We have walked and wandered
thru field and forest.
We have waded in pools in Brooklyn.
We have lived and lingered;
given and gotten,
we have glimpsed the face of God.
You are my brother
til breath is bitter
and still we push to the fore.
Run and stand
and sit in silence
and the journey is the reward.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
movement
"The entire body of my earlier work reflects a movement towards Jesus Christ. In 2002, I consecrated my work to Jesus Christ. This did not involve a denunciation of works that reflected the journey. It was rather a statement that from then on I would write directly for Jesus Christ. I would write works about salvation, as opposed to alienation.
- Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire, Queen of the Damned, and others.
- Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire, Queen of the Damned, and others.
Monday, April 12, 2010
what if
what if the Gospel is so big that even the people who get it wrong, still get it?
addendum (due to general confusion):
To anyone confused and wondering idly if I'm falling into heresy - some clarifications on this thought that came to me.
in brief, the setting was such: I was reading an LDS ("Mormon") friend's blog (what up, K, if you're reading this!), and she mentioned that her greatest passion was "for the Gospel".
It struck me how, as a Protestant Christian, I - and, I'm guessing, you guys - would say the exact same thing is our passion: the Gospel, the good news that God loves and saves a broken world. But yet we do mean, I think, fairly theologically different things when we say "I love the Gospel".
Then I flipped it - what if I approach the question, not from the angle of "what does it mean when I say - I love God", but from the angle of "what does it mean when God says - I love you"? To whom does He say this? Who can read John 1:12 ("Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God") and rejoice?
This extends to other communities. What about, for example, the Roman Catholic communion? I believe firmly that I fellowship with several Roman Catholic brothers and sisters; I love them, I trust that they love me, and, more importantly, I trust their love for God. I don't know if their doctrine is 100% correct - but I do believe that they are, underlying and interacting with their doctrinal belief, simply in love with Jesus Christ.
It makes me wonder what kind of thing the Gospel is. Is it something that we have to "know about" in order to obtain? I don't think many of us would want to say you have to understand philosophy about Jesus in order to receive love from Jesus - one reason being that this is actually impossible.
Now, when we ask questions about the Gospel, we're still talking about a pretty specific statement. Jeff points out to me that "the Gospel" is objectively defined, shaped by a specific and unique historical context.
My point isn't to be a universalist - saying, everyone, everywhere, is loving God. That's too broad, and it just rings untrue. That's not what I mean when I say, "getting it wrong."
What I do mean when I think about us "getting it wrong" is that I wonder what role knowledge and doctrine play in our love of God. God not as an abstract, nonspecific, vague concept, but God as a real, all-loving, all-powerful, incredibly present being whose presence and direct intervention is found throughout the world and human history. I think good teaching is vastly important - but even good teaching gets some details wrong sometimes. Does Jesus still love us when we make mistakes when talking about him?
...
This is meant to be a rhetorical question. The answer, I believe, is Yes.
But this begs a further question: "how many mistakes can we make, and still be talking about Jesus?"
And this is a very real question.
It's a big question: Which details matter? If you and I are both talking about our favorite cars, and I mention mine - the Mazda RX-7 FC3S - I might be picturing a white car, while you picture a red car. No big deal - we're still talking about the same thing.
But if I talk about an RX-7, and you picture a VW bug, or a horse, or a birthday cake, we're on pretty different pages. That's become a conversation whose details are so disconnected that it's not even a conversation "about" RX-7's any more.
And that's a question whose answer comes into focus when we humbly examine Scripture, seek God in prayer, listen to our mentors/disciplers, and so on.
addendum (due to general confusion):
To anyone confused and wondering idly if I'm falling into heresy - some clarifications on this thought that came to me.
in brief, the setting was such: I was reading an LDS ("Mormon") friend's blog (what up, K, if you're reading this!), and she mentioned that her greatest passion was "for the Gospel".
