Tuesday, December 8, 2009

A Reflection on the Gospel

In the eleventh chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, there’s this fascinating story most commonly known as the story of the Tower of Babel. As the author tells it, humanity has rebelled against their creator and subsequently fallen into brokenness and disarray on every level of their existence, and we find them pressing further and further into their own hopelessness and futility with each passing day. As the story goes, rather than recognize their futility, these people decide to take heaven – achieve fame and salvation – by the work of their own hands. "Come, (they said) let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

It seems to me that, at a certain level at least, these people understand that salvation is what they need; they understand that things are not as they should be. But for these people, the solution to their problem lies in their own hands – in bricks and blueprints: building a tower to reach heaven.

As I read this story, I am struck by how little ‘religion’ has actually evolved since then. We can talk about preferences in the types of bricks and we can argue about the blueprints for the tower, but every religion, at its heart, boils down to a compilation of instruction about what to do in order to attain salvation (or otherwise find the solution to the ways things are messed up): bricks and blueprints. In Islam, for example, salvation is found in living according to the five pillars. In Buddhism and Hinduism, our hope lies in discovering the path to enlightenment. But in Christianity? Salvation is found in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

When we take the time to actually look, I think that this is precisely why a Christian worldview is genuinely radical: when you look closely at Christianity, you don’t actually find a religion at all… you find a story. We don’t find a compilation of instruction about what to do in order to be saved. Instead, we find a proclamation about something that has already been done. Christianity is, at its heart, not saving instruction; it is a saving EVENT. It is about coming face to face with a moment in history: a moment in history which, as discussed in my previous reflection, centers on the cross.

In attempting to describe all that happened between Good Friday (the cross) and Easter (the resurrection), it’s all too easy to fall into philosophical abstracts: an endless maze of figurative and convoluted language. In the end, there’s just more going on there then we really have the ability to understand. Suffice it to say, though, that on the cross, Jesus took on everything and every way that we had messed up and, in the resurrection, made a way through it: doing for us what we could never do for ourselves and providing that solution that everyone, in their heart of hearts, is really looking for.

We are terminally ill; Jesus is the cure. We are rebels facing the consequences of a failed and misguided revolution; Jesus has secured our pardon. We are hopelessly in debt; Jesus paid it off for us… these are just some of the images scripture uses to try and describe the cross and all that follows.

To use the language of an earlier reflection, we, as well as the world we live in, are hopelessly out of tune, unable to participate in the symphony for which we have been created. Jesus is both an embodiment of perfect intonation and the craftsman able to fix the instruments of our own souls. He is the auto-tune that enables us in our feeble attempts to play along in the present moment, and that hand that, if we let him, will skillfully and gradually adjust the tension of the strings of our hearts so that, eventually, we will find ourselves able to make that music we were created to make. Able, finally, to take part in the endless, creative symphony of heaven itself.

The reason the Bible calls this ‘Good News’, and not just ‘good instruction’, is that this tuning and repairing work is something that must be done to us and for us. Apart from the hand of the craftsman, all the good instruction in the world will ultimately only serve to frustrate and alienate; we instruments cannot tune ourselves. The good news is that this HAS been done for us. The death and resurrection of Jesus is that event, that moment in history, where the craftsman entered the scene, placed humanity on his workbench, and did for us what we could never do for ourselves.

Before we are able to move forward with Jesus, it is this reality, this story, with which we must come to grips. It isn’t until we lay down our religious bricks and blueprints, until we stop attempting to fix ourselves with our own resources or abilities, stop trying to behave ourselves into heaven, and come to grips with the good news that Jesus has already done the work on our behalf that we will be free from the crushing weight of our own brokenness and the burden of religious moralism, finally able and free to make a genuine difference in our world.

