Imaginary Gods

Who we imagine God to be can be very powerful.

Though powerful, our imaginations are often not accurate. Imagining God will always lead us to an imaginary God.

The God of Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Peter, and Paul did not base their life on images of God. They experienced God – real life, real places, real time. Revelation.

I am noticing that there are two very popular images of God – in and outside the church. The first is what I call “the Parking Space God”. The second, “the Distant God”. Both of these gods seem to be much more imaginary than the God of scripture.

1. The Parking Space God. Have you ever been late, or stressed, and been in need of a parking space? And have you ever prayed to God for Him to provide for you a parking space? I confess that I have. It is a bit embarrassing.

I believe that God is intimately involved in the details of our lives. However, the parking space god reduces God to be used for my needs and wants. This popular image of god does not challenge me to reorient my entire life around the kingdom of God. Rather, it prays that God would reorient Himself around my lifestyle – needs, wants, prayers, desires, values.

The “parking space God” gets God’s “nearness” correct. But it misunderstands God’s holiness, God’s Kingdom, God’s Lordship, God’s agenda. We might know when we are worshiping this false god when we pray for parking spaces, instead of God’s Kingdom coming to earth. We might know when we are worshiping this false god when we ask God to submit himself to our wants, instead of submitting our lives to what God wants for his world.

2. The Distant God. Could you sum up the Christian life as giving your life to Christ and now trying to live a moral life? For seasons of my life, I have. But this is often a symptom of worshiping “the Distant God”.

I believe that God is huge, awesome, holy, and “other”. I believe that he reigns from the throne of heaven and holds the universe in his hands. However, this image reduces god to an idea – the idea that a god exists somewhere and that we can read about Him in the Bible. But this popular image of God is not the God of the Christian faith – Immanuel, God with us.

This distant god gets God’s “bigness” correct. But it misunderstands his nearness, his revelation, his incarnation, his sending of the Holy Spirit, his intimate love. People who worship the distant god live as spiritual orphans – thinking God that exists, but is absent. But Jesus promised not to leave us orphans, but send us the Holy Spirit that will be with us.

Frankly, God desires intimacy with us.

Intimacy with God is a good thing.

Are you worshiping an imaginary god? Or our your learning to grow in intimacy with the Lord of Heaven and Earth?

Because I Follow Jesus

There has been a lot of hoopla lately about Qur’an burnings and Mosque building.

Because of this, I have been in a lot of conversations about interfaith dialogue.  How do we handle these situations?  Should the mosque be allowed?  Is America a Christian Nation? Etc.

I am sure that people have thoughts and opinions that fall all over the spectrum, but I have noticed two particularly strong reactions to these situations.

The first reaction is what I call power defense.   People with strong American and Christian sentiments tend to see Mosques being built and react by burning Qur’ans.  It may seem ludicrous to many.   But I was intrigued to learn that many of the phone calls that Terry Jones (the Florida pastor) received were from angry American/Christians who were upset that he canceled the burning.  This “power defense” reaction tends to say: “I am a Christian and I am an American and I need to defend my faith and country from people who are not.”  I understand this is an over-generalization, but I am learning that there is quite a bit of this sentiment in our country.  As a pastor, I am very intrigued that so many Christians take a defensive and hateful stance towards people/their neighbor/their enemy, when Jesus clearly teaches to differently.

The second reaction I notice is from people who promote interfaith dialogue.  I am a huge fan of interfaith dialogue, relationship building, and loving our neighbors.  However, having been part of many of these conversations, I notice a disturbing trend.  Often times, interfaith dialogue has a misguided end goal (in my opinion).  The goal, simply, is to help religious people “get past” their faith, which is seen as a point of division and conflict.  (And yes, I understand that religion has been, and is, a point of deep conflict in our world).  The solution, it seems, is a generic “God”/”Higher Power”.  In this like of thinking, “Jesus” becomes a problem.  Identifying with Christ is considered close-minded and a stumbling block to interfaith conversations. A few pastors I know will not preach/teach Jesus because they are seeking to promote interfaith relations. It seems to me, the end goal is to “progress” past our archaic and ancient beliefs and be spiritual gurus in a post-modern world.

I would like to offer a 3rd way.  I would like to suggest that we dialogue, serve, love, and befriend people of other faiths and nationalities BECAUSE of our faith in Jesus.  I think the DEEPER our devotion to Jesus is, the MORE we will love and befriend Muslims and people of other faiths.  To be a Christian ought to mean that we walk as Jesus walks (1 John 2:6).  Following Jesus does not look anything like the first option.  On the other hand, peace and dialogue will not happen by abandoning our faith, but by deepening it.

The illness of American Christianity is not that it is too strong; it is that it is too weak.

Those who claim some of the strongest devotions to Christ, are actually the weakest.  Their faith has become ill with hate, fear, and the false god of country.   I heard this story last week:  During the Holocaust a Christian man went to into the Jewish ghettos to suffer and ministered to the Jews who were undergoing persecution.  During this time, his family, friends, and church urged him to return home, fearful for his life.  One man from his church urged him to come back by writing, “Come home.  Why are you doing this?  They are not even Christians!”  The return letter had 3 words:  BUT I AM.

The Church, Warts and All

“Sometimes we hear our friends talk in moony, romantic terms of the early church.  ‘We need to get back to being just like the early church.’  Heaven help us.  These churches were a mess, and Paul wrote his letters to them to try to clean up the mess.” (Peterson, Practice Resurrection)

“If we permit- or worse, promote- dreamy of deceptive distortions of the Holy Spirit creation [the church], we interfere with participation in the real thing.  The church we want becomes the enemy of the church we have.  It is significant that there is not a single instance in the biblical revelation of a congregation of God’s people given to us in romantic, crusader, or consumer terms.  There are no “successful” congregations in Scripture or in the history of the church” (Peterson, Practice Resurrection)

At times in my life, I have lost trust in the church, rejected it, walked away from it, written against it, critiqued it, worked for it, gotten paid by it, bashed it, loved it, planted it, cultivated it, and more.

