expectation

It’s been a very busy week, so the posts haven’t really been flowing the way I thought the lazy days of summer back in the States would allow. I keep promising myself to be more disciplined, that I will be more faithful to post every day in August, especially when school starts. This kind of delusion has some sort of spiritual metaphor attached to it, but drawing that out sounds like a post in and of itself so I may as well bank that idea for when I’m sliding a post in at 11:58 PM in a few weeks, thinking some cyber-post-Nazi will reach out of iWeb and throughly accost my hands if I don’t post in time. This particular post, consequently, is just a small smattering of things garnered from the past week, during the days of posting silence, with likely little cohesiveness but perhaps some kind of far-fetched theme. Hey, there’s always hoping that a theme will manifest itself. I learned that iPhones do not have the ability to save the world or otherwise entirely reorder your existence into living virtuously. I feel cheated, Apple. On Monday, after several years of waiting and negotiating with my parents, I was finally cleared to obtain the coveted prize. I possess an iPhone 3G S. (I am not a fan of iPhone 4, aesthetically it looks like a clunky piece of junk. Yes, it really came down to aesthetics.) Though this device has revolutionized my life -- I get email and my text messages appear in a threaded view -- it has not brought about the Second Coming, of which I had a certain degree of confidence it would.

Oh, there’s the theme!

I had this little thought on the way to AT&T that made me, and I imagine God, laugh. I was considering the absurdity of how much I wanted an iPhone. I admit to being one of those people that get really excited over people and things, to the point that I can become incredibly hyper with anticipation. Every second on the way to the store was infinity; every red light was a hinderance to my desire. But I knew I was getting an iPhone, I was certain of it, so the waiting, though it was annoying and I would have preferred not to, was somehow motivating. Every second that passed was another moment to think on the fact that I would soon have the coveted prize. Though I waited, I waited with certainty of what was coming.

And why do I think this line of thought made God laugh? Because it didn’t take long for me to make a sermon application out of it. Now, Jesus is not my boyfriend and He’s certainly not my iPhone, but I wonder if that kind of directional focus wasn’t what the apostles were feeling post-Ascension in Acts 1. Jesus is taken up in glory and promises to return, they have no idea when, but He hasn’t been wrong about anything else, so they have a certainty about that reality. Indeed, as you read the rest of the New Testament, you can hear the anticipation in the writing, the certainty that at any moment He would be returning. It paints a rather brilliant picture, for they are on the edge of their seats, each day wondering if that day was the day but still having to go about the day as if it were like any other.

And yet, the day isn’t like any other. The days we live in now are days in which we are certain that He is coming back. We have certainty that our resurrected Lord shall return and in the meantime has given us His Spirit. So we live in expectation. We live knowing that we are, to put it crudely, getting Him, even if the seconds turn into minutes into hours into days into months into years into millennia -- He is indeed returning.

But have we lost that blessed mindset the early followers of the Way had? Are we no longer expectant? Do we expect now to die to see Him face to face as opposed to getting to see Him come in glory in our lifetime? What would it look like, how would we live, if we expected Jesus to come back today?

I don’t think that would be our license to eat macaroons all day and tell of everyone who ever hurt us. I think it would place, as we see in the epistles, a sense of urgency upon the Gospel message and a sense of needing to share. Maybe it would make us more merciful and kind, slower to anger and more generous with how we allot our time. These are just thoughts, of course. Right now, I have macaroons that need to go into the oven.

foundations

“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” -- John 1:14 (NASB) You’d be hard pressed, if you’ve been around here for a little while, to not notice that I’ve been thinking a lot about the authority of Scripture lately. There’s honestly no particular reason for this, because as I look back to a conversation a few weeks ago that I might be tempted to pin it on, if I’m honest and think over it carefully the thoughts were swimming and rising in my mind much longer than that. In fact, it seems to have been a particular thematic thought that ran from the end of last semester throughout the summer. Now, I could go about this the usual way by explaining all the places in Scripture (for instance: 2 Timothy 3:16, 2 Peter 1:12-21, just to be safe) that state the importance of the Word in our lives and how it should be the foundation from which all other things, the Creeds, the Tradition, and so on, comes, but I think that it’s best for this post to be quite simple and reflect upon, briefly, the verse from the first chapter of the Gospel of John that I have quoted above.

Why is Scripture important to me, so much so that I think it is the very foundation upon which all other aspects of our Faith should come?

Because the authors of the text got to see Jesus in a way that I didn’t and I want to know the Jesus they knew.

When John says quite simply, “we saw His glory,” I am left shaken by the gravity of those words.

These writers, these recorders, are not merely putting words to paper but are putting to paper what they witnessed God doing. What they saw with their own eyes. What they beheld as God literally coming into the creation and dramatically, awesomely, breathtakingly beginning the work of redemption through the death and resurrection of Christ. They were the witnesses to these events, they were the people that God allowed to see so much more of Himself than I have ever been honored to partake in. I value Scripture, I place it as the foundation, because I realize that the people who wrote its pages were people who were given the awesome chance to see God as I know I shall only see in part until He returns or I pass from this life into the life to come.

May I digress quickly: they got to see Him. They got to see the glory. How much I long to grasp even a fraction of what that means! How much I long to read the words they penned through inspiration just to understand a glimpse of that which they got to see! Why would I look anywhere else first? They got to see Him. They got to see Him resurrected! What honor that I long to know.

