Caravaggio and Doubt

I was at church this morning taking in the Easter festivities and breakfast, when I looked up and saw this on the screen.

The painter Caravaggio, from the little I’ve read, was a wayward man.  He was no choir boy.  But he brought about a needed change in the world of painting.  The past century of art had been stuck in the mythic-realism of idealizing the human form and life.  Yet Caravaggio was a fresh step out of this idealism and into a natural portrayal of life and the human body.  Jesus isn’t portrayed as an avid member of the local YMCA.  He is exceedingly normal.

And this is the first thing the painting helps me remember: the resurrection was a real event, with used, well-worn bodies, full of doubting minds and reaching fingers.  It all sweeps by me now, but Peter showed up at the tomb sweating and panting.  There were wringing hands, and groups huddled in fear; disappointed women, old and unsure of how they were going to roll away the stone but going anyways.

It is good for me to step out of the idealism of my faith and rethink the simplicity and strangeness of this new day.  Everything is so often cast in superb colors and the highest form that I forget that they refer to something real.  Do you think Peter got a side-ache running to the tomb?   Yet not even this one underhandedly glorious day, but the whole of my life is misshapen by a daydream and stretched vision that I lose sight of the humble present.  It seems that we either try to make the miraculous everyday or the everyday miraculous.  Yet there must be space for me to say that God wants me healing the sick, speaking to the broken hearted, and doing the dishes.  But I’m afraid we too often sit talking, imagining together what our lives could, should, or will hopefully look like.  The dreams always dripping with the amazing, cultured, and heroic, while the immediate need of the moment, the small task, the ignored word, is left unspoken, untried, and unrealized.  O Lord forgive me.

But here is the second thing the painting showed me: in the midst of my doubt, Jesus pulls my hand to his pierced side.  I love Thomas’ eyes.  I love that his finger is actually in Jesus’ side.  I love the wrinkles and looks of inquisitive perplexity on the men’s faces. But most of all, I love that Jesus welcomes their skepticism and pulls Thomas in.  ”Touch me, Thomas.  Come here, and feel the wound in my side.” O Lord take hold of me.

I am often startled by what I believe.  Somethings don’t seem to add up, and others do and are just as unsettling.  From apparent discrepancies in the gospels to clearing the promise land, I’m not always leaving my time in the Word rejoicing in God’s goodness or renewed in my assurance of his presence (or existence).  And, what is more, I often feel guilty: how can I be given so many opportunities, have so many experiences, and be assured so many times and still doubt? Surely, I am a frustrating disappointment to God.

Yet this painting calls me to think again.  Jesus does not just passively accept Thomas’ doubts, reluctantly opening himself to his touch and prodding.  He pulls him in, grabs his hand and welcomes his doubts.  For what can my questions and doubts hold against the risen Christ?  And what is more, Christ not only is far above my concerns, he condescends, comes down to make himself known to me and settle my fears.  He returns again to Thomas, not leaving him out wondering, but returns for him to see, touch, feel, and believe.

So this Easter, I have a God who is risen and coming back around to this reluctant skeptic.  And may my doubts and questions too be transformed to the exclamation of awe and worship: “My Lord and my God!”

The Gospel for a Honduran Jail

On February 15th a fire began in a Honduran prison killing 350 prisoners. Rescue workers were reportedly unable to find the guards with keys, so many prisoners died trapped within their cells. It is possibly the world’s deadliest prison fire ever.  The Economist reported that officials have suggested the fire was possibly started by either a protesting inmate setting his mattress on fire, a fight between prisoners or an electrical fault.  Yet regardless lives could have been saved if the conditions in Honduran jails were “not so grotesque”.  What is more, this is not merely an injustice relegated to the developing world.  There are serious overcrowding issues in jails in California and throughout the U.S as we (especially Christians) have cultivated a culture of retribution rather than restoration.  It is sadly ironic that the people of grace and mercy are the most ready to cry,  ”Crucify him! Throw the teenager in jail for life! Electrify him!”

