Getting to know Grace

Grace and Mom, 1994

In my earliest memories, I lived in a small bubble of Chinese families in a Southern town. But when I was eight, my parents went off the reservation, and we started attending a large, mostly white church. One lady that befriended us all in that lonely transition was Grace Mutzabaugh. As a child, I thought she was old as dirt with her deep criss-cross of wrinkles, but she would have been 60ish when we met. She loved games and at a time when I threw temper tantrums if I thought I were losing, she helped me stay the course through rounds of Parcheesi.

I remember in middle school, she returned from a trip to South America with a gift for me, a bird made out of animal horn. I remember liking the bird, but really marveling that she had thought of me while traveling.

When I was in high school, she tutored my mom in English. I don't remember anyone else spending time with my mom like that. They were dear friends, taking walks and praying together for many years.

Miss Mutzabaugh was the never-married founder of the National Institute of Learning Disabilities which worked closely with the church and Christian school I attended. She traveled to other countries to help missionary parents with learning disabled children have the skills to help their child and stay on the field. She was my example of a woman doing big things outside of home life. But more importantly, she embodied the Jesus-life and showed me what it was like to see people and not projects, to see people and not see labels and expectations.

But I was thick and even though I grew up in a Christian home, in a church, with Grace in my life, it wasn't until I got to college that I understood God's grace. Somewhere between the lovely community of believers I met and the books I read, it finally sank in that there was nothing I could do to make God love me more (and nothing I could do to make God love me less).

As a black-and-white perfectionist, this was revolutionary and deflating. I could not try harder, collect more achievements, do anything to increase the love of God for me. But the primary orientation of my life up to then had been precisely doing more, doing better. So once you can't do anything to earn God's love, what do you do? The doing is what is called discipleship, it's training to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (II Peter 3:18).

Some time after I left home, Grace developed Alzheimer's and had to be moved out of her house. Many of her books came to our house, and maybe a dozen or so are with me now. Looking over those titles, I got a glimpse of how this friend chose to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in a lifeling process of letting God be Lord over all that she was, heart, soul, mind, and strength.

What Grace chose to read, how far she chose to travel, or how she chose to love my family did not earn her a place a heaven. But these were part of an ongoing habit in her life to entrust herself to God. This is discipleship; this is what we do in grace; this is what it means to say yes to Jesus. We apply the strength we have to move in the direction of the will of God and trust in the power of the Holy Spirit for the rest.

The Ministry of Silliness

With preschool aged kids around the house, I'd say our lives are a mix of the sweet, sour, and silly. Lately, we've been in high friction mode with a lot of "That's my toy!" and "But I was playing with that!" followed by "Waahhh!!" Drives me nuts, but also makes me more aware of when the house rings with laughter and cackles. It might only be for 30 seconds, but it's gold.

This week, I've been meditating on Hebrews 4:14-16, particularly this idea of approaching God's throne with confidence.

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.~Hebrews 4:14-16

In the text, this confidence appears to rest in two things: first, that Jesus has ascended to heaven as our great high priest, and second, that Jesus lived our human life and "gets" it. An Old Testament high priest offered sacrifices on behalf of himself and the people of Israel for their sins. But the blood of animals had to be offered regularly to cover sins. Jesus, as the high priest, offered himself as a sacrifice not on his own behalf, but on behalf of all humanity for all time. So that's one part of our confidence, that in Jesus, we are expiated, our sins have been paid for and do not prevent us from coming before God's majestic throne.

The other part of our confidence is supposed to be in the fact that Jesus walked the earth and lived human life and can understand our weaknesses. I'm making a bit of a leap here, but I think this works out in all the language used to describe our new relationship with God as one of adopted children.

For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry,“Abba, Father.” ~Romans 8:14-15

Yesterday, we were out at a big birthday dinner, and our kids were at one end of a long table happily into all the sprinkly condiments. There was salt and pepper getting shaken out, there was sugar and pepper, pepper in water, sweet n low and who knows what. The parent-self wanted to chastise them for doing it wrong. But the kid-self remembered all those grown-up dinners my brothers and I attended where we entertained ourselves in the same way albeit Chinese style: tea and soy sauce, tea and chili paste, chili paste and mustard and green onions, and so on.

As I think about this and I think about approaching God's throne of grace with confidence, I think this confidence we're to come with is not the confidence of triumph and ability, but the confidence of relationship. It is like the confidence my children have that we find them delightful, that we are after their good, that we desire to help them*. In this, I think we need to spend more time meditating on Jesus' call to have faith like a child.

