. As we attempt to explain it to ourselves and others, we generally begin with our own perspective and describe God’s ways as putting it on its head. Is this true, is God the one who inverts, or are we?

“Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” 1 Corinthians 1:21

When we say, “He chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise,” we do not necessarily mean that He is retroactively undoing the wisdom of the world, as it sounds in 1 Corinthians. God undoes our wisdom about as much as the Sun revolves around the Earth. From our perspective, we say the Sun rises and the Sun sets. Similarly, we say that God turns things on their head or “makes them foolish.” The truth is the Sun is stationary, and the world revolves around its axis as it revolves around the Sun. In the same way, our wisdom is never truly wisdom, but a rejection of God’s wisdom. His wisdom is first, and we rejected it; having rejected it, we created our own wisdom. As we are sitting around congratulating ourselves on our wisdom, God now comes in and demonstrates His wisdom that has been since the beginning, showing us just how foolish our wisdom actually is.

Think of all our value systems: we value the strong, the quick, the smart, the brave, the beautiful, the young, the well, the whole, the successful, etc., etc., etc. In short, we generally value anyone or anything that appears to be self-reliant. Beautiful people are sufficient in their beauty, the young are indestructible, the smart are full of answers, the strong can handle any challenge. How dare anyone suggest that we need something or someone else? Are we not sufficient in ourselves, are we not the source for any answers we might need? How dare someone try to lay their values on us, their judgments against our wishes? It is a crime against humanity, I tell you.

It is not much different in the church. We honor the successful, the beautiful, the good speakers, the cool spaces; then we struggle to explain the failures of our celebrity pastors as they misuse their positions or as their families fall apart. We say it is the meek who inherit the earth, but our actions say it is the bold! Our actions say that the popular are blessed, those who are on the cutting edge! In the Marine Corps, on our forced marches, we would shout out chanties:

“Let the weak”

“Fall by the wayside!”

“Only the strong”

“Survive!”

And we would, too. We let those who could not keep up slide to the back, where they would straggle along, left behind by the main body.

That made sense in the Marine Corps; it does not make sense in the church. Yet, that is what I see and hear on a regular basis. When people leave one church to go somewhere that “feeds them,” in essence they are making an argument for abandoning a weaker vessel for what is perceived to be a stronger vessel. When a church feels that they need to establish a satellite of themselves in another community, or they desire to “reproduce” themselves in another community, they are basically saying that only they possess the “right stuff.” Look at the “leaders” of America’s evangelical church today. Do they say, “I am weak” or do they say, “I am strong?” The leading ethos within the church is one of strength, of confidence, of ego. There is nothing meek about the attitudes of the “winning” churches these days.

Now, it’s true that not all churches do this. There are some who serve under bridges and in slums; many who labor quietly in obscurity. And while they may be admired, they are rarely honored as being the standard by which we judge our own efforts. That is retained by the large, “successful” churches. Yet, in Scripture, it is the meek who inherit the earth; it is the sick who are well. Those who need no physician are in trouble, those who say they see are actually blind.

I think our inverted reality goes much further. For centuries, God provided the sun to light the day, the moon and stars to light the night; and they largely dictated the times of rising and sleeping for humanity. Then we created gaslight, followed by electricity, and you never have to sleep again. Have you ever been around a person who has not bathed in a while? Isn’t it revolting how smelly they are? But, God created us this way. What He did not create is clean-shaven men – clean-shaven women for that matter, nor hair that smells of strawberries or all these soaps and perfumes we use to mask our stench. I wonder, does the natural odor of our bodies make God gag, or does all the work we do to make ourselves better?

By following Jesus in faith, His disciples proclaim that they make God gag and need His forgiveness, not their own perfume. By repenting of our sins, we proclaim that we are the ones who are upside down, and we want to start living right side up. It is hard, though, isn’t it? Even as we declare we want to live by Christ, we still struggle to let go of our worldly perspective. So many things He calls us to do seem wrong or ill-conceived, almost backwards or upside down in its ways. When confronted with such a situation, maybe we should consider: “who is upside down, us or God?”