Sometimes God Scares Me Spitless

After I first started following Christ, circa 1972, I devoured the Bible. I loved it; I needed it. The stories about Jesus especially gave me hope. He was so self-assured, kind, smart, unflappable--all the things I didn’t feel I was. The way he treated the underdogs with respect, dignity, and love let me know he would treat me likewise.

Not to mention the miracles and all the other amazing stuff he did and said. Jesus made me feel good. I couldn’t get enough and toted my Bible everywhere I went.

But after a time certain parts bothered me. For example the story of Ananias and Sapphira dying after lying to Peter and God about how much of their money they donated from the sale their property scared me spitless. I mean I was--and still am--far from perfect. What would stop God from just taking me out? I probably deserved it.

How do we deal with the Bible stories about God we are uncomfortable with, don’t like, or that scare us spitless?

For a time I ignored them and only paid attention to the sections that made me feel good.

In seminary, though, I had to face these ugly pictures of God and humans. It is in seminary also, however, I learned to reason the difficult passages away.

One branch of scholarship simply decided that the parts of the Bible they were uncomfortable with were not inspired by God but made up by humans. The trouble with this, as you probably know, is that more of the Bible is harsh than sweet and, in the end, this group began to call the whole book myth.

The opposite branch cried foul to that but developed a whole series of complicated systematic theologies to explain many of these problem passages. Some of these explanations made sense, some did not. I agree with many of them. But they are often convoluted and too complex.

Slowly I’ve come to see that maybe the problem is not with God or the Bible, but with me. My view of God is askew. And coming up with ways to validate my perspective on life and God only puts more distance between God and me. I have begun to believe maybe God holds more in his hand for me (and all of creation) than me feeling good.

If God’s top priority is other than making me feel good or be happy, then maybe it’s okay to be uncomfortable, not like, and be scared spitless by certain parts of the Bible and God. Maybe I’m supposed to feel that way and not know all the answers.

It seems to me God does not view pain, death, and even life the same way we do. Are they to God as splinters and knee scrapes are to parents of young children? We care but know they are not the end of the world.

Somehow I’m beginning to see how God, with his vast view of eternity, knows that seventy to eighty years (more or less) of life containing a mixed bag of pain and joy that ends in death is only a blink of his eternal eye. Beyond that blink lies much more than we can think or imagine.

Should I be scared that God let Ananias and Sapphira die because of their lies? Sure enough. God is not safe. But God is so good that he will not let what happens to us in this broken world to define him or us, because there is so much more in store.

The Bible Versus Reality TV

The Bible records more murder, mayhem, sadness, and disgusting human behavior than an entire season of Desperate Housewives. Quentin Tarantino has nothing on this violent disturbing book. To me this is rather confusing. Wouldn’t more people like the Bible and maybe even believe in God if the Bible were more like those sweet, uplifting Chicken Soup for the Soul books or an episode of Barney?

Take Judges 21 for example. In the Book of Judges a bunch of guys need wives and so slaughter every person in another town except the virgins. Then in the Book of Ruth everyone but the two women die in the first paragraph. Wow.

Sometimes I just want to read the sections that tell about Jesus holding children on his lap and healing blind people.

So, why did God let all this awful stuff find its way into the Bible?

Reality TV is not real. If that spoils it for you, I apologize. Obviously there are elements of these shows that are real. The competition, the ups and downs of relationships, the tears and laughter are true elements of life. But in the name of entertainment the producers and directors carefully craft what we see, manipulating situations and splicing scenes, and therefore producing an hour of TV that is anything but real. The producers keep the show just dangerous enough to be exciting but safe enough so they don’t get sued.

Is that what we expect of God and the Bible? That he direct and produce, manipulate and splice life so that it’s safe but exciting?

Maybe that’s why we get so uncomfortable with the violent, painful sections of Scripture. They are bold, gritty, ugly, real, not sanitized. And God rarely gives a narrated voice over to explain why he would let such things happen. Just like real life.

And when I am being real, I appreciate these sometimes incomprehensible sections of the Bible more than reality TV because they let me know God will be there for me even when my heart and life is at its ugliest.

