The Now and the Know

Recently I paid a rare visit to my mailbox at the church where I work. Because I don’t stop by there nearly as often as I probably should, the box was quite literally overflowing with things. The items inside were mostly generic: newsletters, updated list of phone extensions, reminder of some event that had long since taken place. However, buried near the bottom of the pile was a half sheet of paper, like one would on a notepad. On it was a picture, obviously drawn by a child. It took me a while, but as I looked at it I realized that it was a person singing, standing on a small box (or stage?). The words “He is mity to save” were written across the top in the handwriting of a child. Someone with better handwriting had written on the side, “For: Chris Petrick; From: Eric Admunson (age 6).”

The picture (not the one to the right of this text) was of me. And it made no difference that it didn’t actually look like me at all, didn’t matter that there was nothing to set this portrait of me apart from a portrait of any one of the 2,000 other people in the worship center that morning. The picture was of me because that’s what the artist said it was and that’s all that matters. You see, no one gets to dictate what you are except the one that created you.

For the last several months I have been exploring the topic of purpose. InPart One I examined the motivation behind why we make the choices that we make… we are all searching for something. We are all dying to know that we are valuable. Part Two focused on what happens when God, the one thing that is supposed to give us a purpose, feels absent. This post begins with a well known Psalm, Psalm 23. In the New Revised Standard Translation of the Bible, Psalm 23: 6 reads like this, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life…” If you are at all familiar with this Psalm, then this wording probably sounds correct to you. But here’s a shocker… it’s not. The Hebrew word that gets translated as “follow” here is “yirdifuni” (transliteration). Though follow is not an entirely incorrect translation, a more accurate word in English would be “pursue.” I know it’s only one word in a book (or technically a library) of millions of words, but it makes all the difference. Why? Because if God is pursuing you it means he put something inside you, he wired you up and made you worth pursuing.No one dictates what worth except the one that made you.

A story that has always raised a lot of questions for me is the calling of the first disciples. Here is the story, as recorded in Matthew’s gospel:

As he [Jesus] walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zeb’edee and John his brother, in the boat with Zeb’edee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him. (Matthew 4:18-21 RSV)

It’s a curious little story isn’t it? Here are several men with careers as fishermen and, while it is not the most desirable position, it is a job nonetheless. Not only this, but they have their lives, surrounded by family and friends. So these men are out at work and along comes Jesus, who tells them to follow him. And here’s the amazing part…. they actually do it! Seriously? When I first heard this story I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of person would do that? Who would leave his entire life behind and follow a man he had never actually met? The story begins to make sense, however, when we understand something about Jewish culture at the time. The “dream job” of male Jews was to be a rabbi and at a very young age that training begins. The boys would spend years memorizing Torah and Jewish law and only the best moved on. Rob Bell explains further:

So when this student came to the rabbi and said, “I want to follow you,” the rabbi wanted to know a few things: Can this student do what I do? Can this kid spread my yoke? Can this kid be me? Does this kid have what it takes?

The rabbi would question the student. Questions about Torah, about tradition, about other rabbis. Questions about the prophets and the sages and the oral law. Questions about interpretation and legislation. Questions about words and phrases and passages.

… if the rabbi believed that this kid did have what it took, he would say, “Come, follow me.”

The student would probably leave his father and mother, leave his synagogue, leave his village and his friends, and devote his life to learning how to do what his rabbi did. (Bell 2005, 129-130)

Now let’s take this information and think about that story from Matthew again. These men are fishermen, which means at some point some rabbi determined that did not have what it takes to do what he does. That being said, they resigned themselves to the family business: fishing. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but it’s important to note that these were the “not good enoughs.” Now along comes Jesus, and as far as anyone knows at this point Jesus is another rabbi among many. And this rabbi came making bold new claims about scripture and its meaning, not all that uncommon for rabbis, actually. Word gets around about the new rabbi with new ideas, so we can even assume that the disciples would’ve heard something about Jesus before he met them that day on the shores of the sea. And when the rabbi calls out and says, “Follow me,” what is he really saying?

Come be like me.

Come learn from me.

I believe you have what it takes.

I believe you can do what I do.

