I should pause here and say that when you’re a pastor, your heart and soul and paycheck and doubts and faith and hopes and struggles and intellect and responsibility are all wrapped up together in a life/job that is very public. And Sunday comes once a week, when you’re expected to have something inspiring to say, regardless of how you happen to feel or think about God at the moment. This can create a suffocating tension at times, because you want to serve people well and give them your very best, and yet you’re also human. And in my case, full of really, really serious doubts about the entire ball of God wax.
That Easter Sunday was fairly traumatic, to say the least, because I realized that without some serious reflection and study and wise counsel I couldn’t keep going without losing something vital to my sanity. The only way forward was to plunge headfirst into my doubts and swim all the way to the bottom and find out just how deep that pool went. And if I had to, in the end, walk away in good conscience, then so be it. At least I’d have my integrity.
This book, then, is deeply, deeply personal for me. Much of what I’ve written here comes directly out of my own doubt, skepticism, and dark nights of the soul when I found myself questioning—to be honest—everything. There is a cold shudder that runs down the spine when you find yourself face-to-face with the unvarnished possibility that we may in the end be alone. To trust that there is a divine being who cares and loves and guides can feel like taking a leap—across the ocean. So when I talk about God and faith and belief and all that, it’s not from a triumphant, impatient posture of “Come on, people—get with the program!” I come to this topic limping, with some bruises, acutely aware of how maddening, confusing, frustrating, infuriating, and even traumatic it can be to talk about God.
What I experienced, over a long period of time, was a gradual awakening to new perspectives on God—specifically, the God Jesus talked about. I came to see that there were depths and dimensions to the ancient Hebrew tradition, and to the Christian tradition which grew out of that, that spoke directly to my questions and struggles in coming to terms with
how to conceive of who God is
and what God is
and why that even matters
and what that has to do with life in this world,
here and now.
Through that process, which is of course still going on, the doubts didn’t suddenly go away and the beliefs didn’t suddenly form nice, neat categories. Something much more profound happened. Something extraordinarily freeing and inspiring and invigorating and really, really helpful, something thrilling which compels me to sit here day after day, month after month, and write this book.
Which leads me to two brief truths about this book before we go further.
First, I’m a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God. I realize that for some people, hearing talk about Jesus shrinks and narrows the discussion about God, but my experience has been the exact opposite. My experiences of Jesus have opened my mind and my heart to a bigger, wider, more expansive and mysterious and loving God who I believe is actually up to something in the world.
Second, what I’ve experienced time and time again is that people want to talk about God. Whether it’s what they were taught growing up or not taught, or what inspires them or what repulses them, or what gives them hope or what fills them with despair, I’ve found people to be extremely keen to talk about their beliefs and lack of beliefs in God. What I’ve observed is that while we want more of a connection with the reverence humming within us, we often don’t know where to begin or what steps to take or what that process even looks like.
So if, in some small way, this book could provide some guidance along these lines, I’d be ecstatic. In saying that, I should be clear here about one point: this is not a book in which I’ll try to prove that God exists. If you even could prove the existence of the divine, I suspect that at that moment you would in fact be talking about something, or somebody, else.
This is a book about seeing, about becoming more and more alive and aware, orienting ourselves around the God who I believe is the ground of our being, the electricity that lights up the whole house, the transcendent presence in our tastes, sights, and sensations of the depth and dimension and fullness of life, from joy to agony to everything else.
Now, about where we’re headed in the following pages.
This book centers around three words. They aren’t long or technical or complicated or scholarly; they’re short, simple, everyday words, and they’re the foundation on which everything we’re going to cover rests.
These three words are central to how I understand God, and if I could CAPS LOCK THEM THE WHOLE WAY THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, I would; or write them in the sky or etch them in blood (on second thought, maybe not) or graffiti them on the side of your house (let’s not do this either, though I’d love to see what Banksy would do with them), because they’re the giant, big, loud, this-one-goes-to-eleven idea that animates everything we’re going to explore in the following pages.
They’ve unleashed in me new ways of thinking about and understanding and most importantly experiencing God. They’ve made my life better, and my hope is that they will do the same for you.
But before we get to those three words, we first have two others words we’re going to cover. (Nice buildup, huh?)