It struck me how, as a Protestant Christian, I - and, I'm guessing, you guys - would say the exact same thing is our passion: the Gospel, the good news that God loves and saves a broken world. But yet we do mean, I think, fairly theologically different things when we say "I love the Gospel".
Then I flipped it - what if I approach the question, not from the angle of "what does it mean when I say - I love God", but from the angle of "what does it mean when God says - I love you"? To whom does He say this? Who can read John 1:12 ("Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God") and rejoice?
This extends to other communities. What about, for example, the Roman Catholic communion? I believe firmly that I fellowship with several Roman Catholic brothers and sisters; I love them, I trust that they love me, and, more importantly, I trust their love for God. I don't know if their doctrine is 100% correct - but I do believe that they are, underlying and interacting with their doctrinal belief, simply in love with Jesus Christ.
It makes me wonder what kind of thing the Gospel is. Is it something that we have to "know about" in order to obtain? I don't think many of us would want to say you have to understand philosophy about Jesus in order to receive love from Jesus - one reason being that this is actually impossible.
Now, when we ask questions about the Gospel, we're still talking about a pretty specific statement. Jeff points out to me that "the Gospel" is objectively defined, shaped by a specific and unique historical context.
My point isn't to be a universalist - saying, everyone, everywhere, is loving God. That's too broad, and it just rings untrue. That's not what I mean when I say, "getting it wrong."
What I do mean when I think about us "getting it wrong" is that I wonder what role knowledge and doctrine play in our love of God. God not as an abstract, nonspecific, vague concept, but God as a real, all-loving, all-powerful, incredibly present being whose presence and direct intervention is found throughout the world and human history. I think good teaching is vastly important - but even good teaching gets some details wrong sometimes. Does Jesus still love us when we make mistakes when talking about him?
...
This is meant to be a rhetorical question. The answer, I believe, is Yes.
But this begs a further question: "how many mistakes can we make, and still be talking about Jesus?"
And this is a very real question.
It's a big question: Which details matter? If you and I are both talking about our favorite cars, and I mention mine - the Mazda RX-7 FC3S - I might be picturing a white car, while you picture a red car. No big deal - we're still talking about the same thing.
But if I talk about an RX-7, and you picture a VW bug, or a horse, or a birthday cake, we're on pretty different pages. That's become a conversation whose details are so disconnected that it's not even a conversation "about" RX-7's any more.
And that's a question whose answer comes into focus when we humbly examine Scripture, seek God in prayer, listen to our mentors/disciplers, and so on.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Grace. (3 of 3)
[The last in a series of posts on Grace, excerpted from personal correspondence.]
"can you struggle for grace? is it something to fight for?"
-I think you can struggle to give grace. But you can never struggle to receive it (because that would be earning it, making someone give you grace).
-But you can struggle with giving grace: because, like I said above, we're sinful. And because we're sinful, whatever we are supposed to do, we dislike doing; and whatever we're not supposed to do, we like doing. So, in the same way we were made to be like God, we were made to give grace; and, in the same way that we fail, daily, to be like God, we fail to give grace.
"if you have to fight for it is it somehow no longer grace?"
-I think it is still grace; the struggle, in the case of struggling to give grace, comes not because what you are giving is not truly grace; it comes because we, as flawed individuals, are unaccustomed to doing what is supposed to come naturally to us (in one of the analogies above: our lungs, filled with water, choke as we try to force in air).
"does it then equate to something akin to charity?"
-I think so. I think, really, that it all comes down to charity: our existence comes down to charity, to receiving something that is not ours to demand, but was, in God's abundance, God's to give.
"is that a totally irrelevant question if all of people's actions are a component of a god-given world?"
-I don't think it is. Yes, all of people's actions are a component of a God-given world; but just because we work within God's given framework doesn't mean that each individual action that we perform is directly licensed by and caused by God (if so, that's an incredibly messed-up version of a deity that I really don't want anything to do with). God created us with free will (if you want to talk about why, there's a whole separate discussion there), and I do think that us having free will is for the greater good. And I do think that God will, at the end of everything, make everything Right, for forever. But, in-between, there is a lot of us messing up, and God cleaning up after us, and us messing up again, etc.
