Friday, July 29, 2016


At one point during the reign of King Hezekiah, a powerful army comes against the people of God. Rumored throughout the land as conquerors, this army has every right to brag - they have defeated literally everyone they have battled. They're undefeated. They have smashed gods, taken prisoners, and not looked back. And when they come to the people of God, they assume that none of that will change. 

They intend to do the same to Judah.

They intend so much to do the same to Judah that they've taken the time to learn the Hebrew language. When they come to the fortified cities, they do not rely on an interpreter or on the leaders or elite of Judah to know their language; these soldiers know the language of the people of God, and they speak it. Boldly. 

Hey, people of God. There's no use fighting us. We're going to do the same things to you that we've done to everybody else we've encountered - we're going to blockade you, attack you, defeat you, then strip you naked and carry you off while we pound your God into the dust and stomp all over Him. Unless, of course, you want to make it easy on us and just, you know, open the gate and come out like good little boys and girls.

The leaders of Hezekiah's administration are quick to respond, demanding that this bully army stop talking to the people in their own language and instead, speak to the leaders directly in a tongue that the common man would not understand. The army, of course, refuses to oblige.

And here we see one of the great troubles of the church today, perhaps throughout her history. We are caught in the same trap as Hezekiah's army - the world speaks all too well our language, and we respond by demanding some kind of cryptic tongue. 

The world knows how to speak of Jesus. They know how to talk about this Son of God. They know words like grace, love, hope, and mercy. This world can pull the red letters out of our Bibles more fluently than many of our Christians can, and they do it in a mocking tone. This world is bent on taking our God, smashing Him into a thousand pieces, and trampling Him underfoot as just another empty idol, just another worthless hope. 

Then we come back at them in our own voices, the voices of the high and lofty, the voices of the elite and educated. We don't use words like hope; we use words like sanctification. We don't use words like forgiveness; we use words like justification. We don't say Jesus; we say Second Person of the Trinity. We talk about Communion and Eucharist while the world talks about bread and wine. And we're happy to do this, as though our language somehow shields us from the misinterpretations of the world. We even shout to our soldiers, Do not listen to them. Their common language is laughable. They do not know our God if they do not know His big words.

I gotta tell you - if I'm a soldier on the front lines and I hear the enemy talking more God than I hear my commander talking, I'm scared. If the guy who is coming against me says more words that I understand than the one who claims to have my back, I'm listening to the guy who is coming against me. And all of a sudden, you know what? Maybe I'm willing to open the gate. 

Maybe I'm willing to come walking out like a good little girl. Maybe I'm willing to surrender to an invading army because it sounds a whole lot better to be led away defeated than to be carried away naked. Maybe I'm willing to let this world talk me into what it believes about my God because it feels like, the way they talk, they're the ones that can prove it. It feels like they're the ones not trying to hide anything from me. So yeah, maybe I'm willing to open the gate.

And the sad truth is that this is not just rhetoric; it's real. This is what is happening to the church right now. There are too many soldiers on the front lines who are willing to open the gate because the world is speaking a more conversational language about our God than our churches are. The world is telling us more about what Jesus sounds like than our pastors are. The world sounds like it's making a lot of good points because, at the very least, we understand what the world is saying; we don't understand the words that echo in our sanctuaries.

We have to change this. We have to stop pretending that the language of God is a high language. We have to stop talking with each other, and with the world, as though this is a tongue that most people just cannot understand. Jesus Himself spoke plainly; we ought to do the same. When we don't, we're creating a generation of Christians, a force of God's people, who are far too quick to open the gates and let another army just come walking in. And we are seeing where this leads us:

To a faith that isn't real because the Temple is empty. To a hope that isn't real because the hands that hold tomorrow also hold our necks. To a grace that isn't real because sin isn't real. To a truth that isn't real because it's not loud enough. To a God that's in a thousand pieces, trampled underfoot like dust because His people...because His people heard a voice that spoke to them in their own language and they opened the gates. 

Because being led away defeated feels so much better than being carried away naked. 

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Light and Living Water

The rainbow is the one new thing that God creates after the flood, after the earth has once again come out of the formless and void and been filled to the brim with all kinds of life. It is the first new thing He is doing in a world destroyed by sin.

...and it is the sign of the new thing He is doing in a world destroyed by sin.

Yesterday, I said that the rainbow is essentially light and magic. Or mystery, if you prefer that word. But that's not quite the whole story. Because it is light, but it is not magic; it's water. The rainbow, the visible invisible, the everything that is nothing that is everything, the sign of God's promise is made from the very substance of the Promise Himself:

Light and Living Water.

That's what makes a rainbow. That's how the physics works. At the end of the rain, as the clouds begin to part, light makes its way through the cracks and dances with the little droplets of water that sort of just hang in the air, that are still falling to earth. The rainbow dances, the light dances, because the water cannot stop dancing; it's alive. It is somewhere between heaven and earth, being somehow in both places wholly at once.

This is our Jesus. These are two of the things that Jesus tells us that He Himself is. These are two of the things that God promises that He is, that His Son is. John tells us early in his Gospel that Jesus is light, the Word become light. In Him, there is no darkness. He bursts through the broken places in our world, rolls back the clouds, and becomes a beacon of hope...and the dark night of the storm.

Jesus Himself speaks about being living water, when He meets a woman at a well who is tired of drawing a bucket from the depths of the earth every day. He tells her that He is an endless stream, a deep well, living water from which she will never thirst, if only she would drink. He cannot stop moving; love is such a powerful force. And He seems to fill the space somehow between heaven and earth, being in both places wholly at once. 

Put these two together, and we discover that Jesus is the Promise that was given to Noah after the Flood. The very same promise. Formed by light and living water, made up of this very essence. And in Him, we see the same things that we see in the rainbow:

He is everything precisely because He is nothing. In Him is both absolute fullness and complete emptiness, a divine form and a human one. In Him, the invisible is made visible. In Him, the intangible is made tangible. In Him, the impossible is possible. And in Him, the Promise is lifted up that all creation might see, and might know, that the Lord our God is good. 

It's breathtaking. It's amazing. It's incredible. It's...beautiful.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Something Beautiful

So God destroys the entire creation for the sake of man's wicked heart, and then the waters start to recede. The formless and void starts to divide once again between the heavens and the earth, an invisible barrier in place to separate the two. The clouds roll back, and the sun starts to shine; the moon and the stars dance in the night sky. Land starts to peek out from the depths of the water, and it's not new land; it's land that has been forever changed by what it's just gone through, but God has not started over with the dust. The land remembers, at first light, how to begin growing again, and it's not long before something green sticks its little head out from the mud and the muck and reaches heavenward, only to be plucked from its tender home by the curious dove, who then flies away for good. The animals that teem in the seas settle in the waters as they pool in their respective oceans, lakes, and streams, and the animals that crawl along the ground come out of the ark and begin, once again, to fill the earth. 

And finally, after all is clear, man makes his entrance, as well. 

From the very moment that the rains cease, the heavens and the earth take up the act of creation all over again, filling out from the void up, just as they had done the first time. And yet, God, in all His wisdom, is keenly aware that unless He does something new, He's inviting His creation back into the same old problems.

Enter the rainbow.

It's interesting that after all this destruction, all this darkness, all this wrath, the rainbow is the one new thing that God does. He doesn't start over on anything. He doesn't change His grand design. He doesn't sit around and painstakingly recreate everything He once made with a whisper. But He makes a rainbow.

What's amazing about the rainbow is that the rainbow is both everything and nothing. I'm not sure we can say this about anything else in all creation. It's everything because caught within its captivating rays is every possible color on the spectrum. Every hue, every tone, every shade, every gradient is caught within the rainbow's reflection; there is nothing you could make in all the world that wouldn't draw from its vibrant colors. 

