What We Talk About When We Talk About God (12 page)

Did
that
culture still have a long way to go in their treatment of women?

Of course.

Does
our
culture still have a long way to go in our treatment of women?

Of course.

There is a chain of restaurants called Hooters.

Do I need to say anymore?

 

What we see in these passages is God meeting people, tribes, and cultures right where they are and drawing and inviting and calling them forward, into greater and greater
shalom
and respect and rights and peace and dignity and equality. It's as if human history were progressing along a trajectory, an arc, a continuum; and sacred history is the capturing and recording of those moments when people became aware that they were being called and drawn and pulled forward by the divine force and power and energy that gives life to everything.

To make it really clear and simple, let's call this movement across history we see in passages like the ones we just looked at from Exodus and Deuteronomy
clicks
. What we see is God meeting people at the click they're at, and then drawing them forward.

When they're at F, God calls them to G.

When we're at L, God calls us to M.

And if we're way back there at A, God meets us way back there at A and does what God always does: invites us
forward
to B.

This is true for individuals, families, tribes, nations, cultures, organizations, institutions, and churches. All of it taking place on a continuum, a trajectory, a God-fueled movement within and through human history.

This bit about the clicks leads us to an obvious truth about the Bible, but one we should point out anyway: the Bible is a library of radically progressive books, books that were
ahead
of their time, books that tell stories about human interactions with the divine being who never, ever gives up on us and never stops calling us and pulling us and inviting us into new and better futures.

Several observations, then, about this divine pull.

First, the dominant sins, structures, systems, and stagnations of each of us and the cultures we live in often
resist
the radically progressive movement of God in the world and therefore hold us back from the growth and flourishing God intends for us.

Here's an example of this resistance, from the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. God promises a man named Abraham that he is going to be blessed and that out of him is going to come a great tribe and out of that tribe
the whole world is going to be blessed.

There's a progression in this promise, a progression that is loaded with implications for our world. Abraham, who doesn't have any children, learns that he is going to be the father of a tribe, a nation. This would have made sense to Abraham, because that's how people in his day understood the world: everybody was part of a tribe and every tribe had a father—an originator, a patriarch. Some tribes wandered and some tribes were more settled and some had lots of possessions and were quite wealthy and some had land and some had large armies and some didn't and some went to war often and others avoided conflict at all costs and some formed alliances with other tribes in order to defend themselves against other alliances of other tribes.
Your
identity as an individual in a tribal culture like Abraham's was found in the
tribe
that you belonged to. (Kind of like college football.)

It's in this tribal-centered culture that God calls Abraham to be the father of a tribe that will be different from all the other tribes.

Abraham's tribe will have a higher purpose than simply their own wealth, preservation, and well-being. Abraham's tribe will exist to bless and benefit all the
other
tribes. God calls Abraham to a new state of being that—and here's the really important part—
includes
tribal identity and preservation but then
transcends
it to a higher calling—a calling beyond just maintaining and protecting his own tribe, a calling to help and bless and elevate all the other tribes.

Abraham's calling isn't just about him,

and it isn't just about his tribe;

it's also about the well-being of
all other tribes.

The rest of the Bible tells the story of Abraham's tribe—the Jews—and their struggles to live up to their destiny and calling. Even their name, Israel, means “the one who struggles with God.” Over time prophets rise up and call Israel back to their destiny, one of those prophets, Isaiah, telling them that they're a “light to the Gentiles.” (
The Gentiles
is a phrase that essentially means
everybody else
.) Jesus arrives and what does he teach Abraham's descendants? Don't hide your light; let it shine!

Jesus continually reminds Abraham's tribe of their identity and mission and calling, essentially asking them time and time again, “how did you so badly lose the plot? This was supposed to be your story!”

And many of them don't get it,

because

tribes naturally have a tendency to become all about themselves.

Sound familiar?

Have you ever been part of an organization and the experience soured because you realized there wasn't any larger mission or purpose or motivation beyond its own preservation?

Have you ever heard of a nation becoming so addicted to a particular natural resource that it could not produce enough to meet its insatiable need? But instead of cutting back and going with less, it spent even more resources and used a wide array of questionable and sometimes even violent means to obtain this resource from other countries, at the risk of bankrupting itself and causing the loss of untold life?

These truths about the call of Abraham and Jesus's teaching to his tribe lead us to another truth about the divine pull, one that speaks directly to religious communities. It is possible for religious people who see themselves as God's people to resist the forward-calling of God to such a degree that the larger culture around them is actually
ahead
of them in a particular area, such as the protection of human dignity or the integration of the mind and body or the treatment of women or inclusion of the forgotten and marginalized or compassion or intellectual honesty or care for the environment. Churches and religious communities and organizations can claim to speak for God while at the same time actually being
behind
the movement of God that is continuing forward in the culture around them . . .

without their participation
.

