Tag Archives: The Chosen

Everyday worry: God’s love in uncertain times

A life in the Spirit, Spiritual direction, , , , , , , , , , , ,

As I look out my high-rise window right now, I can no longer see the Philly skyline. After a week of rain, we still have showers! — today the clouds are so low I am looking into one. Last year I think we had a drought, this year a deluge.

I felt like I was in a fog long before the clouds descended. I’m not alone. You might also feel like a dark cloud has dimmed the light since Trump took office and issued 150+ executive orders. Sometimes this thunder and flurry of paper feels like a storm cloud, but more often it just obscures our view of the future. I won’t go into the latest from his trip to the Middle East and the awful budget bill, the impact of tariff nonsense, general corruption, and Stephen Miller. I’ve done quite a bit of that lately.

Regardless of the details, the descent into authoritarianism is a cloud of worry over most of us. The other day I looked out into my life landscape and my generally positive future seemed nowhere in sight. I had the usual worry about clients and my relationships — but what about the country? What is happening to the church? Selling my condo has been Trumped. Other business interests are beginning to be impacted. The 27% of my zip code neighbors who live below the poverty line are being squeezed even more.

Worry is not good. There is help.

I was having trouble turning into the presence of God as I looked out my window and prayed, so I looked for some help. What I found might help you, too.

First, I went to the book I am reading: Companions on the Inner Way by Morton Kelsey. I thumbed back to s spot I had underlined. Kelsey notes how Jesus called God “Abba” and told us to do the same. He says “Abba” should be translated “Daddy,” not just Father. It is affectionate, familiar.

My own father was not as warm as I would have liked, so I have always relished my somewhat “secret” relationship with God I developed when I lived with him, which still feels warm. I am grateful for that.

I think many of us like Jesus the most when we see him with his disciples saying, “I will not leave you orphans, I will come to you.” I feel great sympathy for my clients who never had a parent who could be relied upon to show up in ways that communicated love to them. I have lamented with 30somethings who are still waiting for love to “happen” in their lives. They are still like children in the cradle waiting to be picked up. Or they are really “over” not getting picked up and will tell you they’ve given up on true love.

I was enjoying my relatively easy relationship with God when a stray thought wheedled its way into my mind. My somewhat passive acceptance of  God’s love is great, but I decided I needed to add some conviction to it. Lounging in God’s arms is good, especially when I am worried, and such repose should be constant. But in a day clouded with alarm everywhere I look, I think the feeling needs some kick.

Receiving grace should meet our conviction

My mind turned to the wonderful Romans 5

We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. (vv. 1-2)  

There is Abba gracing me with that wonderful safe place to stand every day and delight in the hope of glory. But Paul goes on with the kick.

And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (vv. 3-5)

There is the conviction we need to apply. God’s love has been poured into my heart, and I’ve got plenty of affliction. Paul thinks that reality is going to result in something good. The Spirit is activating the conviction zone. I think of conviction as a response to the Spirit nudging me — that’s a good reason I discipline myself to pray every day, so I can get nudged.

Even more, conviction is the passionate action I take after I’ve turned into God’s embrace. My football coaches taught me this by saying (well, yelling at me a lot), “White, it is great you know the plays. But you don’t block and tackle with enough conviction (they probably said balls, or guts, and they really meant malevolence). If you don’t act with passion, nothing good will come of your understanding. I apply that lesson to loving. Love is a gift we experience from God; but it does not become something we live until it meets with  conviction and becomes our passion, too.

Love received. Love given.

I have so much experience with the Bible, I could then pull up two more places that guided me further. (Therefore, learn the Bible people).

I did not even try to remember where the phrase “mountains falling into the sea” was in the Bible. I Googled it. I guess I did not really need to find it. I knew the gist because I was experiencing it. I feel like the mountain of the U.S. I am used to is falling apart. It is unraveling before our eyes. A lot of us are watching it or trying to ignore it. And millions of us are convicted to respond. (Were you out on the street last Saturday? What are you planning for June 14?).

