Move Over, Bacon

This morning I read the account of Jesus casting demons into a herd of pigs. It was recorded by a first-century Jewish tax collector and it reveals something amazing and perplexing about Jesus.

When he arrived at the other side in the region of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men coming from the tombs met him. They were so violent that no one could pass that way. “What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?”

Some distance from them a large herd of pigs was feeding. The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.”

He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. Those tending the pigs ran off, went into the town and reported all this, including what had happened to the demon-possessed men. Then the whole town went out to meet Jesus. And when they saw him, they pleaded with him to leave their region.

The thing that struck me this morning about this story wasn't the exorcism or the gory scene of dozens of pigs splatting, splashing and drowning in the water. What struck me was what happened next. The very next verse says,

Jesus stepped into a boat, crossed over and came to his own town.

That's it? He sailed all the way across the Sea of Galilee and then turns right around and sails back because the pig farmer asked him to? Wouldn't you expect him to press a little? Shouldn't he explain how the loss of their pig rancher's herd is less important than the salvation of these men? After all, he went there to preach, right? His leaving means there are lots of people in that region who won't hear the gospel because the pig farmer told him to go. This isn't exactly "setting his face like flint" to bring his message to the Gadarenes.

Is Jesus really so passive that he abandons his crusade the first time he meets with a disapproving audience? Or is he really so cavalier with the souls of people as to give up on reaching them so quickly? What about his rights? Shouldn't he be allowed to speak and let the marketplace of ideas decide whether he's the messiah or a swine-hating Jew out to destroy the local economy?

Jesus, apparently, rejected all of those aphorisms and simply sailed back home.

Maybe he knew the outcome. Either by divine revelation or common sense, maybe he could tell that his message wouldn't be well received and to deliver it would be a waste of time. Or maybe the whole exercise was to make a point about the antithetical nature of capitalism and gospel community, or Jews versus Gentiles, or those rich in wealth versus poor in spirit. We don't know.

What we do know is that Jesus, in wisdom, humility, courage and faithfulness, made a decision to honor someone's request to their own detriment and others'. Jesus was willing to be rejected. He was willing to take "no" for an answer, even when doing so affected others unfairly. And he was willing to do so without bitterness or slander.

What do you think of that? Does that sound like the Jesus you know? Does it sound like Christians you know? What more can we learn from this story?

Reflections On Reflecting

I'm such a product of my environment. I think we all are. I've been catching up on Breaking Bad recently and suddenly chemistry seems really interesting. I know this is not true. I know that chemistry is not interesting. It is, in fact, the spawn of evil science professors looking for a way to send students back home to live in their parents' basements. But, as Jesse Pinkman might say, Mr. White gots me trippin' yo.

The same thing happens to me when I get into a good novel or start studying any compelling story. I'm prim and proper when I watch Downton Abbey, restless and cold when I read Hemingway.

In a way, my soul is like a computer. I was in high school when computers were like Michael Bay movies: big, dumb and clunky. I had classes in "computer" where we learned a programming language called Basic. The fundamental principle I remember from those classes is this: garbage in - garbage out. That was a mantra to remind us that computers just do what you tell them to do. The code has to be clear and clean. If you write code poorly, you get poor results. I know humans are infinitely more complex than the Apple IIe I learned Basic on, but in some ways, we're not so different.

That reminds me of another computer term: icon. The Septuagint calls humans "eikons of God". We are meant to reflect his glory. But we are free agent eikons; we reflect whatever shines on us. If we expose ourselves to the light of scripture, we reflect grace and truth in our relationships, our work, and our daydreams. If we expose ourselves to the travails of a cancer-ridden-chemistry-teacher-turned-drug-lord, we reflect something different.

There's a balance here, of course. We aren't called to abstain from culture. We aren't all called to be monks. But I have to remind myself that I am always reflecting something — always showing forth what shines on my soul.

A Swimmer Who Wants Freedom

I want my writing to improve, so this summer I've been doing little exercises, sort-of creative writing calisthenics. I've been reading about the elements of story and I realized that the only two things you need to get a story going are character and ambition. So I devised a drill. I wrote down as many characters as I could think of — a butcher, a mom, a CEO, a killer, a pirate, a doctor, etc. I filled a page with them. Then I did the same with ambitions — power, love, escape, rescue, pleasure, revenge. Now I just play "spin the topic wheel." I ask my kids to pick a number and then I write about the character and ambition associated with those numbers — a son who wants love, a pastor who wants rescue, a mountaineer who wants to kill, etc. 

This blog isn't normally about fiction, but I'm posting this as a way to improve my writing and invite feedback. I hope you enjoy a few of these installments. 