Eugene
P.S. This was first written for and adapted from www.bibleconversation.com

The Plight of Homeless Christians

In 1977 I was homeless. So, disgusted with city-life, I high-tailed it for the mountains and pitched my tiny orange tent in Cottonwood Lake Campground. I dropped out and spent my days hiking, trout fishing, and reading Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” Waking as the tent heated from the morning sun and falling asleep with a billion stars shining as my nightlight was freedom defined.

Occasionally my camp-mate and I drove his Plymouth Belvedere to my cousin’s house on Trout Creek. There we sat in stiff wooden chairs around her kitchen table and ate and talked and laughed with incense burning and Pink Floyd playing in the background. Inside her walls lived a different kind of freedom: the freedom of belonging. Her screen door slammed shut on a fearsome loneliness. The summer wore on. We visited my cousin’s home, our home away from homelessness, more frequently.

I was a young, immature, follower of Christ in 1977. I knew less than nothing about God and life. I had no idea that what we were doing around my cousin’s kitchen table was oddly church-like. We sang no hymns, passed no offering plate, and followed no liturgy. We broke bread; we gave thanks; we encouraged one another; we loved one another. We had a sacred fellowship. And God was there, though not invoked, yet gentle, invisible, insistent. God surfaced in nearly every conversation, hung around in every corner.

Everyone needs a place to belong: a community to talk, laugh, cry, and encounter God with.

In 2008 I became a homeless Christian, without a gathered Christian community to encounter God with. At first, like in the summer of 1977, the freedom was exhilarating. Did you know people sleep in, read the comics, and freely hang out in coffee shops on Sunday mornings? Suddenly Sundays became Sabbath, relaxed and unpressurized.

Eventually though, reading the funnies, or even the Bible, in my boxers lost its appeal. I missed the intellectual, social, and spiritual stimulation present in a gathered Christian community. I yearned for encountering God in music, sermons, ancient and modern rites, and most of all, other people. I did not miss, however, the politics, the griping, or the massive weight of trying to speak honestly for God.

While homeless, my spiritual life resembled a slowly receding tide, leaving bleached, empty shells of faith on the beach. My faith became a distant, powerless belief system rather than a vibrant way of life. Now months later, surrounded by a grace-filled Christian community, God is rebuilding my soul.

I am not the only one to experience spiritual homelessness. Disgusted with the real and perceived hypocrisy, ritual, dogma, judgementalism, and general irrelevance of what we now call church, many followers of Christ have dropped out and pitched a tent in their own backyards hoping for the best. Researchers claim only about 20% of Americans attend church. While three quarters of American adults call themselves Christian.

A sizable majority of Christians are homeless, without a gathered community to belong to. You may be one.

The problem is God designed life to be lived with-in a caring, serving, worshiping community called church. Unlike bowling, Christianity is not an individualistic sport. God most often shows up in the spaces (interactions) between people and the more distant those spaces the smaller the interaction and the easier it is to lose sight of God. God loves us as individuals but calls us to live in community. “Let’s see how inventive we can be in encouraging one another, not avoiding worshiping together as some do but spurring each other on . . . .” Hebrews 10:24-25, The Message.

This question is not whether one “can be a Christian while never ‘going’ to church.” Church is a family, if often a dysfunctional one. You may go to your family’s house, but you don’t “go to” family. You are family. You are the church. In Christ we have been adopted and are a part of a family whether we are estranged—homeless—or not. And just as being estranged from our biological families has far-reaching effects, so too, does being estranged from our spiritual families. The plight of homeless Christians is serious and debilitating to us as individuals and to us as the church.

Often it is not laziness or apostasy that keeps us homeless. Very real fear, pain, and past disappointments keep many of us from belonging to a faith family. Jesus knows our pain and estrangement. The Prodigal Son is not just a story about forgiveness, but also about coming home to God and family, pouty older brother and all. Reconnecting is a fearful prospect, I know. But know also that God is waiting for your return and will kill the fatted calf when you do. We might even put on some Pink Floyd.

