Jesus is the Where to My Why

Today I want to clear up some misconceptions. I have come to believe that one of the reasons people have a hard time coming to grips with God is because God is not living up to their expectations. And when God is not the God that they expect God to be, they go back to the old gods. The door to salvation may be thrown wide open but we have a propensity for trying to pull it shut again.

You think that sounds strange, but I’m right about this! In the letter to the Ephesians which we read this morning, the writer says, “God chose us in Jesus before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless in love. God chose us from before all time to be children of God for no good reason except the good pleasure of God’s will.” That sounds to me like God wants to throw the door wide open but to welcome people like you and me in.

But we can’t handle a God like this – a God who chooses us. Just who does this God think he is? This God of Ephesians sounds like a God of grace. You know what grace is? Unmerited love and acceptance. Love that comes our way even when we don’t deserve it and haven’t earned it. What kind of deal is that?

I run into people all the time who have rejected God and who don’t seek out the church because they assume that if God is really God and believes in justice that God will require them to be something different than they are in order to be accepted. God will require them to have their act together and to look perfect.

Or if God doesn’t require it, at least the church people will. Do you realize that there are people who won’t come to church because they think they have to dress a certain way or be of a certain economic class or have a spotless background? You might have had to overcome it yourself to get you in church. “Those people won’t accept me the way I am, so I’m not going to go.” Behind that is another notion: “If that’s the way God’s people act that must mean that God will not accept me the way that I am either.” Do you see how important this radical hospitality thing is?

So people will not come because they believe God is too strict and too judgmental to be able to handle who they are. And if they ever get passed all the obstacles to actually get to church and to hear Paul talking in Ephesians, they hear about this God who has chosen them from before the foundation of the world to find salvation and adoption through Jesus, and they say, “You’re not the God I rejected. So maybe you can’t be God at all.” Then they quote a little Groucho Marx who once resigned from a social club by saying, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me for a member.”[i]

People will reject the good news because they can’t believe they would be worthy enough to receive it. They will also reject it because they can’t believe that God won’t let them earn a spot in heaven. I mean, God has the ultimate prize and just wants to give it away! What kind of parenting is that? How will the children ever learn to be responsible if the parent is willing to give them something for nothing? God is supposed to be a taskmaster, right? Making sure that we toe the line? Not giving us the time of day until we straighten up?

Once again, though, God doesn’t live up to our expectations. The God that Ephesians talks about is a God who talks about our salvation in the past tense, as if it had been won for us long before we were even born. “In Christ,” the book says, “we have already obtained an inheritance.”

Wait a second! We were accepted by God before we were even born? Where is the sense in that? Isn’t that a risky thing to do? God accepted me without the promise that I would return that love? Did God know I was going to turn out to be such a mess? Did God know that I was going to have so many quirks and flaws? Did God know that I was going to fail in so many ways to live up to my potential? And God obtained an inheritance for me anyway? I don’t know that I want to accept salvation by a God who would do such a foolish thing.

So God is not living up to our expectations that God be uncompromising and that he do a little means-testing to see if we’ve earned our way in. But there’s another way that God is not living up to the expectations that many people in our world have for God. God is too inclusive.

The popular image out there is that Christians believe that holding onto Jesus is a way of shutting out the rest of the world. They believe that when we say things like, “Jesus is the Way,” we are putting down other people. We are building a safe, little wall around our community. We are condemning non-believers. In particular, there are many people who believe that every time we profess our faith in Christ we are saying that people who believe differently cannot be loved by God.

It is a real stumbling block for a society that wants to believe that love and salvation are inclusive. There are many people for whom the first question they have is, “What about people of other faiths? What about Jews and Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims? Am I cutting myself off from the world by professing that Jesus is Lord?”

So this time the misconception is that God is so exclusive that God cannot love those who do not call upon Jesus. But the message of Ephesians is just the opposite. It is because God has come in Jesus that we know that God wants all of the world to recognize their adoption. Jesus did not come to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved. The purpose of this whole Jesus business is to make clear the mystery. As Ephesians says, “God made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure which he set forth in him, unto the plan of the fullness of time to bring together all things in Christ – everything in the heavens and in the earth in him.”

God is bringing together all things in Christ. God’s not building walls. God is not standing around with a checklist to see whose names can be crossed off because they didn’t earn it. God is throwing open the door and it all becomes clear in Jesus. God is planning a great reunion and hoping that we will accept.

