I wasn’t able to make it to Andrew’s baptism, but I prayed for him that day, and I watched the video the church made to mark the event. In his testimony before his baptism, Andrew said, “I put off baptism because I felt like I was in a state of sin, like I wasn’t good enough or fit enough to be baptized. But then I realized that baptism is done at the beginning of your faith journey, not the middle or the end. You don’t have to have everything together to be baptized . . . You just have to grasp God’s grace. God’s grace is enough.”
SIX
Rivers
There is a tendency for us to flee from the wild silence and the wild dark, to pack up our gods and hunker down behind city walls, to turn the gods into idols . . . And when we are in the temples, then who will hear the voice crying in the wilderness? Who will hear the reed shaken by the wind?
—Chet Raymo
YOU CAN ALWAYS PICK OUT JOHN THE BAPTIST FROM A lineup of saints.
Among the dour, robed patriarchs, he’s the one with wild eyes and tangled hair, ribs protruding through sun-browned skin, hands cradling a cross-shaped staff or a scroll that reads, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Basically, he’s the guy you’d avoid bumping into in the Walmart parking lot.
The miracle child of Elizabeth and Zechariah, John likely watched his father perform ritual cleansings as a temple priest in first-century Jerusalem. Levitical law required Jews to cleanse themselves from impurities contracted through things like menstruation, skin disease, or contact with corpses, and many Jews made pilgrimages to the temple to be immersed in water in preparation for festivals and holy days. Friends and family probably expected John to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a temple priest. But John didn’t stay at the temple. John left the city for the countryside and abandoned the ceremonial bathing pools for free-flowing rivers.15
Subsisting on locusts and honey and calling people to a single, dramatic baptism to symbolize a reoriented heart, John embodied the prophet Isaiah’s imagery of a voice crying in the wilderness, declaring God was on the move and everything was about to change. John knew this God-movement would not be confined to the temple, but that “every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:5–6 NRSV).
“Prepare the way of the Lord,” he told the people, “make his paths straight” (Mark 1:3 NRSV).
The people didn’t have to go to God anymore; God was coming to the people. And God, in God’s relentless love, would allow no mountain or hill—no ideology or ritual or requirement or law—to obstruct the way. Temples could not contain a God who flattens mountains, or ceremonial baths a God who flows through rivers. Repentance, then, meant reorienting one’s life around this reality. It meant repenting of the old ways of obstruction and joining in the great paving of the path, in the demolishing of every man-made impediment between God and God’s people, and in the celebrating of God’s wild, uninhibited presence filling every corner of the earth. It meant getting baptized in rivers and getting out of God’s way. After all, with enough faith, a person can move a mountain . . . even a mountain of her own making.
“The kingdom isn’t up there; it’s right here,” John said. “Repent, for the kingdom is at hand. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight.”
I wonder if these words ran through Philip’s mind when he baptized one of the first gentile converts to Christianity: an Ethiopian eunuch.
As the story goes, after Jesus had risen from the dead and instructed his disciples to go and practice resurrection in the world, the evangelist Philip was sent by the Holy Spirit to the “wilderness road” from Jerusalem to Gaza. There Philip encountered a royal eunuch from the distant land of Ethiopia who was reading Hebrew Scripture from the back of his chariot (Acts 8:26–40).
As a eunuch, this man would have been strictly prohibited from even entering temple grounds, much less participating in its rituals (Leviticus 21:20; Deuteronomy 23:1). He was a sexual and ethnic minority, and as such would have been totally excluded from the religious community in Jerusalem, even if he believed in Israel’s God. Had he approached the temple for baptism, he would have been turned away.
Yet this religious outcast, this man who was thought to be in a state of perpetual uncleanliness, had gotten his hands on a sacred scroll and found a passage from the prophet Isaiah that resonated profoundly with his own experience:
He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth.
ACTS 8:32–33
When Philip heard the eunuch reading these words aloud, he approached the chariot and asked if the eunuch understood them.
“How can I unless someone guides me?” the eunuch replied.
Philip climbed into the chariot, and as it rumbled through the wilderness, told the eunuch about Jesus—about how when God became one of us, God suffered too.
Overcome, the eunuch looked out at the rugged landscape that surrounded them and shouted, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”
We don’t know how long that question, brimming with such childlike joy it wrenches the heart, hung vulnerable as a drop of water in the desert air. At another time in his life, Philip might have pointed to the eunuch’s ethnicity, or his anatomy, or his inability to gain access to the ceremonial baths that made a person clean. But instead, with no additional conversation between the travelers, the chariot lumbered to a halt and Philip baptized the eunuch in the first body of water the two could find. It might have been a river, or it might have been a puddle in the road.
