Introspection: Who Are You?

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

Comments are always welcomed.

Who Are You?

Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations?

Tell Me if you know.

Who set its measurements? Surely you know.

Who stretched a measuring tape on it?

On what were its footings sunk;

who laid its cornerstone,

while the morning stars sang in unison

and all the divine beings shouted?

Job 38:4-7 (CEB)

What do I know of You

Who spoke me into motion?

Where have I even stood

But the shore along Your ocean?

Are You fire? Are You fury?

Are You sacred? Are You beautiful?

What do I know?

What do I know of Holy?

From "What Do I Know of Holy" by Addison Road

Last month, I met my friend George for coffee.  At that time, he was the pastor of one of my home church's sister congregations.  He had been appointed to another church, so I wanted to pick his brain before he relocated.  George is also an author¹ who once worked for a Christian publisher, and I wanted to learn more about Christian publishing.  He gave me some helpful information about the industry.  He also encouraged me to keep writing, particularly without an audience in mind.  In other words, he encouraged me to start journaling.  Since he and my own pastor, Laura, had both suggested I do this, I finally decided to give it a shot.

I wanted a subject for my journaling, so I started turning to the daily lectionary readings that accompany the weekly readings used by many churches on Sunday mornings.²  There are three passages listed for each day, but I make it a point to read only one of them.  I would rather mine a single passage for meaning than run the risk of reading numerous passages shallowly.  On an ideal day, I will read the day's passage before leaving for work in the morning, ponder the passage throughout the day, and write something about the passage sometime during the evening.  Of course, I also write about the day's events and other thoughts from the day.  I have even written some things I didn't particularly want to put into writing.

What I like about the daily lectionary is the fact that it limits my choice of Scripture passages to read; otherwise, I might constantly gravitate to my favorite passages, like the Parable of the Prodigal Son or the discussions about the most important commandments.

According to St. James, Scripture is like a mirror.³  Right off the bat, one thing that my practice of daily Scripture reading has shown me about myself is the fact that I carry around a lot of spiritual baggage.  There are a lot of Scripture passages that don't exactly warm my heart but rather give me heartburn.  Sometimes, when I sit down to write about the passage I read earlier in the day, I find myself writing what I dislike about it.

Years ago, I left behind a form of Christianity I now consider toxic, but I find that I still have not yet fully recovered from it.  I still suffer from a very broken perception of God.  Sometimes I wonder if God truly loves all of humanity as Jesus said or if God is just itching to chuck some of us into the fires of hell as certain megachurch pastors like to say.

The reason I have an initial allergic reaction to some of the passages I read is the fact that I initially read the passage through the broken lens of a distorted view of God.  I find that if I continue to study and ponder a passage I initially find troubling, I am able to find love and hope in it.  Still, I wonder if I am reading the Bible correctly or if I am simply reading what I want the Bible to say.

Of course, my distorted image of God creeps into my life at other times.  Last month, after a disgracefully bad game of bowling, I commented to my mom, "Life likes to teach me humility.  I think life should leave me alone and move on to somebody else for a while."  Of course, I wasn't saying what I actually meant.  By "life," I really meant "God," and by "teach me humility," I really meant "viciously and spitefully put me in my place."  Of course, when I come to my senses I remember that God isn't vicious or spiteful and that I tend to attribute to God the qualities of other authority figures.

I delivered my most recent sermon, "A God-Sized Gospel," at two churches, my own and another sister church, and I did so with a great deal of fear and trembling.  In my sermon, I critique a lot of things I had been taught about God, about Christ, and about Salvation, and I feared that I might incur the wrath of people who might hold the very beliefs I criticized.  Looking back, I think that I might have also felt a little guilty that, though I wanted to offer people a message of hope, I wrote what I wrote in my sermon because I had a theological axe to grind.⁴

I wonder if I focus on God's love when I write because I am still trying to convince myself of God's love.

Three years ago, it came to light that some segments of Christianity are extremely protective of the idea that hell is a literal place of unending conscious torment as punishment for sinners.  As I started reading a book by one such thinker, I began to think that, if God would indeed impose such an existence on a person, then maybe we cannot say things like, "For God so loved the world," without crossing our fingers behind our backs.  I began to wonder if maybe God wasn't loving at all, and I came closer to a nervous breakdown than I had ever come in my life.  I converted from Christianity to nihilism.  Trent Reznor's devastating prayer, "I'm all alone in a world You must despise," suddenly rang true to me.⁵

My conversion to nihilism didn't last very long: I snapped out of it after a few days.  I really didn't have too much of a choice if I was going to be a functional member of society.  With all the conflicting images of God out there, I became a lot less certain about God, but, for the sake of my own sanity, I decided that there are some lines of thought within Christianity that I need to avoid like the plague.  I became even more particular about the books I read and the sermon podcasts I follow.

