Think of some of the images in your mind that help you conceptualize God. One of the problems I have is that sometimes those images migrate from tools that help me understand God into filters that outline boundaries on my perception of him. In other words they become barriers that edit God into a smaller frame of reference, one that I have believed is relevant to my particular experience of the world?

We can imagine God as authoritarian keeper of the rules. This is the image of the traffic cop that pulled us over last week. Probably most of us have had the unfortunate experience of being pulled over. The sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach when the lights go on behind you. The suddenly realization that this is going to be expensive. Of course if you are anything like me you don’t even have to be the one getting pulled over to get that feeling. As soon as I hear the siren or see the lights I get worried because I know somewhere down inside that even if I didn’t get caught this time it could have been me. I was probably speeding just a little too much, or cutting into a new lane just a little too close for comfort. Maybe I was serving just a little too wide as I typed a text message on my blackberry. Even if he didn’t get me this time he could have. This is the God that is defined by his list of rules.

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.