UFC, dragons and the image of God

"When we place value (the only value) in the overcoming, or transcending, or triumph over these things, (struggles, difficulties, sufferings etc.) we empty them of their positive content and value. When it comes to people then, the victim is valued when they overcome their victimization, the addict is valued when they have triumph over their addiction or when they clean up and the "criminal" has value when they are delivered from their "deviance" and rehabilitated." (hineini)

i think i hear what you are saying, hineini.

last summer, i was in a meeting where somebody made a statement that all they had had to do was pray and they were healed... that their faith had made them whole.

now, i have no problem with feeling this- i mean, it's even biblical.

however, feeling and articulating are two very different things. one must needs be careful with this kind of testimonial because of the message of hopelessness and failure that this kind of announcement indirectly puts out there for someone who is still struggling with and being overcome by something that is completely out of their control. to put it another way, the victim of an infirmity feels devalued as a person because of his or her inability to somehow slay this dragon and bring back a victory report to the crowd.

a friend of mine, an old 'saint' and one of the most faithful followers of Christ i know, had been struggling with major kidney failure and had been doing and receiving from others a heckuvalot of prayer- but was losing the battle. to make this glib 'mind over matter' kind of statement in his presence was to suggest that his faith was somehow not strong enough to overcome this physical ailment. what was intended to be a shout of victory for the encouragement of the masses within their own circumstance probably just rang out as hollow hopelessness for my friend. try to tell someone who has been praying against something for years to no resolution that 'God has no favorite children' and then listen to their side. there is this pervasive 'well why not ME then?' question begging for an answer- although my friend would never say this, i believe i might if i were in his place.

even beyond this, contrast western prosperity theology and all this 'child of the king' talk with war, hunger, starvation, disease, homelessness and natural disaster in any of the three or four worlds and see how well the rhetoric holds up to real life. i remember being rather stuck for an answer when a new friend of mine in sri lanka asked me point blank the first time we met:

"what do i tell the people of my village who have lost everything- family, friends, home, livelihood- to Tsunami? who is this God that i am to share with them?"
(rev david gunasari)

d'uh... good question.

journeys down 'alleyways of strife' have and always will be things of beauty... but not the comfortable, renaissance, dayglo psychadelic or off-in-a-field-somewhere-with-the-archbishop-of-canterbury kind of beauty... the kind of wild, action-painter beauty of jackson pollock paintings, bearing upon them the scars of the creative battle itself; the beauty of jacob's walk after his all-night UFC bout with an angel of God; the beauty of my friend rev david's angry resolve to hold tightly to his faith in an invisible God- the only thing in his life that wasn't destroyed by the disaster that destroyed his village and killed many of his family and friends.

there are very few things as inspiring to me as seeing the faith of one who is fighting an ongoing battle with something and refuses to relent on either the battle or the faith that brings greater strength to contend.

i find great inspiration in the white-knuckling of faith in the face of all manner of opposition. job's refusal to accept the advice of his wife to just 'curse God and die' makes him already victorious- but not in the manner of the 'colonial triumphalism' described above, which seems to be a 'fought the good fight, ran the good race' kinda thing.

in my view, job's 'victory' is an ongoing one of day to day conviction and plain perseverence- not in naivete but in hard-nosed faithfulness. rather than being the opiate of the people, faith for people like job and my friend is adrenaline, enabling them the supernatural strength to somehow do things that they really shouldn't be able to do.

but i don't think that any of this is what hineini is saying.
what i take from hineini's comment above is a challenge...

i am being challenged to find inspiration in the life lived in desperation, struggle and strain; the life lived to ultimate 'failure' in these Victory in Jesus terms; the life lived to bear testimony to the love and lifebreath of God simply because it is a human life, and being such bears the truth, the dignity and the opportunity to enlighten that is the very image of God.

a cruel God

(disclaimer: warning, some theological BASE jumping here...)

nope, you're right

i definately have a tough time with the 'big cruel God' thing... however, as i started typing the drivel below my brain started to do some backflips which may or may not make sense... let me try to put the ideas together.

in my understanding of it (bereft of any supplemental consultation with our friends at either biblegateway.com or dictionary.com LOL) the whole notion of cruelty turns around not only one person's propensity to act in his or her own self-interest at the expense of all others, but to draw great satisfaction from the pain inflicted upon others in the process. ability, opportunity and motive are all part of the deal.

it is for this reason that i really push back against the whole 'cruel God' idea because most of the time it is embraced by those who are seeking someone to blame for the things that they hate or cannot explain. might as well project responsibility upon someone invisible- provides a bit of counterfeit comfort.

okay, here's a question: are cruelty and responsibility the same?

