My wife has convinced me that our table should be an altar.  Our time around this altar is about blessing, reflection, community, love, and celebration of life.  This is a relatively new development in what is roughly a seven year-old marriage at this point.  We’ve always eaten – but we’ve not always communed – we’ve not always slowed down and enjoyed our time around the table.

While it probably wasn’t the first step, the precipitating factor, I think was trashing our previous alter – 20-something inch RCA, mind-numbing box that I bought nearly 10 years ago now, when I first moved to North Carolina.  We had started to become more pragmatic in our thinking well before this and so our television and our Dish Network subscription were both casualties of this newfound thought.

The major rationale was not, as you may think, because we were wasting too much time, our our relationship was suffering.

Nope.  We just wanted a chair.

In our relatively-small-but-far-larger-than-adequate apartment, our living room area is fairly cramped and the large electronic artifact and it’s stand simply took up too much room.  Practically, because we literally only watched The Office on DVR and various episodes of things on the Food Network, we tossed it and it’s pedestal out.

It wasn’t some exercise in intellectual superiority.  We are not better than you.  We simply wanted a chair.

In the same way, that a balloon floats high above when it’s no longer tethered to the ground, we began to notice that things were becoming less the same than they had been.  We weren’t forced to talk to each other – we were freed to talk to each other.  We didn’t spend more time in the kitchen out of boredom, we were freed to not rush to the living room to choose one of the 113 episodes on our DVR.

What had happened was that we smashed the altar that we had created and had worshipped at every night and were converted to the altar of the dining room table.  Around this altar, community happens, even in our own home when it’s just the two of us.  Appreciation of food and drink is about more than sustenance – it is about provision and life and happiness and a connection with the earth itself.  Ingredients eventually become our body parts and so we have become aware of the people, and places, and the care that went into growing and harvesting and preparing what we eat.

The clinking of glass against glass, the silence of a savoring moment, and the eyes-closed appreciative pause reinforce that all of this is spiritual – that all good gifts – food, drink, friends, life – are sent from heaven above.

And now, instead of wanting to make sure I record every episode of The Office – I want to invite my friends to come and sit and commune at our table, however scratched, and shaky, and humble it may be.  These moments are the ones that matter.  These are the moments that redeem us to our rightful place in creation and with each other.  These are the moments that teach us about restraint, and satisfaction, and community, and respect.  Everyone around the table matters.  Everyone around the table can have a second helping- but the guests more so.

Enjoy your time at the altar.  Turn off the distractions.  Commune.  Enjoy.

Eat.

Judgement day was, yet again, a dud.

Matters of faith are obviously compelling for people.  It can literally alter our behavior, cause us to sit back and consider others before we act, compel us to give generously of our resources.

It can also plunge society into a state of either mass hysteria, or mass mockery of those in hysterics.

As someone who believes that Jesus does give us the best example of how we should be thinking and living and doing, all of the talk about the rapture and judgement day has honestly made me queasy at times over the past few days.  For some reason, we get the idea from reading God’s message of love that the approach to life is to be preaching of a dire doomsday; hellfire and brimstone will rain from the sky and burn our flesh.  Come to Jesus now for your fire insurance.  Come now before it’s too late – before Jeeeeeezus casts you into a churning lake of molten evil.

Over and over and over and over – we miss the point.  Not just those guys like Camping who sit around and crunch numbers in an effort to know the infallible instant of the lord’s returning, but those of us who make life about a collection of individuals deciding either right or wrong, damnation or paradise, heaven or hell.  Over and over we make accusations based on our time-tested, God-inspired interpretation of scripture… even though it’s in opposition to your time-tested, God-inspired interpretation.  Over and over, the message that is presented is that a solitary collection of individuals has it right and are giving you the last-chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity to sign up (and, many times, support) and escape the horrors of life on the wrong side of eternity.

So now that another Christian’s prophecy has crashed and burned in a spectacularly humiliating affair what does that mean for those left behind?

It means we go on, living the kind of life that approximates Jesus gently rather than insists on Jesus forcibly.  It means we continue in generosity and encouragement and grace, without much concern about whether or not we or anyone else are going to be here tomorrow.  It means that love without preconditions is still a better gauge of the state of  your soul than the degree to which you want to leave everyone else behind.

