A Preview of Chapter 4 from Myth of a Dying Church
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My theology is always rooted firmly in the experience of my humanity, not because it’s anthropomorphic so much as that I believe strongly that God, who chooses to pitch a tent among us in the personhood of Jesus, does so to offer the perspective that coming to a deeper understanding of God isn’t an academic pursuit, per se. It requires us to enter into relationship. So as I write Myth of a Dying Church, I discover parts of myself are necessarily revealed because relationship isn’t an academic pursuit.
In my rewrite of Chapter 4, my friend Jonathan Sanchez suggested I need an anecdote to tie the threads together, and it feels like it’s become one of the most profound pieces of self-expression I’ve ever written. I share it here because Love Sees Color is a blog about my journey, and this certainly fits the bill!
– Eric the Lutheran, 9:15 am
A Cup of Cold Water
Every group of two or more wrestles with how to move forward when there are compelling reasons to stay behind.
And honestly?
I don’t always need a second person to find an argument.
To remain. I meant an argument to remain.
There’s a way in which religion encourages our tendency to remain or abide. In John 15, which is during Jesus’ last evening with his disciples, he tells them, abide in my love. Abide, remain, dwell — all verbs expressing that his love is a place to spend time some real time. It’s not a stretch to read Jesus’ intent as, take comfort in my love with you as you go, for you’ll need it in the time to come. After all, Jesus is saying goodbye to his disciples, and everyone in that room knows folks are determined to make an example of him. So it makes sense that Jesus encourages them by offering them this word as a means of providing shelter — and that his word is the same love he incarnates from the Beginning.
But Jesus offers no easy love.
Jesus offers the love of a mentor. It’s like cold water to the parched heart, yet its luxury is found in the distance we travel to reach it. Jesus’ love makes demands and holds expectations, sometimes harsh in the way of a parent, yet comforting because Jesus expects his disciples to fail at least as much as they succeed. This is one of the core differences between Cultic Christianity[1] and following Jesus’ commandments. The Cult demands success, defined by unfailing devotion to the tyrants’ demands, while Jesus demands love that offers grace in the face of anticipated betrayals and failures. Love makes room for the fact that Jesus is speaking to grossly imperfect people, After all, they’re his people. He’s chosen them to share in this love, knowing it to be enough.
So many of us are bought and sold for a low, low hourly installment of less than $19.95 an hour to corporate interests satiated by no amount of gain. At the end of the day, what makes Jesus’ love so miraculous, and part of why it’s not easy, is that there is a point at which enough exists.
The Cult always demands ever more, and the paradox of love is that because all Jesus demands is everything, it’s so much less than ever more.
A Home We’ve Never Seen
The story of the Bible is a lot of things, among the most important is that it’s the story of God’s love for creation.
It’s also the story of humanity’s attempt to understand our place with God, ever-mysterious yet ever-present. To be honest, I think these are equally confusing in their own way.
The mystery of God’s transcendent reality as the Creator of All That Is, Seen and Unseen becomes quickly incomprehensible when we come to understand that we’re less than specks of dust in the grand scope of creation. As much as we’ve seen, on average, we’ve seen nothing. The mystery of God’s imminence is equally confounding even before we get to the idea that God desires relationship with us and creation, in no small part that in considering creation on the subatomic scale, creation itself becomes even wackier than the largest of expanses as we encounter the mysteries of quantum entanglement and all the fuzzy maths involved in trying to shed light on light itself.
In our pursuit of a comprehensive tool and theory, we usually employ tools and resources ill-equipped for the task. We try to use religion to do science, and science to explain religion. We apply anthropomorphic conceptual models to explain the greater and lesser mysteries around us. There may be an adequate tool or theory to deal with everything, but that doesn’t mean we’re equipped to use or understand it.
And that’s the problem.
We create divides in a world that’s unified, identifying science and religion as sides of a coin rather than locations along the spectrum of ever-deepening our understanding of the world. We spend so much time trying to solve mysteries far beyond us because it leads us to a greater understanding of our own existence. And because it provides some of what we genuinely need, we forget to be about our own existence. Knowledge, comprehensive understanding, deep theological insight, contextual moral clarity, and all the other pursuits are worthy and worth the effort, and because they’re so immersive — and because we’re easily distracted by shiny things — we neglect the most basic truth of our humanity.
It’s not good for us to be alone, even though it can be so hard to be together.
When I was wrestling with all the things as a young adult, I endured a longstanding infatuation that may well have been love, but it wasn’t the kind of love she needed or wanted from me. It wasn’t a love that would have sustained me or made me happy, yet I’d woven all sorts of stories into my heart about a feeling that was misplaced — or at least mistimed. I think I always knew the fact that I had to grapple so hard to justify it was also the sign that it wasn’t meant to be. But what drew me to her was what our reality has always been at its best — we were easy friends.