Philip got out of God’s way. He remembered that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out, but who it lets in. Nothing could prevent the eunuch from being baptized, for the mountains of obstruction had been plowed down, the rocky hills had been made smooth, and God had cleared a path. There was holy water everywhere.
Two thousand years later, John’s call remains a wilderness call, a cry from the margins. Because we religious types are really good at building walls and retreating to temples. We’re good at making mountains out of our ideologies, obstructions out of our theologies, and hills out of our screwed-up notions of who’s in and who’s out, who’s worthy and who’s unworthy. We’re good at getting in the way. Perhaps we’re afraid that if we move, God might use people and methods we don’t approve of, that rules will be broken and theologies questioned. Perhaps we’re afraid that if we get out of the way, this grace thing might get out of hand.
Well, guess what? It already has.
Grace got out of hand the moment the God of the universe hung on a Roman cross and with outstretched hands looked out upon those who had hung him there and declared, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Grace has been out of hand for more than two thousand years now. We best get used to it.
And so the call persists: Repent. Reorient. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make clear the path. God’s tumbling through the world like white water on rock. There’s nothing left but to surrender.
PART II
Confession
SEVEN
Ash
As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.
—Psalm 103:13–14
WE ARE MADE OF STARDUST, THE SCIENTISTS SAY—THE iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, and the chlorine in our skin forged in the furnaces of ancient stars whose explosions scattered the elements across the galaxy. From the ashes grew new stars, and around one of them, a system of planets and asteroids and moons. A cluster of dust coalesced to form the earth, and life emerged from the detritus of eight-billion-year-ol
d deaths.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
In the creation story of Genesis, God shaped man out of the dust of the earth and animated him with divine breath. God placed the man in a garden by a river and taught him to tend it. When God saw that man needed a partner in this work, God created woman and together the pair learned how to be alive: to plant and prune, to laugh and make love, to crack open sticky pomegranates and dig dirt out from under their fingernails, to recognize the distinct melodies of the birds and to walk with God in the cool of the day. They lived in the shade of the Tree of Life and were naked and unashamed.
But when life was not enough, when the man and woman wanted more, they sought wisdom in the garden’s only forbidden tree—the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. They thought its fruit would make them like God. But in their grasping and rebellion, in their independence and greed, they instead learned fear, anger, judgment, blame, envy, and shame. When God came to walk with them in the cool of the day, they hid in the brush, afraid. So God banished them from the garden, away from the Tree of Life, and they understood that they would die.
“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken,” God told the man. “For dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19).
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
When the descendants of Adam warred against one another, armies burned the cities of their enemies to the ground. The sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve knew well the smell of ash, the bitter aftertaste of forbidden fruit. They knew, too, the difference between good and evil, yet they chose evil again and again in a violent quest to be like God. The gray residue of incinerated matter signified destruction, mortality, grief, and repentance. In the wake of tragedy or in the anticipation of judgment, our ancestors traded their finer clothes for coarse, colorless sackcloth and smeared their faces with the ashes of burned-up things. They ritualized their smallness, their dependency, their complicity.
“Put on sackcloth, my people, and roll in ashes,” said the prophet Jeremiah, “mourn with bitter wailing as for an only son, for suddenly the destroyer will come upon us” (Jeremiah 6:26).
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil didn’t reveal every secret. Even the wisest found its fruit pulverulent. Solomon declared, “Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return” (Ecclesiastes 3:19–20). When Job demanded an explanation for his suffering, God asked, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand” (38:4). Job retreated to a heap of ashes and cried, “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3).
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Once a year, on a Wednesday, we mix ashes with oil. We light candles and confess to one another and to God that we have sinned by what we have done and what we have left undone. We tell the truth. Then we smear the ashes on our foreheads and together acknowledge the single reality upon which every Catholic and Protestant, believer and atheist, scientist and mystic can agree: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.” It’s the only thing we know for sure: we will die.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
But a long time ago, a promise was made. A prophet called Isaiah said a messenger would come to proclaim good news to the poor and brokenhearted, “to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.” Those who once repented in dust and ashes “will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendor” (Isaiah 61:3).
We could not become like God, so God became like us. God showed us how to heal instead of kill, how to mend instead of destroy, how to love instead of hate, how to live instead of long for more. When we nailed God to a tree, God forgave. And when we buried God in the ground, God got up.
The apostle Paul struggled to explain the mystery: “The first man was of the dust of the earth,” he said. “The second man is of heaven . . . just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man” (1 Corinthians 15:47–49).
We are not spared death, but the power of death has been defeated. The grip of sin has been loosed. We are invited to share the victory, to follow the path of God back to life. We have become like seeds about to transform, Paul said. “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies” (1 Corinthians 15:36).
Life to death, death to life—like seeds, like soil, like stars.
No wonder Mary Magdalene mistook the risen Jesus for a gardener. A new Tree of Life has broken through the soil and is stretching up toward the sun.
