Saying Yes to the Risen Christ

Resurrection readings on this Resurrection Day.

An invitation

to live in the confidence that every act of compassion matters - not just now, but forever,

to celebrate the infinite possibilities beckoning  past "the reigning plausability structure,"

to say "yes" to the present risenness of Christ,

to stand in flux and change as bright "immortal diamond." 

Christ is Risen!

He is risen indeed!

Who Are You Looking For? Anna Kocher, 2006

from Resurrection, Rob Bell, 2010

resurrection announces that God has not given up on the world

because this world matters
this world that we call home
dirt and blood and sweat and skin and light and water
this world that God is redeeming and restoring and renewing . . .

resurrection says that what we do with our lives matters
in this body
the one that we inhabit right now
every act of compassion matters
every work of art that celebrates the good and the true matters
every fair and honest act of business and trade
every kind word
they all belong and they will all go on in God’s good world
nothing will be forgotten
nothing will be wasted
it all has it’s place

everybody believes something
everybody believes somebody
Jesus invites us to trust resurrection
that every glimmer of good
every hint of hope
every impulse that elevates the soul
is a sign, a taste, a glimpse
of how things actually are
and how things will ultimately be
resurrection affirms this life and the next
as a seamless reality
embraced
graced
and saved by God

there is an unexpected mysterious presence
who meets each of us in our lowest moments
when we have no strength when we have nothing left
and we can’t go on we hear the voice that speaks those
words

destroy this temple and I’ll rebuild it

do you believe this?
that’s the question Jesus asked then
and that’s the question he asks now

Jesus’ friends arrive at his tomb and they’re told
he isn’t here

he isn’t here
there is nothing to fear
and nothing can ever be the same again
we are living in a world in the midst of rescue
with endless unexpected possibilities

they will take my life and I will die Jesus says
but that will not be the end
and when you find yourself assuming that it’s over
when it’s lost, gone, broken and it could never be
put back together again,
when it’s been destroyed and you swear that it could never
be rebuilt

hold on a minute
because in that moment
things will in fact have just begun  

Resurrection, Manuel Panselenos, Greece, ca 1300

from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Lesslie Newbigin, 1989

It is obvious that the story of the empty tomb cannot be fitted into our contemporary worldview, or indeed into any worldview except one of which it is the starting point.  That is, indeed, the whole point.  What happened on that day is, according to the Christian tradition, only to be understood by analogy with what happened on the day the cosmos came into being.  It is a boundary event, at the point where (as cosmologists tell us) the laws of physics ceased to apply.  It is the beginning of a new creation – as mysterious to human reason as the creation itself.

But, and this is the whole point, accepted in faith it becomes the starting point for a wholly new way of understanding our human experience, a way which – in the long run – makes more sense of human experience as a whole than does the reigning plausibility structure.  That the crucified Jesus was raised from death to be the firstfruit of creation is – in the proper sense – dogma.  It is something given, offered for acceptance in faith, providing the starting point for a new way of understanding which, instead of being finally defined by the impassable boundary of death (our personal deaths and the final death of the cosmos), moves from death outward to an open world of infinite possibilities beckoning us into ever fresh regions of joy.

Doubting Thomas, Emmanual Nsama, Zambia, 1970

from Abba's Child, Brendan Manning, 2002

For me, the most radical demand of Christian faith lies in summoning the courage to say YES to the present risenness of Jesus Christ.  . . . I have lived long enough to appreciate that Christianity is lived more in the valley than on the mountaintop, that faith is never doubt-free, and that although God has revealed himself in creation and in history, the surest way to know God is, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, as tamquam ignotum, utterly unknowable.No thought can contain him; no word can express him. He is beyond anything we can intellectualize or imagine.

My YES to the fullness of divinity embodied in the present risenness of Jesus is scary because it is so personal. In desolation and abandonment . . ., in loneliness and fear, in the awareness of the resident pharisee, and in the antics of the imposter, YES is a bold word not to be taken lightly or spoken frivolously.

