Face Melting.

At the end of the glorious movie Raider's of the Lost Ark, our hero Indiana Jones and his lady friend are the only survivors of a supernatural devastation that occurs when the bad guy opens the Old Testament Ark, which is said to contain the very power of God's wrath.  As I think about this movie, it seems clear that Indiana Jones did not have an appropriate reaction to what he experienced.  Being a historian and an archeologist, and knowing the Old Testament stories of the Ark of the Covenant, he should have experienced a dramatic life change after being in the presence of the Ark in action.  An army was laid waste before him.  Jones and Marion were the only survivors as a regiment of the Nazi's finest were melted away.  But at the end of the movie, we only have Indiana lamenting to Marion about the government bureaucracy.

Marion: Hey, what happened? You don't look very happy.
Indiana: Fools. Bureaucratic fools!
Marion: What'd they say?
Indiana: They don't know what they've got there.
Marion: Well, I know what I've got here. Come on. I'll buy you a drink. You know, a drink?

The interesting thing is that while his reaction isn't what it should be: worship, awe and praise; it is a true human reaction.  We are shown many signs and wonders in the course of our lives.  The simplest things should amaze us. Consider that the very breath drawn into our lungs is somehow full of the very thing that gives life to our blood and that blood is pumped by a miraculous muscle into the nooks and crannies of our spectacular body and into the mind, even one that has all the necessary oxygen still doesn't take the time to contemplate what it would take for one small planet, alone in 14 billion years of unimaginable vastness to fall into the perfect temperate range x million miles from an appropriate sized star and amazingly achieve life with no explanation of why or how (at least not in scientific terms), not to mention the very playground of the Universe itself and where it may have come from.  We experience the glory of the universe on a daily basis and then, somehow, move right along.

"Hey Marion, remember when we were captured by the Nazi's and they opened the Ark of the Covenant and the Angels of God came and removed the wicked from it's presence?"
"Yes, I remember that?"
"What was the name of the guy that opened it?"
"Beloc."
"Beloc, right.  Wow, that was crazy huh?"
"So crazy.  I still have nightmares."
"What time do you go in to work tomorrow?"
"Meeting Brody at 8am."
"Love you."
"Love you too, goodnight."

I spent my childhood praying for my own figurative opening of the Ark of the Covenant.  Face-melting certainty was preferred over the gentle, lifelong mercy God had planned for me.  Indeed, somewhere in my wiring is an irrational desire for destruction because of it's immediacy and undeniability.   This is much preferred over the lengthy thoughtfulness and subtlety of patient accountability.  But I really did want to believe.  Numerous Sundays I went up, like many of my siblings, for alter call after alter call waiting for the bright light of Jesus to strike me blind.  That would be something.  That I couldn't ignore.  But it never came and I processed my failure to receive revelation as a failure on my part.  I think I held out that God loved me, but he didn't seem particularly interested in me.  Maybe he was disappointed in how I was turning out.  The divorce of my parents and the dissolution of my family played a big factor into how I perceived things. 

So God still existed for me, out there somewhere.  Maybe he was Jesus and Jesus was him, but I didn't spend too much time looking into it.  Instead I spent a lot of time trying to poke holes in the validity of the Bible, Faith and certainly Organized Religion.  I went on the offensive and tried not to have anything I needed to defend.  Eventually, that approach wears on you.  You have to believe in something, you just do.  But even those who believe in nothing have to have a construct for which to believe in nothing, and then putting great faith in those constructs.  Humans are built to believe, to worship.  What we choose to worship varies greatly and indeed can be very destructive.  If we worship that which is worthy of worship, we get joy.  If we do not, we get depravity. 

Proverbs 22:6 says,  ^"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."  I heard some one suggest recently that the phrasing may actually be "It will not depart from him."  This second phrasing feels right for me, because I had certainly departed from the countless hours of Sunday School teaching I had been given and fully abandoned my family's legacy of great faith.  It appears, though, that it did not abandon me.  The Hound of Heaven, Jesus Christ himself, was after me and over time I could no longer out run his presence.

