This is part of the healthy way that the church has evolved throughout its history in a continual effort to find new and meaningful ways to talk about their faith. That process of cultural evolution has continued.

Substitutionary Atonement
The predominant metaphor that is heard today as the evangelical church talks about the atonement is one we call substitionary atonement. Sometimes we call it vicarious atonement or propitiation or judicial theory or penal substitution, but all of these subtle variants are a form of a metaphor that paralleled the development of the modern legal system. This framework focuses on the divide from the diagram earlier (see Part 1). Paul writes to the Roman church and says, “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” and we are disconnected from God by those shortcomings. The theory of substitutionary atonement lines this reality up against the model of the developing legal system. We have transgressed the standard that God has set for membership in his social order much the same way a criminal transgresses the social order that society has set for itself. Similarly to when someone breaks rules and must be penalized through fine or imprisonment, God has set a penalty for our transgression, and that penalty is death. Now that is a bit of a kludge on the metaphor, which has been articulated much more eloquently to reflect the nuances of the relationship between God, law and sinner by better theologians. However, in its most basic form, substitutionary atonement is a legal picture of our relationship to God. The twist comes in because God sends his son, to pay that penalty for us. In his death he saves us from the consequence of our own actions by stepping into the gap for us.

This idea was first articulated in the 11th century by Anselm of Canturbury in what he called Satisfaction theory. You can feel the 11th century in the language. God has been offended or insulted and he demands satisfaction. I can almost see God slapping me in the face with his white glove before drawing his rapier and declaring, “on guard”.

The major theme though is that the price for our mistakes or our sins, if that language is still meaningful to you, is too high for us to pay on our own. The idea of the connection between death and sin has a rich history. It is first developed in the language of the Old Testament. The high priest of the Jews would sacrifice a spotless lamb every year as a payment for the sins of the people. When Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God in the scriptures he is being compared to that picture. Even beyond that one symbolic moment each person was required to provide sacrifice to atone for their transgressions. The picture of death in those sacrifices was meant to continually remind people of the very serious and consequential nature of their personal decisions. This time though, God himself is making the sacrifice for us. The spotless lamb is pictured in the sinless man, his death a covering or atoning sacrifice for our mistakes.

This picture of the atonement is incredibly important because it shows us the significance of the choices both that Jesus makes on our behalf and of the choices we make for ourselves as we choose or choose not, to live the life we were intended for.

The danger is that sometimes this becomes the only picture we talk about in less rooted Christian traditions and without the multiplicity of lens through which to see the mystery of God’s atonement our language becomes incomplete, starts to break down and becomes open to criticism or even ridicule.

This picture of substitutionary atonement while, very important can become unhelpful. Picture this metaphor in a slightly different, albeit crude, context.

One day a father is sitting inside his living room watching television, enjoying his day off when a baseball comes crashing through the window shattering the serenity of the moment and the glass of the window. The father is enraged by what has happened and storms out the front door of his house, down the steps and onto the lawn, where he can see the neighborhood kids playing in the street. He demands to now who threw the ball through his window. One of the boys puts up his and hand and admits to the accident. The father calls to his son who is playing with some other kids in the backyard and proceeds to spank him in front of everyone until he feels his anger subside. He then tells his son to go back to playing in the backyard, tells the kids across the street that all is forgiven and goes back inside to finish watching his show.

This is not the picture that substitutionary atonement is trying to convey. However, without the balance of our other metaphors it can start to look suspicious to someone on the outside looking in. Substitutionary atonement is not about cosmic child abuse, a slavishly legalistic deity or even divine courtroom. It is a picture of the personal responsibility each of us have for our actions and decisions and of the great lengths to which God is willing to go to bring us back no matter how far we have strayed from what we were intended to become.

Jesus saves us by experiencing the consequences for each of our mistakes.

Mosaic
Humanity made at one with God. You and I, able to sit down again, with our God. All of creation reconciled to its creator. This is a picture that is bigger than my personal salvation, although it is that too. My journey toward God is part of a story that encompasses all of history and all of creation. Personal choices, eternal truths, environmental realities and social contexts, all of these brought back into alignment with God. This is why all of these pictures are important for us. When we speak of the atonement we are talking about the mystery of the universe, we are talking about THE story of everything. The way in which all of these different pictures or lens or metaphors interact is what gives this story its incredible magnitude, depth and beauty.

Let me go back one last time to a quote from CS Lewis
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ’s death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. All the same, some of these theories are worth looking at.

It’s important for us to try to come to an understanding of this story. However in that attempt we need to keep some sense of mystery there. The atonement is so big and so important that my fear is any attempt we might make to have it appear easy or concise will necessarily lose some of the significance. At the same time, an idea as central to our faith as this, can’t be ignored or left alone. It is something that calls each of us to continually come back to it, to study it, to marvel at it, to be thankful for something so beautiful in our lives that we will never be able to completely frame it. The truth is, the atonement is all of the ideas we’ve looked at and in some sense it is none of them. It is simply the mystery that God has offered each of us the place of at-onement. All of the ways we talk about that idea simply add to the beauty of what that means. To finish I go back to where we started. All of these ideas need each other. You can’t talk about the death of Jesus without taking about his life and you can’t talk about his resurrection without talking about his death. So when we look at the ideas around the atonement we need to realize that we can’t talk about his taking our place unless we talk about his influence on our lives and we can’t about his victory unless we talk about his sacrifice.

It’s in the interplay between all of these myriad ideas that we find something of what it his death means for us, that in all these ways we are saved we are saved by Jesus.

Moral Influence
CS Lewis, among others, wrote a lot about this concept I’m calling moral influence. Lewis described the very appearance of a moral objective standard as an argument for God. At the same time his belief was that this appeal to an objective moral standard could not be explained as mere instinct, because it does not always win out, nor as mere social convention, because it appears to transcend and is appealed to across cultural divides, nor as a law of nature because the very idea of morality is prescriptive for our world rather than descriptive of our world. Therefore he argued that morality, in and of itself, points us towards not only God, but his intervention into the human story. Jesus steps into that story to bring us a more full picture of what a human life can be. This divine example of humanity becomes an influence on us of unequaled proportion. In fact, Jesus demonstration in his life and in his death is so perfect, and so powerful that it has altering effect on the course of human history helping to point us towards God.

One of the ways I like to imagine this idea is to think of life on a spectrum between our two outstretched arms. Without the story of Jesus we have an imagination of what life can be that spans the distance from our right hand to the tip of our nose. This is the imagination of the range we have to aim at in life. The story of Jesus opens us up to the possibility of an expanded spectrum of humanity, a spectrum than spans the distance between our two fully outstretched arms. Where once the best we could aim for stopped halfway across the spectrum the story of Jesus opens us up to the possibility of a more than we could have imagined on our own. This shift in perspective fundamentally alters how we see ourselves and our world. It’s not just that Jesus is some great moral teacher, with some helpful ideas to think about. This is the idea that Jesus as divine, as the creator present in creation, gives us an example of what a human truly can be, and example that transcends anything we could have ever seen or understood on our own.

He saves us, by removing the limits on our limited perspective.

This leads us into another major lens that we have seen the atonement. This one comes from very early in the Christian movement, in fact it finds it roots in the words of Paul the Apostle.

Ransom Theory

For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men.
1 Tim 2:5-6

The basic idea being communicated here is the idea that humanity is caught in slavery to sin (and to Satan if that language is meaningful for you). We find ourselves in a situation where we simply can’t pull ourselves out of this position.

In narrative form this metaphor paints a drama to help us understand the atonement. Jesus in his death is making a deal with the devil (somewhat literally) that works like this; him for us. Essentially like a ransom. Now the term actually refers more to the idea of buying a slaves freedom than it does to Mel Gibson’s kidnapping movie of the same name, nut essentially Jesus and us swap places in his death. Now the drama isn’t over because on the third day Jesus pulls a fast one on the devil and rises from the dead, too powerful to be contained in the way we had been. Everyone lives happily ever after, expect presumably, for Satan.

If you’ve ever seen a Christian drama where the devil is celebrating as Jesus dies, it’s coming from this tradition, the idea that he never saw it coming because he was, essentially, double crossed by Jesus. Serves him right, I suppose.

Now we don’t use this metaphor as much today (for somewhat obvious reasons), although, it is still around in a strong way in more charismatic circles.

The real central idea here, communicated in this narrative, is this; that there is a part of ourselves that we can’t defeat on our own. We need help to become the person we want to be, the person we were created to be and somehow Christ, through his death, is the means through which we’re able to step past the limitations of our own story. In Christ death, in his decision to go past the limits that we would probably set for ourselves, his commitment to the right choice and then the next right choice, you and I can find the strength to make our next right choice. Even in the areas that seemed to be immoveable, or intransient, we find a measure of victory through Christ over our worst tendencies, and most difficult internal struggles, that we couldn’t have discovered on our own.

He saves us by overcoming what we couldn’t on our own.

This moves us along to the next lens

Christus Victor
This one comes to us as the major theme of the early church for the first few centuries of our development. We call it Christus Victor.

The major focus in the first few centuries of Christianity was surviving in the middle of terrible persecution. The Emperor Nero would literally tie Christains to stakes and burn them to use as torches at his parties. Domitain was the Emperor who started using the early Christians as entertainment and putting them in the Coliseum to watch them be eaten by animals. I mean this was a terrible time to be a follower of the story of Jesus. So part of the way that these early Christians talked about the death of Jesus was to express a measure of victory in death. They largely understood that they were not going to escape and that, more than likely, they would face a similar fate to their savior. So they began to take solace, in fact more than solace, they took courage and strength from the story of Jesus death. The story that Jesus had once faced death as well but had not only faced it with courage, had overcome death in his resurrection. They understood Jesus as the first –fruits of the next life and that through him, while they would face death, they would also find resurrection into the next life. In Christ death they found victory over the limitations of this life and the limitations of the immediate story they found themselves in. Historians record the idea of Christians facing death and reciting the phrases that gave them strength and courage. Christus Victor is this kind of lens on Jesus death.

He saves us by inviting us into his victory over the finality of death.

Since then a number of people have asked for the audio and/or notes so I figured I would rework the info into an article for the blog… then I remembered that I have my regular job/writing to keep up with. I still think it’s a good idea (for my own personal thought as much as anything else) but I need a bit more time to put the information into proper(ish) sentences… so I’m going to be posting it in pieces over the next week or so as I go.

Hopefully it can help shape a different (or at least broader) frame on Jesus life and death than the sometimes myopic view presented in the evangelical church.

Intro
There are a number of traditions in the family of the Christian Church and each of those have placed a different emphasis on parts of the life of Jesus. The Eastern Orthodox church has primarily focused on the birth of Jesus – his entry into the world as the focal point for their theology. The Roman Catholic Church has built much of their emphasis around the resurrection, that fact that he died and came back to life as their focus. The protestant tradition which is where Westside has come out of, by contrast, has primarily focused their attention around the death of Jesus. Of course none of things can really be separated off in a meaningful way, because they were all a part of the story of Jesus.

You can’t have a resurrection unless you have a death.
You can’t have a death unless you have a birth.

So it’s important for us to keep in mind that we really missing out if we focus on one aspect of the story Jesus to the exclusion of another.

That said, the death of Jesus has always been a focal point in history. We divide history more less by occasion of his death (faulty dating but nonetheless we still mark time by this moment). It has also become fodder for all kinds of speculation, from conspiracy theories that suggest his disciples stole his body, to teachings that suggest that Jesus was just a spirit and didn’t really have a body to begin with.

Jesus death remains the focal point for much of the discussion around Christianity because it’s one thing to listen to and appreciate the ideas of Jesus, and it is another thing to make the leap to believe that this guy not only died but came back to life and that his life, death and resurrection are the turning point of human history.

I had a friend ask me a question just last week. He had been in a lecture at the U of C where the professor had made the comment that, “the death of Jesus is the central idea of the Christian Faith”. And so he ask, “Why? Why is the death of Jesus so central to our story?”

Well the key to our whole story and the reason Jesus’ death figures so prominently is the idea of the atonement.

Atonement
Atonement is actually an invented word. As all words are at one time or another.
William Tyndale, a Bible translator in the mid 16th century couldn’t find a good English word to translate this idea of what Jesus’ death was about. So he made up a word. He really liked the idea of reconciliation, which is a quite beautiful picture to begin with.

The word reconcile comes from the latin
Re – again
Con – with
Sol – seat
Reconcile – to sit with again

Tyndale however, felt that for him, there was another element that was missing. That reconcile didn’t fully capture this idea of the forgiveness or covering of sin that he saw in the feast of yom kippur. (which he eventually translated as the day of atonement) So he essentially invented the word atonement by combining some English words – “at” and “one” and the turning them into a verb atonement or at-one-ment. Tyndale felt this captured the idea of reconciliation – to sit with again but added a more intimate feel to the idea. This concept of being at-one with God.

It was a brilliant move because this very simple word conveys so much. It is an entry point to the entire story of God. Now sometimes we attach baggage to it and things get obscured much as the do with religious words like “sin” or “gospel” but it at its heart the word atonement is a fairly accesible metaphor for an extremely profound concept, because however we understand Jesus, however we dissect and study his life, death and resurrection, we are called, primarily, to understand this; that he has brought us to a place where we are at-one with God. That’s the Christian story. That we can literally, from the word reconcile, sit with him again. Atonement points us to that mystery.

We have lots of these important words and metaphors to help us understand and articulate what we’re talking about; how that happens or how we can explain it, but this is such a big concept that it’s hard, maybe impossible, to contain or communicate in succinct packages.

It’s been to our detriment that we have often done just that. Instead of making the idea of the atonement big, we’ve made it small. Instead of making the idea of the atonement mysterious, we’ve made it simple. And I think we’ve lost something important in that process.

Today the most common way you will hear the death of Jesus or the concept of the atonement explained looks something like this

You’re on one side
God’s on the other side

Death on your side
Heaven on the other

Quite the conundrum.
Thankfully, Jesus appears and becomes the bridge that gets you from one side to the other

Now that’s not necessarily a bad start. The problem is it can stop short of encouraging us to explore the depth of what this relationship means because it oversimplifies one of the great, actually the great mystery of the universe.

It is the intellectual equivalent of a flash mob for me

Hundreds upon thousands of individuals contributing their part to a story bigger than any person could write on their own

The ultimate web 2.0 redefinition of what an encyclopedia can be
I love it
I use it for everything
I research everything from my messages to random common conversational disagreements to forgotten factiods that have slipped my mind and are driving me insane
It’s amazing—

For the record, wikipedia currently holds over 10 million articles
Comprised of over 1.3 billion words

An average of 4000 articles are added everyday
Each of those 10 million articles are edited an average of 14 times a day
Almost 57 000 people have contributed at least 10 edits on the site
And almost 2.7 million edits are recorded every single month
And at that pace you could forgive someone – perhaps me-
from starting to believe that all available knowledge will soon be accumulated in wikipedia – by the end of the week maybe

And that real research is for suckers

Because wikipedia is all you will ever need
But it can even start to feel there isn’t much left to be discovered in the world

Given a couple more days wikipedia will have it all anyway

Scientists believe they can trace history back 10 to the negative 43 seconds after the big bang
That is one million, trillion, trillion, trillionths of a second after the moment when all matter coalesced into the space no larger than a single atom and exploded into creation

You consider that and it can seem like there is very little left to the imagination at times

the problem with that is sometimes it doesn’t seem to leave any space for us to write a good story with our lives
What do you and I have to contribute?

Where wikipedia should feel like a smart mob with each individual contributing their piece to create something bigger than any one person

It can start to feel like your contribution doesn’t mean much in the face what’s already been gathered
Like you have nothing to contribute
Everything’s already been written
And this is part of what I think we’ve lost when it comes to spirituality in our culture

We tell the story of God likes it’s already been written

Like the book is closed
The story is over
It’s clinical and it’s sterile
its like a textbook and our place is to simply read and retain
Absorb and assimilate information

But never to participate
Or contribute
Or find our own meaningful place in that narrative

Because everything has already been written
____
But then thankfully we occasionally come across cracks in our knowledge base

Glorious little flaws in the way we have constructed the world around us

Things that remind us our understanding doesn’t go as deep as we might have thought

I sent out an article this week on the facebook update titled

13 things that don’t make sense
I won’t bore with all 13
Although you can still go read the article if you are as fascinated with random knowledge as I am

But one simple example

Placebos
We have no idea how or why they work
Don’t try this at home
But imagine you were to induce pain in someone everyday for a prolongued period
And then control that pain with morphine

And then a ways into the experiment you switched the morphine for, say, saline solution without telling the patient slash guinea pig

What do you think would happen
Well in most trials having non-medicinal saline solution pumped into your arm would take the pain away

Now we know placebos are powerful and most people would say it’s all in the head

But a guy named Fabrizio Bendetti was satisfied with that answer
So he actually did this to his patients
The lesson, beware Italian doctors
He took this a step farther
Once the saline solution was controling the pain he introduced a drug called naxolone into the experiment without telling the subjects
Naxolone actually counteracts the effects of Morphine
Now since no one was actually receiving any morphine Bendetti didn’t expect anything to happen
He just really like the idea of injecting drugs
Incredibly though
the nazolone started to counter act the effects of the saline solution that shouldn’t have been doing anything to start with

So now thanks to Bendetti doctors believe the placebo effect has some kind of biochemical basis

It’s not just all in your head
But now they are even more confused because no one knows exactly how or why or what is really happening
And it only took 24 patients in excruciating pain to figure out what we didn’t know

I only bring that up to remind us that there are still vast numbers of categories that don’t fit within the boundaries of what we understand
Things that haven’t been written
Things that we push to the edge of our experience or just simply ignore because we don’t know what to do with them

And maybe spirituality was always meant to fall into one of those categories

Maybe it was always meant to be more like wikipedia
(where everyone has something to contribute to the story)
and less like a traditional encyclopedia or less like a religion
(where everything is defined for us up front)

I realize that when we talk about the scriptures as a story we find ourselves in

It can be kind of esoteric and airy- fairy

It’s hard to put handles on that

But hopefully as we start to walk our way through the book of John during this series that will start to make more sense to us
I want to read you the open passage to gospel of John in a second

But first let’s put this book in context

John is writing at the end of the 1st century

This is a very late book, probably one of the last books in the Bible to be written
And as such he has a very different approach than the other gospel writers
The other guys are writing history
Not in the way we might write a history book today, trying to get all the details

But they’re trying to capture the most important moments in Jesus life as they happened, or at least as they remember them

John on the other hand is writing theology
He’s writing to make a point about Jesus
If Mark was written in the mid- 50s within a couple decades after Jesus death
And the Luke and Matthew follow in the 70s and 80s

John is writing in the late 90s a full 60 years after the time of Christ

And he’s reflecting on everything the church has learned and developed and hypothesized about this man Jesus
And he’s trying to capture that in a form that brings us along for the discovery

Just listen to the language that John uses he writes here his opening words

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

_John 1:1-14

So John is writing with an agenda here – to make a point about Jesus
To sum up a half century of theological exploration and development that has happened since Jesus’ death

And look at the language that he uses here
It’s certainly not the language of a text book or a history book
I mean what does his writing sound like to you?
To me the best parallel I can imagine is something more like a fairy tale

“In the beginning” sounds a lot like
“Once upon a time” to me

In fact the comparison runs even deeper than the language of the text
In the Jewish culture the bed time stories, the fairy tales of the Hebrews were the old testament scriptures

And by the time John writes most of the Jewish population has been hellenized

That means they have been integrated into Greco Roman culture

They lived and worked within the Roman economy
They adapted to Roman culture
They even wrote and spoke Greek most fo the time
In fact John is writing in Greek rather than Hebrew
And the most popular version of the Old Testament at that time was a Greek translation
We call that translation the Septuagint
And it was the primary old testament text in the early church

You can push that even farther because in the Greek tradition books didn’t have catchy names like they do today

They were called by, usually, the first 3 words of the first sentence

So when John is choosing his first sentence, it’s an important decision
And he makes a pretty ballsy move
Because he lifted the first three words from what book? The Septuagint
He’s just titled his book, for lack of a better contemporary equivalent… the Bible… by John

He’s framing the story of Jesus in the same terms as the stories of the Jewish tradition
He’s placing the story of Jesus in the canon of Jewish family history
He’s connecting the story of Jesus to every thing important to the Jews that has come before
And he does that not by giving us the details
But by presenting us with a story

Now think about what you need for a good story

First he sets up a protagonist
In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God

So the hero of our story is God

And then he builds a context for God to operate in

He says, though him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made
So the stage for this drama is epic

It’s creation– all of it
Everything that is

You and I and everyone else you meet
Or wherever else you go

Is the stage for this story John is telling us
And then he builds up the anticipation

He was the light
and that light that brings light to all men was coming into the world

But we still need a conflict – something to drive the story

And so he writes this, he says, he came to the world but the world didn’t recognize him
He came to his own but his own did not receive him

Now an interesting thing here
Because John sets this conflict up in a very personal way

He says He came to his own
The word is “idios” and he uses a form of the word that is passive neuter
It means his own stuff – what he owned
Remember John has already said that he made the world – so it is his own world

But then he switches things up a bit and he says his own did not receive him

Now this time it’s a masculine plural possessive form of that same word

This time it means his own people – or his own family, that’s who didn’t receive him
He came to his own world but his own family didn’t receive him
John is trying to pull his readers into the emotional context of this conflict

That God would come into his world in a way that risks his own safe position

I mean if you want a good story then the protagonist has to risk something right?
This is the batman superman problem
Batman is a regular guy who wants to stop crime so it’s easy to root for him – to see yourself in his story

But Superman is, well Superman
He can’t be beaten, he can’t be defeated
Sure he’s got his one weakness to kryptonite but really do you ever feel like Sups isn’t going win?
And where does all that kryptonite come from every week anwyay?
Well John’s trying to tell a story about God
So how do you make God a compelling, relatable hero?