This YES is an act of faith, a decisive, wholehearted response of my whole being to the risen Jesus present beside me, before me, around me, and within me; a cry of confidence that my faith in Jesus provides security not only in the face of death but in the face of a worse threat posed by my own malice; a word that must be said not just once but repeated over and over again in the ever-changing landscape of life.

Resurrection, unknown artists, Istanbul, ca 1315

from That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection, Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1888

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, nature’s bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!

. . .  Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

Jesus: the Resurrected One, Jason Fowler, 2011

Earlier posts on the resurrection:

Where is Newness Needed, March 2013

Risen Indeed!, April 2012

Resurrection,, April 2011 

The Measure of Our Minds

Last week I reviewed Cross Examined, Bob Seidensticker’s novel of ideas purporting to challenge popular intellectual arguments for Christianity.

In general, I like “novels of ideas,” and am all for examination of what we believe, and why.

Codex Schoyen 2650 Matthew's gospel

Unfortunately, as I wrote last week, I found the plot of Cross Examined thin, and the intellectual discussion even thinner. So much so, I find myself returning to some of the arguments, amazed at the superficial treatment presented as unassailable wisdom.

One parlor trick in particular both amused and annoyed me.

Reclusive atheist Jim proposes an experiment to see if the oral tradition of the gospels can be considered reliable.

He asserts that the time between Christ’s crucifixion and the writing of the first gospel is twenty or thirty years, and suggests that he’ll tell his sometime adversary, sometime protégé Paul a story, and see how well it’s remembered a few minutes later.

The story he tells is a rough summary of the tale of Circe from the Odyssey. He offers a page or so of detail, discusses some other issues, then asks Paul to retell the story as precisely as he can.

Ah, scientific reason at its finest. Paul omits details, confuses parts of the story, and voila, as we knew, oral tradition is discredited. What a surprise.

These are fictional characters, so any semblance of science is fictional, at best.

But how many contemporary critics discredit oral tradition because they measure the possibility against their own modern minds, with comparisons as flimsy as Paul’s retelling of the Circe story?

I didn’t grow up in an oral culture, yet my own experience of memorization points to the absurdity of Seidensticker’s supposed experiment.

The mind is a muscle, able to do what it’s trained to do, and our current forms of education barely scratch the surface of the mind’s retentive power. Paul, the lab rat of the imagined experiment, was no scholar, had no real interest in the story, heard it roughly summarized exactly once.

Even as a kid, I could have pointed out the flaws in logic.

When I was nine or ten, I found myself drawn to poetry, and began memorizing poems for the sheer joy of the language.

I started small: 

“I’m nobody.
Who are you?
Are you nobody too?” 

Soon, though, I had moved on to Longfellow: "The Wreck of the Hesperus", "The Village Blacksmith", "Paul Revere’s Ride". I started on "Hiawatha," then shifted to Poe. "The Raven" was my last thousand word poem.

My method was simple: tape the next stanza to the mirror in my bedroom and read it over while brushing my hair, or review it on my way down the hall to brush my teeth before bed.

Scripture caught my attention as well: in the few years of my memorization craze, I stashed away numerous psalms, chunks of James, my favorite chapters of John.

Then I started middle school, took up sports, joined some clubs, and my memorization abilities faded.

Now, decades later, I find it hard to keep even a few verses in my head.

What I know about memorization:

It’s easier to commit long things to memory after hearing them repeated.
It’s easier to memorize things you’ve chosen yourself, or things you care about.
The more one memorizes, the easier it gets.

How much can the human mind hold?

Here’s a recent post I stumbled on:   

In honor of the 11th day of the Hebrew month of Nissan, the anniversary of the birth of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, of righteous memory, Chabad-Lubavitch students across the globe studied an entire tractate of the Talmud and memorized its text.
The tractate, Bava Basra, which is currently being taught in Chabadyeshivas, consists of 352 pages.

Yehoshua Heshel Mishulovin, a student in Montreal, Canada, and the son of Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries in Los Angeles, Calif., took on the additional challenge of memorizing the tractate's super-commentaries of Rashi and Tosafot.

So - 352 pages for an average student. Quite a bit more for one who excelled.