What does the gospel have to say in all of this?  Where is the word of truth? Is the gospel merely a proposition for justification or does it reach into the brokenness of today?  Does it have something to say, or what is more–the power to transform the here and now?

I was asked by a professor once, “What is the gospel?”  I hesitated and rambled for a couple seconds about how I had recently written an essay on the subject for an exam (I’m an idiot).  I eventually threw together a few phrases, which were several levels below extraordinary.  He was gracious and drew out the few good things I had managed to stumble upon. (Interesting that I’m not used to “sharing the gospel”) But he then took out a piece of paper, and drew a familiar presentation of the gospel.  He drew a person on one side of a great chasm with God and heaven located on the other side.  The person was unable to get to the other side by their own effort until the cross magically appeared and became a bridge for the sinner to come over onto God’s side.  This was the bread and butter, go-to-gospel of my Baptist upbringing.  He then asked, “What are the implications and cultural assumptions inherent in this presentation of the gospel?”  We talked for the rest of the hour about the escapist mentality inherent in the model. How consumer culture makes the gospel just another transaction.  How our individualism makes the gospel merely an “I-God” thing.  And how all this leads to a reductionist view of justification and redemption.  That discussion was pivotal for me, yet in the past two years I have barely moved in my understanding of the gospel.  Or more accurately, this lesson has had little affect on the way I live.

What of those 350 Honduran men? Again, is the gospel just a message they probably never heard?  A proposition that they might not have accepted? Or does it have something to say–some transformation to bring to bear?  Like a wave overwhelming.  Like a song lifting up.  Like a revolution overthrowing.

I have to believe that the truth of God is meant to make us new, not just in the sense of someday, but now.  Today.  That the Spirit of God fundamentally transforms us so that  children held in prostitution, women sold by husbands, mothers watching their children starve, and prisoners burned in their cells can begin to say to one another, “I’ve heard that God has come down to rescue us.  And He is rising through a multitude of the-once-broken like a insurmountable tide.  And he means to set us free.”

Anything less can’t be the gospel.  Anything less is our feeble attempts to clothe ourselves. Nothing less than the power of God being manifested in the lives of his redeemed will do.  So rests the hope of the nations.

 

 

 

Questions and Thoughts

I sometimes walk around mumbling to myself, “I am weak.  I am weak.”

How appropriate is this self-image? It seems to be rooted in the fact that we in Christian circles like to talk about being depraved, born with no good in us that might make us lovable.  ”God loved us while we were still sinner”, yet we mean not just corrupted but incorrigible, not merely bent but broken.  Yet I wonder, would God really love the unlovable?  He does not love injustice.  He does not seek out selfishness and lies.  But he loves us depraved sinners? Does God set his affection on evil? Can He?  Then why did he set his affection on us if we were not just sinners but depraved sinners?  It seems amiss to follow the teaching that before knowing Christ we are nothing but sinful creatures whose natures are totally depraved.  Or is it possible to permit that things are more complicated then exalting us as gods or smearing us as devils? Perhaps we were just fallen lovers.  Perhaps we were lost sons and daughters.  Can I hold my sinfulness and hold my godlikeness as well?  Can we not bear the resemblance, our hints of goodness from the Father even in our rebellion?

Yet here is where things get interesting. What difference is there for me now as a redeemed son?  Am I now made whole? I want to say that my goodness is no longer the fringe within the infection but the whole man made new. We sing and proclaim and affirm our freedom from sin, our deliverance from death, our victory over the flesh, our fellowship in the resurrection, our new life in Christ, our inheritance as saints, our baptism in the Spirit, but our lives do not match our rhetoric.  Should I believe in the power of the cross, when we his people seem to be as lost in our sin as we were before? By the way we live and preach, it may be proper to hail death as our real deliverer.  Our hope for deliverance is now waiting for the grave and the freedom that then comes, the life that then comes, the glory that then comes, the holiness that then comes.  It seems that my “being saved” is just a passive hope that I have a reservation for a seat at the feast. We have diminished the power of Christ over life here and now.  In the suffering and sin of the present, Christ has become a token of the life and freedom we hope to one day enjoy, not the Lord of the now who has set us free.

