Faces Before Crowds: Five Questions for When the World Demands a Take | Passed By | Chad Belew

[BLANK_AUDIO]

You know what, I'm gonna start here, so I'm gonna begin somewhere a little more

gentle, not because what's happening in the world right now is gentle, but

because I think how we enter the conversation matters.

And we live in a moment where everything feels very reactive.

Everything's urgent, everything demands a take.

And you guys know me, I'm not gonna not say something.

[LAUGH]

But what I don't want to do today is simply add more adrenaline

to the community that's already tired.

So instead, I wanna help us maybe understand something a little deeper.

We'll ask some questions today.

Maybe give some framework to how we can navigate through the world right now.

The first question I wanna ask is, why do moments like

the ones we keep experiencing land so

differently for different people?

What are moments like the ones we keep experiencing land so

differently on different people, why do we experience these things differently?

What does some people move immediately toward naming harm, while others

instinctively move towards silence or explanation or

defense, not to excuse harm, not to avoid accountability?

But so that we can become the kind of community that knows how to move

toward repair instead of getting trapped in endless cycles of outrage,

despair, division, I want us to kind of take a breath.

If you were here last week, I didn't come at this in that same posture.

And some of the anger in the frustration has not gone away, but

I'm trying to reposition, reposture myself and I think maybe we can do this together.

A lot of you guys know this, I am a 20-year college student.

I am, I'm actually, I'm back in school, I'm on my second semester back in college.

I'm a senior, but I've been a senior for a very long time.

>> [LAUGH]

>> Yeah, thanks man.

Monty said senior citizen, which is how I feel in most of my classes right now.

>> [LAUGH]

>> Half the professors I'm older than, I'm like, and they got PhDs.

I'm like, okay, but I'm back in school.

I went back to school for psychology and I'm always going to love psychology,

but I really fell in love with it, you guys know this.

So a lot of studying that I'm doing right now is, just on psychology,

on how our brains work, how our minds work, how we enter into life and relationships.

I actually, this week, had a meeting with one of my professors,

who's a research PhD that's at the school.

And he's, he does research on like positive social psychology,

empathy and kindness and compassion, yeah, that's the first semester I was there.

I got asked to help in a lab, which is like a, like really, it's an honor.

I think they're just like, this guy's old, so he might actually focus.

But the first lab, and I'm still in this lab, but

the professor, her psychological, or her psychology focus is on relationships,

on intimate relationships, but on the negative sides.

So it's very dark, and I'm not a dark person, that's just not.

So it's an interesting place for me, and

I'm also the only guy in the entire lab, which is real weird.

So they say like negative things and then they just look at me and I'm like, yeah,

that's my people.

But this other lab that I was meeting with a professor this week, and

he's doing some work with an organization called the Templeton Trust in England.

And they're doing this really cool research on how our idea of who God is.

And the characteristics of God affect how we see not only ourselves with the world,

and from a psychological, like empirical study, like how is this affecting people?

If we see God as a punisher, as someone who is constantly a judge and

there to catch us when we do something wrong, how does that affect us?

If we see God as a loving God, a caring God, a compassionate God, how does that affect us?

If we're kind of caught between, how does that affect us?

And he was like, do you think this is something you want to be in?

Like you'd be in too, it's like, yes, that's why I'm here.

So, I say all that to say, you're going to get some psychology today.

But I think it's good.

Because one of the things that psychology has helped me see, I think more clearly,

is that we don't experience reality directly.

We experience it through lenses, through our nervous systems, through our stories,

through our communities, and whether we realize it or not through our image of God.

What we believe God is like, like quietly shapes what feels faithful to us when things break.

There's a moment in the gospels where Jesus names this kind of dynamic with real clarity.

And we miss this, I think, a lot.

But I want to read it to you, and we'll keep going through this.

John 5, verse 39, it says,

John 5:39

"You have your heads and your bibles, constantly.

Because you think you'll find eternal life there.

But you miss the forest for the trees.

These scriptures are all about me.

And here I am, standing right before you.

And you aren't willing to receive from me the life you say you want."

I think this line should stop us.

Jesus isn't criticizing their devotion to Scripture.

He's speaking to some religious elite, people that know the Word, they know the Scripture,

they're well versed.