Nooma 008: Dust

Rob Bell has an interesting short video that talks about the rabbinic practice of memorization. As he points out, at the time of Christ, all Jewish boys from six to ten were expected to attend Bet Sefer (literally “house of the book”), where they would learn the Torah. As in  - memorize the Torah. That’s the first five books of Hebrew Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.  79,847 Hebrew words (The words were counted, and numnber recorded, each time the text was copied, as one method of maintaining accuracy).

From ten to early adolescence, boys who showed promise would attend Bet Talmud (“house of learning”) where they would attempt to memorize the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures all the way to Malachi.

I remember as a teen reading Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and The Promise, and the sense of awe I felt when I realized that, even in the twentieth century, Hasidic boys studying to become rabbis were expected to memorize not only the entirety of what I knew as the Old Testament, but also the rabbinic discussion about large portions of text.

The men who followed Jesus, while none were training to become rabbis, had been trained in memorization in ways we can’t begin to understand, and were part of a faith tradition that took words seriously.

As observant Jews, they would have said the Shema twice a day, morning and evening, from the time they were small. They would have been taught to remember words, to teach them to their children, to bind them to themselves. To write them on their homes.

According to the “form criticism” of the late 19th and early 20th century, the oral traditions of the early Christian church were not historically reliable, for the following reasons (repeated in part by Seidensticker in his novel):

1. The early Christian movement was entirely illiterate and writing played no “regulative role” in the transmission of oral material about Jesus.
2. Oral traditions aren’t capable of passing on extended narratives with any level of exactitude.
3. Orally dominated communities have little interest in historical precision.
4. Communities, not individuals, pass on oral traditions, without reference to individual eyewitnesses who could serve as safeguards of the accuracy.

I'll be honest: I find form criticism either deliberately deceptive or stunningly, frighteningly clueless. It's hard to read far in either New or Old Testament without encountering a fierce commitment to the value of words, deep loyalty to historical event, sharp warnings against falsifying the record.

Whatever the motivation for learning Torah and Talmud, the first Christians' motivation for remembering the stories of Jesus would have been greater: they’d seen something so life changing, so earth shattering, so completely new, they were willing to leave the comfort and safety of their homes, the familiar networks, the known world, to share the story they carried with them.

For every scholar who discounts the accuracy of those follower's stories, or the reliability of the form in which they were passed on, there are others who consider the New Testament writings as the most reliably transmitted of ancient texts.

Sir William Ramsey, Scottish archaeologist who began with a strong anti-Bible bias, spent fifteen years trying to discount the gospel of Luke, and concluded: "Luke is a historian of the first rank . . . This author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians."

Much more recently, St. Andrew's scholar Richard Bauckman noted,

"Most history rests mostly on testimony. In other words, it entails believing what witnesses say. We can assess whether we think witnesses are trustworthy, and we may be able to check parts of what they say by other evidence. But in the end we have to trust them. . .

Now in the case of the Gospels, I think we have exactly the kind of testimony historians in the ancient world valued: the eyewitness testimony of inolved participants who could speak of the meaning of events they had experienced from the inside." 

Clark Pinnock, McMaster University, considering the reliability of historic sources, concluded:

"There exists no document from the ancient world, witnessed by so excellent a set of textual and historical teestimonies ... Skepticism regarding the historical credentials of Christianity is based upon an irrational bias." (Set Forth Your Case, 58).

Yes, we all have biases. Some irrational. Some more considered.

We have assumptions and experiences of our own that shape our understanding of the past, our assessment of the present, our hopes for the future. Some scholars choose to doubt the holocaust. Some think slavery was a good thing for the slaves. We'll be debating global warming until every polar bear is gone and the arctic circle is an open ocean.

We have our own grids to test what's true - and our own ideas about how to decide what's possible.

As for me, I find the gospel narratives compelling.

I find the evidence for their veracity convincing.

I know no story of pre-modern time that has come to us with more force, or more authenticating detail.

Belief is still a matter of faith, a decision about whose testimony to trust.
.

But so is disbelief a matter of faith: faith in the smallness of our minds, the weakness of our memories, the narrowness of possibility.

I know which faith I choose.

Associates for Biblical Research: Textual Evidence

"Here is the New There"

     Some say the world will end in fire,  

     Some say in ice.         

