We had a good sermon Sunday morning. One of those sermons that have been a long time coming and seem somehow overdue, you know? It began with talk about how Christians are supposed to become more like God over time, which seems entirely right and correct to me. I mean, if you’ve ever hung out with a bunch of people that think a certain way, it’s hard to keep from buying into that. It’s sort of like osmosis, if you think about it; it makes sense that if you’re in community with God you’d become more like him.

I’m not going to say anything ground-breaking here. I know loads of people have said it, and a good percentage of them have said it much better. I just have to get it off my chest.

Here’s the thing, though: if you’re supposed to start looking more like God as time goes by, what does the way you look say about your God? Or what does the way your community looks say about its God? You have to figure that a bunch of people in community growing together to look like something, well, eventually they’re going to come to resemble (as a group) that thing that they’re growing towards.

That is to say, if your religious community resembles elaborate kabuki, what does that say about your god? If it looks like an exclusive monastery for masochists, what does that say about your god?

It’s a good question, I think. Ask yourself. Are you growing up to look like your father, God, or are you growing God up to look like you? Or to put it in the language of scripture, are you being conformed to the image of God, or is God being conformed into the image of you?

I imagine that we often think of this in terms of it being someone else’s problem. For instance, it’s the problem of modernist, consumer-oriented mega-churches held rapt by the glittering American materialist dream. Or it’s the problem of a bunch of German post-Enlightenment scholars who decided one day that their empirical measurement of scripture was more important that scripture’s measurement of itself. Or it’s the problem of a few woo-woo postmodern shaman types who dance in the aisles and light candles and stuff during what one could loosely describe as “services”.

But of course it’s not just their problem. It’s your problem, too. Because it’s not just as easy as picking up the Bible and seeing what God looks like. I guess we have this history of “interpreting” scripture for exactly this reason: Jesus doesn’t just leap up out of the book and give you a list of bullet points. It’s quite complicated, really.

I just realised this post could go on forever, if I wanted it to. I could talk about the Holy Ghost moving in people, and how people chose these books to be scripture while rejecting others, or how people split up into camps about what God looks like, or how everybody thinks everybody else is wrong.

At the end of the day (and at the end of this paragraph), though, there’s nothing left to do but take a good long look at yourself. Maybe stop glancing around to see what other folks look like, and just get out a mirror or something. What does what you see say about your God?

Here I was, all set to watch Mad About You, and settle down for a nice evening of not really thinking about anything. And of course the internet has to come along and spoil it for me.

Having read several books that place the focus of Jesus’ message on redemption not only of souls, but also of creation, I found a review of one of these books that called the author’s formulation of scripture’s message as a “sad substitute for the gospel”.

But is it?

It keeps prompting the question in me that if Jesus came to save souls, great: but what comes after that? What does that look like?

Or, why does salvation have to be this either/or thing between a liberal social gospel (which, I agree, standing alone doesn’t make much sense at all) and the liberation of souls from the devil’s grasp?

Why does it always seem to come down to that?

Scripture says that Jesus came to reconcile all things to himself. All things. Not just human souls, but his creation as well, unless I’m reading that verse completely wrong. Putting it another way, the creator of the world, the Word, comes back in the flesh to re-create things and make them good again, the way they were before the fall.

But what does that look like? I admit, if you’re looking for the end of the world in a decade, if you’re thinking that Jesus is going to–excuse the hyperbole–come down from on high in his spaceship and beam up all the saved people, if you’re expecting everything to just end, if you’re expecting that heaven is the final destination, yeah that makes sense. It makes sense in an individualist sort of framework, where you have a personal relationship with Jesus, who has come to save your soul, so you can eventually end up in heaven, where you will be happy and you and you and you and on and on and on.

If scripture talks that way, I must have missed it, and I’ve been doing my fair share of reading lately. I’ve poked these ideas with a sharp stick, and they bleed true, I think.

For instance, the kingdom has come. It has. Jesus said the end of the world would be in his generation, and the children of Israel saw it come, but they also saw the replacement for their small corner of the earth. They saw the children of Jesus strewn across Asia, and then across the world.

Yet the kingdom hasn’t come, not really, not the full thing, has it? Jesus isn’t reigning on earth yet. Things aren’t good here. We don’t have our new heaven and new earth. We still have entropy, and microevolution, and death, and suffering, and war.

