Spirituality

I don’t think our spirituality is safe from our humanness. Yes, we are very human in every pursuit. There is always a voice in our heads that is evaluating, comparing, and judging others. It’s that voice that often convinces us that we can be “better” than other people and by “better,” I mean more “spiritual.”

Grace is the great leveling force, though. God does not offer grace based on who deserves it. That’s kind of the point of grace.

There is this song by Sufjan Stevens about John Wayne Gacy, Jr., Chicago’s infamous serial killer. Sufjan describes in intense detail Gacy’s horrific acts, and despite its subject matter, it is quite a pretty song. The best part, though, is the final lines: “In my best behavior, I am really just like him/look beneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid.”

We get to thinking sometimes that there are things of which we’re not capable. Among them are usually rape, murder, and child abuse. It’s usually people that have done those things that we compare ourselves to and start feeling good about where we are. But realizing that we are just as guilty as killers if we are spiteful or prideful is the first step to true spirituality. It is the first step to realizing who we are and who God is. We are sinners and the more fully we understand our own brokenness, the more we will understand the depth of the grace God offers us.

The truth about you

Boy, we Christians are really bent on separating ourselves from the world and in the process, separating ourselves from the truth. Did you ever notice that there’s all this stuff you can’t do while you’re at church? You can’t cuss, you can’t smoke, and when you roll into the parking lot, you have to turn down your music. Even if that’s all stuff you do normally, it’s not kosher at church. And it’s not all that kosher to talk about all the other times you’ve sinned, either.

There’s something wrong when we can be ourselves in other places, but we get tense when we go to church. In trying to be so Christian, we forget about the importance of truth. Christians seem real big on truth – about doctrine, about God – until you start talking about the truth about yourself. You can’t tell the truth about some of the stuff you’ve done because at the very least you’ll make people feel uncomfortable. Or you might “make people stumble” or “ruin your testimony.” We forget that we have ruined our testimony by being phony.

Now, I’m not saying that we should all run around church trying to be provocative or doing things just because we can. “Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.” (1 Cor. 10:23) But I am saying that church should be a place where people can be honest. We wonder how we can produce transformation, but we require that people are already transformed when they get to us.

The truth is important. Let’s be people of the truth.

Other gods

I believe in the God who reveals himself in Jesus. I know this doesn’t sound like some great revelation, but it kind of is to me. It sounds like a rather “orthodox” thing to believe, but to me it’s revolutionary because I think Jesus is different than the God a lot of people believe in and the God I have believed in for a long time.

There are a couple of other gods people believe in that aren’t like Jesus. One of these gods is more like karma. A lot of people live like there is some temperamental force beyond the universe that only deals in punishments and rewards, kind of like your 5th grade teacher. If you appease that god, then you will receive glory. If you don’t, you won’t. I don’t believe in that god because I believe in a God that offers mercy. What about justice, you say? I’m counting on Jesus.

Another god that people believe in is more like superstition. They believe that if they say “the Lord’s name in vain,” bad things will happen to them and that if they pray the right prayer with just the right amount of gusto, they will receive what they ask for. I don’t believe in that god, either. That god doesn’t have a personality. He is just a machine that receives input and offers output. I believe in a God that is a personality and that personality is revealed in Jesus.

Notice I don’t say that those other gods don’t exist. I think they do and that there are people who put their faith in them. But, I don’t want to put my faith in them anymore because they don’t do anything for me. I’m putting my faith in the God revealed in Scripture, the God who reveals himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the God I believe cares about me and has come in Jesus Christ to reconcile me to himself and who is interested in changing the world for the better.

To be

The two hardest things to be are to be yourself and to be in the moment. We’re usually trying to be who we think other people want us to be or who we think we ought to be. We spend the rest of our time hoping or worrying for something in the future or regretting something in the past. There are not a lot of times when we just are.

Sometimes we render God as someone who confirms these thoughts. We think that God wants us to be different than we are, so we spend all of our time trying to be who we think he wants us to be and looking forward to when we will arrive there. Then, we think God is focused on our sin, so we spend a lot of time trying to explain the past. What we forget is that God loves us right now, as we are. God is not focused on who we are not, but on who we are.

It is his Presence that reminds us of the truth about ourselves – that we are people in process. In his Presence, He can be God and we can be us – flawed, broken, fragile humans. He is interested in changing us, but into who we really are, not who we’re not. The way that happens is by us being exactly ourselves right now. We will not be changed if we are always trying to change ourselves or pretending we’re someone we’re not. And God cannot change us if we will not just rest in his presence in this moment and let him do the work. The goal is to be yourself right now, which is what God wants of you. He wants all of you exactly as you are and he will fashion you into what you were created to be: yourself.

