Wednesday, November 22, 2017

How to Keep the Gods Happy

If you lived in the Middle East five thousand years ago, you would notice there were a few things everyone seemed to know. In those days, everyone knew there were lots of gods who existed outside of human control. These gods were responsible for all the things we couldn't do on our own: for the rain, for the sun, for the crops, for the hunt, for the fermentation of beer, and for fertility. We couldn't control the gods, but we needed them to like us. The only way we knew to keep the gods on our side is to give them something we liked. Need the gods to like you a lot? Give them something you like a lot. Did you make the gods really mad somehow? Give them something you like the most. The system of sacrifice pre-dates the Bible, it is older than the book of Leviticus, and it is as old as human consciousness.

We know we don't control everything, and we need to keep those who do on our side. 

A few years ago I was in Jordan with some of my students. We were walking down a very old-but-modern street in Amman. Next to the shisha bars and kebab restaurants there was a very new looking burger restaurant. We were all in a group across the street from it, walking calmly down the road that evening when a pickup truck screeched to a halt in front of the burger joint. Two men jumped out of the cab of the truck and pulled a very uncomfortable and loud sheep from the back. We froze. The men drug the sheep bleating to the curb and a third man came running from inside the restaurant with a large knife. This man slit the throat of the squealing sheep and let its blood fill the street. My group of American students were horrified. Some began crying, a few gagged. The sheep breathed its last breath as deep red blood squirted from its neck.

What? 

Why did that sheep get killed right in front of me on a normal night in 2014?

I looked at the lady who was taking us to dinner. She could see the questions I had before I could get them out.
"He must have made an oath to God," she said. "That is probably his restaurant and he made a promise to kill a lamb if it was allowed to open. Don't worry, the meat will be given to the poor."

"What century is this," I thought. "How barbaic, how archaic, how backwards."

We modern people would never do something so silly. We would never worry about making God angry with us. We would never sacrifice something in order to keep beings we can't control to like us. We would never change how we act in order to be accepted by outside forces. We would never spend more money to be accepted. We would never try to keep up with our neighbors just to impress them. We would never think if we just did this, had that, dated her, looked like him, or bought those then the people from whom we crave acceptance would really like us.

"Everybody worships."  David Foster Wallace was right. We can't help it. We are limited creatures who are all painfully aware of our limitations and that we need outside help to be happy and alive. We have to keep the gods happy. We have always known that and we have organized systematic mechanisms in order to assure us the gods are happy with us. 

Here's the amazing thing about Jesus. God is exactly like Jesus, and God can't change so God has always been exactly like Jesus. God is exactly like Jesus and God has always been exactly like Jesus. Make sure you understand what that means. For centuries and centuries humans tried to figure out where we stood with the gods. The Israelites developed an intricate system of sacrifice to make sure they stayed on God's good side. To them, God needed the sacrifice of bulls and goats in order to even be in their presence. In order to even be able to talk to God, something else needed to die. Except over and over and over we see glimpses in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) that God didn't want those sacrifices in the first place. In Psalm 51:16-17 King David understands that God isn't pleased with burnt offerings and sacrifice. In 1 Samuel, in Hosea, in Jeremiah, in Isaiah,  and most persuasively in Amos we see God speaking through prophets--the men who were supposed to know most what God wanted and what He was like. In every case, we see them telling the people that God doesn't want these sacrifices. The sacrifices aren't keeping them in good standing with God because God never wanted them in the first place. The sacrifices were something they were already doing because that's what they assumed the gods wanted, and God allowed this to be part of the system through which they came to worship Him. The sacrifices were for our hearts, for our own peace of mind.

In Jesus, we see God fully revealing Himself to us. He shows us exactly what He has been like all along.  God doesn't need the blood of bulls and goats. God wants our hearts to be pure and our actions to be good. We don't have to worry about making Him mad. We don't have to work and work in order to please Him. We don't have to compete with our neighbor in order to be the best. We don't have to compete for blessings from a capricious father who gives good to some and garbage to others. God loves us and gives us only good and perfect gifts.

