The Pineapple-buyer's Guide to the Cosmos
"With all wisdom and insight [the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ] has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in [Jesus], things in heaven and things on earth."
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Dear Kate,
Yesterday I preached a "sermon" for the first time, and via Zoom too, speaking to a wall of human bricks, and thankfully, some of them truly human to have a face or two on them.
Here's my transcript. I don't really consider it a "sermon." If it is, then there are at least 5 in it. Sharing with you.
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If I am a novelist and need to build a character from the ground up, begin with one character trait, one distinguishing characteristic, and from there map out the cosmos, the little universe of a person’s mysterious existence, take in a fuller measure of his strange glory and tragic folly, the one characterization I am going to begin with is how trusting, how trustful this person is.
I know a man, quite intimately, I think. One time we went for grocery, from one place to another, and it was pineapple season. We first went to Safeway, he picked a pineapple, the best as far as he could see and touch, of course, and was very happy with his decision, and I too was, because it smelled like a huge grenade of honey. And then we went to a different store, T&T (speaking of dynamite) and there it was, pineapple again--but for a dollar less each. The man picked one up, examined it, and with deep distress, declared, “I’ve been cheated.” I knew the man enough to know he wasn’t exactly joking.
“I’ve been cheated.”
Of all the one-liners I’ve heard from this man, this one has to be one of the most telling and memorable. He thought he was “cheated.” It didn’t matter he was perfectly happy half an hour ago with his decision to purchase the first pineapple. Didn’t matter that no one pointed a gun at his head to force on him the decision, and that no one played a sleight of hand to trick him into any false belief. Also didn’t matter the two pineapples are of different brands and with rather different looks, the second one obviously much more compromised even upon superficial reading. None of these matters. The man has already made up his mind, long before he arrived, stood at the crossroad of fruitville: that the world does not have his best interest in mind, that no one has his back when it comes to the matter of commerce, and the least of “those people” “out there in the world, the cosmos,” who would look out for his interest would be big corporations, who care about nothing but to get more of his money. “No reason to believe they would charge me the right price if they can cheat a dollar more out of me!”
How does this person relate to others, especially those closest to him? How does he manage his finance, which Jesus said speaks most definitively about our heart. How does he view politics, the health care system, this pandemic, the weather network? When he gets old, gets sick, starts to lose control over everything, how would he age? I’ll let you be the novelist to write yourself into this character.
Oh, just to make sure today I am preaching a Christian sermon, let me add another question in passing, how do you think this man would see God (if there’s one--I am not jumping to conclusions for you)? Or maybe I should say, if there really is a God, would this God be visible to him, at all? This man I was talking about is otherwise a very smart person, I can say probably smarter than any of us here. But his distrust, his skepticism makes him blind to even the obvious difference between two pineapples, things that he can hold in his hand, see with his eyes and smell with his nose, weigh and judge, hard evidence for him to question his own assumptions about life and the world around him. To put it in Christian language, you can say he does not have "faith" in things and people, that he doesn’t trust that the world, despite all, is sustained by grace.
Are you a trusting person? The question speaks about our past, how we’ve come to know life, and also about our present, your presence, how we are living this very moment, in a pandemic or not. Of course it also speaks about our future, the possibility and the nature of hope. If there is not much we can trust, life is not only hopeless, it is hell. And the question is not only for us as individuals, but also collectively as members of family, church, society, and of humankind. To trust in nothing is to say there is no shared meaning, no togetherness between you and be, that we are in neither this nor that together. That’s when a society turns from order into chaos, as we have seen in the world in the very recent past. So it is a question of planetary emergency (e.g. Why should I trust the science behind environmental issues, or that I should wear a mask?), cosmic significance, the question Paul tried to engage us to consider in the Book of Ephesians.
We’ve read a part of the first chapter of Ephesians just now. Verse 3 to 14 is one long sentence in Greek, with more than 200 words, exuberant, exultant language, fantastical we say, probably with deep theology way beyond the reach of a layperson like us. Yes, much theology has been made out of it, but not until many years later. It was not an alien language to the first recipients of the letter: they knew what Paul was talking about. Paul didn’t send with the letter a book of commentary to explain himself. So what does it mean, if I, a person with a university education living in the year 2020, or you, likely fully functioning, thoroughly engaged in modern civilization, couldn’t quite understand what Paul was talking about?
