Trusting and Believing

      In the last post I asserted that as Christians we are not defined so much by the rightness of our beliefs but by our relationship with Christ, a relationship characterized by love and demonstrated by the way that we love others.    In other words, we find our life in Christ, not in the rightness of our beliefs.  It is Jesus whom we trust, not the rightness of our beliefs.

The problem comes, of course, when we define trusting Jesus as holding the right beliefs about Jesus, which is how it was put to me when I was young.   In fact, the way it was put was “trusting in Jesus,” which doesn’t seem like much of a difference but really is.  “Trusting in Jesus” was synonymous with “believing in Jesus” which was synonymous with “accepting Jesus.”  All different ways of saying the same thing, and the way to do the thing they all said you needed to do was to believe the right things about Jesus and then pray and tell him that you believed all the right things about him—that he was the son of God, that he died on the cross for your sins, and then he rose from the dead to prove that he was God, and that if asked he would forgive you of your sins, and so now you were asking and believing that indeed all this was true and you were now forgiven.

All of these things, all these beliefs, everyone of them is absolutely true.  But then you come to find out that there were some other things you had to believe in order to believe in Jesus, because if you doubted them, well, how could you be sure of, say, the resurrection?  The list of right beliefs that you had to hold depended on which version of Christianity you were hanging out with, so on that list you would might the virgin birth, the absolute truth of Scripture, the premillennial return of Christ, the Rapture of the church before the premillennial return of Jesus, a Baptism of the Holy Spirit separate from and subsequent to the filling of the Holy Spirit, a literal six-24-hour-day creation, the laying on of hands for healing, advocacy for the poor, and ax heads that actually floated.  You couldn’t afford to be wrong on any of these things because wrong beliefs on these things could lead to wrong beliefs about Jesus, and wrong beliefs about Jesus indicate a faulty acceptance of Jesus, which means you just might not really be saved.

Boy.  I sure am glad salvation is by grace and not by works.

Even if it were possible for any one person to be absolutely right on every belief, that’s not what Jesus calls for.

Jesus calls for faith, and the kind of faith he calls for is the kind in which you will commit to a certain course of action even though you are uncertain about the outcome.  Even though it seems that the course of action will probably fail.  Even though it seems that the course of action is the exact opposite of what you should be doing.

That’s what Jesus asks of us.  He tells us that the way to abundant life is not to seek it, that the way to finish first is to be last, that the lowly servant is the greatest  person in the room and the one who is obviously the greatest person in the room really isn’t.  He asks us to stake our lives on these things, which seems nuts.  But it’s what he did.

Of course, it got him crucified.  Who wants that?  But he was resurrected, and we all want that.  What we really want is resurrection without crucifixion, but Jesus said the two go hand-in-hand.  “But, trust me, it all works out.”
         Do we?  Do we trust him?

Now, admittedly, in trusting him it helps if you believe that Jesus really is the Son of God, and that he really did rise from the dead, that he really does love us and wants to show us the way to life in the eternal kingdom.  All these right beliefs matter, because they help establish his bona fides, they give us reason to commit to following his course of action, but it’s the following that gives meaning to the right beliefs, not the other way around.  Trusting Jesus means trusting enough to actually follow, and trusting him in this way is the only thing that matters.