*We do have punchy parent moments where we screw this up.

The mysterious ascension of Jesus

If you're an orderly-minded person, you should just go find something else to read.

This Thursday is for many Christians the Feast of Ascension which commemorates the Jesus' return to heaven after his resurrection and is celebrated 40 days after Easter. I have never celebrated the Ascension; I've never heard a sermon on it that I remember (although I did have a pastor who loved Acts, so he may have covered it at one point); I basically have never thought about it.

But this year, I noticed, and I'm trying to rectify the issue.

First off, in proportion to the space given to Jesus' sermons and actions, the description of his return to heaven takes up very little space. In fact, if you will indulge me, I'll provide all the scripture describing the event*:

When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. And they stayed continually at the temple, praising God. ~Luke 24:50-53

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”~Acts 1:9-11

So this week, I read NT Wright's chapter in Surprised by Hope on the Ascension and Dallas Willard's chapter in The Spirit of the Disciplines, "Salvation is a Life". Both of these guys talked about stuff I had never contemplated, but I'll just present one theme that came through in both author's writing: Jesus had a human body after resurrection that was taken to heaven.

The body had wound marks from the nails. It could eat food. (Luke 24:40-43) This enfleshed being, not some dissolved spirit, was taken to heaven which isn't literally up but is actually elsewhere and near at the same time. Or so they say. It seems wonderful and totally sci-fi at the same time.

So where does that leave us? Well, for one thing, however, heaven and earth are organized and related, if I thought I understood it, I certainly don't now. Jesus, as a physical human, is somewhere in heaven, a nonphysical reality. Do his lungs still need oxygenl? Go to the bathroom?

For another thing, Jesus is not with us, but he did send the Holy Spirit. And that was for our good (John 16:7). And Jesus promises to come back (John 14:3, 18, 28). So in the Holy Spirit, God is with us, but God the Son is not, but he will come back. Clear as mud? I don't know what to do with this, but at the least, this points to the idea that my life and history are not complete. There will be a time of deeper union and intimacy between Jesus and individuals, his bride the church, and earth itself.

Finally, and perhaps most tangibly, the resurrected and ascended body of Christ shows us that the whole life of Jesus could not be stopped by death and so in Christ, our whole, embodied lives are saved. On the other side of death, Jesus had the body that he had lived in to walk and talk, eat and sleep, laugh and cry. It's from there that we get the encouragement that "...whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. (I Corinthians 10:31)"  Our very bodies and all that we do in them, hugging, hitting, holding, hiding, these things Jesus died to save. So that our hugging, hitting, holding, and hiding would become actions embued with and transformed by our loving God.

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*This is not to say that there aren't suggestions in the Old Testament of something of this sort. Nor is it to say that Jesus wasn't talking about this in John 14-17 (although the disciples certainly didn't get it). Nor is it to say that the rest of the New Testament doesn't touch on the implications of this, but as far as the Gospels go, there's not a lot.

Truths for the Suffering Believer

Paul wrote, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come."

What does this mean when we are hurting? If the world without Jesus hurts and the body of Christ hurts too, what's new? What is the old that has gone?

For starters, I don't actually know. But here are some ideas from the Bible that we can hold on to.

First, as I concluded in the last post, God is not indifferent to our pain and weeps with us. This doesn't make chemo any more comfortable or solve the grief of a lost loved one, but it is nevertheless light in dark times.

Consider this testimony:
"Two weeks after my daughter's [fatal] accident, I was lamenting in prayer over how damaged Paula's body was. She had been an attractive young woman at the apex of her beauty, but in the accident she was thrown from the car and crashed against a concrete barrier. When I first saw her body in the casket, I thought we had walked into the wrong chapel. As I relived the horror of her shattered body with God, His quiet voice spoke inaudibly, "I felt that way, too." I was shocked into silence as I remembered that He, too, was a bereaved parent. (Reynoso, "Formed Through Suffereing" in The Kingdom Life)"

At the same time God empathizes with this woman who has tragically lost her daughter, God's heart is for each of us in our own experiences however we think it compares to anyone else's experiences. Pain is pain; God sees and grieves with all of us.

Secondly, we have the Holy Spirit as our comforter. In John 14, Jesus is preparing his friends for what's coming up. He tells them he's leaving soon, but that he's not going to abandon them as orphans (vs 18). With them will be the Holy Spirit described as the parakletos which gets translated as advocate, counselor, helper, comforter. Common ideas within these translations is that the Parakletos comes to the aid of one in need. And Jesus gives the promise that the Parakletos will never leave (vs 16) and will teach and remind (vs 26).

