Pinning the Butterfly
If the person you were five years ago doesn’t consider the person you are right now some sort of heretic, then you aren’t growing.
Your faith right now has boundaries. Borders. An edge. If that edge is in the same spot a year from now, you aren’t learning, you aren’t growing, you aren’t changing. You’re stagnating.
Some say that God is an ocean and our brains are a soda can trying to scoop Him up. But if you’re sitting here with the same canful of ocean water that you started with, you’re missing out on a whole lot of God.
(And as my friend Sam Van Eman likes to say: “You can’t afford to stay at your current maturity level.”)
At best, the tabernacle is meant to be a place that shows us and reminds us and re-molds us into people of God. But too often we make tabernacles an end in and of themselves, instead of the tool it was meant to be.
The Bible is another obvious example of this. It is a signpost, a massive finger pointing in the direction of the Divine, revealing to us what God is like. But for many Christians, we like to latch onto it instead of God, because words—unlike the Divine—are so easy to grasp. In the words of Scott Erickson, "Talking about the Bible with certainty feels rational. Talking about God with certainty feels laughable."
It’s like worshiping the moon for its light and ignoring the Sun as the true Source.
Instead of following where it’s pointing—where it's going—we like to settle down and build a temple around where the Spirit is, walling it up as if we could contain it any more than we could water through our fingers, trying to set boundaries and categorize the Divine and wrap it all up in a tidy little box of our own comprehension.
In some ways, I think even the religion of Christianity itself can fall into this trip. There’s so much culture, so many unspoken rules, do's and don’ts, assumptions, ways of carrying ourselves that all—ultimately—get in the way and interfere with what God is actually trying to do in our lives and in our world.
God is alive. He’s really, really big. He’s also good—gooder-er than we even want or dare to believe. That means He can’t be confined within walls, or to a book, or to a certain particular understanding or perspective; oceans and soda cans, right? God is always on the move, outside our boundaries, beyond our borders. The Divine is restoring all things, making rivers in the wasteland, and has asked us to join Him in the dance. I’d hate to miss it because I was looking the wrong direction. I’d hate to miss it because I thought it was already here within my walls and I was too busy building a temple.
Instead, I want to pitch a tent at the feet of God and join Him where He's going and in the work that He’s doing. I want to build an altar to share the good news of what happened here, and maybe a cairn to memorialize it, but then I want to be back on the road ready to pitch a new tent wherever God ends up next.
It’s a homeless, barefoot kind of spirituality. But isn’t that... kind of exactly like Jesus?
———
The church isn’t Christ. The Bible isn’t Christ. Christianity isn’t Christ. They all *point to* Christ.
Instead, we have a habit of making these things sacred, and therefore missing out on the Truth that actually *is* sacred.
Maybe that’s why Jesus chose to teach in parables, and why He usually answered questions with more questions. Because parables and questions are slippery. They’re hard to pin down. They have facets, angles, and depth. We can’t simply memorialize a single aspect of it, to tabernacle it, wall it off, and make it sacred. We have to work at it and dig and uncover and reveal the mystery that is hidden within.
Mysterious. Unknown. Hidden in plain sight. This is how Jesus describes the nature of the Divine, and what it looks like to live in the Kingdom of Heaven.
So anything that doesn’t leave room for the same sense of Mystery that Jesus teaches, doesn’t actually have much in common with Jesus.
Rules and traditions and laws and equations and formulas and patterns and transactions and methods and rituals; Jesus had a lot of harsh things to say about the religious people who had made these things their Sacred Source and missed the Divine Source that these tools are supposed to point to.
As soon as you pin down a butterfly, it ceases to be that which makes a butterfly a butterfly. (Or, as this catchy song says: "Oh, you're doing it wrong, dissecting the bird trying to find the song.")
Locking up the truth in a single expression, a single language, a single cultural perspective, a single interpretation…that’s pinning down the butterfly and dissecting the bird. That’s alienating whole swaths of people (*see note) who won’t resonate with that imagery. Making the gospel message graspable and "sacred" is the very thing that prevents it from actually growing and taking root in the world. There’s no life or magic in it anymore; no power.
Perhaps the miraculous, transforming power of encountering the Truth can only happen when we sit with the mystery and chew on the unknown, turning the gem to examine its many facets, and allow the Spirit we encounter behind and through the metaphors to change us and shape us and renew us.
I wonder if today we speak with too many certainties about our faith. This is right and this is wrong. This is in and this is out. This is what the parable means. This is the correct interpretation. This is the boundary.