"Rightness" and Righteousness

       I come from a faith tradition that emphasized the “rightness” of our beliefs.  In fact, you could say that the path to “righteousness”—the forgiveness of sins and restoration of our relationship with God—was through the “rightness” of our beliefs.  This is what was meant by being saved by faith.  You weren’t saved by doing anything, because that would be a work, and we are not saved by works, we are saved by faith, which had to be an internal thing, a matter of the mind and the heart.  If you believed the right things about Jesus, you were saved.  If you didn’t believe the right things about Jesus, you weren’t saved.  Even worse than not believing the right things about Jesus was believing the wrong things about Jesus.  So while we were taught to have sympathy toward those who didn’t believe in Jesus, we were taught to have contempt toward those “Christian” groups or individuals who believed the wrong things about Jesus.  Of course, it wasn’t like my teachers said, “OK, you need to be contemptuous toward Catholic priests because they teach salvation by works”, but when teaching us what was wrong with Catholicism they did so with a contemptuous attitude and with contemptuous remarks, we learned to be contemptuous.  (That contempt was even clearer later when I learned that they had caricatured Catholic teaching about salvation.)  And it wasn’t just Catholics who believed wrong things about Jesus.  Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Pentecostals—oh, my! The Pentecostals!—Lutherans, and even some in the Baptist family all had some questionable things in their theology of which I was warned.

When I got older and began to think for myself and learn how to interpret the Bible for myself, and as I talked with Christians and pastors of other denominations and read books by those outside of my narrow brand of Christianity, I learned that the Baptists of my particular clan weren’t always right.  Which meant that I wasn’t always right.  And I learned that that was all right.

And I also saw that holding a contemptuous attitude toward other Christians was never right.  If I hold and understand all of the right beliefs without love, then I am violating the very nature of what God came to achieve in humanity through Jesus.  Right beliefs without love does not lead to righteousness, and in our contempt we deceive ourselves.

I'm not dismissing the importance of right beliefs, not at all.  In fact, I think that right thinking about God is very important , which is why I keep studying, reading the Bible, listening to other Christians, searching, revising, and questioning.  If I think all my beliefs are right I won’t do any of those things.  To stop thinking, studying, questioning and revising is to solidify those areas in which I'm wrong but don’t  yet know it.  But even in those areas in which I'm right I have to recognize that I still see through a glass darkly, that my “rightness” is just a faint shadow compared to what I will see when I stand face-to-face.

Some may accuse me of becoming wishy-washy about my beliefs, preferring me to assert my certainty: Here I stand!  I can do no other!  But, no, those of you who have engaged me in theological conversation or sat under my teaching know that what I believe I tend to believe strongly.  It’s not wishy-washy.  But I have realized that if I’ve been wrong in the past about certain matters of belief I'm probably wrong about certain things right now, and will undoubtedly be wrong about certain things in the future.   I have learned that certainty is actually dangerous.  It’s antithetical to faith.  Doubt and uncertainty aren’t the opposites of faith, they are the essence of faith.  Faith is committing to a course of action even though one is uncertain.  I follow Jesus even though I don’t know everything I feel like I need to know, and even though the way is rough and steep and looks like it leads to deprivation and maybe even death.

I follow Jesus because I know that I don’t know, but I trust that he does.  I can’t trust the rightness of my beliefs, but I can trust Jesus.  Of him I can be certain.

A Plan, Not a Blueprint

      What is meant when Christians say that God has a plan?  I think there is a great deal of misconception among Christians on this concept, and it leads to some misconceptions about the nature of God, about the nature of evil, and the nature of humans.

It is hard to look at Christian belief and not see the influence of Augustine, that great 5th Century theologian.  Our theology either reflects his thinking or is in reaction to it, but Augustine cannot be ignored.  I read recently that Augustine was a theological genius, which means that when he was right he was spectacularly right, but when he was wrong he was spectacularly wrong, and I think that is accurate.  Heavily influenced by Christianity’s ascendance as the official religion of the Roman Empire, with the backing—and therefore power—of the Emperor whose will must be obeyed, Augustine viewed God as an all-controlling deity.  Nothing occurred that did not have God as its prime mover.  Augustine is largely responsible for the blueprint worldview that the church developed, which holds that everything that occurs happens according to a blueprint that God had developed, even before creation, for the history of the world.  Every event—good and bad—happens according to this blueprint.  The way it is put colloquially is that “everything happens for a reason,” which, in a way, is actually a denial that anything is actually bad.  If it happened, it’s a part of a good God’s good plan, so even if it seems bad, it’s not really.  It’s just that we can’t see how this seemingly bad thing fits in the blueprint; if we could, we would realize that it’s not bad at all.