Could it be that the language is archaic, has fallen out of fashion, simply not the way how a normal person would talk in this day and age? That it is not how we see things, because it’s certainly not a “scientific” cosmic vision, more like a sort of religious fairy tale that, really, “doesn’t do anything for me,” not relevant to how we conduct our daily, modern lives.
Maybe. But if you continue to read Ephesians, you will see even as Paul appeared to have been speaking with his head high up in heaven, his feet were firmly planted on planet earth. He would go on to speak about the most mundane daily matter of husband-and-wife and parent-child relationship, workplace ethics, etc. while creating one of the most well known Sunday School visual aids, the Armor of God, likely by checking out from head to toes and back the Roman soldier that was guarding him in prison. Paul was at such a lowly place, that I am not sure if he would waste a word to speak about something “irrelevant” to the earthly reality of his suffering and helplessness, or if he believed writing a religious fantasy novel on clumsy parchment paper with no white-out or backspace button is a good way to pass time in prison, waiting for his next beating or possible execution.
Even more important, do we really think Paul was speaking very differently than how we speak now? Let me speak modern language to you, and see how that compares to the words of Ephesians:
Such a feelin's comin' over me
There is wonder in 'most everything I see
Not a cloud in the sky, got the sun in my eyes
And I won't be surprised if it's a dream
Everything I want the world to be
Is now comin' true especially for me
And the reason is clear, it's because you are here
You're the nearest thing to heaven that I've seen
I'm on the top of the world lookin' down on creation
And the only explanation I can find
Is the love that I've found ever since you've been around
Your love's put me at the top of the world
Somethin' in the wind has learned my name
And it's tellin' me that things are not the same
In the leaves on the trees and the touch of the breeze
There's a pleasin' sense of happiness for me
There is only one wish on my mind
When this day is through I hope that I will find
That tomorrow will be just the same for you and me
All I need will be mine if you are here
I'm on the top of the world lookin' down on creation
And the only explanation I can find
Is the love that I've found ever since you've been around
Your love's put me at the top of the world
And our answer to such magnificent, unrestrained outpouring can only be…? Amen! Or, alternatively, Puke! It depends on when you need to speak such language if you have experienced such love or not, whether you can trust someone, your lover, has your back, and your head and your heart, in such a way you can only respond to this love with complete devotion and unreserved exultation.
You might think we are talking about a blind faith here, but no, it is a matter of trust. You might not trust such a lover actually exists, but the one who sings this song has experienced such love and you cannot take it away from her. Her trust is based on evidence, and not of an elemental, observable kind, to carry out empirical science with discipline, but the kind of evidence that infuses every atom of her existence with value and worth, purpose and prospect, creativity and re-creativity. You can kill her body but her soul won’t die with it. If you ridicule her she won’t hate you for it, for the love she was blessed with is so big that it embraces even your contemptuous unbelief and dissolves it.
The song is from, of course, The Carpenters, a group that rose to stardom in the late 60s, at the tail end of an era of protest and strife that left the world with not much to trust in, but by then people were just sick and tired of all the protest songs, and ready for love again. We are always ready for love. But to go back to the initial question, Are you a trusting person? I am sure all of you have a few questions of your own to question the question. The first, and likely the last, till the day we die, is this: Who can we trust? I want to be in love all the time, with no reservation, 24/7 head over heels, but Who can we love wholeheartedly?
We’ll say to The Carpenters, Good for you for having experienced such love, but I haven’t. In fact, the love that they were singing about, does not exist. Not on earth for sure. No lover can carry the weight of the songwriter’s exaggerated expectation and demanding devotion. Just because you the singer came up with the language to dream upon a star, it doesn’t mean you will get the star, let alone having the star going across the sky and writing your name on it. Who do you think you are anyways, to think that “something in the wind has learned your name,” that God would “choose you in Jesus before the creation of the world”? Who do you think you are?
Here is a piece of cold hard scientific truth to speak about who we are, if “scientifically” is the only way we speak about truth, that according to the renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking, "The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes." Now make sure you’d recite these lines to affirm your true identity when you wake up Monday morning to face another scummy week!
