Here is a piece I wrote for my last blog "So Goes The Sojourn" - I just want to tuck it in here at the beginning so that it's "on the record." It is a good introduction to where I'm coming from. Also, here's a picture I took at a rest-stop in MN in November of '07. It was a glimpse of the New Creation for me and I always want to remember it.

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“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” - T.S. Eliot

“He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” - Gandalf the Grey

There’s an old story that probably began as a folktale, grew up to be a parable and somewhere along the way got modernized so it now includes a “scientist.” I’ll tell it as I heard it. Once there was a scientist who found a bird. The scientist wanted to know what made the bird alive, so he put the bird on the dissecting board. Piece by piece he took the bird apart, and mysteriously, the only thing the scientist was looking for was the one thing that increasingly disappeared the more he looked for it.

Well, scientists take a lot of flack from people of faith. I’m sure people of faith don’t mind scientists when they are creating cures for the common cold or coming up with robots that mow the lawn, but when they dangle their toes off the edge of methodological naturalism into the murky waters of universal implementation, we people of faith can get a little edgy. That is because science as we know it deals heavily in reductionism (ironically, so does a lot of religion these days). And there are a lot of mysterious realities in the real world that cannot be explained away in formulas and theorems. And when we try to “explain away” these mysteries, we only isolate and impoverish ourselves.

The television show “LOST” is a brilliant parable illustrating this truth. The basic premise of this show is that a plane crashes on an island, people survive, and the island is weird. People see things on this island from their past; things and people that can’t possibly be there. Out in the jungle, you can hear invisible people whispering. There is some sort of monster that no one ever sees that is eating people. And there seems to be other people already living on the island, who elusively try to “blend in” with the survivors. This is a postmodern epic - “postmodern” because nothing is explained on the show, and the more you find out about the island, the less you know. Every revelation about the nature of the island uncovers twenty new questions. Yet “getting the answers” is not what the show is about. The way the people on the island are connected is far more fascinating. Through flashbacks, we see that these strangers have all played significant roles in each other’s lives - even though they are unaware of it. So the show presents us with two ways of seeing the island. The spiritual; one character says, “I have looked into the eye of the island and what I saw was beautiful” and the scientific (or the methodological naturalist): seeing the island as having “unusual properties” that can be harnessed. The show doesn’t try to influence you in any way from whatever point of view you choose to see the island from; it simply gives you a big enough experience to keep you asking questions.

So in one TV show, you have a fascinating narrative and multiple realities with which that narrative can be experienced. Kind of like life itself. The more you try to explain it, the less there is of it. But to simply ENTER IN and LIVE it without trying to manipulate or control it; THAT’S where life is found. This is why the “kingdom of God” is such a potent metaphor. In our day, we are caught in the middle of so many competing realties (I will go into more of these in future posts; this post is mainly regarding reductionism) and yet the question is whether or not there is one fascinating narrative that encompasses all of them. See? When I set it up like THAT and then say, “Why, yes! And that grand meta-narrative is the gospel of Jesus Christ” you will think, “How weird that would be if it were true.” But the gospel never claims to NOT be weird. It actually thrives on being so.

The question we never ask is, “What is the gospel?” because we all think we know. We’ve either reduced it to a divine business transaction or have imagined it to be some sort of Gnostic, mystical thing that makes no sense until we “lock into it” with whatever “special knowledge” we’ve got that gives us the “inside scoop.” But the gospel of Jesus Christ is neither transactional nor overtly mystical (and it’s especially not Gnostic.) It is a merciful RESPONSE by God to EVERY (and ANY) ONE of our wayward life-threads. It is “sharp as a double-edged sword” meaning it is “precise” enough to respond meaningfully to any human life in any cultural context. You don’t have to be specifically executed under ancient Roman law to know the “way of the cross.” Even the word “gospel” had a distinct cultural meaning in 1st Century Palestine BEFORE Christians adapted it into their vocabulary. Now, certain people latch onto to certain aspects of the gospel and try to make a whole from that one aspect, which is the definition of idolatry. The point is: Jesus said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light” on one hand and then said, “Everyday deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.” So the way of Jesus is both very easy and very hard. To try to reduce it to one or the other is to make it something else entirely.

It is very easy because it has no prerequisites: only desperation. It is very hard, because it doesn’t end with “getting saved” - it BEGINS. Basically, it pulls you roughly from whatever secure “womb” you’ve been curled snugly up in your whole life and throws you out into the big wide world where the winds are violent and the sun is fierce. The gospel is NOT a security blanket; it is a passport to a BIGGER reality. Many Christians have re-arranged it in different ways through the centuries - some have shrunk it and some have preserved its “weirdness” - some have entered through the “door” into greener pastures and others have simply redecorated their womb with crocheted bible-verses. But one of the main messages the gospel communicates is this: we will all get ripped from our nice warm little wombs someday and better sooner than later.

You may be thinking, “Wait a second…? Isn’t the gospel basically that Jesus died for my sins and if I accept him as my personal lord and savior, I will go to heaven when I die?” I understand that it has been predominantly phrased that way over the last couple of centuries, in the interest of “saving” as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. But something gets lost in translation along the way. That way of phrasing the gospel makes it only a “bank-note” to be cashed in at a later date. Whenever you die, or whenever Jesus comes back. The thing about making the gospel a way of securing a “one-way ticket to heaven” is that RIGHT NOW the life you live becomes all about “waiting to live” rather than “living to live.” Yes, Jesus “wiped our slates clean” on the cross; but he also unmasked the cruelty and gutlessness of the world-powers, he also planted a “life-grenade” in the bowels of death, he also gave us an example of winning by losing, he also…did so many things by dying on the cross, one paragraph (or a thousand theological volumes) will never do it justice. Only a heart fully alive to God can do the gospel any sort of “justice.” The formulas we try to scrunch the gospel into don’t really capture it; but somehow the lives we live can. Not perfectly, but somewhat.

I’ll end by quoting Eugene Peterson, from his tasty book “Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places”:

“Writing about the Christian life is like trying to paint a picture of a bird in flight. The very nature of a subject in which everything is always in motion and the context is constantly changing - rhythm of wings, sun-tinted feathers, drift of clouds (and much more) - precludes precision. Which is why definitions and explanations for the most part miss the very thing we are interested in. Stories and metaphors, poetry and prayer, and leisurely conversation are more congenial to the subject, a conversation that necessarily also includes the Other.”