In the end, to step from brokenness into the life that we’ve been created for is simply to come face to face with Jesus – the healer, tuner/fixer, and ultimate source of life – and say, “Yeah… I want that.” As to what follows? That’s a journey; one that I am even now still in the midst of, and expect to be for a long, long time…

The Cross of Christ

Perhaps the most central - and challenging - facet of a Christian understanding of the world, is to come to grips with the role which the death (and subsequent resurrection) of Jesus Christ plays in dealing with the dissonance of sin and evil that both surrounds and infiltrates us as human beings. To do business with Jesus is, ultimately, to do business with his execution, and to wrestle with the reality that Jesus claims to have endured that suffering willingly, and for our benefit. From the outside looking in, this is the real puzzle of the Christian faith; it all seems a bit over-dramatic and unnecessarily grotesque. If all we’re looking for is a good example, or some helpful teaching, all this talk of blood and suffering and sacrifice just muddies and complicates things for us. At the end of the day, however, this is the very heart of both who Jesus is and what he sought to accomplish in the world. To deal with Jesus is, ultimately, to deal with the cross; there’s just no avoiding it.

To understand the significance of the death of Jesus, we must first understand something about the nature of death itself, and how it affects us. On a basic level, death is the void – the abscess, the black hole – at the center of our existence. Through the ages people have tended to personify death, to relate to it as a force or a presence. In reality, though, death isn’t a presence; it is an absence. It is, really, nothing at all; death is not a thing in itself, it is merely the hole where something else ought to be. Simply put, death is the absence of life.

Much as the sun is the ultimate source of energy which makes biological life on our planet possible, scripture tells us that God is the source of life itself; the true center of all reality and that which holds it all together. Our story, as human beings, is that of a rejection of God as the center and source, attempting to play god rather than be with God; essentially locking ourselves in a dark room and attempting to be our own sun. Walking away from our creator and source, we rejected God as the center of our reality. The trouble was – and is – that we have nothing in our own hands with which we are able to fill that void. Where there was once a life-giving sun, there is now only a black hole – an emptiness, a chaos – a void, consuming and draining life rather than giving it. We walked away from the source of life and, in that moment, as a people we discovered death.

The destructive power of nothingness is an awesome and terrible thing to behold. And, though we’d rather not think about it most days, it is the fear of that great void that is the engine of much of our day-to-day existence. Like astronauts, separated from the vacuum of space by a paper-thin sheet of Mylar, our carefully crafted lives tirelessly strive to give us the illusion of security, in the face of an awesome emptiness and futility that we can’t really bear to think about seriously, lest we just go nuts. Whether it’s nations warring violently over natural resources or the more subtle interpersonal warfare of jockeying for recognition, influence and financial status, we people kill each other – literally and figuratively – in our efforts to just hang on for a little bit longer to that life that we feel so inevitably slipping away. For all our posturing and grand esteem for ourselves, we are frail and afraid. The world around us behaves and feels as if it is spinning apart as a result of our cumulative insecurity and the attempts to combat that insecurity with our own resources. This is the reality and the power of death.

Even death itself would not so affect us were we not painfully aware of how tragic the whole situation is. There is something at the soul of humanity that just cries out that we are not meant to be temporary and futile beings. There is just something about humanity, however much we may attempt to deny it, that echoes with eternity. This is the beauty in the midst of the brokenness; the beauty that the world most deeply longs to be restored.

It is in this context that we can begin to understand the mystery and the significance of the death of Jesus. Death – this void in existence created as a result of our desire for self-sovereignty – is a real problem. It has real consequences. If we are to ever get past it, then, it follows that we need a real solution. God, in his inexplicable desire to see humankind restored to rightful, life-giving relationship with himself, offers the only solution possible: death must be defeated. The void must be filled. The emptiness must be overcome. As we lack the resources to do so, God furthermore proceeds to accomplish this himself, on our behalf.

Death – and all the present consequences of chaos and brokenness that it yields all around us – could not be ignored. It couldn’t be passed over, explained away, or walked around. It had to be entered… and overcome. In Jesus, God did what would otherwise be impossible for God to do; namely, die. Stepped directly into our own black hole and was, if only for a moment, overwhelmed by it. As it turns out, however, the fullness of life that is inherent in Jesus was too much: having consumed life itself, the emptiness was no longer empty, the void found itself filled. What we could have never accomplished on our own, Jesus accomplished on our behalf.

Jesus died the death we were already dying in order that we might have the life we could never live on our own. As such, the cross of Christ stands as the turning point of human history, and the moment which all people must ultimately do business with, determining for ourselves how we will respond.

