the gospel of miyagi… June 20, 2008

“Walk on road…Walk right side, safe. Walk left side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later get squish just like grape. Here, karate, same thing. Either you karate do “yes” or karate do “no.” You karate do “guess so,” squish, just like grape. Understand?” – Mr. Miyagi – The Karate Kid Part 1

“…These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” – Revelation 3:14-22

Mr. Miyagi has a way of cutting straight to the heart of Daniel’s rebellious nature. He teaches that the only way Daniel will ever learn karate is to put aside his preconcieved notions of what it looks like to learn karate. “Wax-on, wax-off” becomes an invaluable lesson in humility, service, and (to Daniel’s surprise) karate! And he begins his lesson in much the same way as this verse from Revelation. If he decides to not do karate, then Mr. Miyagi knows where he stands. He can pursue Daniel or leave him be. There is no question of “do you want to learn?” If he decides to do karate, then Mr. Miyagi can teach him. Anything in between, and no one benefits!

In the same way, God can use our rebellion to draw us to Him. We can decide to “do karate, no” and God will allow us to continue down that path, being beaten up by the Cobra Kai, so to speak. In the end, this path leads back to the understanding that what we need more than anything is God’s help. As Charles Spurgeon said, “If we think we can do anything of ourselves, all we shall get from God is the opportunity to try.” If we choose to “do karate, yes” then we put our rebellion on the back burner. We follow the unorthodox, uncomfortable, and downright strange ways that God teaches us how to be His kids. We wax the car. We sand the deck. We paint the fence. We put ourselves last. We let go of our ego. We empty ourselves to make room for God. But when we “do karate, guess so” then we are fooling ourselves.

God does not want dabblers. He is not interested in our left-overs. He does not want 10% of our money, or our talent, or our time. He wants it all! In truth it was never ours to begin with. We only have what He gives us to take care of. A lukewarm, take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward God is useless. We think, “I’m a decent person. I don’t cheat on my taxes. I’ve never killed anyone.” Or even, “I’m okay…I believe in God.” But God tells us, “even the demons believe and tremble.” If all we can say is that we believe that there is a God, and that we are decent enough to refrain from murder, and we are satisfied with that, then what good are we? C.S. Lewis says that we are like a child who is satisfied to make mud pies in the rain because we cannot understand what is meant by a holiday at sea.

We are far too easily satisfied, and far too easily pleased. God wants us to have abundance beyond money, and things, and sex, and drugs. He even wants us to have abundance beyond religion. Settling for any of these things make us lukewarm. Even, as Scott Stewart says, “making good things into ultimate things” is lukewarm. We have to realize that our “wealth” is “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.” God wants us to give up what we think of as our wealth in exchange for something that is beyond our wildest imagination. Do not settle for walking in the middle of the road and getting squished like a grape!

“A mere form of religion does upon some accounts bring a man under a heavier sentence than if he were openly profane and irreligious. He that makes a show of religion flatters God, but all the while he acts and designs against him; whereas the profane man deals plainly, and tho’ he be a monstrous and unnatural rebel, yet he is a fair and open enemy. And the kisses of a false friend are more hateful than the wounds of an open enemy.” -John Tillotson (1630-1694), Sermons

how can a loving God send a person to Hell? June 5, 2008

I was driving to work Friday morning and I passed three guys in black pants, dress shirts, and black ties. They were standing on the median in the middle of the road. Two were holding signs. The third, the star of the group, was screaming into a megaphone. The signs said things like “The party’s over…and it ends in Hell!” And the rock star was screaming a list of ways that God was going to come down from Heaven and spank you for being bad. They were a caricature of themselves.

My first impulse was to scream something out the window…or worse. Of course I know that is not the right thing to do. Besides, people who get angry at someone else’s opinion typically do so because they aren’t sure of what they believe. And I realized that nothing would be accomplished by feeding into their anger with more anger. So, instead I jotted down their website as I sat at the light, and then checked it out as soon as I could.

