God is No Southern Gentlemen

One of the images I received about God from my Southern Baptist upbringing was God as (southern) gentleman. God is perfectly polite, I was told, and will not do anything untoward toward us. He is careful and debonair and respectful--holding chairs and doors and always careful to not offend.

This was part of the narrative underpinning of the free-will theology. It's the God who steps back and respects our wishes.

And while I'm less and less certain about what I think about the whole free-will/predestination debate (or even if it matters) I'm absolutely sure of one thing: God is no southern gentlemen.

God is a passionate, jealous lover. He is reckless in his pursuit of us. He absolutely hates, despises, abhors all injustice and the oppression of the poor, weak, marginalized. He hates even more the sin in our lives, the idols that we worship in his place.

God is no southern gentlemen. He is far from poised or polished in his relentless pursuit of all that is his. He sweats and bleeds and cries and dies a gruesome criminal's death to buy back what is his by virtue of creation. It becomes doubly-his after we hand it over to the reign of sin and death through the power of his death and resurrection.

God is no southern gentlemen. He is the great hound of heaven. He tracks after us. He chases us down and corners us into places of despair, emptiness, loneliness, isolation--anything and everything so that we might see that life without him is no life at all.

God is no southern gentlemen. He is too reckless, too playful, too improper for all that. And he will not stop being God in order to fit our neat categories. God is not safe. He is good.

That's something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.

Dangers of Unitarians with Play-Doh, Stepfordizing God, and the Importance of "No"

I recall one woman who shared about growing up in a Unitarian Church. In Sunday School one week the teacher handed all the kindergartners in the class some Play-Doh and said, "Make God."

"That was the moment," she said, "that I knew something was wrong with all of this--even at the age of 4, I knew that making God out of Play-Doh just wasn't right."

With last week's thoughts still buzzing in my head about the necessity of a Jesus that ticks us off, I was listening something by Tim Keller. He suggested an even further function of bumping up against God's "no:" intimacy.

There was a book in the early 70's called "The Stepford Wives." The men in the community were slaughtering their wives and turning them into robots: yes, dear, was their basic disposition.

These men didn't want wives. They didn't want intimacy. They just wanted someone to boss around. Something to be used rather than engaged with.

Keller suggested that all of us would love to have a God who wants to share life with us intimately. But we also have this desire to "Stepford God" our God. Part of us wants us God made of Play-Do because we don't like a God that says to us: "no."

And we don't like a Bible that says to us "no." We'd prefer to do what Thomas Jefferson did: break out the white-out (or whatever he had back then) and choose for ourselves which part of Scripture is "real Scripture" and which parts we'd rather not deal with.

But apart from a "no," there is no way to get to intimacy. To have intimacy at any level, even our own self, is to engage in a relationship where "no" and "yes" are regularly exchanged. If there is no room for "no" then there is no room in our hearts for a real relationship with a real God.

We are, in the end, conflicted creatures--about all our relationships, God included. Our deepest longing is to be known and loved and yet it takes much more courage than any of us has to enter into relationships of true knowing and loving.

But God refuses to let us lobotomize him. He loves us too much to allow us to do so. He is not a God made by us out of Play-Doh. He will not simply agree with our every whim--whims which we imagine are self-generated but are more often products of our gene pool and personal history mixed with our most recent exposure to friends, enemies, and commercials .

And so he gives us Scriptures which we will push-back on. And he tells us "no" regularly. And we wrestle and engage and fight back. This is our prescription for health. There is no other way to true intimacy.

What to do with "Angry God"

Sorry for the blogger silence. I dropped my laptop off to get fixed yesterday morning and I've had the withdrawal shakes ever since. Scary how addicted I am to technology.

Recently a friend of mine and I were looking at the first couple of chapters of the gospel of John. In those chapters you get Jesus inviting people to follow him, and turning water into wine--nice Jesus. But you also get Jesus clearing the temple and talking to Nicodemus about condemnation--mean Jesus.

Sometimes the Bible talks about God's grace and love...and then sometimes the Bible talks scarily much about condemnation and judgment. Bottom line: is God nice or angry?

The Scripture is emphatic: "God is love" declares the disciple John.

But it's also emphatic that he will come and judge...and his judgment is serious. But the trick is to recognize that right and good judgment always serves love.

A good judge is a blessing to society. To have someone who judges rightly is a gift. To have a lazy, sloppy, bribe-able or negligent judge leaves the most vulnerable people in society at the mercy of the most powerful.

Right judgment is a blessing. God is a good and righteous judge. One day, all that is wrong in the world will be done away with. His last word on his creation is "YES!" And so he emphatically levels his "no" towards all that would desecrate, deface, and destroy his creation.

God is love. And his judgments are for the good of all that he has created. His wrath serves his grace. And his purpose in all condemnation is for the flowering of his creation.

God is not torn or at odds within himself. That's us. He is fully integrated within his character. Everything about God, including and especially his anger, serves his purpose to love into wholeness all that he has made.

Sometimes we would prefer benign neglect. Instead, God pays us the greatest and most intolerable compliment: he loves us.