All to often in Christian circles the power of the cross is taken to mean God’s blotting out our past sins and any future ones we may commit.  This is our freedom and transformation?  No wonder we as sons and daughters of God no longer say, “Look at my life and follow me as I follow Christ”.  If this is all that the gospel is, if this is all that we mean by “being saved”, if this is what God accomplished on the cross, than this is a weak and shallow gospel.  Yet be comforted!  ”Your sin is still normative!  Don’t feel guilty about that lingering issue in your life! God never meant to free you from that! It’s OK!  Even Paul struggled in Romans 7!”  Here is a gospel we can handle. All the bonuses of future glory and ease with none of the awkward expectations in the now.  We can have our salvation and our sin.  Why not trade the power of the cross for the comfort of our pleasures, which (of course) we are unable to overcome?  What better gospel could there be then to claim forgiveness without transformation, freedom without change, grace without cost, and healing without holiness?

It is interesting that in Romans 7 Paul draws on an illustration from Roman life.  He says “Who will save me from this body of death?”  Some take the “body of death” that Paul is referring to as a means of execution sometimes used by the Romans.  In order to create a slow and painful death, the Romans would tie a dead body (“body of death”) to the back of the condemned.  The dead corpse would then deteriorate and decay into the flesh of the living person.  The rotten flesh would slowly become their own and lead to their death.  It is a brilliant and poignant image.  ”Who will save me from this body of death?”

Paul’s answers, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” What should we then say?  Is Paul declaring his future hope in freedom, but that now he is still the condemned convict, fighting off the infection of the flesh?  Or has the “body of death” been thrown off because Christ has taken it on?

Just some thoughts and questions.  And in this maybe I’ll learn to say,

“I am made new, I am free.”

Seminary v. Cemetery

So the clever question asks: cemetery or seminary?

I have finished one semester of seminary and it has been a joyful, daunting, doubting thing. There are signs of growth and signs of decay. This already neglected blog has suffered a near fatal blow, my social life is several floors (not steps) below exciting, and my bank account doesn’t exactly infuse confidence or calm.  However, I do know what greek participles look like and what the word “sapiential” means.

It seems fitting to reflect on the ebb and flow of my faith during the past few months, but such exercises leave me panting.  Energy is the one commodity that I don’t have.  That’s a lie, there are a lot of commodities that I don’t have.  That’s besides the point.  I don’t have the emotional energy to reflect on my faith and life.  But I’m going to anyways.

That is, I believe, the point I’m making.  Seminary is a beautiful place to be.  There are a lot of interesting lessons and exciting professors, but in the end, education, and specifically introspective, delicate wanderings involving my life with God, exhaust me.  God infuses all disciplines, but seminary seems especially vulnerable to the intrusion of self-righteousness and doubt.  It begins with feeling the rush of learning something new. For instance by turning water into wine, Jesus was implicitly showing himself to be God by creating wine “ex nihilo” (out of nothing) and thereby inaugurating his ministry with overtones of creation.  Suddenly there is a sense of movement and maturity, something gained that others don’t have.  It almost feels like growth, but inverted and easier.  Instead of needing to interact with God and encounter Him, I can learn about him and give myself to the study of him and talk about, write about, think about, do anything but actually interact with the one that I am so enthused with “knowing”. Academics are sterile, controllable, and rewarding.  God is frustrating, unpredictable, and demanding.  Or so it would seem.  

I am here simply trying to paint the picture that studying God has its rewards, and those rewards can quickly become idolatry, or at least a substitute for being had by God.  Seminary is dangerous in that it offers this alternative: being so near the temple that we miss the God we came to worship.  