Life is about the joys and sorrows, the messiness, the victories that we experience here – not escaping it all for some mansion in the sky, but making what we have right here, right now better by loving the people we come into contact with.

One day at a time.

Luther said that we should read the entire Bible in terms of what drives toward Christ.  Everything has to be interpreted through Christ.  Well, if you do that, you’re going to end up with this religion of grace and forgiveness.  The only people Jesus threatens are the Pharisees.  But everybody else gets pretty generous treatment.  There’s very little Christ, very little Jesus, in these people who are fighting Rob Bell. // Eugene Peterson

What I’ve been struggling with the most over the past few days has been directly related to my sympathy for Rob Bell, author of Love Wins, and accused hell-bound heretic.  I’m not concerned for his soul or mine.  I’m not wishing he would see the error of his ways.  I’m not concerned that he’s leading me straight into hell.

The incredible thing to me is the reaction from christians. Unequivocally, they allege, he is wrong.  Without question.  We have interpreted the true, clear, literal text of the Bible and by the words of Paul, and the actions of Jesus and the power of Greyskull, he is wrong.

I’ve read the verses that talk about judgement at the end of the world.  I get that Jesus said that He, himself, is the way, the truth, and the life.   I know we’ve all sinned and fall short of God’s glory.  I get it, I really do.  But I also read the ones that ask “Who has known the mind of the Lord, or been his counselor?”, the ones that say “As surely as I live, every knee will bow before me.”  I’ve yet to find the ones that say, “Verily, I say unto you, lest ye believe in hellfire as dost I, then ye shall be cast into the flames.”

Many times in the past, I’ve posted here about selfishness and self-centeredness.

I feel like this debate is no different.

It’s offensive to many of us to even think that God would accept someone into heaven that didn’t have to deal with at least some of the same struggles as I do.  If we’re honest, we’re only mildly OK with deathbed confessionals – our religion tells us to be happy because now they’re magically and definitely saved while our minds say why couldn’t I live like him and get in under the wire.  We’re a self-referential people.  Naturally, this is true.  We experience the world as a self.  Everything that we see and hear and touch and know is processed by our self.  When a question comes up we process it by referencing everything else that makes up our self and we come up with an answer.

When an author like Bell comes along and talks about hell in the way that (many of us think, since we haven’t yet read the book) he does, we throw up flags not because we’re against what he’s saying as much as it doesn’t line up with what we have settled in our minds as truth.  This is a psychological reality.  For some, this cognitive dissonance causes deep introspection.  For others, a great exposition as to the reasons the concepts in question are wrong.

We go on the defensive.

Defense, of course, implies that WE HAVE something that is being attacked, something that is of value TO US that is suddenly in danger (for a great discussion on these metaphorical concepts, by the way, read anything by George Lakoff, including this).  There are collections of baggage that come with this and, to be fair, a defensive stance is not always a bad thing.

But it is very much a selfish position.  The unsaid statements are “I am PROTECTING something that I FIND MORE VALUABLE that what is being presented.”

An unselfish response is this:

Rob Bell and anyone else who is baptized is my brother or my sister.  We have different ways of looking at things, but we are all a part of the kingdom of God.  And I don’t think that brothers and sisters in the kingdom of God should fight.  I think that’s bad family manners.

I’m not against there being some truths…. but I believe there are incredibly few of these.  Every things else is commentary.

One last thing…. while you’re waiting for Love Wins to arrive, maybe you’ll want to listen to this.  It’s a sermon by Rob Bell from September 2006.  It’s about hell and probably will give you a good idea of where he’s going with all this.

Listen Here to Rob Bell’s message about Hell (2006)

“Don’t turn your speculation into dogma.” // Rob Bell

Rob Bell has brought me out of hiding.

I have been following the firestorm that has erupted surrounding Rob Bell’s latest (to-be-released-tomorrow) book, “Love Wins,” since one pastor was moved to simply tweet, “Farewell, Rob Bell.”  At issue is the charge that Rob is a “universalist” preaching damaging messages for his millions of wayward disciples.

Tonight, he spoke in NYC during a LiveStream.com interview with Lisa Miller.

Already I’ve read responses both for and against his interpretations and answers (or avoidances) to questions posed by the audience and the online community.  I’ve read that there is no room for questioning basic tenets of scripture.  I’ve read that Rob himself is destined for the fires that “he seems to think are but imaginary”.