The creation knows what’s going on. The creeping things of the earth and the flying things of the air and the swimming things of the water – all the creatures of the earth know already who they are and they are just waiting for the humans to get it. “Maybe today,” the pelicans say as they fly along the coast. “Maybe today they’ll get it.”

“Maybe today,” the foxes say as they watch the lights in our houses in the dark of night. “Maybe today those humans will know who God really is and where this whole thing is headed.”

They know, I tell you. They know that God is not a sadistic ogre waiting for us to slip up but a lover who seeks us out to the ends of the earth. And, of course, God wants us to be “holy and blameless before God.” That’s part of what Ephesians says, too. But that is not a call to pride; it’s a call to being the people we were called to be. God does want us to do right and give up the things that keep us from God and to start growing in holiness, but that never stands in the way of God’s acceptance of us and pursuit of us. We can grow once we know that we are children.

I often think about my last year in seminary. Suzanne and I were living in a one-room efficiency apartment on the SMU campus in Dallas. Every night we had to move the sofa so we could pull the bed down out of the wall. That room was so small you could cook your breakfast while you were still sitting in the bed. And I did my studying at night in a closet so that I wouldn't keep Suzanne up. And we lived in the SMU apartments for four years.

That last year in seminary it all seemed to be coming together. I had just finished a year's internship in inner-city Dallas and I was coming back to school work with a purpose. I knew what I wanted to know and I jumped into my classes in a way I had never done before.

That year I was working in the seminary's audio-visual and copying department which was the perfect job for me. The A-V room was right on the main floor of the main building and it was sort of like the school's general store. Students and professors would stop by to chat and to have things run off. It was information central for anything going on on campus. And there was a lot of time, when the copier was running, when I could study. I usually came in to work with a ton of books.

Every afternoon Roberto would come by. Roberto was one of the custodians at the school and he only spoke Spanish, which was good for me because I needed to practice my Spanish, which was still pretty shaky, even though I had used it all through internship. It was also good because Roberto was a down-to-earth, even earthy kind of guy. He wasn't intimidated by this academic environment at all and I kind of got the feeling that he was often shaking his head in wonder at all the things we did.

So Roberto kept this fantastic year in perspective for me. It seemed like I always had my nose in a book when he came in. One day I remember he interrupted me to tell me a story. He was from a small town in Chihuahua, Mexico. He told this long story about a man in his village who was brilliant. He could speak and read seven different languages. He had the best library in the pueblo and he was always reading and thinking. Everyone in the town was in awe of him.

One day something happened. The man just snapped. All of a sudden he couldn't put a sentence together in any language. He spent his days wandering the streets raving like a madman. Having said that, Roberto left the room to continue his work. Who knows what his message was for me?

I didn't think too much more about that story. Fortunately my mind didn't snap then. Some folks say it's snapped since then, but I held it together through graduation. I graduated at the top of my class. There were several professors urging me to think about a PhD. It was all very heady stuff.

Beyond that I was beginning to think that I had it all figured out. There was a lot of mystery still about God, but I could talk about that mystery for a long time. I could define theological terms. I could tell you why I believed what I believed and who believed it before me and how I had improved what they'd believed. But I was headed for crisis.

That summer we stayed on campus while I did a unit of work as a chaplain at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. It's called Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE, and it's required of all ministers in the Virginia Conference now. What it was for me was a good healthy dose of reality.

Suddenly I was dealing with people on a daily basis who didn't care a lick for the papers I'd written at school. I was dealing with patients who needed a listening ear and a hand to hold and a faith to guide them. I was dealing with people who struggled, not with Karl Barth and Martin Luther, but with pain and illness and tragedy. And I was also dealing with weekly seminars where my supervising chaplains and the others in my CPE group would challenge me on everything I did. They didn't allow me any screens to hide behind and they didn't care how well I wrote or what I'd read.

Well, let me tell you, it was devastating. I got into a major fight with the head chaplain at the hospital and we almost had a major incident at the hospital cafeteria one day. I felt more picked apart and threatened than I ever had in my life. I really wondered if I was cut out for the ministry business.

One day in July, about two months after I had started at the hospital, I came home to our spacious quarters in the afternoon and I could not shake this feeling of being put upon and torn apart. I paced the apartment from one end to the other, which was about like turning around in place, and finally decided I need to get out. I went to the track and ran several miles hoping to run some of the frustration and failure away. Finally I came back to the steps of the seminary chapel and sat down, still not feeling much better.

