what you believe

I’ve been thinking about violence a lot lately. Not really a topic I enjoy thinking about, but I’ve been pondering it anyway. I hesitate to even bring it up in this forum, to be honest with you. I really don’t want to get into anything that even remotely resembles political commentary here.

But the thing is, the topic of violence and its possible application isn’t a political topic at all. Hang with me here—it’s really a question of belief.

What is the most powerful human action? Is it violent intervention or is it love? “God is love,” James tells us (4:8) and the apostle Paul says that Jesus’ moment of triumph was his moment of sacrifice: “He canceled the record that contained the charges against us. He took it and destroyed it by nailing it to Christ's cross. In this way, God disarmed the evil rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by his victory over them on the cross of Christ,” (Colossians 2:14-15). Sure, the New Testament also pictures Jesus as a warrior king (in Revelation), but you’d be hard pressed to make any solid theological argument that this is the dominant picture of the Good Shepherd.

Over and over again, scripture speaks of the power of God’s love—from the Psalms to the prophets right on into the writings of Paul. It is God’s “steadfast love”, not God’s military might, that is so impressive and so alluring. Yes, he is powerful and he can be destructive, but it is his grace and mercy that not only pull us toward him but also change us in the process.

We don’t end up living out the transformation Paul talks about in Romans 12:1-2 because God scares the hell out of us but because we begin to understand that “nothing can ever separate us from his love. Death can't, and life can't. The angels can't, and the demons can't. Our fears for today, our worries about tomorrow, and even the powers of hell can't keep God's love away. Whether we are high above the sky or in the deepest ocean, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord,” (Romans 8:38-39).

Indeed, nothing is more powerful than love.

If you believe that, and it is a question of belief, then you cannot support violent action as a solution to any serious problem, if for no other reason than this—it simply isn’t the strongest possible response.

The world is aching right now in the aftermath of hatred unchecked. How can we affirm that hating our enemies back will solve anything? Isn’t it time, in these days of extreme suffering and pain, that we counter with the most powerful offensive possible? We have no strategic counter-strike at our disposal with more explosive potential than love.

It pains me to see so many of my fellow disciples ready to see more violence in response to violence. As if this cycle could ever bring about resolution, much less redemption. I do not believe this is what we have been called to.

No, I believe we have been challenged to defeat hatred with love. I only hope we will find the courage to answer the call…

better than i can say

Check out this post from Mike Cope's blog. I bought the book last night on Mike's recommendation and at 100 pages in I can tell you it's one of the best books I've read in a while.

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updated saturday, august 26, 2006 at 12:36 am

Okay, four days later and 250 pages into the book and all I can say is that it's not for the faint of heart. It will challenge you in all kinds of ways, but Claiborne sticks strong to scripture and clearly has a deep love for God and his people.

I highly recommend The Irresistible Revolution, but I do so with a caution: read it only if you are ready to be challenged.

moses and elijah

A while back I was reading the gospel of Mark, right up to the point in chapter 9 when Jesus goes up on a mountain and talks to Moses and Elijah. (Theologians and the notes in your Bible call that “the Transfiguration”.) Every other time I’ve read that story I’ve assumed that the point was to make it explicitly clear to the disciples who Jesus was. They seemed to be having a hard time figuring it out and understanding it, so I’ve always thought this was God’s way of saying, “Here’s who Jesus is: He’s my Son. He’s the God of Moses and Elijah. Pay very close attention to what He says.” That is, after all, kind of along the lines of what God says from the clouds on that day.

But a new thought occurrs to me. What if Jesus was just missing His friends? I imagine that before coming down to earth and taking on this suit of skin He could sit around up in heaven and talk with Moses and Elijah any time He wanted to. In fact, they probably sat around all the time, talking and laughing and just being friends. Of course, before He came down to earth He would have to ask Moses and Elijah what it was like to be a human and then use His eternal imagination to fill in the blanks, but there on the mountain He had His own personal experience to call on. That day, standing there talking with His friends, I wonder if He told them that He understood more fully the struggles of humanity—and that He understand Moses and Elijah better, too. I wonder if He didn’t embrace them and cry, saying, “My friends! My friends!”

What if the voice of God that day was as much for Jesus as for His disciples? Before embarking on this whole incarnation thing, Jesus had been able to sit around with God the Father, too. Maybe this voice from heaven, while unarguably affecting the disciples, also affected Jesus. Maybe it was deeply encouraging to Him, the voice of His Father affirming who He was and that He was worth paying attention to. That would encourage me.

