“The Bible is boring. Not in its entirety but boring just the same.” “The Bible is an ancient text, hardly relevant for our contemporary times.” “The God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are different. How do you know which one to believe in?” “The Bible contradicts itself and is full of inconsistencies.” “I read the Bible; but I read the B’hadvagita, the Koran and other holy writings as well.” “With so much stuff out there, you don’t have to limit yourself to one book. Just take the best of the ones you find and find the parts that have meaning for you.” “You can learn more from walking in nature, sitting in a circle of drumming friends until your hearts are in sync, or meditating on a crystal until you are spiritually aware than studying the bible.” “The Bible is just a book.”
How I wish these views of scripture came from secular sources! They did not. This collection of attitudes came from the mouths of Sunday School Class members and other baptized Christians. While many of them are superficial comments from adult children whose spiritual experience in the church never moved from head to heart, the loss defies expression. Though some church people appear to border on what might be called bibliolatry, the attitudes expressed above are even more crippling. In my opinion, the darkness implied (darkness is the absence of light) in such random and perhaps even superficial dismissal of scripture, sends post-modern people on truth quests apart from the church.
This is not all bad. With such ambivalence existing in some traditional churches, these quests may lead to life giving discoveries.
The contemporary world of post-moderns (we don’t know what to call this era), overflows with information. Search the internet and immediately, in seconds, your quest for information exceeds your time to process it. And, while our information queues overflow, neither our ability to give form to the abundance of information nor our time to process that information matches the pace. Here are a few of those reasons.
The information is easy to access; however the presentation of the information is most frequently from anonymous sources. Whether the information is accessed by the individual or by a community, it is likely to be isolated from the source making it very difficult to process or discern in native tongue – native tongue means understanding the contextual meaning resulting from the source’s agenda, bias or other pertinent data which bears upon appropriate understanding1. Such process lacks boundaries. While the modern world produced this overflow of information, it is the dilemma of the post-modern world.
Symptomatic of the age, patients frequently bring a list of possible conditions matching their symptoms to the doctors chosen to administer healing. Where is the authority? Where are the boundaries? Second, third and fourth opinions often result from a quest to find a more ‘desirable’ diagnosis. Without a savior, we try to save ourselves.
The Absence of Authority
The baby boomers of the modern generation are more likely to choose this approach to their ailments. For post-moderns, the unspoken message in such a world cries out: There is no authority.
For post-moderns, the lack of authority and boundaries does not lead to anarchy, which is a modern dilemma. Rather, in the post-modern world, it compels the seeker toward a spiritual quest – a quest that is more likely to be defined by dream-catchers and drum circles than the church. After all, they view portions of the church as not knowing what to believe and those in the church that do believe as debating over doctrines that don’t matter to post-moderns who are on a spiritual quest that captures the heart. So, they presume, why not look anywhere other than the church?
It is not as though the post-modern world ignores boundaries. They define their own. If the age of enlightenment is characterized by reason, the post-modern era, or at least in the interim between where we are and where we are going, is characterized by a heart felt search for a meaningful life. They are drawn to authenticity of emotion, to that which appears to be life giving for the heart. They love the journey and each person and place on the journey for each person or place possesses the possibility of being a spiritual guide. Without ever hearing the phrase about ‘entertaining angels unaware’, post-moderns open their hearts and minds to the possibility of a divine encounter as they journey. If you doubt this, look for the spiritual imagery in their music videos; look at their tattoos and be amazed at the religious icons adorning their bodies.
Of course, while this is not true all the time nor does it accurately describe all post-moderns, it does describe the spiritual quest of the post-modern world. In my opinion, the church has much to learn from them.
Eating With Sinners
Several years ago, my brother invited me to Key Largo where he lived in the Florida Keys. Having recently gone through a divorce, he chose this place to recover. The invitation went something like this: “I’m living in paradise but no one can stay in paradise forever (a prophetic phrase). You need to come visit me soon.” As we agreed to the visit, he added: “By the way, there are a few people here you need to talk too.” I knew what he meant. “There are people who need to talk to a minister. That’s your job.” What neither my brother nor I realized is that I needed to talk to them for my own spiritual journey.
Frank lived in temporary quarters consisting of a converted Step Van with a screened in area outside. The van was parked next to the water. At the time, I struggled to keep a 150 gallon salt water aquarium in my office. Frank laughed and said, I have the worlds largest aquarium as we watched an assortment of tropical fish, including two fairly large Octopi, move below the pier that served as his front porch. If a little beach house in the tropics symbolizes paradise for you, this was it.