So what do we do in the meantime? Is the kingdom this sort of inward-focused blessing machine for the people behind the walls, or is it maybe a blessing to all nations? Do we have a responsibility just to ourselves, or to the whole world?

Does this include helping the poor? Yes. Does this include saving the environment? I think so. Does this involve saving souls? Absolutely.

See, I can’t separate the two things in my head. Saved people do good things. It’s true. Sometimes they do bad things–I do bad things, for crying out loud, all the time–but in general Christians, real Christians, are a blessing to those around them. If you’re saved, doesn’t that mean the default position is feeding hungry people? If you’ve been redeemed, doesn’t that lead to a life of compassion?

Maybe the whole point is not just getting to some place where we all have a personal transformation and that’s it. Maybe the point is God’s glory, Jesus’ glory. And maybe, just maybe, he’s more glorified when we seek to redeem not only the souls of people, but everything, or anything at all.

When I was about 22 or so, a friend asked me, “How do you believe? How do you become a Christian?” When I was done answering, I think it was apparent to both of us that I just didn’t have a clue. Sure, we covered getting answers and finding facts and accepting propositions and stuff like that, but at the end of the day there was always this huge chasm between knowing what’s this and that and believing this and that.

I imagine it’s much like finding your perfect mate and not falling in love with him or her. Your friends might tell you that you two were made for eachother, and on some level you might see that this piece of your puzzle matches his, or this aspect of your personality is complimentary to hers, but on another level (if you don’t feel that way) your instincts tell you that knowing all that isn’t exactly the same as wanting to spend the rest of your life together.

Of course, some people don’t experience relationships like that. Some of you will inhabit love like part of an equation, and that’s fine. We all have different ways of experiencing reality.

Faith is the same, I think. Faith isn’t an exercise you perform or an equation that you balance or really anything like that. It seems to me that faith is like making a friend, in a way. You read scripture, you find Jesus and meet him, and you decide something; either you decide that you’d like to spend the rest of your life getting to know him, or you don’t.

Some things follow after that, says holy scripture. Your life is changed. You act differently. You experience reality in a new way. Or to put it more tangibly, you love God, and you love your neighbor, neither of which are terribly difficult concepts to wrap your head around.

Maybe that’s the problem with the whole faith thing. It’s just too simple. I sometimes think, “If a ten year old can do this, doesn’t that make it simplistic and unrealistic?” I’m a fan of not demonising complexity. I usually say, “Complexity is not a vice.” Yet, some things are simple, gut-level things while at the same time becoming mind-bendingly difficult to wrap your head around when you think about them. Maybe it’s because the heart is better at grasping some things and the head better at others: I don’t know.

I like systematic theology and thought experiments and balancing equations. I really do. They are all useful in their own way, in their own sphere. But you don’t have to balance an equation (2 + 2 = 4) to understand reality, any more than you have to understand five areas of doctrine to have reality refreshed for you. Or to put another way, the theology of meeting Jesus is simply a matter of reading a book and deciding whether or not to follow the guy you read about from cover to cover.

Or to put it yet another way, understanding that Jesus is alive, that he’s still around, and that he’ll take you if you want it. Think of all the people Jesus said, “Your sins are forgiven!” to who were like, “Wait, what?” You don’t even have to go that far, I don’t think. You can find out all those things afterwards. Jesus comes first, always. You don’t really have to know you’re forgiven, that you’re changed, that you’re new. It happens, and you can figure out the wherefores and whatnots later.

It makes me wonder about how I’m going to teach my children about Jesus. I’ve thought about it for a few days now; if I ever pump out (or, hopefully, if my wife ever pumps out) some of the little ones, I think I’d like to tell them early on that Jesus is essentially like me. He’s like dad, except he doesn’t suck at being a dad. Having a dad is — I’ve found out — one of those gut-level things and sometimes a very painful kicked-in-the-gut-level thing.

My kids don’t have to understand my salary and worldview to get that I’m their dad. Yeah, they’re going to grow up and want to know about how to compile a program from source and how to change the oil in the car and what exactly why I don’t want them listening to pop music, but before all that, I’m their dad. If they can understand that, they can understand enough about Jesus and God and all that stuff to relate to him in a way that makes sense.

Sure, I’d like to raise a brood of little Calvinists, but to be honest that follows after raising a brood of little Christians who don’t start learning ass-backwards. I don’t know much, but I know that.

