the eleventh formica friday

It's that time again, another Formica Friday, a treasure trove of hodgepodge, random tidbits, and a bit of this and that. What exactly is Formica Friday? Check out the tongue-in-cheek, I got away with this?, definition from the first post. A quote:

"God almost always asks the impossible. If it is possible, if it is easy, we can almost always be sure that it is the Tempter asking, not God. ... But God doesn't ask the easy things. Satan does. When Satan was tempting Jesus after His baptism, all the temptations were for Jesus to take the easy way out."

-- Madeleine L'Engle, "Penguins & Golden Calves"

A list:

  1. Tuesday; all of it
  2. The addition of cucumber
  3. Growing pains
  4. Depths of indescribable love and trust

Blogs and posts you should read ...

And, as always, a post from me:

Have a post from the past week you want to share? A blog recommendation for me? Leave it in the comments below!

jello

Update: I have thought over this post for quite some time. I stand by what was originally said here and I maintain my conviction about the original events that inspired me to write it, but I am also moved by the sincere hope, desire, and expectancy that redemption would have its place in these events. To hinder that would be a deep and grievous wrong, and to that end, I have gone back and edited this post. The theological content has not changed, but the circumstances have been generalized. Indeed, the problem I have seen with using God's will in the way it was employed reach far beyond just this one instance. In some way, we should all see ourselves in these failings of rightly understanding the will of God. I know I do. Pax et bonum. Ordinarily, I don't pay much attention to politics. I admit to finding them somewhat silly, and I'm not a fan of what I see it do to people from time to time, or rather, what it can draw out of them that was already there in their character. However, something happened recently that made me very interested in an elections: a candidate implied that God's will was somehow involved in the election result.

God's will? Really?

The candidate won. Immediately there was a buzz among supporters who made comments referring to what God was accomplishing through him and how this was God's affirmation for his direction.

When I read these responses of happiness and certainty in God's provision, the words of John Calvin--of all people?!--came to my mind, "Satan has his miracles too."

Earlier that week I had been in conversation with a friend discussing how bothered I was about this language of God's will being used by someone who was supported by people that spent their time bashing and looking for ways to undermine the opposing candidate. It struck me as incredibly blasphemous to say that it was God's call on the candidate's life to serve others only to then turn around and support--because silence is support--the absolute degradation of the rival. Or, as it was shaking out, the enemy. I remember asking, "Do they not know that if they win, they'll have to serve the loser too? If God has called them to be a servant, they have to strip down, pull up the water bucket, and wash the other's feet. That's the will of God."

What have we done to God's will?

By the logic employed by the campaign I have recounted, anything that appears good is God's will. If something bad happens, this too is God's will, but a mystery. So, if I am the young woman who is raped and the rapist is never found, arrested, and forced to stand trial for his unspeakable crime, this is God's will, it is a mystery. But what of the rapist? Can he not then with satisfaction say: This is God's will, that I should not have been caught.

Does this seem ridiculous? It should, because God's will is not the insipid and trite cavalcade of meaninglessness that we make it out to be when we assign it to anything that suits our tastes and whims. It is a cop-out, and a pathetic one, to assign the will of God to anything that doesn't have seemingly good explanation in the ordinary scheme of things.

But we forget about Satan. We forget that we are fallen.

We forget that we have a will. We forget that Satan has a will, too.

Scripture tells us that "God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose." Often, this is the go-to verse for implying that God orchestrates events in a certain way, individually, specifically, to achieve His desired goal. There is only one right path and that path, that path alone, makes it to the desired end God intends.

But there's a few problems with that. First, Scripture there does not suggest that God is standing at each decision in life, such as whether to have a bagel or toast for breakfast, prompting you to make the "right" choice lest His divine plan be thwarted. The implication is that God cooperates and redeems all choices, good or bad, and aligns them to an ultimate, eschatological end that is the good not for individuals who love Him, but for all those who love Him.

This isn't roadmap style God's will. There is no single road that requires you to do this, this, and that in order to achieve what God wants. If Scripture is clear with us about anything, it's that no matter how hard we try to screw it up--think Judah and Tamar, without whom we would not have Christ, and nearly didn't!--He is still going to make it work out exactly how He wants it to.

So, we have our fallen choices. Satan has his miracles. Regardless, the overall will of God is not shaken or moved. And this is the idea that trips people up the most, the idea that God's will isn't about choosing toast or a bagel, that it is so much bigger, certainly bigger than an election.

How do we know?

