A Picture of Godliness

While I was in Bangladesh, my Grandmother, Concordia Munro Searle, passed away. She was 94, and though her mind was sharp, her body was tired. As one of my cousins put it, from where Grandma Connie stood, it was a short walk to heaven. I’m very happy for her. She was always a person who was full of wonder—always spotting something interesting in life—kind of a smart girlish inquisitive quality. I can see her wandering around heaven, enjoying a nice surpise every minute and delighting in the company of all those interesting people—especially the Lord himself, of course.

So I’m happy for Grandma Connie. But I find that whenever I think of her, and I’m thinking of her a lot these days, a very deep sadness comes over me. Without her, the world is a little harder, a little more mechanical, a little more cynical and heartless and strained. I feel like everyone needs to find a good coat.

I have two authoritative sources for understanding the fruit of the Spirit. First there’s Paul’s letter to the Galatians, chapter 5, vs. 22 & 23: “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”My second source is the Christlike personality of my Grandma Connie. She truly personified all of these qualities. And I’m not saying this because she was my Grandma and was always nice to me. I honestly think she was just as nice to total strangers as she was to me. No, she had the kind of Christlikeness that goes way beyond nice. Real kindness is always better than niceness.

You see, the thing is, Grandma Connie lived in such a way that there was no doubt that her life was rooted in the grace of God. She loved because He first loved. Her life is how I know He’s real.

Driving me home from the ranch one Sunday night when I was 10 years old, Grandma took ten minutes to share with me the struggle she had to depend on the Lord rather than on her own strength, like starting over every day. That casual conversation has haunted and sustained me ever since.

It was hard to be so far away when Grandma died, but it was comforting to me to know that she would have loved what I was doing—seeing a new and interesting place, meeting new and interesting people, and talking to them about the love of God in Christ.

 

Why I Like Surfing Movies

The photo below was clipped from my favorite surfing documentary film, “Riding Giants.” What it shows is a guy deep inside the tube of a giant wave. The film was shot from inside the wave! I love the way the cut of his board and his hand create a candy-cane swirl on the inside of the wave. If you think this is cool, you should see it in full motion.

 

At some point, all surfing movies get around to talking about how surfing is a “spiritual experience.” I believe surfers when they say this, though I’m also quite sure that they have pretty much no idea just how spiritual it is or just how it is spiritual. But I suspect that some day 1500 years from now, when we are living in our resurrected bodies on the resurrected earth, there will be a lot of surfing going on.

A few weeks back, I wrote about how watching sand fall through an hourglass might be a whole different sort of experience if we knew a lot more about what was going on. I think a similar thing is going on when people surf and have such a level of “fun” that they begin to see it as actually important–even spiritual. They are wholly engaged with God’s created order, and they are developing unspeakable knowledge of it. They “read” the waves and connect with the power of the waves–a power that can either transport them or crush them on the rocks. Though they normally don’t identify the voice as his, surfers have their ears up against God’s megaphone called nature.

What great surfers do has a lot of metaphorical value in thinking about what the Orthodox Church calls “true theology.” True theology is not the development of derivative doctrinal systems. True theology is knowing God. True theology is real personal engagement with the self-revealing God. I believe we are brushing up against him all the time, in many ways and in many places. His image, for example, is reflected in the face of every human being we encounter. We are often like surfers, enjoying the sound of his voice and not identifying it as his–not giving him proper credit. This is, of course, the great idolatry of the first chapter of Romans.

The key that determines whether I will be transported or crushed is this: Will I just enjoy listening to the sound of his voice, or will I pay attention to what he says? Will I recognize the voice as none other than that of Jesus Christ?

Well, that’s one of the reasons I like surfing movies. There are many others–and yes, Polanyi is involved. Perhaps another time.

(By the way, it is a true testimony of my love for my Church here in Nashville that I turned down an opportunity to serve in one located in Honolulu).

 

Watching Grass Grow

A couple of pastors were working on a computer presentation recently and found themselves spending (wasting) a bit of time staring at the little hourglass cursor while the computer was caught in some eternal loop of logic. One of the pastor’s said, “When we get to heaven, I don’t think we’ll spend any time staring at hourglasses.”

“That’s true,” the other replied, “unless maybe we’ll understand the physics involved well enough to make the experience meaningful.”

Perhaps the things around us are not as trivial as we think. Maybe what makes certain things seem like a “waste” of time is really a problem of perspective or knowledge. The revelation of Creation is deep and multileveled, and we humans don’t see the hand of the Creator in it simply because we lack the faith to look. We breathe God’s air as though it belongs to us, and this trivializes all the miracles involved.