(i know i'm already in trouble here because H subscribes to much of emmanuel levinas' ideas on responsibility, but i'll let him tell everyone more about that)

i mean, we leap to the conclusion that one who is capable of preventing them but permits awful happenings must do so because that one draws some sick pleasure from the pain of others. you know what? in my view, no God would be better than a God like that... if that's who God is then i'll take my chances and not give him my love or my devotion...maybe there's someone else up there i can talk to.

but then we get all this stuff about bad things happening to good people going on, and the age old questions don't really go away when we default to 'who can say?'...

we need someone to blame.

blame God- it's easy... he's invisible and doesn't contest our blasphemies with miracles, signs or wonders- he just lets us choose to believe what we want- even about his very character.

the heart of God must be a ragged mess.

i know that my own skimpy picture of right and wrong bristles when i hear people attribute stupid, humanly preventable tragedies to God's 'plan.' as i've mentioned in this blog before, we saw through the loss of two of my wife's brothers in three months to automobile accidents. one sunny morning in july of 2003, my brother in law went face to face with a semi as he drove to work... no one has ever been able to explain what happened there. then, three months later to the day, another brother in law and his wife and her young daughter collided with a drunk driver in the middle of the night, claiming not only the lives of my brother-in-law and his soul mate, but that of the driver of the other vehicle as well... there was no one we could even hate over it. both of these tragedies just happened.

as angry and confused as i was about it at the time (and still am- the three-year anniversary of losing my dear friend and brother-in-law terry was october 11) i just couldn't blame 'God's plan' for the night when this one drunken bastard left a wedding in his car and was able to drive an hour and a half in the dark with his lights off before running head-on into the front of my brother-in-law's van as he and his wife of only six-months and her daughter were travelling back home after a dance competition.

what the heck would be the point of blaming God? wouldn't bring anybody back. three people died in that crash and the young dancer had to work obsessively at her physiotherapy once all the skin and bone-grafting had healed just to walk again, much less dance (which she did, by the way... she danced at the same event a year later.)

but is God cruel because he doesn't prevent these local tragedies, much less things like the holocaust? is there something that we, in our temporal subjectivity might be missing?

well what if God IS the cruel one? if you twist it around just so, you just might be able to make a case for it and still remain mildly orthodox...

here's what i'm thinking: God can prevent all bad things. however, he doesn't- he has made a deal to permit all of humankind with freedom of will and he's not backing out now. would it be fair to say that God draws satisfaction from permitting us to make up our own minds about things that we believe or don't believe, things we do or don't do etc? well, he's either satisfied or putting up with it for some reason because this appears to be our causal cage whether we like it or not.

is satisfaction pleasure?
could be.

and if it is, then can God be seen as drawing pleasure from allowing us to make the decisions we make even though he can see they are going to bring about pain and consequence for ourselves and others, as well as himself? if so then here lies the cruelty of God...

to agree to abide by our stupid decisions because he derives more pleasure from our freedom to choose life or love or pride or pain than he derives from happiness- ours and his own.

who is really to blame here?

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.

postascription

this post could serve as a postscript for 'blaming God' (posted 09/12/05)
sorry that there's not more here... i've been busy typing out my journals from sri lanka and posting them on poitu varam (jollybeggar abroad.)


it's just that i've been thinking and praying a fair bit lately about the hand of God. you see, i really want people to see it move. i really want people's eyes to open spiritually.

so, when the news reports of hurricane rita's progress and the ongoing evacuations started pouring out of my newspapers and television, i started praying for two things:

1) that the gulf coast of the united states of america would be spared a repeat of the katrina disaster, by the mercy and grace of God. that he would see fit to intervene and cause the storm to cave in on itself or wipe out some UNinhabited island or something. in short, that a miracle would take place and that people would acknowledge it as such.