I’d like to go back and tell my friend what I’m saying now, that becoming a Christian is sort of like getting married or having a dad, and not much at all like playing chess or deciding between quantum mechanics and string theory. I’d like to tell him that Jesus changes your life, and all you need to do is read the book and meet the man and meet the God.

It’s just a book. Really. Look at it sometime without all the funny numbers and footnotes we’ve added, and it’s just a book, or a bunch of books collected into one big book. It’s chock full of stories, poems, historical documents, and other things, some arcane, some obvious. There are things in there that make a lot of sense, and other things you can mull over for days and still not understand, for a variety of reasons. But then, it’s not really just a book, is it?

I remember going to the Art Gallery of Ontario and looking at paintings in various styles by various artists who painted across various time periods. There was one, though, that captured my imagination. It was a Cubist depiction of Christ being taken down from the cross, dead as a doornail. I sat in front of it on a stool with no back, hunched over, just staring at it, taking it all in. It felt like I sat there for an age, though it was probably only fifteen minutes or so, and though I’m no great lover of painting as an art, the painting still affected me. It was a combination of the subject matter and the style and the colours, though none of that really matters. To me, it was much more than just a painting. It was a look into something completely other, something so different from my view of reality that it almost entranced me.

I can’t really deconstruct it. Or I could, I suppose, talk about the thickness of the brush strokes, the colour composition, the contrasting viewpoints, the fresh take on an ancient theme, the name of the artist, his or her body of work, the chosen themes, and on and on. I imagine I could write a very thick book about those things, all because I very much enjoyed the painting, and because it seems somehow important to me.

You could read my book (although I very much doubt you would unless you’re a close friend and I gave you a free copy to read in your copious spare time) and in the end gather a great number of facts about both the painting and about me. You could probably construct a pretty accurate profile of me as a person and author. You could, if you wanted to, make an index of all the things I wrote, so you could cross-reference them at will.

But in the end, you would have merely read a book about a painting, which is hardly a substitute for actually going to the gallery and sitting in front of it for fifteen minutes. You might find that those fifteen minutes, looking at a canvas, just taking it in, would be more informative, more gut-level than poring through my textbook about it for hours. (I picture myself writing a very long book.)

Or maybe not. That’s the thing about experiences. You might take a glance at the work, maybe even sit there for fifteen minutes, and wonder what I’d been smoking. You might not see what I saw in the work at all. You might instead find great enjoyment in a Pollock.

There’s still a chance you might agree with me. And though this isn’t a particularly profound experience, certainly not worth all that I’ve written about it, you might see what I saw. Maybe even more than I saw; who knows? But we could grab a beer afterwards and talk about it. You could explain to me this and that, and I could explain to you another thing, because we both saw the painting and we both had thus and such a reaction. We could write long books about the painting and compare indexes later, to the amusement and consternation of our friends, who would probably be looking up numbers for psychologists.

I feel it’s the same way with that book I was talking about. You might read it and see just a book. Or you might break it down and see some words. But if you read it and it did nothing for you, what’s the point of us discussing it? What would be the point of you reading my much bigger book about the book?

There’s a point here. Imagine going through a book about a painting. What’s the point, if you’ve never seen the painting? It wouldn’t make sense. It would be a lot of writing about something you don’t think is a big deal.

For a painting, that’s okay. I mean, we’ve all got our own taste, and that’s fine and good. But this book, you should read it. You should probably skip all those other books about the book and just read the book. You might not see the big deal, though I’ll politely disagree with you, but you should still read it.

Maybe afterward we can go out for a beer and talk about it, even if our friends start looking up the numbers for psychologists.

Then Jesus asked, “What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air perched in its branches.” Again he asked, “What shall I compare the kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.”

This weekend I got to thinking: what is greater than the kingdom of God? Or to express it in terms more familiar, the revolution of God? I can’t think of anything.

What rule has surpassed the rule of love? What philosophy can come along that says better than, Love the Lord your God with everything you’ve got, with your whole being? Is there any other religion that has conquered the world by laying down of weapons, and of lives? I sure can’t think of any.

It hits me every once in a while. In a world that constantly makes my insignificance blatantly obvious, I matter, not just to a couple of people who may or may not die on me any day, but to a friend who doesn’t change in his care for me, despite my lack of care for him. Do you have a better friend than that? I haven’t found one.

And in this day where I can communicate almost instantly with any internet-enabled person in the entire world, I’m plugged into something even bigger than that, something where I am called a saint. Even when I don’t much look like one. I imagine sometimes that if all the saints in the world were like lightbulbs, they could take pictures of us from space, lighting up the world. Can you think of a better image? I’d sure like to hear it.

