prayer and the lying bastard

i was just digging back through some old emails when i stumbled upon this note that someone sent me once:

"Given my neurotic tendencies, my natural proclivity is to think God is upset with me for offering up such prayers."

i wonder if God, in divine grace, could ever actually be upset with us for praying. no matter how egocentric, experiencially narrow and theologically "off" our prayers might be, to what degree does God judge them versus simply considering their source?

i think that the accusor would have us subjected daily to the judgements of a harsh and perfectionistic divine parent, the approval of whom we fail to receive ad infinitum.

if i was a lying bastard, that's who I'D say God is...

blue christmas

curious servant said... I always feel a little blue this time of year. I shove it aside and work at being all that is right about Christmas for my children. But I feel a little blue.That is OK.
***

a friend of mine was recently confessing the same 'blueness' around the Christmas season. he has used it to fuel his cynicism, explaining that he sees more sadness amongst the people withwhom he works at this time of year than the rest of the year combined. i guess that, to some degree, i agree with him...

yet the agreement strengthens my faith, not my lack of it. it drives me to seek God's face in this time of well-intentioned emotional static.

in my view, if we place our greatest emotional stock in people and human relationships, then christmas can be pretty heavy. people are so good at letting themselves and everyone else down. family and friendly relationships that are supposed to be so close end up feeling -er- obligatory some years.

any breakdown in relationships seems to bare teeth at christmas because we gauge so many aspects of our life's success upon the expressions of our relationships at this time of year... heck, there are stories of soldiers laying down their guns at wartime to enjoy christmas dinner with the enemy, and we get thinking geez- what's that? i can't even think of what to write in a christmas card for a once-close- now casual- friend.

i won't blame satan. that's too easy. it's our problem. however, it's our problem because we leave our biggest spiritual and social buttons exposed during the christmas season and the minions just work the crowd, pushing them and bolting. we turn around and blame each other for our sense of emptiness, rather than open ourselves to the comfort and joy of God as expressed through others, whether strangers or brothers, who suffer the same calamity.

as we place greater stock in our relationship with almighty God through the expressions of goodwill that characterize people's response to the birth of his son (whether intentionally or simply out of tradition) there is the reminder that, with all of its failings, humankind has not been abandoned. the theology of immanuel: God with us is evidenced by the fact that, amidst all that is wrong, there are still glimmers of what is right in every selfless act.

as long as the glimmer exists, there is immanuel- there is hope.

a clear and present danger

i wish that i could think in a straight line.
however, it just doesn't work that way for me. through a series of twists and turns, switchbacks and setbacks i do move forward... although i am sometimes unsure whether it is i who takes a journey or a journey that takes me...

as we drove across a bridge, my attention was drawn to some functional distinctives: many of the bridges here were multi-purpose: a causeway for vehicles, bicycles and trains. lazarus looked up from his near-sleep and said 'like salvation- one bridge.'
***
all along the sides of the road we saw cobra dens... there were apparently a LOT of cobras here.

the cobra does not build its own den. it lets a certain rather tasty, however industrious, type of ant do it... then it eats all the ants and moves in. you can tell the difference between a cobra den and a basic ant hill by the size of the holes...

jey told me that ancient hindus would build little prayer shelters around and over the den of a cobra and then worship it from a spot safely outside. reminiscent of the 'holy of holies.' therein resides the glory of a dangerous God.

(taken from poitu varam -the journals of my first mission trip-
august 20: saturday: day 11:part 2)
***

now there is no longer a holy of holies, and there are no longer hindu prayer huts over cobra dens. what does this say about our relationships with our gods? does this mean that we, as human beings, no longer acknowledge their power? have we grown too big, having reduced those to whom we bow to 'natural forces?'

or is it just that we take the long way home, averting our eyes along the way, lest we make eye contact with the spiritual realm and be obligated to respond in a life-changing way to God's holy gaze?