What if Jesus was there that day, on the mountain, because of something He needed?

I’ll tell you what really gets me: the idea that Jesus’ friendship with Moses and Elijah was so valuable to Him that He would want to do something extraordinary just to be able to talk to them for a bit. To be honest, that idea shakes me. It shakes me because the God of the universe forging a friendship so deep with two men is an amazing thing. Consider what we are compared to Him—how could friendship with us in our fallen, disheveled state be that valuable to Him? Or as David says, “When I look at the night sky and see the work of Your fingers—the moon and the stars You have set in place—what are mortals that You should think of us, mere humans that You should care for us?” (Psalm 8:3-4, NLT).

And yet, He does care. He does want friendship. He does so long to be close to me, to huddle together with me on a mountainside or on a walk or even in my own living room, talking and laughing and crying and getting to know me better as I come to know Him.

If you ask me, that’s just incredible.

no good reason

I was talking with a friend a couple of years ago about God and where each of us where with Him and my friend and I both commented that we felt like we’d drifted, not so much in our behaviors, but more along the lines of the closeness of our relationships with Him. Neither of us had good reason for this, it just seemed that this was reality at the time. We had both gone a while without really praying or reading the Bible or anything like that.

Talking to my friend, knowing that he and I are both fairly good guys and we both love Jesus and all, I asked him why he thought this had happened, and you know what he said? He said that, at least for himself, he thought maybe it was just laziness. Laziness. He said he gets busy and he tells himself that he’s going to spend some time with God and then his schedule gets out of hand and it doesn’t happen. He ends up opting for other time fillers and God gets put on the back burner. He said all of this rather matter-of-factly, like he was telling me that he would have gotten some bananas but the store was out.

I told him I didn’t buy it, not for him or for me.

Here’s why: suppose you go to your doctor and your doctor tells you that you have cancer. Suppose it is a particularly nasty form of cancer and your doctor says that they can save you, but only just barely. The cancer will advance quickly and aggressively and in order to stop this process, you must, absolutely must, attend 5 sessions of chemotherapy a week. He schedules them for Monday thru Friday and asks you to come back after the first week to tell him how it’s going and you’re out the door.

One week later you go back and your doctor asks, “So, how did those sessions of chemotherapy go?”

Can you imagine looking your doctor dead in the face and answering, “Well, Monday was good and Tuesday went alright, but I missed Wednesday. I mean, I meant to go and all, but I got pretty busy with work stuff and then I had a date Thursday night, so I missed Thursday, too. I did, like, a half-session on Friday, which is better than nothing, right? Anyway, I meant to make it every time and I’ll try to do better this week. I really don’t know why I didn’t get around to it more—I guess I’m just lazy…”

In other words, if you knew your life depended on something it would be ridiculous to ignore that thing. Treating your “salvation” with such a bizarre form of casual non-interest would make you certifiably crazy. But that, I told my friend, is what we were both doing.

(My friend disagreed. He said my analogy was too cut and dry and that he didn’t feel he was making that kind of choice.)

I don’t know what time with God is like for you. I don’t think it’s the same for all of us, and for me it is sometimes mystical and intense and sometimes fairly non-eventful. Sometimes it feels like an awful lot of work on my part and sometimes it just flows. It’s different every time, really, and I think maybe it’s supposed to be that way because it is the being together part of a relationship and that isn’t something you can always predict. But whether it’s the kind of experience that leaves me with goose bumps or not, I believe that it is something like chemotherapy for the cancer patient, only considerably more powerful and considerably more necessary.

What I mean is that through my relationship with Jesus and my times of interaction with Him life is imparted to me and death is staved off. When I go for days or weeks without talking to Him, I begin to feel stale and worn thin, like the essence of life within me is leaking slowly out and I’m transforming into some kind of zombie. But when I spend my time with Jesus as I should, as I want to, I feel that life takes on a different quality and it’s not like I hear birds singing all the time or anything, but I do feel a certain meaning and purpose, a kind of power and intent behind things. In short, I end up experiencing the presence of God in my life.