The cross is the sacrifice to end all sacrifice. NOT BECAUSE GOD NEEDED IT, BUT BECAUSE WE NEEDED IT. Notice that was in italics, underlined, all caps, and bold. We needed the sign of who God is, what God looks like, and what God is willing to do while forgiving our sin. We needed it to have our heads cleared from the lies of the devil and our own insecurities. The Cross is the sign stamped on our hearts that we are good with God. He doesn't need a single thing from us. He doesn't need us to try harder, buy more, dress trendier, or look better. He is happy with us. We don't keep Him happy, because God doesn't change.

How jealous are we of other people who we think are getting blessed when we aren't? Why doesn't God like us as much as He likes them? Judgement, division, jealousy are all based in the same insecurity. When we are secure in how much we are loved, there will be no jealousy, no competition, and no judgement. You are blessed. That's a description of your identity, not your current situation.

May He continue to illuminate the cross in our hearts, and may we be reminded of how right we are with God. May we kill our idols. May Jesus' sacrificial love keep us from sacrificing anything to anyone else. 

Friday, November 10, 2017

From Anger to Action

Toddlers are a glimpse into our own unfiltered behavior. They haven't learned how to behave and hide their true feelings from society, so they act the way they feel like acting. When a toddler loses his kite in the wind and sees it sail into a tree, he loses his mind. He falls on the ground, kicking and screaming, he wails at the sky as if the gods have conspired to torment him, he pays no attention to his own ability to walk over to the dangling string and regain control of the kite. When a toddler is over-tired, the smallest thing can set him off into a rage nightmare. His guards are down and the injustice he feels over bedtimes or candy are coming pouring from a volcano of raw emotion. But he doesn't actually do anything to make himself more likely to get what he wants.

There is a lot to be angry about these days. If you watch the news, or read twitter for three seconds, you can work yourself up into a frothing mess. It is inescapable how many wrongs need to be righted and how many systems need to be totally destroyed and rebuilt. It is infuriating how hypocritical those on the "religious right" can be, and how blind they are to it. If I allow myself to think about it for too long, I become a furious mess. But I don't actually do anything about it.

I watched a sermon on YouTube by a pastor out of New York named Carl Lentz in which he talked about how too many people are "angryvists" and not many are activists. That struck me. How many times am I angry, righteously angry, but content to do absolutely nothing? As if being angry about the state of the world is somehow going to do something. Anger is a largely useless emotion. It is a primitive reaction in the most ancient parts of our brains to stimuli we find at odds with our desired method of survival. We get most angry when we are most stressed. Like a toddler who is over-tired, we are more prone to erupt when we feel distressed. When we are overcome with anxiety, we aren't ourselves. Anxiety causes stress, and stress makes us more irritable. When we are irritable, a tweet from a politician we don't like can set us ablaze. When we are stressed, we can watch a report about racial injustice and spew venom for twenty minutes about how miserable the hearts of the people in power must be to allow this to go unchecked, then we sit back down and check out another show on Netflix. We don't do anything about it.

What's at the core of your stress? What is causing you to be irritable? It's more important to know why you are irritable than it is to know what is irritating you. If you give an over-tired three year old what he is yelling about, he will only get irritated about something else. Even if the problem that you think is so irritating gets solved, you will only get irritated about something else.

One of the most common sources of anxiety is fear of the unknown. It's why half of the scary movies in the world take place under water or in space. We don't know much about sharks, so they terrify us. We don't know what we would do if aliens were real, so we freak out at alien movies. If we are truly honest, we don't know a whole lot. When we lie in our beds alone with our thoughts and the darkness and the uncaring ceiling, we really feel like we might be wrong about everything we think we know. The entire field of epistemology exists precisely to show us exactly how little we can be sure we actually know. Our ignorance of the future, of what is going to happen tomorrow, of whether it's all going to be ok--these are the sources of our anxiety.

The opposite of anxiety is confidence. Confidence is attractive because we want to be associated with someone who isn't as anxious and insecure as we are. Confidence leads to action while anxiety leads to stress. When you can manage your stress enough to funnel your disgust about the state of the world into action to end the injustice you see, you are operating from a confidence in something outside of yourself. We can't be confident in and of ourselves. We need something to be confident in so we can act.