And I don't believe he's criticizing their devotion to Scripture.

I think he's saying something far more confronting to them.

You can be immersed in the text and still miss the living presence

of God standing right in front of you.

You can become so focused on the forest, and you miss the tree in front of you.

The tree that is its beauty, its suffering, its dignity, the thing right in front of you, you miss it.

Or another way to say it, you can be focused on protecting the crowd

and completely miss the face.

In this theme, it runs through Jesus' life, religion obsessed with categories,

systems and order, Jesus is obsessed with faces and people.

And it connects directly to the story, in fact we talked about it last week.

In Mark 8, verse 23, Jesus heals a blind man.

Mark 8:23

And he doesn't in the two stages, we talked about this,

after the first healing of this blind man, and again, if you missed the last week,

this is the only time that Jesus heals someone twice.

So he heals this blind man, he spits on the man's eyes and he puts his hands on him.

And Jesus says, do you see anything?

And the guy looks up and he said, I see people, but they look like trees walking around.

Once more, Jesus puts his hands on the man's eyes, then his eyes were opened,

his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.

Jesus sent him home saying, don't even go into the village.

He heals him, he's not blind anymore, but it's distorted.

It's partial sight, and Jesus doesn't shame him for that, he touches him again,

and then the man sees clearly.

Again, we talked about last week, but I think the story tells us something important,

that clear vision is often the process, and Jesus is patient with people

who are still trying to learn how to see.

I think for a lot of us, a lot of Christians, we see people as trees right now,

as categories, as we see it, system. We're not seeing clearly. There's another story

that's super similar, that we see kind of the same dynamic play out, but we see a little bit

more perspectives happening here. And John 9, there's this man, he's born blind,

and the disciples immediately asked Jesus. They say, as he went along, he saw a man

blind from birth, his disciples asked him, Rabbi, who send this man or his parents

that he was born blind?

It's a system question, it's a category question, like what messed up in this person's life that

made them be blind? Was it him, his actions, was it his parents? Something had to have made this

happen. Jesus, what happened? And Jesus completely rejects the premise entirely,

he just heals the man. He doesn't answer that question. In fact, he heals, I mean, he says,

all right, we'll get into it. But then the religious leaders enter the story. So he heals the man,

he doesn't answer the disciples' questions. Now the religious leaders find out about this,

which is probably why in the other story, Jesus said, don't even go into the village, just go home.

You don't want to deal with this, trust me.

So the religious leaders, they enter the story because Jesus had healed this man on the Sabbath.

So they interrogate the man. So they interrogate his parents. In fact, when they're talking to his

parents, they're like, look, he's a grown man, ask him the question. We're not trying to get in

trouble here. They argue about Sabbath law. They're so focused on these rules that they miss this

person standing right in front of them. A human being whose life has just completely changed,

has been, his sight has been restored. And they asked the man, was this man a sinner? What do you

think? They're asking this guy about Jesus now. I mean, he healed you on the Sabbath. That is a sin

under our law. Is he a sinner? And the man who just had his life changed is standing in front

of these religious people trying to explain or answer their questions. He's like, these are

stupid questions. He finally says, whether he's a sinner or not, I don't know. One thing I do know,

I was blind, but now I see. And you know what they did? They expelled him. They said, get out of here.

There was no celebration. There was no, because they're missing the humanity,

because they're stuck in the system. Later, Jesus tells these same religious elite,

if you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin. But now that you claim to see your blindness

remains, yeah, you don't see clearly, but you think you do. And that's the problem.

Jesus is saying the danger isn't blindness. The danger is thinking that you see clearly when you

don't. It's because religious blindness doesn't come from ignoring scriptures. It actually comes

from obsessing over systems while missing people. So here's what I want us to understand deeply.

Blindness usually isn't born out of cruel meanness, cruelty, cruelty. Man, there's my

every once in a while, my little country accent. What's the other one I say? Oh, that ruined it.

Nate Barghatsy, a comedian in this traveling right now, just saw one of his newer kind of ads.

He's coming to San Antonio, I think next month. I tried to get tickets. They're crazy. It's like

900 bucks. But the joke that I saw, he was like, you know, we use this word in the south,

oh, I'm gonna change my old. He's like, you think like a community college in the south,

like that would be one of the first things we fix. Like, oh, I'll oil. It's all. Anyway,

sometimes it happens to us. Let's go back. Religious blindness doesn't come from ignoring

scripture. It comes from obsessing over systems while missing people.