A Reflection on Sin and Evil

Our world is a beautiful, broken place, and we are beautiful, broken people.

A fascinating thing is at work in our generation. On the one hand, the humanistic idealism of the modern age – that conviction that with just enough technology, social progress, and western-style democratic politics, the problems of the world will eventually be taken care of – is being questioned in a new way. Maybe it’s just because globalization and the instant, world-wide spread of information that we have at our fingertips has opened our eyes too wide; maybe we’ve just seen too much, and been exposed to too much complexity to really believe that we here in the United States have the answer to the world’s ills. Genocide, disease, imperialism, corporate greed… Maybe it’s just that we’re overwhelmed. (Some would say that modern optimism ought to have been overwhelmed and killed off by the European horrors of WWI and WWII, respectively, but it has proven remarkably persistent…) Whatever the reason, though, our generation is willing to recognize that all is not right with the world, and we’re beginning to realize that ‘progress’ isn’t going to solve our problems. We recognize that our world is broken.

So, on the one hand, we recognize a paradox in our world; so much beauty, goodness and potential, marred by so much brokenness and conflict. On the other hand, while we are eager to point our fingers at global and systemic brokenness and injustice, we have seemingly lost our ability to talk about genuine personal responsibility. We pay our token regard to it, of course, usually through the positive lens of ‘doing our part’ to be ‘part of the solution’. The modern phenomenon of ‘armchair activism’, or ‘raising awareness’, comes as a result of this; we sign petitions, start and join Facebook ‘causes’, hold candlelight vigils… things which satisfy a certain feeling of responsibility within us in a comfortable and minimally inconvenient way. Not that there is anything wrong with such things, in and of themselves, except that rather than being genuine attempts at serious solutions to the worlds ills, these are often simply exercises by which we justify and strengthen our previously held assumption that we, personally, are not part of the problem. We tend to engage just enough to let our consciences off the hook, and then live our lives however we want to.

So, to use slightly different language, the fascinating thing about our generation is that we recognize that ‘evil’ exists in the world, but we are very uncomfortable trying to name the source of that evil. ‘Judgment’ feels like the only real sin in our society; we feel that everyone ought to be free to live as they see fit without criticism. We believe that evil exists ‘out there’ somewhere; in some violent system or faceless corporate greed. We believe that there are a handful of hypothetically ‘evil people’ in the world – mostly child rapists, murderers and oil tycoons – we just don’t personally know any. But we are embracing a very real paradox when we judge the state of our world, and certain faceless people in it, by a certain standard, a ‘true north’ of some kind, in order to be able recognize that things are not as they should be, while simultaneously taking offence at the idea that there might be a ‘true north’ by which our own lives and choices might ever be interpreted.

You see, our generation recognizes that we live in a beautiful, but broken, world. What we often fail to recognize is that we are beautiful, but broken, people. ‘Evil’ is not something that exists ‘out there’ in a hypothetical system or person… it exists in me. It isn’t just ‘the world’ that’s broken; it’s we, people, who are broken. Beautiful? Yes. Full of potential and goodness? Yes. But it is a marred beauty, a distorted goodness, and an unfulfilled potential.

Let’s put it in terms of music. To say that there is a ‘true north’ in the world is like understanding that there is a true musical scale; there is a true pitch, a true frequency of resonance by which all our playing is evaluated. We can be in tune, or out of tune, depending on the relation of our voice or instrument to that one true scale. From experience, you know that listening to one person play or sing out of tune is bad enough. But a whole band or orchestra with every player both out of tune with themselves and the players around them? That’s just painful to think about. The dissonance of the whole is essentially a function of the dissonance of the parts, even though the collective dissonance of the whole seems to take on a character all its own. This, in many ways, is a picture of our world.

Every one of us is out of tune to one degree or another, and real humility and maturity in thinking about our world comes when I realize that about myself. It comes when I realize that my brokenness, my dissonance; my pride and greed and selfishness and apathy are part of the overall cacophony. We’re all out of tune, and when we’re all playing at once, it’s a pretty awful performance. This is really what we’re talking about when we talk about ‘evil’; big picture ‘Evil’ and personal evil. They are intimately related, and we can’t genuinely engage the big ‘E’ until we’re willing to face the small ‘e’. We need to get our own instruments tuned.