One of the most famous activists--a man whose anger was proved righteous in his action--was Martin Luther King, Jr. He didn't just talk about injustice, he didn't yell and scream about hypocrites, and he didn't just send tweets with a hashtag that aligned him with the "good guys." He went out and did something. He stood on the steps of the Alabama State Capital building on March 25, 1965, and delivered a speech entitled Our God is Marching On. You should read it. He ended the speech with the key to his confidence. Dr. King gives us and his listeners that day a glimpse at how he overcame anxiety based in ignorance about the future and leapt into activism driven by confidence. He asks over and over "How long?" and answers it "Not long!" followed by a reason he is confident his cause will be victorious. He was confident in his belief that "no lie can live forever," and that "the moral arc of the universe is long, but  it bends towards justice." Dr. King believed those statements enough, he could be confident and funnel his emotion into action.

We can be confident in the same things. We can be confident God is ahead of us, drawing us and the world forward. God is for our progress as we move the world towards justice. We can't sit and be anxious, shouting and making more enemies that friends. We have to base our knowledge on the belief our God is marching us toward justice, and then act accordingly. We won't ever fully know anything. In his letter to a group of Jesus followers in the ancient city of Corinth, the apostle Paul--at the end of a brilliant rant about the power of Love--reminds us we only see a dim reflection of reality, but one day we will see face-to-face. We will know in the way in which we are fully known. Your fear about the future is a sign of your lack of confidence if how fully you are known. My angry tweets I thankfully delete more than I send are a sign of my lack of confidence. My rants about the hypocrites in politics are exercises in insecurity.

When he asks "How long will Justice be crucified and Truth bear it?" Dr. King confidently answers, "not long." Let's move beyond anger and into action. Let's move beyond ignorance and into confidence. Let's manage our stress, speak truth into our anxiety, and share the confidence we have with Love. Because Love is the anchor, the bedrock, the foundation. Love is the thing behind the thing behind the thing. Love is the motivator and the engine of all things. Love is creating and building and moving us all towards the Lover of our souls. 

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Fuel

When I moved to Germany I brought a coffee grinder in my carry-on. It was precious to me. It's cliché now to talk about how much you need coffee on the internet, but I don't need coffee as much as I am sustained by it. I don't like it in the way a car doesn't like gasoline, it requires it. This coffee grinder was expensive, it was large, it had a serious sounding name like BistroPro3000 or something, and it was 'randomly' checked at every security checkpoint between Dallas and Düsseldorf.
My first day in my German apartment, I woke up and plugged my coffee grinder in. Sparks. Smoke. The unmistakable smell of a small electrical fire. I unplugged it and looked at it, trying to ascertain the cause of the issue. I looked at my power adapter, it seemed to be working. Like an idiot, I plugged the coffee grinder back in and tried again. Sparks. Smoke. The unmistakable smell of a small electrical fire. And then nothing.
I later found out that it didn't matter which converter or adapter I used, any electrical engine is set to run at a certain speed and voltage, and there is no way to run an American grinder on European electricity. My grinder was trashed and I didn't even get coffee that day.
When you rent a diesel car, the rental car company will usually put THIS IS A DIESEL stickers in at least three places for the driver to see. Filling a diesel engine with gasoline is a quick way to test how 'complete' the complete coverage insurance is. That isn't to say gasoline is bad for all cars. No one would say that,  because it wouldn't make any sense. We know gas is good for some and diesel for others. We know coffee grinders with plugs made for the USA are good there, and grinders with EU plugs are good in the EU. We don't need to try to force one to work on the other's electrical current. We don't get mad at the car for breaking if the driver puts the wrong fuel inside.
Why do we do that for ourselves?
If we see something working for someone else, do we immediately assume it will work for us? Aren't people more varied than cars?
We each have a soul to feed. What feeds our soul is different for each of us. The good news is we all know what feeds our soul, even if we try to deny it.
You know what feeds your soul.
You're feeding your soul when you do something and it immediately puts you at ease, makes you feel fulfilled, and allows you to be present in that moment. You feel like yourself. You feel connection to God, to the world, and to the people you love. For some it might be writing, it might be composing music, it might be going to concerts or painting. It might be sharing a meal or a cup of coffee with people we love. We are all so different and no one can tell you what feeds your soul.
You know that thing you do and when you finish you think "I should really do this more often?" That thing is feeding your soul. Things that feed your soul feel as good when they are over as when you are doing them. 
Take some time to reflect on what feeds your soul. Don't worry about what someone else is doing to feed theirs, only focus on what fuels you. Your engine--your soul--needs to be fueled with specific fuel and today is a good day to find out what you run on.