I presented the following as a seminar to a group of students last Wednesday, right before the break.  It’s long, consider yerselves warned.

 Tikkun Olam: “Repairing the World”
Why Christians are so often wrong about heaven, the environment, fighting social injustice, and what love really looks like ‘in skin.’

Before we really get started, I’d like you to interact with a few statements for me.  Tell me what you think/feel when you hear the following:

1.    If I do all that is required of me during my physical life, I will spend eternity with God in heaven.
2.    I don’t think it’s okay to dump oil on baby harp seals or anything, but the reality is that this world is gonna burn.  Why should I focus my energies on something that isn’t eternal?
3.    There is no political issue that God cares about more than abortion.  The murder of innocent children is the greatest injustice of our time.
4.    Forgiveness is required of Christians, but that doesn’t mean we’re to be foolish about putting ourselves in situations where we’re likely to be hurt again emotionally.

I want to start with two Bible verses before we get into more esoteric and muddier waters.  If any of you are familiar at all with Kabbalah, the school of the mystical side of Judaism that has recent converts the likes of Maddona, Britney, Ashton Kutcher, Jeff Goldblum, Roseanne Barr, Posh and Becks, and Elizabeth Taylor, then you might be familiar with the title phrase of our seminar today.  The phrase is “tikkun olam”, and it’s Hebrew for “repairing the world” or “perfecting the world.”  But before we get any deeper into it, here are the verses I promised.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1:27, NIV)

and …

“These are the things you are to do: Speak the truth to each other, and render true and sound judgment in your courts; do not plot evil against your neighbor, and do not love to swear falsely. I hate all this,” declares the LORD.  Again the word of the LORD Almighty came to me. This is what the LORD Almighty says: “The fasts of the fourth, fifth, seventh and tenth months will become joyful and glad occasions and happy festivals for Judah. Therefore love truth and peace.” (Zechariah 8:16-19, NIV)

We’ll come back to these, but I want to point out two quick things for you to chew on.  First, notice that these two verses, one from the New Testament, and one from the Old, are really pretty straightforward regarding what it is that God wants.  Secondly, it’s interesting what’s not in these verses that a lot of people would tell you is high on God’s wish list.

But let’s get back to the funny Hebrew words.   Tikkun olam is not a phrase that you’ll find in the Old Testament.  It first showed up in the Mishnah, a collection of Jewish rabbinic teachings that was debated from 70-200 A.D., when it was finalized.  It shows up in the larger phrase “mip’nei tikkun ha-olam” (”for the sake of tikkun [healing] of the world”).  The argument is that practices should not only be followed because they are God’s law, but because they help to bring about “rightness” in the world.  The phrase also shows up in the Aleinu, a well-known Jewish prayer.  The context there is translated into English as “to perfect the world under God’s sovereignty.”  The prayer expresses hope that the whole world one day will recognize God and abandon idolatry, which will bring perfection to creation.  I think you’ll agree that none of those are bad ideas.  Basically, Jewish teaching was that only Messiah will ever completely bring about the healing that the broken world needs.  However, it is our job and our sacred calling to live out our lives as agents of change amidst the brokenness, redeeming and in small ways bringing light to every encounter and opportunity that comes our way, all the while looking forward to the great mending of all things that will one day come.

Tikkun olam is, in its most basic sense, about action.  It’s about the things we do.  I was reading recently some things that different Christian thinkers have said about the topic of authenticity, and one of the definitions I came across was “the integration of belief and behaviour.”  That’s tikkun olam.  It’s where the rubber of your mental constructs hits the road of gritty, dirty, real life situations and circumstances.  It’s when your values and beliefs begin to emerge from hiding within the “theoretical,” and come out into the light of the “practical.”  It’s how you put into practice the things you say are your “irreducibles.”  To practice what I’m preaching, let me put it in more concrete terms.  Tikkun olam is in the difference between believing that God has a soft spot in his heart for the poor, and actually giving the lady out front of the hospital a buck or two, even though you know she doesn’t really have a sick son in there.  Tikkun olam is the difference between loving people who are cool, beautiful, and easy to love, and loving people who don’t have anything to give you in return.  Tikkun olam is the difference between “staying out if it” because it’s really none of your business, and sticking your neck out to defend someone who’s being treated unfairly.  Tikkun olam is when your beliefs start to cost you something, and when your values come with a price tag.

You’re going to find me jumping back and forth between these two vantage points as we walk through this.  I’ll spend some of my time talking about ideas and beliefs that we have, and some time talking about our actions and responses.  If you’re tracking with me, you might be wondering why I’d focus so much on beliefs and ideas, if the subject matter is so much more about the practical outworkings.  The reason is this:  If I can borrow from a teacher that has taught me much about philosophy, the truth is that ideas have consequences.  The thinks we think and believe will inform the ways we act and behave.  If, for instance, I don’t believe that environment really has all that much to do with the personal development of the individual, I may subconsciously downplay the importance of providing support and encouragement to those around me (believing such to be of little value in the bigger picture), and thus one day find myself alone, having few friends willing to put up with my callous and brusque nature.  Ideas have consequences.