Francis Thompson - Hound of Heaven

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
   I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
   Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
             Up vistaed hopes I sped;
             And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
   From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
             But with unhurrying chase,
             And unperturbèd pace,
     Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
             They beat—and a Voice beat
             More instant than the Feet—
     'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me'.

Unlike when I was a boy, I no longer wanted to believe, I sensed the great burden it would be.  Fundamentally I knew that belief meant surrendering my spot on the throne.  I still craved truth and authenticity and sincerity, these things mattered regardless of the subject.  In this context, I put a premium on my own brain and assumed that becoming a Christian mean that I would have to surrender my brain along with truth, authenticity and sincerity.  Also, I had convinced myself that all Christians were idiots.  While I dismissed Christians, I gave great credit and deference to Jews, Buddhists, Hindu, Muslims and all others.  They didn't demand anything of me, but Christ did.  Into my twenties, whenever Christ got closer, I lit up my own Ark and tried to self-destruct.  I tried to burn away the goodness that was after me.  I knew it would bring change.  But there was an even more powerful force: worthless-ness.  As more goodness surrounded me, the more I knew I didn't deserve it. 

Yet, in this stage of my life, I was still drawn to Christ.  I would buy Jesus themed candles at the grocery store and line them up on the shelf, trying to be ironic I suppose.  I was drawn to movies like The Last Temptation of Christ and Dan Brown's DaVinci Code.  These were versions of Jesus I could deal with, these depictions contained a contained Jesus.  They focused on the humanity of Jesus.  I liked this very much.   My growing family started to attend a Unitarian Church.  I was sure my thirst for truth would be satiated there.  They talked about things that mattered: truth, justice, compassion and a little bit of Jesus, what a great guy he was.  But as we continued to attend there, and as I consumed more about the human Jesus, the divine Jesus began to reveal himself to me in a way I could receive.  He became uncaged in my heart, and my heart began to ache as the human Jesus was touted and the divine Jesus was refuted.  More and more it became clear that an only human Jesus was pointless.  Many people claim to admire the human Jesus as a great teacher of Love, even as they dismiss his divinity.  C.S. Lewis explores this contradiction best and I have quoted this many times. 

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

This concept would eventually lead me to the heart of my faith, the moment when I could finally hear Christ's small still voice and it said, "Who do you say I am?"

So a human Jesus, what could a mere historical Jesus do for me? Nothing more than any historical figure, Ghandi or Hitler or Kennedy or Obama.  I was getting close, but it would take disparity to drive me to the real, risen, divine Christ.  If I wanted so badly to not believe, why then, did this emptiness of unbelief persist?  The Divine Jesus, the Hound of Heaven, for reasons only he knows, would not let me be.  There is so much more to this story, bears and car wrecks and broken necks and loss and treachery, and I will spare you that, but the point is NOT that I finally became worthy of God's love.  The point is that Love is who God is.   He just loves us and is relentless about it, pursuing  his children, always.  I am one of his children.  I am a child of God.  Realizing this is my Ark moment.  It has taken a lifetime, but what is a lifetime to God?  He could have opened up the heaven's and spoke to me when I was a boy, but much like the unphased Indiana Jones, I would have not allowed myself to be affected and changed but the power of God.  That is the dilemma of Free Will.  God's Glory is revealed at all times and for all times in the Word and in the World.  He does not change, but it is our ability to receive and perceive that is what must change.  For some it comes in a burst of light, for others it comes over the long haul of life.  An open mind and a contrite heart are the requirements. 

Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught' (He said),
'And human love needs human meriting:
          How hast thou merited—Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?
          Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
          Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
          Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
          All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
          Rise, clasp My hand, and come!'
   Halts by me that footfall:
   Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
   'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
   I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.'

As a Footnote, the following link is the author's note from the book, Out of Egypt by Anne Rice.  It is a fictional account of the boyhood of Jesus.  What she found in her research of the historical Jesus is a story I very much identify with. 
Anne Rice Route to Jesus.
If one really seeks the truth, they will find Jesus there waiting and undeniable.  But often, we do not really want the truth.  As Pilate says to Jesus, "What is Truth?"