Now we are squarely back on earth, trapped in the prison of our petty little minds, our aging, dying bodies. Reality sucks, and it will suck up your love too, you will see, soon enough, all you young lovers. Life will one day be mostly about managing troubles, disappointments, mitigating devastations, controlling disasters. You will wake up many mornings feeling utterly alone, shattered; sometimes you would remember what shattered you the night before, other times you wouldn’t even know why you would feel so hopeless, even when everything is by and large going your way. One day you might feel no one has your back, everything, everyone in life disappoints you, including your dog (the cat never cares from day one). You might come to the conclusion of the pineapple shopper, that you need to grab life by whatever part you need to grab to stop it from slipping through your fingers. You will say, If I don’t fight for my tomorrow, my rights, my entitlements and get that piece of pie I deserve, you think someone else will look out for me and DoorDash it to me?
Still. Still, love never dies. Our longing to trust in something, someone, anything, anyone, is like an old injury that will continue to flare up. The ironic thing is: the most distrustful, skeptical people are most prone to trust in anything, and I am not just talking about conspiracy theorists. “Liberal-minded” people also have a salvation project in their head that they think is possible to achieve with their own hands, and for that blind to everything history has taught us, blind to what they see everyday in the mirror. (I’d love to, but I won’t go further into this topic today.) But do observe ourselves, people around you, and you will see: the most gullible people are the most skeptical ones. The trustful people always ask the right questions about life, in good faith, so that they can discern the way of grace that is holding the cosmos together. Any surprise that skeptical people are usually bitter, petty, selfish, and shortsighted?
During the COVID pandemic, there has been a huge increase in the number of people turning to astrology to find direction in their lives. We don’t want to be alone, so much so we would even pray to a stone, out there, in the cosmos. We beg for a cosmic vision of togetherness, while feeling like we are being left completely exposed with our insecurity and insignificance, vulnerable to who-knows-what-next lurking around every next corner, like we are chemical scum but with this shameful sentimentality in us that makes us continue to believe our proper place is at the top of the world, being loved, endlessly.
Now listen up: If we find our life being eaten up by something, a vision, that is so totalizing, that we no longer see a way out, other than going through the motions day after day, WYSIWYG and there is nothing more than what we can lay our hands on and control, then we need to worry, because an alarm is already sounding, a potential train wreck is already gathering its momentum. Maybe outwardly we are still a husband or a wife to someone, a son or a daughter, a song leader at church, a preacher, a lifelong church-goer, a “carpenter,” a miracle-worker in the healthcare system, an A student with great prospect, an upright, respectable business owner, but deep down we are slowly and surely being radicalized by a “totalitarian regime” to rebel against God.
We can be an enemy to God and his Way despite what we appear to be. Whatever cosmic vision that is totalizing us, shutting off the possibility of an old life born anew every morning, is the idol that we do not want to let go. Idolatry is the solace of pornography, a scummy substitute for the real thing, Pharaoh with his blinding amazing technicolor pyramids. We would rather trust something else, believe in a different story, beg for love from something or someone who will make a poorer beggar of us, than to trust that GOD HAS OUR BACK, in Christ Jesus, as Paul says here in Ephesians, before the beginning of creation as we know it, when the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters, when the earth was still formless and empty, purposeless, desolated in its disorder, He had you in mind. Your Father has wonderfully and fearfully formed your back--which, if you could imagine and recall, was only a handful of moonlights ago--but that day, when you came out of your mummy’s tummy, angels broke into a Carpenter song at the minute of your birth, as your Father laid His everlasting gaze of love on you and promised, “I love you. I made your back and I will have it. I will never let you go.”
Do you believe that? Do you have faith, trust in what the Father has done in Jesus, for you, for all? If we truly do, how then would we live our lives?
I now want to speak clearly about what was implied all along, that our struggle to trust God will always be intricately bound up with our struggle to trust people. No surprise, because our capacity to trust and be trusted speaks about our capacity to love and be loved. We are all sinful, damaged people, and we are bound to damage someone and something, when we believe no one cares about our injury, that God doesn’t have our best interest in mind.
If you have a spouse, I want to ask you to look at him, look at her, now. And then look at yourself again. Ask ourselves, Lately, have I been giving him, giving her, a good reason to trust people, trust God? If I find my spouse, drifting away, living an uncreative, ungenerous life, finding the Bible tasteless, foreign language to his ears, could it be not because of a lack of access to Biblical scholarship, or his general disinterest in words, but that something is damaging his trust in God, and that some of the damage might have been done by me? Don’t get me wrong: Your spouse will need to answer to his Master, now and eventually, as an individual; the question is not who is to blame, but rather, am I cultivating a soil in this family for trust to grow?