Which leads to the inescapable yet absurd conclusion that there is really no such thing as evil.  No such thing as sin.  Such things would be opposed to God’s will, and in the blueprint view nothing occurs that is outside of God’s will, much less opposed to it.

The concept of sin and evil really is a problem in this scheme.  If you hold that God planned everything and controls everything, yet admit to the presence of sin and evil in the world then you cannot but admit that God planned for and controls sin and evil.  We sin because God made us this way, and then holds us responsible for it.  It is this very concept that has turned many away from the faith.

Augustine’s error, in my opinion, was in looking at empire and emperor as his model for understanding God and his Kingdom.  In looking at a human model of power and authority, he came away with a distorted view of God.  (In his defense, the power of the emperor at that time wasn’t seen as human but as a conduit of the very power of God.  That doesn’t wholly excuse it, but it does explain it.)  But the Christian understanding of the God’s power and authority doesn’t derive from a throne but from the cross.  The power of the throne is top-down, but the power of the cross is bottom-up.  It’s not power over others, but power under others; not coercive power but persuasive power.  It is the power of self-sacrificing love, which is the greatest power in the world, for while coercive power can change human behavior, only persuasive power can change the human heart.  Coercive power works against human free will (and actually works best when there is no such thing as human free will) while persuasive power both allows for and works with human free will.  Persuasive power allows for the time when good is done and God doesn’t have to do it.  That is the power of agape love.

The Bible does speak of God’s plan, but it’s not a blueprint view.  When the Bible speaks about God’s plan it is saying that God is involved in the world, he has a will and an intention for the world.  Just as we do.  We can work toward God’s will and intention for the world, or we can work against it.  But because God is God, because he is infinitely more intelligent than all of us added together, because he knows all the possibilities, in the end his will and intention for the world prevails.  Can anyone be more persuasive than God?  Of course not. And he has the patience  and perseverance to prevail.  In the end, love wins.  And when love wins, so do we.

Imago Dei Will Win

Sometimes it seems like the world is going to hell.

There’s a bunch of religious fanatics in Iran intent on making a nuclear weapon, and I can’t imagine anything worse than a religious fanatic with a nuke.  Unless it’s an atheist with a nuke, which is what it seems we have in North Korea.   Newtown, Connecticut still haunts us, as does Columbine, 9-11, and Oklahoma City.  And now Boston.  It’s easy to give up thinking that things will get better when they just seem to be getting worse.  

It’s also in times like these that we get pushed—or we push ourselves—toward extreme views.  One is that the total depravity of humanity has been irrefutable proven once more.  Or, at least, that there are some among us who are totally depraved.  It’s hard to argue against that, isn’t it?  Whoever did this has to be a despicable person, someone so warped and degraded as to be sub-human and unworthy of anything but death—and we’d even waive the injunction against cruel and unusual.

But then we have to be reminded that the line between good and evil doesn’t run between people but runs straight through the heart of each person.  Few people renounce all violence—we all have conditions in which we believe that killing another person is justified, whether in self-defense, in defense of our families, of the unborn, of country or creed, or whatever.  And though we have laws governing those conditions, we don’t all agree with those laws.  One person’s justifiable killing is another person’s unjustifiable killing.  Everyone who commits violence feels justified in doing so, even if only in the heat of the moment.  Don’t think for a moment that the Boston bomber(s) said to himself, “I'm an evil person, so I guess I need to go do something evil.”  No, if we catch the person  and if we hear his story, he will somehow justify it.  He will in his own mind have a cause or a reason that he felt justified an act of violence.  We won’t agree with him, and we will find his reasoning depraved, but unless you are Amish or Mennonites or Quakers or Benedictine monks who totally renounce all violence, most of us have a definition of justifiable violence that others would find depraved.