You remind everyone that to love is to risk
To put yourself out there – means you take the chance of being rejected

And it doesn’t matter whether you can create a universe with the blink of an eye
If you want to love – you have to take a chance

So we’ve got a protagonist, a context, conflict
What else do we need for a good story

We need a resolution
And look at how John writes this, he says
The word become flesh and made his dwelling among us
Eugene Peterson translated it this way
He says the word became one of us and moved into the neighborhood

And to all who received him, to those that believed in him, he gave the right to become children of God

___
Now the interesting thing here to me
Is that he ends the story the same the same way he started it

With a choice

He starts the story with a choice that God makes to create
And he ends it,
by pointing to a choice that we make about where we will put ourselves in the story
See this is the thing about faith and spirituality

It can never become a story that is finished and written and over and closed

Because spirituality is built on the concept of a choice
Listen when you think all the way back 10 the negative 43 seconds after the moment of creation

You have one of two logical absurdities to choose from

Either
All matter coalesced into a space no larger than a single atom and exploded into a universe beyond comprehension
On its own
Or because someone chose it

And the truth is both are legitimate choices to make

The problem for me – is one doesn’t leave me with a good story to be a part of

If you choose to believe that all that there is to this universe is matter and energy
You don’t have much of a story left to live
Because in the end, when all is said and done, all you are left with is physical determinism

And any appearance of choice that seems to exist in your life can be reduced down to simply an illusion of the almost infinite number of variables that are at play in your existence
it may seem like you and I can choose but it’s only an illusion
Because if we could construct a computer large enough to calculate all actions of all of atoms in all of the universe

To play out all the ways in which they collide and gather and create molecules then cells then organisms

To calculate all the variables of our interactions and memories and the neural pathways they’ve created in your head
If we could determine all of the biological factors that go into something as complex as you

If we could do all that
And matter really was all there is to the universe

Then we could determine exactly how you would react and respond and appear to chose in any given moment
Everything would have already been written as a simple function of very complex math

Or.. you can choose to believe in choice

That God choose to create
That God choose to set in motion a series of events (how every that looks for you)
that has resulted in you sitting here tonight with a choice about how you will respond to him
And this is the story that John presents to us as a narrative to find ourselves in

He says there is side to this world that will never be able to be contained within a text book or an encyclopedia or a religious system that determines for you the end of your story

Because that is still unwritten
In philosophical terms we call this the Kalam cosmological argument
It actually comes from a form of dialectical argument common in Islamic study
(thank you wikipedia)

But it argues this
Everything that begins to exist has a cause
The universe began to exist
Therefore the universe has a cause
that cause, whatever it is, is what we call God
Now Kalam gets you no where near a Christian narrative about God

But it sets in motion the idea that life truly can meaningfully be about journey and discovery
And that the questions you ask and attempt to answer and are important and valuable and real
There’s screen writer’s guru named Robert McKee

If you’ve seen the movie Adaptation which is a fantastic exploration of the connection between life and story

He is played wonderfully by the actor Brain Cox
Well McKee does these screenwriting classes
In real life and in the movie

And he’s notoriously cranky and mean and sarcastic to his students
But tons of people attend because he’s a guy who understand the craft and has demonstrated that by writing a lot of really good material

If you’ve ever wanted to be a screenwriter
Read his book “Story: Substance, Structure, Style, And The Principles Of Screenwriting”

I haven’t read it yet but I’ve always wanted to
And apparently it is THE book to read on the art of screen writing

Anyway, he says this in his book

The story teller’s selection and arrangement of events is his master metaphor for the interconnectedness of all the levels of reality, personal, political, environmental, spiritual. Stripped of its surface of characterization or location, story structure reveals his personal cosmology, his insight into the deepest patterns and motivations for how and why things happen in this life. It is his map of life’s hidden order.

Now read through the prologue from John’s gospel again

Because that’s exactly what he’s doing
He strips the story of its surface
It’s characterization and location

And gives only the structure to what he’s going to flesh through the rest of his book

And this is his personal cosmology
That you and I began with a choice
And will likewise define ourselves with a choice
____
Look, for us to honestly place ourselves within the larger narrative of Christianity

Yes we need to be cognizant of what has already been written
We need to be students of history and theology and philosophy
It’s a lot of homework being a Christian
We need to learn from those who have walked this path before us
But at the same time we need to keep ourselves conscious of the books that have yet to be written

The spirituality of Christianity is this incredible book store
That spans ages and dynasties and cultures and personalities
But at the same time holds this empty shelf reserved for all the stories that have yet to be told
All the books that have yet to be written

Books that can only be written in each of our lives
As we engage with the story of creation
As we find ourselves in the narrative of the kingdom of God
Something that maybe was always meant to be more like a collaboration or more like wikipedia than we ever imagined the church could be.

This might be a story you’ve heard or read yourself before but hopefully we can look at it with fresh eyes all over again.

In the book of Mark Jesus is travelling with his disciples teaching and up to this point he’s been primarily teaching in Jewish areas of the Roman Empire. But at this point he decides to cross over to the other side. Now the “other side” is necessarily not the “dark side”. It has nothing to do with Emperor Palpitine and lightning bolt finger tips, although it might as well have for a lot of the Jews. The other side Jesus is talking about is the other side of Lake Kinneret, or more commonly called the Sea of Galilee.

At this point in history the Jews stayed on the west and the Romans lived on the east side of the lake. Technically the Romans controlled the whole area but they allowed the Jews to maintain a semblance of soverignity over certain lands, so on the west side of the lake were the Jews but the “other side” across the sea of Galilee were gentiles under Roman Control. There were some hard feelings there. In fact if you read the story in the gospels they refer to the area as the gerasenes, some manuscripts say the gadarenes, or the gargasenes. The confusion seems to come from a trio of little cities on the water in the area, Geresa, Gadara, and Gergesa, so we don’t know exactly where this happened but we can narrow it down pretty accurately. Now this word gerasenes seems to be a Jewish creation that some scholars suggest came to mean “the cast out ones”. Possibly it could have been in reference to the Jewish population that had left the economically depressed Jewish regions for the other side or it could have just been a reference to the gentiles who lived on the east bank and weren’t part of the chosen people. Either way a lot of the Jews were not impressed because this area represented for them all of the people who had occupied Jewish lands since before they were born. Everyone was waiting for the day that the interlopers would be thrown out of the land promised to the Hebrews. Especially the religious Jews had a fixation on the idea of the Messiah who would come return all of their land to the chosen people of God. So however you slice it when Jesus crosses over to the “other side” he’s stepping into a world that was significantly distinct from where he had come from with a lot of bad blood and a lot of political tension behind it. Now keep that in mind and let’s read through this story

They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes. When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an unclean spirit came from the tombs to meet him.
[some translations say “evil” spirit, which is a fair translation but literally the word is unclean]

This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him any more, not even with a chain.
For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.
Mark 5:1-5

Luke also adds the fun little detail that this guy also hasn’t work clothes for a long time. So he’s naked, bleeding, living in the tombs and apparently also in charge of tourist information because this is the guy who meets Jesus and his dsicples when they step off the boat. (no wonder the Jews didn’t cross the lake all that often, the welcome wagon was a little lacking)

When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Swear to God that you won’t torture me!” For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you evil spirit!”
Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”
Mark 5:5-10

Now I know if you’ve read the story before you want to get on to the good stuff but this is where I think the story reaches its turning point. This is where things really get interesting. So I want to pause here because sure in a second Jesus is going to send demons into pigs, who are going to run off a cliff and then the locals are going to get all upset over the bacon shortage, and that’s fun, but there’s some neat stuff going on right here.

Think about this picture so far. Jesus has crossed over to the other side, the region of the cast out ones, where he’s met as soon as he steps off the boat by captain nude.

Now remember in Jewish custom nakedness was a big deal. They didn’t have the kind of soft-core pornography we have on billboards. They didn’t have nude beaches or nudist colonies or the internet. Instead they had stories about how shameful nakedness was. Now my point here isn’t necessarily about nakedness being bad, it’s that there was a large social stigma attached to it. You can go back to Genesis and read a story about Noah. One night he gets drunk one night and passes out naked on his front lawn where one of his sons, Canaan, comes by and is like, “that is hilarious.” He doesn’t have any Polariods to capture how funny this is to him so he goes and gets his brothers to come check out dad. His two brothers, Japheth and Shem are less amused and they actually get a blanket and walk backwards with it until they can put it over their father without seeing his shame. In the morning Noah is a little hung over and cranky and he hears about what happened and Genesis 9 records his reaction this way;

When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said,

May God extend the territory of Japheth;
may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,
and may Canaan be his slave.”
Genesis 9:24-27

That’s the way he talks about his son for joking about his nakedness. So the fact this guy is naked is a big deal for the Jews.

But then again so was blood.

The Jews had a number of rules around blood too. It was considered unclean. In fact, they went so far as have a rule in Leviticus that says that if anyone even touches something that a women touches during her period, then they will become ritually unclean and must bath and clean themselves and not enter the temple for the rest of the day. So the fact that he’s cut and bleeding is a big deal too.

It doesn’t stop there though because in addition to being naked and bloody this guy is living in a cemetery.

Num 19:16 says this “Anyone out in the open who touches someone who has been killed with a sword or someone who has died a natural death, or anyone who touches a human bone or a grave, will be unclean for seven days.”

So, what we have here is a man, naked and bloody and living in a cemetery in the region of the cast out ones. Is there any doubt why Matthew, Mark and Luke, all feel like this guy has, what they call, an unclean spirit. Think about it. In political terms the guy is unclean. He’s not just a gentile- he’s living in the Garasenes. In religious terms this guy is unclean. He’s bloody and living in cemetery. In social terms this guy is unclean. He’s stark naked and that tends to make conversation awkward at the best of times. Even the gentiles and the Romans don’t want him around and apparently went to great lengths to keep him away, they did chain him up in a cemetery after all. The gospel writers are going to great lengths here to make the point that this guy is the ultimate outcast. The outcast of the outcasts. The King of all the outcast.

But they’re not done making their point yet because what’s the first thing that Jesus asks him? He asks, “What is your name?”
To which our naked, bloody, cemetery dwelling friend responds, “We are legion.”

Have you ever seen the movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose? It’s a creepy movie about a girl who may or may not have been possessed by a demon claiming to be… Legion. The Exorcist 3 mentions the demon Legion. All of our pop culture ideas about legions of demons come from this passage, this naked, bloody dude living in the cemetery, the outcast of the outcasts who says to Jesus, “We are called legion for we are many and he begged Jesus not to send them out of the area.”

I’ve already referenced how the situation plays itself out. The demons ask not to be sent into the abyss and instead ask to be sent into a herd of nearby pigs. Jesus agrees. They leave the man, enter the pigs and immediately run off a cliff, into the sea and drown. Not sure that was the best plan but then again I’m not a demon strategist, so what do I know?

Now if you’re like me, this type of story doesn’t fit well into your world. I haven’t had much experience with pigs… or demons for that matter and so my first response when I read these type of stories is to jump to the idea that this is obviously some kind of mentally unstable man and the writers of the gospels, not having the same medical understanding that we do, use the language of demon possession to make sense of what’s going on. I think that can be a fair way to interpret these kind of stories. Maybe that’s how you chose to interpret them, as a primitive to modern language gap, a simple story of a mental unstable man that Jesus helps, but maybe there’s something even more than that going on here.

Remember we talked earlier about the political situation between the east and west banks of the Sea of Galilee, how the Jews remembered the stories of their promised land and their hope for a Messiah who would one day rid them of the oppressive forces of the Roman Empire? Keep that in mind and look again at the language that’s being used. “We are legion for we are many” says our naked friend.

Now Legion was a very specific Roman term. In fact it was a Roman military term. A legion was a group of soldiers who would occupy a territory for the Empire. A legion was actually a very specific group of soldiers. At the time of Augustus it very specifically meant 6826 men, that is 6100 foot soldiers and 726 horsemen. That was a legion. So think about what’s going on. Regardless of how you want to interpret the specifics of this story, is it an allegory, is it an historically accurate representation of an event that really happened in time, is it merely a transposed story of a mental unstable man through the language and lens of a 1st century writer? Regardless of how you want to interpret it there is clearly something underneath the surface going on here.

Jesus crosses to the other side of the river and engages with a man who is ritually, socially and politically unclean. He then orders a legion of oppressive forces into a herd of animals that are unclean by Jewish standards. That legion then immediately runs off the cliff and leaves the very land that the Messiah is standing on. There is a lot going on in this picture. Add to that the fact that scholars like Dominic Crossan have pointed out that the pig, while yet another symbol of the unclean for the Jews, was also a symbol for the Romans. In fact the head of boar was the very symbol of the 10th Roman Legion Fretensis, the very legion that would eventually conquer Jerusalem for the Empire in 70 CE, about the time the gospels were being written.

This is more than a story of a mentally unstable man, and this is far more than a story about a demon. This is a story that is meant to show Jesus as the Messiah the Jews have been waiting for. Put yourself in the shoes of Jesus disciples watching this unfold. Imagine what the early Christians have going through their mind when they read this story. It starts and they can’t believe Jesus is even talking to this guy, if he even touches Jesus he’ll make him ritually unclean. And then the question of why this guy is even worth his time to begin with, the Romans don’t even want this guy around. But then this political allegory starts to unfold in front of them as Jesus, instead of walking by and brushing him off, actually stops and ask him his name. And all of a sudden this outcast, unimportant, less than human, being, steps in to represent everything that stands between the Jews and their destiny. He’s now far more than unclean. He is the enemy.

Yet Jesus, rather than choosing to dehumanize this man as a representation of everything that is wrong with the empire, does exactly the opposite. Rather than creating a casualty of war and advocating a posture that places us on one side and bad guys on the other, Jesus demonstrates to his followers that this Messiah can dismantle an empire without firing a single shot or drawing a solitary blade because his kingdom won’t be won through battles or force or coerscion but instead though the counter-intuitive practice of inviting those on outside of our story into our experience of God. Consider, the Jews were waiting for a Messiah that would cast out the legions of Rome and restore their political will, a Messiah who would cast down the empires of this world and create in their stead a new and more powerful version of the exact same kind of perversion. Those on the inside versus those on the outside. But Jesus uses the occasion to teach us that victory over empire is not going to be won though the military industrial complex. It’s won when we help people find a new identity outside the stories that have defined and limited them. This Messiah wasn’t interested in freeing his people from Roman occupation. He was interested in freeing them from a definition they held in their hearts as second class citizens. In our terms, our Messiah is not interested in freeing us from debt. He’s interested in freeing us from the consumer posture that defines our value. Jesus walks up to the epitome of the outcast and he asks, “what is your name?” What do you define yourself by? What do you feel is important about who you are as a human being, as a child of God and as a creation of the one great creator?

Some have read this as an allegory calling the Jews to rally behind their Messiah and rise up to help him throw the Roman Legions out of their land. Personally I think that completely misses the point. Christ is teaching us that as soon as we dehumanize our enemies we have already lost, but when we can invest, even those that would oppress us and hurt us with the value that requires us to ask their name and understand their story we can find a victory greater than politics or power could ever bring.

We have to ask ourselves what that question looks like in our lives. If God stood in front of you and asked what is your name? How would you respond? Would it be with the legion of things that have occupied you and enslaved your imagination? Maybe it would be all the things that you’re waiting for someone else to come along and fix for you or about you. Perhaps it would be the types of things that define our empire; our clothes, our cars, our DVD collections (that one’s in there for me). Maybe it would be your education or your job or your significant other. Or maybe, when God asks you, what is your name, you could respond with all of the things that you imagine for your life. The dreams that we have about how we could fit into the story of God’s great grace and redemption.

What is your name? Are you simply part of the empire, another cog in the machine, another consumer in the line, your identity subsumed in the economic narrative around you?

Or are you more than that?

Could you become, like Jesus, someone is able to look past the lines that define who is important and who is not? Could you and I be the kind of people that walk across religious and social and political lines to ask someone their name, the kind of people who create space in our lives to humanize the people around us with go out of our way to find the outcasts. And that doesn’t necessarily have to look like finding your neighborhood nudist, if you have one, I’m not sure what neighborhood you live in, because the truth is, if you think about it, the Jews probably wouldn’t have given much thought to this guy at all. In fact that’s kind of the point. Who are the people in your circles who are simply ignored? It’s probably not the crazy guy who won’t shut up. In our world it’s more likely the person who is sitting alone across the room, the one you never noticed because you were engrossed in a conversation on the other side. The story of Christ is about challenging us over and over again to see the world a new light. It’s about recognizing that the greatest battles in our lives are not won with more power, or more influence or more strength but with more compassion and more interest and more investment in the people around us.

Just like we do today, Jesus disciples had dehumanized anyone who wasn’t part of their story and with one simple question, “What’s your name?” Jesus reminds us that everyone, both the people we walk past and never notice and the people we rage against because they have wronged us in some way, everyone is worth our investment.

What’s your name?
How do you define yourself? Is it as the child of a God of endless love and wonder, or just another part of the machine, our identity consumed by the Legion of things that grasp our attention. Could we become the kind of people designed not only to notice, but to help others see the value they never expected to find inside themselves.

I’d like to try to tell two stories with nothing in common to make a single point. So here goes;

Story number one:

About 20 some odd yrs ago

I found myself in grade 3, I think
Playing out in the freshly fallen, no so silent, shroud of snow, that covered the playground at school

And everyone was making snowballs and throwing them and generally having a great time ignoring the no snowball edict handed down from the powers that be
Primarily Ms Griffin –
If she sounds intimidating already it’s because she was… and the Msss part
I don’t know if you can still here the waver in my voice when I think about her somewhat large and imposing frame

Anyway, in the course of said snowball fight I hit a young girl in grade two- in the face – with an errant snowball

She ran screaming to the teacher on recess duty which was- Ms Griffin
And told me like the little baby she was
Within in about 15 seconds I was escorted off the playground and into the office by some kind of secret service that appeared out of nowhere

And found myself in the most intense interrogation I’d ever imagined at 8 yrs old

I didn’t know what to do
So I did what anyone would do- I lied
I made up a story and my story went like this
I was standing in the playground, minding my own business, when another student came by and handed my a snowball and ran away

Not knowing what to do with such a thing I was about to put it down when another snowball thrown by someone other than me

Hit the back of my hand –
causing it to lurch forward with such force that I lost control of the snowball that was in my hand

Out of my grasp it flew thorough the air at which point it then hit the poor little girl in the face

So it’s not really my fault is it?

