Happy Pentecost: On The Flame of Incandescent Terror

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare 

The one discharge from sin and error

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name 

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire

"Little Gidding"-- T.S. Eliot

It's his Pentecost poem. Well, Pentecost is nearly over, I suppose, although I think you can celebrate any holiday in the church year anytime you like. I listen to my religious Christmas Pandora station year-round. And every time we recall Jesus' saving death and resurrection, we celebrate Good Friday and Easter

anew. Sundays themselves are said to be little Easters.

This poem points to the terror of Pentecost, something that gets glossed over by our calm, sleepy worship. The Holy Spirit "breaks" the air in "terror." Our ultimate fate depends upon the Holy Spirit-- our "only hope," demanding we choose "fire" or fire." Pentecost confronts us with a choice. Which fire do we choose-- the flames of the Spirit or the flames of hell? Either way, we are ultimately consumed.

If Today Was Not An Endless Highway

As an English major and critical, occasionally cranky thinker, I think it's important to think about the language we use. Especially when talking about God and the spiritual life. Our language affects us in so many powerful, subconscious ways. Phrases and metaphors of unclarity or dubious truth need to be rejected or clarified. I'd like to suggest a metaphor frequently used by many, myself included, needs to be rethought: the idea of spirituality as a linear path.
The phrases "journey"; "farther"; "advanced"; and "path," in reference to the life of the soul, are probably not good. ("Journey" is okay as a verb, I think.) If the Christian life is a path, it is possible to easily compare spiritual maturity and say, Well, I'm farther down the path than you are. But spiritual growth just doesn't work that way. I might pray more than somebody else does. But that somebody might give more sacrificially to the needy than I do. Who's more spiritually advanced? I don't know. Did you factor in our different backgrounds and present challenges and blessings? I don't think anybody can answer these sorts of questions. We all pale before the radiant righteousness of Jesus Christ.
Generally people who use these path analogies aren't trying to compare people. But that language, especially in our hyper-competitive culture, makes comparison possible, at least in the back of our minds.
"Path" language also perpetuates the fallacy that God has one life plan picked out just for us. Unfortunately, the Bible never says, "I will be with you, and show you exactly what major, career, car, and sandwich to pick." Not to say God doesn't provide guidance. He does, all the time. But lots of times he doesn't, and we have no biblical evidence for saying God has specific destinies chosen for us. That's too easy. It eliminates the struggle that is faith, the intimacy of prayers, questions, and mistakes. But yes, I would love it if God had an itinerary for the rest of my years!
Driving along the interstate is boring, solitary, and uneventful. These are the implications of calling the Christian life a path, too. In reality, we are supposed to journey (remember, I said as a verb it's fine!) in community. And it's supposed to be overwhelmingly exciting! The exhilaration of bringing somebody one inch closer to Christ, the ecstasy of praise, the anguish of suffering beside people you love... Not boring. Not one bit. Okay, sometimes when you're waiting around for God that's boring, but I think it's better described as annoying, like when the person you're meeting is late and you're tapping your feet and wondering if they'll ever get here. Actually, normally I'm the person who is late. But I digress.
Today I heard a pretty good sermon about the Transfiguration. It talked about the mountains and valleys in life. I think those are good spiritual analogies, especially because they are biblical and intuitively correct. (A Wesleyan sermon, built from Scripture and experience!) But, if you read into these images the idea of a path-- determined, straight, perfect-- things get screwy. 
I think of all the times I've missed turns, doubled back, needed a detour. I'm not on a path. This is not an endless highway. I am going on to perfection, which is my destiny as a believer in Jesus, becoming holy as he is holy, fully reconciled to God, to the world, to myself, when he comes again. 

The Great Dane Gives Birth

Soren Kierkegaard was a pretty cool guy. Today I think he would be diagnosed with some kind of mental disorder. But aren't we all a little bit crazy?
He was a great philosopher and theologian in Denmark in the 1800s, I think. Good old Soren wrote piercing rebukes of the lukewarm European church, of the sinful, impotent "Christendom." Fascinating stuff. And he wrestled so hard with his God. His diary compels and terrifies in its descriptions of incalculable suffering. 
He wrote, "To love God and to be loved by God is to suffer." The depth of this truth grows clearer as I grow older. If loving God is easy, we aren't doing it properly. If we aren't second-guessing, pushing through hurts, crying for the pain of the world... we're doing it wrong. Of course, Soren is being very one-sided here. To love God is not constant suffering. If it were, nobody could bear it. The same God who draws us to the cross raises us from the dead, and tells us the good news ahead of time. 
I feel I've earned the right to call old Soren by his first name. I think I know him pretty well.
"If Christianity were truthfully presented as suffering, ever greater as one advances further in it:doubt would be disarmed, and in any case there would have been no opportunity for being superior-- where it would have been a matter of avoiding pain." Yes. Doubt is a nice word for what happens when the living sacrifice keeps trying to crawl off the altar. A lot of the time, anyway. 
"O my God, it was thou who didst hold thy hand over me so that in the long hours of anguish I should not become guilty of procuring an abortion," Soren says, and I almost chuckle at the image of him, dark-haired, skinny, in Victorian garb, pregnant. But birth is like the great drama of faith, and all of us are in labor, in some stage. He has the faith to praise God who held his hand through it all. 