But if the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every human, that means that there is justifiable goodness in each person as well.  We are not totally depraved, just partially.  The image and likeness of God with which we were created manifests itself in people as well.  Comedian Patton Oswalt wrote about this in a Facebook posting that has become popular in the aftermath of the bombings.  He pointed out that when the bombs went off, many people understandably ran away, but there were many people whose first reaction was to run toward the explosions, toward the victims.  They did so without thinking, in the heat of the moment if you will, just reacting.  If people are capable of violence  in the heat of the moment, they are also capable of great goodness and self-sacrifice in the heat of the moment.  I should point out that we don't know what religion these people were, so we cant’ say it was a Christian reaction or Buddhist reaction or Jewish or whatever.  It was, in fact, a human reaction, but one born of the image and likeness of God, for who can doubt that God was immediately with the victims as well?

None of us are totally depraved, and while there are those among us who seem to dwell in the depravity side of the human heart, there are many who allow the God image-and-likeness to take up more space, crowding the depravity into a corner.  I’d like to think that number is growing, but on days like Monday it’s easy to think it’s not—until, once again, you look at the people running toward the explosions.

The Bible tells us that with the Incarnation of Christ, culminating in the cross, depravity lost.  There are some who say that we are in a war against evil, but that war is over, and evil lost.  Depravity still fights, but it loses ground every time we put our swords down and run toward the victims.

More or Less

      You have probably seen the series of commercials for a wireless carrier in which a man asks a group of kids different questions.  “Which is better, faster or slower?”  “Which is better, bigger or smaller?”  “Is saving money better than not saving money?”  And then the kids give funny responses.  One of the commercials has the man asking the kids, “Which is better, more or less?”  And a little girl goes on to explain, somewhat confusingly, that more is better than less.  (That’s not the best of the commercials, just the one that helps me make a point.  The best is the “Hold on, I’m watching this,” one.  I think he is just waiting to see if the kid is going to pass out or maybe vomit from waving his head and his hand around so much.  But anyway.)  More is always better than less, isn’t it?  That is obvious, and the logical extension is that having everything is better than having less than everything.  Of course, that sounds greedy so no one ever admits to that, but there is no end to “more” until you get to everything, so whether we are conscious of it or not, accepting that more is better than less means that we are each seeking everything.  We want it all.  We may be satisfied with less, but we want it all.

That’s embodied in the archetypal story of Adam and Eve.  God gave them everything, save one thing: they couldn’t eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  They could look at it, sit under it, even climb it if so inclined, but they weren’t supposed to eat its fruit.

So they had less.  Sure, that’s the half-empty way of saying it, but that’s how we tend to look at less.  They had less, so they wanted more.  They wanted everything, but found that the cost of having everything is losing the one thing that really matters—their community of three, God, Man, Woman, all in perfect peace.  And so they turned on each other.  “The Woman you gave to be with me, she gave it to me, and I ate.”

What good is it to have everything if you lose the one thing?  If you have everything but the one thing, you have nothing.  Ironic, isn’t it?

Thomas Aquinas said that every choice is also a renunciation.  If I marry one person, I cannot marry anyone else; if I live in one place, I cannot live anywhere else; if I choose a certain career, that excludes many other careers; if I have this, then I cannot have that. The list could go on indefinitely. To choose one thing is to renounce others. That's the nature of choice.

Every choice is also a renunciation, and that includes the choice to be a follower of Jesus.  To be a follower of Jesus means that you have to renounce lots of other things—not just sinful, destructive things, but a lot of good things as well.  And we don’t really like that.  We look to Jesus’ promise to give us abundant lives and we think that means that we’ll be saved from all the bad, destructive things in our lives so that we can enjoy all the good things in life as well.  What else could “abundant” mean?

Jesus gives us a different kind of answer.  He once told a parable about a pearl merchant who found the most precious pearl of all, and went and sold everything in order to purchase it.  He sold everything in order to have one thing.

Last time I looked, “one” is less than “everything.”

When is less better than more?  When it is the One Thing.  The One Thing is better than Everything.