In my loneliness, we made me feel less lonely. In my immature attempts to numb my pain rather than face it, I found comfort in the stability we offered. My misaligned feelings gave me a sense of purpose because I knew I was able to offer a little of what she needed in the same way she did for me.
At twenty and twenty-one, I was desperately seeking a home I’d never known, but that I knew in my bones must be out there.
So it goes.
Isn’t that what we’re all doing at that age?
Bending Blades
Shortly after the beginning, the Bible is about a People who leave the only home they knew. The two found themselves longing for a home they’d never seen, but knew must exist. Yes, because this home was promised, but they knew it because, in their own way, they’d already found it together. In its own way, this is the story of every person who’s ever left the relative security — or at least the familiarity — of their childhood home to make their way in the world.
We know home is out there if we can only reach it.
Taking the lessons we’ve learned, we use them to create something that hopefully feels better than the place we left, while also reproducing something that reminds us of our old home because it’s the only real frame of reference we have. I can look back and see that what I thought I was recreating in that relationship wasn’t feeding all the healthiest parts of me. When my best friend asked me when the last time I kissed her was, which was long ago, I finally came to myself and realized that if I didn’t move on, I’d hold us both hostage by looking for something I already knew I couldn’t find there. All I knew to do was be grateful for a sustenance and stability that allowed me to plant something resembling my feet, knowing I’d been lucky enough to find a kindness and hospitality of heart for which I remain grateful.
It’s funny as I look back to see that I was living in several different realities.
There was the reality of my growth, as I learned how to become a more independent adult. There was the reality of my stubborn refusal to embrace the more independent adult I (thought I) wanted to be. I longed for home so badly that I’d make it anywhere I could, even knowing I couldn’t really stay until it was mine. I was occasionally in love or lust, but I mostly felt alone.
In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul expresses his longing to know himself as fully as his creator knows him. When I read that passage, I always flash back to a moment when I was passing a window in my house when I was a kid, startled by the specter of my own reflection out of the corner of my eye. I remember feeling dumb, but after a second look, I became immersed in the way I was able to see through myself to the yard outside. I could see my face clearly, and the closer I leaned in, the more I could see my finer details, but my reflection wasn’t substantial enough to prevent me from seeing the bushes beyond.
In The Great Divorce, CS Lewis described people arriving in heaven on a bus from hell. When they arrive, heaven’s Reality causes immense pain because they came from such an insubstantial place. When they step out, they’re blinded by the sun. Blades of grass pierce feet not yet real enough to bend them when they walk. The pain of Reality is too much for some to bear, and they get right back on the bus. The narrator stays with others, curious to learn how to exist in what’s real despite being so insubstantial that one could see the bushes behind him through his body.
There are moments when all we are is vapor — longing for grass to bend as it pierces our feet wherever we step until we learn what it means to exist.
Long-haired and probably wearing cutoffs, I was playing hacky sack with my friends outside the honors dorm at the University of South Carolina, the only USC that matters. We were there to invite women to the party at my house that night, knowing the guys would come regardless, and I was stunned by a pair of blue eyes as their owner asked me for a light at a time when smoking was still much more socially acceptable. We sat down, together, on the bench. I told her, “You need to go to the party because there’s nowhere else in Irmo you’ll find anything fun that night.” Since Irmo was twenty minutes from campus and there’s no way she — or anyone — would drive all that way except to go to that party, it was the truth!
That evening, I was in my usual chair playing guitar and singing with several others, and a girl I’d known for a while and always thought was cute began flirting with me. I (finally) noticed she was flirting, and it was a welcome surprise, but around that time I saw a pair of blue eyes walk up the stairs. I played and sang and made eyes at her as I pondered the moment. To my right sat a comfortable possibility with someone I knew and liked.
To my right sat a comfortable possibility with someone I knew and liked.
In front of me sat a road unknown, yet somehow familiar.
After a couple hours, and about half a bottle of Jack Daniels, I found the courage to take my first step toward home. “You really ought to let me buy you dinner sometime, I think you’d enjoy it,” I said with a confidence I rarely felt when talking to a girl.
I’ve followed those blue eyes for over twenty-five years now without regretting a second of it because I found something of home in her from the first moment. We spent our first date at a coffee shop playing rummy and chatting about the entirety of our lives. She was new and familiar, mysterious and comfortable, and it scared the ever-loving hell out of me because I’d never been home before.
Her love was intense. She looked at me with an openness and adoration I’d never seen or imagined, and it was overwhelming and unsettling because I was terrified she’d actually see me. I remember feeling uncomfortable and unworthy because I knew I wasn’t enough, that I didn’t know how to be enough.
Was I substantial enough to bend grass beneath my own feet, let alone ours?
Not at first.
At first, the blades of love pierced me as the blades of my insecurities pierced her. In time, I learned to meet her gaze and to open my own to her. I learned to become substantial in us long before I learned how to cultivate substantiality for myself. We walked, and bled, and wept, and smiled. We became incarnate, bending now harmless grass as we went.
