Does God Care?

One of the most difficult things for any human being to wrestle with is the reality of human suffering. Many have challenged Christianity with the argument that, if there is suffering and evil in the world, then God is either good but powerless or powerful and not good, but certainly not good and powerful. However, the truth is that not believing in Christianity makes dealing with suffering even more difficult. Without a God, there is no hope that evil will one day be corrected or that suffering will one day disappear. Violence and suffering are simply a normal part of the world, not an alien intrusion that will one day be wiped out forever.

Christianity alone says that God became vulnerable enough to go through suffering, pain and even death for His people.  At the center of heart of God is a cross.   And on the cross Jesus didn’t just experience physical torment; he was being cast out of the presence of God.

“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:54)

On the cross Jesus became as alone as anyone could possible be so that you and I can be as loved as we can possible be.

Go to the cross and ask, “God why are you allowing evil and suffering?”  You will not find the answer to all of your questions, but you do find the answer to one question: “God, do you care?”  Yes!

In the last chapter of the last book of the Bible we learn that a New Heaven comes down and a New Earth is established.  That means that this material world is going to be restored, healed, and put to rights.  All that is marred and scared on this spinning ball of mud will be renewed as it was meant to be.  All of the pain and suffered by countless millions of innocent souls at the hand of a groaning earth or from the hands of an oppressive regime will be “swallowed up in victory.” (1 Corinthians 15:54)

Just after the climax of Lord of the Rings trilogy Samwise Gamgee discovers that his friend Gandalf was not dead (as he thought) but alive.  He cries, “I thought you were dead!  But then I thought I was dead myself!  Is everything sad going to come untrue?”

The answer of Christianity to that question is—YES.  Everything sad is going to come untrue and it will somehow be greater for having once been broken or lost.

What could draw Jesus away from heaven and towards the earth and ultimately the cross?  What could possibly He be looking for that He didn’t already have in Heaven?

After the suffering of his soul,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
… my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities. Isaiah 53:11

The only thing He didn’t have in heaven was you. He came to earth and suffered death on the cross to make it possible for you to be with the Father.  He loves you that much.

When you grasp and fully embrace the truth that you were the reason Jesus went to the cross that will compel you to make Him your living hope right now.

A few years ago a woman said to me, “Pastor, I think I could make it through this suffering if I knew anyone cared.”  I had the privilege to tell her someone did.  His name is Jesus.

Fierce Festivus

Many of my family and friends believe that I am the personification of a certain Dickens character.  I have wondered why I have taken a contrarian attitude towards this festivus time of year.  Perhaps it is because the older I get the less I am impressed with sentimentalism.  When we view virtually all the peripheral trappings associated with this holiday with the emotion of teenage girl when she sees a kitten or a puppy as somehow the purpose of the celebration it bothers me.  “Bah! Humbug!”

It could be that I am just a grumpy old man.  I remind my wife of a Burl Ives character from yesteryear. Not the one singing Frosty the Snowman, but Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  The Burl Ives character is big and mean and gruff.  Big Daddy didn’t like his wife, his grandchildren, or blue sky and apple pie.  I grant that I am less patient with the pebbles in my shoes the older I get.  But what puzzles me is that the smaller pebbles, like say loud children in Barnes’ and Noble, irritates me more than people who view that women should NOT be allowed to be president or preach the Gospel.  What used to get my knickers in a bunch doesn’t even give me pause these days.  And what used to be minor emotional ruffles bothers the bajebes out of me.   “Bah! Humbug!”

Maybe I am chaffing against shallowness.  It is such a slippery slope to start viewing Christmas as a time of giving and receiving gifts.  Because when that is all it is about, when we stress and worry over just the perfect gift for our family and friends then it is easy to slide into the consumer commercialism that our culture has deified.  What does Jingle Bells and Snowmen have to do with Christmas?  I know, I know, I know…what is wrong with those harmless ditty’s?  Nothing. Everything.

Perhaps I am put off by all the crowds and traffic clogging up my normal patterns of existence.  I can’t go to my hang out spots to write and study without a fight of UFC proportions. I go to a coffee shop to study and have to hear Dave Mathews Band sing some weird version of a Christmas song.  I even heard Bob Seger singing Little Drummer Boy the other day.  I almost threw up!  Bob “Old Time Rock and Roll” Seger, really?  Come on, man!  Sell out.  “Bah! Humbug!”