Jehovah buried,Satan dead

"Jehovah buried,Satan dead" by e.e. cummings

Jehovah buried,Satan dead

do fearers worship Much and Quick;

badness not being felt as bad,

itself thinks goodness what is meek;

obey says toc,submit says tic

Eternity's a Five Year Plan:

if Joy with Pain shall hang in hock

who dares to call himself a man?

go dreamless knaves on Shadows fed,

your Harry's Tom,your Tom is Dick;

while Gadgets murder squawk and add,

the cult of Same is all the chic;

by instruments,both span and spic,

are justly measured Spic and Span:

to kiss the mike if Jew turn kike

who dares to call himself a man?

loudly for Truth have liars pled,

their heels for Freedom slaves will click;

where Boobs are holy,poets mad,

illustrious punks of Progress shriek;

when Souls are outlawed,Hearts are sick,

Hearts being sick,Minds nothing can:

if Hate's a game and Love's a F---*

who dares to call himself a man?

King Christ this world is all aleak;

and lifepreservers there are none:

and waves which only He may walk

Who dares to call Himself a man

*That was my own edit; didn’t want bad words on my blog

My current favorite poem. It belongs in a sermon, the kind like lightening and thunder and cool, torrential, saving rain I pray one day to preach.

“Jehovah buried,Satan dead” is such a pithy yet complete summary of the gospel. Old Awful Jehovah—awful in Rudolf Otto’s sense of the numinous, of the sacred which fascinates us yet terrifies us—is buried. Jesus is fully God and fully human, and for that eternal moment of Good Friday, buried. And on its heels, bursting forth, with no space for a comma: Satan is dead!

But we worship Much and Quick, slavishly devoted to our computers, iPhones, microwave cooking. We conflate status quo with obedience to God, and like Soviet comrades under a Five Year Plan remain tethered to the great oppressive machinery of productivity, of busyness, for things which are not God’s things.

This is what man does. Who, then, dares call himself a man?

If we call Jews “kikes,” and only one Jew can save us…

We are all liars screaming for truth.

All slaves to sin, as Paul says, too.

Hate is our game.

We shriek in the name of Progress, not the coming kingdom, the only progress that will ever matter or endure.

We equate love with a bad word starting with F, most commonly thought of as happening in bathrooms and couches during raucous frat parties. “Love” that begins with that big F only seeks its own pleasure, and happens not just in frat parties but everywhere opposed to the extravagant, healing grace of Jesus Christ.

So we are, to use the technical theological term, screwed.

Yes, I know, I’m very punny.

King Christ this world is all aleak;

and lifepreservers there are none:

and waves which only He may walk

Who dares to call Himself a man

We are wretched, broken, illustrious punks of Progress. But King Christ dared to call himself one of us. Fittingly, this is the only stanza of hope, and Jesus is our only hope, the only one who can cross the stormy waves, the Atlantic oceans in our hearts, between one another, between what we are and what we are meant to be.

Yes, one day I’d like to preach with e.e. cummings. 

Parables of Kirksville

A girl, about four, runs out of her house wearing nothing but a diaper, surveys the street, sees me riding my bike, turns around, dashes back inside and slams the door.

A young man in a pink T-shirt is doing construction work on the corner of Normal and Franklin.

On my first day of work I steal a furtive glance at my boss, dash outside, get a Diet Mountain Dew out of the vending machine, tip-toe inside and throw the cool lime potion behind the filing cabinet for later. 

A man easily old enough to be my grandfather wears two cardigans and firmly clutches his Doritos as he waddles down the street fast as those arthritic legs will carry him.

A guy walks out of Baldwin with a sneaky grin, a messy haircut, and eyes that pierce like ice darts.

The weather turns from hot to chilly to snowy and back again, and nobody says a word but "Huh?"

A man in his seventies and a man in his eighties are drinking Dr. Pepper and Diet Mountain Dew, respectively, shooting the breeze, going from the price of a restored Ford Model-T to the price of life and death and the merits of a Do Not Resuscitate. 

There is an unredeemed scratcher in my purse right now.