If I find my spouse giving way to anxiety, more of it everyday, and with that, addiction to false idols of pleasure, power and control, would I give her more reasons to dwell in the falsehood, that no one cares about her if she doesn’t do more, worry more about tomorrow, or would I ask God to help me to be the channel of peace and joy through which God could access her heart and her heart could access God’s?
If you are a child to someone, like I am, would you pray with me and examine our hearts together, ask ourselves, Lately, have I been giving my parents good reasons to be better leaders, to trust me more, as a way for them to trust God more? Have I despaired them in any way, giving them reason to say No to God, say No to life, say No to love? Do I have their backs as they struggle to have mine?
If you are a parent, also like I am, would you seek with me an honest word from God to speak about how prideful we might have been, and out of this pride how we might have damaged our children, giving them no reason to give their resounding Amen to echo Paul’s beautiful long sentence, all two hundred words of it, and adding more words of their own, everyday?
What we say, how we act, as a Christian, speaks about, if there is a God, whether He is trustworthy at all. We Christians get it wrong all the time, thinking our job is to prove that God exists, to vindicate our “faith.” But why does anyone want God to exist if He is not trustworthy, that He is unjust, impotent, unable or unwilling to have our back? When people look at how we live, do they see not only that there is a God, but that He is trustworthy? We can engage in businesses that we claim to be “life-affirming” without being “God-affirming.”
For example, can social distancing, not gathering, wearing a mask, or even a “COVID-zero” lockdown etc. be “God-affirming” activities? I suppose yes; why not? But they can also be pontificated out of fear and self-preservation, a convenient moralizing position from our overheated house with strong social support and private vehicle, access to internet and Netflix and Amazon and Skip-the-Dishes, we being utterly insensitive and ignorant of the many varied experienced realities during this trying period. Yesterday I was walking on Hastings, from downtown towards Main Street. I saw a graffiti with these words: I don’t know anyone with COVID. What do you think the artist was really trying to say? Are we going to throw the person to one end of a simple-minded political spectrum and dismiss his/her story?
We pray for the Spirit to speak to us, reveal to us our self-deception. The world is not going to plunge back into chaos just because we stop worrying or doing something about it. No one can undo God’s creative act. “Be confident of this, that he who began a good work in you, [in this Creation], will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6)
So what was Paul saying with more than 200 words, if you have to come up with one concise thematic statement? Here's my take: Jesus Christ is the destiny of every person. It will take our life time to unravel, live out the truthfulness of this impossible statement that speaks about the true possibilities of life. I will just close today with a few initial words on this point. So bear with me.
Destiny is not fate. A destiny is a spiritual drama that is still unfolding. If I am sure of my destiny, I am not afraid of the fate embodied in my personal circumstances and historical situations. When I missed my appointment, it’s not because someone powerful and invisible in Silicon Valley failed me, messed up the software update that is supposed to make my phone’s alarm and everything else in this world work for me. No one owes me anything, not my parents, not my kids, not the government, not ICBC, not CIBC, not the pineapple sellers, not my boss or coworker or the person in front of me in a long lineup or cut me off on the road, not the crazy real estate market, not the wifi that sucks or the T-Bird my daddy has taken way, not someone, something "out there," in the cosmos. Yes, there is and will always be systemic injustice, but that system would not totalize me (or anyone, for that matter)--which is not to say we will accept it, and we can talk much more in the future about a Christian’s political vocation. “If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?” (Romans 8:31) “Whatever God has promised gets stamped with the Yes of Jesus(…)By his Spirit he has stamped us with his eternal pledge—a sure beginning of what he is destined to complete.” (2 Corinthians 1:20, 22)
Jesus Christ is the destiny of every person. God’s plan for the fullness of time is to gather up all things in Jesus, things in heaven and things on earth. I am freed from the totalitarianism of self-pity, self-preservation, and self-destruction. I am free to live, free to give, free to love. I might need to social-distance from people and observe sensible guidelines due to the pandemic, but I can’t wait to jump right back to cash in the inheritance in Jesus that is prepared for all humankind. My Father has a billion dollar in the bank for me; I am not going to live like a penny-pincher or worse, beggar.