Let’s get into some of our specific subject areas.  First off, heaven.  What do most evangelicals picture when they hear the word?  Fluffy white clouds, and harps played by fat, baby angels?  A giant golden cube suspended somewhere in space?  Some trans-dimensional intersection of cosmic realities that exists solely in God’s ability to imagine it?  We have difficulties picturing heaven, largely because the book that tells us most about it also deals with locusts from hell, repetitions of numbers with uncertain significance, talking animals, bowls, trumpets, and women of ill repute riding seven-headed dragons.  I don’t mean at all to be dismissive of the serious study of Revelation, but the reality is that there’s a whole lot about the book that we don’t know.  So, if you had to summarize a “traditional” view of heaven from an evangelical perspective, what would it include?  Streets of gold, sunlessness … all in a place “somewhere else” where we go to be with God after we die?  All after this ball we live on now is consumed by fire.  Sound about right?  How many of you would be surprised to realize that the overwhelming majority of references to our eternal destination actually refer more to God coming to us than us going to Him?  When the Old Testament refers to the “new heaven and the new earth” in Psalm 65:17, you have to read that with the knowledge that the Old Testament has no single word for “universe”.  When the New Testament refers to the “new heaven and the new earth” in II Peter 3:13, and Revelation 21:1, you have to read that with the understanding that scripture nowhere gives us any reason to believe that God’s dwelling place needs to be restored.  “Heaven” in this context has to mean something else.  God is not coming back to destroy this place where we live.  He’s coming back to make it right, to perfect, redeem, and restore it.  It could well be that the path to that restoration will lead through fire, as it does for many of us.  But we cannot forget that His ultimate purpose for this planet is to return it to its former glory and insure that it forever serves its original purpose, which is to glorify its Maker.  Can you see how having a wrong idea about heaven can change the way you act?  God has put me here, in time and space.  He has sovereignly placed me where He saw fit, and where He wanted me to be about the work of the “making right” of his Creation.  Heaven will be eternal peace with God, the absence of sin and temptation, no more tears or sorrow; but it will also be the re-making of that which sin has twisted and ruined.  Our world will be set right, and we will live in its beauty forever.

Having said that, it’s an obvious segue to move into talking about the environment.  This is a very divisive subject among Christians, largely because we don’t agree ideologically with the majority of the people who champion the cause.  When you think about it, that has all the logic of refusing to eat candy bars because some people who eat candy bars also smoke, or kick puppies, or vote for Democrats.  If it’s true that this world is broken, and if it’s true that a great restoration is one day coming, and if it’s true that it’s our job to be about the little mending of all that we encounter every day … then what does that mean about how we should consider the environment?  Let’s start first with a few facts about the environment.  First off, it’s a buzz-word.  Next time someone starts telling you about how liberals care too much about the “environment”, try to get them to substitute the word “creation” and see if it changes their rhetoric any.  That’s really what we’re talking about here.  We’re talking about the physical plant, the non-human elements of terrestrial creation.  Whether you believe that God took seven literal days to make all that we see, or whether you think the “days” there could refer to longer periods of time, the reality is that He could’ve done it all with the snap of a divine finger.  He didn’t.  He took time, and when He was done, He called it “good”.  His involvement with His creation doesn’t end there, though.  Time and time again in scripture we’re reminded that God holds His creation in His hands, sustaining it, knowing every sparrow that falls.  It is He that brings water upon the earth, Who bring crops forth in their seasons, and all of His creation sings back to Him, telling the glory of God and proclaiming His handiwork.  To put it simply, striving to be like God means caring about the things He cares about.  Who could doubt that He cares for His creation, even the non-human elements of it?  Further, if our previous point is true, and this place will be our eternal home, then what we’re doing by caring for God’s creation is tikkun olam, through and through.  We are, quite literally, “repairing the world”.

Up until now, we’ve been largely talking about “things”.  Let’s shift gears a little bit, and spend the rest of our time talking about actions that hit a little closer to home, namely our actions toward our fellow man.  Talking about fighting social injustice is another endeavor fraught with peril in Christian circles.  Lots of terminologies get thrown around, and generally more heat than light is generated.  Again, a lot of it has to do with the ideological makeup of those we like to think of as the “enemy”, and the good things they believe that we call bad simply because of the association.  Now, I believe God is sovereign.  By that, I mean that I believe that there is nothing out of His divine control.  Some babies are born to wealthy U.S. families, while others die in the Far East from simple untreated maladies we don’t even think about anymore.  God is in control of all of that.  So what I’m not saying is that I believe the world should all be like middle-class, suburban America.  Throughout history, God has shown us time and time again that His Bride becomes more beautiful and develops more character when she is subjected to hardship and persecution than when she has easy access to McDonald’s and all the freedoms she can imagine.  All suffering is because of sin.  But just because suffering is present, it doesn’t mean that it’s not God’s will in the short run.  As a matter of fact, Jesus pretty clearly tells us to expect it.  Having said that, though, scripture plainly tells us that we are to fight injustice.  We need look no farther than our starter verses.  The Zechariah passage is particularly clear. “These are the things you are to do: Speak the truth to each other, and render true and sound judgment in your courts; do not plot evil against your neighbor, and do not love to swear falsely”. Proverbs 31:8-9 says, “Open your mouth, judge righteously, and defend the rights of the afflicted and needy.” Micah 6:8 asks what the Lord requires of us, and answers “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God”. The James passage goes so far as to say that religion that God finds pure and faultless is to “to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”  No mention of dress codes or whether you homeschool your kids or whether you only listen to Christian music.  Orphans and widows, and staying focused on God.  Does that sound too easy to you?  If it does, then you’ve probably bought a little bit into the lie that it’s the things you do or don’t do that impresses God.  It’s not.  The only thing that impresses God about you is the perfect sinless life of His son Jesus that He sees every time He looks your direction.  What it boils down to is this:  right is right, even if the wrong people are doing it, and wrong is wrong, even if the right people are doing it.  If you have to link arms with someone with whom you disagree on almost everything in order to feed the poor, defend the weak, or help the helpless … do it!