Good people, too

I think we limit the kind of Christianity we try to promote sometimes, and in doing so, we limit our view of God. The brand of Christianity we try to live sometimes is one that exists for its own sake. We try to spread the influence of Christianity, convert droves of unknowing heathens, and try to make them into what we think good Christians should be. All the while, the world doesn’t benefit much from our goodness. They mostly see that we like to succeed in our own arena and to impress each other with our spirituality. The world is not impressed much with our spirituality, though, because our spirituality is not the kind that benefits the world much.

The Bible talks a lot about helping the poor. There is this spot in Galatians where I was reading the other day that talks about how, other than spreading the gospel to the Gentiles, the apostles asked Paul to “continue to remember the poor.” It’s in Galatians 2:10 if you want to look it up. It seems kind of out of place the first time you read it. It seems like the apostles would have asked Paul to continue being faithful to the church or to continue praying for their ministry, but their request was just for him to help poor people.

I think often we get so caught up becoming good Christians, we forget that God created us to and desires that we become good human beings. We are part of this world and it seems that if we are going to try to minister to it, evangelize it, and change it, then we should start paying attention to its needs, instead of seeing anyone who doesn’t share our viewpoint as an enemy.

Flow

Sometimes I wish I could stop thinking. I’m pretty good at it and I’ve got lots of room in which to do it. My hat size is at least 7 ¾. I say “at least” because I haven’t bought a fitted hat in a while, so I’m not sure if my already giant noggin has grown or not. All I know is the last hat I bought was that size and it was a little tight. It gave me a headache when I wore it. Anyway, the reason I bring all this stuff up about my head is that I think God either gave me some extra processing room knowing that I would think more than anything else, or my head has just expanded because of overuse. It doesn’t really matter. All I know is that I wish I could shut the overworking machine off at certain times.

I was reading this book the other day that said that true happiness comes not from having a lot of pleasure in your life, but by doing things that are challenging, yet rewarding to you. The book also said that when you are doing something like this that is gratifying and not just pleasurable, you don’t even have any positive emotion. You’re just doing and you’re not aware of anything going on in your mind like emotion. You’re not meta-analyzing the situation to figure out how you feel at that moment. You’re just living in the moment. The book called this concept flow. I like that idea. I think that’s what living by faith is like. If you’re doing exactly what you’ve been gifted to do, what God has called you to do, and you just put yourself out there and do it, you stop thinking, analyzing, and hesitating and just do.

Bono on Faith

I was listening to an interview that Bono, the lead singer of U2, agreed to do for a Christian conference with a pastor of the huge church that was putting on the conference. Now, I don't know if everything Bono has ever said, done, or sung is theologically correct, but I do know that he said one of the most Christian things I've ever heard uttered. I say that because it was not in a church service. He was not on a soapbox. He was speaking about his own life.

The pastor asked the rock star something about his view of Christianity. Bono started by saying that he has never had a problem with Christ. It's mostly Christians he's had problems with. That made the auditorium full of Christian pastors and leaders laugh. Then he said something like this: "I have always believed in grace. I'm kind of counting on it."

That made the room chuckle, too, for one of two reasons. It's possible we were laughing because we know rock stars. Rock stars don't exactly have reputations for holding up high moral values, and Bono and U2 have been known to drink, smoke, and cuss. So, maybe we were laughing because we agreed that Bono really needed grace. I hope not. I hope we were laughing because it was so profound that this non-theologian had described the essence of grace and faith without an outline for a sermon or a pulpit to set it on.

The thing is, each of us could have said the same thing about counting on grace and it would have been true. The problem is that most of us don't think about ourselves that way. We know people who are going to need grace when they reach the day of their death, but we don't always count ourselves among their number.

I don't know about you, but all this trying to make myself good has me thinking it's possible to achieve goodness on my own. That's just not true.

Weightlessness

Faith, I think, is that woozy feeling you have when you're free falling. If you've ever had the chance to ride on a zipline, it's that instant between the time you push yourself off the platform and your weight is caught by the cord. It's the jump in your stomach that you have when you're going a little too fast over a hill in the road. I'm sure bungee-jumping is quite similar. It's weightlessness.

Most of the time, we think of steps of faith, like the one Indiana Jones takes in The Last Crusade. There are times when we are tested and we are supposed to step out in faith. The Bible says, though, that we are to live by faith, not to take steps of faith every once in a while. We are supposed to perpetually be seeking weightlessness, not to step out into the air and frantically search for the ground again. Jesus wants us to, in faith, die. There is nothing temporary about death. Once you take a step into the grave, you can't get yourself back out. You have to wait for someone who can raise the dead.