It's not born out of wanting to be mean. It's born out of fear, out of longing for belonging,

and out of identity protection. Which is why moments like the ones we keep facing

don't just test our politics. They test like our formation. They test our identity. They test

who we are. So I'm gonna offer us some framework today, hopefully. Not as a debate tool.

I mean, y'all know I'd love to win arguments, but this isn't what this is about. This is not

a way for us to win an argument, but it has kind of a formation practice. Something we can return

to again and again, because this will not be the last time we experience this.

So I've got five questions that when something happens, when we come to something, when the

time calls for it, we can look at and ask these questions. And there are formational questions

for us as believers who say that we believe in this person called Jesus.

And they should be good questions for us to ask to see how we see things that happen

in our culture, in our lives, and how we respond to them. So number one,

what kind of God do I assume is behind my instinct right now? Something happens and you have an

instinct. You respond. What kind of God is behind that instinct? Who is God that is behind the instinct

that I'm having? It's kind of where everything starts, right? Like,

if you were formed to believe God is easily offended, obsessed with order, aligned with power,

then silence feels faithful.

Naming harm kind of feels dangerous. But if God looks like Jesus, then moving toward the wounded

or interrupting systems of harm, protecting the overlooked that that feels like repair,

it feels faithful, even when it costs us.

So this question should help us slow down enough to notice which God is actually shaping our reflexes.

How are we seeing things? Number two is what is faithfulness required here? Silence or repair?

Because silence is not neutral. It is a choice.

Sometimes silence is wisdom. There's a proverb that is 24-5, I want to say.

It says, "When a fool speaks, don't engage." I'm paraphrasing here. When a fool speaks,

don't engage with them because it makes you look like a fool. And then the next verse says,

"If a fool speaks, correct them because you don't want to allow that to happen."

But the Bible is super clear. Obviously.

Nah. Proverbs, it's a wisdom book. These are choices you get to make.

What do I do when a fool speaks? Sometimes wisdom is silence.

Other times wisdom is correction or repair.

Sometimes silence is just protection of comfort.

Jesus was quiet at times, but honestly he was never quiet when people were being dehumanized.

Repair, it always costs more than silence and that's why it's tough. It requires humility,

listening. It requires change.

And it's why systems that benefit from status quo almost always prefer silence.

We don't want to break or lose our comfort.

Third question, "Am I prioritizing intent or impact?"

Intent protects identity. I didn't mean to. We're not like that.

He didn't mean to do that. He didn't even know it was there.

Someone else did it. Anyway, intent protects identity. I didn't mean to. We're not like that

impact protects people. This hurt. This harmed people.

Jesus consistently centered impact, especially for those with the least power.

Not because intent doesn't matter, but because impact tells the truth about reality.

And listening to impact requires this emotion that we keep talking about.

The humility to admit that the world is bigger than my perspective.

Is it my worry about intent or impact? Question four, "What's at risk for me if we name this clearly?"

It's where things get honest. What's often asked or what's often at risk isn't theology really.

It's belonging. It's reputation. It's access. It's certainty. It's power.

Naming harm can feel like risking your place in the crowd.

Again, helps us here because when we experience awe, it loosens our grip on ego.

Jonathan Hite says that the emotion of awe is the counterweight to ego. Why?

Because it changes our perspective. It makes us realize that we are in a much bigger place

than just us. That things are much more connected. That other things, the bigger picture matters more.

So it loosens our grip on ego and it reminds us that we are held by something larger than

other people's approval.

Five, "If Jesus were standing with the harmed, what would he need from me?"

Not a statement, not a defense, not a perfectly worded post, but presence, protection, and repair.

Faces before crowds, people before power, every single time is how Jesus enters the world.

And now, with that framework in place and these five questions, we need to talk about what just

happened. Because this isn't theoretical, right? This is life in reality right now.

This week,

the President of the United States shared a video that included a racist depiction

of former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle,

placing their faces on the body of apes.

And I've seen it. I've seen people try to explain the other video.

That was the portion that was in this video that was shared from this account.