And yet, it is nothing at all. It is...light and magic. Mystery, if you prefer that word. There's no substance to the rainbow. You can't touch it. You can't catch it. You can't follow it to its end; it has no end. It has no beginning. It's a vapor. An illusion. A beautiful, incredible, amazing illusion. Absolutely everything contained and reflected in absolutely nothing. 

If that doesn't make you stand in awe of God, I don't know what would. Our God, our amazing God, who holds all that is possible in all that isn't. Our God who draws the full spectrum out of the empty air. Our God...who takes the invisible and makes it shine before our very eyes. It's...beautiful.

And it's a promise. It's the promise that the God who did this once can do this again and again and again, that our God will always be making the possible out of the impossible, the full out of the empty, the visible out of the invisible. That our God will always, always do one new thing. Just one new thing in all creation, again and again and again.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Cleansing Flood

An interesting development takes place early in the book of Genesis that often goes unnoticed for its incredible significance: the Flood.

Now, I know what you're thinking. If there's one thing we don't seem to dance around in our churches, it's the flood. If there's one thing even our littlest children know, it's that Noah built an arky-arky. We've all had the play sets, colored the pictures, sung the songs, and told the story, so how can it possibly be that I would argue that the Flood could go unnoticed?

It's not the story that slips by us; it's the significance.

Go back to the beginning. Start at Genesis 1. With delicate care, God creates the entire known universe out of the unknown; He makes the visible out of the invisible; He imposes form on the formless. Over the course of five days, He fills the world with His incredible creation and then, on the sixth day, He crowns His design with His image: man.

And it was very good.

A couple of chapters later, Eve picks a fruit, shares it with Adam, and one of the firstborn sons kills the other in a fit of envy and rage. A few chapters after that, the whole world has gone to Hell in a hand basket, everyone's evil to their very core, and suddenly, what was very good is no good at all.

In the blink of an eye, the entire creation has gone from 'very good' to 'good for nothing,' and because of the failure of the pinnacle of creation, God destroys literally all of it - an essential "uncreating" in the very reverse order of the first six days. First, the men and women are washed away and drown. Then the animals, those along the land and those that swim in the sea, can find no refuge and are destroyed. Birds tire out, for there is no more place to land until they simply fall, and then there's no way to get back up again. The ground's produce is swamped and stops. Then, there's no land at all; only water. As the rain continues to fall, even the heavens are clouded in darkness until, to the very few left in the boat, the whole universe once again seems formless and empty.

When we talk about this, we talk about the God who destroys His own image, the God who seeks such vengeance on His people that He would do such a thing to them. But that's missing the bigger drama of this whole thing. That's missing the incredibly heartbreaking story that's taking place here.

Because the world wasn't evil; men were. Creation wasn't broken; men were. As far as we know, the birds, the animals, the clouds, the sun, the moon, the heavens, the earth...they were all still...good. Not very good any more, but they were at least still good. You could eat the fruit off the trees and trust that it wasn't poison; it was still good fruit. You could plant a crop and harvest it; the land knew what it was doing. The birds woke up every morning with the same song they always sang. The howler monkeys stayed up at night with their choruses. The sun rose in the east and set in the west and when it wasn't daytime, the moon reflected the sun's glory. All in all, creation was still good. It was still working as it was intended.

Except for that pesky little "human" experiment, which was going so terribly wrong that God could do nothing but to undo everything. 

Let that sink in.

No, really. Let that sink in. The trauma of the flood is not what God did to His people; it's what He did to His creation. His entire creation. We don't talk about this enough. Most of us don't talk about this at all. But we should. We have to. 

Because what happens next is breathtaking....

Monday, July 25, 2016

Cleansing Blood

There is a special emphasis in the instructions on Old Testament sacrifices - something about the liver and the kidneys. When we think about all of the delicious, fragrant, pleasing parts of a sacrificial animal, these would probably not be our first choice in terms of attractiveness, yet God is quite clear that these are the very parts of the animal that He desires most. 


All it takes is a little basic anatomical knowledge, and the answer to this question starts to come together rather easily. What is the function of the liver? What do the kidneys do? Out of all of the organs in the body, it is these two that are most responsible for...filtering blood.

It is the liver and the kidneys that clean waste out of our systems. It is the liver and kidneys that purify, to some degree, the life force rushing through us. It is the liver and kidneys that do the very thing that God is trying to do through the sacrifice itself.

There are, of course, two ways to look at this. The first is to understand that in giving the liver and kidneys to God, we are giving Him these cesspools of filth and sin. It is here where all of our iniquity is stored, having been drawn out of our very blood. It is here where the things that are most toxic to us sit, waiting on the body to do with them whatever the body shall do with them until they become excrement. We are giving to God the raw materials of our own waste, the byproducts of our indulgences, the filthiness of our own hearts. 

And we should. God desires that we would trust Him enough, love Him enough, to be vulnerable enough to give Him the most filthy parts of ourselves. He does not relish our brokenness, but He treasures our sacrifice of it. He does not long for our filth, but He handles it with tender care. When we lay our liver and kidneys on the altar, we do so knowing how disgusting and disgraceful these parts of us are, full of scum and slime, and yet, we rejoice, for they are consumed by holy fire and declared an offering, and an aroma, pleasing to the Lord.

The second way we can look at this is perhaps the more obvious: we can understand that in sacrificing the liver and the kidneys, we are offering to God whatever meager ability we thought we had to cleanse ourselves. The blood itself is poured out on the altar; the animal, quartered and divided and roasted. But the liver and kidneys are burned up, for whatever this sacrifice is, it is not so under its own power. It does not cleanse itself. 

We cannot cleanse ourselves. 

We cannot even cleanse our sacrifices. We can wash them, drain them, cut them, quarter them, roast them, sprinkle them, and a thousand other things, but we cannot run our sacrifices through their own filters. We cannot pull the whole ram, lamb, or goat through its own liver and kidneys. We cannot run all its blood through its organs. We are powerless to offer anything pure, anything clean. The best we can do is acknowledge the feebleness of our sacrifices by making these very thing - the liver and the kidneys - central to our confession. For we are an unclean people.

The Old Testament law can be a bit confusing from time to time. Why does God say this? What does He mean by that? Why would God choose this particular thing over that one? What does it all even mean? But as we talk about the sacrifices and the importance of the liver and the kidneys to a God who seeks nothing more than the cleansing of His people, the wisdom of this particular emphasis is quite clear:
To the One who promises, in all grace and goodness, to cleanse us, we offer these simple tokens - a lobe of the liver, the kidneys, and all of the iniquity built up within that even our best design is powerless, utterly powerless, to cleanse. 

Friday, July 22, 2016


All week, I've been talking about diversity in terms of the sham definition that passes for it in today's contemporary dialogue. We're spending a great deal of our time dividing ourselves into certain groups by certain characteristics and calling ourselves "diverse" only by the very things that make us most like a bunch of other people. 

Again, I say that we are painting our diversity in too broad of strokes to be meaningful at all. And what's more important than that, in defining ourselves in this way, we are missing the true miracle of who we are, individually, as image bearers of our incredible God.

The truth is that the human species has more diversity than any other species that we have studied. Look around. You are not, in fact, exactly like anyone else. You can find a thousand different things that make you different from literally anyone else. This is what we ought to be focused on.

We ought to be focused on that thing that makes you most in the image of God: your heart, which is unlike any other heart in the world. Your eyes, which see the world in a way that no one else does...or can. Your ears, which hear a whisper that is only meant for you.

Look around! Out of trillions upon trillions of possibilities, there is you. Now that's diversity.