     From what I’ve tasted of desire        

     I hold with those who favor fire.       

     But if it had to perish twice,          

     I think I know enough of hate           

     To know that for destruction ice       

     Is also great    

     And would suffice.

     (Fire and Ice, Robert Frost, 1920)

When will the world end? HOW will it end? WILL it end?

We’ve lived through the latest doomsday prophecy, with its attendant jokes. Next scheduled date: October 21, with the Mayan doomsday on its heels, in December, 2012.

In the church tradition of my childhood, the end of the world was a common Sunday dinner topic. First the rapture, when the saints are taken and sinners left. Then the tribulation. Then the millennium – a thousand years of Christ’s rule on earth. Then the final battle. Then the judgment. Then, finally, heaven.

I confess, I found the heated arguments about Christ’s second coming so un-Christlike I’ve done my best to steer clear of eschatological argument ever since. Define preterism? Pro/con texts for amillenialism? Defend Theonomy?  For me, fingernails on a chalkboard create the same effect.

The second chapter of Rob Bell’s Love Wins, "Here is the New There", approaches eschatology in a very different way. The chapter is by far the longest in the book, and in many ways the heart of the book.

illustration from Love Wins

Bell starts by responding to the ways heaven is portrayed: somewhere “over there,” distant from and unlike this current life. Ethereal, purely spiritual: “harps and clouds and streets of gold, everybody dressed in white robes.”

The assumption, of course, is that in the end those who trust in Christ will be rescued to sit somewhere else with our robes and harps while this world, this broken home of ours, is destroyed, gone forever.

Bell asks: “Are there other ways to think about heaven, other than as that perfect floating shiny city hanging suspended ther in the air above that ominous red and black realm with all that smoke and steam and hissing fire? I say yes, there are.”

From there Bell goes on to talk about eternal life, life in the age to come, as tied in important ways to life in this age, and suggests that life in the age to come starts now, as the kingdom of heaven presses in on earth, as we learn to live, now, as the people who will live forever in the presence of God.

“How we think about heaven, then, directly affects how we understand what we do with our days and energies now, in this age. Jesus teaches us how to live now in such a way that what we create, who we give our efforts to, and how we spend our time will all endure in the new world."

Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking suffereing seriously now. Not because we’ve bought into the myth that we can create a utopia given enough time, technology, and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has not abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere.”

Pages later, Bell says

“Eternal life doesn’t start when we die;

It starts now.

It’s not about a life that begins at death;

It’s about experiencing the kind of life now that can endure and survive death.”

There’s nothing new in what Bell says here. N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, and others have written at length about how we misunderstand heaven and eternal life, and about the dangerous dualism the church has created between the eternal/spiritual realm of the future and the temporal/material world of now. I haven’t read Wright’s Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, The Resurrection and the Mission of the Church, recommended in Bell’s endnotes, but a Christianity Today excerpt published in 2008 gives an idea of the direction of his argument:

“The mission of the church is nothing more or less than the outworking, in the power of the Spirit, of Jesus' bodily resurrection. It is the anticipation of the time when God will fill the earth with his glory, transform the old heavens and earth into the new, and raise his children from the dead to populate and rule over the redeemed world he has made.

"If that is so, mission must urgently recover from its long-term schizophrenia. The split between saving souls and doing good in the world is not a product of the Bible or the gospel, but of the cultural captivity of both. The world of space, time, and matter is where real people live, where real communities happen, where difficult decisions are made, where schools and hospitals bear witness to the "now, already" of the gospel while police and prisons bear witness to the "not yet.”

This discussion is an important one. In a long post about Love Wins, Byron Borger, of Hearts and Minds Books, offers context, history and additional reading. Scot McKnight, author of The Blue Parakeet and religious studies professor at North Park University, offers his own thoughtful critique of Bell’s chapter in light of Wright’s work, and in light of a broad view of New Testament scholarship.

  

As Bell says

“Our eschatology shapes our ethics.

Eschatology is about last things.

Ethics are about how you live.”

In fact, our eschatology shapes everything. How we worship, how we pray, how we budget our money, share our faith. What we plant in our yards, what we serve at our tables.

