<>Caution – this God is alive and untamed and won't stay in the box where we keep him
What if the entrance to the worship space contained the
following sort of consumer warning: This God is alive and wild. You may be
subject to awe or terrible glory. Flights of rapture have been reported. The
music is not just music of beauty or pleasure. It could reveal unexpected
insight, joy or disorientation of routine habits of thinking and living. Enter
at your own risk. Your relationship to God is serious and could change your
life forever.
Such an odd
framework to a weekly routine and taken-for-granted habit could put the people
on guard and change the expectations looked for and hoped for. In this way the
minds and hearts are (pre)disposed to hearing the message and seeing the
worship: not as an act of honor that one feels obliged to continue indefinitely
in exchange for the fellowship and respect of one’s peers and the possibility
that the whole promise corresponds to some reality. Instead one shifts from
passive honor the virtuous status of Religion to an emphasis on”paying worth”
(worth+ship =worship). So the motion changes from spectator to participant. The
perception changes from invoking God to come to our place of worship to the
reverse: inviting ourselves to focus and still ourselves and be on the lookout
for God among us, as ever He abides, but which we are insensible of.
<>Intersection of The World and Thy Kingdom Come on
Earth & Heaven: vote for God
We read “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” and “following
God’s way is foolishness in the eyes of The World.” So is one meant to retire
from The Game of Life where all the rats are racing? Or is one meant to be in
the World but be not of the World (God’s witness here and now). The message of
Social Justice, “helping the least of these” and “speak Truth to Power,” has a
long history. The record of intentional communities (Shakers but also the
Anabaptists: followers of Menno, Hutter, Amos and so on) testifies to various
ways of applying God’s Word to the small and big cares of daily social
relations and livelihoods.
The OT gives a
formal structure by which God and his people are obligated to each other. The
NT is not a formal, external scaffolding, but instead begins in each person’s
heart. The object is to give oneself to God (his Word, his actions, his nature
of being) and by not straying from that dedicated focus all sorts of things
become possible and within one’s reach as authorized by God. So there is
probably no specific way that the relationship each person develops year by
year can be transposed into a formal, organizational set of guidance or rules.
There could be an OT “app” (smartphone software application) to help one to
judge a situation and its best responses. But the NT convenant is a living,
individual thing that expresses itself from the inside out: by the things in
one’s heart come the words, thoughts, attitudes and actions that are external
and touch The World. But the influences go in both directions: the external
habits and environment affects what is inside, too (birds of a feather flock
together).
In sum, things
like “Christian Democrats” or “Catholic Socialists” appear to apply the Word to
governance, rule-making and judgments, but owning to the “inside à
out” basis of NT, it is unlikely that any organized group could adequately give
form to the Spirit of the Law. Politics and Religion occupy the same public
spaces and enter discussions (explicitly or implicitly), but they are not
extensions of each other: God’s love does not have a political party, despite
the concept of “socially conservative voters” acting as a voting block (moral
majority or minority). However, it surely makes sense for voters to search
their hearts individually and cast a ballot according to conscience. And if a
pattern emerges whereby a sizeable group of people from diverse walks of life
all choose one candidate, then so be it. But any sort of party platform built
of planks from the Top Down is by definition a betrayal of the personal and
individual relationship to one’s God. To be cued by party and not by one’s own
searching heart is wrong.
<>IQ, EQ, CQ but also Spiritual Quotient?
In recent years the idea of ranking a person’s intelligence
has become more specialized to show a person’s quotient is not only
Intelligence, but Emotional and Cultural. So perhaps we can also speak of the
cycle of maturation spiritually; a “Spirituality Quotient” or S.Q. Observers of
human development have pointed out the idea that “Ignorance is Bliss” (one’s
reach and grasp is very small, so it takes very little to gain the feeling of
mastery and confidence), and the idea of “A little knowledge is a dangerous
thing” and “Knowledge is power” (but also that “Power Corrupts” so perhaps then
knowledge, by extension of power, also is corrupting or at least a source of
vain pridefulness). Finally there is the observation that “the more one knows,
the more one knows how much more is out there to know” and thus comes the
realization that the further one travels the path of learning the wider grows
the awareness of one’s relative ignorance.
According to
these observations one begins as a baby with very little information, knowledge
and wisdom. The first few steps give a false sense of Know-it-all because the
scale of the field of knowledge is small. But sustained growth expands the size
of the field of knowledge, revealing how very little one actually does know.
Even as the pool of information, knowledge and wisdom deepens and widens the
trajectory only results in a much bigger universe of possibilities. Taken to
the logical extreme, the wisest person will be the most certain of their
humility and ignorance. To put this into Bible study terms: one begins with the
heart of a child (trusting, ignorant, with little judgment or prejudice), then sets
out to cross the ocean of learning and understanding and comes to realize how
vast things are (infinity is pretty big), and finally nearing the opposite
shore the person may hope to regain the heart of the child –ignorant and trusting
once more, but this time through voluntary hard work instead of involuntarily by
reason of inexperience and youth.
In
conclusion: there is value in Bible study, analysis, interpretation and
splitting of hairs –not for its own sake or to set one apart from peers, but
for sustaining a relationship with the Word (cling to the vine and then bear
fruit). And by learning enough, one can achieve a realization of one’s true
ignorance and humble standing (still authorized to do God’s righteous work, but
without a shred of self-righteousness). Probably a direct, unspoken, incoherent
and unarticulate grip on God is the most pure form of relationship of God. But
most people tend to rely on words to think, express, respond and communicate to others. So the only way to
overcome the false sense of containment/comprehension of God is to learn enough
through verbal means to that one’s ignorance rises into mind.
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