Apologetics

Why I Didn’t Go to Church on Sunday

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Leaving, walking out of churchYesterday was a Sunday. I skipped church.

I didn’t go because I knew what the message topic would be, and I’m burned out on that topic. Seared to a crackly crunch burned out. That the topic just happens to coincide with a major initiative push within the church only further carbonized me.

Honestly, I think I’m also burned out on topical preaching. The Church in America largely moved to topical preaching with the advent of the megachurch model, and as a result, we have no idea how all of Scripture fits together anymore. The Bible has been reduced to a book of wise sayings about certain topics. That the entire narrative arc of God’s interaction with mankind and our relationship  with Him has gone missing as a result of piecemeal teaching of topics is lost on far too many church leaders.

If we want to know why people are leaving the Christian Church in America, part of it is because they never hear the whole story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. An entire generation has been raised in the American Church without any concept of that old, old story. As a result they have no clue how they fit into that story. And as a result, whenever a competing set of topical advice comes along to war with the Bible’s topical advice, not much resistance to the upstart competition is offered.

Facts are useful only if we see the big picture. If your car isn’t running, do you want a mechanic who can only quote crankshaft specs at you? Or do you want one who understands how an obvious problem in the crankshaft may cause a hidden problem with the transmission? We want people who understand how the whole system works together, don’t we?

So it is with the Christian faith. Unless we understand how it works together so elegantly as an ongoing story of God’s love for us, we won’t have the ability to flex with and withstand the times. We might understand a topic in part, but the whole will still be lost on us, the nature of relationship buried under advice on how to do this and don’t do that.

You know what I want to hear about on Sunday? Jesus.

Can we talk just about Jesus for once? The Bible says that knowing the Father and the Son IS eternal life. Since that is true, knowing our trinitarian God could not be more important. There is no topic that trumps it. No amount of teaching on marriage, money, or mammon can surpass knowing Jesus.

And the funny thing is, if we really teach Jesus, the story of creation, fall, redemption and restoration all begins to fall into place. It all starts to make sense. It all works together in a synergy that creates faith, wisdom, and spiritual strength. Even those piecemeal topics start sticking with us. Because now they have a framework, a foundation. And that framework/foundation is Jesus. Only when we understand Him and His story does everything else make sense.

You know what else? Your story of Jesus has value to me. Not just the pastor’s story, but yours. Mine has value to you too. Wouldn’t it be great if we could hear those stories? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see your story and mine fit within that greater Story?

Yes, I think they would be so excellent to hear. Now if only we could find some time in church on Sunday to squeeze them in.

The Cardiovocal Atheist

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Vocal atheist returns less than 11,000 results, says Google, but I ran across it at least three times in items I read last week. In contrast, vocal Christian returns 127,000 Google results.

Funny thing is, atheism doesn’t start with what is voiced with the mouth. I guess Google, fount of all theological wisdom it might be, got this right.

Psalm 14:1 begins like a punch to the solar plexus:

The fool says in his heart, There is no God.

I did a bad thing there in that quote. I left out the ESV’s quotation marks around what the fool said. Instead, I went more for the formatting style of an internal thought. You see inner monologue formatted that way in novels. Sometimes, it’s even written like this:

The fool says in his heart, There is no God.

That second style seems even more ominous than the first. Almost like a shout. Or the whispered thoughts of the heroine in the horror flick who is walking the “empty” house, and we hear her inner trepidations–and all the while we know the deranged killer is right behind her.Inner wasteland

Regardless, what is said in Psalm 14:1 is internal only. It reverberates inside the heart. Call it cardiovocal. A resonate dissonance that ends up shattering the whole man, like some cheap crystal facing Ella Fitzgerald on Memorex.

One gets the sense that it’s a ruminated internal saying, too, a cardiovocalization people repeat over and over as if looped, a repeating sample people dance to.

I think if you could hear the cardiovocalizations of the average person, you would hear There is no God loud and clear. A person doesn’t have to say it with his or her lips because it never stops echoing in the chambers of the heart.

Which is why I think that Alister McGrath, the noted theologian, is wrong in his The Twilight of Atheism. There is no God is the mantra of atheism, and it is being cardiovocalized by millions, if not billions. It is not a saying fading into twilight but a reality expressed nonstop in the world today. Even if we do not hear people saying it with their lips, we see it practiced ad nauseam. People living as if there were no God. Some mantra must be driving that reality.