2) if, rather than intervene, God chose to just allow this storm to hit according to the worst case scenarios that were being spun for us by meterologists, then he would pour his grace and mercy into the american people affected, that they would draw together immediately and allow peace and good will, rather than anarchy to reign.

well, it appears that God IS a miracle-working God, alive and well and at work on planet earth. however, i suppose that people can continue to deny him their worship and thanksgiving, defaulting to

"whew! that was lucky! that storm didn't even come close to the widespread damage and destruction that we feared. still, better safe than sorry..."
***
ascribe to the Lord, o mighty ones
ascribe to the Lord glory and strength
ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name
worship the Lord in the splendour of his holiness
(psalm 29.1-2)

blaming God

somewhat like the apostle thomas, my friend Icarus often plays 'devil's advocate' in speaking out loud the questions that riccochet around inside the hearts of people so socialized and well-behaved that they remain silent in spite of the war within. as i'm sure i've said once or twice before, i find these exchanges invigorating, as they challenge me to try to articulate what i believe and, at least to some degree, why i believe it- i think that that is why i call him my friend... 'as iron sharpens iron'

anyway, recently he tapped into the consciousness of the community once again with this one concerning katrina:
I marvel at the people most affected by this utter destruction who turn and pray to God or praise him for sparing their lives. Couldn't he just have spared everyone's life?! If there is any clear demonstration that a benevolent God does not exist and is not in control of world events it is the random destruction wrought by natural disasters. So I ask you people of faith, how do you reconcile events such as Katrina with your belief in God?
***

i just returned from sri lanka, where i walked along a beach that, just eight months ago, was littered with the bodies of people who did or didn't deserve to die more or less than anyone else.

a man named xavier kindly shared his story with me of how his home was taken from him by a natural disaster, the Tsunami of december 26, 2004 and how his family was saved because he had taken them miraculously from the soon-to-be-affected area just half an hour earlier. that he had taken them to church is, i think, just a nice coincidence, for the church just down the street from his house did not have some big God-bubble around it and the lives of those who worshipped there were lost that day. in any event, he returned to his home just in time to see a 100 foot wall of water rise up from behind the small village across the strait from him, mercilessly engulf the village and then head for him. he jumped on his motorcycle and headed for the hills.

although not a 'believer' per se, he counts it a miracle of God that he is alive to rebuild the house that his family has been in for three generations. he counts it a miracle of God that his wife and kids are with him in this time when so many families have suffered greater heartache.

where he has become cynical is not in the face of God but in the lying faces and empty promises of the many photographers from the west who have, for the last eight months, been taking his picture and promising aid. so far, the bricks he lays to rebuild his home are his own, paid for by the many hours of community service into which he and all the other residents of the town of Batticaloa have found themselves all but conscripted since december's disaster.

(btw: i made no promises, explaining that my photos were to be used to report back to a newly awakened western world of the rebuilding of this area, and of the need that still exists here. one of the tasks undertaken by the team on this trip was the procurement of land by our denomination in order to undertake a largescale redevelopment project with funding already received. with no underlying agenda evident on my part, he was very comfortable, even eager, to share his story... see, everyone left living here has one, and each story is a testimony to the strength and the hope that is to be found within people all over the world.)

it's with this experience freshly imprinted upon my heart and mind, i find the whole 'let's blame God' mentality a bit frustrating, in that we feel this need to point at God when lives are lost, but count it all as luck or coincidence when lives are spared. somehow, i think that, if anything, we have the whole picture bass-ackwards.

