The Better Party

Its been a while since I blogged, but something kind of neat about the story of the prodigal son occured to me this week. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it goes basically like this:

This son tells his father, “I don't want to wait until you're dead, give me my inheritence now.” The father does, and the son goes far away, and blows the whole thing on “parties and wild living”. He eventually ends up starving, feeding pigs just to make a buck and survive (as pigs were considered unclean in his culture, this was pretty low), and decides to go back to his father's house. When he's on the road back, his father runs out to meet him, invites him back with open arms, and throws him a big party.

Now, what I thought was interesting was that the son had been partying almost non-stop for the last few years – the thing he really would have appreciated about being home was that his father loved him, and wanted him back. Yet, his father still throws him a party – the very thing he'd been looking for, in running away, his father gives him, as an outpouring of his love, on the son's return. And it is that love that makes it all worthwhile – all the fun and popularity he had while doing his own thing disappeared when he ran out of money and couldn't do it anymore, but his father still loved him, even as a penniless, starving refugee.

The father here is a metaphor for God, and we are all the son in this story – we can go off, and chase our own thing, but God is always waiting for us to come back to him, welcomes us with open arms, and has a life waiting that is, in any matter of importance, better than the one we can make for ourselves.

Beauty

I took the long way home tonight, a meandering walk around campus. It was an absolutely beautiful night, and I wanted to savour it - the UNB/STU campus is, at dusk on a clear summer day, one of the loveliest places I know. The sky is a deep, glowing blue, and the lights around campus really bring out the red brick of the buildings, and the green in the trees and grass. There's a subtle beauty in light and colour, the simple geometries of the architecture, and the more complex forms of growing things. Strolling in the warm air, a cool breeze blowing through my shirt sleeves, and the stars just beginning to come out above my head, it is easy to remember that Creator God is good.

The Impulse to Destruction

It is an old question: “What on earth is wrong with society?”. The answer to that question, I believe, is that people are flawed. More specifically, humans are driven by an impulse to destruction, a facet of their will that works against their best interests, often in full knowledge of the implications of their actions. Examples of this impulse would be the preverse drive of the exhausted student to stay up one more hour, the glutton's sweet tooth driving consumption long past the point where food is enjoyable, and the antagonisim of the businessperson baiting a touchy coworker, just to set them off. On a weightier scale, this drive is behind the failed marriages and broken families there are new news reports of every week.

So, from politicians and celebrities to the average Joe or Jane down the street, it is easy to find examples of this impulse to destruction. I could certainly point to examples of this in my own life, and I suspect each of you could do the same. This suggests that this counterproductive will is a part of human nature, and that human nature is therefore broken. No one has to teach children to be petty and squabble: “Joey put his finger on my side of the bench, Mommy. Make him stop!”. No one has to teach children to be greedy, eating more sweets than they can stomach. No one has to teach a child to throw a fit simply for the sake of attention. Children do these things without instructions, and some adults never outgrow them (you can find them on any prime-time reality TV show). Some might say that humans are basically good and rational, and that that these examples are abberations, exceptional cases, or that that goodness and rationality simply take some time to manifest. I say humans are essentially petty, greedy, corrupt, irrational, and destructive, and only defeat these characteristics with difficulty.

This paints a dismal state of our race. This blog's byline talks about “the answer” though, so what is the answer to this problem? Mine (as you may have guessed), has a lot to do with God. Not only did Jesus' death pay the penalty for sin (in relation to this post, acts of rebellion against our better judgement are often also acts of rebellion against God, or sin), but his return to life was (and is) a statement of victory over sin and death. Therefore, by the power of Jesus' ressurection, human nature, in all its brokenness and destruction, can be replaced by God's nature, which is triumphant over those forces. People do not have to be bound to follow their impulse to destruction, and that is a good thing for everyone.

An Audacious Claim

I believe a man died and returned to life.

