Making Bricks.

"And I prayed and said, 'God if you are real, make that branch move...now...now...right now.'"  

A few years ago I was talking to a friend and he was telling me about how he would test God when he was a boy.  He wanted to believe in God, but he just needed some sort of confirmation.  As soon as he told me this story I immediately remembered doing the same thing.  I would lay in a field and as different things came into view I would whisper "Make it move."  This friend had just recently come out of addiction and was starting to feel the presence of God again.  However I don't think he could shake the boyhood disappointment.  As grown men we may not ask God so innocently to show himself, but the ache remains of not knowing if he is there.  If he would just show himself, then I could believe!  Arguments about the nature of faith and doubt and why God can't just reveal himself don't quite do the trick in this scenario.  There is plenty of theology to be offered, but none of it gets to the heart of the matter.  This is a boy in the open grass looking at the sky asking to be loved and protected.  He is asking for hope.  

Whatever we ask of God, everything we send his direction, is a prayer.  There are good prayers and there are bad prayers.  For every human emotion, there is a brand of prayer that corresponds: embarrassment, fear, hope, gratitude, loneliness and on and on.  A boy wishing for God to make a tree or cloud or rock move, is a prayer.  An angry grieving father screaming at the sky is a prayer.  A young girl standing on a mountainside overwhelmed with emotion, is a prayer.  

Prayer is like making bricks.  We each have to make our own.  When we first begin to pray, we really don't know what we are doing.  As a child we may have someone teach us, show us how, but until we can make it personal it can feel like we are just piling up bricks, not knowing what to do with them.  Christ has always heard my prayers and certainly answered more than a few as I grew up.  But I could only make that connection in retrospect.  I think I only began to really understand prayer about 10 years ago.  I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room.  There was a young child getting blood drawn and he was hysterical with fear and pain.  I was a tender Christian at that time and everything felt magic and new.  In the moment I just felt the urge to pray.  I offered my prayer to this Jesus, that I still didn't quite understand, basically saying "Is this right?".  The boy immediately became quiet and passive.  He was still, like someone turned off his fear.  It's certainly debatable if Jesus answered my prayer or this was just coincidence of timing.  But what I began to understand in that moment is the idea of offering something to Jesus and asking him to do something with it.  In that moment, I was a boy, offering Jesus a clump of mud.  I didn't know how to make bricks yet.  

We dig in the mud and we make these bricks, hoping to do something with them.  When we make them we have something in mind, we are expecting an outcome.  We may make them with care or in desperate haste but it is not the quality or the skill of the brick maker that matters.  What matters is that we offer them to Jesus.  He will decide what is to be done.  We have to learn to trust him with our bricks, to do whatever he knows is best.  He may build a wall to prevent you from an area of weakness, or pave a path to some new road, or stairs to take you above and over something awful.  Or he may just make something beautiful because that is who he is.  We get so lost sometimes in our faith that we scramble to make piles and piles of bricks and forget to give them to the master mason.  We sit among our ruins wondering why things are so desolate, why is God so far away.  At times we make terrible bricks, with our sin hoping to be hidden in them and hoping God will use them any way.  He cannot.  Building with faulty bricks will lead to our destruction.  At times, the amount of bricks needed seems too much and we are overwhelmed.  And then we look up to see our brothers and sisters making bricks with us, offering them with full hearts to our Christ.  And then sometimes it is our turn to bare the burden.  A worn out and desperate soul drops a load of bricks at our feet and cries, "Help!"  We can tell them what to do with those bricks or that we will offer our own.  But of course what is needed is labor and time, help in carrying all that weight to Jesus.  For some, they see the enormous amount of bricks that are needed, yet they persist.  There is no reason for them to think that they could ever produce enough to make a difference, but they continue anyway.  They are head down, thoughtfully making bricks in the dirt and heat, head bowed and lifting them one by one to their savior.  When they finally look up, they will be in awe to see the work he has done.  The Great Architect has laid out the plan for his creation.  The Great Mason has called us into his work.  We can accept this and worship him with our surrender, or we can go off and build our own crumbling world.  Either way, his will be done.