 

Spiritual Growth

Have you ever thought about what it means to grow spiritually? I’ve become convinced that the way many of my Christian friends think of growth is really more like shrinkage or confinement. Our purpose often seems to be increasing specificity. In the process, we make decisions that confine us. For example, we decide whether we believe in infant baptism, or in the rapture. Or we commit to Calvinism over Arminianism. Or we develop a conviction about the appropriateness of any number of gray issues like drinking, dancing, dating, daily Bible reading, etc. There are whole groups of Christians who still think that long hair (or an earring) on a man or short hair (or make-up or pants) on a woman are bad—perhaps even sinful. To be sure, those groups are a bit extreme, but as I look around, I see that even if we don’t go that far, we think of Spiritual growth as the development of and compliance with an increasingly particular set of doctrinal and behavioral standards.

My problem with this is not that it’s wrong to have a well thought out theology or a commitment to behavioral holiness. It is, however, mistaken to think of those as the sole parameters of the spiritual life. When we do, we end up drawing the parameters tighter and tighter. Using the word “growth” to describe this is something of a misnomer.
The solution to this “problem” is to remember—and prioritize—the personal and relational aspect of spiritual growth. In other words, I view my growth as greater and greater personal interaction or depth of fellowship with God or with other people or with creation. Let me illustrate. When I learned to drive a car, I seriously expanded my capacity to interact personally with the world around me. I began to take up more space in the world—I grew. In a very similar way, if I get to know you well, I can begin to understand and interact with the world from your perspective to some degree. You—or your thoughts and feelings—become like a car I can drive around and get a bigger view of things. By knowing you, my horizons are expanded.

Jesus defined eternal life as knowing God (John 17:3). “Knowing” in this case is personal and interactive, not just cognitive and propositional. If I keep this in mind, I will see spiritual growth as being more and more widely traveled in the personality of God. Then I can put my refined theology and careful obedience in their proper place. They are like cars I can drive around to be more engaged with God. Jesus said as much when he said, “He who has my commandments and keeps them; he is the one who loves me; and he who loves Me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.”

 

A Good Saturday Morning

I spent this morning with two of life’s great pleasures, a great cup of coffee and a really good book. The coffee was Kenyan Kiaguthu Peaberry roasted to the City+ level. Mmmm. The only way to get really good coffee is to roast it yourself, which I’ve been doing for a couple years now. I had roasted some of this Kenyan bean before, but I think I overcooked it. This batch was much better.

The book is called Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt & Certainty in Christian Discipleship by Lesslie Newbigin. If you know me, you’ve heard me talk about Michael Polanyi, the 20^th century scientist and philosopher whose work was the subject of my thesis. Newbigin’s book is a great quick reference for the application of Polanyi’s thought to the Christian life, and I highly recommend it. It’s only 105 pages and is written in a very accessible style. I read the whole thing this morning.
If you’re curious about how Christian thought fits (or doesn’t fit, as Newbigin shows) into classical, modern, or post-modern ideas about knowledge, you should read this book. If you’re one of those young evangelicals that is disenchanted with the hyper-rationalistic hyper-individualistic concepts of Christianity, you should read this book. If you want to figure out whether truth is objective or subjective, you should read this book. If you want to know what is really wrong with fundamentalism or with liberalism (and you won’t find it in what they say about each other), you should read this book.
Here’s a quote to give you the flavor:

“The human person is not a mind attached to a body but a single psychosomatic being. The implication of this, of course, is that the gospel does not become public truth for a society by being propogated as a theory or as a worldview and certainly not as a religion. It can become public truth only insofar as it is embodied in a society (the church) which is both “abiding in” Christ and engaged in the life of the world.”

A few weeks back, my friend Jon (who also introduced me to home roasted coffee) wrote an interesting piece for his blog about a recent trend among young evangelicals in which many are departing to more liturgical versions of Church, especially various Eastern forms (by the way, I think the Emergent Church is sort of a wimpy American-consumer version of the same trend). It’s all a sort of pre-modern postmodernism. If we all read Polanyi (or Newbigin’s short version of Polanyi), this trend would evaporate.

By the way, I FINISHED my thesis last week, and after a very helpful proofread from my English professor friend Bob, it has now been shipped to the seminary! I wish I had read Newbigin’s book at the beginning of the process. It is chock full of pithy Polanyian language.