In more detail, there was a Jewish teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, approximately two millenia ago, who claimed to be God, upsetting the religious leaders of the day. These leaders had him executed: flogged to near the point of death, asphyxiated by hanging, and then, to be completely sure he was dead, put a spear through his heart. Now, if that was the end of the story, there would be nothing much exceptional about it – there have been other similar historical incidents. However, I believe that this man, Jesus of Nazareth, was literally returned from the dead, to physical life in a physical body. There are eyewitness testimonies to this fact that have survived to the present day, with orders of magnitude more reliability of transmission than other documents of similar age. Other historical witnesses state that these eyewitnesses held to their statement, even being executed themselves rather than renounce it. It is, however, rather audacious to posit that a man literally came back to life. Science cannot explain it, and really the only explanation that fits is that Jesus was, in fact, God, as he claimed. Once the familiarity of this claim (at least in Western culture) is put aside, the implications really are enormous.

The Expectant Bride

I've got a little-known fact about Christianity that shocks even life-long Christians. The rite of Communion, practiced in some form or another by all Christian denominations, is actually a wedding vow. Mike from Tenth Avenue North (a really great new Christian band – check their album out if you're into Christian music) expains it really well in this blog post.

For those of you who didn't read the post I linked, the basic idea of Hebrew marriage back then went like this: boy meets girl, some price is arranged for her hand in marriage, boy proposes (with a cup of wine), if she drinks the wine, boy and girl are married, but separated until he's finished building them a house, then boy brings girl back to their new home, and that's a wedding. This process works very well as an analogy for Christianity (the Church is called “the Bride of Christ” sometimes (for those of you outside said Church, when church is capitalized it refers to all Christians, taken as a single body)). The price paid for this marriage is Jesus' own life (the payment I spoke of in this blog post). Right now, we're in the middle stage – Jesus is working now on preparing Heaven, and physically separated from humanity. At some point though, he will return, and take his bride (the Church) back to Heaven with him.

So, this has been a kind of interesting academic excercise, but what's the point? Its simple, really. If you view Christianity as a marriage, rather than a religion, you have to consider a lot of things differently. Earth isn't your home, its simply the apartment you stay in while your home is being renovated – so the important thing there is not “he who dies with the most toys wins”, or to be the most popular person on the block, its to prepare for your journey home. Your life isn't beholden just to yourself, you have the interests of a husband to consider. Furthermore, Sin isn't just breaking God's law, and commiting a fault against your judge, its cheating on your husband. God loves you, has given his life to marry you, and you're shacking up with Satan, the great rebel. That certainly puts a new perspective on things.

"Isn't that unfair?"

The title of this post is a question a friend asked me a few months ago after we'd been talking about grace (the same grace I spoke of in my last post). Last week that question came back to my mind, and I spun it around some, to see if I could make grace “fair”.

The first alternative I thought of was the possibility that grace was meant to turn failure into a learning opportunity. One suspects that the captain of the Titanic, had he survived, would have become the world's greatest advocate for lifeboat reform. If someone gets burned in failure, you would think they would develop a very emphatic resistance to that same failure. I don't really believe that though – just as dogs eat their own vomit, humans tend to repeat the actions that hurt them, even with full recognition that it turned out badly for them before.

The next alternative I thought of was that grace was a form of punishment, or perhaps restitution. Again with the Titanic captain (there were others culpable, but I'll stick with this illustration), would he suffer more for his failure in death, or in decades more of life, with hundreds of deaths on his conscience? Another way, is the best manner in which he can repay his victims by becoming one himself, or by ferrying more passengers safely across the Atlantic? The trouble with this though, is that it isn't a just solution either. Somehow I doubt those who lost their entire families in the Titanic tragedy would say that these solutions comprise sufficient punishment and/or restitution. It goes similarly with any other grace.

At the end of tossing this idea around I'm left with one conclusion. Grace, specificically God's grace, is unfair. It doesn't fit into my conception of personal justice, duty, or fairness. However, the act is already done, a gift given out of God's love, and it can't be returned. My choice then, is to complain about the unfairness of grace, reject it on that basis, and let that very expensive gift go to waste, or, to accept it and run with it. I'd rather choose the latter.

Why My God?