And it was shared like midnight. So if there's an intern sharing things on his personal account

at midnight, somebody needs to get checked. Or, or there's a history that we can look at that

shows us that this is what he does. This image is not harmless.

It's not funny. It carries a long, violent, dehumanizing history.

There's been no apology, no repair, no owning of harm.

And what has been just as disturbing, if not more so from me,

has been the response from large portions of the church.

You know, that's where I always, that's where I live. I live in this world. So that's what we're

doing. Right now, the response has been minimizing, trying to explain, spiritualizing, or staying silent.

So let's apply the questions.

What kind of God is shaping these reactions?

A God who prioritizes power over people?

A God who protects reputation instead of dignity?

A God who is more offended by disruption than by racism?

And it's not the God that is revealed in Jesus.

What does faithfulness require here? Silence or repair?

Jesus was not silent. Never when people were dehumanized was he silent. Ever.

Silence in moments like this, they don't create peace.

It protects comfort for a select group.

Repair, it requires courage and humility and listening to those who were harmed.

Are we prioritizing intent or impact?

Intent keeps the crowd intact. Intent keeps our group good.

Impact, it centers the face of the harmed.

And Jesus always chose the face every single time.

So what's at risk if we name this clearly?

From any churches and pastors, the answer is painfully obvious.

Influence, donors, access to power, crowds, the group, the big show.

And here's the hard truth. When protecting the crowd matters more than protecting people,

we've already drifted far from the way of Jesus.

And I get it. I've got to be honest.

We've been here nine years now, pastured for nine years.

I saw a post yesterday on, I forgot what it was on, threads or X or something.

Where a guy was like, "If your church is 10 years old and it's still 100 people,

you're doing something wrong." I was like, "Oh, thanks."

Thanks. I don't even know we're 100 right now.

Now that what I loved was seeing other friends of mine that were commenting like,

"What are you talking about?"

For nine years, we've pastored. And I can tell you for a lot of that time,

as a pastor, as a person leading an organization and a group,

I did have to make decisions. I do. I have to make decisions on what affects all of us.

And part of those decisions were, "How do we stick around? How do we stay here?"

One of the realities is money is part of that. We don't ever talk about it.

But it is. We have to pay bills.

I got to pay to fix a water fountain that flooded the front of the church yet last week.

I got to fix a door that somebody ran through to steal cameras on the side of our building.

I got the cameras back. I just got to pay for a door.

So the money, we do this, like spend time and try to focus on this and do things.

And so there's salaries that are involved. And the reality is, for quite a while,

we had to kind of navigate that. Most of you guys know, last year, most of the money left.

Because we made some decisions on really who we were going to allow to be here and who we were not.

Which is mind-blowing. And when that happened, the money left.

So for the last year, we've been able to survive and pay bills. But nobody's getting paid to do this.

But it's been a year where I felt like I could actually breathe.

Now, I say that to say, and let's put this in perspective, we're in a huge church.

We don't have a ton of bills and people. So I understand, I really do.

I understand the weight of, if I say this, I lose everything.

But it doesn't excuse it. It doesn't. Because if we're going to be faithful to Jesus,

then repair is always the answer. Then entering into spaces and being courageous

to speak when people are dehumanized is the way of Jesus.

The last question is, if Jesus were standing with the harmed, what would he need from us?

Not explanations, not justification, not silence dressed up as wisdom.

He would need us to see, to speak, and to repair.

Faces before crowds, people before power.

So I'll say this plainly, without hesitation, what we are witnessing right now from large

portions of the evangelical church is not the faith of Jesus. It is the religion that crucified

him. And if Jesus was never unclear, or Jesus was never unclear about where he stood in moments like

this, that's what got him killed. There's a woman in the Christian tradition

who understood this deeply. Her name is Dorothy Day. Dorothy Day was a Catholic activist who spent

her life among the poor, the forgotten, the one's religion often talked about, but rarely stood with.

She didn't build a brand. She didn't chase influence. She chose presence.

And she once said something that still refuses to let us off the hook.

I really only love God, as much as I love the person, I love the least.

That's not sentimental. That's not safe. That's a woman who understood that faith is not proven.

And what we claim to believe about God, but at who we are willing to see,

protect, and stand beside when it cost us something.

Dorothy didn't focus on protecting the crowd. She paid attention to the face right in front of her.

