Nouns and Verbs

Of the Christian life, Brennan Manning once said that we are not travel agents handing out brochures to places we’ve never been. We should not be about pushing people toward a kind of life that we are not yet living.  We are living a life that should be — or at least should become — compelling in and of itself, enough that someone taking notice might ask what it is we are holding to (see 1 Peter 3:15).  Not that it should be in itself the reason we are living it, that others would take notice.  Nope, the Christian life is meant to become the most un-self-conscious kind of life available, natural, easy, organic and fluid.  Life as it was meant to be (as much as possible in the part of the story we are in, this side of the return of Christ) and our character being formed as it was meant to be.

Early on in my life with God I would become really distressed, even frantic, over the bits and pieces of myself I didn’t like and all that I wanted to become. I was intrigued and taken by the possibilities that lay before me, and was scared that I would be left behind.  I wanted to become passionate.  I wanted to become a healer and one who lived the truth out before others.  I wanted to be done with some stupid habits and immaturity.  I wanted to offer life.

Pretty soon, my wife started telling me, “Stop trying so hard to become, and just be.”  Somehow, that spoke pretty deeply to me, giving me permission to rest a bit and not try so hard.  To start enjoying living the kind of life I bumped into rather than trying so hard to offer it.  I could enjoy being enjoyed, right where I was, by a God so passionate for me.  I could enjoy having the resources of the Kingdom at hand — community and friendship, truth about life that finally made sense that brought fragmented pieces of my own story together, taking in sights that I never could see before but always felt like must be there somehow.  A heart that was beginning to beat again.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand life with God to be about both being and becoming. We really do get the best of both worlds: intimacy with a God who is fascinated and fascinating and the chance to grow into a kind of man or woman that we only dare imagine possible.  For me, that is a man of deep heart and faith, bold, full of a consistent joy toward life and love toward Jesus, competent and strong and life-giving.  The first counts us as worthy because of Jesus’ worth; the second grows us up into that worth, like a kid fitting into his daddy’s cowboy boots.  The first is the adventure of knowing and walking with God, of being His companion — a state, an identity, a noun; the second, the risky business of letting the Spirit temper and heal and develop us into the thing that is most alive, to form the image of God in us — an active, moving, following thing — a verb.  The first is the chance of an intimate adventure beyond our imaging and one we’ve been looking for all our days; the second is chance to grow into a character that can handle that kind of life and that depth of living.  The first is to experience the Kingdom; the second, to extend it through an allied partnership with the God we’ve come to befriend and trust intuitively.

It’s not always pretty, this kind of life.  Good grief, I think much of what I see in friends around me and in myself is a kind of cleaning out and exposing of the wounds and brokenness that prevent us from taking on that life.  But the result, and the journey along the way, is worthy it.  It’s worth it.  I am more today like the heart of God, with a greater capacity to both experience and express it.  My joy is in being that man, and my hope is in becoming even more so.

 

A Moment of Grace

Quoted from The Ragamuffing Gospel, p. 92-93:

A story is told about Riorello LaGuardia, who, when he was mayor of New York City during the worst days of the Great Depression and all of World War II, was called by adoring New Yorkers ‘the Little Flower’ because he was only five foot four and always wore a carnation in his lapel.  He was a colorful character who used to ride the New York City fire trucks, raid speakeasies with the police department, take entire orphanages to baseball games, and whenever the New York newspapers were on strike, he would go on the radio and read the Sunday funnies to the kids.

One bitterly cold night in January of 1935, the mayor turned up at a night court that served the poorest ward of the city.  LaGuardia dismissed the judge for the evening and took over the bench himself.  Within a few minutes, a tattered old woman was brought before him, charged with stealing a loaf of bread.  She told LaGuardia that her daughter’s husband had deserted her, her daughter was sick, and her two grandchildren were starving.  But the shopkeeper, from whom the bread was stolen, refused to drop the charges.  “It’s a bad neighborhood, your Honor,” the man told the mayor.  “She’s got to be punished to teach other people around here a lesson.”

LaGuardia sighed.  he turned to the woman and said, “I’ve got to punish you.  The law makes no exceptions — ten dollars or ten days in jail.”  But even as he pronounced sentence, the mayor was already reaching into his pocket.  He extracted a bill and tossed it into his famous sombrero saying: “Here is the ten dollar fine which I now remit; and furthermore I am going to fine everyone in this courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat.  Mr. Bailiff, collect the fines and give them to the defendant.”

So the following day the New  York City newspapers reported that $47.50 was turned over to a bewildered old lady who had stolen a loaf of bread to feed her starving grandchildren, fifty cents of that amount being contributed by the red-faced grocery store owner, while some seventy petty criminals, people with traffic violations, and New York City policemen, each of whom had just paid fifty cents for the privilege of doing so, gave the mayor a standing ovation.

 

The God Who Speaks

Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend of mine about the ways that God has been speaking to her lately. She said that she used to hear people talk about “God told me this” or “God told me that” and she always wondered, “How do you know that God said that?” or “How do you know that God said that?” She said she always believed in God — it was never that she doubting in His existence or even His benevolence toward her — but she never understood how God communicated with us, how He would connect with her in a personal way.

That’s been changing as of late. She’s gone through some tough times over the last few years, really tough. Her world has been turned upside down, and while she has some familial support around her, it’s not enough to sustain her heart through it all. She has had to turn to God in desperation to hold her up. (Literally.) In so doing, she has slowly grown to encounter a God that is not only benevolent, like a friendly old grandfather, but passionate, like a wild lover; a God that not only exists, in the same way that the religion exists or that democracy exists, but a God that is real and present, hot as fire, cold as ice, firm as rock and as close as the air in her lungs. She has met the Living God. And it is changing her in some pretty dramatic ways.

One of those ways is in her perception of Him. I don’t mean just what she thinks of Him, but how she perceives Him, with the sense organ (for that it is, among other things) of her heart. She is now able to hear Him speak to her intimately and personally, just to her — a word of encouragement, a nudge of direction, a whisper of instruction — about her and about her life. Once was through a fortune cookie, another through the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and another through the counsel of a friend.

It is not always that God is so direct; oftentimes He speaks indirectly, expecting that we engage not only with our eyes and ears but with our will, that we trust what we’ve heard before and remember it and walk in it, that we obey what we read in Scripture.  We must remember that the Spirit of Christ in us was given to us, among other reasons, to teach us, to comfort us, to speak to us.

I had that experience last night. I had a dream that I was driving in a car and needing to hear from God about something. I can’t think of what it was, but it seemed only important that I heard from Him. I looked up, and I saw written on a license plate in front of me “John 14:13-15.” I had no idea what that Scripture said, but I took it as from God, and that was all I needed.

Upon waking, I remembered the dream very clearly, which is not typical I might add. Another clue that this might be more than just about the bowl of Grape Nuts I had before I hit the hay last night. I picked up my Bible and headed for the Scripture. Yup. God coming through for me. It was exactly what I needed to remember: “Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it. If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.”

It can be hard to hear God in our culture. We distract and divert ourselves to keep from sitting still, afraid that if we were to be quiet for a moment we’d hear nothing at all, and that scares us to death. That’s also a faithless act. We don’t expect God to be there at all. For my friend (and for me, sometime earlier in my journey), it took a dark turn in life to bring her to need God at all. But once she recognized that need and stopped to listen — in hope beyond hope — to see if God would be there, everything changed… forever. Life began, “the most intimate” part of life (Ephesians 4:30) came in to dwell.

 

The Authority of a Child

I was driving on a windy road in a small residential area yesterday evening. Glancing in my rear view mirror, I noticed a line of cars. When the road straightened enough to get a god look, I counted maybe 10 or 12 trailing behind me. It’s a pretty road, with lots of old oaks and foliage overhanging the street and generous yards serving as buffers between the slow but constant traffic and the homes. The houses are a bit older, constructed I would guess back in the 40′s and 50′s.

Just a few blocks from my turn, two kids caught my eye. I could see them a block away. They came running from a house directly toward the road. They couldn’t have been older than 6 or 7. As I came near, I slowed to a near stop, not sure what they were going to do. The girl and boy came to the edge of the road, and the boy looked both ways with a kind of fearful panic on his face, as if all the warnings of his parents about the dangers of crossing the street came back to him. Not the girl. She stepped on the edge of the road, facing directly ahead — which was perpendicular to the flow of traffic — stood tall, held her chin high, and stretched both of her arms out straight and aimed her palms toward the line of cars. One hand faced me, the other the car coming the opposite direction. She could have been a traffic cop. She stood still for several seconds. She then looked at both lines of cars, first to her left, then to her right, then to her left, and back again. She stood perfectly still, with an air of dignified authority, until she was sure all the cars had stopped and it was safe to cross. Then, with just as much gusto as she had when she stepped up to the street, she and the boy took off running across and made it safely to the other side.