Which takes us back to the divine pull, to a truth about the promise to Abraham that leads to a truth about our day: self-centered, our-tribe-above-all-others consciousness is at the root of untold war, conflict, racism, ethnic cleansing, environmental destruction, and suffering in the world, and when we talk about God meeting people in the Bible
back
then right where they were,
we must, in the next breath, acknowledge that the promise to Abraham is still unrealized.

The click God was calling
them
to
there and then
is a click we still aren't at
here and now
.

The life-giving
ruach
we see at work in the scriptures is still ahead, because in the Bible we find God ahead, confronting and calling people to a new vision of life together that still hasn't been fully realized, that we still haven't seen fully come into existence thousands of years later.

And that truth leads to one about the human heart: as advanced and intelligent and educated as we are, there are some things about the human condition that have not changed in thousands of years. It's very important that we are honest about this glaring reality. We have progressed so incredibly far, invented so many things, found an endless array of new ways to process and share and communicate information, and yet the human heart has remained significantly unchanged, in that it still possesses the tremendous capacity to produce extraordinary ignorance, evil, and destruction.

We need help.

At this very moment there is a great deal of energy being spent by nations around the world to make sure that certain other nations do not get the capability to use nuclear weapons. The nation that is leading this charge is the United States, which has enough nuclear weapons to blow the world up several times and that, contrary to all other nations, has actually used nuclear weapons in the past, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians. The United States has around 6 percent of the world's population and possesses a little less than half of the world's weapons. If there were a group of one hundred people, and six of them had half the guns—well, we would have a serious problem.

We need help.

To read the Bible, then, as a book about
those
primitive people who had made a mess of things and how God was calling
them
forward and miss the glaring fact that it's also a book about
us
and
our
desperate need to be rescued and helped and brought forward into a better future is an epic, historic case of seeing the splinter in someone else's eye and not the log in our own.

All of which leads me to a story about Jesus's disciples, who come to him agitated because they saw someone driving demons out in Jesus's name. They tried to stop the man, they tell Jesus, “because he is not one of us.”

Driving out demons is a good thing, correct?

I think we'd all agree that the fewer demons we have, the better off our day is, right?

So this man is doing something good, something needed, something healing, and yet according to the disciples, “he is not one of us.”

And so they try to stop him.

They do this because, for them, the world is divided up a particular way.

Us. And then everybody else.

However they reached this conclusion, we can assume that their culture and families and a number of other factors had worked together to shape them in such a way that they would try to stop someone from doing good.

Jesus, however, is quite relaxed about the whole thing. He tells them not to stop the man, because “whoever is not against you is for you.”

I tell you this story because there's something going on in both the disciples' actions and Jesus's response that has been going on for thousands and thousands of years. We divide the world up and label people and create rules and feel righteous about our traditional or progressive stances. We spend a great deal of time arguing for these positions that we've taken and working to get the words right so that we can best articulate why we take the stand that we do.

Only to discover that whatever God is up to, it's bigger and better and wider and stronger and more inspiring and expansive and liberating than we first imagined.

A careful reading of the Bible reveals a book about people having their minds blown and hearts exploded with a vision for humanity so thrilling and joyous it can't be grasped all at once. It has to be broken down into a step, followed by a step, followed by a step, followed by a step. Click, then a click, then a click.

All of which raises the question: So what's God up to at this moment? What does all this talk about the God who is with us and for us and ahead of us look like in everyday life here in the modern world?

That's a great question,

one that will take another chapter.

CHAPTER 7

SO

So
what does it look like? That's the question, right?

I'm like you: I get to this point in a book like this and I want examples, concrete images, stories, pictures—I want to know how these big ideas actually take on flesh and blood in everyday life.

God with us,

for us,

ahead of us—

that all sounds great,

but what does it look like?

It looks like lots of things, and to talk about a few of those things, we'll first talk about temples, and then we'll talk about bread and wine, and then we'll talk about curtains,

kings,

comedy clubs,

shadows,

depths,

dark matter,

splagchnon,

monkeys,

and furniture.