"I pray God to rid me of God."
~ Meister Eckhart

I feel like my beliefs have changed since that time.  Maybe the substance of my beliefs hasn't really changed, but something about my beliefs has changed, perhaps the way I believe them.  In the past month, journaling has given me the chance to locate myself theologically.

I have not become atheist or agnostic, but I have definitely become more apophatic.  In other words, I believe in God, but, instead of trying to define God, I think it best to let God be mysterious.  I spend a lot of time in coffee shops, and, living in the Bible Belt, I often have the opportunity to listen in on conversations about spiritual matters.  I hear people speak with confidence about what God is like and what God wants them to do.  By contrast, when I speak about God, I often use words like maybe or perhaps.

As someone who still identifies himself as a Christian, there are certain things I have chosen to believe about God.  I have chosen to believe that God is somehow revealed in Jesus Christ.  St. Paul calls Jesus "the image of the invisible God."⁶  Brian Zahnd, one of my favorite preachers, likes to say, "God is like Jesus.  God has always been like Jesus.  There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus.  We have not always known what God is like - but now we do."⁷  The idea that God can be seen through Jesus, a humble person of love, peace, justice, and mercy, is a great comfort to me.

Even among Christians, there is a lot of disagreement about what God and Jesus are like.  That said, I have also chosen to believe what St. John wrote, that "God is love."⁸  Furthermore, I believe that one should not have to twist the meaning of the word love to make this statement.  One should not have to "balance" God's love with things that are, quite frankly, incompatible with love.  Even the concept of God's judgement against sin should be viewed through the lens of God's love.

The French philosopher Voltaire once mused, "If God has made us in His image, we have returned Him the favor."  I have heard it said more than once that, though we project our own personalities onto God, we paradoxically become more and more like the God we worship.  For example, if a person projects his anger onto God and then devotes his life to worshiping an angry God, he will become more and more angry.  Likewise, a fearful person who makes God the object of her fear will become all the more fearful.⁹  I figure that, conversely, if I choose to believe that God is infinitely more loving than I ever will be and if I worship this loving God, then maybe I'll become more and more loving.

In the 1993 film Rudy, a priest says, "In 35 years of religious study, I have only come up with two hard incontrovertible facts: there is a God, and I'm not Him."  There is only so much we can truly know about God, but what we believe about God matters, because it directly affects who we become as human beings.  If we are truly created in God's image, as the Bible says, then our image of God is extremely important.  I have heard a lot of ideas about God over the years - some that are a great comfort to me and others that make my blood run cold.  There are some ideas I simply cannot believe, and there are others I have to believe.  The truth is that all of these things, in some way, keep me chasing after a God I'll never truly catch.

"Who are you, O God, and who am I?"
~ St. Francis of Assisi

Notes:

1. My friend George is the author of the book A World Worth Saving: Lenten Spiritual Practices for Action.  (2013, Upper Room Books.)
2. The daily lectionary can be found in .pdf format here.
3. James 1:23-24
4. See my sermon "A God-Sized Gospel."
5. From the song "Terrible Lie" by Nine Inch Nails.
6. Colossians 1:15 (NRSV)
7. Brian Zahnd.  "God Is Like Jesus."  BrianZahnd.com, 08/11/2011.
8. 1 John 4:8
9. Rob Bell writes about this concept in chapter 7 of his book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.  (2011, HarperOne.)  Greg Boyd has also spoken of this concept in his sermons.  See the sermon "Escaping the Twilight Zone God."

The photograph of the Pleiades was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2004.

Sermon: A God-Sized Gospel

Delivered at Bethel United Methodist Church in West Greenville, South Carolina on July 20, 2014.

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

Comments are always welcomed.

A God-Sized Gospel

Audio Version

So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh - for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.  For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.  For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.  When we cry, "Abba! Father!" it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ - if, in fact, we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.  For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.  For in hope we were saved.  Now hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what is seen?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Romans 8:12-25 (NRSV)

We were meant to live for so much more

Have we lost ourselves?