And that is Jesus’ definition of abundance.  Not, as we define it, having a lot of things, but having the only thing that matters.  The One Thing.

What is that Pearl of Great Price, that One Thing?  Jesus said it is the Kingdom of God.  You can have everything, but if you aren’t in the community of God’s eternal kingdom, you don’t have anything.

And if you have the One Thing, you don't need Anything else.

Believing in the Resurrection

Do you believe in the resurrection?  That’s a good question to ask on Easter Sunday, isn’t it?  Understand, however, that I'm not asking if you believe in the historical truth and accuracy of Jesus coming back to life after being dead for three days, although that is certainly something important to believe in.  The meaning of the resurrection is embedded in its reality, so it’s important to believe that it really happened.  But that’s not what I'm asking.

I'm also not asking if you believe in the doctrine of the resurrection, although that too is important.  The actuality of the resurrection has theological implications, and it’s important to understand the theology of resurrection, and to believe and accept it.  But, again, that’s not what I'm asking when I ask if you believe in the resurrection.

What I'm asking is if you are willing to roll the dice and stake your life on the resurrection—not just Jesus’ resurrection, but your own, as a future historical reality.  Now, to be clear, I'm not asking if you believe that you are going to heaven when you die.  Everyone believes that.  There are few people who believe in a heaven—or some place of reward or goodness in the afterlife—who don't also believe that they are going to end up there.  According to polls, you don’t even have to be particularly religious to believe that.

No, it really gets down to this: Jesus asks his followers—demands, really—to risk it all in following his program, because his program demands things that, quite honestly, most people don’t think work in the real world.

For instance, Jesus commanded us to love our enemies, not kill them.  And the truth is, most people, including most Christians, don’t believe that non-violent resistance works, not really.  Martin Luther King tried it, and a bullet ended things pretty decisively.  Sure, the assassin went to prison, and the civil rights movement largely succeeded, but dead is dead.  And it’s not like non-violent resistance became de rigueur as a means of achieving social change.  One look at King lying on that Memphis balcony and most people decided that no matter how effective it may be, better that someone else lead the way.  It’s always better to be on the other end of the rifle.  You know, be the good guy with the gun.  You have to meet violence with violence, that’s just the way the world works.

But Jesus met violence with a cross.  His own, that is.

It’s a risky strategy, this put-down-your-sword thing that Jesus talked about.  Are you willing to risk it?  Not without the promise of resurrection.  And for many of us, not even with the promise of resurrection.   We really don’t believe.

The resurrection is God’s vindication.  Jesus came preaching faith, love, and forgiveness, and he was sent by God to do so.  He claimed that this is the way God’s world actually worked.  The world disagreed, and nailed him to a cross.  It mocked Jesus, and mocked God at the same time.  Faith is nice, if you have the luxury to afford it, but stark realism works better.  Love is great, but it’s too weak in the face of evil.  Evil must be killed, executed, exterminated, nuked.   Everyone knows that, and to say anything different is to either to put your head in the sand or to live in an ivory tower far removed from the realities of this brutal world.  Forgiveness is good, but not at the expense of justice.  Justice must be served!  This is what the world was saying when it crucified Jesus.  It still says it.

And how did God answer these charges?  With inaction.  He just watched as Jesus died.  Could have rescued him, but didn’t.  And God answered with silence.  For three days, nary a word.  And then, resurrection!  God’s assertion that love does triumph over hatred, peace over chaos, forgiveness over bitterness, hope over cynicism, fidelity over despair, virtue over sin, conscience over callousness, life over death, and good over evil, always.   Do you believe that?  Do you believe in the resurrection?

That’s what I'm asking.

Sweating Blood

Luke has  a detail in his description of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane that none of the other gospel writers include, and it has always intrigued me.  “In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.”  For the longest time I never knew what to make of that statement.  In high school I read a physicians description of Jesus’ crucifixion, and the writer said that in times of extreme stress capillaries in the forehead can rupture and the blood can mix with sweat, so I just assumed that it was a physical description of what happened.