International Justice Mission

If we believe this world is doomed, and we’re headed elsewhere, we watch with  detachment the suffering around us, eager to be on our way, happy to announce doomsday and watch our neighbors squirm.

If we believe this world is loved by God, and that we are part of the ongoing story of redemption, then our response will be different.

As we hear news of tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and droughts, I’ve been thinking of Romans 8:

For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.

Strange as it may sound to contemporary Christians, our physical selves and the physical world are tied in some way to the unfolding of God’s plan and the working of his spirit. Old Testament prophecies spell this out. Here’s just one of many passages, this one from Isaiah 32:

The fortress will be abandoned,

   the noisy city deserted;

citadel and watchtower will become a wasteland forever . . .

till the Spirit is poured on us from on high,

   and the desert becomes a fertile field,

   and the fertile field seems like a forest.

The Lord’s justice will dwell in the desert,

   his righteousness live in the fertile field.

The fruit of that righteousness will be peace;

   its effect will be quietness and confidence forever.

Blight and oppression are brought to an end as the Holy Spirit moves in God’s people. As Jesus prayed: “your kingdom come, on earth as in heaven.”

Bell may overstate his point in places, but it’s an important point, worth hearing:

“Jesus invites us,

in this life,

in this broken, beautiful world,

to experience the life of heaven now.

He insisted over and over that God’s peace, joy and love are currently available to us, exactly as we are.”

Even that last line gives me pause: “exactly as we are?” And yet, when I stop to think, yes, exactly as we are. Jesus demonstrated this again and again: healing for those who had never expressed faith, forgiveness for those still reeling in their sin, love for those who lived beyond the reach of love.

Our presentation of the gospel, too often, is backwards: “Repent, believe, accept, and sometime, way off in the future, you’ll get a good taste of what Jesus has to offer.”

Kenya Clean Water Project, Water Missions International

What if we lived the kingdom, the eternal life we talk about, in the way that Jesus showed us? What if the love, joy, peace, kindness, friendship, justice, mercy, wisdom, healing, was so visible and available that our friends, neighbors, children, could enjoy the fruit of our kingdom life before we even put it into words? What if our care for creation and our stewardship of resources created islands of grace and plenty that nourished not just our own, but those around us in need?

Isn’t that what led thousands at a time to a life of faith in the early days of the church? Isn’t that still the most compelling witness, in places where the church is growing?

Wright, in the CT article, says: “When the church is seen to move straight from worship of God to affecting much-needed change in the world; when it becomes clear that the people who feast at Jesus' table are the ones at the forefront of work to eliminate hunger and famine; when people realize that those who pray for the Spirit to work in and through them are the people who seem to have extra resources of love and patience in caring for those whose lives are damaged, bruised, and shamed—then it is natural for people to recognize that something is going on that they want to be part of.

I’m not wasting time worrying about when I’ll be rescued and taken off to heaven, and I’m not going to argue about the precise chronology of Christ’s coming. I’m excited to be living “life of the ages,” eternal life, life in God’s presence, here, today, from the minute I wake up to the moment I fall asleep. And I’m thankful for those, Rob Bell, Bishop Wright and others, who challenge the “dualistic, sectarian mentality” of the church and invite God’s people to demonstrate His kingdom now, in every arena.

Superkids 2010 in Kensington Philadelphia

As Bell says:

“There’s heaven now, somewhere else.

There’s heaven here,
sometime else.

And then there’s Jesus’ invitation to heaven

here

and

now,
in this moment,
in this place.”



 Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments. 

Love Wins

“...I believe that Jesus’s story is first and foremost about the love of God for every single one of us. It is a stunning, beautiful, expansive love, and it is for everybody, everywhere.

"That’s the story.

'For God so loved the world . . . '

That’s why Jesus came.

That’s his message.

That’s where the life is found."

That’s the start of Rob Bell’s controversial, brilliant, very engaging new book, Love Wins. As he continues:

"There are a growing number of us who have become acutely aware that Jesus’s story has been hijacked by a number of other stories Jesus isn’t interested in telling, because they have nothing to do with what he came to do. The plot has been lost, and it’s time to reclaim it.