Deductive logic, as often as I am not a fan of it, seems especially useful here. If God's will is a series of correct choices in life and there happens to be only one, perfect, correct way to do things, then the Gospels certainly did us no favors.

We have no idea how Jesus slept. We're not sure where He went to use the bathroom. (Jesus used the bathroom, by the way. Sometimes people are stunned by this.) We don't know if He started walking with His right or his left foot. We don't know if He cut his hair at His shoulders or farther up. We don't know if He always chewed with His mouth closed.

The horror! How then are we to be perfect? How then are we to follow the will of God? God's perfect, unchangeable will that is dependent on me and every choice I make?!

This is foolishness. But it's the same thing as thinking that everything that happens is the will of God as opposed to seeing everything that happens as being ultimately placed into the trusted hands of the Creator, who will take the mess of our will, Satan's will, and His ultimate, perfect will, and bring it all into a logical, harmonious story in spite of our very best efforts to do otherwise.

Dare I suggest that God does not intervene ever in the world? Certainly not! I have written in the past extensively about how I see God working in the everyday, that there are absolute moments of divine intervention in human affairs, and that the Lord cares very much about whether you eat a bagel or toast, but that His care there has more to do with His love for you than it does for some set plan of His will.

So how then to discover God's will? How are we to know how to live everyday lives that are honoring to God?

We look to the One who was able to accomplish God's will perfectly, our example, He who is never recorded as having used the bathroom but is often noted as rushing off away from everyone to pray and spend time with His Father.

In the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus answers the first temptation of Satan to turn the stones to bread with these words: "'It is written, ‘MAN SHALL NOT LIVE ON BREAD ALONE, BUT ON EVERY WORD THAT PROCEEDS OUT OF THE MOUTH OF GOD.’'”

On every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

It is a shame that people who are willing to subject God's will to be about something as silly as an election likely do not read their Bibles much. Because if they do, they must read only the portions of it that appeal to them, finding God's will in snippets of Scriptures out of context and in haphazard attempts to force passages to mean something in their immediate lives. How else is it possible to have such a skewed view of God's will? They do the job of the Holy Spirit for Him, pray often about what they want, but listen little.

But Jesus says that we are to live on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

Woe be it unto us if that means we read little Scripture and act unjustly against our neighbors, against our enemies.

Jesus knew the Scripture better than anyone. He prayed better than anyone. And this combination of Scripture and prayer allotted Him an openness to the Holy Spirit such that He did God's will constantly by being faithful in these things so as to see in the world the way in which He was to go. It wasn't a point to point ministry, it was a flowing song, a movement, a dance, that had many choices and options, all of which were good in the sight of Lord, which made it easy for Jesus to distinguish between the will of man and Satan, which have many choices, and the will of God, which has many choices too: bagel or toast?

It was the will of Satan that Job would be deprived of all he loved and suffer incredibly. It was the will of God that Job remain faithful.

Job remained faithful. Job did the will of God.

Faithfulness is the will of God. Faithfulness to read His Word, to pray, to listen, to be in community with other Believers, to delight in His blessings, to see Him at work in the world. From faithfulness comes knowing God. From knowing God comes discernment. From discernment comes right choices. From right choices, ultimately, comes cooperation with God in God's ultimate, beautiful will.

But this process doesn't happen once, it happens constantly. In the garden Jesus prays to let the cup pass from Him. Even then, He is still discerning, still talking to God, still seeking Him to know what to do. So He takes the cup. He takes it in faithfulness, which ultimately leads to the fulfillment of God's will.

God doesn't care about an election unless the candidate is being faithful to Him. If from faithfulness a position also comes, then it is simply more of an opportunity to be faithful. It is the indication of favor that God has given to someone faithful with little a chance to be faithful with much. But this is all contingent, imperatively, on first having a relationship with God that is intimate, honest, and desiring to serve Him in the little and the everyday.

There are moments, certainly, when the Lord sets a decision before us that is clearly right or clearly wrong. In these times, this will of God is still an act of faithfulness, for faithfulness to God leads to a right decision. That is, not an external call from God on what to do, but an inward intimacy with the Father that prompts a response that pleases Him.

Other times, we are prompted to action in a moment that seems ridiculous. I have been in situations where I felt the need to pray for the person in front of me whom I did not know. I weighed this carefully and found it to be a prompting of the Spirit. I could turn this into a deliberation over the will of God, or I could simply ask, what would be the faithful thing to do? The faithful thing is to do as the Spirit, when tested well to be sure that it is indeed the Spirit, has lead. If it is somewhat hard, if it demands more of you than you think you can give, if it somewhat terrifies your sense of propriety, it's likely the desire of God placed upon you. Being faithful to God is never easy.