And what of the boy in the field, offering something, but what to God?  The boy's prayers are less like brick making and more like dirt clod throwing, trying to provoke the Almighty, "Look at me!"  He is looking, he is always present.    If God accepts that dirt clod and moves the stone, that boy will never learn how to make bricks.  He will be stuck forever throwing dirt clods, never knowing what it's like to build with Jesus.  He is whispering and waiting for you to offer a sincere prayer to him, to gently take it from your hand and begin to show you the wonders of what his Love can build.

Gandhi.

"You really think Gandhi is in hell, being eternally tortured, having his fingernails torn out and skin removed, little devils poking him with pitchforks forever?"  

Yes, I really think Gandhi is in hell.  I have no idea what that means any more than I know what heaven will be or what it's like to be an eternal being.  But what I do know is that hell, in it's simplest definition is this :  not Jesus.  And not Jesus means all "us".  Hell, or torture is "that fierce imprisonment in the self" as C.S. Lewis describes it.  Jean Paul Sarte, describing a figurative "hell said, "Hell is other people" describing the feeling of being judged by others.  Gandhi of course was amazing, he and Mother Teresa are always the names used when invoking saints, the same way Hitler is used to illustrate how bad someone is.  And we use Hitler as an example for everything from genocide to bad manners.  I'm not supposed to say this, but I bet Gandhi was an asshole.  Though he didn't use force or demonstrate his power with might, he still had power.  He's an icon, even today.  Even if people don't know what he was fighting for, they still know he was a good and peaceful dude.  I wonder though, if in his quieter moments, he was internally scheming to gain more influence over those around him.  I bet he lacked some nobility in his motives.  I bet the amazing results he achieved were in part fueled by fear and ambition.  I bet he needed Jesus.  Not so he could go and free his country, but so he could free himself.  Gandhi needed Jesus, not to be a better human, but to be saved and made into an eternal creature.  Gandhi is in hell, he is somewhere torturing himself and maybe he doesn't even know he is in hell.  The distance between Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Hitler is massive in the eyes of humanity.  However in comparison with God, G, MT and Hitler are all in the same boat.  They all need Jesus, and he made it pretty clear that his is the only way to salvation.  Heaven is only heaven because Jesus is there.  Would I like to imagine that all the nice people who didn't accept Jesus still got to go somewhere nice?  Yes, I do.  I picture the faces of friends who have passed and I wonder if there is someway they get to be saved. It's a nice thought...for a few moments anyway.   But to accept that being nice or good is enough is to deny Christ completely.  No one escapes the depravity of the human heart, no matter how shiny they are on the outside, all fall short on the inside.  It's all or nothing.  Jesus is all.  So if we deny Jesus, we choose the only other God available.  And that is ourselves.  And in my experience of  self absorption, self gratification, and self worship, I cannot imagine a more hellish existence than focusing on myself forever.  When God removes his glory and presence from you, you'll see how grotesque you really are without his grace.  Gandhi will look just as depraved as any madman without the beauty and morality given by God himself.  Maybe Gandhi wasn't an asshole, maybe he was every bit the saint as we picture him to be.  But as Mother Teresa knew, all the good deeds in the world pale in comparison to what Christ has done.  She didn't serve to be accepted in to heaven, she served because she knew the love of Christ.  Without that Love, without Christ himself, all is lost, all is hell.

2 Thessalonians 1:8 He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might 10 on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed. This includes you, because you believed our testimony to you.

Road Trip.

"The road stretches out forever.  It never disappears behind a hill or into a forest.  It goes on and on, flat and hopeless into the dust, into infinity.  It goes on so long and so straight that only failure of sight or the curve of the earth prevent you from seeing where it goes.  She sits on the hood of her car pulled over at the side of the road.  It's a good car, old but mechanically sound if not visually pleasing anymore.  But the gauges don't work anymore, so how much gas she has left is only a guess. Her knees are pulled up under her chin and she feels the weight of it all sink in.  She could have just stopped in the middle of the road, because there is no one coming from one direction or the other.  She glances over at the sign again, hoping that some information has changed.  It has not.  In fact there is no useful information at all.  On the faded sign, next to the picture of where a picture of where a gas pump used to be, there is an empty spot where the miles used to be.  After a few minutes, she hops off the hood and goes to look closer at the sign.  She can make out a "4", but that doesn't tell her much.  It might be 40, 204 or 4 million miles until the next stop.  She has been stopped now for probably 20 minutes.  She is paralyzed by the lack of information, the lack of knowing.  Although really, what difference would knowing make?  She still has to make this trip, knowing nothing about how it will end.  When she started she had so many hopes for where it would lead, not really caring, but just happy to be on the move.  Now, as she wanders into desperation, she just hopes to survive."