Much love;
-jglc
"you can accept something with grace - like, without jealousy or anger or pride or vanity or whatnot."
-Right; I think that's true. This is a case of you extending grace to someone else, right: like taking someone's apology, when they have no way to force you to do it. "can you struggle for grace? is it something to fight for?"
-But you can struggle with giving grace: because, like I said above, we're sinful. And because we're sinful, whatever we are supposed to do, we dislike doing; and whatever we're not supposed to do, we like doing. So, in the same way we were made to be like God, we were made to give grace; and, in the same way that we fail, daily, to be like God, we fail to give grace.
"if you have to fight for it is it somehow no longer grace?"
"does it then equate to something akin to charity?"
"is that a totally irrelevant question if all of people's actions are a component of a god-given world?"
Much love;
-jglc
Friday, March 19, 2010
Grace. (2 of 3)
[The second in a series of reflections on Grace, excerpted from personal correspondence.]
Who Gets It?
I said that Grace is offered to all, and I think that is true. From the sickest pedophile, to the cleanest-living Mormon, to the most hypocritical Protestant, to the loneliest homeless kid. I do think that is true. And Grace is unconditionally offered: God does not discriminate based on past, present, or future sins; God is not interested in striking a bargain of good behavior with us. Grace is ours, free for the taking, and we can have total surety in the assurance that this grace is effective and aesthetically ideal.
But, as I mentioned above: "faith without works is dead." I do not think that this means that faith can be alive but then, due to a paucity of good works, sort of sputter off and die. But I think it does mean that there is real, living, Grace-giving faith; and a kind of faith that is faith in name only, faith that calls itself faith, that says outwardly "I have received Grace", but, on the inside, never really understands what Grace means. And a present, even if freely and repeatedly offered, if it is rejected, or left unopened, languishes in neglect.
Then there are the tricky cases: people who never hear about Christianity? People who were abused by religion, who now hate the word "God"? All the good people, who lead beautiful lives of selflessness and yet never assent to the truths of my particular form of theology. What about them?
I could go into great length on each case, but I think two broad strokes might suffice to give you the general picture: (1) Everyone, from the best of us, to the worst of us, has broken the relationship we were supposed to maintain with God. And, again, no matter how well we live - no matter how hard we try to undo our brokenness, or to earn it back - Grace cannot be earned. BUT: (2) I don't know what it means to accept Grace, either. I know it has something to do with loving God, with realizing our inability to do it on our own. But I do not know exactly what the minimum standard of "wanting to find God" is, to qualify one as having accepted the gift of Grace. But I'm not interested in the minimum: sure, maybe I'd be OK if I weren't actively working on my relationship with God. But, believing that this relationship is precisely the point of my existence, I would be silly to abandon it; and kind of a jerk to my friends, if I were to give up on them finding and cultivating the same relationship that brings me such total fulfillment.
What About Human Grace?
So, if we're talking about grace, it would be silly or dismissive to avoid talking about the grace that we, as humans, give one another. But, in order to get to the point where I can address this mundane human grace, I think we need to understand what I believe the greatest Grace to be: because the two are, in my mind, intrinsically the same.
There's this idea, in most religions, that God made Man in God's own image, right? Adam and Eve and all that stuff. And that doesn't mean (though maybe it does also mean this) that we look physically like God. That means that, whatever we do, is a reflection of something that God does or can do. So our love, our care, anything in our relationships with others is an imitation of God's Love, Care, and so on, in the same way that anything a man or woman does can be traced to their parents, mentors, friends, media inspirations, etc. (even if they have placed some innovative twist or spin on it).
[Last, to close: addressing questions raised.]
Who Gets It?