A Consummation Devoutly To Be Wished

Like most people, I had to read Hamlet in high school. It's one of my favorite Shakespeare plays  because of the famous soliloquy: To be or not to be? Hamlet is contemplating suicide. He is stuck between life and death, compelled by that which he does not know and tormented by confusion. In other words, he is a college student. 

I haven't taken a look at Hamlet since senior year of high school, during the Great Snowpocalypse of 2011, actually. But there's one phrase from Hamlet's soliloquy that has been haunting me lately, "Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished."

Now, let me be 100% clear. Although I am writing about a suicidal guy's suicidal thoughts, I am not now, nor have ever been, suicidal. I still remember that dark year back in middle my father was in Iraq, my body, mind, and friends were changing more quickly than I could handle, and I sat around brooding a lot. There was in the news a girl my age who had killed herself because she was bullied on the Internet. After the news segment ended, my mother said quite sternly that if I ever did kill myself, she would never stop being angry at me and my brother, then four, would be damaged for life, unable to love or trust again. I knew then, though suicide and depression were romanticized in the angsty preteen culture to which I then belonged, that they are no laughing matter.

But to be a self, to be a thinking thing, is exhausting. My mind races and flies. I can sit at my desk for an hour and think of a hundred different things and feel that no time at all has passed, that I am racing down highways, and sometimes they look like I-44, I-70, I-5...

To be a feeling thing is exhausting, too. To feel you own raw wounds, to see the anguish around you and take it on, like a cross... C.S. Lewis wrote, "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, possibly broken." I read that quote first in the Barnes and Noble in Independence, Missouri, shortly after moving to Kansas City, and did I know then what God had in store for me? No. I had not yet begun to love in this way. Even now, I am sure I do not really understand, but I have come a long way on those highways. Grace has brought me safe thus far.

Freud was right about a few things, dead wrong about a few more things, and in the middle on the rest. (In my scholarly opinion, having taken one class on him!) He wrote about the id, ego, and superego, how our superego continually has to keep the ego in check. Don't think this, don't feel or say that, and the superego continually pushes the ego down, down. On this, he was right. Preserving the self you think other people want you to be is endlessly wearying. 
Hamlet is wrestling with a terrible uncertainty. I know what that's like. I think it's a universal human experience, to feel the same bundle of questions relentlessly claw at your mind. 
And so, with Hamlet, we whisper longingly, "To die, to sleep..." and so end the mental gymnastics. But how do we die without dying? If we believe life still has meaning, if our God-given survival instincts still teach us to cling ferociously to this worldly existence, if we believe Jesus Christ died to conquer death, we don't want to really die. We just want to cease existing as a self for a while. But how do we do that?
Hamlet says "Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished." We want to lose ourselves in deep consummation, in holy communion, with something else. The gospel promises us this sweet death of self. When Jesus says, "Those who lose their life for my sake will find it," this is partly what he means. When we are lost in the mission of Christ, there is no more worrying about maintaining a perfect self. The Spirit will move us onto perfection. The Spirit will resolve our uncertainty, and sanctify it. The Spirit will enter into our grief and make us one with Christ in his suffering through that grief. 
Mansur Al-Hallaj was a Muslim mystic who I studied in my Islam class. (Okay, okay, I had to Google the exact name.) He was focused on Tawhid, sacred unity with God, and caught up in trances, would say, "I am Al-Haaq" or "The Truth," an Islamic term for God. He talked about the Muslim mystic becoming like a moth drawn to the flame of God irresistibly and yet consumed. (And this was centuries before Otto talked about mysterium tramendum et fascinas, the terrifying and fascinating mystery that constitutes the sacred.) As a Wesleyan I believe in prevenient grace, that the Holy Spirit is active even in other religions, and this seems to me a prime example. We long to lose ourselves like a moth in the flame, long to feel there is nothing in us but God anymore. We yearn to say with Jesus, "I and my Father are one," and one day we will, because we are co-heirs with Christ. 
Can we experience it now? It's an already/not yet thing, I think. Not yet, not on this side of eternity, will we truly lose ourselves in God. But already we can go a long way. Already we can give up our lives by committing totally to Jesus Christ, to place our identity and purpose in God instead of building up ourselves. Often we focus on the sacrifice this entails, and rightly so. But it is also profoundly liberating. 
How else? We can pray, not by asking God for lots of things (although that's definitely a good thing to do-- after all, the Lord's Prayer says, "Give us this day our daily bread," quite petulantly, in fact), but by simply being with God. Sometimes, when I have had a very long week, I like to lay on the floor in my church and just do nothing. My brain starts racing, but I breathe deeply, feel the Holy Spirit filling up my lungs, and think about God's love enveloping me. I don't have to do anything to earn God's love. Just laying on the floor, he loves me infinitely more than I can imagine. And it's a sweet rest. Just as I am, just as I am, he loves me, and the me disappears before his greatness. I walk away strengthened to go do God's work. Contemplation and good works, works of piety and works of mercy, as Wesley would say, are both profoundly necessary. And in both, we achieve the consummation devoutly to be wished.
We can achieve the same trancelike state in other ways too. A youth pastor talked about how he loved shooting baskets in seminary, meditating on God's closeness, simply being with God. The same thing happens to me sometimes when I play badminton, or ride my bike, or have a friend braid my hair or give me a massage. Rest, God's rest.... 
I should add that my discovery of this consummation has been a great work of God's grace. When I read about contemplation first at about fourteen, I lit a candle (excited that I had been given candle privileges recently by my parents), sat on my bed, and expected some great enlightenment. But my mind just exploded and scattered and I felt nothing special. How slow of heart I was, and how patient of God, to slowly wean me off special feelings of spirituality to the meat of the word and of faith in the Holy Spirit whose wind I do not know but whose movement is always with me. 
And I have a long way to go. I am writing about this in part because I am in need of this consummation, to lay down for a while the relentless question-- what is my vocation?-- and give up my life in God. And God, in his grace, has lead me and will lead me still.  