• Went to Laura’s church this weekend. It was good; the sermon touched on a bunch of points that really made me thing about call and response.
• I am determined to become better at Scrabble. Although “determined” is probably overstating it a bit. Rather, I’m wishing that I could become better at Scrabble, and if that could happen via magic, I’d be grateful.
• Have you ever awoken to a day so cold that nothing can make it warmer? If not, you should move to Ontario so you can experience what can only be described as intestine-chilling cold.
• Some of the people I admire most are those with debilitating conditions who manage to persevere and not become a burden to others. On the other hand, I don’t admire those who have a minor condition and make unbearable the lives of their family and friends.
• Every once in a while I hear something that makes me go, “What kind of insanity is this?” It is possible to be so deeply embedded in, for instance, a community or organization that you lose all sense of perspective. I think this is what happens to all those people we look at and go, “How in the world can you believe that?” It can happen to anyone who doesn’t try to strike balance or try to step backwards to gain perspective. An example: those who believe (tacitly) that marriage will solve their problems and elevate them from their pathetic existence. Another: those who become so concerned with holiness that they begin to label everything unholy. Another: those who become absolute slaves to gaining wealth that every part of their life becomes a means to that end. Another: those who become so captivated by gaining perspective that they can never involve and never connect with anything.
• There are some problems that will never be solved. Does that mean that we stop trying? Or perhaps it means we try to get closer to the solution, as close as we can get.
• When will religion in the USA come to understand that neocons in the USA are using religion as one of their “necessary deceptions”? Or is religion using the neocons as well? Is their union just one of partially parallel intentions, but not necessarily of goals? And do they understand that?
• I am currently writing a story about a man trapped in a madhouse from the perspective of one of the denizens of said madhouse. The question will become, I think, who is crazier? The man, or the house?
• After the ice and snow of this weekend, I managed to fall down the steps to my house with a Tim Horton’s coffee in my hand. My back hurt like, well, a bugger, but the coffee miraculously survived the fall without losing more than a few drops. I will thank God for small mercies and pray my back doesn’t become any more painful, because two days later, it’s only gotten worse.
• At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.

I am unabashedly for sola scriptura.

That is, scripture is my only plumbline, my only yardstick. Not to say I’m good at it. Not to say I ever will be. But when push comes to shove, that’s where I’ll stand. When Jesus says, for instance, that the kingdom of God is at hand, meaning that it’s here, it’s now, it’s on this earth, I take that at face value. When Paul says that the kingdom of God is after the resurrection, I take that at face value, too.

But I am not ashamed to say people are imperfect. The “but” beginning that sentence may not make sense now; let me explain. Scripture only goes as far as it goes. It lays down hard and fast rules sometimes, but most often it lays down principles to follow, or guidelines to observe.

Our depravity as people enters here, that we are asked by holy scripture to figure it out for ourselves. (Incidentally, this is why the way of Jesus is so transferable, from culture to culture; there’s no one way to dress, for instance. There’s just decency and modesty.) The writers of the canonical books didn’t have a clue about optical information transfer and the hive mind of the internet, or internal combustion engines. They probably didn’t even understand the vast immensity of the universe that the Hubble telescope has unfurled for us in such vivid photography. Yet they had the seeds of it all there. Why is the free transfer of information good? Why is unlocking the secrets of the universe good? How should we do it? What should be our aim? And even when our goals and methods aren’t very good at all, what should be our response?

That God gave us brains to do this stuff is amazing. It draws glory to him above all. The fact that I can talk to some guy in Indonesia, the fact that I can send money to Come Over and Help to feed and clothe the young people of Eastern Europe, the fact that I can understand how I can’t grasp the vastness of the universe - these things all glorify God in their own way.

Yet, our brains, our beings, these things are all incredibly tainted. The vestiges of perfection are there, yes, but think of the ways humanity, created in God’s image, has mis-applied the gift. War. Weapons. Cruelty. Racism. Poverty. Sexism. Materialism.

These are things that even Christians have perpetuated on other Christians. Let’s not even mention what non-Christians have done to eachother in this and the last century alone! Even with our continuing personal reformation there is still a big chunk of absolute shit in each of our hearts. Think of what you, if you’re a Christian, have done to your brother or sister. To your fellow kingdom member. To your family. To your neighbor. I know: I’ve done my fair share and a bit more.