"I’ve written this book for all those, everywhere, who have heard some version of the Jesus story that caused their pulse rate to rise, their stomach to churn, and their heart to utter thos resolute words, 'I would never be a part of that.'

"You are not alone.

There are millions of us.”

As I've read and thought about what Bell has to say, I'd have to agree: the good news of Jesus has come to sound like bad news for almost everyone, for those who don’t endorse right wing politics, those who weren’t born in our “Christian” nation, those who like to ask difficult questions, those who struggle with gender identity, those who have trouble expressing their faith in the exact formula endorsed by their particular denomination.

Bell goes on to explain that his book is meant to “question some of the dominant stories that are being told as the Jesus story.” He notes “Some communities don’t permit open, honest inquiry about the things that matter most. Lots of people have voiced a concern, expressed a doubt, or raised a question, only to be told by their family, church, friends, or tribe: “We don’t discuss those things here.’”

Right again. Assumptions abound – about whose side God is on, about whose agenda he endorses, about how we know what’s true, about how we read what the Bible says. It’s far too easy to be branded liberal, heretic, non-believer, "universalist," just for wondering why Christians embrace one passage and ignore another, or embrace one issue, while pretending others don’t matter.

So, Bell sets out to reexamine “the Jesus story,“ and the good news Jesus proclaims, to open space for questions that can’t be resolved by anyone this side of heaven, and finally, to demonstrate the breadth of the “historic, orthodox, Christian faith. It’s a deep, wide, diverse stream that’s been flowing for thousands of years, carrying a staggering variety of voices, perspectives, and experiences.”

There are plenty of responses to Love Wins. Fuller President Richard Mouw’s endorsement of Rob Bell’s orthodoxy; maverick Brian Mclaren’s musings on interpretation, communication, and the difficulties in our labeling of Christian liberal and conservative; a very detailed analysis from Reformed pastor and co-author of Why I’m Not Emergent, Kevin DeYoung, detailing what he considers Bell’s errors. One very funny response from Don MIller of Blue Like Jazz fame. And, by far the most helpful, a very thoughtful, careful series of posts by Scot McKnight, author of The Blue Parakeet and religious studies professor at North Park University.

And plenty of uncharitable, wrong-headed, “shoot first then ask questions” comments, twitters, blogs, posts, reviews, many from Christian leaders who should know better. Too often the interviewers sound like Pharisees, trying to trap Jesus with either/or questions, with no real desire to hear the mystery beyond what they’re asking. And too often the critics sound like they know –for sure – how it all turns out, when we’re told “we know in part, and understand in part.”

Which brings us back to the topic of God’s love, and the good news we’re called to share.

Forgive me for jumping to the end of Bell’s book – I’m not really giving away the ending, because on the one hand we already know the ending: Love Wins. And on the other hand, as Bell makes clear, we don’t know the ending, fully, completely, because it’s way past what we can understand or envision. “Heaven is, after all, full of surprises.”

So we know, and don’t know, how the story ends. But this is where Bell takes us:

“Jesus invites us to trust that the love we fear is too good to be true is actually good enough to be true. It’s written in one of John’s letters in the scriptures that ‘what we will be has not yet been made known.’ Jesus invites us to become, to be drawn into this love as it shapes us and forms us and takes over every square inch of our lives. Jesus calls us to repent, to have our minds and hearts transformed so that we see everything differently

"It will require a death,

A humbling,

A leaving behind of the old mind,

And at that same time it will require an opening up,

And loosening our hold,

And letting go,

So that we can receive,

Expand,

Find,

Hear,

See,

And enjoy. . .

"Whatever you’ve been told about the end-

The end of your life,

The end of time,

The end of the world –

Jesus passionately urges us to live like the end is here,

Now,

Today."

That’s not quite the end, but it’s where I want to end for now. Yes, I recommend the book. And I recommend wrestling with the story, as Bell does so eloquently. What is the story Jesus tells about us, about our future, about the world he made? Who has the final word? 

