orthodoxy

“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” – James 1:22

If you like scary things this time of year, I’ve got a good one for you. It is a hobgoblin of a most frightening kind that none of us like to talk about or admit that it keeps company far too close to home. It is the foreboding specter, the ghoulish ghost, of “consistency.” Let me explain.

This past week, I, too, went afield and traveled up to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, into the heart of Amish Country. The horse drawn buggies were in generous profusion, and it was interesting to watch the world’s buffet of general tourists who are drawn with a certain amount of fascination to all things Amish, me being one of them. If it truly is a gift to be simple as goes the song, the Amish abound in many ways. They certainly have no electric bills to worry about, nor car insurance or TV’s that break down, and the problems of Vista are far from their minds. We loved the clothes lines on pulleys that lifted the family laundry proudly up in the air for all to see, flags of defiance to Maytag and all their kin. They marked the Amish farms in clear distinction to any other well kept farm of the community. There is an enforced simplicity here that makes us all pause and wonder if we are truly better off with all our modern claptrap.

Being a woodworker, I snooped around the tourist shops hawking “Amish made” furniture - peeking at the joinery and noting designs. It led me to inquire and follow a trail that led me to an off-road farm a good way from town to Mr. Stoltzfuss’s chair shop. The family dog tried to announce my presence but no one came out. I followed my ears to the sound of a motor running in a back building. What I discovered was a fairly large woodworking shop humming with business. Mr. Stoltzfuss graciously welcomed me and showed me his upstairs showroom and all around his mini-chair factory. It was a family business that involved grandpa and the whole family as they turned out about 3,000 chairs a year. There were no light bulbs in the shop, no electricity of any kind, but I discovered some of the most sophisticated and up-to-date woodworking machinery available today. These machines were driven by either hydraulic fluid or compressed air supplied by a large diesel engine running continuously in an adjoining room. Preformed wood came by way of shipment from commercial suppliers, and these folks were shaping, sanding, and finishing these parts together in a model of home-industry efficiency.

I couldn’t help but let my mind pitch wildly back and forth from the diesel engine and hydraulic motors to the theology of it all that prohibits one form of modern convenience but allows another. I tried to picture a meeting of the Amish elders sitting around and deliberating the worthiness or unworthiness of power driven machinery, which kinds, and how much. To further the picture of seemingly conflicting systems of thought, I stopped by a roadside scene and took a picture of a team of six horses pulling a single row corn picker as it made its way slowly through the field. As it approached me, I suddenly recognized that a gasoline engine was mounted on the corn picker driving the whirring mechanics of that machine. Evidently it is permissible to mount an engine on your corn picker but not on your buggy.

Being careful not to mock this, to us, a glaring inconsistency, both my wife and I confessed that being consistent is, indeed, a difficult thing for us all. It is the hobgoblin of all Christians who profess a high and holy standard and yet struggle each day to live it out. We say that church is important and then skip at will. We would shun worldliness and then let ourselves and our children watch the unthinkable. We say it is better to give than to receive and then consume untold wealth on ourselves. We hold up the great commission but then flee to the safety of the suburbs and our Christian subculture. Scary, isn’t it, how we can so easily hitch gasoline engines to our horse drawn corn pickers and still feel so orthodox?