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.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Ready for Honesty on God's Wish for Peace?
A letter this week to online subscribers of Sojourners Magazine begins with this scripture:
"Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." –Isaiah 2:4
Sojourners is edited by Jim Wallis, one of the leading voices for sanity and honesty in the Christian community. So let’s declare Jim Wallis Day and join him in a moment of honesty: Our scriptures demand peace and to pretend they mean some future time when the world is less dangerous is fundamentally dishonest. It’s been almost three thousand years since Isaiah wrote. If the time of peace hasn’t come yet then I guess it never will, unless of course, we make it come.
Wallis and Sojourners are also voices for common sense, but voices crying in the wilderness. It should be obvious that who we are comes from what we do. To claim we are people of peace while making war defies reason. Can a drug user call himself clean because he intends to quit right after his latest fix? Drug addicts use drugs, war makers make war.
The Sojourners letter goes on to state:
America, Iran, and Israel have been playing war games this summer: Showing off warships in the Persian Gulf, launching missiles, and testing aerial maneuvers – it is like watching a bad game of one-gunmanship.
But it’s not a game. Once again, the talk of military action against Iran has reached a fever pitch, with demonstrations of force on all sides. But this saber-rattling is a dead-end street for the United States and the Middle East.
The letter suggests we contact our government representatives and tell them how we feel. I’m all for that, but I doubt it will do any good. The bias for using military power and threats of annihilation as foreign policy is so deeply entrenched in our culture that it has now infected our latest prophet of change, Barack Obama.
Embedded in the nebulous promise of change which drew so many young people to Obama was the promise we would no longer divide the world into demons and angels, casting ourselves as angels wielding swords of justice. That promise was the implicit bigger picture in his call to end the war in Iraq. But now Obama finds himself so overwhelmed by our national compulsion for military solutions and self-righteousness that he could never endorse a statement condemning “America, Iran, and Israel” equally. The media would annihilate him.
Many believe improving prospects in Iraq take the war off the table in the campaign. But how the war started remains the more important issue, not whether it may finally end well. If you don’t believe it was a mistake to choose war over diplomacy, then you are likely to make the mistake again.
Three thousand years ago we heard God’s will spoken through the prophet Isaiah: God’s way is the way of peace. If we don’t walk it, how can we declare ourselves clean of our addictions?
To read the message from Sojourners click or paste the link below:
http://go.sojo.net/nd.html?r=LdSN2bnqkihd&n=27897552
"Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." –Isaiah 2:4
Sojourners is edited by Jim Wallis, one of the leading voices for sanity and honesty in the Christian community. So let’s declare Jim Wallis Day and join him in a moment of honesty: Our scriptures demand peace and to pretend they mean some future time when the world is less dangerous is fundamentally dishonest. It’s been almost three thousand years since Isaiah wrote. If the time of peace hasn’t come yet then I guess it never will, unless of course, we make it come.
Wallis and Sojourners are also voices for common sense, but voices crying in the wilderness. It should be obvious that who we are comes from what we do. To claim we are people of peace while making war defies reason. Can a drug user call himself clean because he intends to quit right after his latest fix? Drug addicts use drugs, war makers make war.
The Sojourners letter goes on to state:
America, Iran, and Israel have been playing war games this summer: Showing off warships in the Persian Gulf, launching missiles, and testing aerial maneuvers – it is like watching a bad game of one-gunmanship.
But it’s not a game. Once again, the talk of military action against Iran has reached a fever pitch, with demonstrations of force on all sides. But this saber-rattling is a dead-end street for the United States and the Middle East.
The letter suggests we contact our government representatives and tell them how we feel. I’m all for that, but I doubt it will do any good. The bias for using military power and threats of annihilation as foreign policy is so deeply entrenched in our culture that it has now infected our latest prophet of change, Barack Obama.
Embedded in the nebulous promise of change which drew so many young people to Obama was the promise we would no longer divide the world into demons and angels, casting ourselves as angels wielding swords of justice. That promise was the implicit bigger picture in his call to end the war in Iraq. But now Obama finds himself so overwhelmed by our national compulsion for military solutions and self-righteousness that he could never endorse a statement condemning “America, Iran, and Israel” equally. The media would annihilate him.
Many believe improving prospects in Iraq take the war off the table in the campaign. But how the war started remains the more important issue, not whether it may finally end well. If you don’t believe it was a mistake to choose war over diplomacy, then you are likely to make the mistake again.
Three thousand years ago we heard God’s will spoken through the prophet Isaiah: God’s way is the way of peace. If we don’t walk it, how can we declare ourselves clean of our addictions?
To read the message from Sojourners click or paste the link below:
http://go.sojo.net/nd.html?r=LdSN2bnqkihd&n=27897552
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