EIGHT
Vote Yes On One
I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell.
—Gregory Alan Isakov
“GREAT IS THY FAITHFULNESS, O GOD MY FATHER.”
I intone the words with perfunctory detachment, my mind raging dully against the Papyrus font in which they are projected onto the wall. The electronic drums have settled into a sleepy 3/4 rhythm, but the congregation of Grace Bible Church sings louder than before, buoyed by the familiarity of an old, simple hymn. They want to take it slower than the designated beat, and the drummer—a senior in high school with a mass of curly brown hair hiding his eyes—will fight them through the first stanza before surrendering to the slow, steady drone of two hundred Christians perfectly content to take their sweet time singing through the “summer, and winter, and springtime, and harvest” of God’s unchanging love.
By the time we get to the seasons part, I’ve already dropped out, my voice failing at the second line of the hymn: “There is no shadow of turning with thee.”
No shadow of turning. Wouldn’t that be nice?
I feel guilty because there is a breast cancer survivor to my right and a woman recently widowed two rows ahead, each of them singing with raised hands and closed eyes. Their faith hasn’t come easy, I know, but I resent them for it. I’ve done everything right. I’ve memorized the Bible verses and observed my quiet time. I’ve studied the famous apologists and taken the right classes. There was no great personal tragedy to shake my foundations, no injustice or betrayal to justify my falling away—just a few pesky questions that unraveled my faith like twine and left me standing here unable to sing a song I know by heart, chilled by a shadow no one else can see.
My husband of five years, Dan, stands beside me, steady as a pier tethered to a drifting boat. Once we are home, we will crawl into bed together—both of us still dressed in our church clothes, but with our shoes kicked off—and he will listen as I mumble through my litany of grievances: the political jab during the announcements, the talk of hell, the simplistic interpretation of a complicated text, the violent and masculine theology, the seemingly shared assumption that the end times are upon us because we just elected a Democratic president with a foreign-sounding name. I glom onto these offenses, not because they are particularly grievous or even real, but because they give me reasons to hate going to church besides my own ugly doubt. They give me someone else to blame. Maybe it’s time to call it quits, we will say. Maybe let’s give it one more week.
There are recovery programs for people grieving the loss of a parent, sibling, or spouse. You can buy books on how to cope with the death of a beloved pet or work through the anguish of a miscarriage. We speak openly with one another about the bereavement that can accompany a layoff, a move, a diagnosis, or a dream deferred. But no one really teaches you how to grieve the loss of your faith. You’re on your own for that.
For me, the trouble started when I began to suspect God was less concerned with saving people from hell than I was. After graduating from high school, I enrolled in the Christian liberal arts college where my father taught theology, and as expected, I sat in the front row of my biblical world view classes and chugged down Christian apologetics the way most college st
udents ingurgitate cheap beer. And for the first two years, I was intoxicated with certainty. Every question met an easy, satisfying answer, and I swallowed those answers whole. I settled into the convivial pleasures of college life—pranking my roommates, debating theology over cold french fries in the cafeteria, lugging Norton anthologies all over campus like a good English major should. But then the twin towers fell, and a part of the world I’d thought little about came to occupy my TV screen each night while our country occupied its lands. As reports of collateral damage slid across the crawler, it occurred to me that the women and children killed in Iraq’s civil war were mostly Muslims, not so much by choice, but by birth. They were Muslims because they were born in a predominantly Muslim country to Muslim parents, just as I was a Christian because I’d been born in a predominantly Christian country to Christian parents. Was I was supposed to believe the same suicide bomb that sent a terrorist to hell sent his victims to hell too? Because they weren’t evangelical Christians like me? Because they were born at the wrong place and the wrong time? And did this fate await the majority of my fellow human beings, including the millions who had never even heard of Jesus to begin with?
It was a nondenominational university so I found no shortage of answers. The Arminians said God couldn’t save the lost without sacrificing our free will; the Calvinists said God wouldn’t save the lost because, well, God just didn’t want to. The Pentecostals told wild stories about angels appearing to secluded jungle tribes to distribute the gospel on banana leaves. The sophomores quoted Karl Barth. Everyone agreed we all deserved hell anyway, so I best stop asking questions and show a little more gratitude.
My classmates seemed wholly unconcerned when I pointed out the fact that, based on what we’d been taught in Sunday school about salvation, the Jews killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz went straight to hell after their murders, and the piles of left-behind eyeglasses and suitcases displayed at the Holocaust Museum represent hundreds of thousands of souls suffering unending torture at the hand of the very God to whom they had cried out for rescue. I waited for a reaction, only to be gently reminded that perhaps the dorm-wide pajama party wasn’t the best time to talk about the Holocaust.
Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church Page 5