And I recommend a continuing dialogue about what it looks like to live as people of love, people of good news, people of resurrection. As Bell makes very clear, the point isn’t, solely, what happens when we die, but what happens here, now, in this time, in this place. How does God’s love change me, today? How does that love change the world, through me, today? As his chapter on heaven is titled, “Here is the new there.” The story isn't just about life after death, but life before death. 

 

“Jesus teaches us to pursue the life of heaven now and also then, anticipating the day when earth and heaven are one.

Honest business,

Redemptive art,

Honorable law,

Sustainable living,

Medicine,

Education,

Making a home,

Tending a garden-

They’re all sacred tasks to be done in partnership with God now, because they will all go on in the age to come.”

The new life we're called to, the life of heaven, pursued here, now, is love: inviting, expansive, active, personal, shared with those like us and those we could never love on our own, those next door and those on the other side of the globe, a visible expression of God alive in us. Love made possible by Jesus Christ's example, his atonement, and his Spirit at work inside us.  

"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us." 1 John 4:7-12

"And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God". Ephesians 3:17-19


"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."  Romans 8:38-39

Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments. 

The Paradox of Pain

Which of these is true? Either God is all powerful but doesn’t care about the people of Japan and their suffering or He does care about the people of Japan but He’s not all powerful? Which is it?

There’s a viral video clip circulating of an interview with Rob Bell, pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, mastermind behind the effective Nooma videos and author of the just-released much-discussed book Love Wins. The interview, with Martin Bashir of MSNBC, has Bell’s detractors rejoicing at Bell’s apparent sidestepping of some either-or questions.

  

One either-or question Bashir repeats has been echoing in my head, as I’ve followed the news of tornados in unexpected places, heard reports of the continuing struggle following the earthquakes and tsunami in Japan, and spent time visiting and praying for our friend Emily, struck by lightening almost three years ago. Here’s part of the transcript:

Kyodo Press

Bashir: Before we talk about the book (Love Wins), just help us with this tragedy in Japan. Which of these is true? Either God is all powerful but doesn’t care about the people of Japan and their suffering or He does care about the people of Japan but He’s not all powerful? Which is it?

Bell: I begin with the belief that God, when we shed a tear, God sheds a tear. I begin with a divine being who is profoundly empathetic, compassionate and stands in solidarity with us. Secondly the dominant story of the scriptures is about restoration, it’s about renewal, it’s about rebirth, it’s about a god who insists in the midst of this chaos the last word hasn’t been spoken so people of faith cling to the hope God will fix this place. It’s a beautiful hope. We ought to keep it front and center now.

Bashir: So which of those is true, he’s all-powerful and he cares or he cares and he’s not all-powerful?

Bell: I think it’s a paradox at the heart of the divine. Some paradoxes are best left as they are.

Bell is finding himself criticized in Christian circles because he insists on paradox. God loves us, cares, is all powerful, but allows tsunamis. Jesus will draw all men to himself, but we have the freedom to resist. We don’t like paradox, yet if we watch the world carefully, and read scripture thoughtfully, we find reality saturated with paradox, and our attempts to nail things down, tie them up, list them out, thwarted at every turn. 

Consider this short passage: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose" (Philippians 2:12-13).

Who is working? What part does human agency play? Looks like paradox to me. I could spend this whole blog listing inescapable paradoxes, but stay with this one: is God caring but unable to stop tsunamis and tornados, or is God powerful but disinterested?

Put this another way: Where was God when my parents split and left four kids to fend for themselves? When Emily was digging daffodil bulbs and a lightning bolt shot through her? When all those priests whose parishioners trusted them abused the children in their care? When the tornado ripped roofs off homes, and smashed cars with children inside?

Here’s the paradox, the puzzle I can’t unravel. He was right there – grieving. He was right there, loving those who did harm, those done harm, arms of love surrounding both  the innocent and the guilty. Waiting to bring redemption.

Don’t buy it?

We approach the problem of pain from one of two directions. We can see it as an intellectual exercise – the Pharisees either/or. When we come at it from that direction, we get the answer God gives in Job:

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?

   Tell me, if you understand.

  Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! . . .

“Brace yourself like a man;

   I will question you,

   and you shall answer me.

“Would you discredit my justice?

   Would you condemn me to justify yourself?