No one bought the story
But I was sticking to it – for better or for worse
the more incredulous everyone become
the more convinced I became that this was going to work

I just had to stick to the story

So by the time they called my Dad to come to the school and pick me up
I was fully entrenched in the story

My Dad arrives
Asks what happened
And I tell him the story

Amazingly… he doesn’t buy it

My own dad didn’t believe me
I couldn’t believe what was happening
How could he question my integrity like that
Forget that fact that the physical laws of the universe were working against me

How dare he call me a liar
I mean, Yes I was, technically, a liar
but he didn’t know that

It was an outrage – I could not believe what was happening

End of Story number one

Beginning of Story number two

I had a good friend for a number of years
A friend who was truly one of a very few people in my life that I felt helped to shape my journey in a significant way

Someone who had invested a lot of themselves in me
And vice versa
And awhile ago we had a falling out that started with a conversation and became a disagreement that festered into an argument and then most insidiously
settled into a doldrum of passive apathy

Where we both just gave up

For my part
I felt like this whole situation was stupid
It had started because I shared something my friend found uncomfortable
But I felt like I was being honest and truthful so there wasn’t anything to go back on

So all of this situation rested on his ability to get over himself
And just apologize

And I figured, listen, I’m a really great guy
If he would just realize that and apologize for being such a lamewad things would be great

I would be so gracious and humble

In my head he would come to me and say, “I’m so sorry, I’ve been such a fool, on such a grand scale I have missed the fundamental reality that you were right all along”
And I would say – don’t worry about it
Don’t beat yourself up
We- ALL- make- mistakes
And by “we” I mean EVERYONE but me

And so I dug in my heels and I waited for him to make the first move

So look at these two stories
20 yrs ago in grade 3 I knew I was wrong

I knew I was lying
I knew that I was the one that I had created a mess for myself

And yet still I was outraged that someone would call me a liar
That someone would impune my wholly theoretical and entirely imagined integrity

Over the course of living with that lie for an hr
I had become convinced that it bore more resemblance to the truth than any challenge, Ms Griffen, the principle or my Dad cold pose to my fantasies

And now I found myself 20 yrs later back visiting my parents
Back in the same area as my friend

And I knew I was right
I knew this wasn’t my fault

Now perhaps it was the geographic proximity that sparked my conscience
But somehow- it became apparent to me that there was a larger question looming than simply who was right

Because sometimes we just don’t have the capacity to know the difference between the truth
and a lie we’ve told ourselves one too many times
Sometimes we just don’t know the difference anymore – between when we are right
and when we’ve told ourselves we are- one too many times

I knew I was lying about that snowball and I was still offended that someone would imply anything of the sort

A story told enough times starts to ring true and we can start to believe anything we tell ourselves simply be virtue of the fact that ours is the voice we hear with the most intensity and frequency
But if we go through life and only take responsibility for the times we know we’re wrong
When we are completely cognizant of our mistakes

Then we will miss out on some of the greatest opportunities for growth that life presents us with
The opportunities to push ourselves past our illusions
to wrestle with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves

And so I sat down with my friend over a coffee
and we caught up and talked about what had been going on in our lives
And at some point in the conversation it became apparent that when I looked back on our relationship – the way I remember it, probably wasn’t completely congruent with what really happened
And even though I didn’t always see my own faults
Or regardless of the fact that I never intended to act maliciously
Or intend to damage him or our relationship
I had some responsibility to bear

And so I had to tell him that I was really sorry for what had happened
And that I hadn’t always acted the way I hoped I would
I had to take responsibility for the situation that I had convinced myself wasn’t my fault

The reality is if you go through life and the only time you take responsibility for your relationships is when you know you are in the wrong
Then you have still in effect said that the only perspective on the matter that’s important is yours

The way you see it, is paramount
The way you see it, is final and immutable

And sure you’re willing to be shown something and maybe to modify your position
But the only lens that counts is the one that you see the situation through

The problem with that
for those of us that want to model our lives around the teaching of Jesus

Is that we can throw a snowball at a 6 yr old girl- hit her in the face
and believe that it wasn’t our fault
It’s not just me
You would have been scared of Ms Griffin too

But more than that – when we look at the teachings of Jesus he says, explicitly, that just taking responsibility of the times when you know you’re wrong is not good enough

He says that there is a collective wisdom that we need to do life effectively
And we encounter that when we, at the very least, attempt, to integrate more than our own perspective on the world into life

Jesus says that to do life in the model God has set for us you need to do more than just be right all the time

In Matthew 5 Jesus is teaching and he says this-
I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.
“Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.

So let’s pull this apart a bit

Against you is the word “kat-ah” in the Greek

And the word can have a lot of uses depending on what it is tied to

But in this context it actually isn’t tied to anything

So in this passage it simply means “intensity or opposition”
They are angry with you – against you

So in this usage, it could mean, someone who has a legitimate case against you
They have something on you

You have done something wrong to them and they have an intense reaction against what you’ve done
Or it could simply, just as easily, mean
Someone who is just mad at you
Regardless of anything you’ve done

The word in this context has no connection to the basis of that posture

“If anyone has something against you” is saying regardless of whether that feeling has roots in anything legitimate or real
Whether it is deserved or not
The responsibility to deal with the situation lies not with the person who is right or the person who is wrong

But with whoever is aware of the problem
So why does Jesus put the responsibility there
when most of would happily live our lives shifting the responsibility to whoever caused the problem

Well I think there’s a clue in the passage

He makes this weird little statement before he talks about where the responsibility lies
He says if you say Raca to your brother – you’re answerable to the Sanhedrain
The Jewish law courts

But call your brother fool
And you’re in danger of hell fires

And I mean that seems a little drastic doesn’t it
Call someone fool – go to hell?

So what’s he getting at here
Well “Raca” is in your Bible like it is – probably in quotes
because it’s an aramaic word that they couldn’t find a good English word for

It means worthless, or empty
It was a common insult that probably came from the Hebrew word “rhake” which meant empty or vain
You’re saying your so empty, so vain

It was a common insult
Maybe like calling someone a poser today

You’re so concerned about how you look
You’re so vain and conceited but you don’t have any substance
You’re a fake

Now you probably wouldn’t ever get dragged into court for insulting someone
Although they did have liable laws back then
You couldn’t just go around spreading rumors about people
That could get you in trouble

But I think regardless of whether you got hauled into court
Jesus is saying if you insist on insulting people eventually you’re going to have to answer for it
You will answer to your peers
Nobody likes a jerk
There are consequences for thinking that you’re better than everyone else

But then he says – call someone a fool and you could find yourself in really hot water

Now fool doesn’t seem so bad
But maybe they should have left this one in the original language too
The word in Greek is “mo-ros”
It means stupid, heedless, absurd
My Greek dictionary actually says blockhead

It means someone not worth listening to
And the root of the word comes from another word “muo”

Which means literally “to shut the mouth”
So fool, in this passage means pretty literally shut up, It means, I don’t care about what you have to say
Now there is even a little bit more at play here
Because the word fool had specific religious connotations to the Jews as well

When you used fool in a theological or a religious argument
It meant more than just – you don’t know what you’re talking about

It meant you know nothing of God
You know nothing of God
Who is the creator
The final authority
The ultimate arbitrator on what is right and wrong

And so you’re opinion isn’t worth anything
Because you know nothing of God

Fool was a big deal
So he says if you insult someone – “say Racca to your brother” then you’re going to have to answer to your peers

If you’re a jerk to people – it’s hard to make friends
No one will want to be around you
But

If you refuse to see anything from anyone else’s perspective
If you refuse to even listen to the people around you
If you go through life insisting that yours is the only perspective on reality or truth or God that has any value or meaning

You’re in danger of losing everything that makes you valuable as a human being

You’re in danger of losing the chance to be in relationship
Now the translation I read says fires of hell
The greek actually says fires of gehenna

Gehenna is often used as a metaphor for sorrow, punishment… or hell

But literally it was the valley on the south side of Jerusalem where the city dumped all it’s garbage and burned it
It burned constantly with all the things that were no longer valued – not wanted
So Jesus says that when you refuse to listen to the perspective of someone else
you risk becoming worthless
You risk being discarded

You risk becoming nothing more than your own flawed perspective on the world

Completely tied to every lie that you’ve told yourself one too many times
Every time we take responsibility for a situation that isn’t our fault

We give ourselves the opportunity to come out from behind some of the stories we’ve told a few too many times

We give ourselves the chance to see the world through more than our own hang ups and biases
We give ourselves a chance to see things from something more like God’s perspective

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re just a really bad person
And you really are always wrong

Sometimes even in the most objective analysis you are right
But there is a value more important than being right
It’s called being in relationship

And it is filled
it is defined
By the constant greyness of two people struggling to journey together

Now sure there will always be some people that are simply toxic
At there are sometimes very difficult decisions that need to be made about who we allow a place of influence on our lives

But if your goal in life is to win every argument
To be proven right in every circumstance

Then you may well find yourself at the end of your days very pleased with your success rate – but almost certainly alone
So Jesus lays it out

He says – You act like a jerk – people won’t want to be around you

But if you refuse to even listen to what they have to say – you won’t even have the chance to be a jerk

Because they’re going to toss you out of their lives completely
And then he says, okay
Take this as an example

you’re at church one day worshipping God and you think about a friend who’s upset with you
And you’re not even really sure whether it’s your fault or not

But put that question aside and go and fix it
Go and listen to what they have to say
He says, it is more important for you to try to understand their perspective
Than it is even for you offer your gift of worship to God

So deal with that first and then come back

This is how incredibly important it is for you to do life with the people around you
Because without them you are lost to your own flaws and biases and stories you’ve told one too many times

There’s an old saying
There are three sides to every story
Yours, theirs and the truth

Well God’s is the only objective truth in the universe
He’s the only person that sees the world as it truly is

You and I
We both of us, look at ourselves, each other, even God with a distorted lens

Paul says that we all see everything through a glass darkly
It’s almost like we can barely make out reality at all
But everyone of us- we have some incling, some imagination, some experience of God to share with each other

And it’s only as we put those things together
As we share and wrestle and dialogue

That we become more in touch with a God who is so much bigger than any of our individual imaginations could fathom on their own
And this is part of the reason
that if we ever want to entertain the idea of God

We have to take seriously every person that happens to find their way across our path

We have to take seriously the person that happens to be sitting beside us
Right now, in church, in class, on the bus, at the movie theatre
Because every time we force ourselves to see from someone else’s perspective we loosen our biases grip on our reality

And we start to unravel the illusions of perfection we’ve wrapped around ourselves
Simply by virtue of the fact that ours is the voice we hear most often

And maybe we start to catch glimpses of the world more like the way God sees it
Listen, I can take a complete lie

And convince myself it’s 100%, undeniably, incontrovertibly true – just by saying it enough times
or
I can force myself to see things from someone else’s perspective
even when I’m convinced I’m right

And in the decision to do so
By attempting that choice
I can discover patterns and choices and blind spots that I would never see on my own
Things that are preventing me from becoming more than I am right now

From becoming the person God wants me to become
This is the ancient wisdom of being more than right

Because “right” is always filtered and tainted and colored by every bias we’ve bought into and every story we’ve told ourselves

But community and relationship can create for us a collective wisdom that helps to counter act all of the worst tendencies we lean to if left on our own
Have you ever found yourself in a place where it was just easier to avoid someone rather than deal with what was going on?

Have you ever had someone in your life that made you uncomfortable because they reminded you of a part of yourself you didn’t want to acknowledge
Have you ever just wished you could start over with new friends that didn’t know you so well

Or maybe this – there’s this person in your life who frustrates you so much because they just can’t see their own issues

Or maybe someone who is so upset with you but you can’t imagine why – so you just ignore them
Jesus says that retreating into our own biases doesn’t help us grow

That settling for the relationships that are easy and nice and uncomplicated isn’t enough

Because sometimes we need the people around us to help us discover the things we hide from ourselves

There is a value more important that being right
It’s being in relationship

Because lives lived in the exclusive company of like minded individuals
Will never challenge us to become more than we currently are
Sometimes the problem for us
Is we have too much choice

If we don’t get along with everyone at our church we can find a new one
If someone is upset with us – that’s their problem
We can always find new friends – I’ve got facebook too

But Jesus says taking responsibility for our relationships is sometimes more important than determining who’s fault it is
There is a higher calling for us as we strive to create the kingdom of God in our lives

There is a more important mandate as we struggle to find what it means to share life with the people around us
It is the ongoing process of learning what it means to love God and love people

It’s the ancient wisdom of being more than right

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

_John 1:1-14

The Xmas story as told by the apostle John
___
It was 1988 when I learned my first hard Christmas lesson. A lesson that in my memory banks I entitle for myself either, “ Leave the Door Shut” or “No Sneaking after Midnight”. Either way by 1988, ten years into my fragile little life, I had already stumbled upon the unfortunate circumstance of having walking into my parents room while they found themselves in somewhat, though not terribly, compromising amorous situation. Now being a somewhat self aware ten year old and realizing that I had neither the maturity to fully integrate these types of circumstances into my young psyche, nor the maturity to remember to simply knock before entering a room (because that would have made a difficult situation considerably easier to handle) I made the decision, Christmas 1988, to buy my parents a lock for their door. Now that’s a good start- but it didn’t capture the immense appreciation, that I as a ten year old, had for my parents and their decision to do things that I didn’t want to ever run the risk of walking in an find them doing. So my thought was to install the newly purchased lock in the middle of the night while they slept so they would wake up to the surprise of a fresh red bow on their brand new lock, ala Santa Claus.

See even at 10 yrs old I knew Mom and Dad were really Santa Claus. They waited until we were sleeping to come down with the gifts. But I was patient. So I waited, till after midnight, till after 1pm, till after my parents came down with the gifts, till after I heard the stillness of the house return and then I crept upstairs, brought my newly purchased lock and a screwdriver, slowly and quietly, like a cat, opened the door to my parents rooms and began to remove the old door knob. It was a great plan. Except that I was 10 years old and had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Every time I would try to turn the screws on the door, which I was holding between my legs, it would shift and creak. In the darkness of the room, with my eyes adjusted, I could see my parents toss in bed with every squeak of the door. On top of trying to hold the door between my legs the screws were really tight. I couldn’t get them to move. I was only 10 years old after all. So I gathered up all my might and gave it one big try. The screwdriver slipped off the flathead screw. Which by the way, are the worst of the screws. The screwdriver never stays fixed on the line. Every screw should be the square. Anyway the screwdriver slammed into the door, causing it to slam shut, leaving me standing in the hall, listening to my parents wake up.

This time my parents were up
At least my mom was
“Russell what was that – check on the kids”
“They’re fine go back to bed”

That wasn’t going to pass. I knew that, so I grabbed the screwdriver and the new lock and ran down the hall, took the first left into my youngest sisters room and dove under the bed.

Mom and Dad got up and came down the hall, checking both of my sisters rooms along the way, saw them sleeping peacefully and then headed downstairs to my room, where of course, I wasn’t anywhere to be found. That set off a mini manhunt. I do remember hearing the initial conversation though.

My Mom – “where is he, where could he be”
My Dad – “He probably went for a walk, lets go back to bed”
My Mom – “He’s ten years old, it’s three in the morning”
My Dad – “You’re right we’ll talk to him in the morning”
My Mom – “he’s ten years old we’re not going back to bed”

Five minutes later my sisters are up and the whole family is arranging search parties. Meanwhile I’m still hiding under the bed wondering how this went so wrong. Eventually I figure I’ve got to put an end to this, so from under the bed, in my loudest, groggiest voice I call out and ask, “What’s going on, why are you guys making so much noise.”

Everybody comes running over as I crawl out from under my sister’s bed. Now that begs the question. “Why are you under your sister’s bed?” So I try to convince everyone I had been sleep walking and found myself here woken up by their loud conversation. That… doesn’t work. Eventually I reach back under the bed and pull out my screwdriver and brand new door knob, still with a big red bow stuck to it. Surprise ruined. But a pretty good Christmas story to tell going forward. Actually the worst part was having to hear my mom tell that story for the next ten years, it’s only of late that I have developed an appreciation for the humor in it. At fifteen it was less amusing to hear.

I learned a lot of Christmas lessons that year; chiefly why wrapping paper really is the easiest way to keep a surprise (it’s no wonder it’s so popular) but also about the investment and the disappointment that can sometimes come from a truly heart felt gift. Now I know my parents loved it anyway. In fact they probably, looking back, enjoyed the gift even more because of the story behind it but in the moment, It felt to me like everyone was either laughing at how silly I was or annoyed that I had woke everyone up. That’s probably, no strike that, clearly not a fair characterization of everyone’s response but it was how I felt. That this gift that I had invested, not just my allowance, but a piece of myself in, wasn’t received in the way that I imagined it would have been. That the moment I had been working toward wasn’t happening the way I had pictured in my head.

You see a gift is always more than just what’s in the box, or in this case under the bed, it is a sign or symbol of the emotion behind it. If I was to give you a card for Christmas I’m not trying to tell you about how much I love bad poetry and Norman Rockwell paintings, it’s supposed to point to the emotion that drove the decision to write the card in the first place. This is why some gifts just work better than others. Let’s be honest. Your husband doesn’t want another tie. Your kids don’t want underwear and your wife doesn’t want powers tools even if you plan to use them to fix that creaky banister that’s been bothering her for months. A gift isn’t just about the gift. It’s about the assumptions we make about what was behind the reason it was given. In that sense a gift is really about the invitation for a response. We use a gift as a sign or symbol for our love and then we invite a response from the person we love.

I read the Xmas story from the words of John earlier and I was struck again this week in a new way by the words here. These are some of the most theologically packed words in all of the Bible, some of the most rich and meaningful language in all of the scriptures and this week as I read I was struck by the echo of 1988 and this story of a God who invests not just his power and his resources but his very self into a gift to his world. A gift that in the words of John is simply and tragically not received in the way he imagined it could be. John packs an ocean of emotion and understanding and theology into 14 verses that set the stage for his story, this story that he precedes to tell about Jesus through the narrative of the rest of his gospel.

Commentators call these verses a prologue as opposed to a preface. A preface is the stuff you need say before you get to what you want to say, any background or any information that you will need to understand what’s coming but a prologue, like these verses, are a pre-cap of everything that’s coming. In the first fourteen verses of his book John tells the story of everything that’s he’s going to say in a quick poetic capture of the themes and then he precedes to flesh it out in narrative.

If you’re ever interested in doing a study on the book of John keep that in mind because everything John writes is tied to the themes he lays out in the first chapter.

Now John is the last of the gospels. Not just as we read cover to cover through the Bible but also chronologically. It was written well after the death of Jesus, probably very late in the first century. If Mark was written in the 60s, Luke and then Matthew in the 80’s, John was probably written just before the turn to the second century. So John’s not just writing to capture history on paper. He’s actually looking back on decades of church development and trying to, very consciously, set out to address some of the questions that are being asked about Jesus. This is why John is often set apart from the other gospels The others are called the synoptic gospels. Synoptic is a combination of two Greek words, “Syn” and “optic” – they mean “see” and “with”, so we see with them. They are telling us about the story of Jesus life. John, on the other hand, is telling us about the significance of Jesus life. He doesn’t really care so much about the history or the dates or the chronology, he’s focused on what it all means, the big picture.

Look at the start of his gospel. The first three words; In the Beginning. It doesn’t get much bigger picture than that. Mark starts with Jesus public ministry, he jumps right into the fun stuff. He starts with Jesus at 30 yrs old ready to change the world. Luke starts with the story of Jesus birth, that’s why he gets lots of air play this time of year. Mary and Joseph and Bethlehem and angels and shepherds and no room at the inn. Matthew trumps even that and starts even farther back with the geneology of Jesus. He goes all the way back to show Jesus’ connection to God’s covenant with Abraham, where he came from and how Jesus is connected to the story of God’s dealing with humanity from the start.