It's what gives us people who can stand in the storms, those who can dance in the rain, and those who are gifted in organizing the indoor games that help us forget that it's raining at all. It's what gives us those who aren't afraid to walk into danger and those who can see danger coming a mile away, in plenty of time to divert and take a new course. It's what gives us those who believe in themselves and those who need someone to believe in them. It's what gives us all a unique way to believe in God.

It's what gives us some who are rescuers and some who are rescued. It's what gives us both the beloved and the lovers of our world. It's what gives us those who teach, those who learn, those who lecture, those who labor, those who like, those who love, those who long for something more, better, greater still. 

It's what gives us those who put food on the table and those who wait for an invitation. It's what gives us those with clean hands and those with calloused hands. It's what gives us those who turn the other cheek and those who refuse to turn away from trouble. It's what gives us those who speak truth and those who speak grace and those who speak nothing at all but whose presence speaks something unspeakable. 

It's what gives us those who see clearly what's manifest right in front of them and those who see just as clearly the things that are by definition unseen. It's what gives us those with ears to hear and those who truly listen. It's what gives us those who are anointed and those who do the anointing and those who can't figure out what anointed even means, but holiness drips from their lives like honey nonetheless. 

It's this diversity that we're all a part of. It's this that makes us who we are. Not race. Not sexuality. Not sex or gender. Not economics. Not politics. Not any of this stuff that divides us only into two or three distinct groups, into segments and sectors that we classify as "different" even though they are painfully the same. 

It's this diversity that calls forth the image of God from us. It's this diversity from which we must engage our world if we are to make any impact on it at all. It's this diversity from which we must both ask and answer the greatest questions of our time. Not because we are "this" and not "that," but because we are distinctly "this." Out of the trillions of possibilities, this is who I am. This is who you are. That's no accident. It hasn't happened by chance. 

And it's on this holy ground that we ought to meet each other. For it is here that something truly sacred is happening.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Human Problems, Holy Response

I'm not saying that the issues we're talking about so often today are not real issues; they are. But these are human issues. These issues do not reveal to us anything real about the world at all. They are the stories of ourselves, and we are but vapors in the wind.

Where we get to the real heart of the story, where we start to understand the heart of God, is in figuring out how we respond to these issues, how we work through them. How we love each other.

That's all I'm trying to get at. We're spending so much of our time trying to define the problem, trying to put our finger on what it is about race, about sexuality, about sex, about authority, about economics, about whatever, about this world that defines us when the absolute truth is that defining the problem does not get us anywhere closer to solving it.

It only separates us further.

And there's no separation in God's story. There's no pulling apart. God did not create Adam and Eve and put them in the Garden so that they could figure out how different they were and go out to claim their own stakes in the world. They were given to each other as gifts, to be together in this amazing community. With God. God did not give Jacob twelve unique sons so that they could decide who was bigger, better, smarter, stronger, this, that, or the other and go out and find twelve different communities to be. They were one nation, one tribe. One Israel. Jesus did not call twelve disciples and bake them each their own loaf of bread; there was one loaf, and they were each given a piece of the one loaf. Paul did not plant churches throughout the region so that the church could be one thing in one place and something else entirely in another; they were one church.

We are still one church.

We are still one people. 

All this time we're spending trying to convince ourselves that we're not, trying to convince ourselves that our stories are only mildly tangential to one another, trying to convince ourselves that we are living worlds apart is doing nothing to help us capture what it is that God desires from us as His people. 

Yes, there are real problems in this world. Real human problems. Real problems of our own making when we look in the mirror and see anything less than the heart of a real human being looking back at us. Yes, we have to figure out what we're going to do about the issues that seem to plague us, as men have always had to figure these things out throughout the history of time. 

But the answer is not in defining the problems. The answer is not in defining ourselves. The answer is in discovering God, getting back to the heart of things, and coming together as one community - a community of image bearers who bring our incredible God right down here into this dirt in flesh and bone and blood and love. We have to stop fighting with each other and start fighting for each other. But in order to do this, we have to know what we're really fighting for.

And what we're really fighting for goes far beyond what we think the issues are.

What we're really fighting for goes far beyond racial tensions. It goes far beyond equal rights. It goes far beyond opportunity. What we're really fighting for pierces into the very core of every single one of us. We're fighting for heart. We're fighting for hearts. We're fighting for the image of the invisible God that is knit within our very beings.

Listen, I know. It's not easy. It's not easy to look past the headlines, to tear down the walls we've been so busy building. It's not easy to long for heart in a world that lusts for status. I get that. I have been accused, not a few times, of living in a dream world. Of pursuing something that doesn't seem to fit with our present reality. A pastor once looked at me, in disbelief, and said, "Well, yeah, maybe in a perfect world." Yes, exactly! In a perfect world.

Brother, I am a citizen of Heaven; I live in a perfect world.

In a perfect world where I can fight for you from a place of love, where I can go after your heart in whatever cage it's been trapped in, where I can long and labor to give you the space to become the creature of God that you were create to be. In a perfect world where when I look at you, I don't see the things the world sees; I see what God sees. In a perfect world where when I look at you, I see a reflection of Him. Because there's something incredible about you that truly is the image of God. Have we forgotten that? Are we willing to remember?

We have to step up. We have to do something. We have to figure out community again. We have to figure out heart again. We have to fight for each other. And I'm glad we're having these conversations. But let's not lose sight of what's really at stake here, and it's not the headline. 

It's the heart.

And it's not the issues of our day that will define us; it's how we respond to them that will reveal the kind of people we are.

It is my honest prayer that we are a God kind of people. 

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Image Bearers

Yesterday, I said that what passes for "diversity" in our current dialogue is scarcely that, at best. We're drawing our lines too broadly and making diversity only that thing that, on the largest possible scale, makes you and me "different" somehow - race, sex, sexuality, economics, hair color, whatever. And the problem is that when we do this, we neglect the very real diversity that is at the heart of who we are as image-bearers of our incredible God. 

Persons today are too satisfied to be categorized as one thing; we're too quick to label ourselves as this or that. We staunchly demand that others treat us according to what we believe is our most defining characteristic, when the truth is that that characteristic is typically the thing that makes us most like other people. 

And it's why I refuse to interact with others on the basis of such characterizations.

So you're black. Okay. But is that the truest thing about you? I'm white. Is that the truest thing about me? You're gay; I'm straight. What does this say about us? You're male; I'm female. Are we getting any closer? Nope. Not yet. 

Because these things have nothing to do with the heart, and, more tragically, they have nothing to do with the heart of God. Blackness or whiteness is not a defining characteristic of God. It doesn't tell me anything about Him. And honestly? I don't care. I don't care if God is black, white, purple, or some translucent prismatic color. That has nothing to do with the way that He loves, the way that He thinks, the shape that grace takes. It's our construct, not His. So it shows us who we are, but it doesn't show us who He is. Does God's sexuality, assuming He has one at all, matter when it comes to His heart? No. Is God's love homo- or hetero-? It can't be. It's not classified that way. Is God male or female? Yes. And no. And none of that matters. 

What matters is something that's deeper down in all of us. What matters is not the reflection in the mirror but the imprint in our hearts. And that's how we ought to be relating to one another. That's how we ought to be loving one another.

There are all these amazing, incredible, beautiful things about each and every one of us. And almost all of them are lost in today's rhetoric. We are image-bearers of an amazing, incredible, beautiful God, and we're not showing each other, we're not honoring each other, with the intense diversity that this permits.

There are things I don't do well. Things that God does very well that I just don't do as well. But you do them. Your heart is built for that. And when I enter into a relationship or into a community with you, that's what I want you to be. That's what I need you to be. Because when you are who God created you to be, with all of your real characteristics, with all of your defining glory, you reveal something to me about God. You show me something that I can't seem to envision through my own eyes. You expose me to something my heart just doesn't get in the same way that yours does. And when I see it in you, I can't help but ask the questions we're all asking...what does that mean? What does that look like? What is the tremendous benefit of this? What is the potential struggle? Where do I see the tension of God's own heart in this? 