In other words, God says “you think your puny mind is going to understand my intent? Little, time-locked, three-dimensional human, you think you think you can grasp the greater purpose of one who lives outside time, outside space, in dimensions you can’t begin to fathom? You trust your mind that much?”

The other approach is that of the hurt child, the wounded friend, asking “Why?”

Peter Kreeft, philosophy professor at Boston University, leans into this question in a thoughtful discussion of suffering:  

“This is not merely the philosophers' ‘why’" Not only does it add the emotion of tears but also it is asked in the context of relationship. It is a question put to the Father, not a question asked in a vacuum.

The hurt child needs not so much explanations as reassurances. And that is what we get: the reassurance of the Father in the person of Jesus, ‘he who has seen me has seen the Father’ (Jn 14:9).

The answer is not just a word but the Word; not an idea but a person. . . He didn't give us a placebo or a pill or good advice. He gave us himself.

Anna Kocher  2006

. . . He sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives, like water. Are we broken? He is broken with us. Are we rejected? Do people despise us not for our evil but for our good, or attempted good? He was ‘despised and rejected of men.’ Do we weep? Is grief our familiar spirit, our horrifyingly familiar ghost? Do we ever say, ‘Oh, no, not again! I can't take any more!’? He was ‘a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.’ Do people misunderstand us, turn away from us? They hid their faces from him as from an outcast, a leper. Is our love betrayed? Are our tenderest relationships broken? He too loved and was betrayed by the ones he loved. ‘He came unto his own and his own received him not.’ 

. . . Does he descend into all our hells? Yes. In the unforgettable line of Corrie ten Boom from the depths of a Nazi death camp, ‘No matter how deep our darkness, he is deeper still.’

Kreeft’s discussion raises some interesting ideas about suffering, the cross, God’s love, but leaves questions, objections. Any attempt to address suffering is by necessity superficial – pain goes beyond words, beyond thought. Who would expect the problem of pain to be resolved in a two sentence soundbite, (as in the Bell/Bashir interview) a short (or long) blog entry, a few-thousand-word essay?

C. S. Lewis, described as the greatest apologist of the early 20^th century, wrote two full-length books wrestling with the question of suffering, first from the philosophical angle, in The Problem of Pain, and again from a personal, relational point of view, in A Grief Observed. Anyone seriously considering suffering and pain would do well to read them, but his conclusions are no clearer than Rob Bell’s simple admission: “It’s a paradox at the heart of the divine.”

Here’s what Lewis says in A Grief Observed:

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘no answer’. It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate gaze. As though He shook his head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child, you don’t understand.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All non-sense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is a yellow square round? Probably half the questions we ask — half our great theological and metaphysical problems, are like that.

Later, Lewis concludes:

Heaven will solve our problems, but not by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.

We see in part, and understand in part. What I’ve learned, in my own experience, and in shared prayer and struggle with many others, is that when we turn to God in our pain, he comes close. He meets us there. He leads us into deeper knowledge of himself, greater fellowship with Christ and his cross, and deeper compassion with others in pain.

Jeff Roberts, Birmingham News AP

That may be the most mysterious aspect of suffering. “The answer is not just a word but the Word; not an idea but a person.” And while the person is always Jesus, sometimes the person is also us. As Kreeft says: He came. He is here. That is the salient fact. If he does not heal all our broken bones and loves and lives now, he comes into them and is broken, like bread, and we are nourished. And he shows us that we can henceforth use our very brokenness as nourishment for those we love. Since we are his body, we too are the bread that is broken for others. Our very failures help heal other lives; our very tears help wipe away tears; our being hated helps those we love.

How is it possible, that our suffering can aid those who suffer? Paradox. Another of those questions that will be knocked from under out feet, when we see the full purpose, in dimensions we can just begin to imagine. Another mystery to pursue another day.

Like graves, we heal over, and yet keep
as part of ourselves the severe gift.
By grief, more inward than darkness,

the dead become the intelligences of life.
Where the tree falls, the forest rises
There is nowhere to stand but in absence,
no life but in the fateful light.

    From Rising (Wendell Berry)

Please join the conversation. Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments.