There is no leverage in loss. . .

For a very long time we have lived with the false idea that in order to raise up someone, another must be torn down.  That surely shows in the bitter political and social divide which is not merely the competition of ideas but the terrible idea that trashing our opponent automatically makes us look better.  It has also shown itself in the battle of the sexes where it is almost universally assumed that we must tear men down in order to lift women up.  That is not the path to respect or appreciation of difference nor is it any road to the equality that so many say they want.  But it will be the path to the destruction of whatever might be good that remains among us.  

I am not at all saying that we should refrain from calling a sin a sin or condemning wrong.  Of course not. But the goal of calling a sin out or even calling out a sin is not as a means to gain leverage over them.  It is, as Matthew 18 reminds us, to gain back our brother or sister.  As good as that sounds, the reality is that too often we will settle for putting someone else down in the hopes that it will lift our boat as a result.  How has that been working?  To demonize our enemies or those with whom we disagree will seem to make us and ours a righteous cause but it cannot mask the selfish desire that is at the root of it all. 

In education as well as in the job market, we have lived for a while with the shaming of men and their characteristic traits of providing, protecting, and working.  Ambition has become a bad word in our vocabulary where everyone shares in everything no matter what they do or do not contribute.  We say we want to float all boats but the reality is that we are simply emptying the stream until there is nothing left to float any boat.  Then we call that progress.  What does winning look like?  Apparently it looks like men abandoning the fight so that women alone are left in it.  Look at the graduation rates and who wears the gold cords of achievement in high school and college graduations.  It is a sea of feminism.  But in that sea, have all the boats been raised to float or have we settled for merely some?  Is it wise or even accurate to frame every male success as a female loss?  Or, the other way around?

Oddly enough, there was a time when women and children were more regularly in worship -- bemoaning the men who were at work, asleep, or on the golf course.  I have a famous Norman Rockwell print of the family heading to church while the husband and dad in pjs is reading the paper while smoking a cigarette.  Now it seems that we are headed the other way around as more young men are heading to worship while their female counterparts are existing.  Of course, it is about faith but there is also a cultural move here.  As young women pull away from institutional authority, traditional marriage and family, historic values, and clear morality, young men seem to draw closer to the same things.  Sadly, it is as if one part of the equation must lose in order for the other to win. 

AI and the promise of machines to replace us not simply from the menial jobs we do not want to do but from the nobility of work in general seems a dream but is it?  Is it good for humanity to be rich in leisure and poor in labor?   Ambition is not a problem to be solved but an energy to be directed.  We have many needs but chief among them is purpose.  Ambition does not need to be replaced by a dream of a mechanized egalitarian society in which machines do our work and we are left with the jobs that AI and technology cannot do?  Ambition within the cause of God and for His purpose is always directed away from self and for the sake of others.

Jesus does not choose sides, elevating one over another but dies for all that all who live should not live for themselves but for Him.  That is both the gift of this Gospel and its call to shape us and our lives by that Gospel.  Our Lord made man for woman and woman for man, having in His creative love His own selfless love as source and example.  The future for us all will not be built by choosing one over another but by the love that loves as Christ has loved us -- at least until that love finishes its work and delivers us unto the Father.  But until then if Christians are to be a leaven in this competitive world in which you succeed at the cost of others, then we need to honor and respect the differences of male and female not as better or worse but as God's own creative will and purpose -- a goodness grace teaches us to sin where sin sees only a race.  There is no leverage to be won by choosing men over women or women over men.  Each is itself a false choice that would deprive us of the essential values of home and family that God meant us to know and enjoy from the beginning.  Diverse roles, to be sure.  Different characteristics, of course.  But together more than apart.  At least when it comes to men and women, boys and girls, neither will gain at the cost of the other.