While the silent cardiovocalizations of some people do come out in practice or in veiled writings, the nature of such inner monologue is to be hidden. You won’t get a judge who claims to be a moral person yet who makes immoral judgments admit that There is no God drives his decisions. Or the pastor who can’t stop checking out the ladies. Or the soccer mom who lives solely to buy more stuff.

Funny, though I’ve learned a lot in 50 years, one of the most important lessons goes back to my childhood and a children’s story. In that story, it says, What is essential is invisible to the eye.

Might I substitute ear for eye, in this case? Because that interior cry of atheism is rampant. It is essential to understand its prevalence, what it means, and what its ramifications are.

Christians are not immune to cardiovocalized atheism, which should sober us. Every day, I read material written by supposedly devout Christians who deny the gifts of the Spirit, mock the supernatural, make peace with the things Christ gave His very life to destroy, and craft endless mitigations of truth, which masquerade as “enlightened” spiritual treatises and “doctrinally pure” systematic theologies. In short, there is no difference between such people and atheists. The cardiovocalizations are the same. There is no God is at the core.

Sounds like a conflict, right? How can believers in Jesus have a heart that says There is no God?

Simple. They decide that they don’t like what the real God is saying and substitute a god of their own creation. If that’s not a denial of God, then what is? There might be a god, but there is no God.

No person is immune. What is your heart silently saying?

If Christians don’t understand this broken message of the heart, then we will not understand why people appear OK on the outside, yet the world keeps moving forward in the wrong direction. We will not understand motivations that seem to clash with spoken intentions. We will assume everything is fine with the people we encounter, yet inside they are screaming something that should appall us.

The Nonsense of Life

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Jackson Pollack, "Number 8"Recently, I spoke with a peer who is a dedicated educator. He is going blind rapidly. This will end his career and render him disabled.

This doesn’t make sense to me.

I am 50 years old. At an age when I should be awash in wisdom, most of life makes little sense. I don’t understand why some people prosper and others don’t, even when both take the same course to success. I don’t understand why some people get handed insanely difficult burdens that leave them perpetually struggling to keep that burden from crushing them. I don’t understand how people can work for years toward a goal that seems blessed and then overnight it blows up and leaves lasting wreckage.

Perhaps I am admitting my own folly, but I just don’t understand.

Not understanding is not the same as not having an explanation. I can tell you from a theological perspective what the explanations might be. I know how living in a sin-filled world works. I get the sovereignty of God. I can call up chapter and verse. I can answer you with logic and “wisdom.”

But that doesn’t mean I understand.

The title of this post is “The Nonsense of Life.” And indeed, despite being a Christian of many years, I still find life to be nonsensical. Again, this does not mean there is no sense in it at all, only that I am unable to comprehend it.

God says that His thoughts are far higher than mine. For this reason, they appear as nonsense to me. Like the directions for building a complex microprocessor, one paragraph in Finnish, the next in Hungarian, finishing in base 3. It reads like gibberish because I don’t have what it takes to understand.

Tragedies reverberate through time, the ripples spreading out and colliding with other ripples, both good and ill. Some cancel out, while others amplify.

I know another teacher, many years ago, who had saved most of her career to go on a year-long cruise around the world when she retired. Her students were excited for her because she would take that cruise a month after retiring. Yet within a week of getting her gold watch, she died unexpectedly, never having set sail, all that preparation and hope wasted.

Why? I can’t tell you. I’m sure another teacher in another place at another time DID take a similar cruise. Sure I can offer theories, and perhaps they have some element of wisdom, but in the end, they won’t be any more enlightening as to why one took that cruise and the other never made it.

Sometimes, I think the worst thing we can do is try to explain. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is show up and be available for the ones left behind, the ones with questions we would be foolish to answer.

I am a Christian because no other way offers the same truth. No other way explains life more thoroughly. All the other options are meaningless in the long run.

I wish I could say that being a Christian has answered all my questions, but that would be a lie. If anything, I have more questions the older I get, and the answers I defended so vigorously as a younger man are less crystal clear today.

One day, I will understand. Until then, there is the nonsense of life.