It's all about jello.

One of my favorite verses in Scripture says, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being." I think of this like diving into a giant pool of jello, being suspended within this great, abundant mystery of God all around me, pushing through and yet never against, because it flows and forms and moves with me. We are one and yet distinct, united and yet different, held in the same space and yet it is far more expansive and encasing than I. I am within it. I am a part, foreign as I am, of it.

Moving in faithfulness to God is like moving in jello. The Lord surrounds and holds us, His will a giant pool of possibility. The earnest pursuit of Him, the desire to see Him, the desire to serve Him pulls us through the beautiful mess of substance and brings forth the ultimate, great will of God, which is larger than we can even imagine.

Is it God's will that I finish this post today, long as it is?

I don't know. Perhaps it is better to see it as a blessing. Thank you, Lord, that it has come to a close. Be it an honest reflection and useable for Your purposes, Your ultimate will, whatever good, wonderful thing that may be.

Sometimes God hits us on the head with a brick to figure out His will in a moment. Most of the time, He just wants us to pursue Him. Pursuing Him, ultimately, brings about cooperation with His will. He doesn't need us to make it work, He's already got that taken care of, but He would love us to come along for the adventure.

Is it God's will, or Satan's, or man's that a candidate is elected?

I don't know. But I do know that it is the will of God for the elected to strip down, pull up a bucket of water, and wash the feet of the one who lost.

Faithfulness. Faithfulness unto the end.

what's happened to satan?

Coming this Thursday, I am going to start a series of posts called "Tables in the Wilderness," which will be twelve reflections on faith and art, in particular the art of Story and storytelling. They'll be snippets, mostly, lengthy as they are, as this is all going to be part of a larger work. The outline thus far is looking fairly good, with twelve total posts planned. One of them will address Satan, though it is to come rather late (it's planned for number eight as of right now), but I already started working on it yesterday evening. In a sense, I felt a bit drained creatively once it was finished, so I'm pulling an easy out and just posting a portion of it here for you to read and pick apart. Sorry, sometimes I need to protect my creative mental space and I just can't scrounge up enough to make it through Wednesday and Thursday unless I skimp a bit on the originality here. Tomorrow, look for a reflection on God's will, Thursday, for the first part in this series about faith and art, which will focus on Story. For now ... What’s happened to Satan?

One year at a local church’s Fall Festival—one of the valiant, though often unfortunate, attempts to reclaim All Saints Day from the awful, pseudo-holiday of Halloween—I was greeted by a young man dressed up as the devil. At least, his conception of him. Pitchfork in hand, horns on his head, a cape on his back, and a defiant look of satisfaction on his face. He seemed rather pleased with himself, dressed as we was, in the midst of the church atmosphere of harmony and joy.(I learned later that he had not volunteered to attend the party, but was dragged there. He came from a broken home and I imagine that his costume was really more to do with his pain over the turmoil in his family than anything expressly malicious.)

“And what are you supposed to be?” I asked him, while at the same time encouraging yet another child to throw their fishing line—string with a clothespin affixed to a stick—over into the sea—a blue sheet with cutout fish taped to it—to see what they could catch—candy attached to a fish cutout that a very kind, very bored volunteer would time and again place into the expectant clothespin, then give a little tug and put up a playful fight before letting go to the victory shout of the child.

“I’m Satan!” declared the boy, in a way that sounded horrifically of triumph.

I was amused. “You are most obviously not.”

“I am!”

I persisted in reassuring him that he absolutely, most certainly, was not Satan. Finally he conceded that he was only dressed like him, thinking that this was the response I wanted, but I continued in my assurance that when I had said he wasn’t Satan, I had been speaking of the failure of his costume, not just about who he really was. He was perplexed and asked me to explain. Isn’t this how Satan looks?

What stories had he been told?

“No,” I said to him, crouching down to look at him plainly. “Satan doesn’t carry around a pitchfork or wear little horns on his head. It seems in the Bible that Satan is very pretty and looks like an angel, because he was once one himself.” There was a girl dressed up like an angel standing near us, throwing her fishing rod line over the sheet in eager anticipation. I gestured to her, “Satan most likely would look exactly like her costume. But do you know what the difference would be? How you could tell without a doubt that it was Satan?”

