What is the church? Known by its limping.

What is the church?  And what can we liken it to in Genesis 32?

"And Jacob remained alone, and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the dawn. And when he saw that he could not prevail against him, he struck his hip socket, so that Jacob’s hip socket was sprained as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” But he answered, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Then he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” And he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked and said, “Please tell me your name.” And he said, “Why do you ask this—for my name?” And he blessed him there. Then Jacob called the name of the place Peniel which means “I have seen God face to face and my life was spared.” Then the sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, and he was limping because of his hip."

Despite the appearance of a few generations of enlightened christians, the church is not white, clean and neat.  It is not shiny, happy people who have got it all together.  Got it all figured out.  It is not "good" people.  

It is people who wrestle with God.  It is people whom God has interrupted, disciplined, blessed and disputed with and instead of walking away, instead of avoiding, instead of running from or ignoring, these chosen people have struggled to understand and have had the faith not to give up.  They are people who have been led to a hard place, a wilderness place, a place of darkness and death and dying and asked the question, "Why God?  Why?"  And not always gotten satisfactory answers.  Leastways, not right away, if at all.  And God not only allows this, He most often welcomes it.  

"Cease to do evil! Learn to do good!
    Seek justice! Rescue the oppressed!
    Defend the orphan! Plead for the widow!
“Come now, and let us argue,” says Yahweh.
    “Even though your sins are like scarlet, they will be white like snow;
    even though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.
If you are willing and you are obedient,
    you shall eat the good of the land.
But if you refuse and you rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword." Isaiah 1

How can God be so tolerant?  How can he be so patient?  Because the church is His children whom He dearly loves.  The church are those children who want to know why, Daddy, why?

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.
And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love."
 

Why we're all not smoking craters by now.

i heard a man say again today that there are many paths to God. He believed that maybe in four or five generations that Man was going to get it right. We were all working toward harmony apparently. Aside from this being completely antithetical to the Bible... it's Pollyannish Denial on a Psychotic scale. This guy cannot be watching the same news i am.

All day long, the more i thought about what he said, the angrier i got. i let it slide at the time because i had already gone toe to toe with this guy a couple of weeks ago and i had already gone head to head with another member of the group this morning and i'm trying to only pick on one heresy a day. Besides that, we were in a Bible Study with almost twenty guys, i wanted to see what, if anything, someone else might say in response.

Here at home though and all day at work, the man's words and my anger have been bouncing around...bouncing around, sparring, jabbing, testing defenses and poking each other in tentative ways. It was just a feeling at first but the punches got harder and sharper, faster and more wicked until just a few minutes ago when the ground beneath my anger suddenly crystalized into perfect, fiery, resonating clarity...

Jesus. Was. God!

That statement should echo in your head with white, hot thunder!

He was not a nice teacher, a guru, a life coach, an energy force, a flying spaghetti monster or your homey. He was GOD, YHWH! The Creator of Everything! Not the Ultimate Power in the Universe! He made the Universe! On a whim!! To say that God came, as a peasant; a pimply, pathetic, Jewish peasant; did what we could never do and did it perfectly and in perfect humility, died FOR US and then said, "Finished. No one has to do anything more now to be right with God. Just believe i did this." To say all that might be true but it's just one way of many for us to achieve Heaven or Nirvana or whatever you want to call it, is to walk right up to YHWH and open hand slap him in the face! You have dissed God! You mock his deed. You mock his love. You mock his compassion. You mock his mercy. You mock his grace. You mock GOD! How dare you!!

The more clear this thought became to me the angrier i got! The more i envisioned people, casting judgment on GOD for being so narrow minded as to say He is the only Way, (How intolerant. How exclusive. How dare he! How dare He? He's GOD!! That's how dare He!) the more furious i became. The more furious i became, the more i thought about how my anger must have paled next to the angels' and the Father Himself as Jews and Gentiles alike did just that to Jesus moments before the cross finished God's most amazingly loving, transforming, totally selfless work. The more i thought about this Jesus stopping all of Heaven from wreaking perfect justice on the earth at one insult, one more spit in the face after another, after another, after another, the more i fell in love with this Jesus! He didn't retaliate. He didn't even speak. He just took it. God let's us insult Him. God let's us bitchslap him! All in the hope that someday, somehow, we may realize what we've been doing and beg his forgiveness. How can you not love this God?? How can we not warn them??

Remember to use your indoor voice.

i have screamed at the sky. i have read Ecclesiastes and said, "yep, that's truth." Meaningless, life is meaningless, all chasing after the wind. i have lived almost forty years now and found nothing worth the effort it took to get here. No reward in this life worth the ride. i watch the trail of ants coming out of the walls of the house i built and across the counter of the shiny new kitchen and i see a world that is infested with entropy, decay, filth and i hear the laughing of an evil spirit mocking my attempts to recreate a private Eden. There is no rest or refuge on the earth. i have spent four hours working on a drawing for the Rabbitrails only to have someone tell me it isn't work and not so much as imply that it is a waste of time as make it a declaration of fact. And so i get lost in these dark places where i can't see what the point and movement of history is for. You're born, work at something someone else want's you to do for forty-to sixty years and then if you're lucky, you retire before your back, knees and/or health gives out and you putter around your yard looking for shrews but what you're really doing is hiding from one. This is life in America. Finally having your first child and buying your first house in your mid-thirties and then finding out you have cancer. It's watching your children make the same mistakes you did. Watching your parents walk away from each other and you. It's realizing that optimism is a belief that can only be held by the psychotically insane or the so-far astoundingly lucky. It's never being good enough, smart enough, wealthy or healthy enough. It's working your whole life and having the river or the ocean or a fire or a mean neighbor or a total, mind raping, freak accident take it all away in seconds. There are no guarantees. None. Yes, i have screamed at the sky. Why? What's it all for?

"If you don't love your story then you don't love the author of your story." That was a quote by Dan Allender that i heard one morning on a podcast that i was listening too in my search for the answers to those questions. i dunno if you've screamed at the sky but i can assure you that it rarely gives immediate, discernible answers. And from what i've read, you don't actually want it to. So i went looking the only place available to a guy like me: i Tunes.

Well, sort of. Lemme explain. What i went to was the Word of God. But as the Ethiopian eunuch told Phil, "how can i understand this unless someone explains it to me?" See, wanna guy to be humble enough to ask for directions? Geld him. i don't want anyone to eunuchize me so i try to be humble now. So, taking his example, i also go looking for learned folk who have not only read it but spent considerable time praying and studying it and arguing over what it all means with other folk who've spent considerable time praying and studying it. And then got recorded telling others what they've learned or think they've learned. Some of those recordings are on iTunes. One of these guys is Dan Allender and he's worth a listen or two. For the very reason that he drops bricks like "If you don't love your story then you don't love the author of your story," on you when your spackling a ceiling with your headphones on.

i tell you right now, i had to stop. Spackle knife in hand and ask God to forgive me for hating Him for much of my life. All those curses i had been launching at the air around me, they didn't hit the guy responsible for my curse, the guy laughing at me as i cursed my maker, my author, the lover of my soul. They hit the guy holding my ungrateful fist through it all. Trying to explain it to me. Trying to show me the answers to Why and What for?

i still don't know why or what for? i still ask. But i try to remember that i'm asking the guy in the chair next to me who went to the cross for me and while hanging there asked the sky, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" He died for my stupidity, rose and is sitting in heaven somewhere above the sky, i figure that gives him some interesting and worthwhile perspectives on it all.