But John, John starts “In the beginning”. Now there’s no coincidence here, that this is how another book we know starts.
“In the Beginning”

In Greek, books didn’t have titles like they do now. They were generally called by the first few words of their first sentence, usually the first three words. Now that could be modified if it didn’t make sense but generally books were known by their first few words. So what we now call the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible for Hellenized Jews.

Hellenized Jews were Jews who spoke Greek and lived a very grecko/roman lifestyle
For those Jews, their Bible, was commonly called by its first three words
In the beginning

And here John uses the exact same wording as the first three words of the Septuagint. Same words, same tense, same order, exactly. Basically John calls his book by the exact same title as the Jewish Bible. He’s making a pretty important statement already in the first three words he’s written. He’s tying his story, this story of Jesus, into the larger picture of everything that has come before, everything that the Jews understood as sacred and important.

So where does the story of Jesus start for John, where does it really start for the church?

With his miracles?
With his birth?
With his geneology?

No
It starts, “in the beginning”

It would have been impossible for anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures to miss the fact that John is tying the story of Jesus to the story of creation. As if God is re-creating. Not necessarily scrapping everything he’s already done but re-creating, re-purposing, re-newing.

You find this language all through out the early church. Paul talks about this idea in Corinthians when he writes that “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation”. We are re-created.

Probably the most familiar use of this language, this re-creation language, has unfortunately been so misused and overused that it’s almost lost all meaning for us. We hear it all the time now but the only place where we actually read Jesus talking about being “born again” is in the book of John. The phrase is found in John’s writings because he is picking up on this theme, on Jesus mission, to re-create.

In John 3 Jesus is speaking to a man named Nicodemus, a man identified as a Pharisee, as a religious authority. Nicodemus is a man whose entire purpose, and mission and focus was about teaching people to understand and fulfill the law the Moses.

Follow the rules.
Say the prayers.
Go to synagogue.
Study the scriptures.

And Jesus says, no. No, that’s not it. There’s more to it than that. You have to be born again. None of those things really matter. None of your religious practices, or traditions, or good ideas mean anything unless you are willing to start over again because this new way of living, this new kingdom I have come to show you, this new way of life is so radically different, it’s like being born all over again, it’s like starting over.

So Nicodemus says, well how can a man climb into his mother’s womb again, how could anyone do that?

And Jesus says, well that’s maybe a little graphic but you’re starting to get how significant this idea is, because it’s not just about religion, it’s not about rituals, it’s not about rules and expectations and saying the magic prayer, it’s not about being part of a chosen few, or the right club, or the cool kids, it’s about the decision to pattern your life around something new. It’s about finding a new template to model your life around. It’s about stepping into the best possibilities of what you could become. The best of what you already are. The best of everything that you were always created to be, from the very beginning.

To drive this idea home to Nicodemus Jesus gives us the favorite verse of sporting events around the world; John 3:16.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Remember Jesus has just told Nicodemus that all his rules and all his laws are not going to cut it. You have to be willing to start over. Now he says, Oh yeah and being part of the religious club, the Jews, the chosen people; not enough either.

Now it’s whosoever.

Not just the Jews.
Not just the Pharisees.
Not just the religiously established.
Not just everyone who goes to church.

It’s whoever.
Whoever wants to
Whoever chooses to.
Whoever simply takes the chance to believe that life with Jesus could be different than life without.

To whoever that is, to those people, the gift of God is available. This gift of “eternal life”.

Now we usually read John 3:16 the way I read it. That we should not perish but have eternal life or life everlasting but the actual Greek word we translate “eternal” is from the word “a-hee-on” and it does mean eternal, that’s a part of it, but it’s so much more than that too.

My dictionary says that properly the word means an age, extending in perpetuity both into the past and future;
begun without end. It is an idea that is both present, past and future at once. It’s a very Greek idea. They liked to do this with lots of words. “A-hee-on” is the ideal, the perfect, the eternal representation of an era and so some scholars have suggested a better translation of John would be we are given the “life of the ages”.

And yes, eternal may be a part of that, but it’s more than that. It’s also the ideal life that we were created to find. It’s not just forever and it’s not just perfect, it’s that Christ came so that we could have the life we were meant for. This is the gift of God and this is the gift of Christmas, the gift of the incarnation. Not that we can adopt a set of rules that will earn us the adoration or at least toleration of a capricious God in heaven. No. That we can choose to step into the potential God has invested in us and start over, to be re-created in our choice to follow after Jesus. Think about it, in all the ways you and I have been sidetracked by bad choices, and selfish decisions and unhealthy patterns, that we could be re-newed and re-created to find the life that God always had in mind for us. Not the eternal, static, perfect, unchanging, after we die, eternally in a white robe, sitting on a cloud with wings on our back life that we see in the images of Angels on Christmas cards. God came for so much more than that. He came so that you and I could have the life we were meant for.

Do you see what John is doing here?
We are re-created, born-again-
To receive eternal life, the life of ages, the ideal life, the life we were meant to have…
From the very beginning

This is the gift of God, the gift of Christmas that was wrapped in more than just power or glory or resources, It was wrapped in God become flesh. Consider that for a moment, God, large and expansive and incomprehensible, now humble and gentle and condensed down so far that he fit into a life of a child, helpless in his mother’s arms.

Remember a gift isn’t just about the gift. A gift is a sign that points towards the meaning behind it, and it’s about the opportunity we extend to respond to what we offer.

At Christmas, God comes himself, as sign toward what life could be like with him. What it could be like to start over, to move past our failures and step into our best possibilities. And for that chance God risks everything he can, his dignity, his safety, his emotional well being, he puts it all on the line for us before you and I ever gave him a second thought, to be honest, before we even gave him a first thought. The greatest measure of God’s love is that he brings this gift, wrapped in his very person, in a way that is so fragile and vulnerable, that you and I can choose how we want to respond. For the sake of love God takes the chance that we would walk away from what he offers.

Imagine for a moment, God with a broken heart.

Every time you give something of yourself it will you leave you vulnerable. It’s no different even for God.

John says it this way
He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

There’s an interesting thing here in that sentence that might not be readily apparent in the English. John says he came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. There are two “owns” in that sentence that are slightly different in the original text. They are both forms of the Greek word “idios” but the first is a passive neuter form of the word. It means his own stuff. He came to his own things. What he owned. The second “own” only a couple words later is slightly different. It’s masculine plural. It’s a possessive type of word– his own did not receive him. It means his own people, his own children, his own family… his own.

He came to his own world, but his own children did not receive him.

John is using a Greek literary tool to ratchet up the intensity here. In Hebrew they do this by repeating an idea in a slightly more involved manner. So in Hebrew you read things like, when you lie down, when you get up, when you sit at home, when you walk along the road. In the Old Testament you read these passages that sound like lists but each step is increasing the intensity. In English we do it by adding on adjectives or just increasing the volume or the pitch of our voice.

You low down, dirty rotten, scum sucking, too much coffee drinking, bad breath having, lying, cheating, good for nothing scoundrel.

In Greek, one of the ways you would increase intensity is to use the different forms of the same word.

He came to his own world, but his own children did not receive him.
He came to his own home, but his own family didn’t invite him in.

John is trying to show the immense pain that even God feels when he invests himself in this gift to humanity and it is not received in the way he imagined it could be.

In 1988 I had two weeks allowance, and some 10 year old ingenuity invested in my Christmas gift.
God has put his entire being into his.

In 1988 I offered my parents a moments respite behind locked doors.
God offers us life with him. The life of the ages, the life he created us for.

It’s Christmas, the time of year we give gifts.

Have you ever felt like your gift to someone wasn’t received the way you imagined?
Like they didn’t fully understand what you put into it?
Like they didn’t appreciate what you had done for them?
God knows what that’s like.

Have you ever felt like your love toward someone wasn’t returned?
Like they took what you had to offer and didn’t give anything back?
Like they didn’t understand what you had risked to say the words “I love you”?
God knows what that’s about.

As a parent have you ever experienced your kids going through what psychologists might call a dissasiociative phase? The rest of us might call that being a teenager, but all of a sudden they don’t seem like they want anything to do with you and you feel like you’ve given so much but now they’ve put up a wall to keep you out of their lives, and it hurts?
Or as a kid, as a child, have you ever felt like you couldn’t get your parents attention? Like they were too busy to invest in you and what was going on your life? Like others things were just more important to them?
God knows that feeling, that pain and that frustration.

The incredible thing about God, the incredible thing about the model he sets out for us, is his unfailing love.

In the beginning poetry of Genesis, it says God walked in the cool of the day through the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve and still humanity choose to walk away from him.

But instead of giving up, instead of walking away, instead of saying it hurts too much to go back, God makes himself even more vulnerable, he makes himself even more accessible, he chooses to put even more at risk. 2000 years ago the “word” that was God, the “logos”, everything that the very idea of God can capture, became flesh, became a child that would go on to live and die, so that you and I would be able to make a choice about who we want to have in our life. Love meant that God gave us a choice, the choice to live life with him, the choice to find the life we were meant for, the life of the ages, but also meant God made himself vulnerable to our rejection. The chance that we would choose to walk away, to walk another path, to distance ourselves from the one who created and loves us

Christmas is about a lot of things. It is about gifts, and family, and food, and friends but sometimes we do become a little too preoccupied to remember that at its heart Christmas is about the gift. The indescribable gift of God’s love. The gift of God’s vulnerability toward us.

In the Xmas narrative God takes on frail human, vulnerable flesh but more than that he takes on the frail vulnerable posture of love and he challenges us to do the same. He takes the first step, he makes the first move, he offers to recreate us into the life we were meant for and then waits, on the edge of his seat wherever that is, for our response.

Welcome, and congratulations. I am delighted you could make it. I know getting here wasn’t easy. You probably had errands to run, last minute presents to buy, sleeping arrangements for family members to determine, children to gather, calm, dress and transport- all of the decisions and the stresses of which a Christmas Eve is built. The indescribably infinite number of variable choices that have led to you- here- in this room- right now. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than we sometimes give our circumstances credit for.

For instance, behind the choice of which Christmas sweater to wear this evening – for you to be here now, in the words of Bill Bryson, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It is an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never before been attempted and will only exist just this once.

Now imagine if you can- using very delicate tweasers to separate out one of those atom, less than a trillionth of yourself. Now take that single atom and miniaturize it to a trillionth of its initial size and into that space- so vanishingly small it could be said to occupy no space at all- pack everything that is- every last atom and molecule and particle that makes up you and me and Calgary and Calcutta and the rocky mountains and the burning heart of the north star – every last particle between here and the edge of creation- pack that all into a space no larger than a trillion trillionth of you- and you are ready to start the process that has led to you- sitting here tonight- 2007- Calgary Ab- Christmas Eve.

Scientists believe that if we could look back 10 to the negative 43 seconds after the moment of creation- that is one million, trillion, trillion, trillionths of a second after the bang that resulted in you and I- that we would see the birth of a universe. Again I’ll turn to Bill Bryson to describe the moment of creation from his book A Short History of Nearly Everything. In a blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception. In the first lively second is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements- principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or ever will be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.

Bryson writes with an endearingly unapologetic passion and- almost reverence for the science of where we started. And though our enthusiasm has sometimes out stretched our grasp it is incredible to discover the secrets of our story the human mind has unlocked; to be able to look beyond our visual capacity- into space and see the beauty of a universe beyond our comprehension.

And yet- with every discovery- with every advance- with every secret that falls to the unending advance of human curiosity and knowledge- the farther we look out into space- it almost seems as if there is no room left for mystery in the universe.

If you and I are simply- trillions of drifting atoms- the composition of nothing more than random chance- the inconsequential outcome of a series of events with neither purpose, nor direction, not intent – than of what value is the beauty of all that is?

All that is- every particle of creation was condensed into a space so infinitesimally small as to occupy no space at all- The beauty of it is sometimes overwhelming.

It reminds of the Christmas narrative. The reason we have brought- each of us- our trillions of atoms into this room tonight.

The writer of the gospel of John writes about the Christmas story in the large and grand scope of the universe’s creation.

He says-

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

That Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and the Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

All that is- every thought and emotion and significance that resides behind the creation of all that is- was condensed into a space so infinitesimally small as to occupy a space no greater than that of a child lying in a manger- in a backwoods town- born to a simple couple- without even the means to find a place to sleep for the night.

I try sometimes to imagine the scope of creation. I try at times to understand my place in the context of a universe that is beyond my ability to comprehend. And I am fascinated- I am captured by the possibilities of learning and discovering and shaping my knowledge of what is-

But

I will never be able to fit into my mind the scope of the mystery that is Christmas. That God would shrink himself down into a space that fits in my head. That I can picture, that I can hold in my mind, that I can choose to believe.

Why do we invest ourselves in the celebration of Christmas? Why do we gather here tonight when we could be somewhere else?

Why is it that every year we trim a Christmas tree?

Because maybe there’s something to this story.

Would You Rather?

I was thinking about the game this week. Remember the game? The one where you are given two similar options, either both exceedingly fantastic or as exceedingly and creatively disgusting as can be imagined by the questioner and you simply choose, which you would rather.

The only rule to the game is this you have to choose. It’s a pretty simple game as games go.

Here’s an example
Would you rather receive $1000 a day for the rest of your life or $16 833 000 in a lump sum right now, which presuming I was to live to the ripe old age of 75 and die on my birthday would make the totals equivalent.

Now those ones are kind of fun. Would you rather choose lots of money or… lots of money. But then there are the other kind of would you rather questions. Would you rather lick the pond scum clean off a toad or have your toenails peeled back. It’s a tough choice.

And while the fantastical scale of the game that allows the walls of reality to become somewhat permeable; would you rather be invisible or able to fly, while that might make our ordinary daily decisions seem somewhat monotonous; would you rather mild marble or medium cheddar cheese, there is still that element of would you rather that runs through every decision we make.

Every day with every choice we choose one thing to the exclusion of another and yet sometimes as inconsequential as those decisions are, we still struggle to make them. We are paralyzed by the appearance of choice.

Happiness researchers, employed at the Happiness Research project in Palo Alta California (not a real place, at least I don’t think so) who I can only surmise must be either the happiest or the saddest people in the world having studied happiness all day, have concluded that most of our happiness quotient (as they happily call it) has little to do with our big moments of joy or sorrow but is instead driven by the cumulative experience of our lives. Another way to say it is, the big moments even out over time. Other happiness researchers, presumably when they get together at happiness research conventions, call this the set point equilibrium theory of happiness. Now that just sounds happy doesn’t it.

But there’s a new spin on happiness theory that I’ve just been reading. One that is perhaps a little more germain to our discussion here. New research suggests that our happiness in the “would you rather” world of life is often tied more closely to what we didn’t choose than to what we did. They’ve suggested that the biggest barrier to happiness most of us face in the western world is simply that we have too much choice, that there are simply too many options and that every time we make one decision to the exclusion of every other option we become consumed with a latent anxiety over what we’re missing out on.

Take the idea of marriage. We love the idea of marriage. We love the idea of choosing a person and walking down the aisle. Oh the romance and the warm fuzzy feelings. But the truth is 6 yrs, 9 months and 13 days later, there are still moments where I wonder what I’ve done, every other option that I no longer have available to me. Now I don’t know if that admission makes me a bad person but I do know that it is only by virtue of the fact that my wife is a much better person than I am that I even have the luxury of asking said question.

But instead of celebrating what we choose, we spend our energy fretting over what we could have chosen. In poker they say it this way, fold em and forget em, but we don’t. We become focused not on what our choices will bring into our lives but on what our decisions will exclude from us. Internally over time we begin to define ourselves, or we limit ourselves, not by what we’ve chosen with our lives but by the decisions we didn’t make.

And so we start to make non-choices and non-decisions. We make decisions that are designed for little else but to limit their impact on our lives. Instead of making the fierce decision to live for something we make the ongoing, weak, insipid, decision to live for everything, which is, of course, in reality, very little.

And this, above all else according to cutting edge happiness research is the greatest factor in what can hang a cloud of anxiety and dissatisfaction over our lives. We simply become afraid to choose. My favorite line from the great writer Brad Bird, who penned among his masterpieces, the Iron Giant, Cars and now Rattatouile, was a line in the movie, The Incredibles. One of the characters says this, “saying everyone is special is just another way to say no one is special.” The reality is if you have 496 top priorities in life, you have no priorities and if you go through life forever paralyzed to choose one thing to the exclusion of another you will find yourself at some point in the distant future, at the end of your days, with nothing of value left to speak of. And so far we’ve just talked about the meaningless choices of life. The Would you rather choices like what of the advertised 10 000 coffee options will you choose at Starbucks? Or will you have your sub toasted… or not? But what about the big decisions, the hard decisions, the difficult decisions, the fierce decisions of life that come along and ask something truly significant of us.

On Boxing Day December 26th 2005, while you and I were most likely recovering from too much turkey, ham or other miscellaneous Christmas meat, Australian tourist and mother Jillian Searle was faced with the most fiercely agonizing decision I can imagine. Her family’s Thai vacation was washed away in a moment as she sat near the pool of her resort having breakfast. Her husband, seconds earlier, had just walked back into the hotel to grab some sunscreen when a wall of water engulfed the beach side face of the resort.

Dec 26 2005 the Asian Tsunami wrecked havoc across huge swathes of our planet. We all read the reports. We all stood unbelieving as the magnitude of the statistics started rolling in. Some of us even jumped into action to respond but nowhere was the story more dramatic than the microcosm of Jill Searle’s experience. As the water rushed over her family Jill, managed to grab a hold of two year old son Blake and five year old son Lachie. But as the water pulled back into the void it had just left beyond the beach she found herself struggling to hold herself and her two sons tight to a resort fence. Her husband, at this point, watched helplessly from the first floor balcony as Jill pleaded with a women nearby to grab hold of Lachie. As agonizing seconds ticked by it become apparent she wasn’t going to be able to hold all three of them and eventually she was forced to make the decision that I can’t even begin to imagine being faced with. She let her five year old son slip from her grasp so she could use her second hand to steady her hold on two year old Blake.

The water pulled back as quickly as it had appeared. Her husband rushed down from the hotel to find his family. At the foot of the resort he found Jill and Blake still clinging to the fence, Lachie nowhere to be seen. Immediately they starting searching for their five year old son. They called his name, they asked everyone they could find and through two hours of tears, and panic and frantic search they thought their son was lost to them.

And then, incredibly, two hours later, Lachie was found. Discovered by a security guard holding onto a doorway to keep his head above water. Now imagine our “would you rather” paralysis set against the decision of a lifetime Jillian Searle made in a moment. And if that contrast isn’t enough, imagine explaining your decision to your five year old son, later that day. Or later that year. Or a decade later. Or a lifetime later. The real decisions of life are difficult and they have consequences and ramifications and impacts that stretch beyond the horizon of what we can see in the moment but not deciding is not an option. In happiness research terms non-decisions lead to anxiety and despair. In the terms of Jill Searle’s story non-decisions lead to…

One of the things that the story of Jesus continually confronts both 2000yrs ago and today

Is this idea that we don’t have to decide that we can simply and continually add things to our life indefinitely; wealth, success, happiness, religion. He confronts this perception that life is some kind of infinite black hole that we can keep adding things into without ever letting anything go of anything significant.

One of his biggest issues as he walked through the religious quagmire that was 1st century Judaism was this inherent belief that somehow religion and God could be added on to a life without any space being created.

Truth is we perpetuate this sometimes too. What do we say, how do we talk about God? “You have a God shaped hole in your heart” I saw it on a T-shirt. Now I get the intent but, the problem is, it almost makes it sound like God just fits. Without any work from us. Without any decision to create space for him. God just fits.