There's another story where Dorothy worked a lot with very poor, houseless people.

And someone came to her and was like, "Why are you? Why do you do this?" This reminded me of you in

Valerie. "Why do you do this?" And I can't remember the exact quote, but she basically says,

"If I can't see Jesus in this person, I can't see Jesus in anyone."

If Jesus were standing with the harm, the harmed, what would he need from us?

He would need for us to stand up for the hurting and the harmed and call out systems that cause harm.

Racism is never okay, especially when you say you're a Christian, especially.

That post would have gotten most of us fired.

So would felonies, but this is exactly why I keep talking about this emotion of all,

like why I think we need this. Not to calm ourselves into apathy, but to keep us human enough to tell

the truth. Psychology tells us that awe, it lowers our cortisol levels, it brings it down our stress,

it widens perspective, it softens our defensiveness, it actually brings us out of this need for certainty.

awe doesn't make us passive, it makes us resilient. It pulls us out of the crowd mentality and brings

us back to the face. I'll slow this down enough to see the beauty, the pain, and the dignity

of the face in front of us. Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel captured this idea beautifully.

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. Get up in the morning and look at the world in

a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal. Everything is incredible. Never treat

life casually to be spiritual is to be amazed. I don't think this is naive, this is just disciplined

attention. This is allowing awe to be the driving force of our lives. It's a refusal to let cynicism

steal our humanity. It's the same life that Paul speaks about in Romans 8 when he says this,

I love how Eugene Peterson translated this in the message. This resurrection life you received

from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It's adventurously expected, greeting God with a child

like what's next, Papa? God's spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are.

And we know who he is and we know who we are, father and children. This is awe, this is freedom.

It doesn't pull us out of the harm and the things that we're going through in the reality of life

but it gives us perspective. It allows us to see that I'm not here to protect my ego

or my comforts. We are here for each other and so when someone is hurting or when a group of people

are hurting then we step in just like Jesus did. Paul says the same thing in Galatians 5-1,

I've got a tattooed on my hand. Freedom doesn't mean self-protection, it means love.

Paul in Galatians says let me be clear, the anointed one has set us free, not partially

but completely and wonderfully free. We must always cherish this truth and stubbornly refuse

to go back into the bondage of our past. This is supposed to be a life of freedom.

Religion tries to trap us back into certainty and rules and if we allow that to happen then we lose

our freedom. If freedom, it was for freedom we've been set free.

This is the life that I believe emerges when we see God through the lens of Jesus.

So it's not anger, it's not despair, it's grounded, it's courageous, it's hopeful freedom. When you see

when you see people that fought back against injustice they were fighting back against injustice

because they understood what freedom should look like. And as Christians that's where we should be

always, but when we don't push back against harm from power or harm from systems

that I don't believe we're doing the work of Jesus, and I don't want us because this is the

potential for me. I don't want you either to be in a place where anger and frustration and

just hopelessness is where we live. I told you last week Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that

stupidity is not an intelligence thing, it is a social thing that his theory of stupidity was when

we give up our decision-making, when we give up our understanding, when we give up our ability to

think and to reason we have entered into stupidity. And stupidity is being captive to something else,

to a power or a structure that is controlling us. And he said that you cannot reason or logic

someone out of stupidity because reason and logic and truth have different definitions

they are defined by whoever the captor is. But what we can do and what I believe Jesus did

was love people out of stupidity. And not in a passive way, but in a way that continues to point

out faces and doesn't allow people around us to just see structure or systems we have to pull in the

humanity. So here's the invitation for this week. Practice these questions. Not online, not online

at first. Not with strangers, but start with yourself. When something happens and you have an

instinct, what arises in you? Notice it. Notice which image of God is being activated. Notice where

might widen your vision, change your perspective instead of narrowing it. Because the reality is

this will not be the last time. We don't have to keep responding the same way. I don't believe

our nervous systems and our bodies can handle it. So I think this is the way we step

back and we stay human. It's how we resist blindness. It's how we keep choosing love in a world that

keeps testing us. So as you go this week, see faces, choose repair and stay open.

And always arsenal. Go love well because that's who we're made to be. I love you guys.

Stay strong. Stay strong. Let's love. I love you guys. We'll see you next week.

Bye.