Do you know the world’s battle cry during COVID to go “Back to Normal” is secularist language? In Jesus, we are always waiting on the new new things the Father is going to accomplish in Jesus through the Spirit, often via human agents, the chosen ones, supposedly you and me. And the Father doesn’t do that only when things are settled “back to normal.” He does that when there is a crazy tyrant killing off all the babies just to kill the King in the manger. We speak Ephesians, we don’t speak COVID. When was the last time you sing a song about going “back to normal” ? No, we sing, “Lord lift us up where we belong, where the eagles cry on a mountain high.” We sing about life and more life, not the fear of losing and dying. We can be prudent and vigilant without giving into fear and resignation. We speak Ephesians, exuberant, exultant, heaven breaking into planet earth, eternal life, which means, the life of the age to come, available now, especially during a pandemic.
Jesus Christ is the destiny of every person.
We are in this spiritual drama together, to speak about the Good News in a bad news world. In Jesus’ name, one and only, now and forever, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.
Of all the one-liners I’ve heard from this man, this one has to be one of the most telling and memorable. He thought he was “cheated.” It didn’t matter he was perfectly happy half an hour ago with his decision to purchase the first pineapple. Didn’t matter that no one pointed a gun at his head to force on him the decision, and that no one played a sleight of hand to trick him into any false belief. Also didn’t matter the two pineapples are of different brands and with rather different looks, the second one obviously much more compromised even upon superficial reading. None of these matters. The man has already made up his mind, long before he arrived, stood at the crossroad of fruitville: that the world does not have his best interest in mind, that no one has his back when it comes to the matter of commerce, and the least of “those people” “out there in the world, the cosmos,” who would look out for his interest would be big corporations, who care about nothing but to get more of his money. “No reason to believe they would charge me the right price if they can cheat a dollar more out of me!”
How does this person relate to others, especially those closest to him? How does he manage his finance, which Jesus said speaks most definitively about our heart. How does he view politics, the health care system, this pandemic, the weather network? When he gets old, gets sick, starts to lose control over everything, how would he age? I’ll let you be the novelist to write yourself into this character.
Oh, just to make sure today I am preaching a Christian sermon, let me add another question in passing, how do you think this man would see God (if there’s one--I am not jumping to conclusions for you)? Or maybe I should say, if there really is a God, would this God be visible to him, at all? This man I was talking about is otherwise a very smart person, I can say probably smarter than any of us here. But his distrust, his skepticism makes him blind to even the obvious difference between two pineapples, things that he can hold in his hand, see with his eyes and smell with his nose, weigh and judge, hard evidence for him to question his own assumptions about life and the world around him. To put it in Christian language, you can say he does not have "faith" in things and people, that he doesn’t trust that the world, despite all, is sustained by grace.
Are you a trusting person? The question speaks about our past, how we’ve come to know life, and also about our present, your presence, how we are living this very moment, in a pandemic or not. Of course it also speaks about our future, the possibility and the nature of hope. If there is not much we can trust, life is not only hopeless, it is hell. And the question is not only for us as individuals, but also collectively as members of family, church, society, and of humankind. To trust in nothing is to say there is no shared meaning, no togetherness between you and be, that we are in neither this nor that together. That’s when a society turns from order into chaos, as we have seen in the world in the very recent past. So it is a question of planetary emergency (e.g. Why should I trust the science behind environmental issues, or that I should wear a mask?), cosmic significance, the question Paul tried to engage us to consider in the Book of Ephesians.
We’ve read a part of the first chapter of Ephesians just now. Verse 3 to 14 is one long sentence in Greek, with more than 200 words, exuberant, exultant language, fantastical we say, probably with deep theology way beyond the reach of a layperson like us. Yes, much theology has been made out of it, but not until many years later. It was not an alien language to the first recipients of the letter: they knew what Paul was talking about. Paul didn’t send with the letter a book of commentary to explain himself. So what does it mean, if I, a person with a university education living in the year 2020, or you, likely fully functioning, thoroughly engaged in modern civilization, couldn’t quite understand what Paul was talking about?
Could it be that the language is archaic, has fallen out of fashion, simply not the way how a normal person would talk in this day and age? That it is not how we see things, because it’s certainly not a “scientific” cosmic vision, more like a sort of religious fairy tale that, really, “doesn’t do anything for me,” not relevant to how we conduct our daily, modern lives.
Maybe. But if you continue to read Ephesians, you will see even as Paul appeared to have been speaking with his head high up in heaven, his feet were firmly planted on planet earth. He would go on to speak about the most mundane daily matter of husband-and-wife and parent-child relationship, workplace ethics, etc. while creating one of the most well known Sunday School visual aids, the Armor of God, likely by checking out from head to toes and back the Roman soldier that was guarding him in prison. Paul was at such a lowly place, that I am not sure if he would waste a word to speak about something “irrelevant” to the earthly reality of his suffering and helplessness, or if he believed writing a religious fantasy novel on clumsy parchment paper with no white-out or backspace button is a good way to pass time in prison, waiting for his next beating or possible execution.