Google pointed me toward the famous Psalm 46. Here is the part I was looking for from Jonathan Alter’s translation:

God is a shelter and strength for us.
a help in straits, readily found.
Therefore, we fear not when the earth breaks apart,
when mountains collapse in the heart of the seas.
Its waters roar and roil,
mountains heave in its surge.

As I pondered that poetry in the middle of my dire straits, an old song rose up. It was very popular in the early days of our former church.

Even if you did not take the time to listen to it, just try on this mantra. It is the prayer of love meeting conviction:

Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders.
Let me walk upon the waters
wherever you would call me.
Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander,
and my faith will be made stronger
in the presence of my Savior.

These lines are a jolt in the middle of the song. When we sang it as a church, we would get progressively louder and more convicted as it repeated.  Glorious. I was glad to recall the experience the other day when mountains were falling and the waters were rising. I am called into new things in my old age. I need stronger faith for stronger worries.

Truly alive in the middle of uncertainty

I love how Oceans is a mash up of Psalm 46 and the story of Peter being called out of the boat in the storm. When we sing it, we start out being comforted by God in the middle of straits frothing as mountains crumble into them. Then the mantra reflects Peter seeing the Lord walking on water and getting out of his storm-tossed boat. I didn’t go to the Bible to find Peter’s story. I did not really need to, since I’ve heard it from flannel graph to commentary. What’s more, I’d just seen it on YouTube in an excerpt the creators The Chosen have uploaded. It is moving.

Even if you did not watch the scene, know that one of the good things about this video rendition is it does not shy away from the fact that we experience a lot of uncertainty and trauma which undermine our faith. We will always want to cry out and have Jesus save us and not leave us alone, just like we wished our parents had been more adept. God will not leave us orphans. At the same time, we will always need to grow out of our old selves and into our new – need to keep our eyes on Jesus and get out of the confines of our present understanding. Affliction produces endurance and endurance produces character.

Character is the fruit of conviction. We are not orphans. Great. But can you imagine a better time in history to have the love of God meet you in your trouble and energize your conviction to be truly alive in the middle of it and even make a difference? I keep telling myself “Endure the worry. Jesus is with you. The love of God is alive in you, even if the storm seems long.”

Biden in Israel: The problem with being the chosen ones

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction, , , , , , , , ,

Being chosen is a wonderful thing. The surprising hit show The Chosen films the feeling wonderfully, most of the time. Everyone who finds themselves chosen by God — including Jesus appreciating his own self-awareness, is thrilled with the pleasant absurdity of being noticed, appreciated and singled out. There is a lot of “why me?” voiced, both in joy and suffering. We see that being chosen is an experience, a relational reality, an undeserved grace, love.

When I think about the delight of being chosen I usually go back to having a higher-than-expected rank, at times, when I was picked for a team at recess. Or I remember the evening I asked a  young woman at the jr. high cotillion dance (yes, I did that) to be my partner when she did not feel like she was someone who would be asked. She was surprisingly pleased.

Gideon’s army being reduced. James Tissot.

The “chosen people” in the Bible are having the same experience, as far as I can tell. Sarah is chosen to give birth as an old woman and laughs out loud. Her grandson, Jacob is blessed as the second son and is shocked his elder brother does not try to kill him. Jacob’s son, Joseph, is elevated from an Egyptian prison to the highest ranks of government. Moses is called to lead even though he is a stuttering felon. Gideon is told to make a point by collecting a weaker army which can only succeed by relying on God. David is called from the forgotten outskirts to be king and repeatedly restored from utter failure. Then, of course, there is Jesus, the Chosen One, born in a manger in the Roman Empire backwater Israel still is at the time.

The perversion of being chosen

Then there are the people who apparently missed the main teaching. They are proud of being chosen and do not intend to let anyone take that mark of their value away from them. Jesus tells the Pharisees who are restoring and beefing up their identity as Abraham’s offspring:

“Produce good fruits as evidence of your repentance; and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones” (Luke 3:8).

After Emperor Constantine co-opts the Church in the 300’s, Jesus followers generally stopped accepting the main teaching and started living in palaces instead of prisons. After Constantine, being a “chosen one” becomes a badge of privilege and entitlement instead of an experience of surprise and undeserved endowment. By the time Europeans divide us all into nationalities and identities, everyone can have a little sense of being chosen over someone else.