My general reaction to seeing young kids playing near the road like that without an adult in sight would have been one of disgust. “Where are the parents?” I would have scorned. Not this time. I was struck by the commanding presence of the little girl, the surety of her actions, the certitude and confidence in her demeanor. Her authority.

Here we are, 10 or 12 cars strong, moving at 25 or 30 miles an hour, in both directions on the street. That’s 20 tons or so, times two. And here is this little girl, all of 70 pounds, who stands at the edge of the street with her hands up and knows that she will stop the traffic. It is apparent that she has done this before, and it has worked. She has not the power or the will to stop these vehicles on her own, of course. Not at all. Yet she does it. How? In other words, from where is her authority?

You could say that it is in the kindness of the drivers. After all, no one would have had to have stopped. She wouldn’t have been hit from where she was standing, though it would have been too close for comfort. Maybe the young girl appealed to the drivers’ protective instincts. I wondered later if the traffic would have stopped if that had been a teenager or even a grown man or woman. Certainly it would have had it been a uniformed officer. But this is a little girl!

But ultimately, the authority the girl invoked was that of the law. At bottom, I knew I had to stop for the fearless child because I did not want to run the risk of hitting her or the boy with her. But it was not only because of the law. It was also because of her command of it. Though I doubt she understood traffic laws, the girl knew that if she approached the busy street close enough and put her palms up toward the cars, they would stop.

I tell that story because it is so instructive for our place of authority in the Kingdom. When we ask “in the name of Jesus” (John 16:23), we receive not because God is obligated or because we in ourselves have the power to get things done, but because we operate under the covering and in the authority of the Lord of lords. When we rebuke demons “in His name” (Luke 10:17), they submit not because they fear us, but because they are defeated by the work of the Cross on our behalf. We invoke an authority that we may not fully understand — we are, after all, children in our Father’s house — but it is an authority just the same, not too much different from the little girl stopping 40 tons of steel and rubber and glass by the gesture of her hands. We do not have to understand it all; we simply trust the One in whose name we operate.

Driving by once the kids had crossed the street, I glanced over to see what they were after on the other side. Why did they cross the road? A playground. Seriously. That was what it was all about for them. They had their eye on the prize. We are not to rejoice in the authority we have in Christ, but rather that, like the children, we are on a journey, headed somewhere, and walk in the spirit of “power, love, and sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7) that God has given us so that we can get there.

Would that we would become like these little children!

Just because we may not fully understand our role in the Kingdom does not give us an excuse to not seek understanding or to disbelieve. Walking in Christ’s authority is crucial, but so is a sincere belief and mindful approach to our walk with God. I love Annie Dillard’s take on this. In Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, she writes,

Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.

We in Christ live in a very real and very present Kingdom that requires at the same time a childlike trust in our Father’s goodness toward us and the way He said things work as well as a full-grown (or growing), mature (or maturing), wisdom-seeking devotion to God.

 

After the Fray

In How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill paints a picture of ancient Irish culture by discussing Tain Bo Cuailnge, an Irish prose epic. In the story, the hero-warriors Cuchulainn (pronounced koo-hool-n) and Ferdia are foster brothers who love and fight for one another. They trained together under the same master and fight beside one another through epic battles in the dense forests “in foreign lands after the fray.” Cuchulainn refers to their friendship as “fast friends, forest-companions… pupils, two together we’d set forth to comb the forest” of their enemies.

Concerning the hero’s virtue, Cahill writes, “What we can rely on are the comeliness and iron virtue of the short-lived hero: his loyalty to cause and comrades, his bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, the gargantuan generosity with which he scatters his possessions and his person and with which he spills his blood.”

Patricius, who later became known as Saint Patrick (the same Patrick whose life is commemorated each year on the celebrated day named in his honor), was able to evangelize an entire country by addressing these qualities found in their ancient literature. It is Jesus, he explained, who was the one who most epitomizes these virtues, and it was, in fact, the eternity set within their hearts that spurred on such literature, an eternity these men and women knew must by characterized, if by anything at all, by men as alive as Cuchulainn. In their literary heroes their hunger for Christ was given a voice. When Patrick came to bring them the “Godspell,” or Gospel, they listened only because Patrick himself, dead to himself and baptized in the fire of the Spirit of God, was the most loyal, courageous, and generous man they had ever met.