 

First, let's go back in history, five or nine or twenty-three thousand years ago to a hill with a pile of rocks on it. A group of people are laying out sheaves of grain on that pile of rocks, which (you realize as you get closer) is an altar. They're laying out this grain on this altar because they've just harvested their crop and they want to show their gods how grateful they are for the food that will keep their families alive for months to come. They've learned over time that for this grain to grow, they need the rain to fall in just the right amounts and the sun to shine at just the right times and the crops to be protected from any disease or animals that might eat the seeds. It takes a lot of good fortune for a harvest to be plentiful, and they are viscerally aware of their impotence in the face of all these potentially destructive forces. And so they've developed this ritual of taking a portion of the crop and offering it back to the rain god and sun god and protector god as a way of saying thanks, as an act of worship, hoping to keep the forces on their side so that they'll continue to have abundant harvests that feed their families.

Now let's jump ahead a few hundred years to that same hill, only now there's a temple next to the altar, and people in robes are taking the sheaves from everyday, ordinary people and placing the sheaves on the altar.

Why a temple? Because as the years progressed and the offerings multiplied, the same questions arose time and time again as people questioned if they were doing
enough
. Maybe they needed to be more hospitable to the gods, more welcoming; maybe if the Gods took up residence in their midst, things would go better for them. And so they built a temple, a house for the Gods.

But with this growing religious system and its rules and rites came the increasing awareness of how many ways things could go wrong.

A wrong word,

an incorrect gesture,

an offensive act,

a flawed sacrifice—

who knows what would set the gods off?

How do you know that the drought you're experiencing isn't because somebody improperly offered his sacrifice, inadvertently provoking the wrath of the rain god?

And so gradually from among their midst a special class of people emerged, called priests, to oversee all of this ritual and offering. People set apart, devoted to the life of the temple, charged with the responsibility of making sure that everything was done in the way that was most likely to bring the favor of the gods.

Now imagine that you are a young woman and you've just discovered that you're pregnant. You want your child to be healthy and you want the birth to go smoothly, so you decide to go up to the temple to give an offering of some grain and wine to the god or goddess who watches over pregnant women. You want to do everything you possibly can to gain the favor of the childbirth deities.

So you leave your house

and you go up to the temple.

You leave your common, ordinary, everyday space and you go up to the holy, sacred, divine space,

where you meet with the priests—holy, sacred,

uncommon people set apart from the masses to do the holy, sacred work of running the temple and organizing the sacrifices and keeping the gods pleased.

You do this because your life is divided into two kinds of space and time.

There is the sacred,

and there is the common.

There is your house,

and there is the temple.

There is the holy,

and there is the ordinary.

There is the divine,

and there is the everyday.

You would never take your dog into the temple area, in the same way that you would never expect a priest to show up at your house to help unclog your drain.

Let's pause here to note two significant things briefly: One, this emergence of altars and temples and religious rites in human history wasn't a bad thing; it was an
early
thing. Early in our evolution we humans became acutely aware that our existence was at the mercy of forces beyond our control, like rain and sun and disease and natural disasters. This was actually a rather sophisticated development, a click forward, because it was rooted in the acknowledgment that there are dimensions to reality that are
unseen
.

To point out the second thing, I take you back there to the birth of religion, because that early division between the sacred and the common is alive and well today. There's a church near where I used to live that did a survey of its congregation, asking how important people's
spiritual lives
were to them.

Spiritual lives? As opposed to their
other
lives?

Why do many churches celebrate someone being “called” into ministry but so few celebrate when people are called into law or medicine or business or art or making burritos or being a mother?

I can't tell you how many times as a pastor I have interacted with people who were talking about their job and then said something along the lines of, “You know, it's a normal job, not like being a pastor or doing something
spiritual
like that.”

I make these two observations because what we see in the Jesus story is the leaving behind of this division so that human history can move forward. In one of the accounts of Jesus's death we read that the curtain in the temple of God—the one that kept people out of the holiest place of God's presence—

ripped
.

One New Testament writer said that this ripping was a picture of how, because of Jesus, we can have new, direct access to God.

A beautiful idea.

But the curtain ripping also means that God comes out, that God is no longer confined to the temple as God was previously.

God, of course, was never confined by a building. The point of the story is that
our
understanding
of God
was
.

The Jesus story, then, is a radical new stage, or maybe we could say click, in our understanding of God.

A temple is meaningful and useful and helpful because it gives humans a way of conceiving of the idea of the
holy
and
sacred
. To see something as sacred, you have to set whatever it is apart and name it and label it and distinguish it as sacred. This is because you cannot comprehend
everything
being holy and sacred until you can grasp the idea that
something
is holy and sacred. You have to start somewhere. But if you don't keep going, keep moving, keep evolving, there is the danger that in dividing reality up it will stay divided, leading people to see everything else—everything besides that sacred thing—as common, average, ordinary, and mundane.

You have to construct a temple to teach the idea of holy and sacred, but in doing that you risk that people will incorrectly divide the world up into two realms and distinctions that don't actually exist.