Americans, especially the Evangelical portion, have mostly assumed the privileges and responsibilities of being the chosen people. Even Barack Obama made a point to reaffirm  the idea the United States deserves its special place in the world. He, like the rest of us, was taught the U.S., like Israel was given Canaan, was given North America. (Thus we have towns named New Canaan, CT). The myth is, CRT notwithstanding, we kept becoming more deserving of our special place in the world. After WW2 we were chosen to lead the free world. (As if the country had not always had such designs– Thomas Jefferson famously called it an “empire of liberty”). The idea is, the U.S. is chosen to give the world a choice, unfettered by tyrants and tradition. Obama said in his famous “A More Perfect Union” speech,

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law, it is our willingness to affirm them by our actions.“

He wanted a new kind of exceptionalism, but he did not doubt he is one of the chosen people.

When Biden spoke to the country last week about Israel and Ukraine he asked,

What would happen if we walked away? We are the essential nation… And as I walked through Kyiv with President Zelensky, with air raid sirens sounding in the distance, I felt something I’ve always believed more strongly than ever before: America is a beacon to the world, still, still.

We are, as my friend Madeleine Albright said, the indispensable nation.

The dangers of protecting one’s choseness

Ronald Reagan, of course, was much more directly religious than Obama or Biden about it. He was always quoting John Winthrop calling Massachusetts a “city on a hill”  (as in “the light of the world” in Matt. 5:14). He said it again it in his farewell address (here lovingly augmented with background music by the Reagan Library).

At the same time Reagan was preaching, some Christians were writing books about how proud they were to be part of the chosen American people. When my wife took over directing a bookstore in an Assemblies of God church during the Reagan years, she came upon a big display of The Light and the Glory by Peter Marshall Jr., son of the famous Senate Chaplain, Peter Marshall, and the famous author Catherine Marshall. It is arguably the most popular Christian interpretation of U. S. history ever written.

If you are looking for a starting point that ends in the Trump cult, peopled greatly by Evangelicals, this engaging book could be it. In the intro, Marshall and his co-author David Manuel summarize their thesis with this rhetorical question:

“Could it be that we Americans, as a people were meant to be a ‘light to lighten the Gentiles’ (Luke 2:32)—a demonstration to the world of how God intended His children to live together under the Lordship of Christ?  Was our vast divergence from this blueprint, after such a promising beginning, the reason why we now seem to be heading into a new dark age?”

Their answer is “Yes!”  And they proceed to make an historical argument that the U. S. came into being as a Christian nation; it had a special calling from God to be a light to the world, and had fallen away from God, forgetting the Lord’s “definite and extremely demanding plan for America.”

These thoughts have been developing since then. When Catholic, Supreme Court “originalists” ask “What would the Founders do?” it becomes a proxy for “What would Jesus do?” Pastors all over the country impute this kind of moral authority where God has not granted it.  That is idolatry. But idolatry or not, many people thought they were taking back the country for God on January 6. I suspect some Representatives think breaking the House is a small price to pray for returning America to its “calling.”

Biden's visit to Israel yields no quick fixes: ANALYSIS - ABC News

Biden and Netanyahu: a meeting of the chosen peoples

Equating the state of Israel and the United States with the Bible’s description of the “chosen people” is not only heretical, it is dangerous.

Nevertheless, the idea is laced into the country’s thinking and maybe yours. Dallas Jenkins, the writer and the director ot The Chosen says, when it came time to give the show a title, he decided on the name because of the term “Chosen One” is used when referring to Christ.

“We look at and use the term for Christ as the ‘Chosen One. ‘ So, it refers to Christ in many ways. The Jews are God’s chosen people. Even as an Evangelical, I believe that. And the people that Christ chose to follow Him and be on his team – as we like to say – it’s a little bit of a nod to that.”

What if you take that farther and apply Israel’s Old Testament, land-based assumptions to preserving a Christian nation-state?

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations. (Isaiah 42:1)

For many Evangelicals, the U.S. is Israel 2.0. The countries are team mates making sure history turns out right.

