Looking for a Door? God's Got One for You

If you’ve ever tried to explain the Trinity to someone accustomed to seeing God as three distinct “persons,” you may understand why Jesus taught mostly through imagery. Unlike Paul, Jesus avoided getting mired in details of theology. Read Jesus’ words and it becomes clear he intended his listeners to shape God’s story into something that made sense to them. Early Christian teachers knew this, which is why they stole the winter solstice from the Romans and called it Christmas, and turned Druid worship of trees into our most prominent symbol of Christ’s birth.

I remember a wonderful woman in a Disciples class who lashed out at me because I said her picture of the Trinity as three individual Gods amounted to something like the Greek deities of Olympus. In her mind there was no conflict between her scheme and monotheism. So I shut up and apologized.

The more I taught people about God, the more I learned from them. It led me an analogy with that familiar theory on methods of learning: Some learn by seeing, some by hearing, others by touching. Actually, most of us learn by a mixture of the three with certain methods being stronger in each individual than the others. A good teacher discovers which styles dominate in each student and caters to them. A bad teacher says this is how I do it, you adjust.

The same is true I think of helping people find their door to spiritual enlightenment. Many of us grew up with a top-down style of believing in which some authority figure dictates what to believe. But I’m convinced Jesus wants us to participate in discovering God’s presence for ourselves. If that wasn’t so, why did he tell us to seek and knock instead of just saying, “this is what you need to do?” And why would he describe God’s realm in terms of parables instead of just giving us hard facts?

A few years ago, even as I was feeling the spirit more powerfully in my own life, I mistakenly thought I could advise others on how and where to find those doors Jesus told us to seek. But my list of doors kept growing until finally I realized that for all who seek and knock God would provide a door to fit their needs. If I hadn’t let myself get carried away with my own sense of revealed truth I would have noticed right away what Jesus had made clear. “Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will open,” he said. It’s that simple. To seek and to knock are enough by themselves. We don’t need to put in words what is on the other side of the door; seeking by itself guarantees we will find it.

Following that same path, I came to understand how simple Jesus’ message is if we stick to the heart of it. He says that seeking a way to the healing waters of God’s will is more important than knowing where the journey ends, and hungering and thirsting for righteousness is an end in itself. Being righteous -- or thinking you are -- means you‘ll quit seeking.

All of this falls in line with our fickle nature and how Grace is God’s way of giving us a pass into heaven’s realm. God’s intentions are rock solid and always play out as planned. Ours, on the other hand, are distinctly human. We often don’t arrive where we mean to go. But God accepts our good intentions as success. To seek and knock, to hunger and thirst is good enough. I can’t explain how that works, just like I couldn’t explain the mystery of the Trinity. Maybe the seeking keeps us so busy we don’t have time to get in trouble. That’s just a guess. But as the old classroom saying goes, God gives us an “A” for effort.