Yet that contention aside, all the built up warnings about seminary are perhaps overdone.  There are beautiful people here at Trinity who are constantly encouraging me to cultivate and renew my life with Christ.  Not surprisingly, my life and union with Christ depends upon what is has all along.  Loving him.  Seeking him.  Setting aside the myriad of idols that would assault me no matter where I go or what I attempt.    

So there it is.  I am still a breathing, living Christian at the end of one semester and one month of cemetery, I mean seminary.  But more on that again soon.     

This Gospel Thing

I want to talk about the gospel.  That is after all the title of this blog, “gospelmusing”.  Gospel pondering.  Gospel reflecting.  Gospel thinking.  However, I am often tongue tied when pressed to actually share some coherent thoughts about this gospel.  What is the gospel? Is it just an ambiguous catch-all term, allowing us to escape the task of excavating what we actually mean by “the gospel”? What do I mean by the gospel?  Ha–I would sooner be able to tell you about the texture of the moon or what lightning feels like.

Don’t get me wrong; people do communicate the gospel.  They do share the truth of it.  But really?  How? Where do I begin?  How do I begin to explore the idea….scratch that…the truth–that God died on a cross?  Perhaps we are too used to hearing about the cross. Let me state this more bluntly. God died.  And rose.  And lives again.  What?

People have only heard the whispers of this gospel thing and they’ve been changed.  They gotten half-hearted versions, corrupted and molded by our imperfect sight, yet still, even then–people come flocking to hear.  It is powerful.  It is what we long to hear, but we barely even know the glory of the symphony we sit within.

How do I grasp this gospel thing?  It’s like a song.  That is the best I can do.  It’s a song that maybe you’ve heard once and liked but didn’t quite know where it was going, couldn’t quite follow the beat.  Then after a few more listens, a few more plays, and you start to get the feel of it.  Parts you didn’t really catch before become your favorite.  And you can’t get enough, you gotta turn up the volume and just shake your head, clap your hands, and sing-a-long.  You really can’t help yourself because the song is that good.  Then after a while, you stumble upon it again, and there it is.  It strikes you, hits you, moves you, grabs you, shakes you, catches you off-guard, throws you for a loop, and gets you shaking all over again.

I’ve heard the song a lot, but some days I can’t believe how good it is.  I study it, write about it, read about it, talk about it, and some days wish I could run away from it all.  But.  How do I even begin to convey this?  God died.  If that is true, that changes everything.  If God died, what does that mean about him?  He’s vulnerable? Killable?  What does that mean that the Most High, the Holy One, would die? A.  It’s crazy that can even happen.  B. What is his motivation?  If God died for us that we might be with him then…what? The implications feel too good to be true.  Whatever else might come, whatever else might be true, whatever else might confront me, haunt me, stress me out, I can rest assured that in the end, when it is all said and done, I will be with God.  And that makes me laugh.

We peddle the gospel too lightly.  We sum it up in our paradigms, graphs, and bracelets, and just perhaps rush past the beauty and horror of it all.  Have you listened, have you heard the gospel lately.  Have you marveled at what it means?  Gasped at the implacations?

If God died, really died, what does that mean about him?  If he was buried, what does that mean about him?  If he rose again and lives, what does that mean for us?  For creation? How does that change the way I speak, live, and shower?  Nothing is too important that it can’t be washed over and nothing is too insignificant that it can’t be transformed by this glorious gospel thing.

I know I’ve only brushed across the surface.  But isn’t that the glory of it too?  O Lord continue to amaze me with the goodness of your gospel!

Silence…

“Why, O Lord, do you stand afar off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” ~ Psalm 10:1

It’s been awhile since I heard His voice or felt His presence. I’ve been listening for Him. I’ve been looking for him. I’ve even been asking Him where He’s gone and nothing… I’ve wondered if its because I am asking the wrong question or not prostrating myself in the correct way. The Gospel wouldn’t let that thought stand too long. But I have been aching for the last several months for His presence or even just to hear a whisper. I am not looking for a smoke signal or writing on the wall, just a little whisper to let me know that He has my back. And yet it doesn’t seem to matter how often I petition or how desperately I cry there is still simply…silence.