Jesus broaches this subject with the Pharisees in an exchange recorded in the book of Matthew. In the passage he says this,

The teachers of the law and the Pharisees tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.
Everything they do is done for men to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues.

This is not the mild mannered Jesus we find on flannel cut outs wearing white robes and blue sashes across our Sunday Schools. This is a fierce Jesus, a decisive Jesus, a pissed off Jesus, with something to say, and he indicts these religious leaders, these teachers of the law and these Pharisees on their penchant to make rules to add to life. Things to follow, things to do, things to be, and then he says that they foist these regulations on everyone else where they become a burden on people’s shoulders.

He says this picture of religion, this weight, is heavy because it’s constantly adding on, adding on rules, adding on expectations, adding on good and compelling and worthy and religious things to do but never with an eye to the things we need to remove from our lives. Never with an eye to creating space in our lives to actually experience God.

Then he makes some comments about their clothes, says they are way too impressed with themselves and moves on to other things.

Now some background to some of Jesus’ comments here. The word Phylacteries is an odd one. That’s because it’s a transliteration of a Greek word that was used to translate the Hebrew word so by the time it got to English it didn’t mean a whole lot. A transliteration is basically an English spelling of Greek word. But what he’s really talking about here is something called the t’fillon in Hebrew. He says, you make your t’fillon wide.

T’fillon was small little leather box that contained little pieces of parchment on which were written excerpts from Torah. Torah is the Jewish name for the first five books of the Old Testament. Now these boxes were then strapped with a ribbon or belt of leather onto the foreheads or the hands of extremely pious Jews. That may seem like a bit of an odd practice but it actually comes from a very literal reading of a command of God in the book of Deuteronomy, to take the law of Moses, or the commands of God, and bind on your forehead.

The full text says this

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children.
Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

This section is called the Shema which is Hebrew for “hear”, from hear O Israel. This is the central, most important, command of God to the Jews. They recite it as prayer and they take it very seriously. So over time the practice of the t’fillon developed, where the prayer was literally bound to the forehead. We may take God in a more metaphorical sense here but the Jews, especially the Pharisees, took it very seriously and literally.

Jesus steps into a context of deep religious meaning and says, you make your t’fillon wide so everyone can see it. You strap the law literally onto your head but you haven’t made any space in your life to actually live it.

Listen to the start of that passage in Deuteronomy again;

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

Where do we know that from? Most of us know it as a quote from Jesus. At one point Jesus taught that this was the greatest commandment in all the law. Like every god-fearing Jew Jesus revered this passage. So he’s certainly not disparaging the command. He’s just saying that it’s too important to think you can just strap this on top of your life without letting go of something inside. This is too important to think that it can come without a cost.

Now interestingly enough what does he indict them on here? Largely their pride. You want everyone to see how great you are. Your t’fillon is wide. You love the seat of honor. Your ego is out of control.

Now if you skip over to the book of Luke, Jesus is found teaching about this very passage. He says this is the most important law in all of the scriptures and if you really want to get it right, if you really intend to get what it means, to follow through on it, then you need to add a second piece. He says you will need to love your neighbor as yourself.

Love your neighbor as yourself? That’s a big statement. How do we do that exactly? How do we even know who our neighbor is asks a teacher of the law who voices our inquiry from the crowd listening to Jesus.

And Jesus as he is wont to do tells a story, a famous story, the Good Samaritan story, in which a Jewish man is beaten and left for dead by robbers and then helped by a Samaritan who passes by on the road. A Samaritan who were despised by the Jews as low and dirty and beneath them. A Samaritan who a Jew would be loathe to touch or rescue or be rescued by.

It would seem that in the imagination of Jesus, a neighbor is defined by his actions far more than by her status in life. And that a low and disregarded Samaritan could actually be a better neighbor and a better example of the shema than even one of the chosen people.

It would seem, that for the greatest commands of God to be added into our lives we have to be willing to let go of at least some of our pride, the pride that would make us think ourselves above another, the pride that would lead us to boast about and display our importance to those around us. There’s a space that needs to be created in our lives for God. You can’t add him without letting something go. You can’t love God if you love yourself more than your neighbor. And you can’t simply add the greatest commands of God on top of your life with good and compelling and respected and religious practices without taking the time to see what it is that needs to be let go of.

Jesus continues and he says this, your tassels are so long and impressive. My goodness what tassels you have! The word in the Hebrew is tzitziyot and it means, wait for it, tassels. He’s telling them he likes their clothes but the idea comes again from Torah, this time in Numbers

Adonai said to Moshe,
Speak to the people of Israel
instructing them to make, through all their generations, tassels (or tzitziyot) on the corners of their garments, and to put with the tassels on each corner a blue thread.
And when you to look at it remember all of God’s commands and obey them, so that
(and this is the important part)
you won’t go around wherever your own heart and eyes lead you.

Number chapter 15, parentheses mine.

So again Jesus says, that’s great that your tassels are so pretty and so long, I bet everybody thinks that your tassels rock but once again you have completely missed the point. You can’t just stitch on fancy tassels and think you’re done with this

Why did God ask you to stitch the tassels on? So you could look at them and remember God. They were meant to be a pneumonic device to help you remember. And what are you supposed to remember? God commands. Why? So that you wouldn’t go around wherever your own heart and own eyes would lead you.

Again his point is that you can’t just add this to your life, you can’t just add tassels to your clothes, you can’t just fit God in, without giving something up. In this case it will cost us some of what our own heart and our own eyes would lead us toward.

So what’s Jesus’ point here? That following God is all about what you lose?
Well yeah, sort of.
He says the only things that are worth including in our lives, the things that are worth striving for- they come at a cost. The best things in life may be free but they don’t come without a sacrifice.

So when we strap religion on our foreheads and we make our outsides look presentable but on the inside we refuse to let go of what drives us in unhealthy directions or we start to attach significance to our clothing and it becomes the stuff that we acquire and own and display that defines our worth, the tassels and bobbles and trinkets and tiny shiny things that catch our eye- when those things start to defines our worth above the choices that we make to pattern our lives around a pre-eminent model of fully engaged, humanity we find in Jesus- when those things take precedence, life doesn’t work the way it was supposed to. When life is all about adding on expectations and practices and patterns and never about what needs to be let go of it becomes heavy and it becomes a burden. It becomes religious. The writer Paul at one point even goes as far as to call it the religious life that crushed our ancestors and crushed us. And Jesus says to the Pharisees you make life heavy with all of your expectations and you don’t do a thing to help.

Now of Jesus teachings something very different was said. And here’s the part we forget at times, it wasn’t always rosy and glowing and enthusiastic. In one section of John’s gospel Jesus has just finished teaching and John says that many of his disciples (Now realize this is not just a random crowd. These were his disciples who were following him as he taught) Johns says they turned to each other and said, “This is a hard teaching – who can follow it? And from this time many turned back and no longer followed him.”

So there’s a difference between hard and heavy.

Heavy is the weight of every choice we are too afraid to make. I want this but I don’t want to give up that.

Hard is the consequence of every choice we summon the courage to live. It’s letting go of 10 good things to fully live one great thing.

Heavy is trying to be religious on the outside and far from God on the inside. Heavy is being in a relationship and agonizing over every better option out there. Heavy is staying put where you are and dreaming about where you could be. Heavy is living for what we could lose at the expense of everything we could gain with life.

Hard on the other hand, is very different. Hard is letting go of the choice we didn’t choose so that we can live the one we did. Hard is making the decision to live the life of Christ when we don’t know exactly where that will take us. Hard is creating the space in our world for our decisions to be meaningful, so that our choices can do more than be the conveyor belt which moves us from day to day but can instead become the catalyst for completely new expressions of the kingdom of God in our life.

Heavy is when we make reactive decisions from a fear of losing out. Hard is when we make proactive decisions from an awareness of where we are headed.

In the book of Colossians, Paul writes to a community of early Jesus followers people who are still trying to figure out the difference between hard and heavy and he says this-

Why, do you let yourselves be bullied by religion: “Don’t touch this! Don’t taste that! Don’t go near this!”? Do you think rules that are here today and gone tomorrow deserve that kind of attention? Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining real indulgence.
Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
_Col 2:20-3:4

Look at what he says here. Don’t get caught up with a reactive, religious, heavy, posture to life, one that is doing what it’s doing because of someone else’s expectations. In other words don’t do what you do so that you won’t go to hell. Instead, put that frame of reference away, set that lens on life aside and start to make your decisions, start to live your life from a new awareness of what you already have in Christ.

Listen to his language, you have been raised with Christ (already), so set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God, for your life is now hidden with Christ in God. He says given what you already have, who cares about what you could lose. Who cares about what the expectations of a few naysayers are- decide to towards the potential that God has already invested in you. Sure there’s a lot to lose in life but it’s nothing compared to what there is to gain in finding a life patterned after model of Jesus. There is always more to gain as we decide to follow Christ into the fierce decisions of life than ever there is to lose. That doesn’t mean we can see everything coming or that we know all of the implications of everything we choose but it means we set a trajectory and we make the hard, difficult decision to follow after that path. And sometimes to do that we have to let go of lots of good and great and compelling options that don’t help us head in that direction.

I know how difficult that is. My goodness, I don’t consider myself and indecisive person but there are choices that I agonize over. I analyze and dissect and try to uncover every possible variable that could factor into the outcome, but the bottom line, at the end of the day, is very simply- that (a) we can’t know every possible outcome – we simply don’t have the necessary technology and (b) we can’t successfully move through life in the pattern of Jesus without making hard decisions.

It doesn’t matter whether you are discussing a decision that relates to your career, or your marriage, or your intent to follow after a relationship with God you simply can’t have it all. And if we persist in looking at our decisions through the lens of what we are missing out on, life will inevitably become heavy and burdensome and sucked dry of all the joy that God intended for us to experience in choosing for ourselves.

I know it’s tough for us to reorient our perception but fortunately for us we can make those decisions in the awareness of what we already have because in the story of God, the incredible addition of grace has already been factored into our equation.

And if you had to choose- would you rather; make the right choice in the absence of grace. The choice that would let you have everything you wanted in that moment or would you rather make the wrong choice in an honest attempt to follow Jesus, knowing that above all else you make that choice in the grace and love of the creator of all that is.

Sometimes life’s decisions are hard. Sometimes it’s not easy to carve enough space out of our pride to really love our neighbor as ourselves. Sometimes it’s not easy to follow Jesus to the exclusion of where our hearts and eyes would sometimes take us. And I can’t imagine the weight, the burden of possible outcomes, when in an instant, in a moment, Jill Searle had to make a choice that defiantly denies my attempts to communicate its gravity. Did she make a good choice? Did she make the right choice? I don’t know. There is no measure for me to evaluate that.

But could it be – that as we go through life and we are faced with our own unforeseen, unimagined decisions and we attempt to make choices, which are at one time both courageous and yet motivated by our desire to love both God and neighbor in the pattern of Jesus- could it be that our frail, broken and best attempts combined with the grace of God could result in something far better than we could have ever seen in that moment, that all the things we thought we were losing to make that fierce decision, would one day pale in comparison to what God had in mind for us to become.

The question specifically, did God already know that my Eggs Benedict would be overcooked, almost dry, even before the chef rolled out of bed this morning, perhaps even before the proverbial chicken or the egg. The question in general, which is entirely more enticing than my eggs, is, does God know the future and then if that is true what does it mean for God to be outside of, or unaffected by our concept of time. Strangely of late I have entered into this same query in a number of conversations. Each time becoming more and more convinced that the standard response; “of course”, as most standard answers are, is entirely a product of its familiarity rather than its utility.

Truth is, I don’t think most of us have a good reason to believe that God is outside of time. We have simply accepted it as spiritual, perhaps metaphysical fact because it serves to make God- other. That and we’ve always been told he was, is and will be forever (ironic) unconstrained by the experience of timing. Then again, there is one obvious utility to the idea. It makes us feel considerably safer about our own uncertain future. It’s nice to believe in a God who knows our next steps, what’s around the corner, what’s behind the door, what’s under the bed. As long as someone knows the unknown feels a lot safer.

While I understand that draw, there is also something unsettling about a God outside of time. He feels very distant from me. So much of who I am, is about the experience of my life; the purpose in believing that my life can accomplish something meaningful, the anticipation of entering into my next opportunity, failure or success. The idea of a God who saw it all coming and experienced nothing remotely like what I did along the way makes him feel very separate from me. It also means a God who can’t grow into a relationship with me, who can’t learn about me and take pleasure in discovering who I am or conversely take pleasure as I discover what it means to know him. It means a God who can’t celebrate in my success and affection or be hurt by my failure and offense. See, all of these relational ideas and constructs that we want to apply to God rely on causation A God who is outside of time, though, can’t be affected. I’m not suggesting that God is subject to calendars and stopwatches, but a being who is not subject to linear reality can’t have one decision affect a dependant decision. Without linearity there is no ability for one choice to cause a reaction, response or subsequent choice and this is the fundamental building blocks of the common understanding of relationship that we employ (and ascribe to God). I want to know a God who can feel hurt when I reject him, not just a cognitive awareness of my choice. I want to love a God who can who can feel a swell of emotion when I turn to him in need and who in turn can respond to my sincerity with a love that surely outstrips my own.

Now don’t get me wrong I’m not trying to anthropomorphise God into something very much like me, though that is of course the only way we really have to conceptualize God. I have no issue, in truth, I take great comfort in the idea of a God who is eternal, omnipresent and omniscient. I’m just not sure that all of those things we understand about God necessitate his being outside of linear time.

I imagine it this way, when God was alone before the universe. There was no time. He simply existed as himself (I use anthropomorphic language because it is the best we have). God existed as pure conscious love. But the moment he decided to act, to move, to create something outside of himself, time (linearity not seconds and minutes and hours) became. There was a moment where there was nothing but God. And then a decision, then an action, then a creation. Time. God entered into it by the act of creating- for the sake of creating. This is one of the most beautiful images I can imagine. A God who exists, eternal and complete, needing nothing, wanting nothing. A reality immeasurable in seconds or year or eons or eras. But then this God, eternal, complete, love, makes a choice to change that perfection for something… better?

Do I believe that God knows everything? Short answer, yes. More complicated answer is that I believe God knows everything there is to know. I’m not sure where I’ve landed on the idea of God and time but if indeed God has the pleasure of linearity that I have been given, I would say there are things that God doesn’t know. He took a chance on us. He took a chance on me. And though God has all of the experience of the world at his disposal and could calculate the odds of every chance to the smallest degree of probability, sometimes, I think that God’s greatest pleasure is the stuff he specifically created to surprise him- namely… us.

There are lots of implications if I look down this road. Some of them are scary – God doesn’t know my tomorrow, some of them are comforting- God understands my anxiety, some of them are imposing- the future is not a forgone conclusion, while some of them are inspiring- my contribution to history is meaningful to the world and to God but through it all what continues to orient me as I navigate philiosphy and theology is the attempt to know this God more than I did yesterday. And for that I need both today and tomorrow.

Anyway those are my thoughts on a Saturday afternoon, unfinished and still evolving, but perhaps that’s the way it was always meant to be.

I love live arts

One of the pieces was called “heart and killing”. Not a particularly cuddly title but it struck a chord with me. The dancers conveyed with such intensity the struggle to battle busyness and expectation in our lives. The drain of being pulled in every direction at every moment. Apparently the title of the piece comes from the Chinese character for busyness which is a combination of the two characters heart and killing. I don’t know my Chinese but it’s a poignant linguistic statement.

I could identify with such raw emotion that feeling of just always needing to be somewhere- else. This isn’t about the demands of being a pastor either because I would venture to suggest that we all know that desperation.

I wrote earlier about all the kinds of things that vie for our attention but even those seem somewhat harmless compared to all of the things that vie for our time. Honestly, I don’t care whether you’re some high-powered CEO of a fortune five hundred company or the house husband because your wife is the CEO there are more than enough things to fill our days with.

Generally I like to think I’m pretty busy. I take some limited pride in that accomplishment even with the fact I’ve stated we’re all there already. The fact of the matter though is that I like it this way. I’ll schedule my whole day at the coffee shop just because I like the busyness and the energy of people around me. I find impossible to just can’t sit and work in my office and so I pay the exorbitant price to Starbucks not for the privilege of drinking the fine coffee but because I am renting that seat for the day. I scope out the good one next to the plug and plant myself. People will come in to meet me. We sit. We talk. We journey together and then once they leave I stay to write and work until the next person drops by. It’s just seems to work for me.

Even when I’m on vacation I need to have a project to do. On my days away from the office the only way I can stay away is if I have a project to keep me occupied for the day. I’m just one of those people

Sometimes that means I go for a bike ride. Get some exercise. Focus on that. Sometimes it takes a project around the house. This week I moved my compost. It was beside the garage, on the side, out of the way. Problem was it wasn’t getting enough sun to keep the process going. So this week on my day off I dug it all up, moved the box and then refilled it. My wife thinks it’s kind of gross keeping all our organic waste in yogurt containers under the sink but she’s never dumped out the entire compost, moved it 15 feet, and put it back in.

And I used to think this was a pretty busy life. That is, until a friend of mine went away on vacation and my wife and I volunteered to look after his kids, aged seven and nine.

I may have thought my life was busy but clearly I am not ready to handle the role of Mister Mom.

On the first night my friend’s son wanted to watch Star Wars and not one of the good Star Wars everyone likes, episodes four through six (Episode IV: The Empire Strikes Back clearly being the best of the series) but the ones no one likes episodes jar-jar through Hayden Christiansen. So in goes the disc on comes the film and before the words have scrolled up the screen my new friend is beside me on the couch cuddling up against me. Not being the most touchy-feely guy I’m a little awkward but settle in. Five minutes later the first light saber fight is on the screen and now I’ve got a seven year old Jedi dancing around trying to eviscerate me with his plastic light saber he previously had stuffed in his pajamas.

Day two is car pool day. I pick up the neighbors kids and drop the troupe off a school. Nothing too eventful. Three o-clock rolls around and it’s time to pick them up. Back to the school. My friend’s daughter, nine, and the neighbors daughter six, are waiting. I load them in my little two door car.

“Where’s your brother I ask?”
“Oh, I’ll go get him”

She disappears into the playground leaving me with a talkative six year-old stranger strapped in the back of my car. Now I suppose the years of being told not to talk to strangers as a child must have worked because all of a sudden I am feeling really awkward. Here’s a talkative six year-old in my car and I am now the stranger. I wanted to tell her she shouldn’t be talking to me. She doesn’t know me. I could be the stranger her parents had warned her about. I decide it was better to politely respond to her questions about my hair, my car, the weather, school, boys, candy, teachers and existential philosophy. That last one might not have really happened.

By the third night it was 9pm when I crawled into bed before midnight for the first time in recent memory.

I said to my wife, “I don’t know how they do this.”

Work.
Kids.
Past-time projects.

Now add in to that the stress of church and it’s easy to see why we relate sometimes to the emotion communicated in the dance I saw.

These are busy lives we lead and there is always someone or something asking more from us. After a day of deadlines and expectations we come home to kids that need help with their homework. And after a day of writing and creating and imagining I’m welcomed home by my wife who wonders why I can’t be just a little more romantic.

It seems there’s always one more thing to do- or one more expectation to live up to.

And in the early church it was these types of expectations that lead to the first major test of the fledgling movement.

This question of what are we supposed to do?
What are the expectations and the rules to live up to?
What does this idea of church look like?

The big issue centered itself around what to do with new converts to the Christian faith. One group argued for staying within the traditions of the Jewish story. That everyone should first convert to Judaism. Another group said those rules didn’t matter anymore. You come directly into this new faith in Christ. Even well known early leaders like Peter wrestled with how to walk through this issue.

Now you’ve got to remember that these guys didn’t have a lot to go on. There was no model for them to build on, no template to look at, other than what they already knew and so the default became Judaism since most of the early followers were Jewish.

Time for some history, so if that’s not your thing you can skip ahead.