I said that Grace is offered to all, and I think that is true. From the sickest pedophile, to the cleanest-living Mormon, to the most hypocritical Protestant, to the loneliest homeless kid. I do think that is true. And Grace is unconditionally offered: God does not discriminate based on past, present, or future sins; God is not interested in striking a bargain of good behavior with us. Grace is ours, free for the taking, and we can have total surety in the assurance that this grace is effective and aesthetically ideal.
But, as I mentioned above: "faith without works is dead." I do not think that this means that faith can be alive but then, due to a paucity of good works, sort of sputter off and die. But I think it does mean that there is real, living, Grace-giving faith; and a kind of faith that is faith in name only, faith that calls itself faith, that says outwardly "I have received Grace", but, on the inside, never really understands what Grace means. And a present, even if freely and repeatedly offered, if it is rejected, or left unopened, languishes in neglect.
Then there are the tricky cases: people who never hear about Christianity? People who were abused by religion, who now hate the word "God"? All the good people, who lead beautiful lives of selflessness and yet never assent to the truths of my particular form of theology. What about them?
I could go into great length on each case, but I think two broad strokes might suffice to give you the general picture: (1) Everyone, from the best of us, to the worst of us, has broken the relationship we were supposed to maintain with God. And, again, no matter how well we live - no matter how hard we try to undo our brokenness, or to earn it back - Grace cannot be earned. BUT: (2) I don't know what it means to accept Grace, either. I know it has something to do with loving God, with realizing our inability to do it on our own. But I do not know exactly what the minimum standard of "wanting to find God" is, to qualify one as having accepted the gift of Grace. But I'm not interested in the minimum: sure, maybe I'd be OK if I weren't actively working on my relationship with God. But, believing that this relationship is precisely the point of my existence, I would be silly to abandon it; and kind of a jerk to my friends, if I were to give up on them finding and cultivating the same relationship that brings me such total fulfillment.
What About Human Grace?
So, if we're talking about grace, it would be silly or dismissive to avoid talking about the grace that we, as humans, give one another. But, in order to get to the point where I can address this mundane human grace, I think we need to understand what I believe the greatest Grace to be: because the two are, in my mind, intrinsically the same.
There's this idea, in most religions, that God made Man in God's own image, right? Adam and Eve and all that stuff. And that doesn't mean (though maybe it does also mean this) that we look physically like God. That means that, whatever we do, is a reflection of something that God does or can do. So our love, our care, anything in our relationships with others is an imitation of God's Love, Care, and so on, in the same way that anything a man or woman does can be traced to their parents, mentors, friends, media inspirations, etc. (even if they have placed some innovative twist or spin on it).
[Last, to close: addressing questions raised.]
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Grace. (1 of 3)
[Some thoughts on grace, excerpted from personal correspondence.]
All right.
You ready? Sit down for this one, it's gonna be long. Feel free to read thru in a few sittings.
I have been wanting to get back to this question, for quite some time.
Grace is such a difficult thing to talk about, primarily because it is so mystical (mystical in the purest, least "religiousy" way possible... mystical in the sense of transcending what we are used to thinking about), so personal, and so rarely seen. That said, I think that the core of Christian faith and belief must be Grace: so it is also an incredibly important thing to talk about. So I'll try.
Let me see... OK. First things first: I am gonna say what I think Grace is, including what it's not, where it comes from (both in a mundane and divine way, though [as you could probably guess] I think the two are actually the same), and then, based on those beliefs/definitions, address some questions commonly raised.
What Is Grace?
I think the simplest and most impactful definition I've heard is simply this: Grace is receiving what we don't deserve. But packed into that definition (really more of a description, actually), is a lot of mind-twisting thought.
For one: by definition, we cannot deserve grace. And thus, grace is something that cannot be worked for; nor can it be pursued, strived for (one of my favorite Bible verses says that "equality with God is not something to be grasped"), or earned in any way. This is one of the biggest, worst, most fundamental mistakes that people (even many of the Christian faithful) make: they confuse the grace of and from God with something that we work to get. And so you get people "doing the right things" to "stay out of hell".