What Cahill writes of Ireland’s ancient fictional heroes is an apt pronouncement on the life of any Christian, that is, the life of Christ lived fully within us. When we allow Him to live through us, imagine what faith (loyalty), hope (courage), and love (generosity) is set loose on the world. We would have a second wave of revival not unlike in style to that of those wild and willing Celts.

The way to save our own civilization, as Cahill says, is not to think about saving our civilization at all. It is to become saints. Then shall we each be saved, not by government, nor technology, nor new (and age-old) ideologies, but by the Kingdom coming through us as we pursue and battle with fierce intention, a Kingdom not of this world, unshakable, peopled by “citizens of heaven” who run fast after the Living God “in foreign lands after the fray.”

(see Matthew 11:12; Philippians 3:20; Matthew 5:14-16; Hebrews 12:28-29; Luke 17:20-21; Mark 1:15; Acts 14; Romans 14:17-18; Hebrews 12:10; Ephesians 4:22-24; 2 Corinthians 7:1)

 

The Soul Dissed-Satisfied

Every day I am ready to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved — whatever may come my way.
-St. Patrick

I wonder about our willingness to endure “whatever may come our way” for the sake of something greater than ourselves. I wonder about how we in the “West” handle suffering and pain and what we do with it. (I speak of “West” here not as a geographical description but as an ideological designation.) The church in the West has adapted itself to the overriding culture of the day, one that pours every ounce of energy into avoiding pain — through diversion, entertainment, shallow relationships, easy investments, psychobabble, and the religion of popular talk show hosts.

Suffering is the pain caused by the division between desire and satisfaction, and we try our best to bring satisfaction up to the level of our desires.

It never works, or not permanently at least. At some point it fails. Always. Every time. What we do with that failure marks our movement toward either an authentic growth in godliness and transformation or a slinking away from it, a creeping toward (as the only alternative) death.

The Buddhists are familiar with the issue of suffering. The entire religion is built, in fact, upon the evasion of suffering through the eightfold path. The ultimate goal of Nirvana is really a state of complete detachment and desirelessness. It is the absolute absolution of desire. They try to bring desire down to the level of their satisfaction. This also does not work. Desire cannot be completely killed, nor can it be permanently locked away.

What Christ has done is to bridge the gap between our desire and satisfaction. He transforms even our understanding of suffering — remember, this comes from the gap between desire and satisfaction — by daring us not to desire less, but to desire more. And then he dares us to believe that we can actually have what we really want (that is faith). Of course, our desire has to be increased dramatically, maybe infinitely, and He usually does not give us satisfaction of our small desires. We are made for more than those. New cars, fancy clothes, even our version of peace and prosperity — these things would trick us into thinking they are what we are really after. No, He takes us into deeper places of hope, requiring greater levels of faith.

All of this I say this today because I have recently experienced a very personal and painful betrayal, one that has brought me poignantly face-to-face with suffering, and I wonder again its purpose. What is God up to in it? Why does He choose to use it more, sometimes, than any other thing, to bring His redemption and restoration? “To reconcile both of them [Jews and Gentiles] to God through the cross,” as Paul put it in Ephesians 2:16, the cross being the breaking and shattering point of all human suffering, the singularity at which the distance between desire and satisfaction was at the greatest and was born under by one man, Jesus. Whatever else is said of the suffering our Lover-God experienced there, surely by way of it he “put to death” hostility among men and between men and God. This is peace, and this is what we are to desire. Since Christ is the only fulfillment of that desire, we cannot allow it to be filled by any lesser thing if we want it to draw us to the Lord. As Kenneth Boa said, “We must grow in the realization that no earth-bound felicity can fully satisfy the deepest God-given longings of our hearts.”

At the point in Patrick’s life when he uttered these words quoted above, he had long been used to the pains and pangs of human life. He had been naked and hungry as a young man kidnapped by Irish and forced into slavery. He had known what it was to be alone and frightened, broken of body and of heart. But in the midst of those looming shadows, he encountered something greater than his own pain, a secret he held to and sought after, a secret that sustained him throughout his ordeal then and his calling when he later returned to Ireland as a bishop, a secret that kept the fire in his belly burning when all others were snuffed out on the damp and windy hills of that pagan isle. It was a secret that allowed him to embrace suffering, not as an end in itself as a Stoic would, but as a means to something else.