Making God’s Top Ten List

At year’s end newspapers and magazines often publish top ten lists containing what they deem the most significant happenings of the past twelve months. They serve as reminders of what we have just navigated and also reflections of what that author, if not our culture, values. This year’s compilations included the typical earth-shattering events:

• Barack Obama, a gifted young man, is elected President.
• Paul Newman, a gifted old man, passes away.
• Wall Street, seemingly the lifeblood of our economy, flounders.
• Mike Shanahan, coach of the Denver Broncos, is fired.

What if God published such a list? Would it reflect the same priorities? Or would it recognize events we don’t? What if God’s list looked more like this?

• Dennis, a very important and busy businessman, does nothing.
• Brett shares the remote control helicopter he received for Christmas with his younger sister.
• Gladys, an elderly woman living on a small pension, puts $1 in the Salvation Army kettle.
• Mary looses her job, and only source of income, and is not fearful.
• Kevin accepts God’s view of him.
• The Smiths grieve the loss of their mother and sit together in loving silence.
• Cheryl turns to the person behind her in line and smiles.
• Jared asks God to be his friend.
• Abdul prays for the peace of Christ in his war-torn country.
• Robert James is born and breathes his first breath.
• Tony and Marie forgive one another and remain married.
• Daryl reads a good novel.
• Rhonda and Clay kiss.
• George faces the end of his long life with open eyes and heart.
• Cassie offers a neighbor a cool drink of water and some shade.
• Christmas arrives again.

I wonder. Or, because of my blurred, earth-bound perspective, have I missed too? Now we see through a glass darkly, Scripture says. Jesus never seemed to focus on the “big story” of the Roman world but rather on the “little things” in the people around him. The first shall be last and the last first, he said.

Still, I occasionally find myself dreaming of doing something that would land me on one of those earthly top ten lists, "Time Magazine’s Man of the Year." There are those days, though, where simply getting out of bed and facing another day feels astronomically monumental. And other days when my plans and actions of reaching for the moon go unnoticed. Those are the times it’s heartening that God seems to notice the ordinary with the same eyes he sees the extraordinary. Faith pleases God, we’re told. Reality is I spend most of my days with only a mustard seed of faith in my pocket. Too often I can’t even find that among the lint. But maybe, just maybe that’s enough to make God's list.

Kids, Eye Glasses, Skateboards, Snakes, and God

I once accompanied a nine year-old boy on a search for his lost glasses. I did it out of duty. And I held no real hope of finding them. I went only to quell my guilt for not searching when we would inevitably go purchase another pair. Plus this particular nine year-old is a delight and even searching for a needle in a haystack with him could be fun.

We parked my truck near the place he remembered last having his glasses—a walking path snaking through our small community and landscaped with large river rocks. He had been at the new skateboard park and I reckoned we had about three quarters of a mile of path to search from here to there. I knew the path well and was naively picturing the most likely places to search. The boy had followed no such direct route, however, instead following the more fun and loopy nine year-old course.

First, we searched the bushes around every rock he had climbed and launched himself off. Next we veered off the path and hunted around a statue of a flying horse he had investigated. Then we left the path altogether and cut diagonally through a parking lot. But even that was not direct. He showed me the sidewalk railing he had climbed over, climbed over it again, and then cut behind the dumpster and finally sauntered through the restaurant, again. It was truly random! Back on the path we peered under every weed in the spot he had stopped to chase a garter snake. He had bent over there and thought that might be the point his glasses slid off, though he couldn’t really remember. Here I engaged in the search earnestly agreeing it was the most likely place. But we came up empty and continued by scouring every dink and dodge he took off the path until we finally reached the skate park.

All the while, we had a fun conversation about snakes and any other stuff that came up. This was definitely not a mathematically precise power walk or even a systematic search. I observed he didn’t so much walk as bounce, light and airy with his feet only touching the ground for the fun of it. I learned the names of various skateboard moves and saw the familiar, I thought, walking path for the first time. We spooked another garter snake and marveled at how fast they are. We talked about likely fishing holes as we walked near the river. We wondered what fun things we could do with the $70 to $100 his new glasses would cost to replace, if we found his old ones. Reversing the Apostle Paul’s meaning “I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child” and I enjoyed every moment of it. Being a nine year-old ain’t so bad.