Before Jesus had left he said, listen, and I’m paraphrasing here, I’ve got to go but I need you to wait here in Jerusalem until I can send you my Spirit. Now trust me, when that happens things will be different. So the disciples do as requested and in Acts chapter 2 on the day of Pentecost the disciples more than get there money’s worth. They are completely reenergized by this gift of the Spirit and on that day, Peter gets up and preaches to this huge crowd and thousands, literally thousands of people respond.

I mean this is Billy Graham, without all of the cultural conditioning.

These people are completely new to the story.
No background.
No history.
They are just captured by Peter’s words about this story of Jesus and they believe.

Now large groups had come to hear Jesus while he had been around but this was different. If you go back to the gospels you can read these stories about huge crowds wanting to hear Jesus. There’s even one point where so many people are coming to hear him speak as he walks along the shores of the sea that they literally crowd down onto him to the point where he has to get in a boat and push out into the water so the people can see and hear and stop pushing to get closer. The difference was those crowds came and went. It was in the tens and hundreds of people that really followed Jesus from town to town. So this was something new even for the disciples that had walked with Jesus.

So what do you do with all these people?
How do you manage them?
How do you keep them occupied and interested?
What types of things do you need to provide for them, to teach them?

Well the church in Jerusalem opted to base their answer off the only thing they knew the Jewish customs they had grown up with. So they said converts had to convert to Judaism.

That meant, for the men, circumcision; probably helped eliminate most of the riff-raff. Now I know they didn’t have anesthetic back then and I doubt the scalpels were all that sharp, so I would have to be pretty convinced before I let them have a whack at me.

But this was how they dealt with the tension of the shifting culture around them

They tried to cover it up with action, with busyness.
A lot of things to do.
A lot that you had to live up to.
More of what they already knew.
It was a very task oriented approach to religion

And it’s not all that unfamiliar is it?

Now at the time the persecution of this fledging religion was increasing. In fact it was starting to fairly becoming intense. The Jewish powers obviously didn’t like a new religion sprouting up in Jerusalem of all places and the Romans had had about enough of the Jews and their religious arguments, they were just sick of these guys, so they were more than happy to help see the Christians out the door, so many of the early believers fled. They left Jerusalem and spread across the Roman Empire and one of the major centers where a lot of them ended up was a city called Antioch, a couple hundred miles from Jerusalem. In Antioch Christianity started to take off the same way it had in Jerusalem. The difference was the Jewish influence wasn’t as strong because the city wasn’t primarily Jewish. So most of the converts were gentiles, meaning anyone not Jewish. Up in Antioch nobody really cared about any of the Jewish traditions or rules because they had never lived with them anyway.

When head office back in Jerusalem heard about this they were furious and so they decide to send this guy named Barnabas to check things out; to sort of stamp out these hippies not playing by the rules. Thing is on the way up to Antioch Barnabas travels through a city called Taursus and meets this guy named Saul, who would eventually change his name to Paul.

Now Paul has just had this experience with God while he was traveling along the road to another city called Damascus and he’s become a Christian all on his one. He had this incredible moment with God, saw a vision and turned his life around completely without ever having set foot in a church. Remarkably it does still happen. Well the two of them hit it off and they decide to travel to Antioch together and once they get there they find this church that is emerging out of no where. It’s crazy all of these people that are excited and coming to be part of this story of God and so they end up staying for a year and they live and teach in the city until eventually this church in Antioch says listen we can’t just hang on to this for ourselves we need to help others find what we have.

The congregation in Antioch was blessed with a number of prophet-preachers and teachers:

One day as they were worshiping God—they were also fasting as they waited for guidance—the Holy Spirit spoke: “Take Barnabas and Saul (called Paul) and commission them for the work I have called them to do.” So they commissioned them. In that circle of intensity and obedience, of fasting and praying, they laid hands on their heads and sent them off.
_Acts 13:1-3

Back in Jerusalem everyone is pulling out their hair at this point because they are still holding on to the Jewish rules and customs and part of that means centering worship in Jerusalem. They weren’t interested in starting new churches and now these guys from Antioch are planting new churches all over the place.

The tension between Jerusalem and Antioch is ratcheting up with every step

Now let’s pause here for a second, because you’ve got to understand, the Christians in Jerusalem weren’t bad people. I mean look at Peter and his struggle to come to terms with this very issue in Acts chapter 10. This is not a story about bad people. It’s about honest followers of Jesus who were trying how to figure out faith in the face of change.

The culture was shifting under their feet
Issues they had never thought of let alone formulated an answer for were being posed.

How were they as leaders supposed to hold on to what they knew when so much was changing?
How do you balance what you know to be true with the unknown that’s staring you right in the face?

The problem is balance is never a static thing. Every time you take a step you need balance. Walking to the door takes balance. Sitting in your chair takes balance.

Sometimes the image of balance we have is one inanimate object placed on another inanimate object in a closed, unchanging system. e.g. a house of cards perfectly balanced on a table until someone walks by and knocks it down.

And sure that’s a type of balance but it’s not a helpful balance for us as we walk through life. See a balance that’s useful is when we are able to lean into the stresses in our world and remain standing in the face of change.

I test a drove a smart car a while ago. You know, those little two seat glorified power-wheels. I loved it. It was great, at least in part because it was a grown up version of a go-kart. Every time I got to drive a go-kart as a kid I thought about how great it would be to have my own; all the others kids are riding their bicycles and I pull up in my go-kart; how cool is that? Essentially that’s a big part of the appeal to driving any car for me; childhood wish fulfillment.

But as I drove it on the highway I couldn’t believe how much work it was to keep that thing moving in a straight line. Every time a big gust of wind came or a truck drove by with every one I’m hanging on for dear life. Listen I drive a little car already so I’m used to being blown around on the road and let’s be honest, I weight 150 pounds, I’m used to being blown in the wind when I walk down the street, but that car didn’t have any balance in the face of wind.

I had the balance.
I was the one able to steer into the changes.
I was able to compensate for the stress; to adjust for the situation.

Balance is not about being static and unaffected; it is about being able to remain in the center as the circumstances change around you. With every shift of the landscape balance responds to stay on track. To remain rigid and inflexible will never help you keep your balance. In fact, it’s a recipe for your house of cards scattered on the floor

Paul Spalding said it this way in his book Proclaiming Christian Truth in a Postmodern Culture

Reality is the dynamic medium in which human knowing does its work. Both human knowing and the reality it knows are in a dynamic state. And what is discovered in this process [of interacting with reality] is living truth, that dynamic confidence that reality has been engaged and that a real connection has been made that is trustworthy and true.

He’s acknowledging that life is dynamic.
That reality is dynamic.
That you– are dynamic and it’s only when we honestly engage with the life around us that we can find this living truth, truth that leaps off the static page and finds life in our experience of the world.

That doesn’t happen simply because holding on to what we’ve always done, it happens when we fearlessly, maybe even recklessly jump into conversation with life.

Back to our history lesson.
The Jerusalem church sends some people up to Antioch in Acts chapter 15 to straighten them out and they show up telling everyone what they need to do to be saved. Of course everyone in Antioch is confused and upset and mad and so from Antioch they decide to send Paul and Barnabas back down to Jerusalem and the leaders down there agree to this big council, actually the first church council, the council of Jerusalem. In Acts 15 Luke records the meeting

The apostles and the leaders called a special meeting to consider the matter. The arguments went on and on, back and forth, getting more and more heated.

Then Peter took the floor: “Friends, you well know that from early on God wanted everyone to hear the message of this good news and embrace it- and not in any second hand or roundabout way, but first-hand, straight from his mouth. And God has given them his Spirit exactly as he gave us. He treated the outsiders exactly as he treated us.

So why now are you trying to out-god, God, loading these new believers down with rules that crushed our ancestors and crushed us too.
What are we arguing about?

There was dead silence. No one said a word. And then, with the room quiet, Barnabas and Paul reported matter-of-factly the stories of what God had done among the other churches. The silence deepened. You could hear a pin drop.

Finally, James broke the silence. “Friends listen; we’ve heard the story of how God from the very outset made sure the racial outsiders were included. This is in perfect agreement with the words of the prophets:

I’m coming back;
I’ll rebuild David’s house;
I’ll put all the pieces together again;
I’ll make it look like new
So outsiders who seek will find,
So they’ll have a place to come home to,
All the peoples included in what I’m doing.

God said it, and now he’s doing it. This is no after-thought he’s always known this would be the plan.

So here’s my decision we’re not going to unnecessarily burden the non-Jewish people that turn to the Master.”
_Acts 15:6-19

See even this was about that

Here they were arguing about a very small part of the story– how do we do church? And it was this cultural shift brought on by the non-Jewish believers that brought them back to the big story of God’s invitation of grace to the world, to everyone. See it was in part their inability to find dynamic balance with the changes around them that had caused them to lose sight of the big picture.

We have categories like liberal and fundamentalist and both somehow get thrown around like they’re derogatory terms. Balance though isn’t about one or the other. Some fundamentalists want to fight about everything. Every disagreement that comes up is worth starting a new denomination over and at the same time some liberals want to be gracious about everything, like there’s nothing we can stand on for our center. Balance though is different. Balance is about valuing dialogue and discussion, about valuing relationship over just being right all the time and yet at the same time keeping sight of the big picture, knowing what that small and central core is that we are not willing to let go, or compromise. The church in Jerusalem wasn’t willing to dialogue about how the church should change with the culture but the church in Antioch refused to compromise on the big story of God’s grace to the world.

The inflexibility of the church in Jerusalem to deal with the culture that was increasingly becoming less and less Jewish prevented them from having the balance that was needed to hold on to the core of the gospel as the circumstances changed around them and the harder they fought to deny the cultural shift the farther they moved from the center of the story. All the while it was the church in Antioch’s ability to be mobile and fluid that gave them the flexibility to deal with the stress of cultural change and still hold firmly in the center of God’s story of grace to the world.

And this is where the question of the emerging church comes into view. There is a lot of talk about the emerging church – and what that means but the reason people like myself like the term emerging, even though it’s picked up some baggage is because it reminds us not that we fit into any particular category or group but because it is a reminder that we are part of this big ongoing story of church.

After 2000 years nothing has changed we are stilling wrestling with the very old question of how to live out this incredible story of Jesus. Just as the story of the church in Antioch emerged from the story of the church Jerusalem, we continue to emerge. Let’s be honest it’s nice to feel that we’re novel but there is nothing new about this emerging church conversation.

Whether you’re talking about the Roman Catholics or the charismatic movement, if you’re looking at the growth of the gospel in places like Africa, or the emerging church in North America, this is about that, because this question about how to do church today is about that very old question of 2000 yrs ago;
What does it mean to live this story of God in the every changing state of my reality?

Does religion for you bring up the same kind of emotions as the dance I saw did for me? It’s tiring and painful at times but at least I know exactly where I’m supposed to go.

There’s nothing worse than dancing and not knowing the next step, right? Well there’s me dancing in the first place – that’s clearly worse if you have to watch.

But is that what religion brings to the table for you?
Painful certainty?

If that’s the case then something is out of dynamic balance because in fact, what faith should be bringing to the table is often times the exact opposite, you have no idea what the step beyond the one in front of you is and at the same time you couldn’t be more alive

No doubt some will say that God is not a God of disorder, incoherence, or arbitrariness, but a God of order. Of course he is. Unfortunately the whole of the Old Testament shows us that God’s order is not that which we conceive and desire. God’s order is not organization and institution. It is not the same in every time and place. It is not a matter of repetition and habit.

On the contrary, it resides in the fact that it constantly posits something new, a new beginning. Our God is a God of beginnings. There is in him no redundancy or circularity. Thus, if his church wants to be faithful to his revelation, it will be completely mobile, fluid, renascent, bubbling, creative, inventive, adventurous, and imaginative. It will never be perennial, and can never be organized or institutionalized.

If the gates of death are not going to prevail against it, this is not because it is a good, solid, well organized fortress, but because it is alive; it is Life that is, as mobile, changing, and surprising as life should be. If it becomes a powerful fortified organization, it is, in fact, because death has already prevailed.
_Jacque Elles

What if we didn’t know the next step?
What if we didn’t have anyone telling us where to go, or how to dress, or what a good Christian looks like?

The church in Jerusalem had no idea what it was doing- of course neither did church that emerged in Antioch. The difference was instead of retreating from that uncertainty they jumped into the story and they found themselves as they went.

Whether we’re talking about our religious paradigms or our work life, if we are too busy living up to what everyone else wants from us then we have missed out on life.

I mean what would be left if you just stopped
Could you be you without your job?
Could you have faith without religion?

I’ll be honest here sometimes I wonder how much there is to me beyond what I have to say in front of an audience.

Granted, there’s something positive in that, for better or for worse, what you see is generally what you get with me. Regardless of whether you can appreciate it or not, this is me– maybe it’s an acquired taste?

That can be good but sometimes I wonder what there will be left of me when my days as a communicator are over.
When no one is asking anything of me.
When no one is expecting anything from me.
If there’s no audience listening do I really have anything to say– to myself?
The church in Jerusalem fought so hard to hang to what they did, to the roles and expectations that had for years defined them but in that struggle they had lost who they were meant to be. Who underneath all of the labels, they really were.

If religion and faith are ever going to live up to the ideals in the mind of God, then they have to be worth more than rules to us. We have to be willing to let go of the security of busyness, of hanging on to what we already know, so that we can find something much older, and much bigger, and much more true?

What I wasn’t a pastor? What if you weren’t a contractor or consultant or student or plumber or teacher? If you weren’t liberal or conservative and the community you’re a part of wasn’t fundamentalist or emergent– if we weren’t busy living up to the labels we plaster over ourselves could we find ourselves in this ongoing, never-ending, universal, story of God that continues to be written, in every culture, every context, in every moment and in every life? Because in the final evaluation wherever there is someone willing to hear the song of God and sing along in harmony this story of church emerges.

The question for us is whether our lives are open enough to offer that fertile ground for God’s to story to grow in. Are we too busy doing church to hear him? Are we too busy being successful to find our purpose? Have we succumbed to the busyness of life and allowed it to kill our heart and passion and vibrancy.

Or– can we slow down enough to get past the categories and the labels to remind ourselves of the opportunity to touch the big picture of God’s incredible grace?

Go back to the beginning, to the story of Genesis. Where do we find ourselves in these stories? Are these factual events relevant only to historians and the individuals involved or are they more? Could they be more than just a historical account of the long dead? Could they point us towards truth that is beyond the limited experience of those involved as we find our place in the story?

We have the unfortunate tendency to end the story of creation on the sixth day. To imagine that after God finished creating, the world lay in a state of perpetual bliss, perfection, until that is Eve screwed it up. But the word perfect isn’t found in the creation narrative. In fact, it’s not even an idea that found its roots in Hebrew thoughts. Perfect as we understand it is a Greek idea and Greek word and perfect is where we get the idea that everything was over because perfect is complete. Perfect is static. It is unchanging. It has reached ultimate fulfillment because if there was anything left to strive for it obviously wouldn’t be perfect. Thing is it is such a great idea that we read it back on to the Hebrew story and it skews the meaning of the text.

This type of syncretism is pretty common especially in religion and it played a significant role in the spread of Christianity especially in the first couple centuries of its development.

Religious syncretism is the blending of two or more religious belief systems into a new system, or the incorporation into a religious tradition of beliefs from unrelated traditions. This can occur for many reasons, and the latter is quite common in areas where multiple religious traditions exist in close proximity and are active in the culture.

Religions may have syncretic elements to their beliefs or history, but applying the label is often unwelcome by adherents of so-labelled systems, especially those who belong to so-called “revealed” religious systems, such as the Abrahamic religions, or any system that is exclusivist in its approach. Syncretism is sometimes seen by such adherents as being a betrayal of a pure truth. By this reasoning, adding an incompatible belief corrupts the original religion, rendering it no longer true. Indeed, syncretism is sometimes used as an epithet, a charge implying that those who are seeking to incorporate a new view, belief, or practice into a religious system are, in fact, distorting it. Non-exclusivist systems of belief, on the other hand, may feel quite free to incorporate other traditions into their own.
_wikipedia

Syncretism was early on, the bread and butter of Christianity in the early part of the Common Era. The early Christians adopted such central metaphors to the faith as the idea of Jesus as the “Son of God” from the Romans. “Son of God” was a term used exclusively by the Roman Empire to describe the Caesars. Along comes Jesus and his followers, and they decide that the “father/son” metaphor is a perfect way to describe the relationship between Christ and God and so they start going around describing Jesus as the “Son of God”. Now I realize that is touchy subject because the father/son thing is so central to our faith (and rightly so) but we do realize it’s a metaphor to talk about their relationship, right? Christ and the God cannot exist in a literal father/son relationship if they are eternally pre-existent. It’s an image we use to talk about the intimate relationship within the mystery of the trinity.

However, after the Council of Nicea in 325 CE where Christianity was enshrined as the official religion of the state the idea of syncretism fell out of favour. There wasn’t any need for it. We didn’t need to find new ways to communicate our message. We didn’t have to wrestle to find better metaphors to talk about the incredible nature of Jesus. Instead we made it law and forced everyone to believe what we told them.

But here as we read the Genesis account of creation the infection of the Greek idea of perfect influences how we experience the story. God never calls his creation perfect, he calls it good. In fact he calls it very good and instead of this idea of being complete there is this sense in the Hebrew story of not only significance but potential. Each of us as part of this very good creation is endowed with not only the significance of being invested in by the creative God but we have the potential to create more good in our experience of life. In this context the Garden of Eden becomes this interesting metaphor for the womb, this place of unlimited potential. Before we are born we are invested with this incredible potential to create alongside God but none of that potential has been actualized. However, in our experience of life outside the womb we all face into this gap between the way we have lived and the potential God invested us with.

In Brian McLaren’s book, The Story We Find Ourselves In, the character Neo talks about these first formative stories. He re-imagines the story of Cain and Abel beyond the interaction of the two characters and into the story of humanity. Abel as the archetypal nomadic pastoralist. He represents the movement of the human race beyond their history as hunter-gatherers into the stage of raising livestock. No longer is Abel dependant on his ability to find edible food. He is now in control of his most basic need, that of food. He can move his flock from fertile area to fertile area.

In the story Cain becomes the archetypal agriculturalist. He is represents our movement towards advanced agrarian society. No longer is he moving from fertile area to fertile area to feed his flock, he is raising crops. He has become even less dependant on the circumstances around him to support his life and family. But along with that independence comes new responsibilities. He is now claiming ownership over his family, his animals and his land and with that comes the need to defend and protect his investment against those that might trespass and steal his crops for their own food or to feed their animals.

So as the story develops and Cain and Abel have words, “in Cain’s field” perhaps the story hints at the societal movement away from God. That as we become more and more independent of God we become less and less aware of the significance of each other to the point where we could murder each other in the defence of our possessions.

Even the story of Babel is an interesting part of the metaphor. As advanced agrarian society develops and surplus capacity begins to be used as currency small tribal communities begin to develop around the land of wealthy agriculturalists. Now the inherent significance we all enjoy as part of the creation of God is subverted in the pursuit of derived significance in the form of wealth, power and authority. A hierarchy of value develops with the wealthy at the top. In essence we begin to develop a model to represent who is more like God and who is less like God. Perhaps the Babel story of a tower to God represents more than just a physical structure but a societal hierarchy that attempts to place certain individuals closer to the divine.

Now imagine the early development of these tribal communities focused around the wealth of localized land owners. Eventually in the ongoing economic development of these communities they are forced to look outside of themselves. They develop of the need to connect and trade with other similar communities. And so as their grasp for ever increasing wealth and significance drives them, as they seek to have their closeness to God recognized by an ever increasing audience of worshipers they begin to run into the problem of language. Similarly developed communities have regional dialects and unique customs. Communication breaks down, fighting erupts and the movement towards replacing God is muted, for a time.

The point being that these stories have more significance to them in their reality as metaphor than they could as just factual events. Were these real people, in real time and space? Maybe, but that’s not the point. The stories have been chosen and preserved in the history of Israel because they are archetypal. They speak to us of more than the accidents of the narrative but also to the significance of the human journey. It’s not in the factual reality that they communicate something of truth to us. It is in their value as metaphorical symbols that their significance is realized.

