Well, it’s Trinity Sunday, which means I must dust off all my heresy and see what may be said. If you’re a person who prays, shoot a one liner into the sky for all the people who are trembling in their pulpits, wondering if this was the morning they should have scribbled out a whole text, instead of notes and an outline.
As for me, I am teetering between two decisions. On the one hand I am reading an oldish book called When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and on the other hand, I ran into this op ed at the New York Times. Let me see if I can’t mash them both together.
In When Bad Things Happen to Good People, the author posits that you and I have a conundrum. Either God is omnipotent and evil, or he is good and limited. Because we are good and yet bad things happen to us, there must be some way to explain the problem of God. How could a good and loving God let so many bad things happen? He concludes that God is good but limited. He, God, would like to help me in times of trouble, but he can’t always. I must help myself and help humankind (or otherkin, or whatever). The one thing he, the author, is unwilling to question or let go of is his own goodness.
But what about the fall in the garden, I asked myself, as I listened along. Well, he got to that. Because it’s an audible book I can’t really quote him, not without trouble this early in the morning, but essentially, when God said, “Let us make man in our image and after our likeness,” he was looking at the animals. The “us” included him (God) and all the creatures he had just made. Man, then, is a sort of amalgamation: one part God to some parts animal. When man ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he (and she, of course) was choosing the more God like part, to transcend the realm of base animal instinct, to make moral and spiritual choices. This was essentially a good thing, though of course now people feel pain and suffering in a much different way than their animal counterparts. We know the suffering that comes of making a moral choice. We understand that we will die. We can choose good even if it costs us.
On the whole I am finding this book exceedingly bleak, and I can see why his attempts to grapple with the scripture feel so paltry and bland, because, of course, when God said “Us,” “Let us make man in our image,” he wasn’t talking to the animals, who, as far as we know, unless Narnia is real, couldn’t understand or agree, he was talking to his Trinitarian Self.
This is what makes Christianity so hard, of course. It’s easy to understand that God is One, but impossible to understand that he might be Three and One at the same time. But the three-ness of God is breathed into every line of the scripture, just as Jesus himself is. It’s one of paradigms you need to keep in your head as you’re reading, or the text won’t make sense (along with: God is good and we are bad). Take the line from the Epistle for this morning, “Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?” If you’re trucking along and get to the end of the gospels, you know that Christ is physically in heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father, who is in heaven. So how on earth can he be “in you?” Well, only if you have the Holy Spirit, reanimating your soul and bringing the fullness of the Godhead to dwell in you, because they also don’t really do anything separately—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Practically, when you have Jesus Christ in you through the power of the Holy Spirit, bringing your prayers to the very throne of the Father in heaven, so that there is no separation or alienation, you do experience a deeply painful separation and alienation from the world. You have had to choose to take up your cross and follow Jesus, you have died to yourself and to sin, you are no longer a citizen of this world, but of heaven. And so in a real and practical sense, you are willing to let go of everything that holds you here—money, status, power, relationships, and yes, even family.
It is not unlike the claim made by the person in that op ed I linked at the top, who would like you, as a supporter of Black Lives Matter to text “your relatives and loved ones telling them you will not be visiting them or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives either through protest or financial contributions.” Your adherence to the moral claims and values of Black Lives Matter takes precedence over any other you might possess, even those of your family and others you might love.
It has the haunting ring of the very words of Jesus,
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. – Luke 14:26-33
Look at your life, in other words. Count the cost. If you love anything more than Jesus you don’t really love him. Christians peer out and think, goodness, I love everything more than Jesus. I can’t even feel that he is in me, or in heaven. I am beleaguered and confused.
I don’t know any professing Christians, honestly, who have gone and cut off all their relationships after reading this text. On the contrary, they are pitched into lifelong pain for people they love who continue to reject Christ. They pray, they plead, they are sometimes abrasive in their anxiety for the eternal life of their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters.
I say haunting, because the way that Jesus, through the power of the Holy Spirit, and the love of the Father, makes himself supreme in the life of the Christian is not through empowering that Christian to make demands. No, he abases the Christian so totally, through the humiliation of suffering and failure, he so effectively removes all the loves of this life, that the Christian then has nothing to lose. Everything pales in comparison to the glory of Christ. A Christian, then, never says, “You must die for me” to anyone. Having already died to him or herself in Christ, the Christian is more than willing to lay down his or her life for another, for many others, for the sake of the gospel.
I saw a tweet this week that I wish I had saved. It was an honest and believing Christian pointing out that adherence to the gospel in no way precludes political action. And that is true. But as usual, I must say, the stark contrast between the claims made by Christ on the life and heart of the believer are going to be at odds with those made by the world. At some point, at some moment, every Christian is going to have to chose Jesus and that will be painful, it will be another kind of death. Most especially because everyone at this moment in one way or another is perishing. The death is overwhelming in every corner.
“Go therefore and make disciples,” admonished Jesus this morning, as he prepared to return to his Father, “of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Adam was supposed to make a disciple of Eve, teaching her to observe the single command to trust God. He couldn’t, or didn’t, and they both died as a result. And so, Christ came to make them and you and me alive again. If you want to be a revolutionary, go, this morning, to make a disciple of someone—anyone. Don’t cut anyone off. Be willing to die. Know that through the Holy Spirit Christ is alive in you and you are in the very presence of the Father. You have nothing to lose.
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