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He topped sixty seconds for the first time in middle school. He did it on a dare and he nearly passed out. In high school, it became a sort-of parlor trick. 

"Hey Jimmy! Do it in the lake!" 

"Hey Jimmy! Do it in this plastic bag so we know you're not faking." 

He did it every time because it meant prestige. It was a platform for getting dates. Of course, he swam too. He wasn't the strongest body on the swim team but his ability underwater was unmatched. But it wasn't the girls or the letter jackets that drove him to do it; it was freedom. 

Jimmy started holding his breath when he was six. That's when his mom stopped living. They didn't bury her until he was eleven, but by then she was a ghost. She had retreated from the land of the living via pills and People magazine. She ate in her room. She slept in her room. Jimmy's dad didn't. One day, less than a year after she came home from the hospital looking grey and reduced, Jimmy realized he had gone a week without speaking to her. He had only seen her in glimpses through the bedroom door when she had called for pills. He topped one hundred twenty seconds sometime his sophomore year.

Jimmy's dad had parlor tricks too. He drank with sour men who raced miniature motorcycles in Jimmy's back yard and shouted obscenities over the whining motors until the neighbors called the police. Jimmy didn't trust his dad's friends. Once, two of them came to blows and the fight ended with one of them sitting on the other's chest with a handful of hair working it up and down until the back of his opponent's head was gooey and there was a little stream of blood on the driveway. The loser of that fight never came back to drink with Jimmy's dad again. Jimmy wondered if he had survived, but he was too afraid to ask. 

It started in the bathtub. Underwater, he was free from the noises his brain stored up during the day to torment him with at night. His father shouting. Doors slamming. Bottles clinking. His mother moaning. Glass breaking. Engines revving. The TV. The neighbor's dog. The whispers of hunched and white-haired old ladies whose dresses were pressed stiff to make up for the wrinkles in their furrowed faces at First Baptist Church where his father would drop him off on Sunday mornings on the way to the horse track. Underwater he was free from the noises, from the pressure, from time and disappointment. 

A month after graduation, he went with his high school friends to the lake. Most of them were leaving for college in a few weeks. Jimmy was staying behind. They were drinking Keystone and jumping off big rocks into the lake. The higher the rock, the deeper Jimmy sank, and the longer the silence lasted. Deep in the green nothingness, he was free. There were no sounds, no restrictions. Nothing to see or hear or do. By then, he was up to one hundred eighty seconds. 

For two months after that, Jimmy worked at a scuba shop renting equipment to people going on vacation, people with the means to leave their circumstances behind. He stole opportunities to assist dive instructors in the pool, but the little square tiles on the bottom of the pool grew more and more worrisome. There were the same little squares in his parents' bathroom, the room he never saw any more, just past the room where his mom was dying. Floating over those squares, the quiet was deathlike. He saw himself floating over his mother's domain, like a specter. He didn't want to haunt his mother and so he didn't want the job. He stole a weight belt and stopped showing up. 

The weight belt was for the lake. He was timid at first; he kept it tied to a rope that stretched out to a tree on the bank. When he couldn't last any longer, he would drop the weight, swim to the surface, and then retrieve the belt with the rope. He reached two hundred seconds. And he did it alone. No one was there in the blind greenness. No one was within miles. 

It was a late summer afternoon when Jimmy made his final escape. It was premeditated, but not in a hopeless or dramatic way. It was just the next step in his journey. A final step away from the haunting, a last step toward freedom. The shadow of the tree where the rope used to be tied stretched far out from shore. The afternoon light danced on tiny waves inviting him below where they would gently rock him to sleep. He stepped into the familiar, murky green, but it was clear. Everything was clear for Jimmy. He lasted three hundred seconds that day. 

And then he lasted forever. 

Eternal Community

My seven-year-old came home from church on Sunday with lots of new information about heaven. He told us he knew just what heaven was going to look like — gold streets, gates made out of pearls, no sun, no ocean. In fact, he was pretty accurate. Kudos to our friend Joy McDonald who teaches his small group.

One thing my little Bible scholar didn't mention, however, was heroes of our faith who would be there. Peter and John, Paul and Barnabas, Moses, David, Joseph, Abraham — it seems none of them were in his lesson about heaven. Doesn't that seem like a significant omission? Wouldn't you expect any description of heaven to include some mention of its inhabitants?