Biblical literalism is the result of our desire to contain God and to define his truth. The end result is that it often moves us farther from God by betraying the intent of the text. The early stories of Genesis are mythology. They are the oral history of the nation of Israel and the truth of the stories no longer depends on the whether or not there ever was an Adam and an Eve or a Cain and an Abel because over time the stories have been able to transcend the individuals and become part of the larger story of God’s interaction with humanity. They are now a part of our story.

This narrow minded reading of the Bible misses the form and has produced all kinds of silly arguments on both the Christian and anti-Christian side of the curtain. Just spending a couple minutes on Google will find you a bunch of websites that purport to expose the Bible’s many contradictions and moral shortcomings. One particular website I found took the verse where Jesus is tempted by the devil an an anchor to prove how out of touch Christianity is with reality. Now the idea of the devil talking to someone might seem like a pretty easy target but this website took a decidedly different tact. The Devil takes Jesus up on a hill and “shows him all the kingdoms of the world”. Clearly this verse shows just how false the Bible is since the only way you could see “all” of the kingdoms of the world from the top of a hill is if the world where in fact flat. See the Bible promotes flat-earth “science”. Silly Christians. The stupidity of the line of reasoning is only equalled by Christians that continue to hold out against all reasonable evidence to believe that the earth was created no more than 6000 years ago because adding up the genealogies in the Bible takes us back only one hundred and fifty generations all the way to Adam. Both are ridiculous because they don’t respect the narrative form of the text. To treat the Bible as some form of science text book of objective facts is akin to taking a single verse of poetry on which to build our entire understanding of quantum mechanics. It doesn’t work.

Of course these types of arguments are fairly easy to dismiss but it becomes increasingly difficult to hold onto the moral integrity of the text if we don’t understand the narrative trajectory from beginning to end. The simple truth is, there are a lot of immoral, despicable, hateful things done in the name of God across our world. The difficult truth is many of them are recorded in our Bible. If we really want to hold to the idea that the text is universal, absolute and devoid of cultural bias are we ready to embrace the stoning of disobedient children, the reinstitution of slavery and the subjugation of women? Of course not, because as we understand the text in context as the experience of humanity evolving and growing towards God we recognize that as a species we have come to understand God in increasingly more appropriate terms. The way many of the biblical characters understood God in their cultural setting seems often barbaric, cruel or primitive to us but they are part of our story, part of the human story. Their individual story has become part of our history and we have learned to use their experience to further our own. Instead of embracing the cruelty of the ancient stories as universal we embrace them as part of our history, part of the experience of humanity that has brought us to this point in time we are experiencing now.

As we move our experience of church forward into the emerging world this is the same type of invitation we need to extend to the people around us. Our story of church can’t be about a closed system it has to invite those around us into the narrative, Increasingly people want to be connected to more than doctrinal statements or brand identities, we want to be intimately involved in the stories of our communities, shaping the direction, the flavour and the nature of what it means to be church. At times we have been scared to grant this type of influence to the community. Instead we have sequestered it away with the paid professionals and believed that the people would be happy to have visitation rights. Somehow as we re-imagine church we need to develop stories that people feel not only inspired by but an integral part of. Instead of brands we need myths. Instead of image consultants we need story-tellers.

So while Jesus is sitting and eating with these people the Pharisees walk by and they can’t believe what they are seeing.

“What the heck are you doing with them?”
“Aren’t you embarrassed to be seen with them?”
“We would be humiliated if someone saw us sitting and eating with these people.”

And so Jesus, as he likes to do, tells some stories. Just like all of Jesus’ stories he challenges the people listening to find themselves in the stories. He tells a story about a woman who loses one of her coins and searches her house to find it. He tells a story about a man who loses one of his sheep and leaves the rest to find the missing one. And then he tells this story, this story about a man and his son.

The father is a wealthy man and one of his sons comes to him one day and asks for what’s coming to him, he asks for his inheritance. He says, “listen Dad, I know you’re still alive but I can’t wait any longer. I’ve been doing my best just to wait you out but for what ever reason you just won’t die and I want my money.”

Now I don’t have any kids but I can imagine how painful that would be to hear from your son. I wish you were dead. They only significance you have left for me is your money and I want it. I imagine that it was the shock of the request the moves the father to say okay. Maybe if he had waited a couple days he would have told his son to take a hike. But in the pain of the moment he agrees to the request.

So Jesus tells us that the son goes out and squanders his money on “expensive living”.
Now what exactly is expensive living? Well I imagine it has more to do with the question of living than it does with the question of expense. I imagine it carries more to it than just the simple economics of spending more than you make. I think Jesus is hinting at some of the unsustainable patterns in our lives, the ways in which we exchanging the effort of investing in life and relationships for the idea that we can just buy happiness or buy friends.

But whatever the particular fault of this young man’s lifestyle was, a famine happens. The economy hits a downturn and this guy gets into trouble. So after a period of selling himself out as a laborer in some questionable working conditions he remembers his father and his generosity towards the people in his employ. Jesus says that in that moment he came to his senses.
This is an interesting statement because it has this idea of coming back to reality, that his present situation apart from the context of relationship to his Dad didn’t make sense. It wasn’t the way he was intended to live.

So in this moment of clarity he decides to return, to journey back towards his father.

He thinks to himself about what he’ll say. “I have sinned against heaven and against you.”
An alternate translation could say “to heaven against you”, the idea being that he is aware of the magnitude of his offense, and that his sins were so great that they reached to the heavens. He decides that his only choice is to humble himself and ask not to be forgiven and restored but simply to be employed by his father. And so he starts his journey back home.

And this is where the story gets really interesting because Jesus says that even as he was far off in the distance his father saw him and ran to meet him. And while we may not be particularly surprised at this point, this is the punch-line. We may miss it but everyone listening would have got the surprise square between the eyes.

Jesus’ culture was a patriarchy. The father’s position as head of the household may have been compromised when he acquiesced to his sons request at the start of the story but as a father he would never stoop so low as to run to meet his son. He could never humble himself so lowly as to embrace and kiss his son in public, a mother maybe but certainly not a father. See this is more than just an act of forgiveness he is humbling himself to take a position below that of his son. And Jesus stretches the believability of the story here to make his point. He is pulling on every literary device he can think of to show the significance of the man’s actions.

Now there is one more character in the story of this father and son. There’s the second son. The angry son. The one that is annoyed when his brother comes home. You can admit it, you can identify with this guy. He is our sense of fair play in effect. Our belief in the justice of karma.

He has been faithful. He has stayed home and helped Dad even though his idiot brother took half the money and left. And now that the money is gone the kid brother shows up to move back in, presumably to get another half of the inheritance when the old man dies for real. His father may forgive but for him it’s not that easy.

And this is where the story finds a deeper level of significance because this where it leaves the realm of cold, objective, rules and begins to find some roots in our experience of the story. We realize the story isn’t as simple as its first reading implies. The characters are not just one-to-one analogies of our relationship to God. We realize that we are not just the first son in the story. We are all of the characters.

We are the son who needs to feel forgiveness.
We are brother who finds the taste of grace bitter at times.
We are the father who extends his forgiveness in this incredible humility.

It’s only as we place ourselves within the story that we begin to hear God’s voice. We are called to respond to the love of God with more than gratitude, we are called to change our posture in the story. Once we have been the son, we become the father.

Remember Jesus told this story when the Pharisees asked why he was sitting with the “sinners”. He was sitting with the sinners to remind them that we are all the prodigal son in need of forgiveness and he was sitting with the sinners to remind them that we are all the humble father in the position to offer forgiveness to others.

It’s from this place of entering the story, of stepping back from the cold reading of the letter of the law. It’s when we removing the edits we have placed on the story of God, that we start to experience something of his truth.

As we recognize the need to expand our stories of God, to move them back towards description and away from definition we have to engage in the same struggle as we practice church. Our expressions of teaching and communication have to become more descriptive of truth. As we recognize that our propositions can’t contain the reality of God we need to stop selling short his story and instead encourage people to engage in it for themselves. The danger that has always stopped us from moving in this direction has been the belief that without out the strong leadership of a trained pastor the people will go of the deep end. They will lose their theology, forget the truth, melt down their watches and create brand new golden calves to worship. Of course the reality has been quite the opposite; by allowing the pastor to become the single definition of the scriptures application in our lives we have created an idol out of the pulpit. Instead of pointing people towards and engagement with the story of God the clergy have set themselves up as a mediator, an indispensable translator. If we really believe in God and we really believe that his truth is bigger than and beyond our limited ability to grasp and control then where does this fear come from? That doesn’t mean we don’t need each other. In fact the greatest need we have is for a community to help us wrestle with these ideas of truth. As individuals it is our limited perspective that can skew any perception of truth. As community we balance and help each other move towards God. The reality of our modern western experience of church, however, is anything but communal. The pastor communicates truth to us. We receive it. As we wrestle with the implications of Jesus model of truth telling though we are called to walk a more difficult path, one on which we all walk together, the pastor serving as facilitator, describing truth, pointing back towards the narrative of scripture. Of course we need to apply the truth of the scriptures to our lives; we need to wrestle the narrative down into a propositional prescription but that is the job of each individual to find on their journey. As churches, Christians, leaders and pastors the role we need to assume is that of helper, storyteller and poet, pointing not to our view of truth but back towards the larger narrative.

I had the opportunity to spend a few days with Len Sweet a couple years ago at a retreat centre just outside of Calgary. For a renowned intellectual, he’s a particularly great guy. You’d like him. Anyway, in the course of one of the conversations he told a story about an experiment he tried while speaking as a guest at a church. He took the comments of Paul and began to interact with the audience. Paul says that followers of Christ we are to have the aroma of Christ and Len began to ask the community what this idea was all about. What did Jesus smell like? Did he smell like the fresh sawdust from the projects he had worked on as a young carpenter with his dad? Did he smell like the fish that had infiltrated every piece of clothing his companion fishermen’s clothes? Did he smell like the expensive perfume that Mary of Magdalene poured over his head? Perhaps an even better question, what does Jesus smell like now? In heaven glorified. What does the reality of heaven do to the senses?

For the Len the ultimate conclusion was apparent. Jesus, of course, smelt like the dirty and the unclean. Jesus for Len, smelt like a mixture of blood, sweat and tears… and fish, all from the company he kept. He smelt like those he chose to reach out to invest in, to spend his time with and the application was equally apparent for our lives. For us to follow Jesus we too must smell like the people who need our help.

But something strange happened in his interaction with the audience. A people suggest a few ideas. Perfume.
Love.
Roses.
No, not roses, Rose.
Rose?
What’s Rose?

Yeah, she’s right. Jesus does smell like Rose.
Soon everyone in the room was in agreement. Jesus did in fact smell like Rose.
So who is Rose?

There in the back of the room was a 60 year old woman, named Rose. She had been a part of the community for many years and in a variety of ways had influenced, it appeared, almost everyone in the room.

The point of the story is the incredible truth of Paul’s metaphor. For the people in that room the aroma of Christ was Rose. Equally, the aroma of Christ is the scent of the needy and it is the imagination of heaven. As Len stepped out of the way and allowed the community to wrestle with the images of the scripture it became bigger. It became less defined. It became not less but more true. In the process of placing ourselves within the experience of the metaphor we are able to connect with truth that is far beyond our ability to contain within our heavily edited perspective and as we approach the call to tell the truth, we need to approach the incredible mission with the passion to invest ourselves completely in the story, all the while cognisant of our need for the humility to acknowledge that our view of truth is limited.

In high school I sat in an English class with a particularly strict teacher. Unfortunately for us he only exceeded his disciplinary prowess with his ability to lull the class into a semi-conscious state. This was the class where I perfected the time worn tradition of the “tri-pod head prop”. You know the one where you put both elbows on the desk and securely rest your chin in the open palms of both hands. If positioned correctly you can balance in this position with little or no conscious effort. This becomes the perfect position in which to place yourself as the drain of the day pulls you towards an afternoon daydream. So effective is a correctly executed “tri-pod head prop” that some people have even been known to slip right past the daydream state and into a full blown afternoon nap.

Now on this one particular day the student two rows over and three seats up from me had placed himself within the aforementioned tri-pod head prop and our teacher had become aware of his inattentiveness. While continuing with his lecture, the teacher walked somewhat conspicuously over to the student. Eyes darted across the room. Nervous glances across the aisle.

Our teacher approached the dozing student and without breaking stride in his lecture or his path he swept the students right hand out form under his resting head. Now many of us had found ourselves hanging on to consciousness in class before but this particular student had unfortunately long since given up. He was completely asleep, out cold, and as the arm was swept out from below him and the delicate balance of his head was thrown out of kilter his face came crashing down onto the surface of his desk. Blood splayed out from the sides of his face and as he lifted his head disoriented from the jarring of his sudden re-emergence into the world of the awakened we all saw the strange way his nose seemed to have careened off the safety of the center line on his face.

Needless to say our teacher was equally surprised, though probably not as pained, and leapt into immediate action to tend to the student and no doubt attempt to head off the coming repercussions. Now I was not privy to the inner workings of out schools faculty disciplinary process but I imagine that at the very least this incident may have resulted in a slapped wrist.

Hopefully a bloody nose is not the image we hold when we think of an encounter with God but the idea that God is more concerned with the display of authority than our experience of living with him is a commonly held presupposition.

Is this the image that has started to shape God in your mind?

Jarret Stevens in his book The Deity Formerly Known as God has defined the ten six commandments of this authoritarian God.

1. Don’t smoke or drink
2. And you better not hang out with people that do
3. Don’t swear- but if you do don’t use the big ones
4. Go to church- and act like you like it
5. Don’t have sex before you’re married
(It would also be nice if you didn’t envy, weren’t prideful, didn’t have hatred in your heart, weren’t a glutton, didn’t gossip and cared for the poor and oppressed, but if you can’t do those just make sure you don’t have sex before you get married)
6. Seriously, don’t have sex

The question we need to continually ask of ourselves is have our stories about God stopped describing a part of him and started to define him in some unhealthy way. In this story the infinite God, absolute and other, defined by our fear of getting caught. You begin to the see the absurdity of allowing our limited perspective to become a substitute for absolute reality.

We could imagine God as our grandpa living up in the clouds. Sure he’s a little senile but for the most part he’s harmless. I mean seriously I like the guy but can somebody put him in an old folks home so we ca move on with our lives.

We can envision God as a high stakes game of roulette. You put your money on the table and take your chances. Sometimes you win and good things happen. Sometimes bad things happen and you lose. There’s no rhyme or reason just God’s random soverenity.

We can imagine him as board room executive make tough decisions with ice blood in his veins, or a faithful father that stays up late at night waiting for us to return. The father to our prodigal son. Maybe we’ve decided that God is an all you can eat buffet. Take what looks interesting, leave what looks suspect.

The point being, some of these stories are helpful at different points in our journey. Some can be damaging. But all of them become dangerous when they stop describing God for us and begin to define him in our minds. When we lose perspective and believe that the propositions we pull from these images move us closer to the absolute nature of God we step into the dangerous ground of editing our spirituality so that it fits us. Instead we need to remember that whatever our reading of the story, it is one more step removed from the truth of God’s reality.

Blaise Pascal said it this way, “God created people in his image on this sixth day, and every day since, people have returned the favor.” This is the struggle that been ongoing since the day humanity first developed the capacity to conceptualize God as other.

Truth is, God is all of the stories we tell about him and he is none of the stories he tell about him. He is present in our stories because they speak of something of the experience him and yet he can never be contained in our perspective because he is so much more than we can even begin to imagine. And it’s because of this very fact that we need to remember just how important metaphor is to our spiritual journey. It is the only means we have to conceptualize a being that is completely other, that is too big to be contained and controlled by our propositions and language.

And in out pursuit of relevance, of finding out how God pertains to the matter at hand in our lives we have exchanged metaphor as a beautiful description of God’s infinite truth for a sad and small definition that fits within our categories and language. Instead of taking the difficult road of journeying after a God we can’t define we have taken the easy road of shrinking God to fit our perspective. C.S Lewis framed is desire this way, “I don’t want my image of God. I want God.” The challenge in really living that desire is to realize that as we abandon our image of God we are left with the unenviable task of attempting to follow someone who is bigger than what we can possibly imagine or articulate.

Seth Godin has written a number of books on marketing. He is really brilliantly creative and insightful. In the back of one of his books he offers free email advice to his readers. On his blog he tells the story of one young woman who wrote to him to take up the offer. She asked for advice on how to convince her boss at the resort she worked at to drop the prices so they could attract a larger client base. Godin responded that perhaps instead of dropping the prices they should look at raising the prices, and using the increased revenue and resultant lower consumer base to create an exceptional resort experience for their customers.

Basically she thought that was stupid and Godin offered a refund on the free advice. But on his blog he writes this response to the conversation.

Cheaper is the last refuge of the person who’s not a very good marketer. Cheaper is easy and cheaper is fast and cheaper is linear and cheaper is easy to do properly.
Cheaper doesn’t spread the word. Cheaper is a short term hit, not a long-term advantage. Cheaper doesn’t create loyalty, because the other guy can always figure out how to be cheaper still.
_Seth Godin

Sometimes this is what we are looking for, a cheaper way to God. To make God fit into our categories is easier and it’s linear and it can be done effectively. If we reduce God to a series of propositional statements or a list of rules and regulations we can readily determine our relative position to him. Are we making the grade? Do we measure up? If all that Jesus taught us was a list of dos and don’ts then it might be difficult but at least we could alter our lifestyle choices and clearly determine whether or not we fit the profile of a Jesus follower.

Cheaper is the editing of God down into a list of rules to be followed, instead of the personal identity he ascribes to himself. Cheaper is choosing only to acknowledge the impersonal, objective nature of the law instead of the relational dynamic quality of God. This process of editing God down, of making him cheaper and easier was the very tact Jesus’ contemporaries employed.

One of the main religious factions of Jesus’ day, the Pharisees had reduced God to a cause and effect transaction that rested on our ability to follow the rules. The taught that the reason the Jews were subject to the Roman Empire was simply because they were not holy enough and if they could simply raise the holiness quotient to a sufficient level then God would be forced to send the Messiah who would free them from the political subjugation they suffered under.

It’s this dumbing down of God that is precisely why Jesus chooses to use metaphor and image as the primary means for his teaching. He taught about truths that were too vast and too important to be contained in mathematical equations and transactional agreements. His goal was to reawaken the imagination of his people to see the God beyond the rules. This truth was so important that it could only be communicated in his parables and embodied in his life.

Definitions have never been the way of God and cheap and easy were never what Jesus called us to. One of the greatest confrontations between the narrow truth of the Pharisees and the broad truth of Jesus happens in his most famous teaching, the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus places his expensive message in direct contrast to the cheap rules of his contemporaries and asks his audience to decide.

Listen to the words of Jesus from the book of Matthew.

You’re familiar with the command to the ancients, ‘Do not murder.’ I’m telling you that anyone who is so much as angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder. Carelessly call a brother ‘idiot!’ and you just might find yourself hauled into court. Thoughtlessly yell ‘stupid!’ at a sister and you are on the brink of hellfire. The simple moral fact is that words kill.

This is how I want you to conduct yourself in these matters. If you enter your place of worship and, about to make an offering, you suddenly remember a grudge a friend has against you, abandon your offering, leave immediately, go to this friend and make things right. Then and only then, come back and work things out with God.

Or say you’re out on the street and an old enemy accosts you. Don’t lose a minute. Make the first move; make things right with him.
You know the next commandment pretty well, too: ‘Don’t go to bed with another’s spouse.’ But don’t think you’ve preserved your virtue simply by staying out of bed. Your heart can be corrupted by lust even quicker than your body. Those leering looks you think nobody notices—they also corrupt.

Don’t murder? Not good enough. Don’t sleep around? Not complete. And as if this wasn’t enough, as if he hasn’t already turned off enough of the audience, he continues.