The state of Israel translates  its choseness as a right to exist, which Hamas decries. Radically religious Israeli settlers are willing to risk their lives to secure Abraham’s patrimony. The mostly-secular states of the U.S. and Israel are absolutely committed to securing the safety of the Jewish state, even though it has a diverse population that includes Palestinian Christians, both in Israel, and the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

The religion involved in all this political turmoil is ancient and complex. But the sense of chosenness is clear.  Biden promoted his “arsenal of democracy” as an expression of the obligation of being chosen  in his speech. He spoke of the “iron dome” protecting Israel as if it were sacred.

Reclaim being chosen

Psychologically and spiritually, we need help to be sure we are chosen, which always needs to be metered by our desire for the Chooser. Like with sex, we can settle for pleasure and never make the vulnerable connection of love. Being chosen can stay dangerously superficial, attached to whoever has enough power to protect their special status. But that quest for power never satisfies our desire to feel chosen, which requires an ongoing experience of mutuality. We wake up every day wondering if we are wanted, together, and safe. Against our best interests, we might defend our chosenness against anything that threatens our status, but that usually leaves us alone behind our defenses, insecure about being chosen.

The powers that have corrupted God’s gift of being chosen cause us great misery. I keep pondering the irony of the “great Christian nation” firmly supporting Israel’s recent bombs on the Christians of Palestine. The dissonance flabbergasts a doctor at the only Christian hospital in Gaza, which provided shelter to people until it proved unsafe. [Link in case the embed does not show up]

In the middle of the power struggles of the world the upstart, crowd-funded TV series The Chosen reasserts what it means to be chosen over and over. It is an obscure, overtly Christian show that doesn’t deserve to get made or be popular itself! But there it is. When it depicts Matthew chosen by Jesus to become his disciple (in the following clip), it gives me hope that many, if not most, Christians understand the Bible and feel the truth about being chosen in their very bones.

 

The second week of Advent: The joy of being forgiven

A life in the Spirit, Marriage and Family, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction, ,
New Yorker, 9/28/2009

I think I am good at forgiveness as a conviction — mainly because I just don’t want the bad feelings that come with not forgiving people. One time a church I led had the slogan “life’s too short not to love somebody.” I’m on that wavelength.

There’s another reason, too. I never got over my first training as  Jesus follower. I would not say I was well trained, but I was introduced to Jesus giving his “Sermon on the Mount” and his teaching about forgiveness is pretty clear in Matthew 6.

 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial,
but rescue us from the evil one.

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

I never got over the conditional nature of those lines. If I am not forgiving, I’m not on the team. It is a forgive-the-world and restore-humanity team; it is a peacemaking, undo-evil-even-if-it-hurts team; it is a love-is-#1 team. If I don’t want to forgive, but I do want to be forgiven, I’m just trying to get Jesus on my team, as if my vengeance rules should rule. But that is exactly what he is upending and he assumes I will be praying and acting with him.

Forgiveness is a fundamental force for good. I think I should forgive debts, relational and material, even if I am a victim. I think that is why, right after we forgive our debtors, we pray “Don’t leave me alone, Lord, lest I fall again into evil.” There is no way I can keep developing and behaving in a way worthy of the Spirit in me unless I stick with Jesus and forgive.

We have reasons not to forgive

If I am honest (and maybe you are, too), I have some good reasons not to stick with Jesus. So I am not surprised but still fascinated by how I keep running into lack of forgiveness in the broken relationships my therapy clients endure.

Sometimes they have been cut off or have to cut someone off without being reconciled and need to forgive at a distance if they can, because the hate or the danger is just too strong. Jesus is not in the mix or maybe just on one side, so the miracle is not going to happen.

Other times, people just agree not to forgive without rancor. Forgiveness is so difficult they make an agreement not to forgive and write their story without it.  We’re discovering more and more that the increasingly avoidant way we relate is hard to overcome. Some people agree on relationships that incorporate avoidant behavior as normal. I think many more people just go it mostly alone without much thought.