In the comments on my first post, I was asked, “If you have to believe in a god, why yours?”. Its an interesting question, and I've had to mull it over some to come up with a possibly acceptable answer (well, actually, I was thinking of something else, and it occured to me that my train of thought answered that question). The claim I will start with is that I should be damned (and I mean that in its literal sense). I won't go into the details for all the Internet to see, though if you know me personally and need this statement backed up, you may ask privately. Now, what, you ask, does that have to do with God? There are two facets to the answer, which rule out, to the best of my knowledge, any god but mine (and I use god in a very loose sense here).

The first facet is that any god who is not willing and able to damn me is no god at all. This sort of god is inneffectual, powerless, a Santa Claus figure. Santa may have his naughty and nice list, but have you ever heard of someone getting coal? He fudges the list so everyone passes – or, from another perspecitve, is regularly fooled by small children. Who wants, needs, or would follow a god that gullible?

On the other hand, any god that cannot save me from damnation is also powerless, and thus no god at all. If I take a materialistic or humanistic perspective, well, I've failed in representing the good of humanity, and am likely to follow that pattern for the rest of this life, absent any external power – damnation on Earth, if you will. If I believe in reincarnatation, then in my next life I am likely to regress, instead of progress. If I believe in an eternal hell, then that should be my final destination. In short, by whatever standard I set up for god (that passes the previous test), I am damned. Any god that will do no more than this has no power over me, as that would be my natural state anyway.

So, on to my God. Christianity is founded on two principles – one is God's justice, the other is his grace. By God's justice, he can, will, and does subject people to eternal damnation. A lot of Christians don't like to talk about that, and end up with Santa Claus in the sky. Other Christians talk of nothing but, and end up with a God that just damns the already damned, doing effectively nothing. The flip side of this, though, is God's redemptive grace. In more detail (and less Christianese), we say that God himself became human (while remaining God – its one of those things that tie your head in knots), and, though he was a completely perfect human, voluntarily suffered the penalty of damnation. In this process, he brought a fundamental change to humanity – he offered people his own payment of the debt of damnation (the grace part), coupled with an exchange of his perfect human nature for our damned human nature (the redemptive part). This is not to say that all Christians (or those who claim to be such) are perfect – the nature of damnation is rather difficult to kill off – but rather that they have a workable path to perfection.

So, why my God? Because the standard that he is demands my damnation, and I could not reconcile a standard that didn't with my sense of justice. On the other hand, a god that merely damned me would really not have any power, while mine also provides payment of my debts and restoration of my being, out of his own blood.

An Unreasonable God

Sometimes God just doesn't make sense. He is, as near as I can tell, irrational. The key there though, is “as near as I can tell”. Really, it is inconceivable why a God who is perfect, right in every moral sense, all-powerful, and able to create an entire universe just by speaking would love me; I, who am far from perfect, often wrong, weak, and just create blog posts when I speak (well, figuratively – I don't have voice recognition software). If I so often fail him and make a hash of his plans, why give me a second chance (and a third, and a seventy-seventh)? Why let me in on what he's continuing to do, instead of just burning me (and, while he's at it, the rest of the world) to cinders and starting over? It is terribly unreasonable of him – definitely not what I would do, were I in his place. Thing is though, God does not answer to my reason. God cannot be contained, understood, analysed, or disected by my reason. He is bigger than that. He is God. I could say he's a bit like infinity, which is mathematically defined to be larger than any given number, in that he's grander than any given model, but of course that statement is logically contradictory (“this model of God states that he does not fit any model”). Isaiah 55:8-9 is often cited as an example of how we can't understand God's mind:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Philip Yancey, in his book “What's So Amazing About Grace?”, makes the point that perhaps, rather than just God being a whole lot smarter and more subtle than us, maybe these verses are more about his ununderstandable grace – that he continues to work to connect with us, no matter how difficult we make it. All this leaves me quite grateful (and rather baffled) that I serve an unreasonable God.

(I hope my good friend Ash, who writes an excellent blog on reason and critical thinking does not take this post or this blog as an attack on him or his in any way. For me, this blog is a forum for all the things I can't say on his blog, or similar fora, and this post is why I can't say it. I still hold that reason and critical thinking are very valuable tools, and I hope I'm at least being consistent and reasonable with my unreason, if that makes any sense – I believe that I can understand God truly, yet not completely, in much the same way as Google Maps will give me a true, but incomplete understanding of Fredericton.)