But focus merely on the application of scripture. Imagine the Roman Empire with its abundant slavery, and imagine Paul giving slaves the same dignity in Christ as their masters. Imagine how this will, eventually, snuff out slavery altogether. Now imagine Africans being sold by their fellow Africans to slavers, then sold again to the nominally Christian American southerners. How does that fit with the message of the Bible that slave, free, man, woman, black man, and white man are all equal under Christ? It doesn’t. Slavery is evil. Period. And those that promoted slavery while claiming to be Christians were committing a heinous crime against the ethos of scripture, and of Jesus’ and Paul’s message.

Imagine the battalions of Roman soldiers stationed over the known world, the emperors of which empire exercised every manner of cruelty against their enemies. Imagine Jesus’ message that the kingdom of God is not perpetuated with a sword, or with a spear, or Isaiah’s message of weapons being melted down and made into plowshares. Now imagine a nominally Christian president of a nominally Christian nation waging an unjust war against an equally unjust dictator, all while under a flag of a nation that mentions God in every pledge of allegiance. Imagine the thunderous trampling feet of nominally Christian armies lifting sword and shield to free a holy land. Imagine heretics being burned alive. War is evil. Unjust war is even more evil. And those that promote war in the face of scripture’s repudiation of it, and who promoted “redemptive violence” in the name of the Prince of Peace are committing and have committed a heinous crime in and against the name of Jesus.

All this to say, “We’re not perfect.” The sins of Christianity in the 2,000 years after Christ are many and complex. They are more numerous and more complicated that the sins of the Jews in the 2,000 years after Moses. I’ve mentioned some overt sins. But there are more, and they are personal. They are in the hearts of Christians who embrace a Hellenistic version of Christianity, or a rationalistic version of Christianity, or a Judaic version of Christianity, or a post-modern version of Christianity, or a materialistic version of Christianity, or a Pharisaical version of Christianity, and on, and on, and on.

We’re not perfect. This is the reason we stand on scripture as final authority. It is perfect. You can laugh at that from your modernist standpoint if you wish. I am convinced of it, like Paul was convinced.

But I am not convinced we Christians always get its spirit right. I am not certain I do, either. This is why I am unable to simply accept human tradition as an augment to the word. Isn’t that what the reformers fought against? This is why I am unwilling to simply submit to a certain cultural interpretation of scripture. This is why I am unable to say that things lacking clarity in scripture must go only one way. This is why I am suspicious of people who say that such and such is a necessary result of following scripture.

This is why I feel compelled to re-examine practice in the light of scripture over and over again, and to ask questions, and be convinced in my imperfection by that which is in itself perfect in every way. Have you done these things? I think they’re necessary. Essential, even. Simply because my evil runs deeper than even I know (and some of you will of course point out with a wink and a nudge a few places I haven’t noticed yet), and because, like the church, I am my own greatest enemy, and like the church, need Jesus, and only Jesus.

When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he returned to Galilee. Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali — to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah:

“Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, along the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles — the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.”

From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

*

Little children were brought to Jesus for him to place his hands on them and pray for them. But the disciples rebuked those who brought them.

But Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

When he had placed his hands on them, he went on from there.

*

“What do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’

“‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went.

“Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go.

“Which of the two did what his father wanted?”

“The first,” they answered.

Then Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.”

*

Then Jesus asked, “What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air perched in its branches.”

In realizing yesterday’s crushing sense of unanything, I remembered a particular bit of scripture that always buoys me.

Briefly, I am becoming who I am (I think). Still have loneliness, guilt, whatever; but those are not ends as much as means.

I meant to write something about a refinery here, but after boiling away the words I think it was all to say this: masks within masks. Devastation within fight face within resignation within a pious observance of passing. You are within layers of reality, I promise.

Here are some selections of Psalm 25 that I would desparately like to believe:

To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul;

No one whose hope is in you
will ever be put to shame,
but they will be put to shame
who are treacherous without excuse.

You are God my Savior,
and my hope is in you all day long.

Remember not the sins of my youth
and my rebellious ways;
according to your love remember me,
for you are good, O LORD.

For the sake of your name, O LORD,
forgive my iniquity, though it is great.

Turn to me and be gracious to me,
for I am lonely and afflicted.

The troubles of my heart have multiplied;
free me from my anguish.

I would like to give an “amen”.