We're sort of asking these questions already, but they're meaningless without the heart behind them. These questions are meaningless in terms of race. Or sexuality. Or gender. Or sex. Or whatever. In this context, they only lead us back to our world, our broken, messed-up, cursed world. But when we ask these very same questions about qualities of the heart, they draw us up out of this world and into Creation itself. Into the very heart of God Himself. That's where it matters. That's what I'm looking for.

That's the holy ground where I'm willing to meet you - in the place where we are beautifully different because we are creationally the same, image-bearers of an incredible God, knit together in just this way for just this time for just this reason: that we might teach one another something of Him.

(Before you get all down on me, give me one more day on this.)

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

On Diversity

One of today's hottest topics is this idea of diversity. All around us, everyone seems to be taking notice of what it is that sets them apart, that makes them special, that demands their attention and the attention of the world.

Sort of.

The truth is that we draw our lines of diversity in too broad of strokes to be meaningful at all. When we talk about diversity today, we're no longer talking about the things that make us unique; we're talking about the things that make us part of one group or another. In other words, we have twisted diversity to no longer mean the things that set us apart. Rather, our idea of diversity has become the things that make us one thing and not the other. 

For us, "diversity" means little more than black or white, gay or straight, male or female, left or right, rich or poor, Christian or atheist, and a whole host of other things that make us one thing or another, but nothing distinct.

What a shame.

It's a shame because we alone are the species that ought to understand what diversity truly is. For all the research we have done on other species, for all the specimens that we have put under our microscopes, we have never found even a hint of the type of diversity anywhere else that humans have in our peoples. No entomologist has ever put an anthill under the scope and seen some vegan ants over here, carnivores over there, facial hair on these specimens while others are clean-shaven, tiny little temples with little ant priests or coffeeshops full of little hipster get the point. No primatologist has ever uncovered a family of wild gorillas turning social structure on its head, with the matriarch taking on the traditional alpha male role, for example, or with their children choosing their own positions within the community hierarchy. 

You just don't see anywhere else in the animal kingdom the kind of real diversity, and opportunity, that you see in the human species. It's entirely unique. And yet, we have sacrificed this precious diversity on the altar of groupthink. Of all the billions of possibilities that exist in the human species, we have come to the place where our greatest diversity is that thing that makes us like so many other persons around us. 

No wonder it feels like we're all in an identity crisis. No longer we're struggling to figure out who we even are.

No wonder we've lost our value for one another. After all, in this sea of diversity where our lines are so wide, you?'re a dime a dozen. There are a million other people in this world who are just like you. 

There are a million other people in this world who are black. A million other people who are white. A million other people who are gay. A million other people who are straight. There are millions of other people in this world who are the very thing that you say is what makes you so special, what makes you diverse. So why should I bother? 

I'm not saying this type of diversity isn't real; it certainly is. Anyone can look around and see that these things are true about us as a species. But there are not the things that make you special; these are the kinds of things that make us special. This is not the end-all of your uniqueness; it is the beginning of it. When we look at one another and see all of the amazing possibilities of who each of us could be, possibilities that do not exist anywhere else in all creation, we ought to go searching deeper into our hearts, and into the hearts of our brothers and sisters, and discover what it is that makes each one of us a special creation of God. Not in broad strokes, but in finest detail. 

Because you are not who you are, I am not who I am, because of the color of our skin, the orientation of our affection, the anatomy of our physiology, or any other of these ideas that makes us, as a species, special. You are who you are, I am who I am, because of the unique imprint of God on our very hearts, because of His fingerprint on this masterpiece. 

That's where the heart of diversity lies, in the very heart itself. 

More on this tomorrow.  

Monday, July 18, 2016

But Jesus Said

One of the most troubling aspects of the "dialogue" we are currently engaged in in our society, particularly as tragic events continue to occur and persons on both sides of whatever issue continue to demonize the other, is how prominent a role Jesus seems to play in the debate. Yes, you heard right: I called this "troubling."

The problem is not so much that people want to talk about Jesus; we ought to be talking about Jesus. All the time. The problem is that people are wanting Jesus to do the talking, and somewhere in all of this, both His voice and our voices are being warped into things they were never meant to be.

You don't have to look far to see images of Jesus on the social media landscape, always seeming to take up one side of the argument or the other. Always tending to side with one people over another. Always doing things that Jesus would never actually do, as though He actually once did them. 

There are people who are using Jesus to draw lines; Jesus never drew lines. There are people using Jesus to judge and condemn; there's not one example of this in the Gospels. In fact, in the moments when the people begged Jesus to judge and condemn, He judged and condemned...them. You hypocrites! You snakes! In the home of Simon, a known degraded woman grabbed onto His feet, and when Simon demanded that Jesus say something about this spectacle, He did: He chastised Simon! Let's be clear about something here, and the Scriptures are equally clear about this - in Christ, there is no condemnation. So stop pretending that Jesus takes your side.

What's happened is that we've come to the place where we're pretty sure that Jesus would be saying the same things we're saying, that He somehow copies our tone, that He has our heart. No longer are we searching to say the things that Jesus would say. No longer are we looking to follow. No, Jesus is our follower. He's on our side of the street. He's on our line of the protest. He's where we are.

Whatever happened to our wanting to be where He is?

And what's troubling about all of this is that we've completely lost it. We've turned Jesus into mere words. We've turned Him into one more voice on our platforms. We've twisted His words so that it seems that this is all there is of Him - sound teaching, timeless moral advice, and an unwavering commitment to our position. 

Jesus did not come to this earth, walk these roads, break bread with sinners, carry His Cross to Golgotha, be crucified, died, and raised to life to become a meme. 

He did not live a life of our common "wisdom," declaring that if we should ever be so inclined, if we should ever find such a need, that we should do as He said. Jesus often pleaded, "Listen," but He never concluded, "Do as I say." For Jesus, this life He lived was wholly "Do what I do." 

He showed us how. He showed us how to love with extravagant grace and tender truth. He showed us how to interact with persons we don't quite get along with. He showed us how to walk these dusty roads. He showed us how to listen, how to speak, and how little good something like speaking does. And we've lost all that. 

We've lost all that because we're too busy building our walls rather than tearing them down. (Yes, double meaning here fully intended.) We've lost all that because His calloused hands have become our tender ones, no longer doing the hard work in the world but sitting all day behind our screens, tapping on our keyboards as though anything we have to say is anything at all. 

Look at His hands. Look at yours. There's no comparison. His hands show the work, the real work, of being engaged in this world. They are the hands of a carpenter, a Man who built things for a living. They are the hands of a traveler, always covered in a thin layer of dirt and dust. They are the hands that caught fish and broke bread and gave more than they ever received. They are the hands that were pierced and broken and bled for this world. 

Now look at yours. What do you have to show for yourself? The beginnings of arthritis, perhaps. A little touch of carpal tunnel. You've probably "engaged" this culture war without even breaking a nail. 

Good for you.

But let's not pretend that's Jesus. Let's not pretend that's the Jesus way. Jesus never just sat around talking. He didn't enter into the debates. He entered into hearts and lives. He got His hands dirty. And when it comes to figuring out what Jesus has to say about this broken, messed-up, wounded world we live in, it's not about what He said at all. It's about what He did. It's about what He's doing.

What are you doing? What are we doing? 

Let's stop building walls and start carrying crosses. Let's stop debating and start loving. Let's stop drawing lines and start reaching across the table, breaking bread with the persons we disagree with, and condemning those who would have us condemn others. 

And for God's sake, stop with all the Jesus memes. Please. 