Somewhere we live inside

From "Meant to Live" by Switchfoot

At the very beginning of the Bible, there is a poetic narrative that tells us that God created the Earth out of a formless void.  God surrounded the Earth with an atmosphere and covered the Earth with land and sea.  God populated the land, sea, and sky with all kinds of living things.  God then began work on God's greatest creation, a creature that the psalmist David says is "a little lower" than the heavenly beings,¹ a creature that bears the very image of God.  God tasked this creature with the care of the Earth and of all the plants and animals that inhabit the Earth.  I am referring, of course, to humanity.  At the end of this creation narrative, we read that "God saw everything that He had made, and indeed, it was very good."²

But it seems as though the world didn't stay that way.  According to St. Paul, "Creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it."  For reasons we still don't fully understand, the world and all its inhabitants it have been subjected to suffering and death, two things that were not part of God's design and do not reflect the original goodness of God's creation.

Two thousand years ago, during the time of the Roman Empire, something extraordinary happened.  The Son of God, came into the world as a man known as Jesus of Nazareth.  He taught people how to live lives of love, through His words and through His actions.  His fight against corruption put Him on a collision course with the powers that be, and He was executed on a cross.  Amazingly, He was resurrected from the dead, and He ascended into Heaven, promising His followers that He would return someday.  According to Rob Bell, "These first Christians believed that Jesus' resurrection had implications for the entire universe."  They dedicated their lives to sharing the message of Jesus Christ, and, to describe this message, they subversively used a word associated with the Caesar's propaganda.  This word, Euangelion, is the root for the word Evangelical and is often translated into English as Gospel or Good News.³

St. Paul, one of these early Evangelists, traveled throughout the empire, sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ and organizing communities of faith.  As you probably know, he wrote a number of letters or "epistles" to the various churches, and a number of them are collected in the Bible.  Paul longed to visit the faith community in Rome, but, since he didn't know when he would be able to do so, he penned a letter to share the Good News he wanted the Romans to hear.⁴  The Letter to the Romans has been an inspiration to countless people over the centuries, and it is considered by many to be Paul's greatest writing.

Modern-day evangelists still turn to the Letter to the Romans.  Some pick out the bits and pieces they feel summarize the Gospel, and they call these parts the "Romans Road."  They tell us that this fallen world and all its fallen inhabitants are ultimately headed for destruction, for "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."⁵  But though "the wages of sin is death," "the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."⁶  When Jesus suffered and died on the cross, He took the punishment meant for us, for "God proves His love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us."⁷  If you put your faith in His sacrifice, then you can escape your punishment, for "if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved."^{8 9}

In summary, the "Good News," as we hear it from many Christians, is that, even though we all deserve unending conscious torment because we failed to live up to God's expectations, if we (A) admit our sins, (B) believe in Christ as our personal Lord and Savior, and (C) confess our beliefs to others, then, when we die, we will go to Heaven and not Hell.¹⁰  Perhaps someone has presented the Gospel to you in this way in the past.  Perhaps you were once standing in line somewhere when someone asked you, "If you died today, are you certain that you would go to Heaven?"  To hear some Christians speak, it seems as though the whole world is a sinking ship and they want to point us to the lifeboats.

If the Good News is so good, then why do so many Christians feel as though they need to preface it with bad news?  And, if we're honest with ourselves, can we really say that the good news actually makes up for the bad news?  Though a lucky few - or perhaps an "elect" few - make it to the lifeboats and escape disaster, a vast majority of humans are still going down with the ship, so to speak - that's billions and billions of people, mind you!  Though more than seven hundred people were rescued after the Titanic crashed into an iceberg, the event is still remembered as a tragedy because more than twice as many people lost their lives.¹¹  The Gospel is reduced by many Christians to a similar story, a story of a failed world and a poorly executed evacuation.  This tragic "gospel" is not good news: it offers more despair than hope.¹²

Jonathan Holston, the current United Methodist bishop in South Carolina, likes to urge the Church to dream "God-sized dreams."  This year, South Carolina United Methodists are pursuing the "God-sized dream" of collecting one million books for underprivileged children.  If Salvation primarily concerns what happens to us when we die, as many Christians imply, then any "God-sized dream" we pursue, whether we're collecting books, seeking cures to deadly diseases, or fighting evils like human trafficking, is ultimately like trying to arrange the proverbial deckchairs on the Titanic if it doesn't help people to "get saved."¹³

The truth is that we don't need to hear any more bad news.  Unless we live with our heads in the sand, we're already painfully aware of the bad news.  We are aware of the bad news
every time we turn on the evening news and hear about another case of domestic violence,
every time we open the newspaper and read about another conflict over seas,
every time we are alerted to the news of another school shooting,
every time we read the latest statistics about the number of children in the world who die every day because of malnutrition and preventable diseases,
every time we receive a phone call and hear that another loved one has been diagnosed with cancer,
every time we hear that another young person had committed suicide because he or she was bullied.
We are aware of the bad news every time we find ourselves thinking, "This can't be what God had in mind!"

