The Nail That sticks up gets Hammered Down

I'm on vacation.

Evie and Laddie and I are staying in a remote and fairly rustic cabin near Cook Forest State Park in Pennsylvania.

We take these vacations to rest and restore.

I brought five best seller-ish novels along. A Harlan Coben and a Michael Connelly, both definitely best sellers and a Lisa Scottoline and a Phillip Margolin, both of whom I usually enjoy, but are of the ish level and the newest Robert B. Parker, Jesse Stone series novel being continued by other authors since Parker died eight years ago.

I polished off Coben's, Don't Let Go, first. Yesterday, I ploughed through Connelly's, The Late Show.

The Connelly intoduces a new character, Renee Ballard, a highly motivated, idealistic LAPD detective who is a bit of a renegade, who sometimes goes too far in the pursuit of justice to please her superiors and, because she disregards department politics, has already been assigned to a unit from which career advancement will be virtually impossible.

In the novel, one of her fellow officers quoted this Japanese, uh, proverb? to her:

The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

The point being that in a conformist society, such as the highly politicized department for which she works, anyone, like Ballard, who, even in a good cause, fails to fall in line, is singled out and treated harshly and strenuously resisted and, if that person doesn't conform, destroyed.

In one of the several off-the-blog chats I'm in at the moment, I've mentioned the freedom that followers of Jesus have as subjects of the Kingdom of God.

Paul notes to the Galatians that they were called to freedom and instructs them to use their freedom, literally, to slave one another...the word slave is used as a verb.

In my opinion, one of the most destructive failings of institutional Christianity is that it defies the gospel and the work of the Spirit to create a conformist society, one which, to put it mildly, enslaves people and certainly, doesn't empower them to walk by the Spirit and to live out their freedom in Christ.

In Christ, we are called to freedom, not institutional conformity.

More often than not, when the powers that be atop the institutional hierarchy spot a nail that is sticking up, they make certain that it gets hammered.

And, repeating the observation I make so often: The Lord of all authority and power and blessing is not blessing. We decline and decay.

We must repent.

One way that today's church must do that is to confess the sin of enforcing conformity and imposing institutional slavery on the people of the church and turn from those wicked ways and to free people, to empower them to be who the Lord gifts them to be as people living in the Spirit and subjects of the Kingdom.