And here’s the really exciting part: Jesus calls you. God desires a relationship with his creation more than anything else, this much we can be sure of. And it breaks God’s heart to see his people suffering, to see creation living so opposite of his intention. I have had many conversations with people who are questioning or don’t believe in God at all. A common question is, “Well if God is real and the world is so broken, why doesn’t he do something about it?” I’ve got news for you: God is doing something about it… and it’s you and me. Remember Jesus said, “Surely you will do even greater things than this…” The rabbi has come and called us… and as my pastor Mike Housholder is fond of saying, “There is no plan B.” Sure we can speculate all day about why God chooses such broken and imperfect people to take part in his work of redemption, but where will that ultimately get us?

For a long time I thought the point of Church was to increase the number of people who got into heaven. Now I don’t believe that’s the case. Here is what I do believe: I believe the world is broken. I believe that God is good, loves his creation, and has no desire for us to continue to exist in this broken state. It is difficult to look at the world around us and not think, “Something is not right here. This is not the way we are meant to live.” Jesus, the rabbi, calls us to follow him. For what purpose? It’s simple actually, the rabbi thinks we have what it takes. The rabbi thinks we can be like him. I used to think that professing belief in Jesus and “getting into heaven” was the end, now I know that it’s just the beginning. When you are baptized, when you are welcomed into the family that is God’s Church, you become a part of something much bigger than your individual salvation. You become a part of God’s plan to redeem the planet, a part of bringing God’s shalom to the earth, a part of making this world right with God… call it what you want.

Here is the point. If God created us to be a certain way and if we fall away from God every day and if that really and truly breaks God’s heart every single time and if God so strongly desires reconciliation with his creation that he went so far as to die and proclaim final victory over death and if that tomb was really empty that first Easter morning and if because it was empty we are now able to be a part of God’s redemptive action and if the rabbi really believes that we can be like him and if there really is no Plan B… then that changes everything.

To all of us that have questioned our sense of value and wondered what we’re worth and what we’re supposed to be doing with our lives, the rabbi calls out with a simple message that changes everything:

Follow me.

For those of you who don’t know, I am one die-hard Green Bay Packers fan. I love football, both NCAA and the NFL and I am currently engaging in ridiculous amounts of draft analysis to feed my addiction. Anyway, one of my friends, who is aware of this addiction, walked up to me recently and asked, “So Petey, do you think he’ll stay retired?” He was talking about Brett Favre, who had announced his retirement for the second (?) time a few days prior.

For those of you who don’t know the story, here’s what happened. Favre spent 16 years as the quarterback for the Green Bay Packers. He broke a lot of records while he was there and was loved by Packer nation. Prior to the start of the last season, Brett announced his retirement following the Pack’s 13-3 season that came one game short of the Superbowl. A lot of things happened over the next couple of months, but a few weeks before training camp was supposed to begin, rumors started flying that Favre wanted to come back. Rumors became fact and soon Brett was on a plane headed to Green Bay. He left just as quickly, though, and was later traded to the New York Jets. That’s an abbreviated version of the story, but I think it will suffice for our purposes.

What’s the point I want to make with Brett? It’s this: Favre un-retired for a reason. It wasn’t money, he’s done very well for himself over his long career. It wasn’t the lack of accomplishments; Favre holds a spot in every major passing record book and is number one if a few of them, plus he’s got a Superbowl ring. No, Favre’s return can be boiled down to one sentence: I know I can still play this game. He said it a number of times in press conferences, but in retrospect what he was really saying was, “I don’t know what to do when I’m not playing this game.”

In The Search for Purpose Part One, I explored the human need to know who we are and the ways we manipulate and change God to support our own narcissism. I ended by saying that only God gives true purpose, something I plan to explore further in Part Three. Donald Miller sums this up better than I would in his book Searching for God Knows What:

… I was very concerned with getting other people to say I was good or valuable or important because the thing that was supposed to make me feel this way was gone. And it wasn’t just me. I could see it in the people on television, I could see it in the people in the movies, I could see it in my friends and family, too. It seemed that every human being had this need for something outside himself to tell him who he was, and that whatever it was that did this was gone, and this, to me, served as a kind of personality theory. It explained why I wanted to be seen as smart, why religious people wanted so desperately to be right, why Shirley McLaine wanted to be God, and just about everything else a human did. (44)