What I saw when I got there made me sick. There was a side banner that said, “WWJD: Who Will Jesus Destroy.” Another gem said, “The God of the Bible kills people…will He have to kill you?” They had another section that listed people who their “god” would destroy. It included the obvious; homosexuals (referred to in their site as “sodomites” as well as a list of other names I don’t care to repeat), drunkards, whore mongers, and blasphemers. One surprised me. They also listed the “unmerciful.” An odd inclusion for a group that stands on street corners screaming to anyone who will listen about the reasons they are bound for hell.

Of course, this begs the question for my own heart. Am I just being unmerciful to the unmerciful? And the answer is, yes. I hate to admit that, but it is true. Does this mean I agree with what these guys do? Of course not. But I am not the Holy Spirit. I cannot convict them of the fact that they are trying to be the Holy Spirit to the rest of the world. I can only try to listen to the urging of the Holy Spirit in my own heart to be kind and forgiving, even to those who are unkind and unforgiving.

All that aside, we still haven’t addressed the question at hand. Though I disagree with standing on the street corner, spewing out hatred toward all the people a person might wish would burn in hell (which is what these guys were doing. “Your sin is worthy of God’s ultimate wrath. I am forgiven because I work hard, do good, and have somehow earned God’s favor.”), I still have to come to terms with the fact that, as C.S. Lewis says, “I have never met a mortal.” We will all spend our eternity in communion or separation from God.

So, how can a God who loves us send us to Hell? So many people say, “He doesn’t send us there, we choose to go by not choosing Him.” Which is true, but at the same time, not a very satisfying answer. It puts God on the level with the Christopher Titus-esque jerk of a dad. The one who sees the child heading for the electric outlet and says, “Go ahead…yeah, go on…well, I guess you won’t do that again.” It has to go deeper than that. And luckily…it does.

What it comes down to is this: We’ve all earned Hell. God cannot be in the presence of sin. It is against His nature. It is not like kryptonite to Superman. It is not like God doesn’t enjoy it, or it takes away His strength or something. It is like a shadow exposed to light. They cannot exist together. It is totally against the nature of either to be together. If we continue on as the shadow, then we cannot exist in the light. We either accept the gift offered by Jesus on the cross to transfigure us into light, or we remain a shadow that cannot exist in the presence of the Light.

God loves us so much that He came Himself in the form of a human who lived a perfect life in our place. Something about accepting that gift negates our shadow nature. Even though we don’t suddenly become perfect, we become justified. To God, this is the same thing. At that point, the Holy Spirit begins to work on us to gradually transform us into a Heavenly creature. We are given a choice to remain a shadow, or to undergo the sometimes painful transformation into light. But if we chose to “love darkness rather than light” then we have chosen to reject being in the presence of the ultimate Light. For a shadow to remain a shadow in the presence of light, there has to be something in between the two, something that will cast the shadow. That separation from God is Hell.

Hell is not God’s torture of us for rejecting Him. It is what happens when a being of pure light by His nature destroys the shadows. We are not being punished, as our street preaching friends would say, for a list of things that we do. If we are being sent to Hell for doing anything off of some list of damning sins, then it follows that we can earn our own salvation by merely abstaining from doing the things on that list. It would be pretty simple to get into Heaven if all I have to do is to not drink, not be gay, not fornicate, and not condone abortion. Of course, these issues are important, and should be dealt with in light of the Scriptures. But our eternity in Heaven or Hell hinges on our acceptance or rejection of God’s gift. Do we allow God to transform our shadow into light, or do we remain a shadow cast by the partition that separates us from God? God does not want us to be destroyed. God does not want us to be separated. He came to us in the form of His Son so that we could be transformed by His touch into beings who are capable of standing in His Light.

the one and only way? June 3, 2008

This guy makes some pretty crazy claims. He says, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” I have to admit, I have a hard time with this one. I really don’t like being told what to do. And I really hate being told that there is only one way I can go. That basically makes me want to say, “Okay, fine. I didn’t want to go to the Father anyway!”