This is why the Jesus story is so massive, progressive, and forward-looking in human history. Jesus comes among us as God in a body, the divine and the human existing in the same place, in his death bringing an end to the idea that God is confined to a temple because the whole world is a temple, the whole earth is

holy,

holy,

holy,

as the prophet Isaiah said.

Or, as one of the first Christians put it,
we
are the temple.

There's a new place where God dwells,

and it's us.

For more on this leap in how we understand the nature of reality, we'll go to another table, this one on the night Jesus was betrayed. Surrounded by his followers, eating a last meal, he gave them bread and wine, telling them that those ordinary foods were his body and blood, telling them that whenever they gathered and took the bread and wine it would be an enduring experience for them of the new life he was giving them through his life and death and resurrection. In doing this, he was treating common bread and wine as holy and sacred because for him
all bread and wine are holy and sacred
. And all bread and wine are holy and sacred to him because
all of life is sacred and holy,
and that includes all interactions, events, tasks, conversations, work, words, and of course jobs.

The ancient sages say that when Moses comes across the burning bush, he doesn't take his sandals off because suddenly the ground has become holy; he takes his sandals off because he's just now realizing that the ground has been holy
the whole time
.

You are on holy ground wherever you are, and Jesus comes to let us know that the whole world is a temple because we're temples, all of life is spiritual, all space sacred, all ground holy. He comes to heighten our senses and sharpen our eyes to that which we've been surrounded by the whole time; we're just now beginning to see it.

Temples, then, and church services and worship gatherings continue to have their place and power in our lives to the degree to which moms and business-people and groundskeepers and lawyers and plumbers and people who stock the shelves of the grocery store and teachers and toll-booth collectors and farmers and graphic designers and taco makers all gather around a table with bread and wine on it to participate in Jesus's ongoing life in the world as they're reminded that all of life matters, all work is holy, all moments sacred, all encounters with others encounters with the divine.

For Jesus,

it's never
just
a job,

a conversation is never
just
an exchange of words,

a meal is never
just
the consumption of food,

because

it's never just

bread

and it's never just

wine.

Jesus doesn't divide the world up into the common and the sacred; he gives us eyes to see the sacred
in the common
. He comes to help us see things more, more how they actually are: that they matter, that they're connected, and that they're headed somewhere.

 

It's easy for each new day to become like all our other days, isn't it?

Wake up and eat, then go to work or school or exercise or head to the grocery store or return e-mails or walk the dog or call your insurance agent or take the kids to soccer practice or write that term paper or watch that game or mow the lawn or go to the dentist or book that flight or all of the above—all without forgetting to water the plants and pick up eggs on the way home before filling out the expense report and hanging the laundry before brushing your teeth and going to sleep so that you can wake up

in order to

do it all over again the next day.

Our days can easily become a blur,

the parts and pieces blending together,

all of it losing its connection and depth and significance; cut off from any sense that there's
way more going on here

until a tree is just a tree,

a conversation merely a succession of words,

a song simply noise in the background,

a job just a way to get a paycheck.

All of it reduced to what it is at its surface, shallow level, separated from the source.

Which takes us back to that nativity scene, to that baby Jesus with his tiny balled-up fists, to the insistence of that choir in that surf shop in their song that the divine and human can exist in the same place. When we talk about God, we're talking about the Jesus who comes to reunite and reconnect us with the sacred depth, holiness, significance, and meaning of every moment of every day.

Jesus told a story about a king who was making decisions about his subjects, separating people “as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” The sheep, we learn, are the ones who brought the king food when he was hungry and water when he was thirsty and clothes when he was naked and looked after him when he was sick and visited him when he was in prison.

The sheep are confused when they learn of their good standing with the king.

“Uhhhhhhh, king?” they protest. “When were
you
hungry or thirsty or naked or lonely or sick? We've never seen that!” They ask because of course they understand the king to be quite wealthy, not lacking in basic necessities like food, clothing, and friends.

He responds, “Whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

The king here makes the astounding claim that he is somehow present with and standing in solidarity with
all
of them, and that love and care and compassion shown to
others
is love for
him
.

Jesus tells stories like this one often, stories that speak to the divine presence in every single one of our interactions—a unity, power, and love present in all things, hidden right here in plain sight.

This story Jesus told raises the haunting question: What are we missing? Is there an entire world, right here within this one, as close as our breath, but we aren't seeing it because we're moving too fast, we're separated from the source, cut off from the depths, our eyes not as open as they could be?

Jesus comes to help us see things as they truly are, moving forward, with greater and greater connectivity, higher and higher levels of hierarchy leading to holism beyond even us as all matter is permeated by the redeeming energy and power of God.