Accept No Substitutes

Who is he who speaks and it comes to pass when the Lord has not commanded it? – Lamentations 3:37I have for many years gotten a newsletter from a reasonably well-known minister. He is considered by many to be something of a prophet, and he is in the sense that he speaks forth the word of God. I don’t think he has done so well on predictions. He used to always talk about being hit with Russian nuclear missiles, and he could still be right. It becomes more of a possibility as Obama dismantles our capacity to respond. Of course, he is currently talking about the financial collapse, and he brings up a term used by the Puritans who spoke of some events as being “signal judgments”: an event that serves to warn.

Ignoring the world in general for a moment, we are all familiar with signal judgments. We call them by other names like “misfortune”, “bad timing”, “circumstances beyond our control”, etc. Every event in our lives can be illuminated from within and take on significance if we can pay attention.

I don’t often pay attention. I’m so caught up in just making it through the day and dealing with crises and consequences that I forget these very problems have God’s signature on them. He has authorized them. To accept this, I have to expand my faith a little beyond the usual boundaries of Christian thought, a little beyond being good and pleasant and nice and making everyone feel comfortable. I have to embrace some dark hollows, step into the water and realize there is ice forming on the edges. “Jesus loves me, this I know” still applies, but love takes on some added dimensions.

One of his lovers said of Lord Byron that he was “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. Jesus, too, is dangerous to know, dangerous to love because once we step in, He is never going to stop challenging us and pulling us further in.

There are many “lifestyle” Christians. No one in their right mind can argue that there are not positive benefits to the Christian lifestyle. It is, in fact, the default lifestyle in Western Civilization, or it has been up until the last fifty years or so. It is the foundation on which our society is built. I think that is good and should continue. I think the world would be much better off if everyone went to church at least once a week, if families prayed over their meals, if we were accountable to one another in the church for the things we do outside the church, if our children were told to abstain until marriage, if divorce were rare, if the music we listened to glorified virtue instead of vice and celebrated righteousness instead of wickedness, if Hollywood produced more movies in the vein of “It’s a Wonderful Life” and fewer like “Rendition”, if television were more “Andy Griffith” and less “Sex and the City”.

Yet, even if I had my way, it would not be enough for God. It would be a better world but it would not be the Kingdom. A Christian lifestyle is good and positive and healthy but it only makes for a better and more tolerable flatland. Living like Ozzie and Harriet or Ward and June Cleaver means you are a decent, honorable person worthy of emulation, but you may yet be far from the Kingdom, living in the wilderness. Thus the Christian right, though they would generally agree with what I’m saying, still ignore the reality most of the time. Meanwhile the cynics and detractors miss the point that the conservative corporate cog Ward Cleaver is a mystic wreathed in fragrant fumes of Prince Albert, esoteric and wildly sage, as exotic in his own way reading the runes on the evening paper as a tattooed witchdoctor examining the entrails of a freshly slaughtered chicken.

Is there a greater failure of faith than to limit God, to cage Him, to claim His unending love and His infinite mercy make Him comprehensible – make Him tame? He is waking us up. He is breaking out in the midst of us in swelling, rolling floods of passion, in flames like fiery roses to which we are drawn until our pain becomes our all-consuming joy.