Four Ways to Miss God

Maybe it’s the old rut of knowing so much about God that they forgot to actually know the God who stood behind it all. Maybe it’s the old problem of the people who are so focused on keeping the rules that they do not recognize the rule-giver’s voice when he speaks afresh in the person of Jesus or displays his nature in acts of mercy and liberation. 

Maybe it’s the problem of the Grand Inquisitor who at least has the self-awareness to know that he must kill Jesus should he show up again on the scene.

Here, too, is a mirror for us. The written word is a gift, but it can also be a trap. We can think that we have known God because we have kept the word and learned it and deployed it. We can miss the fact that we are engaging the menu while the food itself waits patiently in the kitchen for us to come and get it.

Not-So-Divine Authority

I confess: putting authority figures on a pedestal has never made sense to me. I remember at various junctures of my life having to answer the question, “Who are your heroes?” and I have never known what on earth they were talking about. (Hi, my name is Daniel and I’m an Enneagram 8.)

But people do love authority and power—not just having it, but following it and submitting to it. We see it in the ways religious people flock to controlling and manipulative authority figures. We see it in the ways people are flocking to the brash bravado of Donald Trump. We see it in more subtle insistences that the pastor should be in charge or in the offense that “a junior faculty member would talk to a senior faculty member that way” or in the apparently humble accession to the will of the President or Dean.

In all of this there is a deep and often dangerous and sometimes even deadly mistake. That mistake is the notion that just because someone is exercising power that they are, somehow, closer to God. This is the mistake that the cross was meant to undo forever, and yet we keep perpetuating it in both the church and society.

To be a ruler is to have unmatched opportunity and privileged and power… to transgress against the Lord.

This, too, is a mirror for us.

But… the Prophet!

In the face of each of these failures the trendy way to stand at the edges is to take the mantle of prophet. If God is not found in the rote structure of the priests or the fundegelical devotion to scripture or the tyrannical powers that be, surely God’s voice is to be heard from that prophetic voice on the margin.

Right?

Prophecy is a tool that can be wielded by many hands. To hear a prophet is to hear a prophet. It is not necessarily to hear from God. The ancient prophets can prophesy by Baal and the contemporary prophets can prophesy by our own sacred gods be they freedom or wealth or sex or party or power.

Trite But True

The old, trite, tired, and worn saying goes, “You can’t put God in a box.” Trite but true.

The hard part comes in recognizing the boxes we create; or, better, how we attempt to confine God to boxes we have been given—sometimes even by God herself.

God will not be constrained to sacred places and times. God will not be magically known by sacred books. God will not be embodied in sacred agents of power. God does not inspire every self-proclaimed prophet.

The project of following God is much too wild to be constrained by any of this. Even by the good.

Photo Credits:

Hurezi Monastery © Fusion-of-Horizons | flickr | CC 2.0
Grandma’s Bible © Andrew Seaman | flickr | CC 2.0