It’s these two words that will set us up for the three words that form the backbone of the book.
First, we’ll talk about being open, because when we talk about God we drag a massive amount of expectations and assumptions into the discussion with us about how the world works and what kind of universe we’re living in. Often God’s existence is challenged in the conversation about what matters most in the modern world because haven’t we moved past all of that ancient, primitive, superstitious thinking? We have science after all, and reason and logic and evidence. What does God have to do with the new challenges we’re facing and knowledge we’re acquiring? Quite a lot, actually, because the universe, it turns out, is way, way weirder than any of us first thought. And that weirdness will demand that we be open.
So first, Open.
Then we’ll talk about talking, because when we talk about God, we’re using language, and language both helps us and fails us in our attempts to understand and describe the paradoxical nature of the God who is beyond words.
First open,
then Both.
And then, after those two words,
we get to the three words,
the words that will shape how we talk about God in this book. The words are (I feel like there should be a drumroll or something . . .)
With,
For,
Ahead.
With, because I understand God to be the energy, the glue, the force, the life, the power, and the source of all we know to be the depth, fullness, and vitality of life from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows and everything in between. I believe God is with us because I believe that all of us are already experiencing the presence of God in countless ways every single day. In talking about the God who is with us, I want you to see how this withness directly confronts popular notions of God that put God somewhere else, doing something else, coming here now and again to do God-type things. I want you to see both the irrelevance and the danger of that particular perspective of God as you more and more see God all around you all the time.
Then for, because I believe God is for every single one of us, regardless of our beliefs or perspectives or actions or failures or mistakes or sins or opinions about whether God exists or not. I believe that God wants us each to flourish and thrive in this world here and now as we become more and more everything we can possibly be. In talking about the forness of God, I want you to see how many of the dominant theological systems of thought that insist God is angry and hateful and just waiting to judge us unless we do or say or perform or believe the right things actually make people miserable and plague them with all kinds of new stresses and anxieties, never more so than when they actually start believing that God is really like that. I want you to see the radical, refreshing, revolutionary forness that is at the heart of Jesus’s message about God as it informs and transforms your entire life.
Then ahead, because when I talk about God, I’m not talking about a divine being who is behind, trying to drag us back to a primitive, barbaric, regressive, prescientific age when we believed Earth was flat and the center of the universe. I believe that God isn’t backward-focused—opposed to reason, liberation, and progress—but instead is pulling us and calling us and drawing all of humanity forward—as God always has—into greater and greater peace, love, justice, connection, honesty, compassion, and joy. I want you to see how the God we see at work in the Bible is actually ahead of people, tribes, and cultures as God always has been. Far too many people in our world have come to see God as back there, primitive, not-that-intelligent, dragging everything backward to where it used to be. I don’t understand God to be stuck back there, and I want you to experience this pull forward as a vital, active reality in your day-to-day life as you see just what God has been up to all along with every single one us.
All of which leads us to one more word to wrap it up: so. So what? So how do we live this? So is the question about what all this talking has to do with our everyday thinking and feeling and living.
To review, then:
Open,
Both,
With,
For,
Ahead,
and so.
One more note about notes: all of the places where I cite Scripture verses, as well as credits for other sources for information and suggestions for further reading, are included in the endnotes, organized there by theme or key phrases.
It’s a fair bit of ground to cover, and my hope is that by the end you will say,
“Now that’s what I’m talking about.”
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_c5e1d8fb-e1c1-59b4-b572-e8e0b4b26e0f)
OPEN (#ulink_c5e1d8fb-e1c1-59b4-b572-e8e0b4b26e0f)
One time I was asked to speak to a group of atheists and I went and I had a blast. Afterward they invited me out for drinks, and we were laughing and telling stories and having all sorts of interesting conversation when a woman pulled me aside to ask me a question. She had a concerned look on her face and her brow was slightly furrowed as she looked me in the eyes and said, “You don’t believe in miracles, do you?”
As I listened, I couldn’t help but smile, because not long before that evening I’d been approached by a churchgoing, highly devout Christian woman who’d asked me, with the exact same concerned look on her face, complete with furrowed brow, “You believe in miracles, don’t you?”
