Christianity | Questioning the Answers

Sin in the Presence of a Holy God

March 30, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

There’s a fun little anecdote that most of us are probably familiar with about a frog in a pot of water. The water is warming up to a deadly boil, but at such a slow pace that the frog doesn’t have any idea, so it just floats around happily until it ultimately boils to death. But, as the story goes, if the frog had jumped into the boiling water from outside, the temperature difference would’ve been so stark that the frog would’ve promptly jumped out to safety.

Last week, I was making my way through a book that had been recommended to me and at one point the author talked briefly about Jesus dying on the cross to deal with the sin that separates us from God. This got me reflecting on another thing I’d read recently about sin and the wrath of God. Which made me reflect on yet something else I’d happened across recently that said sin cannot be in the presence of a holy God.

These things then got me thinking about the pained, desperate words of Jesus when he cried out from the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” As the story goes where I come from, this gripping, dramatic cry reflects the pivotal moment where God had to turn his back as Jesus took on the sin of the world, leaving Jesus to experience separation from God for the first time ever. And why did he experience this separation?

Because sin cannot be in the presence of a holy God.

We hear and repeat this idea frequently within Christian communities. It’s the reason that Adam and Eve were booted from paradise. It’s the reason the priests had to go through painstaking preparations before entering the temple. And it’s ultimately why Jesus was abandoned on the cross.

Because sin cannot be in the presence of a holy God.

As I was recently thinking about all of this, I was reminded of a sermon I once heard where the preacher discussed white blood cells and red blood cells to illustrate how God responds to sin: he annihilates it.

Because sin cannot be in the presence of a holy God.

These ideas are so pervasive within Christianity that most people don’t seem to think twice about them, at least in my experience.

Yet there’s a problem with this kind of theology. It’s a problem that either we don’t feel comfortable discussing or that simply eludes us.

And it’s a problem that can be summed up with one word.

Jesus.

The one who put his fingers in the ears and touched the tongue of a deaf and mute man. The one who touched the eyes of a blind man. The one who reached out and touched a man with leprosy… and who let a sinful woman anoint and kiss his feet… and who took hold of a man with dropsy … and who invited himself into the house of the chief tax collector… and who let one of the disciples rest against his chest during the Last Supper.

Jesus.

The one who didn’t avoid adulterers, pull back from prostitutes, or turn away from tax collectors. The one who didn’t shudder around sin.

Jesus reached out to and engaged and touched others. And he allowed others to reach out to, engage, and touch him. And he did this to help heal people from whatever kind of disease that plagued them, be it physical, emotional, or spiritual – though I would venture to say that Jesus saw it all as spiritual.

He did these things to validate people and show them their inherent worth. In a sense, to say “You are deeply and truly valued in spite of what your religion has taught you.” Or in some cases “…in spite of what their religion has taught you.”

Jesus made it clear that God can most certainly be in the presence of sin. So to hold onto theology that tells us otherwise is problematic, no matter how it’s packaged.

It’s curious that these two opposing ideas have somehow managed to live next to each other in this thing we call Christianity. I guess when we’re used to living in the middle of a story, the obvious may escape us. We’re like the frog in the pot of water that’s slowly getting warmer and warmer. We don’t notice what’s going on. We get acclimated to the environment around us. It feels comfortable and familiar. There’s no sense that something might be wrong.

As I sat through the sermon with the illustration of the red blood cells and the white blood cells, even though I found it deeply troubling, I didn’t consider in that moment how it completely conflicts with the idea of God intimately dwelling among us in the flesh.

Photo credit: Image from page 281 of "The pictorial Bible and commentator: presenting the great truths of God's word in the most simple, pleasing, affectionate, and instructive manner" (1878) (license) — Photo credit: Image from page 281 of “The pictorial Bible and commentator: presenting the great truths of God’s word in the most simple, pleasing, affectionate, and instructive manner” (1878) (license)

So even though we’ve got stories in the Old Testament like a man getting struck dead because he touched the Ark of the Covenant where God was said to reside, we need to stop using them to bolster up the notion that God is somehow untouchable by the general populous and that God can’t be in the presence of sin. Because, in case we’ve forgotten, we’ve also got an incredible story in the New Testament of a bleeding woman who had been suffering for 12 long years and who was healed because she approached Jesus and touched his cloak.

Sin can’t be in the presence of a holy God? On the surface, it may seem like a legitimate conclusion, but it can’t be reconciled with what we see in Jesus. Something else is going on with these stories and we need to take the time to consider it, even though it may fly in the face of what we’ve always heard.