If we are not careful and quite intentional, we will be seduced and lured away from what the incarnation is all about.  God invaded our reality.  Why did Jesus leave the safe confines of the Trinity?  Why put Himself in such a vulnerable position of being nursed by a teenage girl?  What could possible motivate the tri-personal God of the universe ever agree to such a plan?

Was God so lonely and needy that He went “slumming” on earth seeking some groupie types to sit around and sing His praises?  I doubt that.  Jesus was enjoying the most perfect relationship the universe has ever known.  Infinite love, infinite grace, infinite glory, infinite holiness, infinite joy…all present, all the time in the Triune God.  If He didn’t need us why did he come?

To teach us to dance.  A dance is two persons interacting — one leads and the other follows, moving step by step according to the rhythm of the music. Dancing is an act of joy, and an enjoyment of mutual knowing and trusting.

The Apostle Paul said it well, “In him we live and move and have our being.” What is that but a dance with the ultimate reality—God.

I am proposing that one of the reasons I am a curmudgeon at this time of year is that somewhere in my soul I know that the world is missing the opportunity of a life time.  To dance with the God of the universe.  But Santa is safer than Jesus and Jingle Bells is less threatening to sing than The Old Rugged Cross.

Rudolf makes us smile, but Jesus makes us choose.

Maybe I want to stand up and shout to the Christmas crowd at the mall: JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON!  Maybe I am deeply disturbed by multitudes missing Jesus for the jingles.  Or…

Maybe I am dancing with the wrong god.

P.S.  I do not need a hug.

Which Prince?

For several summers when I was in my teenage years, I worked on a large cattle ranch in northern New Mexico with my Grandfather.  It seemed like there were only two speeds to working with my Grandfather: all out, “elbows and *butt holes” or complete down time.  It was during those idle times when all the wood was chopped, water buckets were full, dishes were washed, horses were shod, and the saddle house was mucked out that I would wander off into the surrounding woods to think and dream of life that was and life that might be.

Sometimes I would be so lonely that I needed to be by myself.   One day I found a meadow not too far from the cow camp.  I went there to think and when I got tired of that I smoked.  I tried one of granddads worn down pipes and some of his Prince-Albert-in-a-can.  That wasn’t a good idea.  It made me sick.

As long as I had known granddad, he had smoked a pipe.  Every time he pulled air through the red glow of that cheap tobacco it reminded me of two lovers embracing.  There was much about smoking one of his old pipes that was disgusting.  Some of it had to do with the Prince-Albert-in-a-can that burned hot and felt heavy in my lungs.

But the other unpleasant aspect of it was that granddad never brushed his teeth—ever.  Not once in his life.  There is no record of him ever having gone to a dentist.  Granddad’s teeth looked like wet dirt when he smiled.  They were worn down to the gums on both sides of his mouth from years of clamping tight on that pipe.  From time to time he would carry it in the front of his mouth, but that looked silly and he couldn’t cuss from that position.  The thought of putting a chomped and scared pipe stem that had once been in a brown mouth into mine made me shutter.

But I found a way to smoke.  I smoked tree bark.  The inner bark of a dead Aspen tree was prime smoking material.  As a tree decays chunks of the bark would break loose from the trunk and hang suspended by blond strands of fiber.  The yellowish brown strands that clung to the trunk were the best.

I would tear off a handful and rub it between my hands to soften and clean it.  Then I would roll it up into a piece of brown grocery sack, about the size of a small cigar.  And there I did my best imitation of Clint Eastwood in a cheap western, smoking a stub of a cigar.  My homemade version burned quickly and the flame on the end would get pretty big, but it didn’t make me dizzy like that Prince-Albert-in-a-can.

I am not sure why sucking a piece of grocery sack filled with tree bark felt good.  Some of it was that I felt big when I smoked: Older…adult.  Some of it was that I felt a deep comfort every time I breathed that warm smoke into my lungs; it felt good having something outside me going deep inside.

The good thing about smoking tree bark in a meadow by yourself is that you never get sick.  You just look big and you feel comfort go inside.  I remember wishing I could feel the comfort outside of the meadow.  But wouldn’t people laugh at a boy smoking tree bark with singed eyebrows no matter how good it made him feel?

