Doubt as Sacrament.

It’s not very “Christian” to doubt. Or is it?

If by means of the incarnation we are made one with the Son of God–who himself was crucified, buried, and raised–we can only conclude that we are called, as the apostle Paul insists, to participate not only in the resurrection of Jesus, but also in his crucifixion. And if we are to called to participate in — to embody again for the world — the crisis of the crucifixion, we must not, then, fail to make manifest in ourselves the utter forsakenness of Jesus upon that cross.

Indeed, I’m writing to suggest the possibility that we have neglected to fully participate in the cross of Christ when we fail to consider what his forsakenness might look like wearing our flesh, blood, and bone.

As Christians, we are tempted to mask the kind of chaos, crisis, or doubt that sometimes sends our personal theologies into complete disarray. From time to time, we feel the ‘Eloi! Eloi! Lama sabachthani?’ pressing its shape down upon our lives. But it is embarrassing. And when we let the crucified Jesus loose to borrow our tongues to cry the same cry with our own mouths, we are met with all too many well-meaning Christians’ quick and ready reassurances that God is in control, that He is good, that He is sovereign, and that we need not worry or doubt or fear.

And so either out of our deep love for those in close proximity to our lives or out of fearing the potential effects of our doubting upon their lives, we do everything we can to submerge it. We are forced to doubt alone.

Because it’s not very “Christian” to doubt.

And yet there, upon the cross, who do we find but the divine atheist himself: Jesus Christ.

Author Peter Rollins explains: “What we witness here is a form of atheism: not intellectual–Christ directly addresses God as he dies–but a felt loss of God. In the Gospels according to Matthew and Mark we read of Christ crying out in agony, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ This is a profoundly personal, painful, and existential atheism.”

It is really only when we, too, lose God – the God of all our overarching mythologies, the God that faithfully soothes and serves our emotional serenity with endless reassurances, the God of psychological safety nets and rationalization for the chaos of our world – that we may enter into Christ’s cry of dereliction most truly and wholly. I wonder if we are not called to run from our doubt, but to enter into it fully. I do not mean we ought to recklessly throw ourselves into doubt any more than I would contend that we throw ourselves into belief with the same recklessness. I only mean to suggest that it is only when we lose this God (who is, in the end, not really God at all) that we may participate in doubt as sacrament.

Maybe – just maybe – it is very Christian to doubt.

Major/Minor

I’ve lost track of time. And in that time I’ve felt six months’ wages on my heart. And while I’ve been finding new ways of loving Jesus — ways I needed and ways I’m learning — there is part of this heart that’s since left.

I write that hurting.

There’s a vacancy. A void. An open-ness so wrong and painful.

As I write, Thrice’s album Major/Minor fills my ears. It’s the album that’s brought me here tonight. I’ve recently been traveling, and in more ways than one. Maybe wandering is a better word. The past six days I’ve driven from New Jersey to California across plains and over mountains, through snow and sun, in singing and in silence. And after driving three thousand miles I’m still not far from where I started.

I am the other prodigal, more crafty than his brother. For all my traveling, I am home in the worst way. I hope you understand. See, I wander without moving: the better son, the older brother. I’ve learned to leave without getting lost. I’ve found the grave and how to flirt with her, how to land a kiss and not die. But she’s had her wages.

Death is my mistress. And she’s wearing off on me.

I remember rare moments when my heart’s deepest dissatisfaction was met, however fragile its meeting, somewhere between the lines of that beautiful book, like some secret breathed beneath the page, hiding behind the words. I recall its haunting. I can feel my risen pulse on those nights the lines would rob my eyes of sleep and send waves of tears in exchange.

But I am someone else tonight. I am somewhere else. Bring me home, just the way you did at first, the way you’ve done before and again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QFD-PhJRsk  //  ”Words In The Water” by Thrice, Major/Minor.

I am praying this song, and am once more reminded of home, of you, of life. I’ve wandered, cheated, and died. Speak light into my darkness. Breathe life into this dust. I am dry and disappointed, lonely and derailed. I feel wounded and deceived by you, tricked into a hope you don’t mean to fill. I am afraid to stay with you, and only more to leave for good. But your quietness with me is so unsettling. You’ve become so hard to find, and I’ve become too weary to look. I’m hurt by you and your erratic, no-show tendencies. I hate your games. But I know you. You are horrible and beautiful. You wake the dead and heal the dying. I am both.

 

Choked Up.

Several people gathered together Saturday morning around some eggs, bagels, and the call we feel upon our lives to participate in the missio Dei. Our church is at the threshold of a spectacular journey following Jesus as communities of redeemed people intentional about redeeming the world around them. The ‘leaders’ of these emerging communities shared coffee, vision, and stories about what God is doing in, through, and around them. And we watched a short video about gospel-oriented, Jesus-centered communities sent to reach a world desperate to drink the kingdom to the dregs.

