God, America, Meaning & Change

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After five months of gray skies—welcome to Ohio—you can’t blame a guy for being a little morose. A few years ago, I realized I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and mid-February is the nadir of my experience.

So perhaps I’m coming at Rick Ianniello‘s Facebook post with a bit of a glum philosopher’s perspective, but I don’t think I’m alone. Maybe you’re a glum philosopher now too.

Rick wrote:

How is it possible for Christians to propagate the following.

“I really want to go to church this Sunday. Could you find one that won’t try to change me?”

I don’t think that request is impossible to understand. It may not seem logical, but sometimes the illogical still makes sense.

I believe that most people are burned out on change.

We Christians think we have cornered the market in change given that we talk about repentance and sanctification all the time. But  the truth is that our secular culture has more than one-upped us. The message we Americans drown in daily consists of little more than a perpetual torrent of change requests. They go something like this:

1. “Your _____________ is not good enough, so change.”

2. “You are too_____________, so change.”

Into #1, we can fit

kid’s schooling

house

wardrobe

career

hairstyle

car

spouse

Into #2, we can fit

fat

thin

moody

introverted

uneducated

unattractive

cash-poor

When it comes down to it, most of our daily existence as Americans consists of dancing to the pied piper of change. We live in a perpetual conga line of following some leader as he/she/it takes us to the promised land guaranteed by change.

Is it any wonder that some people are desperate to stop the unending jig their life has become?

Int0 this comes the Church. We put means of salvation into #1 and sinful into #2. Our message becomes “change or go to hell.”

Sounds like more of the same, doesn’t it?

This is not to say that the Gospel is wrong, only that perhaps we have to start leading with something other than the “you better change or else” portion of the message.

See, unless our reasons for change lead to something meaningful, constant change in and of itself only leads to despair. In truth, when we distill most of the message we Americans get from our culture, it seems impossible to avoid the belief that life has no meaning.

I’ve been a Christian for a few decades now, and my constant struggle, even to this day, is the search for meaning in life. I realize that most of that struggle is because I’m bombarded by meaninglessness. And most of that comes from the constant message of change.

I am continually convinced that we Christians in the America have got to start leading with love first. Because the Bible tells us that perfect love casts out fear, especially the fear of meaninglessness.

Yes, at some point we have to get to the part of the message that includes the change of repentance, but I believe most people are so burned by change that we have to give them something else before we can get to the change part of the message. This is not to say we bury change, only that we temper it. Pulling a bait and switch on people (“Okay, we gave you love, now you won’t get more love until you change”) isn’t going to work.

I know a couple where the wife is bipolar and the husband is a church worship leader. He’s been the rock. Just recently, he was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s.

In the life of that couple, what speaks most to the meaninglessness of life? Are we going to ask them for more change? Or can we offer better?

I look around and no longer wonder why people don’t want to be a part of the Church. The Church isn’t meeting their need in the midst of the message of change, whether that’s the world’s change or the Church’s. When I hear the heart cry of someone lost in meaninglessness, I understand their lament of “I really want to go to church this Sunday. Could you find one that won’t try to change me?” I get what they mean.

Because for all our talk of godliness, repentance, and so on, it seems that we’re missing where most people are at right now. Yes, people are sinners. Yes, they need to change.

But are we giving them any meaningful reason to?

The Great Unconfession

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The wiser you are, the more worries you have; the more you know, the more it hurts.
—Ecclesiastes 1:18

Winter holds sway here in southwestern Ohio, defined by cheek-stinging cold and relentless gray skies that suck all the color out of creation’s palette. January and February lurk.

This time of year in the Midwest is my least favorite by far. It takes a great deal of energy to refrain from going into the garage (doors down, of course), climbing into the family car, rolling down the windows, twisting the key in the ignition, and letting a CD of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” loop repeatedly on the car stereo while the CO billows over you.

Yeah, that bleak.

It’s that set of weeks when people start thinking too much because there’s time to think;  the Christmas madness is over and there’s little else to do when a foot of snow traps you in the house. Everyone goes a bit more inward than they do in mid-June. They start thinking about their lacks. Christians do this more than anyone, I think.