Even more important, do we really think Paul was speaking very differently than how we speak now? Let me speak modern language to you, and see how that compares to the words of Ephesians:
Such a feelin's comin' over me
There is wonder in 'most everything I see
Not a cloud in the sky, got the sun in my eyes
And I won't be surprised if it's a dream
Everything I want the world to be
Is now comin' true especially for me
And the reason is clear, it's because you are here
You're the nearest thing to heaven that I've seen
I'm on the top of the world lookin' down on creation
And the only explanation I can find
Is the love that I've found ever since you've been around
Your love's put me at the top of the world
Somethin' in the wind has learned my name
And it's tellin' me that things are not the same
In the leaves on the trees and the touch of the breeze
There's a pleasin' sense of happiness for me
There is only one wish on my mind
When this day is through I hope that I will find
That tomorrow will be just the same for you and me
All I need will be mine if you are here
I'm on the top of the world lookin' down on creation
And the only explanation I can find
Is the love that I've found ever since you've been around
Your love's put me at the top of the world
And our answer to such magnificent, unrestrained outpouring can only be…? Amen! Or, alternatively, Puke! It depends on when you need to speak such language if you have experienced such love or not, whether you can trust someone, your lover, has your back, and your head and your heart, in such a way you can only respond to this love with complete devotion and unreserved exultation.
You might think we are talking about a blind faith here, but no, it is a matter of trust. You might not trust such a lover actually exists, but the one who sings this song has experienced such love and you cannot take it away from her. Her trust is based on evidence, and not of an elemental, observable kind, to carry out empirical science with discipline, but the kind of evidence that infuses every atom of her existence with value and worth, purpose and prospect, creativity and re-creativity. You can kill her body but her soul won’t die with it. If you ridicule her she won’t hate you for it, for the love she was blessed with is so big that it embraces even your contemptuous unbelief and dissolves it.
The song is from, of course, The Carpenters, a group that rose to stardom in the late 60s, at the tail end of an era of protest and strife that left the world with not much to trust in, but by then people were just sick and tired of all the protest songs, and ready for love again. We are always ready for love. But to go back to the initial question, Are you a trusting person? I am sure all of you have a few questions of your own to question the question. The first, and likely the last, till the day we die, is this: Who can we trust? I want to be in love all the time, with no reservation, 24/7 head over heels, but Who can we love wholeheartedly?
We’ll say to The Carpenters, Good for you for having experienced such love, but I haven’t. In fact, the love that they were singing about, does not exist. Not on earth for sure. No lover can carry the weight of the songwriter’s exaggerated expectation and demanding devotion. Just because you the singer came up with the language to dream upon a star, it doesn’t mean you will get the star, let alone having the star going across the sky and writing your name on it. Who do you think you are anyways, to think that “something in the wind has learned your name,” that God would “choose you in Jesus before the creation of the world”? Who do you think you are?
Here is a piece of cold hard scientific truth to speak about who we are, if “scientifically” is the only way we speak about truth, that according to the renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking, "The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes." Now make sure you’d recite these lines to affirm your true identity when you wake up Monday morning to face another scummy week!
Now we are squarely back on earth, trapped in the prison of our petty little minds, our aging, dying bodies. Reality sucks, and it will suck up your love too, you will see, soon enough, all you young lovers. Life will one day be mostly about managing troubles, disappointments, mitigating devastations, controlling disasters. You will wake up many mornings feeling utterly alone, shattered; sometimes you would remember what shattered you the night before, other times you wouldn’t even know why you would feel so hopeless, even when everything is by and large going your way. One day you might feel no one has your back, everything, everyone in life disappoints you, including your dog (the cat never cares from day one). You might come to the conclusion of the pineapple shopper, that you need to grab life by whatever part you need to grab to stop it from slipping through your fingers. You will say, If I don’t fight for my tomorrow, my rights, my entitlements and get that piece of pie I deserve, you think someone else will look out for me and DoorDash it to me?