For me, it really is that simple. True, God is personal and He walks alongside me daily as I seek His counsel, delight in His wonders, and worship Him. True, God still reveals Himself today in the everyday, in the simple and the extraordinary. But crucial to me is to not lose the important foundation upon which all of it started, the grand narrative that began in the Garden, was climaxed with Christ, and is playing out into our age and the age to come. And that foundation is the Word made flesh, Christ Himself, who is revealed to us through the inspired words of the Gospels, through the inspired words of the epistles and revelation, and spoken of through the prophets. The text is the foundational signpost, alive and well with the Spirit of God constantly crying out from its words the Truth of Christ and the Truth of the Gospel.

To be without it, to cast it aside, to consider it one among many resources, is to call the foundation an armchair and then yell at the Architect when the living room begins to sink into the sand.

splat!

As I mentioned in a post last week, there’s not much from my conversation with NT Wright that I can blatantly share without it being inappropriate to do so. Nonetheless, there is a portion of it that I’ve been reflecting on since I left Auckland Castle; and, indeed, was reflecting on it not just for what it meant to me personally but how I would share it in a blog post. I asked the Bishop two questions, the first very personal, the second much more open even though it had specific personal implications. This second question was about humility and pride, specifically how we are to approach problems we see in church. (Lowercase, because I mean specifically how we are to approach problems we see within the literal space that we worship: everything from doctrine to administration.) My trouble with this question rests on the following series of thoughts: I know I don’t have everything figured out, nor will I ever until I “behold Him in His essence” (thanks, Aquinas), but I still see things happening in my church that are obviously contradictory to Scripture; I want to submit myself to my church leadership as Hebrews 13 discusses, but I also want to preserve the integrity of Truth that is spoken of in Romans 1; my desire is not to be right, but to see right happen, as in Galatians 1; I am sometimes accused of being proud or arrogant because I am uncompromising on certain points (such as literal resurrection), and it becomes hard to distinguish if what they’re saying is a true reflection or spoken out of a desire to silence the truth I, by the grace of God, happen to be in that moment reflecting. The general, resultant question is the great umbrella under which all of this falls: how do we keep humble but keep speaking Truth? Wright rather enjoyed that question and spent quite a bit of the next hour of our talking coming back to touch on it over and over again. He had many things to say, but the one image that stood out to be the most was also the most encouraging. We had never met before this moment, we had not exchanged elaborate theological positions. He knew how much I appreciated Surprised by Hope, but beyond that there was no explicit conversation about likemindedness. There was simply the feeling, the knowing of our spirits that we were among friends in the sense of His community. So it should not surprise me, though it does as I look back on it, the simple advice he gave me. “When you’re sitting in church and praying, seeing all of the silly things that go on that you know are wrong, that your spirit can’t stand, it’s ok to point them out and kindly remind people that there is in fact better; but, how you keep humble, is to as you are praying, think of how the angels must surely feel the same about your prayers and your faith. They kindly but sincerely must think, ‘Oh you’re so close, but you’ve just missed this part again.’”

My desire, my longing, the very reason I blog is because I have the deepest craving to see people who were once so certain of everything they knew about God to suddenly, without expectation realize that He is still infinite and they still have something new to learn about Him, something to understand. I am but a signpost, a marker, somewhere suspended on a great stream of better people than I who have lit the watchtowers pointing to the glory of the Saviour. I am a bit ahead of some, but there are many -- indeed, who are likely younger than I! -- who are well ahead of me. But that’s the amazing, beautiful, essential thing we must grasp about pursuing God: the more we pursue, the more we understand, the more we see . . . when we’re chasing after Infinity, no matter how much we’ve been running, there’s still infinity to go. And it’s beautiful. And it’s what all of us are called to. But that also means that if we’ve been running longer, or perhaps running more fervently, that we have a responsibility to take what we have been entrusted as part of that journey and reflect it back to those behind us. To give them hope that there is indeed a higher purpose and calling, to remind them of why they run. Correction, too, is a significant part of that, because it keeps people from running in circles or into walls and blaming God for their own foolishness because they wanted Him to be in their image and for Him to compromise for them, not the other way around, not the way Romans 12 instructs us to do.

I will not hide the fact that it was deeply affirming and encouraging to hear the Bishop of Durham say this to me, but I was not foolish enough to believe that I was alone in what he was saying. Rather, it reminded me of something that had always tugged at me: God uses everyday people, young people, to do radical and amazing things. Often, this scares people in power, it worries authorities, but that’s always been the case with the Gospel. So in terms of this great hierarchy, of knowledge and understanding, of having so many years on some one in terms of thinking, or in wealth of philosophical training and all the other “qualifiers” we place beside people to determine if it’s really truth or not, to that I offer and simple verb: splat! God will use who He will use, He shall raise up and take down as He sees fit. Our responsibility is to listen, to be careful to not ignore the voice of the young or the wisdom of the old, to not make for ourselves a new, better way that really isn’t new or better, but is silliness and self-affirmation. We are to keep humble, but we’re also to speak with boldness when we see corruption of the Gospel or denial of its central Truth. Fortunately, as I have mentioned in the past, this can be done in a whisper, because the Gospel in and of itself really makes people uncomfortable in the best of ways. Or, to summarize all this in a much more cohesive way, to pass on a message to my fellows at Baylor and those reading abroad (something that they should keep in mind because they are amazing lights of God), to put a reminder in our hearts of something I had longed to hear spoken out loud and then was delighted to hear Tom Wright affirm: “God uses twenty-year-olds to change the world.”

Well then, go and do.

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As I did a few posts ago when I plugged the sensational Kelsey Jones, I’d like to draw your attention to someone else again. Matt Moser has been mentioned and linked in the past on this blog, but this particular post (it’s a bit academic, to warn you now, but stick with it) was very important to me and some of the thoughts I’ve had lately about church. If you will, head over and take a read, also subscribe to him as well. He’s writing some very important things that I have no doubt will be highly influential in the forum of Christian expression in the future.