Friday, July 15, 2016


Every now and then when reading through the Old Testament, we come across some of the descriptions of the "disgusting" things the people of Israel were doing to worship other gods, gods they had come to call "their" gods. One of these despicable acts of worship is the live sacrifice of their children, which more often than not, meant their sons.

It doesn't take a lot to convince us how disgusting this is. 


Except that the time is coming when Israel's God will turn this story on its head. He will become the God who, condemning His people for the sacrifice of their sons to their so-called gods, will sacrifice His Son for His called-out people. 

There are probably a hundred questions, at least, that we could ask about such a story. One of the most pressing is this: as much as we drape the Cross in good things like love and grace, are we missing how disgusting it was supposed to be? Are we missing one of the lessons that God wanted to teach us on Golgotha? Was the Cross supposed to be not only good, but also gross?

I can't speak for God; I don't know exactly how His heart was aching as His Son hung there on Calvary, dressed only in His own blood, His body beaten and broken. I don't know if God thought this was all disgusting, if it was such a spectacle even to Him that His stomach churned, His heart broke, and He just couldn't bear to look any more.

But I do think there was something that was supposed to be poignant about it. I think there was something that Israel was supposed to notice. I don't know if they did.

I don't know if we do.

I don't know if we get that after hundreds upon hundreds of years of watching Israel sacrifice their sons, alive, to mere idols without thinking a second thought of it, God gave His people something to really think about. You want to sacrifice your sons? You want to burn them alive? You want to run knives through them and slaughter them? You want to hold them at these "altars" and make a public spectacle of your piousness? 

Lookie here. Look on this Cross and tell Me what you see.

This is what sacrifice looks like. This is a son, My Son, sacrificed on your altar. This is what He looks like beaten and bloody and bruised and broken. This is what He looks like torn and naked and scared. This is what He looks like with nails - real nails - driven straight through His hands, cutting through the very pulse of His beating heart. This is what the spectacle looks like. This is your piousness. 

It's a bold statement, that's for sure. It's powerful. I can't imagine how Israel looks at this and doesn't see what's going on here, doesn't understand the display. I can't imagine how the people of God don't think about their own sons, brothers, fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers and wonder how many "sons" were sacrificed and for what? For what?

For here hangs a Son, the one and only Son, whose sacrifice does not appease this God, but grieves Him. 

Disgusting. Just...disgusting. 

Thursday, July 14, 2016

Second Chances

Playing grace off like a given is an affront to the mystery of grace. But so is playing grace down.

The truth is that most of us play grace off like it's no big deal. We play our second chances like they're our firsts, like we've never messed up before. We keep grace quiet lest anyone figure out how desperately we need it.

It's this quiet kind of game we play. Ask me how many second chances I've had in life, and I'll pretend to think about it for awhile. I'll rack my brain trying to come up with maybe even one or two times that I've gotten a do-over. Me? I get it right the first time. Ask my family or my friends, and they'll be able to rattle off a whole list of times I could have used a second chance, probably by rattling off a list of my failed firsts. Ask me again, in a quiet moment, and invite me to authenticity, and I will admit that I've lost count, that I'm almost at a place where every breath feels like a second chance, every heartbeat feels like grace. I will drown myself in my own failures as I contemplate grace. Ask God, and I think the true number is somewhere in the middle of all of this - somewhere between none at all and every breath.

This is another theological difficulty we run into with grace, by the way - the idea that our whole life is grace. It's true that our whole life is a gift, that it's only by God's goodness that we have any of this at all. But grace is a special thing. It's an amazing thing. And when we say our whole lives are grace, we set up this theology where God holds us hostage to grace. I don't think that's God, and I don't think that's grace. I think our lives are created, and filled, with passion and purpose and promise and love, and I think there's grace when we need it.

But how many of us are willing to say that we need it?

Standing in need of grace requires our falling flat on our faces. It requires us tripping over our own feet. It requires us failing and flailing and falling. It requires us admitting that sometimes, our lives look more like a reel of "America's Funniest Home Videos" than a steady walk on water. It requires us saying there are things that we can do, things we cannot do, and things we ought to have done better. It requires us asking forgiveness and seeking second chances, knowing full well that we messed up the first one.

These are not easy things for us to do. Especially not in a culture that places a high premium on performance. It doesn't always feel like there's a lot of room in our world for second chances. There are no ways of going back and doing it all over again. And there's some truth in that. Even grace doesn't give us the chance to go back.

But it gives us the chance to go forward.

See, grace doesn't erase our failures. It doesn't make up for our shortcomings. It doesn't go back and rewrite our stories so that those chapters don't appear in the final edit. Grace never pretends that a second chance is the same as a first or that learning how to stand means we have never fallen. That's what I love about grace. That's what we all love about grace.

Imagine the best stories you know...without grace. Remember the homeless guy with the incredible voice? What if he'd never been homeless? Or think about the men who come out of prison and start amazing programs. What if they'd never been in prison? Take the story of any recovered addict and try to tell it without the addiction. It loses something. It loses...everything. The reason we love the stories that we do is because they blossom in second chances. But they only grow in second chances because we do not forsake the first.

Grace makes things possible.

If I borrowed all the fingers and toes in all the world, I'm not sure I could count the number of second chances in my story. Not all of them have been of huge import; many are just the small things. I could probably count on just my own hands the number of second chances that have been real story-changers for me, the number of scenes where my story has shifted. And I'm humbled by this grace. Truly. Every day.

But still I play it off like it's no big thing, like the person that you see today is the person I've always been. Still I play it off like this second chance is really my first, like I haven't screwed it all up before. I don't know why I do this. I guess it's just...easier.

But it's not really amazing. 

Wednesday, July 13, 2016


Perhaps the most difficult thing to understand about grace is that even when grace is given, it is always the gift. That is, grace does not offer gifts other than itself. Or, as I said it earlier this week, grace only makes things possible, not necessary.

This is an idea that I have had to throw around in my own head for quite awhile just to try to get a grasp on it because I, too, can easily fall into the idea that grace comes bearing gifts, rather than being the gift itself. I, too, can easily believe that grace does all the work. I, too, can so easily subscribe to the idea that when it comes to grace, my job is to sit at the head of the table with the party hat on my head, ready to unwrap whatever good thing grace has given me, for I have been such a good girl this year.

Then I open the box and discover those dreaded words: some assembly required.

Here's where it's easy to get off track. Because we read these words, or at least, I do, and I think that it's grace that must be assembled. I think that it's grace that must be put together. I feel like God has put this grace as a tangled thread before me, and that it's up to me to weave it into the rest of my life. But that's not it at all. Grace is never the tangled thread; it's the starter piece. It's the one thing stretched taut throughout our existence, the thing we are forced to weave the rest of our lives around.

What requires assembly is the rest of our being.

Think again about the Cross. As we saw yesterday, the Cross is the place where we come to discover that grace is not fair; it's amazing. And at the very moment that God hung His Son on that Cross, in the same breath at which He turned His face away, as the earth shook and the curtains tore and the stone rolled both in front of and away from the grave, this tremendous grace poured out on all Creation. It was the grace to set things right again. It was an invitation to Eden.

An invitation, but not an escort.

See, the Cross doesn't save us. Not without our consent. God did not die on the Cross just to sweep everyone back into His arms with one fail swoop. We still have to choose grace. We have to accept His gift. We have to embrace His offer. As He holds out His arms and calls to us, we have to open our arms to Him, as well. Unless we do that, we are not saved. So this amazing grace, this blood poured out, it makes salvation possible, but not necessary. It is given, but it's not given. That's where faith comes in.

And this is also where we can see our attitudes toward grace shine through. Because most of us have spent the past 2000 years trying to assemble this grace from the story of the Cross. We've been trying to put it together in a way that makes sense. We've been trying to untangle the mystery of Jesus Christ, as though figuring out this one thing is the thing that will save us, the thing that will make this grace ours.