That was when Roberto stopped by. He saw me sitting there and he just stopped. Didn't say anything for a few minutes. I felt like he was studying me to see what kind of condition I was in. I must have looked like a mess. Not only was I hot and sweaty, but I'm sure there were bags under my eyes from the lack of sleep and a general droopiness and depression.

Then Roberto told me another story. It was a long story and for about five minutes he gave me the benefit of his wonderful, earthy wisdom. He gave me great detail in this story. But he was speaking in Spanish and I was too distraught to pay attention and I have no idea what he said. But you know what? It didn't matter. Because Roberto's face and his presence and his tone of voice said something even without the words and that is what touched me.

On that day Roberto reminded me of who I was. He reminded me really of who I had always been. He had tried to remind me once before, but I was too caught up in the swirling world of academia. He reminded me that I was human. Because I was human I was going to stumble and fall and make mistakes. I was going to run up against people and situations that seemed to threaten all the achievements I thought I'd made. But God could use me anyway, just as God has always used broken vessels and outright failures.

Don’t get me wrong. God doesn’t want us to be failures. There is a lot God wants us to do. But God knows a lot about picking up people who feel like they are nobody’s and making them somebody’s. God is not going to live down to our expectations. God is going to keep drawing us into the mystery and showing us that God’s intention is shown clearly in Christ. It all comes together in Christ. All our ‘whys’ are answered with one ‘where.’ In Christ, we find the life we’ve been missing. And the world needs to know it. Thanks be to God.

Ephesians 1:3-14

Blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one blessing us in every spiritual blessing in heaven in Christ, just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world to be ourselves holy and blameless before him in love, predestining us into childship through Jesus Christ unto him according to the good pleasure of his will, unto the praise of the glory of his grace with which he graced us in the Beloved.

In this one we have redemption through his blood, forgiveness of trespasses according to the wealth of his grace which he poured out in abundance on us in every wisdom and understanding. God made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure which he set forth in him, unto the plan of the fullness of time to bring together all things in Christ – everything in the heavens and in the earth in him.

In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God's own people, to the praise of his glory.

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[i] http://www.16-9.dk/2007-02/side11_inenglish.htm.

Unspeakable Journeys

I can’t really describe to you what I felt yesterday at the Franktown picnic. Every year on the 4^th of July the residents of downtown Franktown gather for a picnic and this year we were at the Sniders’ house just down the way here. There were hot dogs and potato salad and somebody slipped some vegetables in there. Great food.

Then there was this moment. I was sitting there talking to Harry Crandall, who was all decked out in red, white and blue. A few minutes before he had offered up this wonderful prayer where he gave thanks to God for this company, this food and this free land. Just hearing him say that made me tear up a bit, despite myself. We were there talking and I noticed over his shoulder that the kids had started playing croquet under the shade of those huge oak trees in front of the Sniders. And behind them I could see an American flag hanging on the telephone pole on the street blowing in the breeze. Beyond that was a cornfield in Philip Bernard’s lot with the stalks tasseling and looking a vibrant green.

I try not to be too sentimental but, you know, it was beyond words what I felt there. America, with all of its ideals, really existed right there for a minute. Norman Rockwell should have been there to paint it.

When you get beyond words you are heading for something that feels like truth. Think of the times when you’ve been left speechless. The birth of a child. In the presence of your first love. Watching a thunderstorm move across the bay. Seeing the peak of a great, tall mountain. At such moments you know that you are in the presence of something profound.

“I know a man,” the apostle Paul says. “I know a man in Christ, who, fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was actually in his body or not, I can’t say. Only God knows.”

This is how Paul introduces the passage from 2 Corinthians today. I’m pretty sure the man he’s talking about is himself. But he’s describing an experience for him that was so unusual and dramatically different from his normal life that he might as well be talking about someone altogether different.

To be caught up to the third heaven is a way of saying that Paul was taken up into the very presence of God. The ancient Hebrews envisioned the earth in such a way that there were three levels above us. Because God had separated the firmaments to create space for the land and for life, above us was sky – the first heavens, and above that the waters of the second heaven, and above that the realm of God’s fullness – a third heaven.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “That’s not how it really is! They taught me differently in astronomy class. There’s atmosphere and stratosphere and deep space beyond.” But Paul was talking with the structures he knew and if you ask me there is something beautiful in the image of a world between waters surrounded by the presence of God. It reminds me of the space that is created within the body of an expectant mother for life to grow. A space between waters surrounded by nurture and strength.