The "Romans Road" may have been paved with good intentions, but it falls far short of the glorious message of hope Paul is so excited to share with the people of Rome.  Paul acknowledges that "creation was subjected to futility," but he also writes of a hope "that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God."  According to Paul, all of creation is "groaning": creation itself yearns for news that is better than what many of us have been told.  According to Paul, this fallen world yearns for redemption.

Is Paul, perhaps, hinting that the Gospel is actually much, much bigger and better than what many of us have been told?  What if God is planning something other than scrapping a fallen world and saving an elect few?

From Paul's point of view, the best is yet to come.  Paul writes that "the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us."  In other words, all the pain and suffering of this fallen world will someday give rise to something better.  Paul goes on to say that "the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now."  Though a mother might jokingly remind her child of the seventy-two hours of pain she endured to bring him into the world, the joy her child has brought into her life far outweighs the pains of childbirth.  In the same way, the groaning of the world, according to Paul, is merely the labor pain that precedes the joyous celebration of new life.

Paul and the other early Christians believed that something big was on the horizon.  Paul writes that he and his readers in Rome have the "first fruits of the Spirit."  He speaks of "first fruits" in another letter in which He writes that Christ is the "first fruits of those who have died."¹⁴  The ancient Israelites made it a practice to bring the first of their crops - the first fruits - to the temple.¹⁵  This offering was both an act of gratitude that God had provided for them and an act of faith that God would continue to provide.  Like any other human being, Christ lived, suffered, and died.  What is unique about Christ is that He was resurrected from the dead.  When Paul compares Christ to the first fruits brought to the temple, he is suggesting that, because Christ was raised from the dead, there is even more resurrection to come.¹⁶

Biblical scholar N.T. Wright, in his book Surprised by Hope, asserts,
The central Christian affirmation is that what the creator God has done in Jesus Christ, and supremely in His resurrection, is what He intends to do for the whole world - meaning, by world, the entire cosmos with all its history.¹⁷
Wright proposes,
The New Testament image of the future hope of the whole cosmos, grounded in the resurrection of Jesus, gives as coherent a picture as we need or could have of the future that is promised to the whole world, a future in which, under the sovereign and wise rule of the creator God, decay and death will be done away with and a new creation born, to which the present one will stand as mother to child.¹⁸

If that is not a "God-sized dream," then I don't know what is!

Though many Christians lace the Good News of the Gospel with doom and gloom and hellfire and brimstone, these are not the things that Paul and the early Christians wanted to share with the world.  The Bible tells us that "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son" not "to condemn the world" but "that the world might be saved through Him."¹⁹  The Gospel does not describe an angry God who has lost all hope in the world, but rather a loving God who will do whatever it takes to save the world.  I am not saying that there is no Hell - that is a topic of discussion for another day.²⁰  What I am saying is that God's interest is not in disposing of wrongdoers but in saving the whole world, including the wrongdoers.  Through the ancient prophet Ezekiel, God said, "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live."²¹

At the very end of the Bible, we read about St. John's vision of the future.  The holy city comes down from Heaven, and God takes up residence on the Earth and wipes all tears from humanity's eyes.  God puts an end to mourning, pain, and death and makes all things new.²²  The Good News is not that a lucky few of us can evacuate a dying world and escape to a better place when we die.  The Good News is that Heaven will someday come down to Earth.  At that time, the Kingdom of God will be fully realized, and the Earth will be restored to the glory God originally intended.  To borrow a phrase from singer-songwriter John Mark McMillan, it is as if "Heaven meets Earth like a sloppy, wet kiss."²³  This is our hope as Christians.  This is the hope we express every time we pray, "Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven."