I’ve just now finished watching the interview.  As I’m scouring through my scrawled notes, I can’t find anything that I disagree with or that would make the world a worse place to be. Like Rob, I’m no theologian.  But I have a profound trust that God is primarily interested in grace and love and mercy, about generosity to the poor, about deliverance for the captive.

Early in the discussion, Rob admitted that there are hundreds and thousands of theories and speculation about what happens at the end of time – but that problems being to arise when we plant a stake in the ground and declare that which we cannot know as true.  ”Don’t turn your speculation into Dogma.”  God has been redeeming people for years, delivering people, graciously “saving” people in ways that offend our constructed categories of who deserves what.

One of the concepts that turned loose the dogs was speculation that we cannot know with certainty where Gandhi is spending his eternity.  Whether I try to address this through the eyes of the stauchest evangelical or the freest liberal, I can’t find where we can have issue with this on any sort of logical ground.  We cannot see Gandhi.  We cannot see heaven.  We cannot see hell.  We cannot see the surface of Mars.  We have no idea where he is.  And yet it seems to matter to so many people that Rob Bell said what we already know to be true if we could only get to the core of why this offends us.

Tonight he said that “Grace and Love always rattle people.” And went on to ask why we seem to think that it’s about narrowing who “gets in.”  We have a real issue with widening the pathway.  I tend to think that this is a result of our church past – especially in protestant circles.  Protestants are protestants because they disagreed with some stuff and decided that they were right.  Then a smaller group of protestants thought that another group of protestants were wrong and protested against them and left.  Our trajectory has been away from grace and mercy and towards a “we’re more right than you” target.  Is that what this is about?

Take that concept further and faith begins to subconsciously develop a superiority complex.

Once that takes hold, it is offensive to ask questions.  It is easy to see how people aren’t like you, don’t believe what you believe.

Ultimately, I believe this controversy is about selfishness.  I believe that many of us feel as though we’ve got it right, we’ve got years invested in this thing, we’ve got years of trying to do the right thing and to think that some Joe-Schmoe Atheist might end up at the banquet table next to me is the most offensive heresy imaginable.  As if it’s about us.

A consequence of teaching fire and brimstone and fear of hell is that we’ve moved into preservation mode. This belief structure sets up eternity of feasts or flames and we want the former for ourselves over the latter.  Fear then overruns each part of our life.  When bad friends lead our kids astray we are afraid that our kids will spend eternity in hell.  When we mess up we become overcome with guilt knowing that the world could end at any second and, by God, we had better be ready.

Grace is hard to swallow because it takes the focus of salvation off of my good life and onto someone else’s “bad” one.  We want to know God for ourselves.  We want to get into heaven and celebrate.  We want to avoid eternal damnation.

Our perspectives, though have turned a faith based on perhaps the most selfless figure in world history into one of the most self-centered expressions of belief ever.  I believe now more than ever that we have put our own self-interests at the center of this debate.  I happen to be reading “The Prodigal God” by Tim Keller at the moment who describes (among other things) the concept of debt as it relates to the two brothers.  Both felt that a debt needed to be paid – the younger brother felt that he owed something to the father for his waywardness, and the older brother felt that the father owed HIM money since he stayed around and worked faithfully every day.  Ultimately, the father said that both “debts” were invalid.

We’re the older brother.  We’ve worked for years living a certain way, believing a certain thing, dogmatically knowing that someday our reward would be given to us.  God owes us the inheritance of streets of gold and mansions with many rooms because we have done what we’ve been told.

And it’s time to change.

It’s time to admit that Love DOES win.

It’s time we stop worrying about the destination of our bodies and trust with a “childlike” faith that we’re going to be OK, and that we want more people to come play and enjoy the innocence.

Our selfishness and interest in self-preservation has turned the afterlife from a grace-filled promise to a boisterous distraction.  We spend so much time arguing and bickering and discussing and fighting about what matters and the sad thing is that none of it really does.

Thank God that He is love.

Into the deepest depths of hell, in fact. Not just the surface level, but down into the white hot flames, the most painful, excruciating places.

Where the suffering is intense. Where people come to curse the Lord with as much fervor that could otherwise be mistaken for worship.

Where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Where death is reality. Where darkness rules.