The boy thought. I could tell he had taken every word I had said very carefully into himself. This needed to be his answer, the answer that made the most sense to him as a child. Children know the answer, inherently, but they don't all say it the same way. At last, he said, rather seriously, “Satan can’t be happy. Not happy like she is.”

The girl had been rewarded with a significant supply of cutout fish and candies. I imagine the poor volunteer behind the sheet had at last grown weary with the repetitive act and had decided to both bless a child with a proper bounty and bless herself with a depleted stock of candy, promising a swift close to the evening. It couldn’t have come at a better time. The girl erupted into the most genuine, true laughter, known only to a proper child—at any age of life—and the boy had indicated that it was this happiness that Satan could not have.

We could nitpick here about the difference between happiness and joy, but he meant joy and it wasn't the occasion to correct his word choice. He understood; that's what mattered.

“Yes.” I affirmed, quietly and keeping the serious tone that he had set for the conversation. “Satan likes to pretend that he’s better than he actually is. But you can always tell, if you look hard enough, when he’s just lying to you.”

I realized then how sad it was that this little boy was trying to do the same thing, just from the opposite direction. He was trying to make himself worse than he was for the sake of recovering from the neglect in his family, the dissolution of his childhood grasp of human certainty. I wanted to scoop him up into an embrace and nearly did, until I noted that he had a different plan in mind.

Upon this revelation, action must be taken!

He removed his horns from his head and offered them and his pitchfork to me, stating simply and confidently, “I don’t want to be Satan anymore.”

I received them with the same look of earnest conviction that he had offered them to me with. “Alright, what shall you be, then?”

“Nothing.”

This was not satisfactory and I wasn't about to let it go. Rightly understanding evil was one thing, understanding evil and then letting evil win by disappointing a child’s imagination was another. Satan loves to truncate good imagination, to shame it. He loves the literalists and hates all good metaphor.

The boy was still wearing his plain red cape. There was still a game to be had yet. I became suddenly very secretive and leaned forward, whispering, “Aren’t you a superhero--the superhero--here to investigate why all the candy has been taken into the sea?”

His claim to the liberated candy spoils and his triumph over the “wicked” volunteer, who had imprisoned the candy along with the fish, and who was then brought to honest repentance for her thievery and rewarded with some candy of her own, transpired quickly. He was a very effective superhero. I believe he gave himself a name, but I can't remember it now. But I imagine he named himself well.

This was a defeat of Satan, but it was a defeat of Satan because he had been named rightly, acknowledged, and then laughed away through the triumph of love and good imagination.

What’s happened to Satan?

René Girard’s wonderful work on archetypical violence that I mentioned before nonetheless dismisses Satan in the process. Satan there is a metaphor, not in the true sense described previously, but in the cumulative sense. Satan is a way of describing evil, which is a non-energy, a negation of the good in so far as it is a negation of existence. Satan doesn’t have form or individual character. He is not a he. He is a personification.

Former Bishop N.T. Wright, whom I have had the privilege of sitting down with and talking about this, among other things, holds a similar position. Satan is a good way of describing evil in its most reducible form. He’s a good front man for the wrong.

But is there such a thing as a big bad, as it would be called back in the days of Buffy? No. Not at all.

Scripture does not seem to maintain this interpretation, nor was it particularly popular to feel this way until the modern age. This is a problem for us, especially when talking about the stories of the Text with children. Children can understand ambiguity, they can understand walking on water, they can understand a story that is both…and, but they cannot understand the ridiculous. If there is no Satan, in a personal sense, in a form of corporeal somethingness, then Scripture appears to lie and lie rather poorly.

What or who or how did something encounter Jesus in the desert and tempt Him?

If it was not Satan, if it was instead this great mechanism of symbolic mimetic violence, as Girard would describe it, then why did Scripture bother with assigning him a name and a form? Throughout the Text, ambiguities are celebrated. Double meanings, meanings that are more than even just double, are easy to find, but misdirection is not employed, except by characters in the stories themselves and as an audience we already know the secret before it all really begins. And children are taught early, if they are taught well, to know the difference between polysemous meaning and misdirection.

The Bible, if it is from God in any inspired sense, is True. And Truth is something that never resorts to misdirection. Misdirection is the game of Satan.

Children know this.

-- From the forthcoming post about Satan, due a couple months from now.

The rest of the post, when it's finally up, will deal with the problem of how Satan is represented in the church when he actually is talked about, how we can talk about him well without turning him into an equal with God, and how to do justice to the Word with its limited mention of him while at the same time acknowledging his actuality.

As always, I would love your thoughts.