Smart people say that it is one of the signs of maturity when a child begins to learn to comfort itself without dependency on an adult.  It doesn’t matter how a child comforts itself, but that he learns to do for himself what only others used to do.  But what if the child learns to comfort himself with something harmful?  Like say pornography, alcohol, religion, work, tobacco, image management or video games?

Seems to me how a person learns to access those deep places in a young and impressionable soul are vital to the entire trajectory of his life.  If he chooses the wrong mode of comfort, it might have dire consequences.  How vital it is for a healthy adult to be a guide for this discovery.

I watch my adult sons these days and see that they have found ways to touch those deep places in their souls.  Some of their strategies are healthy and but some are saccharine substitutes.  I wish I had been a better guide.  I pray them better guides.

“…so I will comfort you…” Isaiah 66:13

I have learned that a serious conversation with the Prince of Peace is better than smoking a Piggly Wiggly cigar.

 

*This is not the word my grandfather would use.  But I am trying to keep this PG.

A Pedigogical Waterfall

I get this desire from time to time to go out into the wilderness alone.  A year ago this month I solo climbed a fourteen thousand foot peak in Colorado.  A month ago I traveled to an alpine lake on the eastern side of the Cascades and spent three nights.  Then last week I felt the call again.  I call it the ‘call of the wild.’  I know Jack London coined the term first, but what did he know?  He lived in San Francisco.

I had planned to spend Thursday night and Friday night sleeping on the ground at Lake Serene on the western side of the Cascades here in Washington.  I packed all the necessary gear for a wet trip.  (This is not my first time to the rodeo.)

As I started up the trail last Thursday morning, it was foggy with a hint of mist falling.  But the trail was clear, my legs felt strong, my lungs felt full and I mentally went over my gear check-list before I got too far from the trailhead.  I am confident.

The autumn leaves were spectacular.  As I walked through the dark timber and broke into a meadow of Alders, their leaves shone so brightly I squinted at their brilliance as if they were transmitting liquid golden light.  Some of the leaves were small and others were the size of Thanksgiving serving platters.  Some of the large three-pronged leaves lay on the trail and had already turned brown with decay and looked like the foot imprint of some prehistoric reptile.

From time to time a leaf would release its grip from a branch above and flit this way and that, swinging back and forth in the air—hypnotic, looking for a place to land and decay and thus return to the earth’s compost to nourish its progeny.   I remember noticing and watching them fall and thinking that the only time these leaves are looked at individually is if they fall and dance and swing in the air as someone passes by on this trail.   I empathized for the leaf…wanted to tell it, “I see you.”

After a mile on the trail I passed underneath the Bridal Veil Falls.  The splashing water slapping the rocks stirred up even more mist that drifted away from the pool, clinging onto the surface of my fleece to make a thousand silver beads.  I stepped across the river one stone at a time, never touching the water that flowed out the pool to rush down the mountain.  Up the trail I trekked.

The next hour took me higher and higher up the trail towards the lake.  Wooden staircases in the trail made it feel as if I were climbing to the top seat of some forested stadium.  Thought, this feels like I am climbing the stairway to heaven.

Just before the lake, the canopy opens up and the slope is covered with tall grasses, brush and willows. Then the lake, emerald in color cupped at the base of Mount Index is right before me.  A sign near the lake said “No camping within a quarter of a mile of the lake.”

I sat at the lake, glass still.  Counted four waterfalls falling  from the north slope of the mountain to feed the lake.

Down through the ferns and off the trail, I made camp down the steep grade beside the tumbling water of the outlet.  I found the only flat place about the size of my dinning room table, and pitched my tent there.  The tumbling water just twenty yards away made for a loud but secluded place to eat and sleep.

It started raining about noon.  I decided to get my study material and climb into my tent and read while it rained.   It rained until noon the next day.

The falls next to my camp were getting louder, like an oncoming train.  Not fast, but steady.  I decided to pack up and climb up the four hundred yards to the lake and then start down the trail and out of the mountains.  When I got to the lake, I counted 25 waterfalls feeding the swollen lake.  The trail was full-fledged stream most of the way down.

The lower falls were angry now.   The roar was deafening.  I had no idea that falling water could create its own wind.  Standing at the foot of these falls the grasses were bent almost to the ground and the boughs of the trees were swaying as if surrendering to the pounding water or maybe waving at them to slow down or maybe they were encouraging them to fall faster and faster.

