His Vigorous Heart

A while ago , I said I would think about starting a series sharing some of the more controversial tidbits from my personal musings. Because my recent Easter reflection  still won't leave my brain, I decided to go ahead and start round 2 of this series. (Y'know...only four years later.) — We think there’s a great big barrier between us and God, but it doesn’t exist. We think our sin separates us from Him. But even in Genesis, when God knew Adam and Eve had sinned, He still chose to go walk in the garden in the cool of the day to be with them. Yet it was *Adam and Eve* who hid themselves from God, not God who hid Himself from Adam and Eve’s sin. — We were taught somewhere along the way that God can’t stand to be in the presence of sin. But Jesus—who was God—regularly broke bread with lepers and prostitutes and tax collectors and sinners. That’s one of the main reasons that the Pharisees tried to prove he *couldn’t* be the son of God. Would God really commune with these sorts of p...

It’s that time of year again: the time I least like being a Christian. Because when it comes to Easter, I really think we’ve gotten the story wrong. (Which is bad, because if we get *this* story wrong, then we’re bound to get a lot of other things about our faith wrong, as well). I saw a quote the other day that went something like this: “What sort of predicament are we in that we should require the crucifixion of the son of God [to save us]?” (The quote then goes on to describe how horrible the suffering of crucifixion is, and how it was designed to make the victim subhuman, etc etc. The point being—I assume—that humans must be truly depraved and wicked if it required a sacrifice of that level to redeem us. The magnitude of a crucifixion sentence should make us somberly consider the ramifications of our depth of evil. We must be well and truly effed on an existential level if this is our only way out). But that assumes there’s a punishment mindset behind this whole story. That assume...

It's been a minute since my last blog post, so how's this for a kick-off sentence: 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. 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’...

Easter. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the colorful candy, the whimsy of dyed eggs, the thrill of the hunt. As I grew older, I learned the story of the God who became man, who loved us so much that he died in our place. They call it the most beautiful story ever told. But as I got older still, I began to question that narrative. Because no matter how I tried to contort my brain, I couldn’t get that to align with the rest of the Bible story. When I read the teachings of Jesus, I saw him proclaiming a God who had been completely misunderstood by humans. “You have heard it said this...” he would say, and then he would flip the common understanding completely upside down. Jesus taught about forgiveness, non-violence, peace, love, mercy, and grace, and then said that “if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” (And frankly, it was precisely this subversive teaching that made the religious people conspire to kill him.) And so when Christian churches tell the Easter story, I cring...

Grace: (n) : The free and unmerited favor of God Can we talk about grace for a second? I feel like this has been the year that this concept has been thrown wide open for me, and it’s absolutely blowing me away. Grace isn’t conditional. That might seem obvious, because it’s in the very definition of the term, but somehow it’s sneaked into our doctrinal understandings that we somehow have to earn it. As if there was something we could do to make ourselves worthy of God’s goodness and love and compassion (and even more insidiously, as if we were UN worthy of it in the first place). (Yes, sin exists. Yes, we are capable of great evil. I’m not denying that. Anyone who looks at humans can tell that we are clearly broken in the ways we perpetuate pain and chaos in the world. But the story of creation doesn’t begin in chapter 3 of Genesis; it begins in chapters 1 and 2, where God creates women and men in His own image and calls them good. No matter how much mud and filth we roll around ...