We Evangelicals hear a lot about unconfessed sin. You can blame all manner of ills on that beast. Unconfessed sin is the spiritual antithesis of duct tape:  Everything falls apart when wrapped in it.

Somehow in the English language, a tongue in which I am supposedly familiar, we can have something that is unconfessed but not an unconfession. I find that odd.

But I do not find it odd that, whether the word exists or not, Christians make unconfessions. When I think about what may constitute an unconfession, I consider those confessions that no one would ever declare before an assembled body of believers, even if all are mature and have walked with God for years.

We can probably all imagine what might remain an unconfession: a heinous sexual sin, some awful thing done to a child, possibly even a murder.

In some ways, those are easy.

I think there’s an unconfession even more devastating. It’s the kind of inner disquiet that I’ve never heard spoken out loud in polite Christian company. It’s by no means salacious or repugnant, but it makes so many people uneasy that it goes unconfessed from generation to generation.

What follows, I believe, is the great unconfession of many sincere, earnest Christians in America today:

I gave my life to Jesus, believe in Him with all my heart, serve Him with everything I have, yet life still seems meaningless.

In many churches in this country, if someone respected in the congregation stood up on Sunday and spoke those words, people would be appalled. Yet I believe that a whole host of Christians struggle with that unconfessed angst—and its killing them slowly.

Daily they trudge to a cubicle in a stark glass edifice, punch some characters into a computer keyboard, fight gridlock on the way home, barely stay awake as they wolf down a warmed-over meal, spend some half-hearted moments with their spouse and kids, stare down the list of things they have to do but can never find time to resolve, punch a few more characters into a computer keyboard, trudge to a dark bedroom, sleep six hours, get up, toss off a quick prayer or two asking for yet another unmet need, read a half-baked devotional reading for the day…lather, rinse, repeat until death lays claim to them in an unguarded moment. And they are told by their spiritual elders on Sundays that this is the abundant life.

If they are ultra-spiritual, they may go into the ministry, each day confronting a set of problems in the lives of others, problems that may, in fact, relent, only to be replaced by others, just as the people are themselves replaced by someone else who is hurting.  The great circle of pain. And the meaninglessness increases when all that work comes to naught some day because of one misunderstanding or another, and they move on to whatever the next ministry assignment is. And on Sundays they tell people that this is the abundant life. But there’s a catch in their heart that they hope doesn’t show in their voice—because the meaning of all this still escapes them.

I’ve had people write many times and tell me the reason they read Cerulean Sanctum is that I write from the heart. Truth is, much of what I write here is to myself. I need to hear what I write more than anyone else does.

And so I write this post because I struggle with meaninglessness, too, especially this time of year. I may be alone on this, projecting my own struggle onto the lives of other believers, but I don’t think so. I think many Christians bottle up this unconfession concerning their own battles against meaninglessness in life. To confess that one struggles with meaning post-conversion is about as close as one gets to apostasy in some Christian circles.

It gets worse for many people who struggle with meaninglessness because the truth is that Christ is our sufficiency. If we struggle with meaninglessness, it’s because we are not connected to Christ the way they should be. And that’s not Christ’s fault; it’s ours.

Doesn’t make the struggle any easier, does it?

I think this plague of meaninglessness has been a problem with mankind since the fall. Ecclesiastes captures this better than any book in the Bible. A sampling:

These are the words of the Philosopher, David’s son, who was king in Jerusalem. It is useless, useless, said the Philosopher. Life is useless, all useless. You spend your life working, laboring, and what do you have to show for it? Generations come and generations go, but the world stays just the same. The sun still rises, and it still goes down, going wearily back to where it must start all over again. The wind blows south, the wind blows north—round and round and back again. Every river flows into the sea, but the sea is not yet full. The water returns to where the rivers began, and starts all over again. Everything leads to weariness—a weariness too great for words. Our eyes can never see enough to be satisfied; our ears can never hear enough. What has happened before will happen again. What has been done before will be done again. There is nothing new in the whole world. “Look,” they say, “here is something new!” But no, it has all happened before, long before we were born. No one remembers what has happened in the past, and no one in days to come will remember what happens between now and then.
—Ecclesiastes 1:1-11

Despite the fact that there is nothing new under the sun, I think we humans of 2009 struggle with meaning more than our ancestors did. Under a charcoal sky...Most of our communities have shattered. We roam far from our birthplaces in search of what does not ultimately satisfy, fracturing family and robbing us of connection. We have little time for each other, for that once-tribe that helped root in meaning those who preceded us. Even the imprisoned apostle Paul had his faithful companions who cheered him with their presence. Without them, would the writings of that great apostle have taken an even more somber tone? There’s a reason why God intended the Church to be a communion: He himself is a communion.