I am floored, over and again, by the voices of those who can hardly push past tears the deep, unsettling compassion they feel for a city they call their own, for people they live into and toward and for and among. They pour their lives out as a small huddle of broken people in order to see what beautiful thing Jesus might make of them. These are radically inclusive, embracing, accepting communities head over heels with Jesus and the world he so deeply loves, sincere about reshaping their lives around the missio Dei and not the other way around. Here, now, his kingdom is breaking in. Here, now, his life is fleshed by his people. Here, now, broken people are being healed in love.

It was refreshing to see someone weep over their city.

[ SOMA Communities // Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/22754743 ]

I, Peter.

Maybe it’s because of my seemingly perpetual status of singleness, but I have a love – a special appreciation, perhaps – for hearing people in love talk about their partner when they aren’t around. Sometimes it’s annoying, true. But mostly I love it, especially when I can feel it’s genuine. I’m sure you’ve experienced something like that before.

I’m not talking about the kind of heady, overly-blissful delusions many young dating couples find themselves lost in. I’m talking about marriages 25 years deep, rich with all the scars of a war veteran. I mean marriages just barely hitting the 3-year mark, thick with all the tension and difficulty of finances, insecurities, and in-laws. My sister and her husband are one such couple.

Hearing my sister talk about her husband, one might be tempted to think she’s being insincere or maybe even darkly sarcastic. But her authenticity is palpable, and hers are no empty words. She says “I love you” as one who’s been wounded and healed. And given the chance, she would talk about him – his good, bad, and ugly – with more love than you thought possible.

I love hearing people who love people.

People who love people talk about them. And it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re romantic.

Like the old man whose granddaughter, he would swear, has gifted the world in grace merely by her presence here. Or the little boy who knows that his dad, of all dads, can hit a baseball clear into outer space. Or the admiring daughter whose single mom, strong and selfless, works 80-hour weeks just to make the bills this month. Give any of them an opportunity to talk about the people that matter most to them, and it’s likely to inspire a bit of healthy jealousy in us. They love these people.

I find it hard to know that many Christians don’t like to talk about Jesus much. In some situations, if they manage to avoid talking about him and I was not so successful, I am made to feel sorry for bringing him up. Often, I’m on the other end, more than a little embarrassed to mention him. This week alone, I felt my own embarrassment of him. Twice. And it’s only Tuesday.

Pulling into the parking lot of Blockbuster, I was listening to The Almost’s “Dirty And Left Out” – specifically the part where Aaron Gillespie sings out, “Jesus, Jesus / There’s something about your name / Master, Savior / Jesus!” As I pulled in, I noticed someone I went to high school with but hadn’t seen in some time, suddenly felt self-conscious, and turned the music off. On another occasion, I sat in a Starbucks and was turning through the pages of the newest issue of RELEVANT Magazine. One page contained an ad for a new book that read in large text, “Jesus was weird.” I was careful not to linger on the page longer than I had to; someone might see.

I can’t help but think of Peter, whose self-proclaimed love for Jesus dissolved into shame around a fire. And as much as I’d like to make excuses for Peter (mostly because I’d be making excuses for myself), I wonder at Peter’s love for Jesus. Peter’s shame and Peter’s love were not unrelated. At least Jesus didn’t seem to think so. Pulling Peter aside in John 21, Jesus asks him three times, careful to parallel Peter’s denial: “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?”

“Peter was grieved, because he asked him a third time.” (21:17)

From moment to moment I confess I am more like Peter than Jesus and mostly just assume my love for him. But in my most honest moments, I find him asking me the same: “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?” And I grieve.

You, come flesh.

I am ever confused and perplexed and bewildered as I wonder all the more about Your incarnation, Your taking on our flesh — You: infinite, always, ever — embodied in such humiliation.

I marvel at why, because I know myself.

You’ve made yourself so low, so much like me, and You were offered no mercy at our hands though for mercy on us You came. Even daily, I make efforts to set You on Your cross and bury You beneath the busyness, beneath the meetings and music and more.

You, who wove us together in Your love as we developed within our mothers, You who write our story in Your love as we flash a finger toward you in indignation, You who could not be more inexplicably faithful: I am appalled at Your life, because I am appalled at mine. You stand in such painfully sharp contrast to me, and yet with such remarkable solidarity. I am grateful, if only sometimes, if only with irregular authenticity, that Your entering into our story to redeem it is not merely past but here, present, now, and that Your persistence overwhelms my best resistance.