Forgive me, but let me break from the story for a moment.  Driving home the other a couple of days ago, I was listening to talk radio and caught the tale end of a caller.  He was animated, but succinct, thoughtful and clear.  He was talking about the search for God, positing that Man's search for God was evidence of Man creating God and not the other way around.  His monologue was so succinct and thought out that it did not leave much room for response.  He went on to say that science had now identified the part of the brain that was evolved to be spiritual.  He referenced the book, The God Part of the Brain and the website God Part .  I'm not much of a journalist, so I didn't do the necessary research on any of this, but here's a small taste:

"What if we were to now apply this same principle to the fact that every known culture from the dawn of our species has believed in some form of a spiritual reality? Wouldn't this suggest that spirituality must represent an inherent characteristic of our species, that is, a genetically inherited trait? Furthermore, wouldn't this then also suggest that our "spiritual" instincts, just like our linguistic ones, must be generated from some very specific region within the human brain? I informally refer to this site as the "God" part of the brain, a series of neural connections from which our spiritual beliefs are generated."

The caller, after describing this God Part of the Brain went on to suggest that, early man, because their life was so short and brutish needed a way of coping and essentially this God Part of the Brain was proof of an evolutionary coping mechanism.  And Religion, Belief and Spirituality were all essentially a way of making sense of things we don't understand.  

He was a good caller.  And although he had done a lot of research, he was still drawing a conclusion based on his beliefs and not necessarily as scientific as he would have the listeners believe.  It felt like, and it often feels like, there was a proclamation that because we have this scientific discovery, there is no God.  That is quite a leap.  Essentially, he does the very thing he is arguing against.  That is offering up a way of making sense of that which we do not understand, just like those poor brutish cave dwellers.  

Generally, I believe in God a creator of all.  Specifically, I believe in the Savior Jesus Christ who died for the sins of the world.  Therefore, conclusions I draw from the same information that the non-believing caller was using is, not surprisingly, entirely different.  If you tell me that there is a part of the brain that is genetically disposed to seeking God, it is reasonable for me to assert that that part of the brain is right in doing so!  Not because we need to cope, but because there is a God. The website goes on to say, quite honestly that :

"The 'God' Part of the Brain" offers a secular humanistic [albeit atheistic] alternative to our old religious paradigms. Herein lies a new way of perceiving ourselves, our place in the universe and ultimately what it means to be human—flawed and mortal—but with the hope of living meaningful and fulfilling existences despite that there is no God, no soul nor any afterlife."

This, of course, is a belief system.  Compelling, especially to an atheist, but no more founded in science than any belief system.  It is, again, a means of making sense of things.  Scientific discoveries were born out of the desire and for the purpose of Glorifying God, discovering his nature and bringing mankind closer to the Awe of the Universe.  Now, people make amazing scientific discoveries and the first reaction is "See, I told you there was no God!"  

Discovery:  There is a part of the brain that seeks meaning.  

Conclusion:  This is a trait, evolved to help humans cope.
Even if this conclusion is true, it's hardly satisfying or substantiated.  We know so little.  My unscientific conclusion would be:  Man seeks, so there must be something to find.  For an illustration, let's consider that there is a part of the brain that can use the olfactory senses to determine if something is spoiled.  It is safe to conclude that there is such a thing as spoiling. Furthermore, we have evolved the understanding that these spoiled things are harmful to us.  The brain urges us to search for food, food exists.  The brain compels us to seek a mate and have intercourse and there is such a thing as pro-creation.  Did we invent Math? Or has math always existed waiting to be discovered? Like an itch in our brain compelled us to seek it out?  C.S. Lewis says it this way,

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." (Mere Christianity, Bk. III, chap. 10, "Hope")

Evolution hardly explains away God.  It's likely that whatever God's means have been for ruling the Universe since before the Big Bang, if they happen to include evolution, I will not understand them.  To suggest that anyone fully understands the implications of the Theory of Evolution is only slightly more absurd than suggesting that we can fully understand the ways of God.  The best course always starts with understanding how little we know. 