Let’s not pretend this is easier than it really is. If you want to live a morally pure life, here’s what you have to do: You have to blind your right eye the moment you catch it in a lustful leer. You have to choose to live one-eyed or else be dumped on a moral trash pile. And you have to chop off your right hand the moment you notice it raised threateningly. Better a bloody stump than your entire being discarded for good in the dump.
_Matthew 5:21-30

Listen to the imagery and metaphor in his words? Do you see the magnitude of what he is trying to communicate? He is talking about truths that are far too important to be contained in rules and regulations. In fact to miss the metaphor and take his words literally completely destroys the meaning. He is saying that there is no way to contain a morally pure life. No matter how long the list of rules becomes it could never exhaust the expanse of what it means to follow God. To imagine that you could cut off your right hand and become morally pure is a gross distortion of the text. Not only because it is an obviously crazy idea but because it tries to reduce the story to an insufficient proposition. It is just as futile as trying to devise a rule for every possible human interaction. Somehow we are called to live the story despite the fact we can’t reduce it to categories we can define.

Now we may say, that’s all fine and good. Obviously this is a metaphor. Jesus would never advocate self mutilation. But the history of Christianity would suggest otherwise. There have been people that have taken these words very literally and missed the significance of Jesus’ teaching. Understood in their proper context as metaphor, however, his words point us towards a much larger truth, one that a list of rules, no matter how exhaustive, could contain.

The message of Jesus is about relationships and by their very nature, inclusive of disparate individuals; relationships are beyond simple definitions and categories. They are too unique and too varied. The only way that we can understand the truth of God across all of our experiences is to place ourselves within the context of story.

Though we have been looking for absolute truth in our interpretations of Jesus words his very style of communicating retains its influence precisely because it cannot be contained or distilled in propositional terms. The only form of teaching that transcends our limited experience is metaphor because though it allows propositional arguments to be related to our lives it retains an ability to rise above the interpretation and point us back towards truth that we can’t fully contain in our perspective.

Taken as a list of rules, the message of the Pharisees applies to specific relevant situations in our lives. In the broad story of Jesus’ metaphors we find ourselves within his words, his truth reaching into our very experience of life.

This is why image and metaphor become so central to our experience of spirituality; it is why myth is so important to the Christian narrative, because these are the ways we have to communicate truth that is bigger than our experience.

True speech about God is narrative in form. Theology is history. A divorce between the ‘Christ of faith’ and the ‘Jesus of history’ only arises if faith and history have first been separated. Christian theology has been so much dominated by pagan Greek metaphysics that it has lost the narrative character. The theology of the Gospels is typically in the form of parable – stories of concrete mundane realities in which the nature of God’s rule may be grasped by faith. The main tradition of Western theology has seen this as something merely illustrative of truth which must be properly stated in abstract and timeless propositions.
_Leslie Newbigen

Proposition has been the holy grail of the modern worldview, the true or false statement that reduces truth down to a digestible sound bite. We have taken story and metaphor and pulled propositions out to help us understand what is being communicated. An example of this is when we read the parables of Jesus and the give sermons explaining what he meant to say. Pastors have created an art form of out the practise of pulling lessons out of stories. We have believed that metaphor points us towards proposition. That story is something less than true and its value is derived from our ability to interpret and apply the hidden lessons.

Because of this low view of narrative, proposition has gotten a bad wrap in emerging circles because it has been seen as a means to edit truth in order for it to fit our story. You need to look no further than the wealth and prosperity gospel of the western church to see that what we often understand as a universal truth can only work within out limited experience of the world. Of course, the reality is that proposition is important. It is the only way we have to talk about what is true. It is the only means we have to communicate our understanding or ideas. Instead of rejecting the concept of propositional truth we simply need to expand our horizons to understand that metaphor and story are valuable in their form not only as means toward proposition but also as a tool to communicate above the line of cultural bias. In the emerging worldview metaphor ca be a mediator between an absolute that cannot be contained within our limited experience of reality and our understanding which is a limited application of that truth in time and space. Metaphor, image, story and myth communicate something to us of the vast nature of absolute truth. As we interact with those stories we must develop propositional statements that apply our understanding of the truth story to our particular experience of life but we need to be wary of placing our perspective in plane with God’s.

It’s for this very reason that we are continually called to re-imagine the stories we tell about God. Have they ceased to describe God for us and become absolute definitions? Have we used them to make him relative to us instead of inviting us to relate to him. Have they stopped inviting us into the story of God and began to fit him into the story of us.

We are living in confusing times. Many culture-watchers are convinced that our society is undergoing a transformation of broad proportions. This cultural shift goes by various designations. Some observers tell us we are in the throes of a transition from a Christian to a post-Christian era. Others declare that we are moving from a Constantinian to a post-Constantinian situation.
But the most widely used description suggests that we are witnessing the emergence of a “postmodern” society. Whatever may be the preferred nomenclature, the various voices are in agreement that the cultural shift now transpiring carries grave implications for the church.
Stanley J Grenz

I am sitting in a coffee shop today where I sat about two months ago when I overheard a conversation between a mother and her two sons; the first about five years old, the second a little older, maybe seven. The mother was scanning the menu board to find her preferred coffee while the two kids pressed their faces up against the glass display housing all of the moderately fresh treats. As she prepared to order she told the tow kids to pick something that they might like to eat while she had her coffee. The two boys were pretty excited about that and turned al of their attention towards the looming decision. Just as the mother had entered into her paragraph long description of the latte she had chosen the first so turned to her and proclaimed, “I want a rice krispie square.” Scanning the display case she returned back, “I don’t think they have rice krispie squares, how about a marshmallow square.” Obviously in her mind the similarities were striking. The aesthetic similarity, the high marshmallow content of both, the utter lack of nutritional significance in each, surely these were enough to offset the minute differences. To her son however, the dissimilarities were quite significant.
“I don’t want a marshmallow square. I want a rice krispie square”, the agitation in his voice rising to a desperate plea.
By this time the second son had had quite enough. Being older and wiser, he gathered all of his experience in this particular field of study and turned to his younger sibling.
“Marshmallow squares are the new rice krispie squares.”
It was a bold statement. It was powerful and pithy and captured the entire zeitgeist of modern coffee shop treats. It was good enough for his brother.
“Okay, I’ll have a marshmallow square.”

The problem with the shift that is happening in our worldview today is that we know what the old rice krispie squares are, we just don’t know what the new rice krispie square is going to be. We walk into churches and we are completely aware of what we don’t want to experience. We were turned away by the perceived dissonance between the words and actions of the religious. We had had enough of the money grabbing and lifestyle manipulations and yet somehow in the midst of all of our angst we have been unable to articulate what we imagine our experience of spirituality could be. We have long ago decided that we were dissatisfied with the easy answers of the institution of church and yet in their place we have little to offer. Though many of us have walked away from the old we are still searching in the fog for what could emerge, for what could become.

Grenz is right. Our world is shifting. It has changed and is continuing to change in the same churn of development that has brought us this far as a society. The stories we have told about God have become stale. The images and metaphors that once connected to our experience of life and self have become out of date and lost their power to motivate, influence and inspire. Somehow, over time, we have confused our stories, born out of a limited perspective on God and truth, for the absolute reality of his existence. We have forgotten that the stories we told about God were designed to describe him, never to define him. We have forgotten that the power of metaphor and image and story reside in their ability to point us towards truth that cannot be contained in proposition or language, that cannot be articulated in theories and theologies. Ultimately we have forgotten that God is so much bigger than our imagination of him.

It is this very shaking of the presuppositions of the modern world that has caused us to re-examine the validity of our stories. It has called us towards the realization that we have used our limited perspective of God to limit him, to make him small. In an effort to make God relevant to our limited experience of life we have edited God so that he fits into our categories.

Those of us that have wrestled with the implications of an emerging worldview have been derided as formulating a subjective understanding of God. The accusation is that we have thrown out the pillars of the Christian faith and rejected absolute truth. Of course that is a very cursory evaluation. Many people through out the history of the church have wrestled with what it means to know an absolute God within the context of our limited experience of the world. To acknowledge that limitation is not a rejection of God’s absolute character. It is simply recognition of our place in relation to truth.

To take relativism to it’s logical conclusion ends in absurdity. To suggest that there is no truth beyond my limited experience of life is not a sustainable worldview. However, what is becoming equally apparent as our worldview shifts is the absurdity of asserting that our limited experience of life is absolute.

Truth exists. It exists beyond whatever experience you or I have of it. The problem comes when we substitute our experience of truth for truth itself. You and I and every other person we encounter have a different story that has brought us to our point of interaction. There is a history that has brought to you the point of reading this book and it will have a role in shaping how you understand my words. In the same way that story influences the way we perceive and interact with truth. Though that realization may show our experience of truth as subjective it doesn’t call into question the otherness of God or the existence of truth beyond ourselves, it simply brings perspective to our bias.

Make religion seem relevant.
Address the felt needs of your given target audience.
Connect with their experience of life.

It’s kind of like wanting to put your church on extreme makeover. A bit of liposuction here, straighten out that crooked nose there, fix those nasty teeth and of course get those breasts knocked up a couple cup sizes. If we could just make church sexier it would be just like the show where the ugly duckling woman is finally revealed to her waiting boyfriend or husband. He can hardly recognize her. She is beautiful. Whatever struggles they had in their marriage or relationship disappear into the ether melted away by the newfound lust he feels for his newly breathtaking woman.

All of this in the effort of bigger, better, church communities. A larger slice of the religious economy. It would seem at times the glorification of the lowest common denominator is the highest ideal we could possibly reach for. Of course this is all just as offensive and shallow as it is to imagine a boob job can fix a broken relationship.

Now with that said, I can admit that I too want to be relevant. I don’t want to be considered outdated, insignificant or unimportant. I want to feel a sense of validation in my job, in my words, in my relationships. I want to be considered a helpful voice in journeys of those around me. Basically I want my value as an individual to be realized.

And yet as I sit here in a coffee shop preparing my thoughts for another weekend, ideas rolling through my head, I am at a bit of a loss to define an idea that could capture anything beyond my own imagination with a sense of relevance. I mean, what is relevant? What is relevant to me? To you? Are those things even remotely connected to each other? As I imagine the task of writing or speaking to an audience beyond my own imagination relevance seems like a heavy burden. Is it even a reasonable task to ask of someone?

The problem is, of course, that relevance is subjective. It has to be- by definition. The Dictionary defines relevance as, “pertaining to the matter at hand.” The problem with that is that the fact of the mater pertains to the hands that are involved in the matter. Now you can try to say that ten times fast but the fact remains that we are all involved in different matters, different lives, and different situations with different decisions and choices and struggles to make our way through. We all have different interests and biases that we bring to the table. So as we bring any one matter to the focus of the collective audience we all have a different evaluation of its perceived relevance to our lives.

What is there that could possible pertain to all of the myriad of matters in the hands that are holding this book? Could I possible tell a story that would touch us all with sentimental feelings, or a joke that would make everyone laugh? I may not be up to the task of relevance but the truth is, that type of relevance would take more than a great writer, it would take a great audience and though I have a great deal of appreciation for your commitment to read this far into this post, I don’t think you’re up to the task.

Take something as common as a simple pastime. I know a lot of people that golf. Now if you are a golfer you know that golfing is all about consistency and accuracy. You step onto the course focused. You know your best score, your target score, and your handicap. You know the tools in your bag. Maybe you have scouted the course or made mental notes from an earlier round. Personally, when I golf, I want to get through the course as fast as possible, get a few balls in the holes along the way and finish the day with at least one of the balls I started with. In fact my favorite part of golfing is the golf cart. Truth is, my ideal golf course exists, we just call it a go-kart track. The relevance of golfing is not lost on me, though some may disagree. I simply edit out the parts I don’t like.

So when we come to a topic like spirituality you can see the breadth of where relevance resides in our culture, the mosaic of religious traditions that emphasize different aspects of the spiritual journey, the ways that we edited out the parts that don’t resonate with our particular experience of life. Whether that is the reinvention of the Buddhist tradition minus the supernatural, or the politicizing of Islam into a nationalistic identity, or even the continued divide and divide and divide again nature of the protestant wing of Christianity, we are continually made aware of our desire to shape religious experience to fit within the presuppositions and biases that determine relevance for us as individuals. Spirituality especially in modern western culture seems as times little more than a buffet table of options for the religious consumer. So much of what flies today as an attempt to become relevant is little more than a quick edit job. Cutting off the fat so speak. The parts of faith/belief/spirituality that we don’t feel comfortable with.

But what if we were to explore spirituality unedited? What if we determined to journey into spirituality and take it as it comes, not discarding those things that might not fit at first glance? Is there a place that we could recognize our limited view of the world with all of the presupposition, bias and baggage that comes along with it and yet chose to acknowledge the larger story of God that supersedes our limited perspective? What if we took spirituality at face value even when it calls into question our habits and patterns? This spirituality might look very different from our tightly edited relevance of today.

Editing a book sounds like a good thing. We give out Oscars for exceptional editing of movies. But the editing of our spirituality just sounds a little wrong doesn’t it. Unedited spirituality; that seems like something we can all get behind, right? The tough thing, of course, is that to face into spirituality unedited we have to acknowledge the presuppositions that have forced our edits in the first place. The reason we edit our parts of our spiritual journey is because they don’t fit into the presuppositions we bring with us to the table. The most common example these days is the modern presupposition that everything in the world is ordered and rational and within our theoretical ability to grasp, replicate and communicate. To fit our experience of faith into that presupposition we have edited out most of the mystery and ambiguity in a very real sense, defines spirituality. We have developed theology and theory and diagrams and acronyms to explain almost everything we could possible question about faith.

We have somehow taken the mystery of what it means to respond to Jesus and edited it down into four easy to remember spiritual laws. Our relationship to God has become little more than a simple diagram. You and I as stick figures on the left side of the page, separated by a gulf of untouched page across from the stick figure god on the right hand side. Jesus doesn’t get to be a stick figure; He gets to be a bridge in the shape of a cross that you and I, as stick figures remember, get to walk over to get to God. Somehow the God of the universe has become a simple transaction. Your sins (-) plus Jesus suffering (+) equals zero.

We have developed apologetics in an expressed attempt to make it unreasonable to accept anything but a Christian worldview. Of course we have long since forgotten the fact that Christianity is anything but reasonable. We believe in some entirely crazy things, things that are beyond the definitions of empirical science. But this is the essence of faith; that we chose to believe in what we cannot prove. And somehow in the world of faith, those pieces that we can’t explain or prove become, amazingly, the solid cornerstones for our lives. To edit out the mystery quizzically leaves a pretty precarious house of cards to live in.

The paradox in our pursuit of relevance is this, that in an attempt to define a God that fits within our presuppositions about the world we have edited him down into a form that is relevant to none of us. We have made the gospel about a series of propositions that universally hang over every head instead of the open ended relational dynamic that the kingdom of God hinges on. We have thought that if we could define and disseminate our understanding of God we could make everyone believe the right things or do the right things. All the while God has been trying not to be relevant to everyone in one fell swoop but to become relevant to each of us in the uniquely divine relationships that define the kingdom of God. I know that seems like an incredibly inefficient way to go about running the universe but thankfully for us, he is still God. If we were to take our limits off of God we might actually find that there isn’t any need for us to make God seem relevant because we would find that he is already present in every moment, every interaction, every relationship inviting us to come to know him in a more meaningful way.

It’s not that ministry didn’t really work my first time through. In fact I really enjoyed a lot of what I did. My perception, however biased, was that the people I worked with and for seemed to enjoy my work as well but there were questions. Lingering doubts that I just couldn’t put out of my head long enough to settle into the role.

There was a time in my life when my greatest doubt was around my understanding of the universe. I was completely comfortable with the presupposition that God was up there, somewhere. I believed that beyond any shadow of doubt. Of course I had doubts but they revolved around my understanding of God. Was Christianity correct? Did I have my theology in order? Did I really believe the propositions of the denomination I was affiliated with? These were the extent of questions that bounced around in my head.

But something changed a long the way for me. At some point in the experience of carrying out the will of God I realized that I wasn’t all that concerned with his will. I was consumed by my perceptions of success and by the stated goals of the organization I worked within I become acutely aware that I had become little more than a producer in the religious economy. Was this really what I wanted to do with my life? All of a sudden the questions about correctness that had consumed my energy fell away and I started to wrestle with the very core of my faith. Did the teachings of Jesus really mean anything to me beyond the trappings of the religious economy? If I had nothing to produce and no one to consume my thoughts did I still believe in these ideas? In fact if I was going to take Jesus seriously was I willing to transition my faith from a model of communicating mental ascent to theological truths into an active participation in what I was increasingly coming to understand as a call not towards belief but towards co-creation. Outside of the need to produce engaging sermons and exciting events I found myself captivated by Jesus’ idea of the kingdom of God, not as a future life-after-death but as a present reality brought about in the practice if our lives. These ideas started to influence the core of my life. I found myself disinterested in the institutional church and longing for meaningful relationships. I found myself disinterested in the celebrity of preaching and looking for ways to influence the people in my immediate life. I started making choices about the way I was participating in the economy. I choose not to support companies that profited by exploiting people and the planet and began removing my investments from companies that I didn’t see as ethical. I started to read the words of Jesus not as some hidden code to be deciphered, a guide to proper thought, but as a radical call to change the world. A challenge to create this kingdom he described. Forget whether or not I had all the answers I was looking for, I was coming to realize that I had been asking the some of the wrong questions to begin with.

While I had always been taught that these ideas of the kingdom of God as social change were somehow a distortion of Christ’s message by the “liberal” church, they found a resonance with me that I couldn’t shake. The amazing thing was the more I wrestled with my faith the more I found that I really did believe in these ideas. In a more significant way than I had ever understood it before this interaction between my personal relationship with Jesus and the kingdom of God was changing me. Beyond the questions of theology that still bounce within my head I found a deep trust in the kingdom of God, a profound belief that the teachings of Jesus really were somehow connected to the truth of the universe. In losing my need to make sure everything in my theology was correct I found real sense of faith in Jesus, a conviction that was shaping my life in ways I hadn’t imagined before.

Now that brought up different questions and new struggles for me. What did faith look like if it wasn’t focused on proselityzing? Was I able to put my faith into something I could no longer explain satisfactorily to myself? So much of my systematic theology was built like a house of cards. One proposition supports another which in turn supported another. To pull out some of those blocks had major ripples that spread through my mind. While I held on to this central idea of the kingdom of God I found myself with new doubts around the nature of truth and the very existence of God. Somehow in embracing the implications of Jesus teachings I found myself questioning the answers that I had been giving out for years. And to my surprise I found that I was okay with it

Truth is my theology doesn’t work as well as it did a few years. There are ideas in my head that don’t play well together and yet as I have come to understand Jesus in my life I have found a place of faith that allows me to embrace the mystery of believing in God. He doesn’t fit into my categories. He doesn’t work in my logic. And yet he is where I choose to place my faith. I was asked a couple months ago what my greatest doubt is as a Christian leader. As I pretended to think about my answer I thought about the implications of what I was about to say. My greatest doubt is God. I am wholly committed to the ideals of Jesus’ kingdom. I have decided that this is how I want to live and yet there are times that I wrestle with the idea of a God beyond my experience of this world. Was this okay for a pastor to admit? What are the effects of sharing this kind of doubt with others? In the end I have decided that effects of sharing honesty are insignificant to the damage that is caused when we refuse to acknowledge our questions. Faith is about questioning.

Frederick Buechner said it this way, “Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal Himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.”

This is the place of faith for me today. Not the confident assurity of the modern church but the humble acknowledgement that while we can’t answer every question and while we still wrestle with the very big ones, we choose to believe. That interaction between my questions and my faith is somehow the place that I connect to God. He doesn’t force my hand or destroy a part that is very core to my sense of identity. Instead he embraces me unedited and invites me towards him in the same manner.

This series of posts is going to be exploration of the ideas that are shaping our faith community in Calgary AB. Some of it comes from my mind, most of it has developed from the thoughts of others, voices both from within our community and from others who have influenced us from the outside.