The bleeding woman in the gospels who “touched God” was healed, commended, and sent on her way with the encouraging and compassionate words “Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

In all seriousness, perhaps the “timeless truth” from this gospel story – the one that gets masked from a surface, literal reading – is that the suffering we all need to be freed from is theology that tells us that God is untouchable and that sin can’t be in the presence of a holy God.

The Village

January 31, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

Some time ago, a movie came out that was aptly called The Village, a story about a tight-knit community whose village is surrounded on all sides by a deep, dark, and deadly forest.

Continual stories of the danger that lurks within the surrounding woods ensure that the residents don’t venture beyond the boundaries, into the woods, and ultimately through to the “outside.”

(Insert obligatory spoiler alert here)

Some of the village’s elders know the truth of what’s on the outside. It certainly isn’t all bad – some of it is actually quite good – but they prefer the controlled environment that the village gives them.

Because of what the elders deem as bad and dangerous on the outside, they propagate their carefully constructed stories, certain that it’s for the safety and betterment of the residents.

href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/127581242@N02/15773266562/"target="_blank">tommyg_83 cc — photo credit: tommyg_83 cc

Now the village isn’t a bad place. It provides the people with a great deal of safety, security, and community.

Most of the people who live there are content and don’t think twice about their lives. There’s no reason to consider that the woods aren’t truly filled with dangers, let alone consider the possibility that beyond the forest lies something amazing and beautiful and greater than what they can possibly conceive.

On the contrary, they’ve adapted to a lifestyle of reinforcing the importance of keeping a safe distance from the established boundaries.

But some of them aren’t content. Some yearn to explore, certain that there’s something more. Certain that, as great as the village is, it simply can’t represent all that life was meant to be.

Amid the people of the village, such thinking isn’t well-received. It’s threatening. It’s an indicator that someone is potentially wayward or rebellious, but most certainly in grave danger.

It’s all an interesting, almost ironic parallel to how life in Christian circles can be.

Doing life together in Christian community can be a cherished gift, provided we keep a safe distance from the edge of the woods.

Fireside chats and discussions over meals are fine as long as we don’t question the truth of the surrounding forest or speak with intrigue about what lies on the outside.

The doctrines and beliefs and creeds of Christianity – along with occasional lines drawn in the sand – all serve as boundaries that provide us with the security, certainty, and safety that we crave as people.

We can live within these boundaries, certain that we’re experiencing all there is, or at least all that we’re meant to experience. Certain that what we believe as true is not merely something we’re choosing to believe is true for us, but is ultimate truth – complete and accurate and not to be tampered with.

Just like the people in the village.

But what if something deep in our souls tells us there has to be more? Do we have the courage and faith to venture out, or do we hold back because we’re so certain of the boundaries that define and protect our village?

What if our understandings of the village and the surrounding dangers have been misshaped, whether intentionally or not?

What if there’s actually something out there worth leaving the safety of the village for?

And what if the creatures lurking in the dark forest aren’t nearly as dangerous as we’ve been led to believe or don’t truly exist in the ways we’ve thought?

I relate to it all.

To the safety of the village. The security of established boundaries. The fear of the forest.

And the potentially risky question of “Is this really all there is?”

I’m getting very close to publishing my book, Brand New Day: How Questioning the Answers Rocked My World, Reformed My Faith, and Released My Soul.

I invite you to check it out, especially if you can relate to the scenario of the village or the question of whether there’s more.

Objects of Wrath

August 6, 2014 By admin Leave a Comment

I was recently reading a blog post and the author said that if you blog long enough, eventually you’ll be called a heretic. I hadn’t even been blogging for two months before that happened to me. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Honestly, that’s part of the reason I initially resisted starting a blog or writing a book to begin with. I didn’t want to invite controversy into my life or the life of my family. But when you feel strongly called to do something, there comes a point when you have to let go of fear and simply surrender to the path you’re called to be on.

The furor that arose over some of the things I’d written was far more than I expected. Not only that, some of it was directed at things that I found surprising. I knew that expressing my evolving views on an issue as controversial as homosexuality was akin to kicking a hornet’s nest. I fully expected some hides to be chapped over that, so I was seriously taken aback to hear instead that I was subverting and attacking the heart of the gospel message. Wait. What?

In one of my first articles, I talked about how certain elements of the Christian story can be internalized such that they shape us in unhealthy ways. And I mentioned that I’d lost count of the number of times I’ve heard that we’re enemies of God without the blood of Jesus.

This swiftly became a massive problem because, as I was informed, “enemies of God” and “objects of wrath” are crucial themes that lie at the heart of the gospel message. And thus I was subverting the gospel.