When In Doubt, Sing A Charles Wesley Hymn

This Easter was beautiful and bizarre. So much that comes from God is. I heard a sermon that weekend that deeply offended me. The first thing that bothered me was the pastor preached on the walk to Emmaus, not, explicitly, the Resurrection. The Resurrection story is the foundation of our faith. It is at the very center of the Christian identity. And this was an Easter sermon!
But listening more closely, it became clear why the pastor could not preach the Resurrection that day. He was saying that Jesus heals us, takes our brokenness to make something beautiful, and that is the point of Easter. He even compared Jesus to Dr. Phil.
My Lord is not a TV doctor.
Easter is not about me.
Easter is not about Jesus healing me. To be sure, healing is part of Easter. But Easter is so, so much more. Easter means that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is victorious over death. It means that we need to fall on our knees-- together as a church, not just me in my special "healing"-- and worship our conquering King. 
Most theological questions can be addressed using Charles Wesley hymns. "Christ The Lord Is Risen Today" contained far, far more sound theology than the sermon I was hearing this weekend. Christ the Lord is risen today; Alleluia! First, seeing the empty tomb, we worship him. 
And we do it joyfully! There is no joy like the joy of Easter morning, sun shining, organ blaring, people on their feet, voices full and golden. Jesus is alive! Woo-hoo!
The next verse, quoting Paul and Isaiah, says, "Where, O Death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!" Easter means that death is conquered. When I die-- if I die before Jesus returns-- I will be safe with God, and upon Jesus' return resurrected together with the rest of the saints to new life. What a far greater promise than abstract emotional "healing."
The last verse says, "Ours the cross, the grave, the sky! Alleluia." Easter means that we must go to our own Good Fridays, take up the cross and deny ourselves, as Jesus says, but in so doing know there is an end, our redemption is coming! Every tear, every drop of sweat and blood, is rewarded by God in the end. We will be caught up in the air, as 1 Thessalonians says, not to be "raptured" but to watch God's new creation! Alleluia! Easter means I have hope when I suffer.
And that's part of why I was so offended by Easter as a promise of emotional healing. Did God heal Martin Luther's emotional wounds? Or John Wesley's? Or Kierkegaard? Or Mother Teresa, who labored in her dark night of the soul for fifty years without relief? Or Paul, who wrote 2 Corinthians "out of great distress and anguish of heart" out of love for the church, who "despaired of life itself," who said that he was being crucified daily for the sake of the Corinthians, back in 2 Corinthians, chapter 4? Or, shoot, mine?
Being a Christian is not easy. Being a pastor is not easy, either. It means riding the roller coaster Paul describes in 2 Corinthians, at one minute full of that great distress and the next full of "great confidence and pride" for the flock.
Something in me snapped, hearing that sermon. I felt inexplicable rage, and I said something to the pastor on my way out that I won't repeat here. It wasn't highly inappropriate; I didn't swear or yell. I just asked a question that I hope shamed him. 
I'm not saying I'm wise. Christ knows I have a lot to learn. But in that moment, I was mad as hell and just couldn't take it anymore, and I think God was, too. 
Hebrews says that our God is a consuming fire. Consumed, burning up, aflame, no longer I but Christ in me, us now, united in suffering...
It was a strange Easter. But I think it was a good one. And best of all, Christ is risen.
Christ is risen, indeed. 
Edit: Just want to make it crystal-clear that the person who preached this sermon is not in Kirksville, and who it was is quite irrelevant to what I am trying to do in this blog post.