A Personal God Story...

At some point along the way we all have visions of what our lives are going to look like, don’t we? Maybe they’re not quite adventurous enough to be considered our ‘dreams’, per se, but those snapshot expectations of where we will find ourselves a few years down the road; the future moments for which we plan, prepare and educate ourselves, consisting of a palette of job opportunities, geographical preferences and romantic interests. We all have hopes, however firm or vague they may be. We all have some picture of the horizon that we are aiming for in the present. At twenty-eight years old, I am not where I thought I’d be. This place where I find myself is much more complex than the crude drawings of my twenty year-old imagination. It’s a harder place, though more beautiful. It’s more complicated, but more rewarding. It isn’t exactly the future I had once hoped for, but I wouldn’t change it now. I suppose, though, all this is to be expected when you invite someone like God to take the wheel of your life. I still remember that moment.

It’s always hard to look at a period of your own life in retrospect and admit that, despite your own best efforts at the time, your were basically a miserable person. There’s a degree of self-knowledge and disclosure in that sort of statement that most of us would much rather just avoid, myself included. But as I think about my sophomore and junior years of college, I can’t help but concede the truth: I was miserable. It would even make for a better story if I could tell you that my misery was of the sort imposed by outside circumstances, but it wasn’t. Mine was a self-imposed, self-inflicted variety of misery and, as such, I was blind to it for a long time. I was functional enough; near the top of my class and a leader in my church and Christian fellowship. I was friendly enough; those people that I chose to open myself to became a large enough circle of friends to satisfy my reasonable social needs. But in the midst of all the activity and life going on around me, my heart was drying up. I was the center of my own universe, and the gravity was beginning to take its toll. It took a long time before I began to recognize that what trapped me in misery was the death-grip with which I was holding on to my dreams.

I had a vision of the future and, as vague as it may have been, I clung to it. There were the thoughts of a career path that would have been comfortable and personally satisfying. There was a girl who I wanted to marry. But the doors to that career never seemed to open fully, the girl couldn’t seem to convince herself to feel the same, and the tighter I clung, the more these things seemed to move out of reach. With all the will I could muster, I longed for my vision of the future to come to pass. My frustrations turned that will inward, and I began to shrink. And God? As far as I was concerned, I was glad to have God along for the ride, but as long as he failed to help me achieve my goals, I wasn’t sure what good it did me. As it turns out, God is a pretty crappy co-pilot.

Then, one day, through some eventual combination of compiled frustration, exhaustion and disappointment, I remember coming to the end of myself. It wasn’t an extraordinary day, and the disappointments therein were not in any way new, but my self-orbiting universe just imploded. I finally looked down at the white-knuckled fists that were clinging to my hopes and dreams, my visions of the future, and I realized that I was squeezing the life out of everything that I loved, and everything I was clinging to. It was February in Rhode Island, and in an abandoned lifeguard stand overlooking Narragansett Bay, I came face to face with my own misery. And in that moment, I heard the voice of God. It wasn’t audible, per se, so much as a moment of inescapable conviction, but the word was clear; “Open your hands.” So I did.

It was there in that moment that I understood for perhaps the first time that God could never be a mere companion on my journey; He was the orchestrator, the pilot and the guide. It could never be a matter of taking the plans of my self-centered universe to him for his token blessing; it was about His plans, His will, His centrality. I understood for the first time that I could not accept and cling to the gifts God had poured out on me, only to ignore His calling and His purposes in my life. Those gifts, and my hopes, had become my god, and they simply couldn’t carry the weight. So I opened my hands. I released my hold on my future. I held out all that I was, all that I had, and all that I would be, on open hands before God and said, “Take it. Take me. Do with me as you please. Send me wherever you will, because I can’t drive this thing, my life, anymore. It’s yours.”

Suffice it to say that I am not where I once thought I would be. But it’s better. It’s fuller. It’s more truly alive. Because, through my frustration one February day those years ago, Jesus saved me from myself, and for that I am forever grateful.