Wow. I’m still perplexed by that. I thought love was at the heart of the gospel message.

To equate growing weary of hearing that I’m an enemy of God without the blood of Jesus with subverting and attacking the gospel message doesn’t compute with me. Especially considering that, in the gospel accounts, Jesus didn’t go around telling people that they were enemies of God. Or objects of wrath, for that matter.

In fact, didn’t Jesus look upon those who were discarded by society and show them that they had value?

Didn’t he say something about how the second most important thing is to love others?

Didn’t he look on people with compassion and talk about them being harassed and helpless, not objects of wrath?

In the parable of the prodigal son, do we get the sense that the dad had to hold back his wrath against the son?

The intense imagery associated with a term like “objects of wrath” simply doesn’t seem to have been crucial to what Jesus was trying to convey. This leads me to think that plenty of his first followers lived their lives without ever entertaining the notion that they were objects of wrath, let alone embracing it as crucial to their understanding of the Jesus message.

Speaking of the Jesus message, I was recently hanging out with some friends and we were reading and discussing some prayers from the Didache, an early church handbook, of sorts. Likely dating from the late first century, it contains various teachings on ethics and provides details on practices such as baptism and communion. Some people have dated the Didache as early as the mid first century, which would make it earlier than at least some of the gospel accounts. But even if it dates to the late first century, that still puts it within the same time frame that the later gospels were written. So it gives us a peek into practices and beliefs of some of the earliest Jesus communities.

I’ve often heard that the first-century church is the model for what God always intended. Well, minus the part about sleeping with in-laws, getting drunk at communion, suing each other, and the like. But seriously, what better way to get a glimpse into the first-century church than looking at a first-century church manual that specifically outlines the church’s practices? One that likely pre-dates the book of Acts, by the way.

In the Didache’s section on the Eucharist (more commonly known as the Lord’s Supper or communion in evangelical America), the prayers that are recited in conjunction with the bread and the cup are quite surprising.

“We thank thee, our Father, for the holy vine of David thy Son, which you have made known to us through Jesus thy Son… We thank thee, our Father, for the life and knowledge which thou hast made known unto us through Jesus thy Son… We thank thee, holy Father, for thy holy name, which thou hast caused to dwell in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and immortality which thou hast made known unto us through Jesus thy Son…”

As soon as we were done reading these prayers, everyone was quick to make some very interesting points.

“There’s no talk of sin or forgiveness.”

“It says that Jesus revealed life and knowledge.”

“The focus is on what his life stood for, not what his death stood for.”

“There’s no talk of his death at all.”

It was perplexing. How can this have anything to do with a tradition as sacred and central as the Eucharist?

It almost didn’t compute. After all, we exist within a Christian tradition that tends to highlight very different things when it comes to the bread and the cup. Things like Jesus taking our punishment upon himself, Jesus dying in place of us, our responsibility for his death, and God’s inability to be in the presence of sin. Things ingrained so deeply that labeling ourselves as “objects of wrath” has become a key component to what we’re calling good news.

So what do we do with a crystal-clear indicator that “do this in remembrance of me” meant something very different to some of the earliest communities of Jesus followers? Followers whose focus was on the life that Jesus lived and the knowledge he made known. Followers who didn’t equate the bread and cup with suffering, death, and sin.

Talk about a paradigm shift. And potentially a very, very uncomfortable one, because it challenges our traditional understanding of Jesus.

Suddenly we’re faced with the question of whether our faith is big enough to handle something like this, as well as the possibility that an understanding so crucial to our faith tradition isn’t quite what we’ve always thought.

Can we even sit with and consider these possibilities, rather than responding defensively and with staunch certainty and rigidity?

It may be uncomfortable, for sure. And in order to deflect the discomfort, it can be very easy to point to a given scripture with certainty in order to reinforce an established belief or point of view. But even though we’re often quick to do that, we should consider that the early followers of Jesus simply didn’t have that ability.

Atonement theology is a massive topic, one that I never even knew existed. Theology? What’s to theologize about? Jesus died because of me, plain and simple.

Well, it doesn’t take an extensive commentary on the Didache to realize that it’s actually not plain and simple. The conversation on atonement extends far beyond the prayers found in this early church handbook, but maybe meditating on or otherwise reflecting on these prayers will allow us to consider that the Christian story hasn’t gone uninfluenced from the time of its origins.

Maybe we can open our minds and hearts to the possibility that there has been far more development over the course of the last 2000 years than we’d ever imagine.

And maybe we can consider that not everything is as black and white as we’ve thought.