My life has been a mess lately. I was attending seminary working toward my M.Div. but it all seemed very empty. There were theological hurdles that scripture would not let me jump. I left. I was living with one of my best friends but he moved to Chi-town to pursue his master’s. I am working a job that simply sucks the life out of me. I am living in a great community of believers and I still feel alone, isolated from the world around me which seems to be moving forward and forgot to send me the memo. And to top it all off, I gave my heart to something very dear to me which I had to recently let go. I want something solid to stand on. If there was ever a time in my brief life that I needed to feel the presence of my Savior and hear but a whisper of his voice its now…silence.

Like the lament of the Psalmist, I am crying out. I have questions, and more than answers I simply want Him. I don’t have a grievance. I just simply have a hurting heart that is longing for rest and comfort. I am not in a great search for answers to impossible questions. In the end I just want to know that He knows that I am hurting and I want His help…silence.

I am not saying that I don’t have questions about why life is often so difficult or doesn’t make sense. I know that answer exegetically and could spend the rest of this post quoting scripture. I have moved past a few of those insecurities. I want to experience their answer…silence.

Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Paul all use the metaphor of humanity being as clay which the Potter is able to work into the shape that he chooses. We all played with Play-Doh as kids. We made snakes, castles, horses, glasses, and anything else that we thought would get the attention of our friends. But Play-Doh like clay eventually dries up and it doesn’t matter how hard you try, you can’t make a snake with Play-Doh that only crumbles. I feel the clay of my heart drying and the Potter doesn’t seem to notice. There is not the faint tap of footsteps nearing or the groaning of the wheel as His feet start to spin…silence.

It seems that despair is hiding in the shadows; it’s ugly head peaking out every so often to see if I’m alert. And so I sit praying to God that I don’t give in before He shows up. I’m left to trust and long. Faith and waiting seem to be my new companions. Where did you go Lord? Don’t you know I’m hurting? Don’t you know I need you? Are you coming back? You didn’t forget about me did you?…silence.

And then it happens. Like the last noise just before you fall asleep that your not sure happened because it left as quick as it came. But it enveloped me. It may have been a song or the thought of your promise, but it happened. I know that you know Lord. It’s enough for now. You’ve given me tears to wet my clay. Hurry Lord my tears dry quickly.

“Hear my cry, O God, listen to my prayer; from the end of the earth I call to you when my heart is faint. Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I, for you have been my refuge…Let me dwell in your tent forever!” ~ Psalm 61:1-3a, 4a

Ignorance is Bliss?

Found this tasty tidbit while reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Cost of Discipleship”. Bonhoeffer gives this quote from Martin Luther, who himself is speaking in the voice of God.

“Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend–it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. My comprehension transcends yours. Thus Abraham went forth from his father and not knowing whither he went. He trusted himself to my knowledge , and cared not for his own, and thus he took the right road and came to his journey’s end. Behold, that is the way of the cross. You cannot find it yourself, so you must let me lead you as though you were a blind man. Wherefore it is not you, no man, no living creature, but I myself, who instruct you by my word and Spirit in the way you should go. Not the work which you choose, not the suffering you devise, but the road which is clean contrary to all that you choose or contrive or desire–that is the road you must take. To that I call you and in that you must be my disciple. If you do that, there is the acceptable time and there your master is come.” Luther

Surprise, surprise. My efforts to understand what God is up to in my life is not only futile, it’s foolish. The whole issue at stake is is not wanting to do God’s will and being unsure of it, but wanting my life to count for something, wanting to be important, wanting to do the best thing, which crowds out the real issue of trusting God and desiring him more than my own plans. So perhaps I should embrace some more ignorance. That shouldn’t be a problem for me.