Still. Still, love never dies. Our longing to trust in something, someone, anything, anyone, is like an old injury that will continue to flare up. The ironic thing is: the most distrustful, skeptical people are most prone to trust in anything, and I am not just talking about conspiracy theorists. “Liberal-minded” people also have a salvation project in their head that they think is possible to achieve with their own hands, and for that blind to everything history has taught us, blind to what they see everyday in the mirror. (I’d love to, but I won’t go further into this topic today.) But do observe ourselves, people around you, and you will see: the most gullible people are the most skeptical ones. The trustful people always ask the right questions about life, in good faith, so that they can discern the way of grace that is holding the cosmos together. Any surprise that skeptical people are usually bitter, petty, selfish, and shortsighted?
During the COVID pandemic, there has been a huge increase in the number of people turning to astrology to find direction in their lives. We don’t want to be alone, so much so we would even pray to a stone, out there, in the cosmos. We beg for a cosmic vision of togetherness, while feeling like we are being left completely exposed with our insecurity and insignificance, vulnerable to who-knows-what-next lurking around every next corner, like we are chemical scum but with this shameful sentimentality in us that makes us continue to believe our proper place is at the top of the world, being loved, endlessly.
Now listen up: If we find our life being eaten up by something, a vision, that is so totalizing, that we no longer see a way out, other than going through the motions day after day, WYSIWYG and there is nothing more than what we can lay our hands on and control, then we need to worry, because an alarm is already sounding, a potential train wreck is already gathering its momentum. Maybe outwardly we are still a husband or a wife to someone, a son or a daughter, a song leader at church, a preacher, a lifelong church-goer, a “carpenter,” a miracle-worker in the healthcare system, an A student with great prospect, an upright, respectable business owner, but deep down we are slowly and surely being radicalized by a “totalitarian regime” to rebel against God.
We can be an enemy to God and his Way despite what we appear to be. Whatever cosmic vision that is totalizing us, shutting off the possibility of an old life born anew every morning, is the idol that we do not want to let go. Idolatry is the solace of pornography, a scummy substitute for the real thing, Pharaoh with his blinding amazing technicolor pyramids. We would rather trust something else, believe in a different story, beg for love from something or someone who will make a poorer beggar of us, than to trust that GOD HAS OUR BACK, in Christ Jesus, as Paul says here in Ephesians, before the beginning of creation as we know it, when the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters, when the earth was still formless and empty, purposeless, desolated in its disorder, He had you in mind. Your Father has wonderfully and fearfully formed your back--which, if you could imagine and recall, was only a handful of moonlights ago--but that day, when you came out of your mummy’s tummy, angels broke into a Carpenter song at the minute of your birth, as your Father laid His everlasting gaze of love on you and promised, “I love you. I made your back and I will have it. I will never let you go.”
Do you believe that? Do you have faith, trust in what the Father has done in Jesus, for you, for all? If we truly do, how then would we live our lives?
I now want to speak clearly about what was implied all along, that our struggle to trust God will always be intricately bound up with our struggle to trust people. No surprise, because our capacity to trust and be trusted speaks about our capacity to love and be loved. We are all sinful, damaged people, and we are bound to damage someone and something, when we believe no one cares about our injury, that God doesn’t have our best interest in mind.
If you have a spouse, I want to ask you to look at him, look at her, now. And then look at yourself again. Ask ourselves, Lately, have I been giving him, giving her, a good reason to trust people, trust God? If I find my spouse, drifting away, living an uncreative, ungenerous life, finding the Bible tasteless, foreign language to his ears, could it be not because of a lack of access to Biblical scholarship, or his general disinterest in words, but that something is damaging his trust in God, and that some of the damage might have been done by me? Don’t get me wrong: Your spouse will need to answer to his Master, now and eventually, as an individual; the question is not who is to blame, but rather, am I cultivating a soil in this family for trust to grow?
If I find my spouse giving way to anxiety, more of it everyday, and with that, addiction to false idols of pleasure, power and control, would I give her more reasons to dwell in the falsehood, that no one cares about her if she doesn’t do more, worry more about tomorrow, or would I ask God to help me to be the channel of peace and joy through which God could access her heart and her heart could access God’s?
If you are a child to someone, like I am, would you pray with me and examine our hearts together, ask ourselves, Lately, have I been giving my parents good reasons to be better leaders, to trust me more, as a way for them to trust God more? Have I despaired them in any way, giving them reason to say No to God, say No to life, say No to love? Do I have their backs as they struggle to have mine?