But if there's one thread in this world that's not tangled, it is the scarlet thread flowing from Calvary. And God never asked us to weave this into our own stories; He called us to weave our own stories around this. Rather than trying to make this Jesus one theme of our lives, one adornment of our tapestry, our call is to make Him the center of it. This is the place where all things being. This is the one point of reference we've got for making sense of our lives. And that's all we can really do.

Because nobody can make sense of grace. It's that far beyond us.

That's why grace takes faith. It takes believing in something that we can't quite understand. It takes trusting in something we only know in dances of shadow and light. It takes staking ourselves on the whisper that all of this is real, that it's true, that it's...amazing. And going from there.

Grace is not a given, but it's an incredible gift. No assembly required. 

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

At the Cross

As we discussed yesterday, we are living in a world where the human heart is so entitled that even something so amazing as grace seems "fair," as though grace is just one more thing we are entitled to, one more thing we are expecting, one more thing that God owes us because God is, after all, God, and God does grace. So if God does grace, then grace just happens, and it is a part of our experience not because it's amazing but because it's expected. And so we judge grace not by its awesomeness, but by its fairness.

That seems fair.

What's most troubling about this thinking that permits us to think such bland thoughts about grace is that grace inevitably leads to Golgotha, and sadly, here, too, we have decided that fair.

We've decided that it's fair that God Himself should die for our sins. After all, He made us. He put us in this broken world. He refused to destroy the fallen angels at the moment of betrayal. He surrounded us with temptation. He gave us free will to choose the wrong things. He made faithfulness and discipline and integrity the hard things in a world that's got a lot of easier options for us. He made all the strict rules that are impossible for us to remember, let alone follow. He took all the fun out of this life that He's given us. So absolutely, it's fair that if anyone is going to fix things, it ought to be Him. If anyone is going to pay the price for the way things are, it's God. If anyone should die for the horrible nature of this world around us, it's Jesus.

That seems fair.

Yes, this is really where theology stands for many of us. This is really where we are. This is what our hearts are telling us is true. The Cross? It's not amazing; it's expected. It's exactly what we would expect for God to do in a situation like this. And it's what He should do. He owes us the opportunity for things to be possible. He owes us the possibility of His promise. So of course, Calvary. Of course!

And for those who have recognized this shift in our theology, for those who bristle at the idea that we've come so far as to say that the Cross seems fair, the response is often to go too far in the other direction, to try to recapture the horrendousness and the spectacle of the crucifixion. This, too, is a failed theology. This, too, is the wrong image of the Cross.

We simply cannot live in a heart that tells us either that the Cross is gruesome or a given. Both twist the very real story of grace that took place on that hill.

What we have to do is stand there, to behold the broken Jesus with our own eyes. We have to be willing to look at the blood and the gore and the tears, to hear the mocking in the soldiers' voices, to hear the pain in the mother's cry, to listen to the conversation of the thieves. We have to put ourselves there, where drops of sweat and blood mixed and fell onto the sacred ground, where a crown of thorns told us that this was our King. We have to dare to look at Him, to look at this innocent man who would not even speak a word in His own defense because He was too busy defending us. To look at this man whose hands and feet were calloused, but whose heart was tender still. To look at this Son of God, and to know...

This isn't fair.

It's not fair. And for all the blood, all the sweat, all the tears, all the noise, it's not gruesome, either. It's gory, but it's not grotesque. It's...beautiful. It's...breathtaking. It's...amazing. It's...


Monday, July 11, 2016

An Expectation of Grace

One of the amazing opportunities that life affords me from time to time is the chance to extend grace to someone in a little need of it. I love moments like these because I understand how very often it is grace that makes things possible, and I love helping others to embrace the possibilities. But a few weeks ago, I seized one of these chances for grace and was met with an increasingly-common response that caused me to stop dead in my tracks. After extending grace to an individual in need of it, his prompt response was:

"That seems fair."

Fair. Fair??? No, brother. It's not fair. It's grace.

"Fair" is playing by the rules. "Fair" is following the letter of the law. "Fair" is making sure that you face the prescribed consequences for your transgression, that you fall into the very hole that you've dug for yourself, that you have to figure your own way out of things. "Fair" is that you're being treated the same way everyone else is being treated. "Fair" means that at just the moment when you feel like things have become impossible, they truly have, because things like this are only possible again with grace. And grace isn't fair.

I think it's got something to do with the entitlement that this world feels. It's a world where we've convinced everyone that anything is possible if you work hard enough, that anything is do-able if you set your mind to doing it. And so when something comes along that simply makes things possible, something like grace, then that's almost expected. Because things are supposed to be possible, aren't they? So it's not even grace any more; it's just the way things are supposed to be.

Faced with this response, I found myself in a new conundrum: grace isn't fair. But if I were going to convince this individual of that, I would have to do something inherently unfair, inherently ungracious. You might even say unjust. To rescind grace, or even to modify it, once it has been given, is to deny grace altogether. It changes the fundamental nature of the offer, making it somehow conditional. And grace, which is not fair, is also not conditional.

And so I find myself with an individual who still believes that grace is fair.

The truth, of course, is that this is, as are most things, a bit of pot, meet kettle. Because I think of all the times I have pleaded for grace from God just because I am burdened by the impossibility of the situation that I've gotten myself into. Just because I want a way out. I think of the times that I have not been able to breathe, where I haven't even been able to squeeze the air into my lungs, and the tears are streaming down my face, and I so long not to be trapped in my own impossibility. I know the bed that I have made for myself, and I ache for God to come and wake me from it. 

And when He does, it's so easy for me to think that's nothing special. That's just the way God does things. It's almost expected. 

It seems fair.

It seems fair to me that God would be God, and that I would be me. It seems fair to me that this God for whom all things are possible would make things possible for me. It seems fair to me that this God of second chances would give me yet another one. It seems fair to me that on the grounds of whatever excuse I have come up with this time - that I didn't mean it, that I didn't think it through, that I didn't know, that I messed up - this God would give me another chance at getting it right, simply because He knows I didn't mean to get it wrong. 

It seems fair to me...and not all that amazing. Because isn't this how things are supposed to be? Aren't things supposed to be...possible? Isn't God supposed to be...good? Isn't there supposed to be...grace? 

Lord, forgive me, for I have too often lost sight of the most amazing things. Things like grace, which are not givens in this world but are given nonetheless, even to a retch like me.

Friday, July 8, 2016

Walk the Walk

Here we are again, trying to make sense of a world that increasingly just doesn't make sense any more. Our own thoughts are so often drowned out by all the political rhetoric that dominates our televisions, social media, coffeeshop conversations that none of us really know what we think. None of really know what to do. 

And the temptation is to add our voice to the noise. Say something. Because quiet never accomplished anything. Right? But all the talking in the world does not solve these problems. All the theories, all the debates, all the ideologies do not get us a single breath closer to a solution to the violence problem in our country, indeed, in our world. And as we all know, anyone who doesn't already agree with us isn't listening anyway. 

We're literally talking ourselves in circles...until the stories come back around again and again and again, with different names and different faces but the same terrible outcome.

It's time to stop talking.

It's time to stop pretending that if "the other side" would just "understand" how things "really are," then that would be enough to stop the madness. It's time to stop pretending that we have the power in our own voices to get someone who's not listening to hear us. It's time to stop pretending that the answer to all our problems lies somewhere in politics, that the answer is somewhere on the left or the right, that the solution to this whole mess is somewhere on the debate floor.

It's time to stop pretending that we can convince anyone of anything with our words, when none of our actions line up with the very things we're saying. You can't pound gentleness into someone's heart. You can't bully anyone into forgiveness. You can't demand respect without first giving it. You can't beg someone to see things from your perspective if you're not also willing to open your own eyes.

