And to that, that impulse, craving, yearning, longing, desire – God says yes. Yes, there is water for that thirst, food for that hunger, light for that darkness, relief for that burden. If we want hell, if we want heaven, they are ours. That’s how love works. It can’t be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says yes, we can have what we want, because love wins.
But sometimes when I hear people quote the Bible, I just want to throw up.
It’s one thing to be in love; it’s another to act because of love. Love is a noun – a feeling you have – and it’s also a verb, something you do.
But when I’m talking about God, I’m talking about the divine being who can’t be located tangibly with the kind of evidence that the rationalism of reductionism demands in the same way that you cannot be located in your eyelashes or spine or shoulder.
This is a book about seeing, about becoming more and more alive and aware, orienting ourselves around the God who I believe is the ground of our being, the electricity that lights up the whole house, the transcendent presence in our tastes, sights, and sensations of the depth and dimension and fullness of life, from joy to agony to everything else.
What will you do with your power and wealth and might and armies? What kind of world will you create with it? Will you use it to manipulate and overpower others to build your empire even bigger, or will you use it to help the widow, the orphan, and the refugee among you?
Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.
Great artists know that it isn’t just about what you add; sometimes the most important work is knowing what to take away. Removing clutter, excess, all the superfluous elements – and finding out in the process what’s been in there the whole time.
So when we talk about God we’re using language, language that employs a vast array of words and phrases and forms to describe a reality that is fundamentally beyond words and phrases and forms.
An image of God doesn’t contain God, in the same way a word about God or a doctrine or a dogma about God isn’t God; it only points to God.
When you create space for another to thrive, it always unleashes new energies.
Second, Jesus consistently affirmed heaven as a real place, space, and dimension of God’s creation, where God’s will and only God’s will is done. Heaven is that realm where things are as God intends them to be.
This God disrupts the familiarity of the story by interrupting the sacrifice. Picture an early audience gasping. What? This God stopped the sacrifice? The gods don’t do that! Second, the God in this story provides. Worship and sacrifice was about you giving to the gods. This story is about this God giving to Abraham. A God who does the giving? A God who does the providing?
God is in the best, and also the worst. God is in the presence, and also in the absence. God is in the power, and also in the powerlessness.
To name is to order, to participate, to partner with God in taking the world somewhere.
Being a Christian then is more about celebrating mystery than conquering it.
The Bible was written by Jewish people who belonged to a Jewish minority living under the oppression of a succession of massive military superpowers who had conquered them: The Egyptians, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans. These.
You start with your 1 and then you suspend judgment on what you’re doing, because you don’t know what you have when you start. When you are constantly judging what you’re doing, you aren’t here. You aren’t present. You are standing outside of your life, looking in, observing. The time for judgement will come at some point, but in the moment, you have only the 1. And then the 2. And then the 3...
Can your story be retold? Can all of the various things that have happened to you and the things you have done you’d prefer to never think about again and the embarrassing parts and the painful parts – can all of it be retold in such a way that the worst parts become the most powerful, poignant parts?
Gospel is the announcement of who God insists you are. You’re a child of God, not because of how great you are but because God has all kinds of kids and you’re one of them.