Keeping Faith

Scripture – Psalm 121: 5, 8 (NRSV)

The LORD is your keeper … The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.”

Devotion

Hypocrisy is high on the list of critiques about religious people. As leaders who claim to follow Jesus, we are susceptible to being criticized for not “walking the talk.” And, rightly so.

One way to limit the damage of the critique of hypocrisy is to draw our circles tighter. It is easy to narrow the scope of the great commandment to love God and our neighbor. “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29) is just such a question asked in Jesus’ day by someone theologically astute. Nothing like a clever theological question to divert attention from what God intends.

Image: Color Study: Squares with Concentric Circles by Wassily Kandinski, 1913 in Public Domain via WikiArt.org.

In the creation account, God placed human beings in the garden “to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). The sense of the word “keep” is to take loving care of something. Interestingly, the same verb is used in Psalm 121 about God’s care for Israel (and by implication for all humanity). For emphasis, it is used no less than six times in the psalm. God actively cares for his people – in all circumstances and at all times.

God does for his people exactly what he expects his people to do with what has been entrusted to them. It is a wonderful example of the very opposite of hypocrisy: congruent leadership. But the question remains, what (and whom) are we to “keep”?

The tragic response in the biblical narrative is to narrow the circle. In Genesis 4, Cain responds to God’s question about the whereabouts of his brother Abel by asking the question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Read narrowly, God’s mandate to human beings was to keep a garden, not each other. But it is clear from the story that God’s intention for keeping the garden was to include also all its inhabitants. The answer to Cain’s rhetorical question is “Of course, you are your brother’s keeper!” The great commandment makes that abundantly clear – we are to love our neighbor.

But back to Jesus’ questioner. Who is my neighbor? In Jesus’ day, the distinction was made between enemies and neighbors – as in “love your neighbor but hate your enemy.” Another way to draw the circles tighter. But, Jesus won’t have it. He recovers the intent of the great commandment: “You have heard it said… but I say to you, love your enemies…” (Matthew 5:44). The largeness of the originally intended circle is restored.

In our day, in my evangelical tradition at least, we seem much more comfortable keeping our brother than the world in which we live. We struggle with those who are different from us and make them our enemies. We relegate the physical world to, at best, second class status, not giving the garden that God originally committed into our care the attention it deserves.

I struggle with this as much as anyone. In my attempt to avoid hypocrisy, I draw the circles tighter, making my cares more narrow. And, that is perhaps hypocrisy after all.

Thanks to Uli Chi, Founder and Chair of Computer Human Interaction and Senior Fellow at the De Pree Center, for contributing this devotion.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Commentary on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Grace Transforms Suffering in Our Life in Christ (Romans 5:1–11)

Subscribe to Life for Leaders

Sign up to receive a Life for Leaders devotional each day in your inbox. It’s free to subscribe and you can unsubscribe at any time.