What happens when God, the “thing” that is supposed to make us feel good or valuable, is gone? Well, allow me to clarify, when it appears to be gone. God never actual leaves us, but we often attempt to ignore God’s presence. What happens is we ascribe meaning to things that have none. I think perhaps the best way to understand this is to think back to middle school. I wouldn’t normally ask anyone to do that, because if your middle school experience was anything like mine it probably isn’t too worth remembering or thinking about all that often. But still, remember Trapper Keepers? Anyone? No one said it, but everyone knew it: it mattered what kind of binder you carried all your stuff in. The more pockets, the more absurdly large, the better! When it came time to get out your binder in class on the very first day, you knew you were about to make a social statement about who you were and what you were about. And the whole time you were eying the people around you, hoping to confirm that your binder was, in fact, the best one.

That might sound a little heavy handed, but that’s part of my point. At that age we didn’t know any better, but we were ascribing meaning, taking our sense of value, from something that was meaningless, that gave nothing. This is what happens when God is seemingly out of the picture. And when we can’t take our value or purpose from God, we will take it from others. Without God, I am only as valuable as the people around me say I am. As Donald Miller explains in the aforementioned Searching for God Knows What,we start existing as though we are in a lifeboat:

The thing is, if people are in a lifeboat, the reason they feel passionate about being a good person and all is because if they aren’t, they are going to be thrown overboard; they are going to be killed. I realize that sounds grim, but I kept comparing, in my mind, the conversation that might take place in a lifeboat with the conversations I heard at Palio or at Horse Brass. Because when you really think about it, these wants we have, like wanting to be right, wanting to be good, wanting to be perceived as humble, wanting to be important to people and wanting to be loved, feel perilous, as though by not getting them something terrible is going to happen. (106)

Without God I am only as valuable as people tell me I am, so I’d better get people to think I’m valuable. Facebook, Twitter and the like are all tools we use to project an image, to help us stay in the boat. Without God, there is nothing more than self-preservation. And the real problem with taking of value from, among other things, Trapper Keepers is that they are finite. Eventually, the Trapper Keeper will be gone and if all of my sense of value, my identity is wrapped up in that Trapper Keeper then I have no idea who I am or what to do now that it’s gone. That’s exactly what I think happened with Favre. He had no reason to return except that he had no idea who he was away from football. And understandably so, that was all he had known his entire life. Insofar as God’s presence profoundly impacts our loves, so too does God’s perceived absence. As Erwin McManus writes in his book Soul Cravings, “Ironically, even if you do not believe in God, your life may be more shaped by your lack of relationship to Him than any other relationship in your life.” (Entry 18) Our lives will be greatly impacted when we try and live them without God because we will be forced to grant meaning where there is none. We will look for what which cannot be found anywhere or in anyone other than God.

When we try and live life without God we will constantly be searching for something but never finding it. As McManus writes:

You will spend your life working through relationships trying to understand your need for love, your inadequacies in love, your desperation for love, and all the time you might miss the signs that your heart is giving you, that you’re searching for God.

A life without God will eventually lead to all of us feeling like Brett Favre. Eventually that thing that we thought was fulfilling God’s role, that we thought was giving us value, will pass away. We won’t be able to play the game any more. We won’t be able to work, to do the job the same way we used to. And we will find ourselves saying, “I have no idea who I am or what I’m supposed to be about.”

Do you know what you mean to God?

Hello, my name is Chris and I’m an Identaholic.

Hello Chris!

There, glad I got that out. I feel better.

I have been playing around with this idea for a while now: we are addicted to identity. Let me explain. In the age of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and countless other networking sites that exist under the broad umbrella of “social media,” we have become addicted to identity. And don’t get me wrong, I’m just as guilty as the next person. My BlackBerry makes it that much easier to fuel my addiction to identity. We’ve got a problem folks, a serious problem. Countless status updates make it easy for us to let people know who we are… and who we want them to think we are. The anonymity of social networking allows you to be whoever you want to be.