(i have often toyed with the idea that an entire sermon could be preached using only questions, but eventually rhetoric gets old, n'est-ce pas?)

i can't speak for the hindus- in fact, i find the whole 'prayer hut for the slithering god' a bit spiritually troubling, considering the common colloquialism for 'satan' in sri lanka is the snake.

what i can hang onto is the notion of the 'holy of holies.'

for the ancient jews, the holy of holies was the part of the temple that could only be accessed by the priests on an annual basis in intercession. (that they were only permitted to enter into this special place when going on behalf of others is probably a whole nother blog on the value of intercession in the eyes of God.) when Jesus died, the gospels tell us of the heavy curtain that separated the holy of holies from the rest of the temple being torn by the hand of God himself- not by the hand of man. now whether this is to be taken literally or figuratively is up to your theology.

the thing is, Jesus was the bridge uniting the spiritual and the physical realms... it was he who truly had a foot in both worlds and he became our means of accessing the inaccessible- of gaining audience with the almighty. before Jesus, God was unapproachable- after him, God was close enough to kill.

kill or be killed- that would appear to be the way of the world outside of the garden. all of that darwinian spin comes together nicely when we look around us... and yet sovereign God is patient and loving and actively working out a means by which we can daily be saved.

curious servant recently posted a humble prayer:

My Lord...
Do not listen to my bravado...
Do not let me glory in things that are small...
Like who I am and what I have done.
Do not leave me with myself,

For I am a speck of self-important dust

My Lord...
Hear my prayers begging to serve...
Let me glory in things that are great...
Like who You are and what You have done.
Press me close to You,

For You made Yourself small to tell me I am loved

small enough to tell us of his unfailing love without the message destroying us... taking on a physical body to do so, only to have it destroyed by us.

the classical tragedy becomes comic: 'behold i make all things new...' for our would-be deicide became our only hope of survival beyond these short seventy or eighty years.

now if, in our bravado, we still claim dominion and stubborn self-reliance, then the physical experience, encumbered by things like time, space and circumstance, is all we can hope for... at the end of it all we still face the truth that 'we had a good run, but now it's done.' however, if we cross the bridge- choosing to put our hope of a greater future in the care of a dangerous God- we discover that a holy and eternal creator is dangerous only to that which threatens his investment and restricts our joy to the realm of the physical.

a segment is a direct, measurable distance between two points on a line.
a ray is an immeasurable distance, beginning at a fixed point and extending on to infinity.

so which geometric figure do we choose to best represent 'life?'

yes virginia, there is a santa

did i say 'santa?' sorry, i meant satan.
an easy mistake for any poor typist.

i've been thinking a fair bit about natas lately (that's backward-masking, for those who didn't grow up in the 70's spinning records backwards in order to hear all the evil messages that the devil had put there!)... not really brooding or anything. just thinking. in our outpost there has been a fair bit of spiritual warfare, so to speak, of late; and just as mark heard said in a song twenty-some years ago 'in the eye of the storm the friends of God suffer no permanent harm...' i've been thinking about battle, victory, defeat and, yes, permanent harm.


on november 11, my sons and i watched pearl harbour. there had, of course, been much talk in school about global conflict leading up to remembrance day, many poppies had transformed many coats from mere insulation into uniforms for peace. and so, in keeping with the season, we popped in a war flick.

(by the way, i know that there are many history buffs and film critics who hate this particular war-flick, calling it the greatest piece of quasi-historical love-story schlock ever produced, but hopefully this doesn't eclipse the spiritual truth that i was led towards as i watched...)

what always captures my imagination is the curious enigma of the japanesse kamikaze pilot- the original twentieth century terrorist. there is one fateful scene where a suicide squad of aerial warriors poses for a significant photograph before getting into their zeros... posing for posterity alone, knowing that none of them will ever see the picture.

as i consider the whole notion of evil personified, and the related notion that this personal evil has an unholy agenda: to rob almighty God of everything towhich he is entitled simply because 'he is'... (psalm 29.1-2 gives us some direction there) i find myself thinking about suicide-bomber pilots. it is not part of the suicide bomber's mission to win the war- but the suicide bomber's mission can be part of winning the war. the evil brillance of terrorism is its utter selflessness- once again satan takes something beautiful like laying down one's life for his friends and does some spin in the name of 'honour.' the entire wing of zero pilots in the picture is doomed from the beginning, yet there is victory in their eyes... why?

