Penitent Disciple

I can be a pretty effective convincer of myself. As I’ve gotten older, and especially as I’ve been trying to make a more conscious effort to recognize, and submit to, the will of God, I’ve discovered that I’m really good at rationalizing my own thoughts and desires. Without much effort, I can come up with a list as long as my arm for reasons I “need” this or “deserve” that, and for why my opinions and wisdom are just as good as – if not better than – God’s.

This impulse, of course, goes back to the very first days of recorded history. It’s the original sin. “Here, eat this fruit, and then you can be like God. You don’t need to answer to anybody. You can be just as smart, just as wise”.

Because I’m all too familiar with the Kingdom of Me, something jumped out when reading an article on the website of the Kansas City Star about the recent disputes within the United Methodist Church over the marriage and ordination of practicing gays, lesbians, trans, etc. folks by the denomination. The largest church in the entire Methodist denomination, the Church of the Resurrection, is located in the K. C. metro, and its pastor, Adam Hamilton – who is in favor of conducting marriages for and ordaining practicing homosexuals – is considering pulling his church out of the denomination after the denomination’s recent (very close) vote to keep to a traditional view of marriage and sexuality. So this is a fairly big local story on the religion beat.

While reading the story in the Kansas City Star, there was a quote from a woman named Cheri Jones, a lesbian and former Church of the Resurrection member who moved to Florida in 2007: “It’s been tough to find a church that won’t go against me,” she said.

A church that won’t go against me. A church that will affirm me. A church that will conform to me.

One of the truths that has been driven home in my feeble attempts to be more faithful is that God didn’t establish His church to affirm me. In fact, one of the major characteristics of God’s church is this: It’s not about me. It’s about the will and purposes of God. I’m invited to accept the truths of the God as revealed in scripture, and I’m invited participate in what God is doing. But I don’t get to dictate the terms.

Yet this notion of answering to – of serving – an infinitely superior being (scripture regularly refers to Him as King) is increasingly unpalatable to a growing percentage of people who identify as Christians. A major denomination, at their most recent denominational gathering, advanced the idea of a “kin-dom” rather than a “kingdom” to describe the church. They want to “critique the idea of kingdom as a top-down monarchy” and “reimagine it as kin-dom, a more horizontal structure of power”. This language suggests that they find the notion of a King to whom they must answer, and a Kingdom in which they’re not their own rulers (or at least co-rulers), to be preposterous, and just plain distasteful.

It’s the original sin, revisited for the zillionth time. And – as always – it will really, really not end well.

Look, I get the allure of “me”. But my own desires should not – and cannot – be my guide and measure if I truly want to follow Jesus. I’ve got to defer to God’s truth as revealed in scripture – even the parts of scripture that I don’t “like” – in all things. And I’ll admit that sometimes – from my tiny, limited perspective – that sucks. But the word of God demands it of those who would follow. Not suggests. Demands.

Pushing back against the impulse of “me” is a constant battle. It involves a daily, hourly dying to myself. Often I’m not very good at it. And the self – at least my self – definitely does not want to die. It wants to assert its own feelings, its own opinions, its own claims of sovereignty. But it has no such claims. I am not my own. I was bought with a price. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).

I’m called to lay my life – my thoughts, feelings, opinions, desires – at the foot of the cross. I’m called to surrender them all, to allow God to refine them – and at times destroy them – in the fire of His Truth, and then to follow the thoughts, feelings, opinions, and desires He gives back to me, trusting in His power to help me do it. Increasingly, that will probably put me out of step with the culture. And no doubt I’ll still slip back into asserting my own sovereignty on a regular basis. But if I’m vigilant on my end, I can trust God to remain faithful on His end.

It’s not about me.

You remember the old puzzle as to whether the owl came from the egg or the egg from the owl. The modern acquiescence in universal evolutionism is a kind of optical illusion, produced by attending exclusively to the owl’s emergence from the egg. We are taught from childhood to notice how the perfect oak grows from the acorn and to forget that the acorn itself was dropped by a perfect oak. We are reminded constantly that the adult human being was an embryo, never that the life of the embryo came from two adult human beings. We love to notice that the express engine of today is the descendant of the “Rocket”; we do not equally remember that the “Rocket” springs not from some even more rudimentary engine, but from something much more perfect and complicated than itself – namely, a man of genius. The obviousness or naturalness which most people seem to find in the idea of emergent evolution thus seems to be a pure hallucination.

On these grounds and others like them one is driven to think that whatever else may be true, the popular scientific cosmology at any rate is certainly not. I left that ship not at the call of poetry but because I thought it could not keep afloat. Something like philosophical idealism or Theism must, at the very worst, be less untrue than that. And idealism turned out, when you took it seriously, to be disguised Theism. And once you accepted Theism you could not ignore the claims of Christ. And when you examined them it appeared to me that you could adopt no middle position. Either he was a lunatic, or God. And He was not a lunatic.

I was taught at school, when I had done a sum, to “prove my answer”. The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonising it with some particular truths which are imbedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason is prior to matter and that the light of that primal Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams: I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner: I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world: the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific point of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else. – ‘The Weight of Glory’