This example of unforgiveness is a composite of different people I have known. Lets say a married couple grew up managing their dysfunctional parents. The woman apologizes easily because she needed to to protect herself from the wrath of an abusive mother’s control system. But she admits her apologies have no content. Her husband won’t apologize at all since his mother was consistently drugged by painkillers and his father was absent so there was no place to take his injuries. He despairs that there is anything to forgiveness at all and doesn’t do it.

So in their relationship they have a deal: You don’t need to change if you don’t make me change. You don’t need to say you are sorry if you don’t make me say it — that is, as long as you keep your behavior on a spectrum that is not too damaging. She likes that because she doesn’t need to figure out how to forgive with her heart. He likes that because forgiveness is generally fruitless. But when they talk about it, they realize that forgiveness is really on a higher plane than they are operating, not lower. If they don’t forgive, there is no unconditional love in their relationship, no grace,  just the same managed distance with which they were raised, never a closeness. She says, “Oh yes. Love would be nice.”

A client was mortified when they thought our appointment was an hour later than it was. When we got together, they said they were sorry and I said, “I forgive you. Let it go and lets move on together.” They were a bit stunned. No one had ever said something like that to them before. Maybe they got “It’s OK.” or “No problem/o” or “No worries” but never, “I forgive you.”

Do we not like to say “I forgive you” because it seems too formal, too ceremonial? Is it too authoritiative? Maybe it is too committed, too publicly caring. Maybe it is too, “I have to mean it if I say it, and people need to think I can mean it, and I need think it is OK if I presume I mean something.” Maybe we aren’t sure.

The incarnation is about forgiveness

Maybe we don’t forgive others because we won’t, or think we can’t, forgive ourselves. Maybe I don’t readily forgive myself because I don’t practically receive forgiveness from God. Even if Jesus spoke, “Father forgive him” over me at the cross as I was nailing him up,  maybe I still don’t get it and don’t receive it. I’m  still in charge of making the world run right and ashamed I keep failing.

Want to pause an say, “I receive your forgiveness God?’

You may have found that little sentence humiliating, like you had to admit you were wrong for not receiving forgiveness well enough. Isn’t that why people say, “No need to ask” after I say I am sorry? It is sweet that they meant, “Of course I forgive you. I would never make you ask me.” But I DO need to ask and receive an answer. I don’t get forgiven easily. I need the act so I know it happened, so it is recorded in history, and so I know myself as the forgiven one. Being forgiven speaks me into being. It is a creative  and re-creative act. Don’t let me miss it!

Massacre of the Onnocent — Leon Cogniet (1824)

The incarnation of God in Jesus this month is, in itself, an an act of forgiveness. Before Jesus is born it is  predictable that Herod will try to kill him. We are so about power, not love, about creating debtors, about do all we can to deliver ourselves from more trauma. That’s the kind of sin being forgiven. Jesus is rightly seen as the new Adam, wrestling sin into exhaustion and defeat, that’s what it takes to forgive someone. He is also seen as the new Noah gathering people into a new ark that will make it through the trials of this stormy journey into the age to come. Forgiveness is right in the middle of the turbulence and Jesus is right there with as as we endure the waves.

People did not like it when Jesus saw his incarnation as, primarily an act of forgiveness. You may feel the same. But just one more story.

In chapter 2, right at the beginning of Mark’s gospel, he tells a story about a man paralyzed from birth. His friends believe Jesus can heal him and lower him through the roof of the place he is teaching. The gatekeepers of orthodoxy question his authority and Jesus knows what they are thinking.

Now some of the scribes were sitting there questioning in their hearts, “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves, and he said to them, “Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic— “I say to you, stand up, take your mat, and go to your home.”

We may be paralyzed and cannot use our bodies. Our hearts may be stone and we can’t love. Our spirits may be undeveloped so we can’t forgive. But the advent of Jesus is God coming to our homeplace to forgive each of us and to spread grace throughout the world through all of us. One of the joys every year during Advent is hearing Jesus say again, “Stand up. You are forgiven. Whatever is easiest for you to hear, I am here to say it. Now stand up. Learn to walk with me.”

Shall we pause to feel the joy of hearing him? “Stand up. You are forgiven.”

Do you think someone will feel joy when they  hear that same forgiveness from you today?