the pilots know that any damage, any pain, any disruption of the natural flow of freedom in the western world is victory... perhaps not decisive victory, but victory nonetheless. i think that this is a picture of the diabolical mind of hell.

satan is a created being, not a demigod, we all know that, but in his vanity he has lifted himself to a place where he presumes to be God's adversary- in fact, satan is our adversary, for we who bear the name of Jesus upon our lips and the blood of Jesus upon our lives are constant reminders that he is fighting a war that he has already lost. yet knowing that the victory is the Lord's, he keeps on. same question: why?

because any glory stolen by whatever means necessary is glory that God won't get. it is as simple as that. it is my belief that satan and his staff already know that they will enter into every battle beaten. being that the outcome of the battle (and, in fact, the whole war) is a foregone conclusion, all hell breaks lose in order to take from God whatever it can on the way down. it's not that satan thinks he can 'win'... it is simply that he wants to prevent God from getting it all. i remember when sadaam hussein set fire the oilwells in kuwait. it was reminiscent of an old don henley song called them and us which represented 80's coldwar, all or nothing thinking: "if we can't have the ball, there won't be any winner this time." when you have nothing to lose, anything you take seems like victory.

this is most evident in the areas of personal pain and tragedy.

(NOTE: i feel like i'm repeating myself here with the following story, but i have just gone through my posts and i can't find it anywhere... i did NOT check all the comment boxes, though... sorry in advance)

two years ago i lost two brothers-in-law in three months to separate car accidents; one in a 'mysterious' collision with a semi and one (along with his new wife of five months) to a drunk driver.

in that time my wife's dad mentioned many times that he felt like job... and continued to white knuckle his faith through the pain.

in that time i also heard a lot of bad theology from well-intentioned people about God's part in personal pain:

God has a plan for our lives and clearly his plan for [brother-in-law and his wife] was that it was their time..."

pardon? if this is the way God does things then i find myself wondering which of my relatives are next in this systematic wiping out of a family. i just can't buy that.

but, others counter, God is the author of all things.

defaulting to God being the 'author of all things' is placing him directly responsible for all manner of calamity, lawlessness, exploitation and human pain. satan would love for us to see God in this way because the natural outcome of this view is a theological fallacy... believing God is someone that he isn't.

in a world that seemed to be crumbling around me, the only thing that remained changeless was who God was- in fact, his face became clearer. after going through stages of mourning etc a truth came through to me... God chooses to redeem the lost; to make all things new; to be glorified even in times of our greatest pain because he is God and this means justice and love, not random infliction. he can bring peace and power and freedom in anything this world can throw at us if i turn to him for it.

God is the author of all GOOD things. there is the key theological difference. satan has twisted and perverted God's story in order to rob God of the glory that is God's and God's alone by filling our heads with all sorts of bad pictures of who God is.

we must be careful to remember who ultimately ushered suffering into this life- humankind with its need to control and 'be like God' as we read in genesis3. and who talked us into it? not satan, he simply asked the right questions. we talked ourselves into oblivion.

and God, in his love, allowed us to make decisions that would destroy us, severing the relationship between ourselves and the giver of life and all goodness.

awful things happen, not as a surprise to God but as a tragic reminder to God of our willful rebellion and its causal outcomes. the spiritual and the physical were united until we rent them apart in our quest for dominion. having chosen in his omnipotence to abide by our will, God watches us venture down the dark 'alleyways of strife' instead of walking with us through his garden.

miracles come about when God choses to interrupt the natural cycles and laws that he has set in place to govern and perpetually maintain the physical cosmos. he does, however, perform a lot of miracles that we, in our 'empirical wisdom' turn our backs to and explain away as coincidence rather than co-incidence. this does not, however, keep God from pouring his goodness into a world peopled by spiritual insurgents- it simply robs him of the glory in direct opposition to the words of that old hymn

'so give him the glory, great things he hath done...'

yes, virginia, there is a satan- but let's let him and his crue burn to the sound of God's people singing this hymn. time to steal God's glory back.