a transcontinental, one-sided conversation :)

Hey bro -
Like the link about "thoughts dear to you." I've heard a lot of McLaren secondhand, but not read any directly.

I take exception with one point. I agree with the first list of things God hates: sin, selfish arrogance, indifference and hate. And we ought to be for what God is for and against what He is against. But the second list: God being against exclusion and suffering, I am not so sure about. Is God really against suffering? Perhaps, but it seems he is against sin more, it pleasing Him to have Jesus suffer too for sin. Having God be primarily concerned with suffering and exclusion seems like an attempt to remake God in a "sensitive 90's guy" definition of God and love - which I don't buy. Just ruminated on love in church Sunday - perhaps love means causing "suffering" in the short run for someone's better in the long run? Perhaps it is more loving and merciful for God to cause me to suffer and change rather than leave me in my pitiful, pathetic current state...

Peace,
Jeff


broski,
it's a pity you are far away and we cannot share this "baada ya kazi" style over Tusker. i have a section of my budget labeled "Africa" and it's growing, albeit way too slowly. so sometime we will fellowship again in this lovely realm of ideas.

I do not see how God could be more against sin than suffering--staring into the eyes of someone starving or lonely or suicidal or just plain bored and saying, no, what's really important is to follow these rules; because you broke these rules, I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to have anything to do with you and you're going to have to suffer forever when you die. It's really your fault: you broke the rules.

I used to think that the Seven Deadly Sins were a list of things you didn't do because if you did, Jesus would kill you. Then, for a while, I became more enlightened and realized that no, you wouldn't die now, you'd die the second death and never get to be happy in heaven.

Then I met Mike Walters, a theology prof at Houghton, who convinced me that the whole idea started with a dude named Evagrius, who lived with a bunch of other dudes in one of the first monastic communities; he came up with the Eight Bad Thoughts, or something like that, to explain all the pain and sorrow and suffering that each member of the community inflicted on each other and themselves. Later a pope with a flair for the dramatic and a little knowledge of numbers trimmed it down to seven and added the flashy title and wrote a bestselling book about the Seven Deadly Sins.

The Big Secret behind the seven deadly sins isn't some law code, where you break them and the judge in the wig says, "sorry son, but you broke the rules. you lose. go to hell. do not pass go, do not collect any celestial goodies that are saved up for good people who make me happy by following rules..."

The Big Secret is that they Seven Deadly Sins are Deadly. They kill you. Then they kill people around you. They start with your soul, Greed and Envy stealing your happiness and your purpose, and then Gluttony and Sloth destroys your body and mind while Rage and Lust and Pride wreak havoc in your relationships. You end up a miserable, lonely, angry, fear-filled, hollow, disappointed whining person. These things, when they run your soul, destroy it. This is a place I have been. Sin, in truth, destroys you. It makes you miserable, it turns you into a pathetically vicious and self-centered monster.

Forget far-off pond'rings about heaven and hell--I want to be saved right now from becoming any more of a soul-sucked zombie than I already am. I want good relationships with people; I don't want to spend my days being disappointed by fame, material posessions, my own impressive self, mind-numbingly lonely sex, and my slowly decaying body and mind. I've looked around the world and seen nothing but miserable people deluding themselves about their own importance and happiness--crumbling monuments built on slavery and oppression and suffering.

Why then, would people sin? My guess is suffering. People have suffered so much that they do not, in G.K. Chesterton's words, know how to be human anymore. All they know how to be is monsters, tearing at each other and themselves in an frenzied orgy of destructive attempts at living. Love is painful and doomed to failure or betrayal or both; lust is a safer option for the short-term, and all we know for no one has shown us what love looks like. Sharing is dangerous, hoarding is safe--for the short term. As life becomes increasingly more meaningless, people turn to whatever they can get for the ailment in their souls. And find only disappointment.

It helps to look at human society as the combined result of the worst natural disaster and most horrifying act of war ever perpetrated (Donald Miller's idea, not mine). Bloody, wounded, and scared, they will do anything to survive--even if it ensures their prolonged misery. They strike out at each other in fear and blindness. They band together in little communities for survival. They submit to abusive power structures because they fear that they cannot survive on their own. They are always edgy and uncertain of their place within the community, reflexively attempting to prove their importance at every chance.

Then Robert Jervis' security dilemma pops up, as communities run into each other. They know that other groups can threaten them, so each one becomes a threat to the others by amassing power out of fear. Ideology is used to strengthen the community and ensure "our" safety; us verse them becomes more and more tense. Fragmentation and war ensue.

The thing is, no one knows how to live anymore. All we know how to do is lust and die alone. No one knows what it's like not to be ruled by fear, or have relationships untainted by envy, greed, and lust. We all suffer, and we all cause ourselves and others to suffer and slowly die inside--if we ever even knew life at all.