Church: one of the few entities on earth that has a core message potentially worth living and dying for. Light of the world. Salt of the earth. Unconditional love.  That is when it doesn’t get bogged down with selfishness, superiority, or cynicism.

We should be convinced that life is not about acquisition – that living generously is a better way to live. Giving food to the hungry or resourcing the poor is not an obligation or a chore or a bullet point on a job description. Our intended trajectory away from greed and self-centeredness is counter-cultural and inspiring.

Rob Bell, in Velvet Elvis, says that one of the worst things to have happened to the Christian faith is the movement towards heaven and hell being some distant places – separated from our day to day experience.  It leads to us wanting to escape this planet that must be void of God, in this scenario.  Our trajectory becomes about saving our souls from eventual damnations and more about ME spending forever in bliss and satisfaction.

Instead, heaven and hell are present realities.  Eternity started on day one. Hell is right here right now.  It’s the mother who can’t feed her children.  It’s the pain of loss.  It’s disease.  It’s ridicule and bullying and genocide.

You want to get to heaven…. bring it.

Jesus didn’t leave some mystical land to come to our neutral ground to persuade people to be good so they can ride the salvation express to heaven.  He came, himself, and brought heaven with him – by healing and feeding, by turning people’s hearts in a different direction, and by turning water into wine.

I want the church to go to hell, too.  I want people to see the comparison – to consider the alternative.

I want people to understand that heaven isn’t about walking streets of gold and wearing sparkling white robes.

Heaven is about the tears and pain and the bruises that come before restoration.  It’s about hard-core, unabashed love that doesn’t ask questions or require any thing besides your being.  It’s about getting rid of the darkness by shining in s spark of light – not about pointing out how dark hell is.

Heaven is what moves in when hell is pushed out.

But you can’t push hell out of the picture from the sidelines.  You can’t feed hungry people if you don’t go where the hungry people are.  You can’t build relationships by sitting on your couch.

What a hellish perspective then to celebrate “some glad morning” when we all will “fly away.”  For those who think that trying to live like Jesus is the best way to live, it seems counter intuitive that God would have his people fleeing the scene.  Who’s left to advocate for those with no voice?  To feed those with no food?  To visit those with no friends?  To give hope to those who have nothing to look forward to?

So, I’m done with the halo envy.

I’m done with looking forward to my mansion and streets of gold and diamond harp.

If there’s no more hope or love or happiness today than there was yesterday then we’re all missing something.  If we’re living as if this place is doomed, then we’ve screwed up big time.  If you’re not concerned about replacing hell here and now with heaven here and now, then we are diluting the redemptive message that Jesus was supposed to be all about.

Jesus example, if we believe it, says that being concerned that someone’s stomach isn’t full is at least as important as the state of their soul.  It shows that aiming towards emotional maturity is at least as important as aiming towards spiritual maturity.  He tries to convince us tax collectors, and prostitutes aren’t the wrong crowd.

Jesus didn’t seem to think that going to hell was such a bad idea.

In fact, it was probably the most important thing He ever did.

Pursuit is not merely chasing something that you’ve longed for. It can be, and it is often rewarding when you reach the end of the journey. Recently, though, I have begun to re-evaluate the pursuit, to see it in a completely different light, and to recognize the central role that it plays in our lives.

It started with my wife.

As is the case with most couples, we faced a shifting landscape – from a love filled with dates, and flowers, and sappy love songs composed on a whim at the piano to one filled with an understanding that one of us usually takes the trash out and sometimes she really does have a headache.

There is a falsehood that many couples begin to believe and that is that the pursuit ends with “I do.” One lavish ceremony marks with near laser precision that transition between passion and tolerance.

We say that God is an infinite universe of knowledge and depth and love and that we are created in His image. If that is true, how can we so decidedly declare that we have reached the end of what it is to know another human being? Each of us are creatures of infinite worth and value and mystery. There is no end to what there is to know.

And so the pursuit.

It never ends.

We get so enthralled with a perceived end that we miss the excitement of the pursuit.

This is not just true with romantic relationships. It’s true of every pursuit of value that I can think of.

There is no end to the spiritual realm, for example. It weaves and twists and turns and while there may be a trajectory towards some ultimate reality, the pursuit always goes on. At the end there may be a truth that we’re pursuing but each experience along the ways forms us, molds us, and makes our path unique.