So the big question, then, is this: why do I go thru those periods of ignoring God? Why did my friend and I end up being lazy or careless or whatever? I told my friend that I didn’t believe it was laziness at all, but that I thought maybe it was a problem of belief. If I only understood my need for Jesus, then it would seem I’d never miss any time with Him. That’s partly true, but not totally, because I know I need Jesus, need Him to the core, and I still find that if I’m not purposeful in talking to Him and reading about Him and interacting with Him then I don’t do it, and I think maybe that’s because my relationship with Him is a real, actual relationship, and relationships take work. Every one of them. Relationships have to be maintained and tended to and this has to happen often or friends drift apart. Think about it: surely you have friends you were once quite close to—people you haven’t spoken with in ages. Why? What happened? Likely nothing. It was what didn’t happen that ended up separating you, and it’s the same way with Jesus.

I can’t tell anyone else how often they need to talk to Him. Relating to God is not the scientific endeavor that chemotherapy is. You can’t prescribe a daily intake of 100 mgs of God, but I’ll tell you that I doubt very much there’s a single human being alive who doesn’t need at least one meaningful interaction with Jesus every day in order to be in a real relationship with Him. Jesus Christ, Himself, when here on earth spent an incredible amount of time with the Father in prayer and fasting and that tells me at least three things: one, He loved God and liked being around Him. Two, His time with God was a big part of who He was. And three, His time with God was a priority because He always made time for it to happen. If Jesus is supposed to be any kind of example for us, we ought to learn something from that.

Going back to my friend, I have to honestly tell you that I still struggle to make time every day and I ask God to help me understand this and change it. I think it’s weird that it can be hard to do something so necessary and easy to just not do it. I could talk about the idea that there are spiritual forces at work trying to interrupt my relationship with Jesus and that maybe that’s why it’s hard, but I’d rather not remove the responsibility from myself. I mean, I do think those spiritual forces make it harder, but at the end of the day I’m the one who either walked with God or didn’t on that day, and while there are more days that I do than don’t, I’d be lying if I said I did every day. Again, this is a relationship and it has a sense of ebb and flow to it. My hope and my most sacred goal is that with each passing day, I’ve moved somehow (perhaps by God’s grace) a little closer to being closer to Him, and that with these moves, small though they may be, I’m staving off death and ingesting a source of life. Not life for the sake of living, but life that leads me closer to Him, because being close to Him is really all I have or ever hope to have.

That’s what I pray for—for myself and for my friend, and even for you.

nothing but himself

“Before we get too carried away with thoughts of God’s power, we should listen attentively to what St. Paul says about the ‘weakness of God’ (1 Cor. 1:25), which is a vital part of God’s self revelation. If we look at the way in which he discloses himself in Jesus Christ, we have to acknowledge that he does not come into our world with a great display of superior power; in fact, this was one of the temptations which our Lord had to resist as being contrary to his mission, contrary to his true nature. (Mt. 4:5ff). He does not come in strength but in weakness, and he chooses the foolish and weak and unimportant things of the world, things that are nothing at all, to overthrow the strength and impressiveness of the world. As we saw earlier, he is like the judo expert who uses the strength of his opponent to bring him to the ground; it is the art of self-defense proper to the weak.

“This is why, if we keep clamouring for things we want from God, we may often find ourselves disappointed, because we have forgotten the weakness of God and what we may call the poverty of God. We had thought of God as the dispenser of all good things we would possibly desire; but in a very real sense, God has nothing at all to give but himself.”

—From Prayer by Simon Tugwell

I find this quote to be both refreshing and challenging, which is rare but wonderful.

God has nothing to give but himself.

The beauty of that simple truth is that the genuine disciple wants for nothing more. What more could I ask God for than the pleasure of his company? What greater joy is there?

This truth grounds me, and I need to be grounded because the temptations of our consumer driven culture push me to the brink of trading God for my own thirty pieces of silver. Yeah, you heard me right; and yes, I live my life that close to falling. All the time.

I need to be reminded of who he is and how much I not only need him, but how much I delight in him. I need to remember that there is something so great about him that one day in his courts really would be better than thousands elsewhere. (Them ain’t just pretty words.) And I need such a reminder often. I forget often.

Today I ground myself in the knowledge that he is all I really want, even when I want for more, and he is all I’ll ever need, even when I think I’ll die without…whatever. Today I embrace the simple truth that he is offering me nothing but himself, and I accept.

Matter of fact, I think I’m getting a pretty good deal.