All we're doing is talking. It's time to stop talking. 

It's time to start walking.

It's time to start living out what we're asking of others. We all seem to have the solution to this problem; it seems so simple to us. But if it were so simple, we'd be living it ourselves. 

We'd be respecting those that we're asking to respect us. It's that simple. You can't name-call, accuse, assault someone into respecting you; you have to give them a reason to. And the reason you give them is that you respect them. This idea's gotten more than a little backward in our culture. There are a lot of people that think being respected means being affirmed, and that's not true. You can respect someone without agreeing with them. You can respect someone without giving them permission to continue a broken lifestyle. You can respect someone as a human being and still have extreme fundamental differences between the two of you. 

Our problem here is that we demand that someone respect us not because we're human, but because we're "right." Clearly, the onus is on the "wrong" to respect the "right," but that's precisely what creates these hard lines between us. You want to do something radical? You want to do your part here? Respect someone you think is wrong. Respect the shooter. Respect the political opponent. Respect the one who makes you feel like it's necessary to speak at all. You don't have to agree with them, but you do have to respect them.

Revolutionary, right? Think of all the lines that we're standing on that could be erased if we would do just this one simple thing. 

Because the truth of this world is not that it's us vs. them. Or even us and them at all. There is no such thing. There's only us. There's only us who are trying to do the best we can with this one thing we've got called life. There's only us who are working through the same messes, trying to manage the same troubles, trying to figure out what to do with these wounded hearts. There's only us working our way toward tomorrow one messed-up, troubled, broken, blessed today at a time. There's only us. There has never ever been a them. All that them has ever gotten us is something to fight about, and who has the time when there is so much to fight against?

We're dealing with wounded hearts. Ours, theirs, everybody's. And no wounded heart has ever been mended by words or by politics or by protest. Wounded hearts take tenderness.

There are a thousand things I want to say on a morning like this morning, a thousand valid, logical arguments I want to point out. But they won't be heard. Nobody cares. At least, nobody that doesn't already agree with whatever it is that I might want to say. So I'll save my breath and not speak politics. 

But I'll pull my bleeding heart right out of my chest and put it out there on this battle line. I will love hard, on both sides of the issue. I will give my ear, and my hand, to anyone who seeks it, anyone who needs to talk through the woundedness that is eating them alive. I will feed those who are hungry, no matter what side they think they're fighting on. I will clothe those who are naked. I will visit in prison both the protester and the accused. I will call on the sick, taking whatever healing balm I can bring. And I will pray for peace. 

And you know what? That's never going to be the headline. That's never going to be breaking news. That's never going to be today's top story - that love won the day. That mercy and grace and justice and peace are real. And that's okay. Because it's not a headline. 

It's far, far more than a headline.

And whatever love, mercy, grace, justice, and peace come out of my broken heart and dirty hands...these do not even begin to touch the tragedy in the far corners of this world. Whatever I do today is unlikely to touch Dallas...or Orlando...or Paris...or Brussels...or Fallujah...or Sudan...or wherever. But it's 100% guaranteed to touch my community. It's 100% guaranteed to mean something here. It begins to touch the tragedy closer to home, the brokenness of the human heart that is so longing for these better things....

...the longing to stop feeling like a them and somehow be us

I'm making us us. I'm creating a space for us. And everyone's welcome. 

You want to do something today? You want to know the answer to the world's "problem"? Love somebody. Draw them close and make us us. Give what you're asking to get. Do the things you're asking others to do. Win the day. Because mercy, grace, justice, and peace are real. And they start right here...with dirty hands, with bleeding hearts.

It's time to stop talking. 

Thursday, July 7, 2016


If the deepest truth of Jesus in this forsaken moment is not strength of heart or resolve or incredible faith, what is it that allows Him to cry out my God, my God in the same breath as forsaken?

It's relationship.

It feels like it's impossible for us to understand something like this. How could Jesus have any thought of the relationship when He also declares that it is God who has turned His back on Him somehow? How could the love of the Father and the Son persist through such torn darkness? Is Jesus foolish or naive to still consider this "forsaker" His God? The whole thing is ludicrous! Or is it...?

It feels like it's impossible to understand, but the truth is that we can actually understand this quite well because we see it on a micro scale in our own parent-child relationships. (And remember - we are dealing here with both a man-God relationship AND a parent-child relationship.) But it's the parent-child relationship that allows Jesus to continue loving God even when He feels forsaken.

Let's bring this down to our level. A human father is teaching his human son how to ride a bicycle without training wheels. Both are excited about the outcome - the freedom to ride bikes like a big boy. Both are a little apprehensive about the process - the boy is not sure about things, and the father knows that a fall or two is coming. Sure enough, a few feet down the road, the boy falls. He skins and bloodies his hands and knees as he hits the pavement. And he gives his dad...the look. It's the look that says, "Why did you let go? Why did you let me fall? Do you see my bloody knees, father? These are your fault..." And the son is troubled by the father.

At the same time, he comes running to him. The son seeks comfort in the father's arms. In this moment of pain and failure, his father's embrace is the only place he wants to be. He doesn't want to talk about riding bikes right now. He doesn't want to think about trying again. But he wants his daddy to hold him, to mend his wounds, to wash clean his scraped up hands and knees, and to reassure him, even in this moment...especially in this moment...of the love that is shared between them. He does not trust his daddy to hold the bike, maybe, but he trusts his daddy to hold him.

And this is not some feat of super strength on the son's part. It's not because his heart tells him that he ought to continue to love and trust his father. It's not because something in him thinks he needs to forgive his dad for the pain he's feeling right now. That's the furthest thing from his mind. And it's not some act of incredible faith. Ask the kid in this moment. Ask him how he feels about his father's trustworthiness when it comes to bikes. He's not ready to get back on there, not even if his daddy is holding him steady on two wheels. So it's not that he has some weird, unexplainable faith in his father at this point.

It's all about the relationship. This man, this strong, incredible, amazing man that this child has spent his whole life growing up with, this man who just let him take a hard, bloody fall on the pavement, also happens to be his father. He also happens to be the man who reads him bedtime stories, gets him a cup of milk, sneaks cookies in the middle of the night, takes him to school, goes fishing with him, lets him help in the woodshop or in the garage, teaches him how to laugh and to love and to cry and to question. Yes, he just fell, but they have a million other moments together that help to reshape this one, that help to redefine this one. And at the very moment that his flesh is torn, even though there's a part of him that cannot ignore that it was his father who let him fall, he instinctively turns and cries out, Daddy!....

This is what we see on the Cross, in most dramatic fashion. (Yes, even more dramatic than a young child who has just fallen off his bike.) This is what we see in Christ. At the very moment that His flesh is torn, even though there's a part of Him that cannot ignore that it was His Father who orchestrated this whole thing, He instinctively turns and cries out, MY God, MY God...because this is still His God. And in the very breath that this man feels betrayed by His God, this Son clings to His Father. 

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

My God

As we try to understand these words of Jesus on the Cross and the theology of forsakenness, we must start with the very words themselves, as they give us a tremendous clue to yet another paradox of God revealed in Scripture. Look again at the words:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

This is where Jesus, even in His humanity, far surpasses us in ours. Most of us, in times of trial or trouble, put distance between ourselves and others. Most of us, in the grips of pain, take a step back. It's instinct. Most of us, in the clutches of heartache, in the moments of felt forsakenness, do not cry out my God, my God.

We simply cry out God.

For this reason alone, we cannot ignore what Jesus is saying here. We cannot dismiss these words as simple rhetoric or hyperbole or even poetry. There is a depth of meaning here that we cannot escape. In the toughest of times, in the hardest of trials, as His body hang limp and wounded on the Cross, even after a prayer in which He prayed for there to be any other way, anything else He could do to fulfill His purpose, Jesus has the courage, the faith, the audacity to cry out My God, my God.