Imagine you're writing the heaven scene for a Hollywood production — the resolution where all the great men and women of the story are saying good-bye, or possibly hello, forever. Think of Luke and Han getting their medals from Princess Leah. Think of the newly-crowned Aragorn and Arwen kneeling with Gandalf and Legolas and all the others to honor the unlikely hobbit heroes.Think of Arthur and Lancelot and Galahad taking their seats at the round table. If you're writing these scenes, you include each hero. You appreciate each victory and each scar. This is their moment. They are the resolution. They are the characters who endure.

There is Legolas with his bow and Aragorn with his crown. There is little Frodo with his bare feet and his heart of gold. There is Gandalf in his beard and gown and wry, knowing grin. There is Chewbacca growling and Gimli glowering and Indiana with his whip and Forrest with his blissful smile and Atticus with his law books and William Wallace in face paint and Huck and Jim on their raft and a shirtless, bloody Rocky still wearing gloves.

But when John gave us the clearest glimpse of heaven ever recorded, he didn't write the scene that way. His Revelation isn't a Hebrews 11-style parade of who's who. In fact, there are no names mentioned, only a faceless multitude of worshippers. Even those smaller groups who are described in detail aren't identified. The four creatures and the 24 elders aren't named. Are they patriarchs and apostles? Angels? We aren't told.

What we are told is what those unnamed heroes are doing — worshipping. The glory of the One who sits on the throne so overshadows the heroism of any of our stories that John can concentrate on nothing else.

But there's another lesson here besides our relative dullness in the presence of God. In Revelation as in Acts, we common creatures have all things in community. Scot McKnight says of Revelation, "Alongside such visions, of course, is the obvious: humans themselves are joined in fellowship with one another. One is not treated to a blow-by-blow account of 'who sits where' and 'who gets to sit next to whom,' which was the foolish question of James and John. Instead, eternity is so corporate that individuals simply are unrecognized…"

The worshipping throng is so healed of its self-consciousness, so united in humility, so unconcerned with any sort of hierarchy that even the greatest heroes among them blend into the crowd.

I expect (and don't ask me to prove this) that we'll know David and Peter and all the rest when we get to heaven. I hope to spend many a sunset dinner listening to their stories. But I'm also grateful that heaven won't be an eternal episode of The Apprentice, jockeying for attention from the Big Guy. We will be equal with our heroes, not in elevated honor, but in unified humility before the throne which, my son will tell you, has a rainbow around it.

Unity and equity. Worship and joy. I'm so glad my seven-year-old is giving me a clearer picture of heaven.

Relational Eikons

How does your small group relate to Adam and Eve? This morning, I was reading some thoughts from Scot McKnight about the story of God and our place in it. Genesis 1:26-27 says this:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.

The word for "image" in those verses corresponds to the Greek word Eikon. We were created in the image of God to be icons of him — incomplete but faithful reflections of a bigger, grander, more perfect being. But what parts of our being are Eikonic? That is, which parts of us reflect the nature of God, and which parts are just baggage? Just so much blood and tissue? And is it even possible to separate the divine from the carnal? Here's what McKnight says about that:

To be an Eikon means, first of all, to be in union with God as Eikons; second, it means to be in communion with other Eikons; and third, it means to participate with God in his creating, his ruling, his speaking, his naming, his ordering, his variety and beauty, his location, his partnering, and his resting…To be an Eikon means to be in relationship.

Of course, Genesis 1:26-27 is followed closely and mercilessly by Genesis 3. That's when conflict entered our story. That's when our enemy attacked everything it means to be an Eikon — our relationships with God, with one another, and with his kingdom reign. Now we are cracked Eikons. We offer inadequate reflections God's glory to a world at odds with his reign.

All that made me think of small groups. Our mission in Small Groups at IBC is to grow deep relationships that advance the kingdom of God in dark places. We are to be on mission together to restore little pieces of our universe that were ruined in Genesis 3. And it occurred to me this morning that those relationship we're building are, themselves, the kingdom. If being Eikons means being in relationship, and if what was cracked in the Fall was relationships, then the Missio Dei can be defined by restored relationships. To the extent that we bring light and health to our relationships with other Eikons, we are helping restore the kingdom reign of God in the world.

One other thing McKnight emphasizes is that this Eikonic restoration is prosecuted by the Holy Spirit. He is leading our charge — opening opportunities for us, revealing the cracks in our reflections, sending us to serve the broken world, calling us to deeper love. Our success in our mission does not correlate to our church attendance, the quality of our training, our allegiance to pastoral leadership, our copious sermon notes, or our agreement to any model of group life. Our success in the mission of God depends on our following the Holy Spirit's lead.

We may never bring Eden back, but if we'll allow the Holy Spirit to deepen our relationships, we can bring light to darkness, joy to despair, health to illness, and the kingdom reign of God to dark places in our world.