The third heaven, then, is the language Paul has for this place beyond. The other name he has for this is Paradise – a place where the harmony God intends for all creation is made real. A place like the place we humans knew when we were fresh-made from the mud of the garden of Eden. A place like Jesus promised the repentant thief when they were both being crucified. “Today,” Jesus said, “you will be in Paradise with me.” Paradise is the place where see Jesus and know Jesus and feel the presence of God.

“In this place,” Paul says, “this man heard inexpressible words which a person cannot speak.” Something beyond language. It’s not that Paul can’t speak the words because he has been forbidden to speak them or because they are too hard for him to say. Paul can’t speak about this journey to the third heaven because what he has heard and seen breaks every category of thought and language that he has known.

There’s a word for this experience – it’s rapture. Not like the rapture that they talk about in books like Left Behind, but the root of the word is the same. It means to be caught up and when we are caught up in a direct experience of God it is something that blows our minds and alters our reality. You can’t live in a state of rapture. Because of our finiteness and our limitations as humans we will always fall back into the world of language and reason. But once we are granted a glimpse of a God-filled world, it’s hard to forget that we are surrounded by glory.

The early church leader Augustine of Hippo, whom I’m prone to quoting, has an account of an experience of rapture in his most famous book Confessions. As he was headed to the coast near Rome, returning to Africa with his ailing mother, they stopped at the town of Ostia on the Tiber River. His mother was near death and yet she was very happy because her son, Augustine, had finally become a Christian after a long time of debauchery and exploration.

They were wondering what life among the saints was going to be like and they suddenly had an experience that gave them a glimpse of heaven. “We proceeded step by step through all material things, even the heavens, from which sun, moon, and stars brighten the earth.” On and on they go beyond speech and thought to eternity. “And while we speak of this,” Augustine says, “and yearn toward it, we barely touch it in a quick shudder of the heart. Then we sighed our way back down…into the sounds of our own words which proceed in time from their beginnings to their ends.”[i]

Then Augustine begins to reflect on what they had experienced and he wonders if they had touched something “in a quick shudder of the heart” that was so great and so magnificent that nothing in this life could match it. If you had that experience of rapture would you ever want to come back?

Augustine asks: If all the things of this world which speak to us “were to fall silent, silent all shapes of earth, sea, air; silent the celestial poles; silent the soul, moving (oblivious of self) beyond the self; silent, as well all dreams and internal visions, all words and other signs, silent everything that passes away, all those things that say, if one listens, “We did not make ourselves, he made us who never passes away;” if, after saying this, they too were silent, leaving us alert to hear the One who made them; and if He should speak, no longer through them but by himself, for us to hear his word…if this were to continue, all lesser visions falling away before it, so that this alone held the universe in its grip…and eternal life resembled this moment of wisdom that we sigh to be losing—would that not be what is meant by the words, ‘Enter the joy of your God’?—a joy that will be ours, when?—only when ‘all rise (though not all are changed).’”[ii]

What a wonderful thing that would be…to be able to see through the brokenness of this world to hear God’s voice directly! It’s no wonder that Augustine saw that moment as a great gift to him and his mother. It’s no wonder that fourteen years on that same sort of experience was so fresh to Paul that he struggled with remaining in the flesh. He wanted to dwell in that place beyond words.

Instead, Paul got the Corinthians--this quarrelsome, disobedient, conflicted group of Christians who were constantly questioning his credentials as an apostle. This group that were getting on his last nerve. And how could he use this mystical experience in the third heaven to convince them of his connection to God? He couldn’t. He wanted to boast on behalf of that Paul who went to Paradise, but instead he had to be the Paul who put up with the problem children of Corinth.

To top it off, he was also given a wound. “So that I would not get too high and mighty, an angel of Satan gave me a thorn in the flesh,” Paul says. What was it? We don’t know. Bible scholars have speculated for centuries. The early Church leader Tertullian thought it might be a pain in the ear or head. Others have said that maybe it was lust or stammering speech. Maybe an eye problem brought on by his blinding on the Damascus road. Maybe it was the people who opposed and persecuted him. I even found a scientific abstract that suggested it was a “visual migraine aura with the additional symptoms of…photophobia and anorexia.”[iii]

I’ll add to the speculation. I think the thorn in Paul’s flesh was his flesh. Paul talks about the flesh in a negative way in many of his letters and he talks in 2 Corinthians about the struggle he feels in remaining in the flesh. His rapturous experience left him longing to be with God and he began to despise the weaknesses and infirmities he felt in having to remain embodied.

