Contempt must have no home among Christians

Photo by Lucas Myers on Unsplash

Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but the interests of others… (Letter to the Philippians 2:3-4).

“It would break my heart to see you playing that piano.”

Dad said this to our host as we walked through the auditorium of a little Church of Christ congregation in rural Ohio.

We were dinner guests of that congregation’s minister and his family. Dad brought along Mom, my two sisters, and me. Before we ate, we got a tour of the small church building.

We belonged to a Church of Christ congregation that read the Bible in a way that forbade instruments in worship. This was no small matter, but what we in the Church of Christ call a “salvation issue.” That is: instruments in worship would do no less than damn participants to hell.

So Church of Christ ministers, like Dad, often preached, taught, and wrote against the “false doctrine” of instrumental worship. It’s what most Church of Christ congregations expected of their ministers.

Some Church of Christ folks liked it when their ministers went further. They enjoyed WWE-style “takedowns” of “denominations” and rogue Church of Christ congregations that played a guitar or piano in worship. They didn’t mind when their ministers used insults to try to humiliate those who stood in “error.” After all, did “false teachers” not deserve public shame?

That made the little country Church of Christ and its piano fair game for Dad. I’m sure that, for at least some folks in Dad’s own pews, he had a right to blast that congregation and its minister with withering contempt.

But contempt is not what I heard from Dad. About the piano, he simply said it broke his heart and that was it. The “conservative” minister (Dad) and his family entered the home of the “liberal” minister (the one who played the piano in worship). There, our families broke bread together.

I used to wonder why this memory stayed with me all these years.

Maybe God kept it alive for times like these.

Dad once told me once that he read from the Letter to the Philippians almost every day. Perhaps that is why Dad’s attitude and behavior so resembled texts like Philippians 2:3-4.

These days, some folks might criticize Dad for not attacking the piano-playing minister and his little country congregation. They might call Dad weak for being so meek and mild.

Dad was meek and mild. He was the kind of guy who would not “break a bruised reed” or “quench a smoldering wick” (Gospel of Matthew 12:20).

But Dad was in good company. Rather than try to please the partisans in the pews, he was trying to imitate someone else:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death–even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

From the Letter to the Philippians 2:5-11

Contempt has no place in the heart of the Christian because contempt has no place in the heart of the Christ.

The choice to love as Jesus loved is not timidity or weakness; it is bold faith that fixes its hope on what God will do in God’s time.

Every day that Dad read the Letter to the Philippians this worked its way into the very cells of his body. Perhaps that is why he won so many to his Christ. He showed no contempt; only mercy.

A lot of us would do well to follow his example these days.

Grace and peace.