That was my attitude for the longest time. Even after coming back to Christianity after a very long absence, I still struggle with this claim of exclusivity. How can it possibly be that God is going to punish a person for not choosing to walk down the path of Jesus? Especially when the moral code of most religions teach the same basic things. When you look at it, the basic tenets of Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Islam, Sufism, Wicca, (etc…ad nauseum…) are basically the same. Love each other. Love God. Do good things. Don’t do bad things.

But still we’re left with this claim of exclusivity. So what do you do with it? Christianity does have the same basic moral code as the other religions, but it also has more. Jesus doesn’t claim to have spoken with God. He says he is God. He does not claim to have discovered a Way. He says he is the Way. He does not claim to point others to Truth and Life. He says he is Truth and Life. This is not something that is easy to swallow.

This weekend a visiting pastor, Mark Whipple, was discussing this verse, and he showed a clip from Forrest Gump. He showed the scene in Vietnam in which Forrest is looking for his friend Bubba. He keeps running in to find Bubba, and in the process keeps seeing people who are injured, and have no hope. He grabs them up and carries them out of the woods to safety. Mark said this is a better representation of Jesus as the Way. Finally it clicked in my head.

I have spent my entire life reading that verse with the attitude of “many paths, one way.” But it is not like that at all. Religion is a path to walk. It is something that we do of our own power. It is a series of hoops to jump through. What Jesus offers is totally different. It is like trying to drive a car to the moon. There are some roads that take you into valleys which are farther from the moon. There are some roads that take you up on mountain tops for a better view of the moon. But Jesus says He’s the space shuttle! It is not a claim that He is a better kind of road that we can scurry about on. It is a claim that what we need is not a road at all. If we stay on any road, we are ultimately driving in circles. It is a complete shift in transportation.

To put it another way, we are like a person who has been in a wreck. There are so many onlookers telling us different directions to the hospital. We are still lying there bleeding, and everyone is telling us that if we just follow their particular set of instructions, then we could get ourselves up and get to the hospital. Then comes the ambulance driver. He does not deny that these directions might get us to the hospital. But He also knows that in our condition, we have no hope of ever being able to follow them perfectly enough to get us where we need to go. So, He lifts us on His shoulders, cleans our wounds, and follows the directions perfectly for us. Our job is to stop fighting and trying to get there on our own, and just let Him save us.

If Jesus is just another path to walk down, then He is nothing. A path is something that is beneath us. It is something that we can choose out of our own power. And if ours is the True path, and everyone else’s is wrong, then we can be proud of how smart we are, and feel sorry for how stupid they are. Or worse, we can drag people kicking and screaming toward our path, and kill them if they refuse to walk it with us. Jesus is not just another path. He is not a set of rules to follow to achieve perfection. Jesus is the rescuing hero. He comes along side of anyone on any path who is willing to let Him, and He takes them with Him and says, “There, weren’t you tired trying to do this all alone?” And takes them Home.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30

a lullaby from the voice like rushing waters… June 3, 2008

“The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.” – Zephaniah 3:17

My son has an inner ear infection. We caught it early, and he is doing much better. But for several nights he was inconsolable. He would scream and kick and cry every time we tried to lay him down. We had no way to make him understand that he was going to be okay, and that the pain wouldn’t last forever. So we had only to hold him close, bear his kicks and screams and thrashing about, and to sing to him. In time he’d wear himself out from crying, and he’d quiet down enough to hear the song, and he’d finally calm down and relax into our arms.

There have been a lot of moments like this since I became a father. There are some aspects of God that have only really become clear to me now that I am some one’s dad. This moment gave me the image of what Zephaniah was talking about in this verse. We are thrashing about. We kick and scream at this pain we can’t understand. We lash out at a God who isn’t taking away our pains. We are inconsolable. Then at some point we become so worn out from the struggle that we stop our fighting long enough to hear that still small voice singing a lullaby. God holds us closely, and patiently sings a song over us until we understand that we are in the hands of one who is “mighty to save.” Even in our anger and fear and frustration, God rejoices over us, and sings a song of praise and comfort to our weary soul.