Several years ago, I sat in my office with a married couple in our church. They’d been leaders in our community and admired by many. I’d watched them navigate a number of life challenges with faithfulness, poise, and profound confidence in God. But here they were, sitting down with me to tell me that their marriage was ending. The husband had decided that, in his words, “love was leading him elsewhere.”
Witnessing the disintegration of what was once, at least from the outside looking in, a beautiful model of loving fidelity, I was struck by the fact that what I perceived as disintegration was being experienced by this man as re-integration. For him, the pain of cutting off one set of relationships—with his wife and children, specifically—was subsumed by the insatiable longing to graft himself into a new relationship, with another woman. We were seeing and experiencing this one thing, the destruction of this marriage, as two very different things.
The wife was experiencing this as a cowardly act of infidelity.
The husband was experiencing this as a courageous act of newfound fidelity.
The late David Foster Wallace’s well known line from his commencement speech at Kenyon College goes like this: “There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” Worship means lots of things but it means no less than unwavering fidelity to a particular person, thing, or reality.
So if Wallace is right, and he is, then his words can be put another way:
“There is no such thing as absolute infidelity. Everybody lives in fidelity to something. The only choice we get is, what or who.”
Take the idea a bit further and we see the other side of the same coin:
“There is also no such thing as absolute fidelity. Everybody lives in infidelity to something; to many things. The only choice we get is, what or who.”
To live in fidelity is to live in infidelity.
To be faithful is to be unfaithful. Fidelity in one direction means infidelity in the other, or in all other, directions.
What does this mean then for Christian fidelity, or faithfulness to Christ? It means many things but as much as anything, it means infidelity to all previous allegiances. It means cheating the world. On the surface, this is a frightening proposition. To commit our lives exclusively to a first century Jewish rabbi we claim is still alive and rules and reigns as King of the universe is already fraught with risk; but then, Jesus adds this pressure:
I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. - John 14:6
Sin, human rebellion, and the resulting brokenness have rendered union with God an impossibility. But there is one exception to the rule of a life apart from Him.
“Except through me.” He’s the only exception. As sin bends human life away from God, Jesus declares himself to be the one and only way back. In the words of Aslan the Lion to the young girl Jill in C.S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair, “You will die of thirst… [because] there is no other stream. Fidelity to Christ is the only way. And fidelity to Christ is by nature infidelity to all other cultural and worldly orthodoxies, of which there are many:
I am god, in which case I don’t need a way to god; I’m right here.
Success is god, in which case winning is the way.
Money is god, in which case earning is the way.
Pleasure is god, in which case whatever feels good is the way.
There is no god, in which case there is no way.
Everything is god, in which case everything is the way.
Every person on the planet has a choice to make—which orthodoxy will we pledge our fidelity to? For church communities and their leaders, this has enormous implications. When we invite our people to pledge their allegiance to Christ alone, we are also asking them to renounce all previous allegiances, to cheat all previous orthodoxies.
I have to confess, for much of my pastoral ministry life, I’ve struggled to adequately communicate and embody the gravity of this choice. Imagine that you and I are lost in the woods and there are two paths before us.
One path is marked, “danger,” and the other is marked, “home.” Now, imagine you were to ask me,
“Do you want to get home?” (which is a question about desire)
“Do you trust the signs?” (which is a question about belief)
If I were to say, “yes” to both questions, affirming my desire to get home and my belief in the signs, but began walking down the path marked “danger,” I’d be a liar or a fool or delusional.
The misalignment or disconnect between what I say I want and trust, and my embodied action would ultimately mean infidelity to my stated desire and belief.
Again, for much of my ministry life, I worked so hard at compelling, maybe even accidentally coercing, people to state the right desire and belief, without giving the necessary time and energy toward helping them walk the right path. I did this with good intentions, for the sake of seemingly good things, like accessibility or relevance or meeting peoples’ felt needs. But I was unintentionally offering people a farce—that a person can desire God and believe in God while simultaneously entertaining and embodying opposing desires and beliefs with their actual lived lives.
In the early church, before a person could fully participate in the life of the Jesus community, they were baptized. But before they could be baptized, they had to be catechized, which was an arduous months- and sometimes years-long process. And at the end of that journey, on their final night before baptism, they would stay up all night, praying and reading Scripture. Then when the rooster crowed at dawn, they’d be led out to a body of water. They waited for the rooster to crow because it was a visceral reminder of Peter’s denial of Christ.