And so I confess my aggressive subversion, my covert coup for Your throne, and my readiness to abandon Your mission when it does not fit my agenda, when it challenges my hierarchy of values, when it asks too much. I confess I more often put flesh to Peter’s denial, to Judas’ betrayal, to the Pharisees’ self-righteousness than I put flesh on Your life in mine. And so I pray for Your continued patience, persistence, and power, that Your conquering me would serve to be witness to Your reign and advancing kingdom. Help me to put on Your flesh with more  risk, creativity, and love, that You would be known and I would be forgotten. Make Your marks of death and resurrection on my life, and redeem Your world by Your life through mine.

YOU are terribly faithful.

Sometimes I cry when I read out loud stories that I can read silently tearless, like Lewis’ A Grief Observed. I find myself growing increasingly pastoral, more frequently and intensely moved to a painful ache for others I can’t explain. I gaze into the eyes of a hurting person, and it starts in my chest and I feel my eyes and nose sting with their pain, and it becomes hard to swallow, and I can’t stop blinking. I feel like the Grinch, whose heart is growing more rapidly than he really knows what to do with. It happens as I listen to a friend’s story of family abuse, or sing a song about the beauty of God’s final healing of his world, or watch the strength of compassion as it chokes the voice of Francis Chan when he talks about hell as if he wakes in the dark of the night sweating from the heat.

God, I just want you to know. . . I see what you’re doing to me. You are terribly faithful in your reshaping, remaking work in me and around me and through me and for me and, oftentimes, despite my shortsighted and deep-seated resistance. I want you to know I notice, and sometimes I’m grateful. Be your best, inexorably gracious self toward me.

My Schizophrenic Faith.

In a previous article, I asked lots of questions regarding faith, which I hope was a beneficial glance at piece of Christianity we know surprisingly little about. And as helpful as questions can be, I hope to offer some answers, even if they might immediately seem strange. My hope is that we would experience the freedom of the gospel–the true gospel–which declares with joy that Jesus is all and everything for us. I write in hopes that we might see that the gospel is better news than we say it is. If you haven’t read the article, you may find it here.

In hopes that I’m not alone, I confess that it is not infrequently that I’ve seriously questioned why I became a follower of Jesus, or that I did at all. I’ve wandered through very dark nights of doubt, uncertain that my motives were actually pure when I “accepted Christ” for the first time. Or the next time. Or the next time. (That’s so revealing about us: we, who proclaim with pride that if we place our faith in Christ we are saved once and for all, are nervously “accepting Christ” again and again and again.) And this seems to be the common experience of so many Christians. If we’re honest, we know and admit, with nausea, that it is because in dark rooms of our psyche we’ve sought to suppress the haunting questions: how true was my faith, really? am I actually believing in Jesus for selfless reasons, or am I deceptively self-seeking? how can I know that my trusting and believing and hoping really worked, was really enough, was really true and pure and right?

If you’re anything like me, you know that anxiety-ridden place, and it scares you to think how tattered and riddled with holes your faith may truly be. Let me cut to the chase: your faith, and mine, is unstable, uncertain, and unreliable, and I would not stake the weight of eternity on the integrity of my schizophrenic faith. It is sandy at its foundations and it is selfish in its motives.  Sure, a mustard seed will move a mountain. But let me ask you: how much of your eternity are you willing to stake on that seed of yours?

How much? Are you really that confident in your own faith?

Stop. Think about that.

The sooner we embrace the failure of our personal faith, we may begin to turn and see that the gospel is wholly and truly beautiful, that it is good news, that it is freedom for the slave: Jesus has believed for you.

Let this sink in.

You’ve let go of the idea that you can somehow accomplish or earn your salvation by works. But understanding that faith is not merely something you have but something  you do–believe, trust, hope–have you been released from the notion that salvation is not upon your faith, but his?

Jesus has done it all. 

Jesus has done it all.

Jesus has done it all.

This is the gospel. Breathe. Jesus has done it all.

God loves you so utterly and completely that he has given himself for you in Jesus Christ his beloved Son, and has thereby pledged his very being as God for your salvation. . . Jesus Christ died for you precisely because you are sinful and utterly unworthy of him, and has thereby already made you his own before and apart from your ever believing in him.

The real believer is Christ and we live by and out of the human faith of Christ. . . Our faith is the knowledge, given to us in the Spirit, that he has accomplished our salvation in his person and work and that we are saved purely by his unconditional grace.

To repent and believe in Jesus Christ and commit myself to him on that basis means that I do not need to look over my shoulder all the time to see whether I have really given myself personally to him, whether I really believe and trust him, whether my faith is at all adequate, for in faith it is not upon my faith, my believing or my personal commitment that I rely, but solely upon what Jesus Christ has done for me, in my place and on my behalf, and what he is and always will be as he stands in for me before the face of the Father. That means that I am completely liberated from all ulterior motives in believing or following Jesus Christ, for on the ground of his vicarious human response for me, I am free for spontaneous joyful response and worship and service as I could not otherwise be.

- T. F. Torrance (in Incarnation and Mediation)