Stop and think about it for a minute. Look at your past Facebook updates. Who do you want people to think that you are? The Smart Guy? The Party Girl? The Work-A-Holic? The Hip, Semi-Emergent, Theology Reading, Suedo-Pastor Guy? (That last one may or may not be a self-portrait.) Donald Miller writes in Searching for God Knows What:

…I figure I was attaching myself to a certain identity because it made me feel smart or, more honestly, it made other people tell me I was smart. This was how I earned my sense of importance. Now, as I was saying earlier, by doing things to get other people to value me, a couple of ideas became obvious, the first being that I was a human wired so other people told me who I was. This was very different from anything I had previously believed, including that you had to believe in yourself and all, and I still that is true, but I realized there was this other part of me, and it was a big part of me, that needed something outside of myself to tell me who I was. (43)

This section in my copy of the book is highlighted, underlined, and marked with a bright yellow tab. Why? Because it hit home. Miller says he is a person, “… wired so other people told [him] who [he] was.” Whether he knows it or not (and I suspect that he does) Miller is making a commentary on the condition of humanity. We are all people wired up so that others dictate our value. I determine what my role is and how important I am by how other people treat me. The kicker is that now, in the age of social media, we have the ability now more than ever to project the imagine that we want others to perceive. Status updates and Facebook profiles (not to mention blogs by no-name students of theology  ) all help us tell people who we want to be, how we want people to think about us. But let’s take it one step further:

One of the needs on Maslow’s pyramid was the need to know God. Not to know God, but rather to supply for the human psyche a kind of divine heritage providing, among other benefits, an explanation for existence. Because science is severely deficient in details of origin, Maslow held that man invented God as a kind of false bridge from one need to the next. God, far from a Being who had revealed Himself to man, was more an intellectual cuddly toy with which man snuggled during his dark night of the soul. God, in other words, was somebody who validated man’s identity. Man need God to shove into the crack created by the truth of his meaninglessness.

The truth of our meaninglessness. Here is the great irony of our lives, we think (note I said “we”, which includes me) that we don’t need God. We understand our existence (read: purpose) to be wholly separate from God.God is more like an accessory to existence than a necessity. And here’s the best part, he comes in different makes and models. There is Catholic God, Lutheran God (or Catholic God 2.0 if you want to poke fun at Lutherans, which I do because I am one), and countless others. And in this age if you don’t like any of the flavor options, you can even create your own. We treat our God experience like we’re stepping up to the custom burger bar at Fuddruckers. To paraphrase Miller, we create a God that validates our identity.

I have discovered two truths of humanity:

1) We crave meaning. Our addiction to identity is nothing more than an attempt to satisfy our desire for purpose. We long to know, we are desperate to know, who we are. It’s not selfish, it’s how we’re wired up. Everyone needs to know that they have purpose, that they belong somewhere and are valued by someone.

2) We create meaning. Because meaning is so fundamental to who we are, we create it everywhere: the jobs we have, the degrees we hold, the cars we drive, the stuff we own. We assign meaning to everything in our lives, including God. Does anyone else see the problem with us assigning God a purpose? Me too.

I have discovered this truth about God:

Only God gives true meaning and purpose. No one gets to tell you who you are and what you are meant to be except the one who created you.

One thing you should know about me is that I work in this big church. Some people would probably call us “mega” but I don’t because I don’t like that word. So I call us big. Anyway, working in a big/mega church isn’t really any more or less interesting than working a no-so-big/mega church. But that’s really here nor there.

Anyway, in staff meeting today our senior pastor was giving us a little talk about a vote coming up in our synod. I’m not going to mention the name of the church, our location, or the synod with which we are affiliated because none of that really has anything to do with this story. So he’s talking about this vote that’s coming up and sort of laying about the different sides and where the pastoral leadership comes down on this issue theologically and then pauses and looks off into the distance, as he often does, and says, “We’re living in a post-denominational world.”

Whoa.

Growing up I can remember very distinctly this conversation with one of my teachers:

Teacher: Where do you go to church?

Me: We’re Christians.

Teacher: Yes, but what kind?

Me:… We’re… Christians.