When we are in pain, pretty much we just want it to end or at least lessen. As we understand it, any supernatural power a god could have should be applied to that end. However, we frequently don't get that and certainly not when we want it. But just because we don't get what we want doesn't mean that as believers the Parakletos is not with us, that we do not have supernatural aid in our need. We may not notice until we're at the end of our rope, but God our Parakletos has been with us all the while actively helping us in our need.

Thirdly, as we follow in the way of Jesus, we come to know that death is not the end. Whether our suffering is spiritual, emotional, physical, relational, whatever it is, we have the hope of heaven. This is not a pansy, precious moments angels heaven. This is a stiff, bracing new reality filled with beauty, health, and rightness.

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,”for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” ~ Revelation 21

We look around at the pain in our lives and the pain in the lives of others and the pain across the globe, across history and we can ask, "Is this as good as it gets?" And the resounding answer is No. All the good that we hope for will be fulfilled perfectly in eternity.

Where is God in suffering?

We envision God as the source of life, light, and goodness as is claimed in the Bible, and when we encounter death, darkness, and despair, our logical conclusion is that God has turned his back on us. This only adds to our misery.

Yet when we go back to scripture, we see time after time God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit moved and bowed in the face of suffering. I do not understand how this works, but this is a pattern in scripture.

God the Father
Nobody reads Ezekiel; it's a weird book tucked in an obscure part of the Old Testament, but it gives the most amazing description of the heart of God.

In chapter 16, God explains his relationship to his special people, the Israelites, with a story about an abandoned newborn he found in a field and saves. She grows up but is still fragile and in need of care and he cleans her, marries her, takes care of her, lavishing her with jewelry, clothes, and fine dining. She becomes famous across the world for her beauty.

But she begins to trust in this beauty, and the love story begins to unravel. She starts sleeping around eventually not taking money for it, but giving money for it. She takes the riches she had been given and uses them to make idols. Then, she sacrifices her children to them. What wickedness, ugliness, and profanity!

Far from abandoning her in her sin, God takes it in the chin like a rejected father and cuckold husband. Then he allows her to reap what she has sown. And there is verse after verse of his howling pain and anger, descriptions of the results of sin. Israel suffers the consequences of her betrayal, and God the Father suffers right there with her.

God the Son
In Jesus, the infinite God squeezed himself into human flesh and lived among us. That's what we celebrate at Christmas.

God physically enters our world and experiences it from first to last breath--experiences sunburns and mosquito bites, making new friends, losing old friends, family members dying, new births, weddings, physical exhaustion, hunger, and longing. Jesus lived in a minority group in a mighty empire, was born as a refugee on the run from a tyrant, was a brilliant adolescent apprenticed to become a blue collar carpenter. But more remarkably, this Friday we remember his ultimate suffering on the cross, a cruel, publically humiliating way to die slowly.

In the life of Jesus, we can be sure that not only does the great God the Father feel the fallout of sin in mysterious, supernatural ways, but God the Son fully understands our human sufferings.

Isaiah prophesied this about Jesus' sufferings (chapter 53):
...He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain
    and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.

In life, Jesus experienced what we humans experience. In death, out of love, he took on the compounded, sin-upon-sin of all people and it "pierced" him, it "crushed" him. Far from abandoning us to the suffering caused by sin, Jesus in his crucifixion faced the ultimate suffering, the collective wages of sin.

God the Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit, promised to us our comforter and guide also knows pain and grief.

In this next passage, we see the love of Jesus in action, our sin, and a grieved Holy Spirit:

...In all their troubles,
    he was troubled, too.
He didn’t send someone else to help them.
    He did it himself, in person.
Out of his own love and pity
    he redeemed them.
He rescued them and carried them along
    for a long, long time.
But they turned on him;
    they grieved his Holy Spirit.
Isaiah 63 (The Message)

While the Holy Spirit may be generally grieved by sin, we are told he is personally grieved as he accompanies us in our suffering:
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.
Romans 8:26

This interceding is a emotional pleading that the Spirit does with us as we pray in our weakness, in our need, in our desperation.

So what?
We expect God to be far from suffering in general, from our suffering in particular. But scripture does not read that way. Instead, we have a God intimately acquainted with suffering in all ways. Whatever we may feel in our pain, God is not indifferent to our suffering, and we are not alone. His back is not turned, his face is upon us and he weeps with us.