The pursuit is the point. It translates as “I still care. I’ve not figured it all out. I’m not so proud as to think that THIS way, MY way, is THE way. The pursuit is where we feel life with it’s joy and it’s sorrow and pain and frustration and meaning.

No one ever says, “Remember when we finished our trip? Remember when it was all over?”

They say things like:

“Remember when we took that wrong turn and got lost in New Jersey?”, or…

“Remember when we found that awesome little mexican place where we had the best tacos of our lives?”, or…

“Remember when we first drove north into Virginia and saw those amazing views for the first time?”

I would argue that you don’t make memories by arriving. They aren’t given out as your trip comes to an end.

It’s important to visualize goals – to reach for something of worth. But the goal is never the point, or the reward. It merely orients us towards something. It gives us a direction, a trajectory, a launching pad.

Life is lived, relationships are forged, meaning is discovered, pain becomes teacher, loss becomes gain on the journey. It is the pursuit that matters.

The pursuit is the point.

Back before evangelicals, and reformation, at crusades, and popes, there was the book of Acts.  These guys knew what “church” was all about.  They invented it.  They ate together.  They hung out. They sang.  They talked about God as if it was OK not to know every little detail.

And, best of all, they lowered the bar.

They lowered the bar so we could all walk across together.  At some point they realized that their expectations were too high.  People were interested in getting involved but couldn’t live up to the standard that had been set.  These people knew that there was something altogether different about this Jesus guy they had heard about and wanted to try to live like him because they thought it was a better way to do life.

Of course, now that he had been crucified and was long gone from the scene, the people left over were those who had encountered him, or encountered people who encountered him.  This first group of insiders, then, were Jews.  There were thousands of years of history and tradition and ritual that came along with that – there were time-honored traditions that became as much a part of their faith and practice as God himself.  You may remember that part of what God wanted the Israelites to do was for the males to undergo a little surgical procedure as a sign.

I know, I know.  That’s a whole other story.

It’s not even like these people were “converting” to Christianity.  They were inventing it.  With all of their baggage and history and tradition, they were figuring out with other people who encountered Jesus (again, all raised within the Jewish tradition).  They understood that Jesus was a Jew.  They understood that he was a Rabbi and so he acted in certain ways, and reasoned in certain ways, and did things that religious Jewish men did.  He ate kosher.  He studied the Torah.  Everything they had seen Jesus do had been in the context of Jewish life.

So what about when people who weren’t Jewish, who had no idea what it meant to be Jewish, who loved red meat, came and wanted to know more about this Jesus guy?

The people who were already in had a couple of choices.  The first was to simply say, “Sorry, you don’t qualify.  You’re not a Jew, Jesus was a Jew, unless you’re willing to become intimately familiar with Jewish law, practice, ritual, and nuance, you’re out.”

But that’s not what they did.

Instead they sat down, and they tried to figure out that if Jesus story was in fact for everyone then what they had was a situation where a lot of the rituals and nuances that grew out of living life as a Jewish individual may not apply to non Jews…. you may know them as Gentiles.  What they came up with was this:

“…we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.”

It goes on to say that they didn’t want to burden the Gentiles with any rigid requirements.

They “lowered the bar” so that more people could learn to figure out Jesus without having to worry about how many grains of wheat could be picked on the Sabbath, what songs to sing at what time of day, or how they were going to pay for that surgical procedure with no health insurance.

Now, contrast that with today.

We’ve got churches who figure that they’ve got it all figure out.  You can’t be a member here unless you wear this, or pay this, or believe this.  Another tragic turn from our roots of inclusiveness, tolerance, love, acceptance.  We add condition upon condition, barring access to Jesus like we’re the oafish doorman outside the trendy nightclub.  We had a good thing going there for a while, but then we let our power get in the way.  At some point, we switched from the desire to have more people come live this life to the desire to have them meet our expectations.  Nevermind that half of these “doctrines” are at least irrelevant to how I live my life, and perhaps even as far as counter productive to what Jesus wanted to do.

It makes me angry that people who honestly just want to see Jesus to figure out if he’s the real deal, if what he said in his day was worth living for, have to go through the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo that we’ve added to the process.  He doesn’t care what you look like or what you do.  He doesn’t want you to figure it out first, and then come talk to His people.  Half of what we say is heresy anyway.