The pool the water fell into was much larger from all the rain and spilling down the mountain in such a fierce way that I wondered about my ability to get across.  I had lightly stepped across on smooth stones coming in, but now those smooth stones were two or three feet under rapidly moving water with a class 4 rapids dropping off down the stream bed to the valley floor.

I unbuckled my belt, loosened the straps so that if I was swept off my footing by the current, I could get out of my pack quickly.  I sat at the edge of the pool while the wind from the slamming water raged past my hooded face.  I planned my route through the foaming, tumbling white water.  This was not going to be easy or without risk.

To use as a third leg, I found a stick the thickness of my wrist and as tall as my head and turned to face the water spilling down from three stories up and began to side stepped across the current, careful to never cross my legs.  I felt large stones with the side of my foot and stepped over or around them.  I could feel smaller stones rolling along the bottom of stream bed and thumping and thudding into my boots.  The water rose to my knees and then thighs and finally to my groin.  With deliberate and steady strides I made my way across.

I remember pausing halfway across, taking my eyes off the frothy water swirling through my legs and panning my vision up to the top of the thirty foot fall, the wind blowing my hood off my face and seeing the silver waves of water silhouetted against the gray sky just as they crested the edge of the cliff and started their descent, and thinking two thoughts:

• I am glad my wife is not here seeing me do this.
• It’s a lot easier to get into some things than it is to get out.

Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me. 8 By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.  Psalms 42:7-8 (ESV)

Up There Down Here

In December of 1980 or so I wrote my father a note asking him about going into the ministry.  I had sensed a “call” to preach when I wass 9 years old, but had found a lot of satisfaction and success as a young man working in the construction field.  I was confused about my vocation.  I have kept his scrall on an worn and faded peice of paper low these many years.  I post it now because my son is asking some of the same questions and maybe others are as well.

Your call to preach cannot be based on wheter or not you are happy working the job you currently have.  God made all of us to be happy when we are productive.  And you haven’t been productive in a long while.  Jesus is telling you that real joy comes when we have “entered into the joy of the Lord” which is being productive like God is productive.  (cf. Matthew 25:14-31)

A sense of fulfillment will come to you when you are productive.  For God made us to cooperate with Him in stewarding this good earth.  Your call to preach God’s Word must come from God, not a feeling of satisfaction from within.  It is a call to give up ones normal pursuits of life and make the wellbeing of the Church of Jesus Christ your vocation.

God may want you to be a bi-vocational pastor or a lay leader in the Church, but the call comes from God not through reason or any sense of fullfillment in your current job.  It is a call to build His Church.

Have a Marry Christmas,

Dad

Lynette and I were visiting the Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts a few years ago and I had an interesting encounter with one of the actors that was participating in the interpretive museum.  He was in one of the replica thatched-roofed huts and as we passed by we could hear him reading scripture.  Nette and I walked into “his” house and listened to him read from the book of Ecclesiastes.

After a few minutes I asked him a question or two like what was the weather like and how was the voyage over on the Mayflower.  The actor speaking in a brogue accent stayed in character the entire conversation.  He was portraying one of the actual pilgrims that had made that arduous trip.  I was curious as to what “Isaac’s” trade in the New World was so I asked the following question:  ”Issac, what is your profession?”  And with the 1611 version of the King James Bible open on his lap he looked at me with incredulity and said, “Why I am a Christian sir!”

I smiled at the profundity of this actor and asked a second time what his trade was and he said that he was a tailor.

Calling and profession can be confusing.  I know this:  The Kingdom of God on this earth is the most important mission of which I can be a part.  I have been called to leave my “normal pursuit” of the world and dedicate myself professionally to preach and teach the Word of God.

But we all have a higher calling than that.  All who are born from above have been beseeched to walk worthy of the calling with which we were called.  We have all been called to be foot soldiers in the advancement of the Kingdom of Heaven.  So, whether you work as a teacher, and engineer, brick layer or a preacher we are all called to be Kingdom bringers to this sorry, dark world.

A job is an avocation and it exists only to provide a means to advance the vocation.  And that calling my friends is to bring “up there down here.”

That is my profession and it is yours as well.  How is that going for you at your job?