All nails in the butterfly.
That’s the spirituality I want to embody. That’s the image of the Divine that I think Jesus is pointing us to.
Let me unpack that a bit.
Your faith right now has boundaries. Borders. An edge. If that edge is in the same spot a year from now, you aren’t learning, you aren’t growing, you aren’t changing. You’re stagnating.
Some say that God is an ocean and our brains are a soda can trying to scoop Him up. But if you’re sitting here with the same canful of ocean water that you started with, you’re missing out on a whole lot of God.
(And as my friend Sam Van Eman likes to say: “You can’t afford to stay at your current maturity level.”)
If your boundary is growing, then at some point you're going to include ideas and concepts about God that you didn't used to believe. If you had built a wall around your border, you're just going to have to knock it down.
That’s why I’m frustrated with the idea of building tabernacles, and I’m much more enamored with the idea of pitching tents.
To build a tabernacle is to say: “This is it. I will confine the boundaries of my faith to these four walls. Everything there is to know about God can be found right here.” There’s an admirable certainty to it, for sure, but when it comes to understanding the Ocean of the Divine, that same certainty comes across as laughably naïve—or worse, foolishly arrogant.
That’s why I’m frustrated with the idea of building tabernacles, and I’m much more enamored with the idea of pitching tents.
To build a tabernacle is to say: “This is it. I will confine the boundaries of my faith to these four walls. Everything there is to know about God can be found right here.” There’s an admirable certainty to it, for sure, but when it comes to understanding the Ocean of the Divine, that same certainty comes across as laughably naïve—or worse, foolishly arrogant.
At best, the tabernacle is meant to be a place that shows us and reminds us and re-molds us into people of God. But too often we make tabernacles an end in and of themselves, instead of the tool it was meant to be.
The Bible is another obvious example of this. It is a signpost, a massive finger pointing in the direction of the Divine, revealing to us what God is like. But for many Christians, we like to latch onto it instead of God, because words—unlike the Divine—are so easy to grasp. In the words of Scott Erickson, "Talking about the Bible with certainty feels rational. Talking about God with certainty feels laughable."
It’s like worshiping the moon for its light and ignoring the Sun as the true Source.
Instead of following where it’s pointing—where it's going—we like to settle down and build a temple around where the Spirit is, walling it up as if we could contain it any more than we could water through our fingers, trying to set boundaries and categorize the Divine and wrap it all up in a tidy little box of our own comprehension.
In some ways, I think even the religion of Christianity itself can fall into this trip. There’s so much culture, so many unspoken rules, do's and don’ts, assumptions, ways of carrying ourselves that all—ultimately—get in the way and interfere with what God is actually trying to do in our lives and in our world.
God is alive. He’s really, really big. He’s also good—gooder-er than we even want or dare to believe. That means He can’t be confined within walls, or to a book, or to a certain particular understanding or perspective; oceans and soda cans, right? God is always on the move, outside our boundaries, beyond our borders. The Divine is restoring all things, making rivers in the wasteland, and has asked us to join Him in the dance. I’d hate to miss it because I was looking the wrong direction. I’d hate to miss it because I thought it was already here within my walls and I was too busy building a temple.
Instead, I want to pitch a tent at the feet of God and join Him where He's going and in the work that He’s doing. I want to build an altar to share the good news of what happened here, and maybe a cairn to memorialize it, but then I want to be back on the road ready to pitch a new tent wherever God ends up next.
It’s a homeless, barefoot kind of spirituality. But isn’t that... kind of exactly like Jesus?
———
The church isn’t Christ. The Bible isn’t Christ. Christianity isn’t Christ. They all *point to* Christ.
Instead, we have a habit of making these things sacred, and therefore missing out on the Truth that actually *is* sacred.
Maybe that’s why Jesus chose to teach in parables, and why He usually answered questions with more questions. Because parables and questions are slippery. They’re hard to pin down. They have facets, angles, and depth. We can’t simply memorialize a single aspect of it, to tabernacle it, wall it off, and make it sacred. We have to work at it and dig and uncover and reveal the mystery that is hidden within.
Mysterious. Unknown. Hidden in plain sight. This is how Jesus describes the nature of the Divine, and what it looks like to live in the Kingdom of Heaven.
So anything that doesn’t leave room for the same sense of Mystery that Jesus teaches, doesn’t actually have much in common with Jesus.