Except that isn’t what Luke says.  He says that his sweat became like great drops of blood.  As a simile that never worked for me.   In what way does “great drops of blood” describe sweat?  Are drops of blood larger than drops of sweat?  Does one bleed more profusely than one sweats?  What exactly is Luke describing?

In The Passion of Christ, Mel Gibson played up the physical agony of Jesus, showing in graphic detail the lashing, the beating, the nailing, etc., but the gospel writers don’t really make much of Jesus’ physical suffering.  Mark just says, “And they crucified him.”  What the gospel writers emphasize is Jesus’ emotional anguish; he is betrayed, denied, abandoned, mocked, and reviled.  This is what Luke records: it’s in his anguish that he sweats blood.

And if you have ever loved someone so much that they are a part of you, you understand the simile.  Keeping the marriage vow, for instance, will make you sweat drops of blood.  There have been many, many happy times in my marriage to Pam, but after 31 1/2 years I can tell you that there have been times when both of us sweated drops of blood.  Truth is, it didn’t take that long.  Pam is a wonderful woman, but she is also a wonderfully complex woman, just as I am a complicated man.  We all are.  I don’t fully understand her, and she doesn’t fully understand me, and that was especially true those first few years when I was in seminary and working part-time jobs while she was working full-time in low-man-on-the-totem-pole jobs.  There were times when each of us wondered privately, “What in the world did I get myself into?”  And through the years there were times when we each thought that life would be so much easier if we weren’t tied to the alien being we call “the opposite sex.”  Keeping the marriage commitment requires sweating blood.  It’s not easy, and I don’t reckon it’s supposed to be.  But it’s worth it.  And it’s gotten easier as we have learned to accept each other and forgive each other.  We have grown closer together over those 31+ years so that we truly understand the “one flesh” concept.  And that means that there will be even more times when we will sweat blood, because when she hurts, I hurt, and when I hurt, she hurts.  There is a cost that comes with being faithful, but it is a cost gladly paid, even if in blood.

Being a father is a wonderful thing as well, but having raised two kids through the teenage years and into young adulthood, I understand what sweating blood means.  All of the joy that I have had with Angela and Austin didn’t come without the cost of some blood, sweat and tears.  Growing up is hard, and its not easy for a parent to watch a child struggle, knowing that there is really nothing you can do about it.  Some struggles they just have to figure out for themselves.  Commitment and faithfulness sometimes means not getting involved, not rescuing them.  And the watching can be tough.

The blood Jesus was sweating, albeit figuratively, is the price of being faithful in love.  “Father,  I don’t want to do this, but if you say I must, then I will.”  And he did.   Biblical love—faithful, consistent love, unconditional love, not the  dreamy kind of love of movies and novels, but love in the grit and grime of the real world—sometimes demands that we enter a loneliness of duty, of fidelity, of giving up life so that we can find it.  Unconditional love and absolute faithfulness will sometimes drive us to our knees in anguish, praying for steadfastness, yes, but also seeking some easier way to have the joy that we want but at a lesser cost. 

And if that is true of our relationships with spouses and children, it is no less true of our relationship with God.  It's popular to call people to a relationship with God through Christ with promises of abundant life here on earth and eternal life in heaven, with assurances that faith in Christ will help your marriage and undergird the raising of children--and these things are true, I've experienced them.  But loving the Lord will all your heart, strength, and soul comes at a cost as well, and we would do well to speak plainly about that.  In his relationship with God Jesus experienced love's joy, but he also experienced love's anguish.  He sweated blood because of his relationship with God, and we shouldn't expect anything different either.  He calls us to minister to a world that thinks upside down is rightside up, which means that we have to renounce upside down living.  But living rightside up in an upside down world is tough, especially when those who profit from the upside down world feel threatened.  But it's our calling.  It's what it takes if we are to follow a savior who was faithful unto death.