But we have lost the idea of communion/community. For this reason, I believe we have magnified our struggle against meaninglessness.

Meaning also goes wanting when a society’s end goals cheapen, when beauty is replaced with cynicism, accomplishment comes down to material accumulation, and youth trumps age and its community-building wisdom. All of this detracts from our sole source of meaning, God.

We are all caught up in this race to the bottomless pit of meaninglessness. Some handle it better than others. I know that I do not handle it well at all.

Maybe that’s because I believe life can be better than it is. Maybe we don’t have to settle for less. Maybe in the midst of all that meaninglessness something better arises: hope.

Or maybe I’m just fooling myself. Ask me again come March.

Becoming Ecclesiastical

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I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted. I said in my heart, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
—Ecclesiastes 1:14-18 ESV

Wisdom in old ageBack in the summer of 1988, at the young age of twenty-five, I was working at a Christian camp in Wisconsin. While walking back to my residence, one of the young women on summer staff noticed me singing a hymn to myself, walked up to me and said, “What makes you so happy? You’re the happiest person I know.”

Yesterday, I was sitting down with my young son reading some passages out of an old Good News Bible—the one with the stylized line drawings in it. After we were done, I was flipping through and found a passage out of Ecclesiastes that made me laugh, especially since I have blogged here many times about the Church and work issues:

Only someone too stupid to find his way home would wear himself out with work.
—Ecclesiastes 10:15 GNB

That got me thinking about the rest of Ecclesiastes. At the time of my being told I was the happiest person that young woman knew, Ecclesiastes was my favorite book in the Old Testament. Considering the somber and almost regretful tone of the book, it doesn’t quite seem to work with my state of mind at the that time. Truthfully, I’m not sure the whole of the book rang true for me. Sure, I loved passages like

Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
(Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 ESV)

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
—Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 ESV

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.
—Ecclesiastes 3:11 ESV

but I never truly pondered the rest of Ecclesiastes because, frankly, I was too young to see.

Now I am forty-two, a husband, and a father. On reading through Ecclesiastes again in the Good News I was struck by how the rest of the book now spoke to me in a way that it didn’t seventeen years ago. There’s a bittersweet longing for youth, yet with the understanding that to be youthful is to be largely ignorant of the world, much like I was at twenty-five.

If I ran into that same young woman who pronounced me to be the happiest person she knew, I don’t believe that she would say the same thing of me today. However, I don’t consider this a step backward in my faith. Instead, I acknowledge it’s a part of “becoming Ecclesiastical,” seeing life with older eyes and noticing now the vanities you never considered before. To be twenty-five is to be invulnerable, but to be older means you’ll sooner than you imagine be attending funerals for friends you once thought would always be there. It is to know that the world we leave our children will not be as idyllic as the world we inherited. It is to see how striving after riches and glory is nothing more than wind. It is to understand that perhaps a nice meal with people you love is more important than power and fame.

There is a sadness in becoming Ecclesiastical. It is the sadness of accumulated wisdom, a wisdom despised by the young who must painfully learn the lessons of Ecclesiastes only through their own aging. The world says otherwise, but those who become Ecclesiastical understand that

… under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
—Ecclesiastes 9:11 ESV

It’s the wisdom of God that He’s made us to learn hard truths in time. There’s no shame in acknowledging that life is difficult and eventually leads to the grave. Yet too often we praise the fools who pretend that this simply isn’t the case.

The tough wisdom of Ecclesiastes shouldn’t be written off by those who always want to think happy thoughts. This book exists in the Bible for a reason. Life isn’t always happy and there would be no rejoicing if sorrow didn’t exist. To the older and wiser, becoming Ecclesiastical renders both the sorrow and the joy our friends, even if the rest of the world around us cannot understand.