Rules and traditions and laws and equations and formulas and patterns and transactions and methods and rituals; Jesus had a lot of harsh things to say about the religious people who had made these things their Sacred Source and missed the Divine Source that these tools are supposed to point to.
As soon as you pin down a butterfly, it ceases to be that which makes a butterfly a butterfly. (Or, as this catchy song says: "Oh, you're doing it wrong, dissecting the bird trying to find the song.")
Locking up the truth in a single expression, a single language, a single cultural perspective, a single interpretation…that’s pinning down the butterfly and dissecting the bird. That’s alienating whole swaths of people (*see note) who won’t resonate with that imagery. Making the gospel message graspable and "sacred" is the very thing that prevents it from actually growing and taking root in the world. There’s no life or magic in it anymore; no power.
Perhaps the miraculous, transforming power of encountering the Truth can only happen when we sit with the mystery and chew on the unknown, turning the gem to examine its many facets, and allow the Spirit we encounter behind and through the metaphors to change us and shape us and renew us.
I wonder if today we speak with too many certainties about our faith. This is right and this is wrong. This is in and this is out. This is what the parable means. This is the correct interpretation. This is the boundary.
This.
This.
This.
All nails in the butterfly.
What if, instead, we included a sense of wonder in our worship? A sense of humility? A freedom to say “I don’t know; I’m still letting that story work on me.” (What modern American Christianity consistently seems to forget about the Jesus story is that it wasn’t the sinful worldly riffraff that had a problem with Jesus and wanted Him dead; it was the religious folks—the ones who thought they were already right, and whose structures Jesus completely shattered.)
What if we allowed ourselves to believe that God is working beyond the boundaries we’ve created for Him? What if His Spirit is bigger than the sum of our religious system has led us to believe? What if there’s more to the butterfly than all the things we’ve dissected out of it? What if this thing is actually supposed to *fly*?
That’s the spirituality I want to embody. That’s the image of the Divine that I think Jesus is pointing us to.
Won't you join me?
———
*Note:
I just got back from visiting the Navajo Nation with a group of gap year students that I help mentor.
I always love this trip, because it's an opportunity to explore culture from an outsiders' lens—and it reminds me of my own study abroad experience in Australia/New Zealand and our education of the Aboriginal and Maori people.
I remember one night, the chief of the village we were staying in asked us this question in the form of a parable:
"Imagine that God gave humanity the Truth of Jesus Christ, and He gave it to us as an apple. Some people took the apple, tossed it in a press, and made apple cider. Others sprinkled it with cinnamon and sugar and baked it into an apple pie. Still others chopped it up with a bunch of other fruit and made it a fruit salad. Is God frustrated because no one accepted the apple just as it was in its original form? Or is He satisfied with all of these versions because they all contain the apple within them?"
Oof. What a question.
I bring it up here, though, because I think it plays into this idea of certainty vs mystery, of static vs living truth.
Nobody thinks they have an accent until they are around people who don't share that dialect; and likewise, no one thinks they have a culture until they are no longer swimming in it.
As a Shame-based and Fear-based culture, many Native people don't resonate with a lot of our Western imagery of Law and Guilt; these are the flavors through which we experience the apple, and who's to say that our flavor is the best way? In fact, weren't the early scriptures themselves written in a variety of differing Hebraic, Aramaic, Roman, and near-Eastern contexts? What sorts of flavors might they bring?
Presenting applesauce to a person unfamiliar with it is not going to introduce them to the apple; they're going to be overwhelmed and overpowered by all the cinnamon and sugar. But if we discover their palate and how they understand the world, we can make them a dish where they can appreciate the fullness of an apple.
In the same way, presenting our tabernacled, static, sacred, easily-grasped Western cultural and religious certainties to a Native person is not going to introduce them to the Wonder and Mystery of Jesus Christ. They'll be too turned off by the whiteness of it all, for lack of a better description.
Instead, there must be a way to translate the apple, to reveal the Truth behind our culturally-biased presentation of it.
In other words, Truth shouldn't have an accent. Which is the same as saying it should have every accent, and should speak every language. Truth should be recognizable to anyone in any culture, every tribe and every tongue.
Early Christian missionaries tried to "kill the Indian, save the man," assimilating them into our culture in the process of telling them about Christ. But all that accomplished was genocide, and the remaining survivors of those people groups not wanting anything to do with Christianity.
There must be a better way. Surely God is bigger than our soda can of understanding. Maybe in His grace there's a canful of ocean water that will make sense to Native people, even if it doesn't make sense to us.
Peace,
--JD
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