But okay, that’s the homeless, the destitute, the immigrants and the broken.  What about my friends?  What about the people in my life every day?  What about my classmates, my co-workers, the people I go to church with, and my family?  What does all of this mean with regard to them?  Let me go off the path here for a second and tell you my opinion.  I think that the most important thing that we get to do here is what I call our vertical obligation.  At any given moment, there is nothing more important going on in your life than how you are relating to God.  He is your Maker, your Sustainer, and your Future, and you owe Him big time.  He makes no bones about it.  We owe him worship, honor, and praise … simply because of Who He is.  Only a little ways below that, though, is what I call our horizontal obligation, the responsibilities we have to those that God sovereignly puts in our paths every day.  Those of you who’ve spent more than 30 minutes talking to me have probably heard me reference a quote from C.S. Lewis, taken from his essay “The Weight of Glory.”  It’s one of my favorites because he says it so much better than I ever could, and I offer it here in it’s context:

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no resumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence hich parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your
Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

So it is that I firmly believe that the second most important thing, the second most sacred thing we are ever given the privilege to do, is to enter into our fellow traveler’s “crap”, their “mess”, and stand knee-deep in it and try to keep each other from falling down.  The mental picture of two people standing knee-deep in their own excrement is ludicrous, at least until you remember times when you were well more than knee-deep in your own, and were left to go it alone.

What does that look like in relationships?  That’s a question with highly individual answers, and goes well beyond the scope of what I’ve prepared here today.  Here are some principles, though:

• It’s not work if it doesn’t cost you something.  If it’s easy, you’re probably not doing all that you could be.
• People who are easy to love are easy to love.  There’s more virtue in loving those that aren’t as easy.
• Honesty about your own “mess” is one of the most common keys to authentic engaging with your fellow travelers.  Everybody knows you’ve got it, own it.
• There are two kinds of “selfish jerk.”  Everybody knows the first kind, who takes and takes and never gives.  The second kind is more subtle.  They’re the type in a relationship who give and give, but never take.  They never lean on people, never let anyone into their mess.  When they do that, they communicate one of two things: either 1.) that they don’t have any mess to enter into (which everyone knows is a lie), or 2.) that the mess they do have is their own, and that while they’re worthy of standing knee-deep in yours, you’re not worthy of entering into theirs.
• Remember the definition of authenticity; “the integration of behaviour and belief”.  The things that you believe about your fellow travelers will affect the way you treat them.  When you realize that everyone you’ve ever met deserves dignity and respect, simply by virtue of being a bearer of the image of God, you will approach those interactions with the holy fear they require.  Ideas have consequences.

Relationships are the front-line in this effort.  Nowhere else will you encounter the brokenness of the world in more graphic detail.  Nowhere else will you have as much access to that brokenness. And nowhere else will the small acts of healing, mending, and redemption that you can perform have as profound and lasting an effect.

Let me try to take some of the trails that we’ve skittered down and pull them into something you can take home.  Healing the world is, of course, something that you and I will never accomplish.  All of the government or non-profit programs in the world will not set the world to right.  Every email forward you’ve ever received about telling your friends today that you love them, or not buying gas on Thursday, or spaying and neutering your pets (well-intentioned though they may be), will never bring about lasting peace and harmony, even if everyone in the world made the effort at the same time.  There is one Healer, one Perfector, one Lifter of our heads, and it is only His coming restoration that will make our world, our bodies, and our relationships into what His plan has been all along.

But, in His wisdom, He has given us a part to play in His grand design for this place He originally called “good.”  He has placed within all of us His image.  He has granted us the right and privilege to be agents of His change, His heart for His people and His world.  From spending an afternoon picking up trash in a park, to speaking the truth in love to a brother or sister who’s hurting … from buying lunch for the shoeshine kid on the street to writing letters of encouragement to political and religious prisoners … from organizing an awareness campaign for the homeless to spending a day off with a friend who you know needs it instead of doing things that feed you … all of these are tikkun olam.  All of these are little healings of brokenness in your corner of the world.

So do these things: act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God, and love truth and peace.  Look for ways every day to be His hands and feet in the lives of those He sends across your path.  And pray that He will use you in some small way each day to heal His world.