I say “Lower the bar, Church.”  We’ll all be more like Jesus.

Jesus as a philosopher is wonderful: there is no greater role-model in my mind than Jesus Christ. It’s just a shame that most of the people who follow Him and call themselves Christians act nothing like him.
Bill Maher :: O’Reilly Factor

It’s no secret that people think Christians are complete and total wackos. I think most Christians are wackos. We march around the city, and the country, and the world proclaiming our message of love by saying some of the most slanderous, hateful things, by imposing our values on others, and feeling that we can justify it all by messages direct from God that we pull out of our preferred version of “Life’s Little Instruction Manual”

See what I mean? Complete and utter lunatics.

There’s this misplaced nobility that causes us to behave as if we have something to protect, that we need to act as God’s cosmic body guards from Satan’s mujahideen. The problem is that God doesn’t need anyone to come to his defense. We can’t humanize God and think that His feelings get hurt when somebody badmouths Him. Or talks bad about His momma.

He doesn’t have a momma.

I have every confidence that God doesn’t need us to defend anything. That said, I don’t think He’s interested in us going on the offense either. That’s just as bad, if not worse.

We’re offensive enough as it is!

To steal a page from Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis, this whole faith journey is more like a trampoline that you enjoy than a brick wall that you defend. You stand around and guard a brick wall because, even though it’s solid and secure, it can be topple over if too many of the bricks get damaged or warn. The whole thing can collapse. Bell talks about these bricks as representations of Christian beliefs (e.g. the trinity, the virgin birth, that homosexuality is a sin, that alcohol is evil, etc). If you neglect the wall, if anyone has a substantive argument against one of your bricks, and it gets removed, the entire wall (aka Christianity) comes crashing down.

At the same time, if these same beliefs are allowed to flex and bend as a trampoline spring flexes and bends, you enjoy the experience of jumping. We can go as far to say that the flex of a spring is essential to the process of jumping. When you live in a better way, choosing generosity over green, love over hate, tolerance over intolerance, compassion over criticism, when the springs can bend, you can enjoy jumping.

You can’t jump on rigid springs. You can’t invite your friends over to enjoy jumping on a trampoline with springs made of stone.

But when there is flex and movement, the experience comes alive. You jump and are free. It almost becomes a challenge to see how far you can stretch the springs to see how high you can jump.

Bell says, “You defend a wall, but you invite people to a trampoline.”

It’s true, but the church has allowed us to pollute our view about what the invitation is. The invitation is not to sign up as a member. The invitation is not to come to a ninety minute meeting to listen to a preacher drone on and on about the evils in our lives. It’s not an invitation to an uncomfortable prayer meeting and it’s certainly not an invitation to a rally designed to crush the spirits of another human being.

The invitation I would argue is not even one to pick up a cross.

The invitation is simply to jump.

You don’t jump on a trampoline and frown. You jump and you smile and you laugh and you flip and you lay on your back and look at the sky. You don’t have to love Jesus to be generous and either way it’s a more rewarding way to live. You don’t have to love Jesus to encourage someone, but it’s a better way to spend your time. You don’t have to love Jesus to be positive and it beats being negative either way.

You don’t have to love Jesus first.

You just need to jump.

We have this concept in our lives that we need specific, provable answers to questions.  This is a relatively modern development in terms of human history.  We have not always needed to have THE answer.

The point was illustrated with this parable.

There was a man who came to a Rabbi and said, “I’m a student of every type of logic you can imagine.  I am a deep theological thinker and want you to test me.  Please, Rabbi, test me.”

The Rabbi hesitantly agrees and presents the following scene, “Two men come down a chimney.  When they get to the bottom, one man washes himself and the other does not.  Tell me: which one washes.”

Proudly the man replies, “Obviously, the one that was covered in soot.”

The Rabbi responds, “No.  Don’t be so silly.  The man who was not covered in soot sees his friend and decides he himself must be dirty as well.”

The man, unfazed by his incorrect answer, says again to the Rabbi, “Please, Rabbi give me one more chance.  I can do this.”

The Rabbi says, “Ok.  Different question. Two men come down a chimney.  When they get to the bottom, one man washes himself and the other does not.  Tell me: which one washes.”