I wasn’t old enough to know any of the difference. Now it seems I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life studying the theological discrepancies between the mainline denominations, primarily Lutheran, Catholic, and Methodist with a little Baptist and Pentecostal thrown in for good measure. During my freshmen year of college I had a crisis. I found that I didn’t agree with one of the doctrinal stances of the church to which I belonged. What to do? I had been through the whole confirmation and youth group thing and had been well-indoctrinated with “good Lutheran teachings.” But now I found myself up against a road block. No matter which way I looked at this issue, I just couldn’t come to the conclusion that that was what the Bible really said. So I left. And it was kind of a big deal because at one point I was set on becoming a pastor in this synod. Today I can’t imagine…

When we were growing the only differences we recognized in our churches is that we used different colored hymnals, sang different songs on Sunday morning. Obviously the differences were and are much bigger than hymnals and songs, but when you’re a kid those are the sorts of things to which you pay the most attention. For a long time I thought it was really important which denomination you claimed… now I’m not so sure. Also hear me when I say that I don’ think denominations are all bad, but here are some things I’ve noticed over the years…

1) Denominations tend to divide instead of unite. One of the things that concerns me the most about denominations is that it is a system of labels. Pastor and writer Nanette Sawyer of Wicker Park Grace Church in Chicago wrote:

He [Sawyer's childhood pastor] was defining Christian identity as assent to a list of certain beliefs, and he was defining Christian community as those people who concur with those beliefs. This didn’t leave any room for questions, doubts, or growth in faith. It made community acceptance of each other completely conditional on having already arrived at a particular intellectual destination. In asking me if I was a Christian, and accepting my preteen answer, he essentially told me that I wasn’t part of the community. I wasn’t in; I was out. And so I found myself spiritually homeless. (from essay, “What Would Huckleberry Do? A Relational Ethic as the Jesus Way”)

The great irony innovative thinkers like Luther, who is credited with “starting” the Lutheran church is that Luther never wanted to leave the Roman-Catholic Church. In fact, he loved it. He cared so deeply about it that he set out to reform its way of thinking, believing that the church which he so dearly loved was headed in the wrong direction. He didn’t come in and say, “Hey these guys got it all wrong… let’s get out of here and start our own church.” When one thinks in terms of denominations there is something at work that is almost always damaging: the desire to know who is right and thusly who is in. If I subscribe to a denomination, I can easily know who is in and who is out… and if our primary concern as the Church is who is in and who is out, then we’ve probably got larger problems to deal with. As Sawyer writes, “Even if we could answer the question of who is andisn’t a child of God, it wouldn’t help us be better followers of Jesus; it would only help us divide people into categories.”

2) Church Shopping. Okay, this is going to happen whether denominations exist or not. What I think we all fall guilty of doing is attempting to “sell” our specific church of denomination like we’re selling a product… or even worse a lifestyle. The aforementioned senior pastor said that we don’t want to encourage people to think about our church purely in terms of where we stand on social hot-button issues. As he said that, I turned to my friend The Digital Pastor and said, “But that’s how people shop for a church.” Instead of asking the question, “What does this Church do to love God and love people?” People come in and ask questions like: what’s the church’s stance on gay marriage? What about the death penalty? Pro or anti war? Contemporary? Conservative? Liberal? Are the church’s stances on these issues important? Yes! But only insofar as they reflect what the church believes to be Biblically founded truth and not a marketing campaign in disguise. I believe that denominations make it easier for people to make  assumptions about the church before they’ve ever set foot in it, like religious window shopping. And that usually ends one of two ways 1) You leave with nothing or 2) You go home with a bunch of crap you don’t need.

3) Majoring in the Minors. We (the Church) are really, really good at this. I know that this isn’t intentional, but a lot of the time what happens with denominations is we end up focusing on the things that are not important… what is referred to as majoring in the minors. I believe that it stems from our desire to know and understand everything… that sort of post-enlightenmentism that we are still combating in a lot of ways. One could write countless blogs about this… and many people have… so I won’t dwell here.

What I will do is end with a quote by Mark Scandrette:

And we are reminded that kingdom love is not so much something to be exhaustively understood as it is a present reality to inhabit through action. (from the essay, “Growing Pains: The Messy and Fertile Process of Becoming”)