As Christians, we live in the tension of the "already" and the "not yet."  We know that God is already at work redeeming the world, but, we know that God's work is not yet complete.  We know that the Kingdom of God is already within us, as Jesus said,²⁴ but, at the same time, we know that the Kingdom is not yet fully realized in the world.  As Paul points out, we do not hope for what we already see.  Until God's work of redemption is complete, we groan, we wait, and we hope.

As creation groans collectively as it yearns for redemption, each of us groans individually, yearning for personal redemption.  We groan because we know that each of us has, in his or her own little way, contributed to the greater problems of the world.  We groan like Paul who laments, "I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate...  Wretched man that I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?"²⁵

In the same way that God is at work putting the world back together, God is at work putting each of us back together.  According to Paul, we need not be held prisoner by our faults and our mistakes, and we need not fear condemnation from God.  God invites each of us to receive a "spirit of adoption" that we might live into our identities as beloved children of God.  We may think of God as our loving parent just like Jesus who prayed, "Abba, Father."  Paul writes that as children of God, we have "the first fruits of the Spirit."  It is the Holy Spirit who works within us, helping us to "put to death" our selfishness and guiding us into abundant lives characterized by love.

Paul writes that as children of God, we are "heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ."  He also writes that "creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God."  According to N.T. Wright,
[Creation] is waiting - on tiptoe with expectation, in fact - for the particular freedom it will enjoy when God gives to His children that glory, that wise rule and stewardship, which was always intended for those who bear God's glorious image.²⁶
In spite of all the horrible things that have happened since the creation of the world, God has never abandoned the original plan to make humankind the caretakers of God's good creation.

When Jesus sends the Disciples out to proclaim the Good News throughout Israel, He tells them to proclaim that "the Kingdom of Heaven has come near."  He then tells them to "cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, [and] cast out demons," so that people can see that the Kingdom has indeed come near.²⁷  This model of evangelism does not lend itself to an apathy toward all matters seemingly outside of the spiritual realm.  We dream "God-sized dreams" for the world and work to make them a reality because we are ready to step into our roles as caretakers of creation.  We seek cures to deadly diseases, collect food, clothing, and books for those in need, and fight evils like human trafficking as we await the fruition of God's own "God-sized dream" for the redemption of all creation.

The world is not a sinking ship, and we Christians are not the rats abandoning the sinking ship.  The Gospel is not news of an evacuation plan but rather the Good News of a restored creation.  Ever since the world fell apart, God has been hard at work putting it back together again.  No matter how much bad news we hear, we must not forget about the Good News of redemption.  God has not given up on the world, so neither should we.

Amen.


Notes:

1. Psalm 8:5
2. Genesis 1 (NRSV)
3. Rob Bell. NOOMA You | 015. 2007, Flannel.
4. Romans 1:8-15
5. Romans 3:23 (NRSV)
6. Romans 6:23 (NRSV)
7. Romans 5:8 (NRSV)
8. Romans 10:9 (NRSV)
9. According to Wikipedia, the "Romans Road" also contains Romans 10:10, Romans 10:13, and, though it's not in the Letter to the Romans, Revelation 3:20.
10. These steps are known as the "ABCs of Salvation."
11. Wikipedia: "Sinking of the RMS Titanic"
12. In the book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived., Rob Bell heavily criticizes both the idea that Salvation is an evacuation from the world and the idea that Salvation for a few is actually good news.  2011, HarperOne.
13. To hear an example of this line of thinking at work, listen to the 10/14/2011 episode of the Homebrewed Christianity podcast, "Slave Free Earth: Cathy and Will Henderson on human trafficking."
14. 1 Corinthians 15:20 (NRSV)
15. See Leviticus 23:9-14 and Deuteronomy 26:1-11.
16. N.T. Wright.  Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.  2008, HarperOne.  p. 98 (Page numbers for this book are taken from the Kindle edition.)
17. Surprised by Hope, p. 90
18. Surprised by Hope, p. 107
19. From John 3:16-17 (NRSV), emphasis mine
20. To read about my views on Hell, see my perspectives "The End of the World," "The Gates of Hell," and "Could You?"
21. Ezekiel 33:11 (NRSV)
22. Revelation 21:1-5a (NRSV)
23. From the song "How He Loves" by John Mark McMillan
24. Luke 17:20-21
25. Romans 7:15,24 (NRSV)
26. N.T. Wright.  Paul for Everyone: Romans, Part One.  2005, Westminster John Knox Press.
27. Matthew 10:7-8a (NRSV)

Saint Paul Writing His Epistles was painted by Valentin de Boulogne in the 17th century.