This God was still His God.

I struggle with that one, more often than I'd like to admit. (Although I must also say I struggle with it less the more I know about God, the more I come to trust Him.) It's far too easy for me and you to pull back a little bit, to come further into our pain, and maybe we still cry out to God, but not to our God; He's only our God if He figures us a way out of this. He's only our God if He comes through. He's God; that much, we'll still give Him. But is He our God? Let's see how this thing plays out.

Isn't that how we do it? Aren't we always holding God hostage to His own performance? Aren't we always waiting to see if God is going to do anything God-like before we claim Him as our own, before we give Him stake in our hearts again? And don't we, at the moments that we feel most forsaken, boldly claim that we probably don't even have a God any more. This God...this God is still God. He's just not ours.

So even in these words, even in these troubling words from the Cross, Jesus is declaring something about His Father. He's declaring something about Himself. He's saying something about the relationship that we can and should have with God, something that seems far beyond what our flesh is either willing or able to do. Something far beyond what our minds can understand. This...this is the ultimate betrayal and yet this is also my God. 

How can this be? How can we wrap our feeble, finite minds around something like this? 

It's more than strength of heart; we need not wish that our hearts were simply stronger. As someone with a pretty tough heart, let me tell you that toughness of heart never draws God nearer on its own. A strong heart still must seek Him with everything it's got. It's more than just solid faith. Faith itself wrests more on questions than on answers, which means that even the most solid faith questions from time to time. If you're not questioning, how can you ever believe? It's not even some supernatural, special God characteristic that Jesus has and we just don't have access to. Jesus does not set for us here an example we cannot follow. He does not call us to carry our crosses so that we can come to the place of forsakenness without anything to soothe our spirits. That would go against the very heart of God, the very heart that we know and love. 

So what is it? What is it that lets a man (and in this moment, He is still fully man, perhaps most fully man), cry out in a moment of utter betrayal, My God, my God, even when the words must also be, why have you forsaken me? .....

Tuesday, July 5, 2016


One of the most difficult words of Jesus is the word He spoke on the Cross, just before drawing His last breath. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

The reason these words are so difficult for us to comprehend is because of the deep theological thinking required to process them. What is Jesus referring to when He says He's been forsaken? What is He feeling? What does this mean for the Son of Man? What about the Son of God? What about the Holy Trinity?

Just a few hours before, Jesus had been in the garden of Gethsemane. He'd been praying for there to be another way, any other way, although He remained fully surrendered to the plan that God had had for Him from before time began. Not my will, but yours be done. He knew what was going to happen. He knew how it was going to happen. He knew everything that awaited Him just a few heavy steps away. When He cries out forsaken on the Cross, is it because He feels this final prayer of His has not been answered? Is it because this cup has not been removed? Is it because, like us, He prayed this fervent, honest prayer and was met, seemingly, by silence by the very Father who claimed to both hear and love Him?

Maybe in that moment, maybe in those final breaths, God somehow pulled away from His Son. Maybe at the very moment that Jesus felt He needed His Father the most, at the very time His eyes and His heart were crying out Abba, God Himself turned away. Jesus could not see the eyes of the Father; only His back. Only His shoulder. Only His drooped head as He looked the other direction. Is this what forsaken is? Is it possible for the Father to turn away from the Son so decisively without threatening the community of the Trinity? What can we possibly make of this if even the Father and the Son can turn away from one another? 

Maybe at the very moment that the entire world is being saved, Jesus feels profoundly what it is to be unsaved. There is no one there to take away His pain. No one there to cover His shame. He's beaten, bloody, bruised, broken, and naked. Maybe He's feeling a little bit of what we all feel - with all this amazing grace, with this incredible saving work happening right now, why is there no one to save Jesus? Why is there no one to rescue Him?

The theology here is thick. There are implications no matter how we come to interpret these words of Jesus, implications that can be either challenging or comforting, depending on how we are able to process it. Does the Trinity hold together even in this critical moment...or is it prone to the same relational stress that we are? Is Jesus still a Son...or just a sinner? Is God a good Father...or an omnipotent puppetmaster? 

Most pressingly, if even Jesus, the very Son of God, can be forsaken by Him, what possible hope is there for the rest of us?

And that's why we have to wade through these murky waters. That's why we have to ask these tough theological questions. That's why we have to figure out what in the world Jesus meant, what He was saying, what was really happening, at this moment when He cries out forsaken. It's absolutely crucial for our understanding of God, of Christ, and of ourselves. 

Thankfully, the very words themselves give us at least a good starting point....

Monday, July 4, 2016


Today, America gathers to celebrate freedom. But freedom is not what most people think of it.

Most people think of freedom as this thing with no boundaries, this thing with no lines. Freedom is the ability to do, think, say, believe, pursue whatever it is that tickles your fancy; literally anything is possible with freedom. Anything short of this isn't really free. Anything with rules, guidelines, lines, or boundaries isn't freedom. 

But freedom requires precisely these things.

True freedom requires parameters, and to an extent, we know this. Even in perfect "freedom," you are not free to do things which are not possible for you. At any given time, you are constrained by the finiteness of your own being. That is, even in perfect freedom, you cannot fly. You were not made to fly. Even in perfect freedom, you cannot sprout flowers out the top of your own head; you are not a flower. So even at your most free, there are limits to what you can and cannot do, and these extend down into the deepest places of your heart and the most vibrant truths of our reality.

You are free to lie, but this freedom exists only within the confines of truth. If there is no truth, there can be no lie. So even in lying, you are drawn in by truth. You are free to break relationship, but this freedom only exists within the boundaries of closeness. If you are not close to someone else, there's no relationship to break. You are free to wander, but you can never get off the map; you will always be somewhere. You can't not be. You can't be nowhere. 

And each of us has within us some guides that set our special freedom, some things that are specific just to who we are. We can do many things, and we are free to do them, but they all come back to this place of our own identity, of who we have been created by God to be. You may do things which lie outside your own creation, but choosing to do them requires that you be created in the first place, and so you are limited, to some degree, by the very thing you are desiring to break free of. 

Kind of a bummer, huh? Not really.

We need these kinds of guides and boundaries; they are essential to this thing that we call freedom. Without them, what we have is something much, much less than free.

Imagine that you could go wandering and find yourself off the map. Imagine that you could become nothing at all. How would you ever get yourself back? You cannot simply manifest yourself into something out of nothing; it's not possible. Or imagine that you did not quite become nothing at all, but you became something much worse: lost. Would you not need to find yourself, or find some point of orientation, before you could do anything else? Sure, you might welcome being lost for awhile, but man does not best exist lost and it doesn't take long before his lostness becomes a driving force and all of a sudden, you are not free at all; you are a prisoner of your own lostness until you find your way out of it. Lostness drives everything you do, not freedom. Lostness demands that you be found, and any demand on your life limits your freedom.

When there's nothing to guide you, you don't gain your freedom; you lose yourself. You lose any sense of right and wrong, up and down, left and right, east and west. Without boundaries in place, you're a nomad...and a no one. You become ill-defined and then non-defined, becoming a vapor in the wind or a blur in the scenery. If truly everything were possible, how would you ever know what you were truly capable of? If you were free to do anything, how would you know what you were supposed to do? 

If you were free to lie without the confines of truth, how would you know you were lying? You wouldn't. And therefore, you are not free to lie after all. You're just babbling. Words with no meaning. Noise. Nobody pays attention, not even you. Living within the lines of truth creates your very freedom to lie.

So today, as we consider our freedom, let us consider also the things that hem us in, the guidelines and limits and parameters that make our freedom free - things like love. Things like grace. Things like truth. Things like sacrifice. Things like blood. Things like....