Confidently, the man responds, “Well the first one.  He see’s his friend covered in soot and decides he must be dirty as well.”

Chuckling, the Rabbi says, “Stop trying to be so clever.  Of course not.  The man who is dirty and covered it soot, who feels it on his arms and in his eyes, washes himself.”

Finally, the man says one more time, “Rabbi, please.  Just one more test.  I know I can pass this one.  Ask me another question.”

“Ok” says the Rabbi, “one last question: “Two men come down a chimney.  When they get to the bottom, one man washes himself and the other does not.  Tell me: which one washes.”

“Is it the first man, but for different reasons?”

“No.”  responds the Rabbi. “How can you think that anyone would come down a chimney and think that they’re not dirty.  Both men wash themselves.”

The point, of course, is that there is no singular answer.  There are infinite answers based on context and circumstance.  We try to process the existential realities of life and faith in the realm of a modern quest for facts and figures.  Some questions, however, are simply not meant to be answered with clear facts.

It is awesome to me that the universe is perceived to be infinite in proportion.  But the minute that someone puts a static, verifiable figure on the volume or weight or age of the universe, it will not be as incredible or hard to believe.  Some people might even say, “Is that it?  I would have thought it was much bigger.”  When we replace the unknown we are removing wonder and awe.

In our curiosity, we look at gods and miracles and faith and try to answer the questions – believing like everything else that we’ve learned that there’s something to figure out.  Once we were completely at home in the realm of the unknown.  Now, we abandon belief in favor of proof.

Surrounded by a universe filled with wonder, it’s incredibly short-sighted to opt for knowledge.

Here’s my deal: I believe that God is more about love than he is about rules. Sometimes I let that come across as an anything goes, do what you want, God wouldn’t send you to hell philosophy. I don’t know if that’s true or not. In fact it’s the not knowing that’s the key for me on this. I don’t believe that we CAN know how God will handle those people that don’t know “what would Jesus do.”  I’m at odds (not necessarily AGAINST) “In vs Out” theology – the idea that some people are in, some people are out, and that we can use scripture to figure this out.  It doesn’t pan out for me.

We have at least two responses to this “In vs Out” concept:

The first is commendable: pursuing the “truth” of the matter – delve into scripture, find the things that we should do and those that we shouldn’t do.  The pursuit shows a deep level of love by those people that believe in God to find out more about him. Further, we assume this shows a great deal of love for others because we say we want to help them know God and get “in.” We use the Bible as a starting point, believing it is at least a mostly accurate recounting of history and fact about God. The church has come to call this pursuit “theology” and grants great privileges to those versed in it. Theologians have great respect for longing after the truth for the truth shall set us free.

But the fact that we have called it commendable does not mean that its findings are “truth.” in this case I’m thinking about truth as the way that God wanted things to be in both the world and how we relate to each other.  The truth here reflects our role as Jesus followers.  I’m not convinced that this is how we should be spending our time on this matter.

We’re a curious species and the pursuit of knowledge has become the modern representation of that curiosity. We assume, falsely, that there is nothing that we cannot “know.” We don’t even entertain the idea that there are somethings that we SHOULD NOT know.  I argue that this very matter is something that we will not know and probably SHOULD NOT know.

Instead, it should be completely irrelevant.

The second response then is simply to realize the irrelevance of the question “Is this person ‘in’ or ‘out’?”  It consistently leads to questions and debate about nit-picky issues that are of no relevance to Jesus. You are and will always be loved by God – there are no degrees to this love, no chances to level up.  You simply are.  And so, we need to simply love.  Simply build relationships.  Simply go to the short man’s house for tea.

What does it matter if this person is in, or out, or used to be in, or was out but thought about getting in later?  How does it change how I act towards them.  Yes, I want them to know God, but I don’t want them to know man made God – I want them to know all loving God.  How do I do that?  Simply by loving them myself – by simply being in a meaningful relationship with them.  Nothing more.  The rest – the guilt that’s associated with not helping someone get in, the thinking of people as projects, the endless pursuit of something we cannot and should not know – is nothing but a distraction in the periphery of what real life and love really is.

I hope that we can humble ourselves, realize that our role is not to be judge, jury, or excommunicator.  Our role is to be lovers, and friends.  To do justly.  To love mercy.  To walk Humbly with God.