Nahhhhh.
[Side note: there is a point to doing "good" things, even after receiving grace: doing good things is a response to receiving Grace. It serves as a sort of sign that receiving Grace has changed us, and that it has really impacted our lives in a meaningful and life-altering fashion (another favorite verse says, "faith without works is dead").]
So, grace is something that we don't deserve, but that we receive. More than that: Grace is something that we don't deserve, but we need. It is literally vital to us: without grace, not only will we die, but we are dead. Grace is like the air in CPR, being breathed into unresponsive lungs. The lungs are made for that air, will quickly die and atrophy without it, but cannot, on their own, pull that needed air into themselves.
Why is this? It seems stupid for something to be made (humans) that intrinsically need something that they cannot grab hold of (grace), right? What kind of designer (ahh shades of "intelligent design" rhetoric... sorry.) would do something as stupid and broken as that?
Why Do We Need Grace?
Well, it comes back to a pretty oft-repeated topic: sin. What we humans nowadays consider to be our "natural" state is not the state of our nature as intended at creation (and I don't mean some dogmatic anti-scientific Creationist creation, either, I mean, at the metaphysical point where God designed the human). We were created to love God and to be loved by God; to know our Creator and be known by the Creator. But at some point in the history of our race - a point that is repeated in each of our individual lives - we broke ourselves. We were greedy, or fearful, or weak in some other way, and we heeded our own understanding of our purpose instead of the understanding of our Creator. And so we removed ourselves from that love, care, and nurture that was supposed to be the air in our spiritual lungs, replacing it with some noxious fluid of our own creation. And so now we lie, on the beach of this earth, gasping for nourishment. It is my fault, not the Creator's.
But, thank God (literally), the Creator still has a purpose for us; God still holds onto God's perfect love for us, despite our having abandoned it. So God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves: the Creator seizes the Creation and provides for us. It is my absolute and convicted belief that the way in which God provided that Grace (which is, really, a sub-heading of the greater umbrella of Love) is by a living act of sacrifice, the act and person of Jesus Christ.
Because, you see, Grace is free and offered to all (we'll get to it), but it is not cheap: to breath air into a victim's lungs, the person administering CPR must sacrifice her own air, right? It takes work to resuscitate the near-dead.
So this great illness that besets us - this fragmented person, this broken identity, this thing that is not as it ought to be - has to be made right, at some great cost; and, in the Christian faith, that cost was Jesus Christ, a perfect God and a sinless (and hence unbroken) Man, condescending to our level and taking our sins on himself. Dirtying himself, to clean us off. Which we in no way deserved, but which God wanted to give us. No child deserves a present - have they ever truly earned it? - but yet good parents love to give good things to their capricious children :)
[Next: Who gets Grace? And then - closing questions.]
All right.
You ready? Sit down for this one, it's gonna be long. Feel free to read thru in a few sittings.
I have been wanting to get back to this question, for quite some time.
Grace is such a difficult thing to talk about, primarily because it is so mystical (mystical in the purest, least "religiousy" way possible... mystical in the sense of transcending what we are used to thinking about), so personal, and so rarely seen. That said, I think that the core of Christian faith and belief must be Grace: so it is also an incredibly important thing to talk about. So I'll try.
Let me see... OK. First things first: I am gonna say what I think Grace is, including what it's not, where it comes from (both in a mundane and divine way, though [as you could probably guess] I think the two are actually the same), and then, based on those beliefs/definitions, address some questions commonly raised.
What Is Grace?
I think the simplest and most impactful definition I've heard is simply this: Grace is receiving what we don't deserve. But packed into that definition (really more of a description, actually), is a lot of mind-twisting thought.