The final act of catechesis into the church body was immediately preceded by a reminder of an act of great infidelity.
Then, at this body of water, the people would remove all of their clothing (one of the few ancient practices I’m actually grateful we’ve left behind). And standing there, completely exposed, they would publicly renounce Satan, be anointed with oil, then asked three questions from the Apostles’ Creed.
“Do you believe in God the Father?” “I believe.”
Then they’d be immersed in the baptism water.
“Do you believe in Jesus Christ the Son?” “I believe.”
Then a second time into the water.
“Do you believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy church, the resurrection of the dead?” “I believe.”
And finally a third immersion into the baptism water.
And it was only then, after months and years of catechesis, culminating in the renouncing of Satan, bearing their bodies before the community, declaring their belief, that they’d be received as a true member of the church family.
At the end of every year, lots of churches send out an annual report type of email, with numbers and statistics that we celebrate. How many people attended Easter and how many people served and how many joined a community group and how much money was given and on and on. I’m not criticizing this. Our church does the same. So in late December, we sent an email to our church and with great joy we shared all the numbers, including the total number of people who’d been baptized at our church in the previous year.
But our annual report email did not specify that those people had publicly pledged their absolute fidelity to God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or that they’d declared their unwavering belief in the holy church or the resurrection of the dead. Now, we did ask the standard baptism questions and they did all say yes, so maybe safe assumptions can be made.
But our email had no mention of the total number of people who had, “turned their backs on all previous allegiances.” I’ve not once read a church’s annual report email that said, “Because of your generous participation, 27 people renounced Satan this year.”
My point is that sometimes for church leaders, it is tempting to equate Christian-commitment with Christian-fidelity. Both matter. But fidelity is not just an ongoing commitment; it is also an ongoing denial.
When we invite people to “yes” to Jesus, we’re not inviting them into passive receptivity but to singular fidelity, which means an all-encompassing, declarative no to all else. We’re inviting people to gain Christ and lose the world.
If it doesn’t feel like loss, like a severing from previously held schemas, then it may not actually be fidelity. Fidelity is hard, it’s painful, it’s sacrificial. It can feel like losing a limb. And we have to be brutally and beautifully honest about this.
Jesus didn’t invite his followers to a life of comfort or leisure. He said,
Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves (read: infidelity to self) and take up their cross and follow me. - Matthew 16:24
In our age of expressive individualism, where self-expression and autonomy reign on the thrones of societies and individuals, self-denial is seen as offensive and oppressive. But this seeming loss is actually gain.
Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. - Matthew 16:25
In this way, the seemingly excruciating nature of fidelity is in fact the birthing pains of freedom. Dietrich Bonhoeffer explains it this way:
“Freedom is not something man has for himself, but something he has for others [...] It is not a possession, a presence, an object, but a relationship and nothing else. In truth, freedom is a relationship between two persons. Being free means ‘being free for the other,’ because the other has bound me to him (read: fidelity). Only in relationship with the other am I free.”
Being bound is freedom. Fidelity is freedom. But to embrace this truth demands an expansive imagination. We often think that people who cheat on their spouses do so because they’ve begun to imagine the enticing possibility of a new lover. But I think the opposite is true. I think infidelity most often takes place because the person has lost their ability to imagine.
The writer Harrison Key wrote a book last year reflecting on the fallout of infidelity in his marriage. Reflecting on his experience, he writes this:
“I think most divorces are merely a failure of imagination: you lose the capacity to conceive of a happy future. The two of you are like a wet pair of matches, hardly able to get the fire back. Why keep trying? The world is full of dry matches. All you need is a new one.”
In a world full of “dry matches,” we must learn to imagine again; to reorient our wandering gaze away from the chaotic mass of cultural and worldly orthodoxies and redirect our allegiance toward Christ, one decision, one day, one season, one life at a time.
This is a painting called The Procession to Calvary by the 16th century Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel, who was fond of depicting hard-to-find centrality amid chaos in many of his pieces.
The power of this painting, and much of Bruegel’s work, is the decision the artist is forcing the viewer to make. Christ is hard to see but he’s there, in the very center of the madness. No matter how hard you try, you cannot focus on everything and on the One thing at the same time. You must choose. This is what it means to live faithfully to Christ. We can let our eyes wander, our gaze tossed back and forth by the chaos of the crowds. Or, we can fix our eyes on the very center, where Christ walks the path, carrying his cross, calling us to follow, in fidelity to him and him alone.