He tells us that he asked God three times to take away this wound but God responded by saying, “My grace is sufficient for you, because my power is brought to its proper end in weakness.” And it seems to me that the whole passage turns on this phrase. God does not want Paul or any of us to despise our weakness, to think that we’d be better off somehow, that we’d be better servants somehow if we got rid of our weaknesses. It is in our weaknesses, in our bodies, in our difficulties and struggles and our stammering attempts to put God’s love into word and deed that the power of Christ can take up a home in us. And when we claim those things about ourselves we begin to realize that the love of Christ is meant to be incarnate, just like Jesus himself. The love of God does not despise the flesh. The love and power of God are shown through the flesh. This is the lesson Paul has learned through his suffering and maybe even through the things he is not able to do.

The theologian John Swinton tells the story of a course he was teaching through the University of Aberdeen in Scotland for people with disabilities. As part of the course, class members were sharing stories of their spiritual experiences. A young woman named Angela, who was deaf, was sharing a dream she had about meeting Jesus in heaven. “Jesus was everything I hoped he would be,” she said. “And his signing was amazing!” There was no expectation that heaven for her would mean losing her disability. In heaven it was the norm. Her ‘weakness’ was shared by Jesus himself.[iv]

So what’s the excuse you’re using? Where do you find yourself saying, “I would serve God better if it weren’t for…I would have more to offer the world if it weren’t for…I would be a good Christian if only this thing wasn’t plaguing me”? The truth is that the Jesus way is not meant to be an otherworldly thing for otherworldly people; it’s mean to be a this worldly thing for this worldly people – people who are messy and messed up and who have bad family histories and bad personal histories and who aren’t perfect and aren’t just right and haven’t got all the loose ends tied up and all the i’s dotted and all the t’s crossed. But people who have had their lives turned upside down by Jesus and who want to offer their imperfect lives in service to their savior.

You think God can’t use imperfect people? Just look at David, the boy turned king who got intoxicated by his power. Just look at Esther the beauty queen who was goaded into action by her relative Mordecai to save the Jewish people. Just look at Peter, the passionate disciple who spoke before he thought and denied Jesus three times before becoming the leader of Jesus’ church. You don’t think God can use weakness? Just look at the cross and see if the savior who came to live among God’s people doesn’t look like every other dying criminal being executed on the hillside that day.

We’ve had people in our own congregation who have spoken powerfully to us through their lives and they did it through what some would call disabilities. Barbara Tankard in her struggles with cancer with her deep joy. Stephen before her. Christian and Cristina who did not let physical limitations like the lack of a limb keep them from being bright lights among us. And who would we be today as a Church without our Arc Angels?

We all have limitations and we imagine what it would be like if we could just be over them…if we could just shed them for some unspeakable journey to the heart of God. But the message from Paul today is that our weaknesses are part of that journey to God and we can discover the life God intends by leaning into them and offering them to God so that Christ can dwell within us richly. Thanks be to God.

2 Corinthians 2:2-10

I know a man in Christ who, fourteen years ago - whether in the body of outside the body I know not, God knows - was raptured to the third heaven. I know that this man - whether in the body or outside the body I know not, God knows - was raptured into Paradise and he heard inexpressible words which a person cannot speak.

On behalf of such a man I will boast, yet not on my behalf except about my weakness. If I wanted to boast I would not be foolish because I speak the truth. But I refrain from this so that no one will think more of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional revelations. And, so that I would not rise too high, an angel of Satan gave me a thorn in my very embodiedness so that it would wound me and I would not rise too high.

Because of this, three times I called on the Lord that this should fall away from me. And he said to me, "My grace suffices for you, for my power is brought to its proper end in weakness."

Therefore, I boast gladly in my weakness so that the power of Christ can take up a home in me. So I am content in weakness, in insult, in distress, in persecution, in difficulties, on behalf of Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

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[i] Augustine, Confesssions, 9.4.24, trans. by Garry Wills, [Penguin Books: New York, 2006], pp. 200-201.

[ii] Ibid., 9.4.25, p. 201.

[iii] “Headache Classification and the Bible: Was St. Paul’s thorn in flesh migraine?”, Wiley InterScience, http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119248782/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0.

[iv] John Swinton, introduction to the book by Stanley Hauerwas & Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World, [Intervarsity Press: Downers Grove, IL, 2008], p. 13.