For one: by definition, we cannot deserve grace. And thus, grace is something that cannot be worked for; nor can it be pursued, strived for (one of my favorite Bible verses says that "equality with God is not something to be grasped"), or earned in any way. This is one of the biggest, worst, most fundamental mistakes that people (even many of the Christian faithful) make: they confuse the grace of and from God with something that we work to get. And so you get people "doing the right things" to "stay out of hell".
Nahhhhh.
[Side note: there is a point to doing "good" things, even after receiving grace: doing good things is a response to receiving Grace. It serves as a sort of sign that receiving Grace has changed us, and that it has really impacted our lives in a meaningful and life-altering fashion (another favorite verse says, "faith without works is dead").]
So, grace is something that we don't deserve, but that we receive. More than that: Grace is something that we don't deserve, but we need. It is literally vital to us: without grace, not only will we die, but we are dead. Grace is like the air in CPR, being breathed into unresponsive lungs. The lungs are made for that air, will quickly die and atrophy without it, but cannot, on their own, pull that needed air into themselves.
Why is this? It seems stupid for something to be made (humans) that intrinsically need something that they cannot grab hold of (grace), right? What kind of designer (ahh shades of "intelligent design" rhetoric... sorry.) would do something as stupid and broken as that?
Why Do We Need Grace?
Well, it comes back to a pretty oft-repeated topic: sin. What we humans nowadays consider to be our "natural" state is not the state of our nature as intended at creation (and I don't mean some dogmatic anti-scientific Creationist creation, either, I mean, at the metaphysical point where God designed the human). We were created to love God and to be loved by God; to know our Creator and be known by the Creator. But at some point in the history of our race - a point that is repeated in each of our individual lives - we broke ourselves. We were greedy, or fearful, or weak in some other way, and we heeded our own understanding of our purpose instead of the understanding of our Creator. And so we removed ourselves from that love, care, and nurture that was supposed to be the air in our spiritual lungs, replacing it with some noxious fluid of our own creation. And so now we lie, on the beach of this earth, gasping for nourishment. It is my fault, not the Creator's.
But, thank God (literally), the Creator still has a purpose for us; God still holds onto God's perfect love for us, despite our having abandoned it. So God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves: the Creator seizes the Creation and provides for us. It is my absolute and convicted belief that the way in which God provided that Grace (which is, really, a sub-heading of the greater umbrella of Love) is by a living act of sacrifice, the act and person of Jesus Christ.
Because, you see, Grace is free and offered to all (we'll get to it), but it is not cheap: to breath air into a victim's lungs, the person administering CPR must sacrifice her own air, right? It takes work to resuscitate the near-dead.
So this great illness that besets us - this fragmented person, this broken identity, this thing that is not as it ought to be - has to be made right, at some great cost; and, in the Christian faith, that cost was Jesus Christ, a perfect God and a sinless (and hence unbroken) Man, condescending to our level and taking our sins on himself. Dirtying himself, to clean us off. Which we in no way deserved, but which God wanted to give us. No child deserves a present - have they ever truly earned it? - but yet good parents love to give good things to their capricious children :)
[Next: Who gets Grace? And then - closing questions.]
Saturday, March 13, 2010
wise words
Pastoral advice from MC Naledge of Kidz in the Hall:
"...I don’t have to make the whole “this is the socially-conscious record” with a bunch of opinions, metaphors, big words and similes. I can just tell you a story and sometimes that’s what people need. They wanna feel like the music is genuine. I’m just saying shit from my heart and what’s going on in my life. It makes the music easier to perform and easier for me to rest my case. If you like it, you like it. If you don’t, you don’t. This is me." (The Smoking Section, March 2010)
"...I don’t have to make the whole “this is the socially-conscious record” with a bunch of opinions, metaphors, big words and similes. I can just tell you a story and sometimes that’s what people need. They wanna feel like the music is genuine. I’m just saying shit from my heart and what’s going on in my life. It makes the music easier to perform and easier for me to rest my case. If you like it, you like it. If you don’t, you don’t. This is me." (The Smoking Section, March 2010)
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