Maybe that’s what Jesus meant when he called the children onto his lap and told his adult followers to have a child-like faith. Maybe the “kingdom of heaven,” as Jesus talked about it and lived it, is more than a “straight and narrow path” defined by rules and time lines and well defined adult perceptions and ideas. What if the freedom Jesus promised his followers is better illustrated (and lived!) by a young boy turning his search for his glasses into another adventure? What if our pursuit of meaning—and Jesus himself—sometimes became a fun and loopy path? These things I pondered on the way back home.

But I had pretty much given up the search. After all, I had begun the search thinking I would not find what I was looking for (to paraphrase Bono). I would look down at the ground occasionally just because I should. Nearing my truck, I guiltily glanced down again and to my utter disbelief spied my nine year-old companion’s glasses sitting in the landscaping bark neatly folded as if someone had purposefully placed them there.

The nine year-old squealed; his face beamed; we high fived. We danced around as if we had found Jesus’ “pearl of great price.”

“I was just praying we’d find ‘em,” he said. “Jesus dropped ‘em right where you were lookin’.” Immediately my adult mind found a more plausible explanation for how the glasses ended up neatly folded where we had already searched. I wish it hadn’t.

God Sightings in the Gilcrease Museum

Get me within one hundred miles of Tulsa, OK and I get the shakes: an irresistible urge to visit the Gilcrease Museum.  I exaggerate not; just ask my family and any one of my million friends.  The Gilcrease is one of the finest western art museums in America, featuring Thomas Moran, Charles Russell, Frederick Remington, and others.  Besides it's free.

I especially appreciate Remington because even I understand his art.  Okay, I can't honestly claim to understand it, but I like it.  His art depicts stories I can imagine myself in.  For example, when standing in front of his sculpture of four cowboys firing their pistols, riding on wild-eyed ponies "Coming through the Rye," I find myself flinching, trying to duck out of the way of the thundering hooves.  I also realize Remington is inspiring me to tell my own story.

I'm not the only one.  Larry McMurtry also borrowed inspiration from Remington in the Gilcrease.  Remington's stop-action painting titled "Stampede" seems to show up in McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning western Lonesome Dove.  "Stampede" pictures a drenched cowboy in leather chaps racing his terrified horse alongside a panicked cattle herd.  Rain streaks the gray sky as lightning cracks behind them like a whip in the hand of God.  In Lonesome Dove Newt and the gang are chased across the prairie in a beautifully similar fashion.

I also find the Gilcrease irresistible because it has inspired in me a desire to know the artists themselves.  I am drawn into Remington's stories in art but also into Remington's own story.  I devoured a biography on him, finding in those pages a man gloriously obsessed with authenticity in every detail.  Remington is credited with changing how artists painted horses and other animals because he studied them in motion and accurately depicted them in art.  He even burned a pile of his own art in his back yard that did not measure up to his exacting standards. Each time I visit the Gilcrease, I find myself wanting to know more about this gifted, creative, intelligent man who could tell such enticing stories through color and clay.

An ancient poet once experienced a similar draw to another Artist:

"For you, Lord, have made me glad through your work;

I will triumph in the works of your hands.

O Lord, how great are your works!

Your thoughts are very deep."

At the Gilcrease, I too began to glimpse God's picture, a deeper portrait of life that inspired me to live my story in authenticity.  Now when standing in awe in a golden grove of aspen or among a snowflake-diverse group of people, I am drawn into a Story bigger than myself.  I dream; I listen; I am inspired.  I turn again and again to that strange biography about this Creative Genius who could work such wonder with color and clay.

The Gilcrease reminds me that all of life is an art gallery in which God, the ultimate Artist, draws us into the Story that inspires all others.  So, I deeply desire to live out the authentic story painted for me by the Artist of Life.  And maybe, like seeing Remington's masterful "Stampede" in McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, by God's grace, someone may glimpse God's story in mine.

That's what God Sightings are all about: seeing the Artist in the art.  God may not always speak through a burning bush, passionate prophet, or whispering wind.  But God is not silent.  Our task is to stand in the gallery and see and hear and know the Creator of our souls: to see God.

I hope these words, my meager art, such as they are, help.