The exciting thing about Jesus is--He was the first to suffer, but not sin. He was the first to grow up in a world that specializes in breeding miserable monsters out of babies without becoming a monster himself. He showed us the way out of our miserable, self-destructive lives that didn't involve avoiding the everyday suffering of living with everyone else's sin.

He was sinned against, but did not sin. And if we follow his example, we discover that the way of life we are used to--the diseased and self-destructive habits we've picked up from those around us unconsciously or used to cope with the suffering in our lives--is soul suicide. But His way--the way of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, goodness, self-control--is the way of life. Our lives, day by day, become what they were meant to be: glorious, full of life and joy and creativity and community.

Christ did not avoid the suffering inherent in living in our world--but he was no slave to its destructive and debilitating patterns. Our challenge and calling is to likewise belong in this world, to taste of its suffering and joy deeply, and to become part of the Restoration--the Redemption.

But I am off-topic. We were talking about sin verses suffering, and which is more important to god.

The stories tell of a god who walked the earth, suffering and laughing and teaching monsters how to become people, who spent a great deal of time at parties with drunk people and strippers and prostitutes and he wasn't sad for them because they were breaking the rules--he was sad for them because after the drugs and sex and the thrill of money and power and toys and prestige wore off they were still miserable, hurt and alone. Life, in the unforgettable words of Thomas Hobbes, was solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short, and they were making the best way of it that they could. He was happy that they knew that there was a fundamental problem with the earth--they were ready for an answer that way.

The stories tell of god walking the earth, and getting angry when the churchgoers and pastors and dignified, successful, upstanding community members didn't realize that their lives, too, were full of misery and loneliness. They, too, were simply making the best of it they could, except they thought that their best was a lot better than everyone else's best and Divinely Ispired and Purpose Driven and Morally Superior and all that drivel. They denied their common plight, their common wounds, their common needs, expressed in different forms but fundamentally the same illness that they shared with the pimps and car thieves and loose women and child molesters and hookers and tax collectors and politicians and Pharisees.

When they denied their common plight, their common lost-ness and their common human experience of suffering and confusion, they cut their hearts off from compassion. Compassion is not pity, bemused or otherwise, bestowed from the better position. It is literally suffering great emotion with. The religious made no effort to understand their neighbors, much less to love and fellowship with them. Instead of glorying in the image of God in everyone, they began judging people through a rubric: good and bad, right and wrong, Christian and non-Christian, acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior. The people became judged by the behavior, instead of the behavior by the people. The story of the individual went out the window with fellowship and compassion.

I think that if I believe anything, I believe that what Christ is doing is not setting up some cosmic contest where the holier or those with better doctrine are rewarded and those who are more screwed up or less intellectual and punished. God does not institute suffering to correct sin: he corrects sin to end suffering. Kids in a fight will often try to get Mom or Dad to prove them right, or at least more right. The point is not that some will say "Ah-Hah! We told you so!" while others hang their heads. The point is not to reward the good kids and make sure the bad ones feel ashamed.

The point is to keep surprising all of them by bringing them face-to-face with themselves and all the evil and distortion that is there, and then to surprise them even more with grace and redemption until they laugh at the notion that they ever called each other "good" or "bad" or any other names but those which they were called by Christ.

I don't know if this is about sin or suffering anymore--but it is much easier to isolate sin and define yourself out of it when you isolate it from suffering. Sin without suffering becomes someone else's problem, then someone else's fault, and soon those people are bad and we are good. Sin without suffering ends blaming without understanding, accusation without compassion, blame without involvement. Then it can be individual, it can belong to someone else and not be our whole, messed up common heritage as human beings. If sin were divorced from suffering, and the two could be weighed in the balance, what kind of god would find sin more important than suffering, the proper formalities more important that the lifesaving measures?

Sin alone seems detatched, academic, as simple as an individual choice, something we've overcome, why haven't they? Suffering, that has meat to it. You see it in people's eyes, you know it when it haunts you, you feel its pangs when you find yourself embroiled in it, causing it in your neighbors without even realizing it, discovering it raw and open in your heart in places you thought were all right. And usually, you can follow it, track it by the blood and body parts in its wake, right to the evil in your own heart. And then you can pick up your cross and join the war on suffering, the Redemption War, the only one worth fighting, reclaiming this tortured battleground one injured heart at a time.

well, as usual brother, i've wandered off topic almost immediately and stayed there despite all attempts to remain within the scope of the question. but i think that's the problem--we're asking different questions, trying to feel each other out from different definitions, different passions, different emphases. i hope that this serves as not as a challenge, but as a chance to feel with me some emotions, and explore with me some ideas in the way that i am exploring them.

cheers!
dan