Coping, may very well be an evolutionary creation.  Belief in something does ease the pain and burden of this brutish life.  It wasn't just brutish for the pre-historic, it's brutish for us as well.  A longer life doesn't make it less so.  Our pain has evolved with our life span.  But anything man made eventually wears thin and cannot be sustained.  A belief system will fail when things get too hard, too mysterious or too weird to explain away.  It is at that point that genuine connection to a Real God becomes critical.  Up until this critical point, our self constructed world view may have done the job.  But in all our lives there comes a point, when we need more.  Life has a way of crumbling that which we have built for our selves and ultimately, we do not have the capacity to save ourselves.

Let's try to wrap this up, shall we?  Let's return to our girl at the crossroads.  She is wondering what to do next.  

"After squatting under the sign, thinking of giving up and just laying back into the dust, making dust angels until she wastes away, she has a moment of resolve.  She bounces up and heads to the driver side.  She confidently turns the key and the car rumbles and starts right up, as if to say 'I'm with you!  Let's go!'  The girl glances out at the sign again, 'It's not that far.'  she tells herself.  She looks down at the broken gas gauge and says, "There's enough."  With the car now shifted forcefully in drive, it spits streams of gravel out from under the tires until it squeals on to the pavement.  The girl didn't even look for oncoming traffic.  Out on the road, forward momentum taking hold, she smiles confidently.  "I'm gonna make it." she says almost audibly to the empty car.  A few more miles down the road, as the monotonous hum of the tires on the road plays under the wind whipping through the open windows, a question mark starts to make it's way onto the end of that lingering sentence.  'I'm gonna make it?' As she presses on, foggy thought becomes clearer in her head.  It's a persistent thought that has always been there in one form or another, 'Will someone save me?'"

The girl can tell herself that there is enough gas or that it's not that far, but that doesn't make it so.  What remains for the girl and for everyone taking breath, is that we need to be rescued.  Her fate on the road and in the physical world remains uncertain.  However, her eternal fate as well as our own is not bound by circumstances.  Eventually there is a reckoning for us all.  There is no escaping it one way or another.  Coping or explaining or hope itself may get us on the road.  However, if object of our faith in is not real, then there will be a consequence. That thing in our brain or in our heart that tells us to seek out this rescuer might have very well been put there by the one that is meant to rescue us.  That mysterious savior we crave, may turn out to be real after all.  Our path and our destination is determined by our willingness to step out in faith: To act on that urge to seek out the rescuer, the savior, the creator of all things.  My belly tells my brain to seek out food, so I do.  My skin tells my brain to put on a jacket, so I do.  My heart aches with pain and joy and tells my whole being to find rest in the author of life.  So I did.  This Faith that continues to grow and sometimes shake is only worth something if Christ is the true King and Savior of all.  I have enough evidence in my experience to have a resounding confirmation.  But it remains true that I won't know the depth and the scope of his answer until I pass on to the next life.  

Thread.

"I've often wondered how they got that bridge across the falls. Just recently I heard that there was a story in a newspaper that explained just how. It said that the "The suspension bridge built across Niagara Falls was begun by a thread attached to a kite. When the wind blew, the kite went across. Then on the thread they attached a string and they pulled it across. Then to the string, they attached a rope and pulled it across. Then to the rope they attached a cable, and that cable was then fastened to each end, secure. Then on that cable a basket was attached for the men to work and eventually the bridge was built.

They say that gap was overcome by a thread, and with that small piece of thread, eventually a giant of a bridge was built.

Well, there's a more powerful thread than that. When you share even a thread of God's grace in Christ, as His ambassadors, you're sharing the new life that only God could bring, the new life that God has indeed secured, the Grace that can change everything in a person's life, now and forever."  Sermon Excerpt Rev. Dr. Gregory Seltz