Wednesday, November 14, 2007

"Y3W"

Just about the time you’re convinced that television is completely without redeeming qualities, it shows you how powerful well-chosen sounds and images can be. ABC’s Good Morning America does a weekend piece called “Y3W” for “Your Week in 3 Words.” Ordinary people use video cameras to capture their week in images and then choose three words (or groups of three words) to express it all. Behind the images play the haunting sounds of The Weepies’ “World Spins Madly On.” And it’s powerful and moving: a soldier in Iraq standing by a wall with a sign: “Happy B’Day Morgan;” a baby stumbling across a floor to waiting hands with the words “Her First Steps;” a hand with the words “Lost My Job” written on it, and when the hand is removed a “For Sale” sign in front of a house. Powerful.

It’s powerful because of the God-given capacity we humans have not merely to respond to life, but to reflect on it. Someone has called this “the flying fish perspective.” Like flying fish, we humans can leap out of our environment momentarily and gain some perspective, some sense of the whole, before we plunge back into the murky madness where everything looks and feels the same. Like flying fish we can’t do it very long, there’s swimming and eating and predator-avoiding that takes priority over perspective. But we can do it, and when we do, it’s powerful and provocative.

It’s the difference between viewing the events of our lives as a random collection of “little stories” that don’t go anywhere or mean anything (like the stories on the nightly news), and seeing them as “scenes” in a single story that has point and purpose and plot. As Christians, we refine this metaphor further by seeing our lives not just as scenes in a story, but as scenes in The Story, God’s story in which we are characters and our lives are scenes. History is His-Story. German theologians of another day had a big word for this: Heilsgeschichte, “salvation history.” But what they really meant is “The Story” God has been writing from the moment He called creation out of chaos and you and me from our mothers’ wombs.

It makes a difference how you see your life, whether or not you see the daily and weekly and yearly events of your life as mindless and pointless, or whether you see your life as having point and purpose and plot. It can get you through a tough week.

Take last week, for example. I buried a twenty-six year old mother of two who was killed in a head-on by a drunk driver. All week I kept saying to myself: “It makes no sense. What’s the point?” And then I remembered the flying fish and realized that I can draw no conclusions about the plot of The Story until God is finished with it. He’s an amazing “Author” Who gives His characters terrible freedom to do both awesome and awful things, like drive drunk and take lives, and yet is so creative that even this awful “plot twist” He can incorporate into the plot of The Story. He’s had experience, you know, at a place called Golgotha.

Oh yes. My Y3W? “Life is hard…God is good.”

Thursday, November 8, 2007

"End of Construction: Thank You for Your Patience"

Though I’ve not seen it myself, I’m told that on the tombstone marking the modest memorial to a remarkable woman who was, given the public prominence of her preacher husband, inevitably known simply as “Billy Graham’s wife,” read the words: “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.” Ruth Bell Graham chose them herself years before her death. They come from a road construction sign she once saw greeting travelers with the good news that the long wait and faithful patience was now being rewarded. She reputedly commented: “What a marvelous image for the Christian life – a work under construction until we go to be with God. That’s what I want as my epitaph.” And so it is.

What strikes me about that epitaph is not just the modest, self-effacing candor that was so typical of Ruth Graham’s life, but its appropriateness as a metaphor for the Christian life – a work under construction. Nowhere, in my experience, is there more dissonance between “Baptist” and “biblical” than here. There is a popular Baptist soteriology (doctrine of salvation) that sees salvation as purely event without any sense of a process, journey, “work under construction” at all. Our language betrays it: “So-and-so got saved last night.” Finished, complete, end of story. And sadly, for many it is! The day they give their “hearts” to Jesus is about as “Christian” as they’ll ever be. Armed with the knowledge that they’re now “saved,” their “ticket is punched,” they return to life and to “business as usual.” No Christian growth, no discipleship, no “work under construction.” And then we wonder why there are so many “undiscipled disciples” (as Jess Moody called them) in the Church!

To be sure, salvation begins with an event, a decision, a moment, but it does not end there, not if it’s really “salvation.” To save us, God must change us, and that takes a lifetime, as Ruth Graham knew. It is transformation, enculturation, formation, and it is both event and journey.

C.S. Lewis once wrote: “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.” What he meant was that God loves us just as we are, but because He loves us, He cannot leave us as we are; He must form us in the image of His Son Who is both our Source and our Destiny. That is why He is so infinitely patient with us; He has a lifetime (ours) to finish the construction.

And note: Construction zones are not smooth highways and easy rides. Lots of bumps and “lane shifts” and starts and stops can be expected. Anybody who tells you otherwise has never been “in the zone.” Think about it! Patience and persistence are required.

One thing more. In this “construction zone,” we don’t just work on Sundays.