His teacher Paul knew the same secret. Listen in closely to what he says in Philippians 3: “I want to know Christ and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings…” Good Lord. Really? Does he not know what it was that Christ suffered at that still point on the cross, the dividing historical event between the old and the new, between death and life? Why would he want to suffer with Christ? Because through it, he could “attain to the resurrection from the dead.” Because life was in the balance. And because of Christ, in the suffering there is life, because there is fellowship with Life Himself.

What hangs in the balance with the betrayal I am faced with is everything. What I do with it will determine whether or not my own desire — and possibly the desire of those who betrayed me and my friends — will deepen, and so approach more fully Christ’s own desire, or whether or not I will try to starve it. The first means that I will suffer, deeply, but it also means I will know Christ all the more. The latter is the easier, broader way, the more common route and the one that I could only enter into through some sort of denial or numbing. It is the way of death.

As the greatest contemporary theologian (in my opinion) Rich Mullins once said, “So go out and live real good and I promise you’ll get beat up real bad. But, in a little while after you’re dead, you’ll be rotted away anyway. It’s not gonna matter if you have a few scars. It will matter if you didn’t live. And when you wash up on that other shore, even though you’ve been disfigured beyond and recognition, the angels are gonna see you there and they’ll go, ‘What is *that*? We’re not even sure if it’s human.’ But Jesus will say, ‘No, that’s human. I know that one.’”

Jesus will touch me or speak my name and I will rise. He will look me in the face and ask if in these moments — when all around is at a breathless standstill awaiting my response, while in the midst of the bitter pain of betrayal not unlike in kind but less in degree to that of Jesus — whether or not we knew each other. Because today is the day of salvation. It is here, in the dirt and grime of suffering, that we can experience the staggeringly intimate love of our God. In the words of George Herbert, “Here, in the dust and dirt, O here the lilies of His love appear.”

 

Peace in the Storm

Yesterday my 10 year-old nephew and I took a walk during a storm. The rain had slacked and the sun was trying its hardest to peer through the dark and ominous clouds overhead. It has been a stormy season, with tornadoes and severe thunderstorms pounding the midwest relentlessly.

What made our walk really good was the fact that my nephew doesn’t like storms. They terrify him, actually. But, his dog hadn’t been out of the apartment in quite awhile and needed a break. So we took him, together. In our talk, I asked my nephew what it was that scared him about the storms. He couldn’t answer, except to say that they can produce tornadoes and tornadoes can cause damage and death. But I kept probing, asking why he was scared of tornadoes. Had they ever hurt him or even anyone he knew? The answer was no. Of course talking him through how low a chance statistically he had of being in a tornado didn’t help. Reason at this point had been abandoned.

But what did help was to talk about Perfect Love and the embrace of the Lord Jesus and the reality that we are in His hands. How this works out for those who do get hurt during storms — like those that ripped through the area a month ago and destroyed the homes of four people I work with — I cannot explain. I can say that I have friends who had held their mattresses over their heads in the hallways of their homes while all around them winds ripped their houses apart. And they came through unharmed.

What I could say to my nephew was that right at this very moment Jesus was holding us. We were covered under the protection of His mighty wing (Psalm 91). Even as I said that I realized that I wasn’t making it up. It was real. And I knew that it would not be believable for a 10 year-old (who still has eyes to see through lies because he hasn’t learned yet to lie to himself) if I didn’t believe it myself. He asked what that meant, and so I described what His wing might look like, might be like.

He started getting it. And then we stepped over a puddle in the parking lot. A car must have leaked some motor oil, because the film rested on the water. As soon as we stepped over, the sun won the wrestling match and appeared triumphant from behind a cloud. Our eyes on the puddle, suddenly a rainbow of colors washed across the surface of the water, more color than I’ve seen in any rainbow in the sky. I thought it was pretty, if not a little irresponsible environmentally, but it was my nephew who got it. It wasn’t lost on him. He said, “Look. God just promised me that he wouldn’t flood the earth again, that he wouldn’t give me more than I could handle.”

I was blown away. That’s only something the Spirit of Christ could bring to his deep heart.

Maybe the coolest part of the story is that my nephew’s name is Jonah. Hebrew for “dove,” a symbol of God’s peace and provision for His own.