Scorched Earth Christians

So, I think I started this blog off with the wrong tone. You see, the thing is, I'm really not supposed to be Elijah. Calling fire from heaven wouldn't really be all that convincing to a modern audience anyway – they'd be looking for the hidden pyrotechnics, or suggesting that the water was switched for petrol (sounding British is fun). Don't get me wrong – I still believe my God lives, and that one day there will be incontrovertible proof of that. However, the question arises of how to prove that assertion.

To start with, as I said, fire from heaven doesn't really cut it for proof these days. If God sent literal fire, I'm sure people would explain it away as a freak asteroid, or the rays of Venus diffracting through pockets of swamp gas (yes, that was a Men In Black reference). In the more figurative sense, I have a sneaking suspicion that sermons of hellfire and brimstone create more sceptics than converts.

What, then, would really show God's existence in an obvious way? I'd say the answer is love, and beyond that, grace – an unmerited act of favour, driven by love. The impression I get is that modern Christians are most known for what they're against (or at least what many of the more vocal of them are against): homosexuality, abortion, evolution, “fornication and tomfoolery”, and the list goes on ... . What if, instead of being known for being against things, Christians were known as people who loved people, people who gave of themselves for others, the people who, if you lost your job and had a family to support, would invite you into their home, and support your family until you were back on your feet, even if they ended up eating Kraft Dinner themselves to make ends meet. What if, instead of picketing funerals with hate and noise, Fred Phelps went to the families of each fallen soldier and offered himself to serve – to mow the lawn of the father whose son will never do it for him again, or visit the grandmother who lives alone, and has lost her only granddaughter (I dunno, maybe those specific examples would be more creepy than not, but I think you get my idea). I likely wouldn't know anything about Mr. Phelps, but the people whose lives he'd touched would know a bit more about God.

I think this model of the loving Church is what God intended for us anyway, and that the implementaion of that vision has, in many cases, failed to meet the specification (though there are individuals and organizations who certainly show God's love in real ways) is one of the greatest tragedies in the world right now. Is anyone else doing better? Well, not really, but that's not the point (there are plenty of non-Christian people doing great sacrificial things – I'm not saying there aren't, just that there should be more Christians that are). Can that specification actually be implemented? I think so. A couple years back, it was really popular to preach on the Acts 2 Church – I heard more sermons on it than I cared for, but looking at it again, there's really a point there:

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. Acts 2:42-47 (NIV)

So, to my original statement – that I'm not meant to be Elijah. I think instead my role (and I would hazard to say that of most of the rest of the Church) is to be an altar stone. There is certainly a place and a need for the prophetic voice calling down fire from heaven, but I think that what is more needed is altar stones, scorched earth Christians, the people of God utterly consumed in showing God, in his power, grace, and love to the world.

The Answer is not 42

In Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there is an alien computer which, using a program that runs for thousands of years, calculates that the answer to “life, the universe, and everything” is 42. I disagree, but there are many who would not. It is a common belief that the fundamental questions of life, the universe, etc. can be reduced down to science, to self-existant natural laws, to ideas, to numbers – in essence, to 42.

I am reminded of a Biblical account of the prophet Elijah (you can find it in I Kings 18:16-39 in your favourite translation). The nation of Israel had turned from their God, and started following the Caananite god Baal. Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal, in front of all the people, to test which deity was real – the sign would be fire from heaven. The four hundred and fifty followers of Baal chanted, wailed, prayed, incanted and pleaded with their god for an entire day, yet no fire came. Then, in the evening, Elijah built an altar, had the watching people thoroughly douse it with water, and prayed a two sentance prayer. God then sent fire, which consumed the sacrifice Elijah had put on the altar, all the water, and even the very stones the altar was made of. On that day, all the people knew that this was the proven, incontrovertable truth: that Baal didn't exist, Elijah's God lived, and that Elijah's God was God. On this day, though people may mentally dance around and speak scientific incantations thick with mathematical signs and Greek letters to attempt to displace that God, and replace him with the empty idea of 42, the same is true – Elijah's God (and mine) still lives, and God still reigns.