Where gentle rains once pierced our souls, we became.
Becoming is hard work, but until we can stand the rain, we can’t appreciate its gentle touch. We learned not only to stand in rain and bend grass, but we came into being together, creating home from our hope.
Love is no easy master. It’s fitful and ornery as often as it’s gentle or kind, yet nothing can endure all things and bear all things without substance to become faithful in the sun’s heat or the winter’s cold. Love is hunger, and only then satiety. The intensity of love’s comfort burns us until we’re real enough to embrace it in the same way those blue eyes pierced me until I’d grown strong enough not to flinch away from my reflection I found in them. Learning to love God and others is found in the ability to love ourselves, in no small part because their love teaches us how.
And in the beginning, it feels like all love craves is more — yet we grow to the grateful understanding that all it wants is everything. We bathe in love’s satiety by learning to offer and receive everything.
It’s not good for us to be alone, and even though it can be so hard to be together, love offers us shelter — makes us real enough to find joy bathing in its gentle rain.
Give Me Shelter
Jesus not only bathes the disciples in his love by washing their feet, he offers them the shelter of his peace.
Do you know what I’ve done to you?
This may be the most critical question in the entirety of scripture. In no small part because, judging from Peter’s response, the answer is clearly “No.” Not only because of what it does or doesn’t do, this has a special significance because it describes the nature of what Jesus’ death and resurrection mean in a context unique to John, in which Jesus’ Passion isn’t an act of substitution, but is, itself, an expression of God’s creative work that always draws creation closer.
Being drawn closer to God’s heart is, in itself, salvation.
John begins with a creation story, and rather than being told from a human perspective like in Genesis, this creation account is told from the Divine perspective. John offers insight into who God is, and for what purposeGod is creating and incarnating. In John, Jesus’ death and resurrection aren’t so much about people being broken and sinful, but it’s more like creation itself is falling away from its Creator, even as God continues in drawing us closer. By entering into creation at this particular point in time, God draws creation close, and because God abides within creation, creation abides within God.
Incarnation is God’s final declaration that salvation is something God is doing to, not for, creation.
For this reason, what makes Jesus washing the disciples’ feet so significant is that it’s an act of imparting vocation and identity upon them as practitioners of making God’s presence known as they take up the work of imposing this new life upon a world that will wake to its new reality so very slowly. The world can do things to us, and it can even turn our heads, but there’s nothing the world can offer that will fill the hole in the soul that solely belongs to God.
What’s so different than in the other Gospels is that this isn’t a meal in which the disciples participate. This isthe work — it’s a mandate. It’s a vocation that Jesus imposes upon them because it rests in the peace and equity only God can give, rather than the shifting sands of authority and power, which are all the world can offer. The intimacy of the act itself is almost portrayed as an act of adoration — not worship, but venerating the space our Creator draws us to share, where the very ground beneath our feet has become holy.
What Jesus does to his disciples — including Judas — offers them a taste of glory.
Peace. I leave you peace — and not peace like the world sells — I give you my peace so your hearts can become untroubled, and to help you gain courage for the time to come.[2]
Jesus’ peace isn’t the sort you can pass or share like we do in worship as part of our Communion liturgy. Jesus’ peace is a bone-deep sense of God’s being-in-this with us that demands intimacy and trust. It fosters community. Jesus’ peace gives life because it’s a gift of service — a pragmatic act of love that cannot be undone or unaccepted. It’s offered in public and in the intimacy of community, so it cannot be unseen or unacknowledged.
We can pound our washed feet into the dust, but when the dust adheres to the residual moisture and turns to mud, it’s obvious that their dirtiness is an act of rebellion against the water that washed them clean. Part of our rebellion owes to the pervasive myth that we must achieve any true peace for ourselves. Peace isn’t an achievement to unlock. It’s an abiding presence, a place we rest our weary bones.
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[1] The American Christic Cult is my descriptor of America’s cultural / cultic religion. American in its foolish reliance on independence and industry; Christic in its using Jesus words in ways that reflect nothing of his meaning; and a Cult because of its insular nature, idolatry of patriotism, and suspicion and enmity with those who don’t belong. I refer to it interchangeably as the American Christic Cult, the Cult, Cultic Religion, or our Cultural Religion. I intended to abbreviate it as ACC, but another idolatry exists for that acronym in the world of college football! 🙂
[2] Paraphrased from John 14:27. I offer this footnote because the Greek is more different than my typical paraphrases. The text reads more like Peace I leave you; my peace is what I give you. I do not give as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. I think the reason is self-evident, yet I’ve always thought it was missing a piece that explicitly outlines the difference between what Jesus and the world give. I think it’s obvious in the larger context of John, particularly after John 12 and the rest of the Farewell Discourse, but encapsulating it here felt meaningful.
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Featured image: Kid Walking on Grass – “Kelly Piet Photography” – http://www.kellypietphotography.com
Love Sees Color 