Over this time, I realize that my understanding of the church is extremely important.  Too often, I looked to the church with with unfair expectations that lacked a biblical grounding.  Church, I thought, was supposed to be perfect, meet most of my wants and needs, be centered in Christ without any entanglement in sin, deeply spiritual, and generally idyllic.  When it failed to meet these criteria, I was left with 2 options:  1) criticize and critique it (and thereby, I would often remove or distance myself from that tangible community); 2) romanticize and  mystify it (i.e. remove the theological dream of the church from its tangible reality).  Over time, neither of these options satisfied.

Don’t misunderstand me- engaging in critical thought on the church and embracing the mystery of the church are both important.  However, these things cannot be separated from the tangible, living-breathing, social and local, worshiping community.  For so long, I struggled with this tangible, living-breathing reality called the church.  It had too many warts and hang ups.  Truth is, it was easier to critique the imperfect bride of Christ than to be part of it.  If I privatized my faith, dabbling in occasional conversation with family and friends, I did not have to do the hard work of becoming part of the “body of Christ”.   I reasoned, as a believer, I was part of the mystical body of Christ while refusing to engage in the tangible body of Christ.  But biblically and historically, God’s people have always been a social and tangible reality in the world- warts and all.

It has been in the context of the church, the real, living-breathing community, that my faith has been sharpened the most.  Reading books, talking to friends, writing blogs, listening to sermons are all great and helpful.  But they easy.  They engage my heart and mind, but not my humanity.  It is in the context of the church, I am challenged with difficult people, actual arguments, differing personalities, real needs, and so on.  This context, better than any other I know, helps me to grow up in Christ- taking up my cross, submitting my my brothers and sisters, encouraging and being encouraged in the faith, forgiving and being forgiven, etc.

I admit, that I also find my workplace, the neighborhood, “the world” as a context for growing up in Christ.  This is important both for my maturity in Christ and the mission of God in the world.  And there are many Christians and churches, who in avoiding the world, seriously hinder their faith and neglect God’s mission.   But this is the church scattered, it is not the body gathered around the Christ’s body.   I have certainly learned that I cannot be the church alone.   It is both too easy and too difficult.  Mostly, it is not God’s intention.

“I want to look at what we have, what the church is right now, and ask, DO you think that maybe this is exactly what God intended when he created the church?  Maybe the church as we have it provides the very conditions and proper company congenial for growing up in Christ, for becoming mature, for arriving at the measure of the stature of Christ.  Maybe God knows what he is doing, giving us church, this church.”  (Peterson, Practicing Resurrection)

Eugene Peterson Gems

If pastors only carry moral sayings in their pockets and go through the parish sticking them, like gummed labels, on the victims of the week, there will be no good pastor work; they must learn how to be gospel storytellers…  The storytelling pastor differs from the moralizing pastor in the same way that a responsible physicial differs from a clerk in a drugstore.  When and ill person goes to a physician, the physician “takes a history” before offering a diagnosis and writing a prescription.  THe presumption is that everything that a person has experienced is relevant to the illness and must be taken into account if there is going to be healing.  The clerk in the drugstore simply sells a patient medicine off the shelf- one thing for headaches, another for heartburn, another for indigestion- without regard for the particular details of a person’s pain. – Eugene Peterson

Love Thy Neighbor

God does not call us to love the world. He does not command us to love everyone. (yes, I just said that) God, the Bible says, loves the world. God loves everyone.

But the second greatest commandment is to “love our neighbor.”

The question, for thousands of years has been, “who is my neighbor?” Jesus himself got asked this question. And yes, Jesus greatly expanded who we are to think of as our “neighbor”- pagans, enemies, the poor, the unclean, etc.

But I would like to ask a different question. Not, “who is our neighbor?” But, “why neighbor?” Why not just command us to love the world, love everyone? If that is the nature of God, why not command us to do the same?

We do not have the capacity to love the world, to love everyone. God does. But we do not. The command to love our neighbor is a profound statement about what our love is to be like. Our neighbors are the people that God has placed in our lives. They are real, and tangible, and close. They have names. They are our family, friends, co-workers, and literally neighbors.

I think we have made a huge mistake in expanding the word neighbor to mean “everyone.” When we do this, we turn our love into an emotion without much content. Love becomes a feeling we are supposed to have, but a feeling that is incapable of changing the world. I believe that God called us to a much more powerful and tangible kind of love.

God calls us to love our neighbors. To love the people he has placed in our life… but to love them well. This is a tangible sort of love, expressed in action- time, meals, visits, phone calls, prayers, play, shared experiences, and so much more.

God does not call us to love the world. But He has called us to love our neighbors- the people He has placed in our life. But He has called us to love them well.

Our energy is not meant to be spent on trying to love more and more people. Rather, it is best spent on loving the people in our live better- in a way that changes things.

Over and Under Contextualization

In what ways to we over and under contextualize the gospel?

In other words, if I went down to Mexico and began talking to people about the kingdom of God, or the love and forgiveness found in Jesus, but the whole time was speaking English… that would be a ridiculous example of under contextualization.

Or, ifIwas trying to help military men follow the ways of Jesus and begin a relationship with God, but supported the ideas of violence and hating your enemies, that would be an example of over contextualzation.

Or, in what ways are do you think we need to oppose the cultrue we live in, and in what ways do you think we can “go along” with the culture we live in???