i wonder if many of our theological problems have to do with our basic reasons for believing or disbelieving in God in the first place. bad theology usually comes from bad faith (as opposed to good faith, which is well-placed trust.) on one hand, a belief in a cosmic badguy God who swings an almighty hand purely out of self-interest maintains our personal comfort in a strange way, somewhat like the whole lee harvey oswald story: we have given the killer a face and can now rest assured that his behaviours are being monitored for our protection... on the other hand, it also enables many to point at this ridiculously (in our trippy western perspective with its logic and causality fixations) unjust and dareisay somewhat needy deity who is so incapable of simply 'being still and knowing that he is God' for being the obvious source of everything we fail to be able to understand or control.

it's been about control for us since the garden. we've been struggling with our desire to be 'like God' through the use or misuse of the knowledge of good and evil. where this all turns to rubbish for me is that it leaves us alone in the cosmos with no one to look up to and although i don't particularly care for being alone in this way, i would rather be alone than accept a slanted, humanized, one dimensional picture of God- i think i'll try atheism if it comes down to that.

however, there is one important phenomenon that exists in our world, the origin of which is also very difficult to calculate using any scientific method: where does good come from?

humankind? not likely, we've recently seen again what people can and will do to each other when given the chance. there is a good that seems to be both originating outside of us and inherent in us, although buried beneath generations of spiritual rebellion and willingly consumed soul poison.

satan and the staff of hell? again, not likely. seems to me that everything attributable to this fallen angel is largely about selfishness and ambition at the expense of all else... it is arguable that any good that can even survive in this moral vaccuum, much less be created within it, is not really worth calling good anyway.

advanced extra-terrestrials? oh come on. that's what the last blog was about.

nope- i choose to blame God for the good and chalk the bad up to coincidence.

that's probably where the whole scriptural idea of faith being 'the essence of things unseen and the source of all things hoped for' comes from. i think that that is for me the only answer to the question posed by the psalmist who asks 'where does my hope come from?'

now as to why God doesn't step in in every case i have no idea. the weight of that burden has been kept from me. i would just really welcome people who are trying to either make points about the existence and sovereignty of God or the non-existence and consequent irrelevence of God to quit blaming him for bad things in order to make their point as they play to the crowd.

Icarus continues the dialogue in his comment responses: I certainly don't advocate putting "blame" on God for Katrina, that's ridiculous, but you can't just say that all the good things (miraculous events and such) are because of God's intervention but none of the bad things are. If God interferes then he has to answer for the miracles and the times when he does not perform miracles.

i would probably disagree with Icarus here if he had worded it differently. the 'if God intervenes then...' is the place where much of this pivots back and forth. God's decision to intervene or not has more to do with his perspective than our projection. we read the 'wager' between God and satan (cited earlier in Icarus' responses is a summary of the biblical story of Job) according to our own perspective- projecting all of our fallen human stuff on a person who is actually incapable of any of these attitudes or behaviours. being God and being holy, God cannot also act out of emotionally disconnected selfishness, the essence of 'sin.' it is the only thing that God can't do or be. however, because our eyes are clouded by our own propensity to be this way and our frustration with others who are as well, we default to this notion that everyone has it in them to act in a manner that puts themselves first. it just stands to reason, then, that one who is ultimate in all things is probably also the ultimate in being selfish.

so God becomes, as aptly put by dotbar, the whipping boy. buried in our psyche, because God put it there, we have this notion that God probably shouldn't do anything bad, but we have a terrible time not attributing bad things to him because we get all hung up on this 'why didn't you stop it from happening' thing, taking it as evidence that God is in fact malevolent or at the very best aloof. this not only goes against the very nature of God, but against our nature as his crowned of creation (his 'workmanship, created for good works in Christ') and calls into question the essence of who we are as created beings. then it becomes of great comfort to say 'if this is God then i don't want him- i was not created by something like this...'

in my view, this reflects a lot more about us and the limited ways we think and the logical leaps we make in order to remain comfortably the same, than it does about God.

example? we, in our limited capacity to help have opportunity to give to redcross america and many others in order to engage in the current drama in the wake of hurricane katrina. how many of us have actually done this? have we done anything to intervene in a small way the way that we would hope that God would intervene in a big one?or are we just as aloof as we claim God is, seeing something and doing nothing?

we have created a picture of God's face which looks strangely like our own.

***

gotta thank you again, Icarus, for getting me going enough to process this stuff in this way.