If you are a parent, also like I am, would you seek with me an honest word from God to speak about how prideful we might have been, and out of this pride how we might have damaged our children, giving them no reason to give their resounding Amen to echo Paul’s beautiful long sentence, all two hundred words of it, and adding more words of their own, everyday?
What we say, how we act, as a Christian, speaks about, if there is a God, whether He is trustworthy at all. We Christians get it wrong all the time, thinking our job is to prove that God exists, to vindicate our “faith.” But why does anyone want God to exist if He is not trustworthy, that He is unjust, impotent, unable or unwilling to have our back? When people look at how we live, do they see not only that there is a God, but that He is trustworthy? We can engage in businesses that we claim to be “life-affirming” without being “God-affirming.”
For example, can social distancing, not gathering, wearing a mask, or even a “COVID-zero” lockdown etc. be “God-affirming” activities? I suppose yes; why not? But they can also be pontificated out of fear and self-preservation, a convenient moralizing position from our overheated house with strong social support and private vehicle, access to internet and Netflix and Amazon and Skip-the-Dishes, we being utterly insensitive and ignorant of the many varied experienced realities during this trying period. Yesterday I was walking on Hastings, from downtown towards Main Street. I saw a graffiti with these words: I don’t know anyone with COVID. What do you think the artist was really trying to say? Are we going to throw the person to one end of a simple-minded political spectrum and dismiss his/her story?
We pray for the Spirit to speak to us, reveal to us our self-deception. The world is not going to plunge back into chaos just because we stop worrying or doing something about it. No one can undo God’s creative act. “Be confident of this, that he who began a good work in you, [in this Creation], will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6)
So what was Paul saying with more than 200 words, if you have to come up with one concise thematic statement? Here's my take: Jesus Christ is the destiny of every person. It will take our life time to unravel, live out the truthfulness of this impossible statement that speaks about the true possibilities of life. I will just close today with a few initial words on this point. So bear with me.
Destiny is not fate. A destiny is a spiritual drama that is still unfolding. If I am sure of my destiny, I am not afraid of the fate embodied in my personal circumstances and historical situations. When I missed my appointment, it’s not because someone powerful and invisible in Silicon Valley failed me, messed up the software update that is supposed to make my phone’s alarm and everything else in this world work for me. No one owes me anything, not my parents, not my kids, not the government, not ICBC, not CIBC, not the pineapple sellers, not my boss or coworker or the person in front of me in a long lineup or cut me off on the road, not the crazy real estate market, not the wifi that sucks or the T-Bird my daddy has taken way, not someone, something "out there," in the cosmos. Yes, there is and will always be systemic injustice, but that system would not totalize me (or anyone, for that matter)--which is not to say we will accept it, and we can talk much more in the future about a Christian’s political vocation. “If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?” (Romans 8:31) “Whatever God has promised gets stamped with the Yes of Jesus(…)By his Spirit he has stamped us with his eternal pledge—a sure beginning of what he is destined to complete.” (2 Corinthians 1:20, 22)
Jesus Christ is the destiny of every person. God’s plan for the fullness of time is to gather up all things in Jesus, things in heaven and things on earth. I am freed from the totalitarianism of self-pity, self-preservation, and self-destruction. I am free to live, free to give, free to love. I might need to social-distance from people and observe sensible guidelines due to the pandemic, but I can’t wait to jump right back to cash in the inheritance in Jesus that is prepared for all humankind. My Father has a billion dollar in the bank for me; I am not going to live like a penny-pincher or worse, beggar.
Do you know the world’s battle cry during COVID to go “Back to Normal” is secularist language? In Jesus, we are always waiting on the new new things the Father is going to accomplish in Jesus through the Spirit, often via human agents, the chosen ones, supposedly you and me. And the Father doesn’t do that only when things are settled “back to normal.” He does that when there is a crazy tyrant killing off all the babies just to kill the King in the manger. We speak Ephesians, we don’t speak COVID. When was the last time you sing a song about going “back to normal” ? No, we sing, “Lord lift us up where we belong, where the eagles cry on a mountain high.” We sing about life and more life, not the fear of losing and dying. We can be prudent and vigilant without giving into fear and resignation. We speak Ephesians, exuberant, exultant, heaven breaking into planet earth, eternal life, which means, the life of the age to come, available now, especially during a pandemic.
Jesus Christ is the destiny of every person.
We are in this spiritual drama together, to speak about the Good News in a bad news world. In Jesus’ name, one and only, now and forever, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.
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Yours, Alex
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