Nearby, it was ‘local’ night at the Marina Restaurant, where my brother, a musician, entertained each Thursday. A tike bar with limited seating extended from an open covered area to a large uncovered area on the dock. By locals, I mean the people who worked at the Marina, those who lived in boats anchored just off the Marina, and those living in the trailer park behind the Marina. They were not patrons of any traditional church.
While waiting for the tables to be set up outside following a brief shower, Judy, my wife and I sat at the bar. My brother told me about the young bartender. At twenty-six, Jeanne was a single mom for three children. Frank had loaned her money for a car a few weeks previously. She obviously appreciated his friendship (and that’s what it was) and extended that warmth to us acting as if we were all family. A man, who I would later discover was a 46 year old ex-convict, sat next to me. He talked without stopping.
Suddenly, Jeanne came to my rescue. “That’s it,” she said to the man. “Time out! Ten minutes and no talking,” she said looking at him while making a zipping motion over her mouth. He started to say something but Jeanne pointed to the clock and repeated, “Ten minutes.” Imitating her zipping motion over his own mouth, the man nodded as Jeanne gave him a smile and a thumb’s up.
While it looked like a game and was given in a friendly manner, the man played along for the required ten minutes before resuming his conversation. This time, he participated with us instead of dominating everything. Jeanne didn’t embarrass him. She didn’t tell him to leave. She didn’t scold. She drew a boundary that kept him sitting at “the table,” to borrow a phrase often used in the church.
We moved outside on the dock near the place where Frank was playing. At his break, he sat with us. “Who is that?” I asked, gesturing toward a man whose right side appeared partially paralyzed. “That’s Jimmy. He was to be a member of Nixon’s cabinet until he had a stroke.” Watergate? I asked. Frank indicated that he didn’t know.
About that time, Jimmy tried to ask a question of the waitress who was passing near the spot where he stood leaning against a piling. Struggling, Jimmy said a few words before his vocal cords appeared to give way and he lost the ability to form the sentence. “Hold that thought,” the waitress said to Jimmy touching him lightly on his arm. “I’ll be back,” she said smiling as she served her customers. “We all have to help Jimmy,” Frank said explaining.
I looked across the dance floor at an obnoxious man that tried to be too friendly with a woman who obviously kept moving his hands and pointing her finger at him. Each time, he would dance for a while and, then as if by instinct, she would sense his untoward move and catch his hands. Not once did she treat him with anything but kindness. It was a true example of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Who is that man? What’s his story? I asked my brother. That’s the Rocket Scientist, he replied. He moors his boat by one of those pilings in the harbor. You don’t have to pay anything. Just tie up. He lives there. And, hey, the guy’s brilliant but a social misfit – even here. He hits on all the girls. Most of them won’t let him come anywhere near them. Brenda, the one that he’s dancing with, took him on as a project to keep somebody from getting mad and hurting him.
About that time, Susan came to our table. She was an attractive twenty-two year old who sang, at times in a duo with my brother. She wasn’t singing that night. Introducing herself, she asked, Are you Sam, Frank’s brother?
Affirming a yes, I rose to shake her hand. She looked at Judy and said, “Are you Sam’s wife?” Judy responded with a nod and Susan continued, “You’re beautiful.” My wife denies it to this day but I distinctly remember her telling Susan to please sit down, right at that moment.
For the next several days, Susan went everywhere we went. When we went sailing and snorkeling, she showed up with her flippers and mask. “I believe in God,” she told me, “but I don’t believe in Jesus. He was just too long ago for it to mean anything.” We talked about many things but mostly about God and our lives.
Susan tried hard to convince me to smoke ‘weed.’ How can you be against something if you’ve never tried it? She would say. Although I brought up no specific issues, like smoking marijuana, Susan assumed that I would be against it because “… that’s what the church is, against things,” she said. (To answer your question, I didn’t smoke weed.)
Walking across the dock, two very large men sported tee shirts that proclaimed, “Jesus is Lord.” Do they believe that? I asked my brother.
I don’t know, he responded. But, I know they believe in Vern. Looking at my puzzled face, he explained. Vern is a guy that tied his boat to one of the public pilings. He would come into the Marianna to buy gas and a few supplies making friends with the owner and the people here. Nobody knew he was a ‘preacher.’ One day he asked if he could hold services in the Marina, Frank said, pointing to a cross mounted on top of one of the pilings. They met here for awhile, he continued, until the crowds outgrew the space. Now they meet in a storefront just down the road. Vern still lives on his boat.
I looked around at this assortment of humanity. If someone moved from a trailer, the next person willing to pay the site rental and the utilities could move in behind them. As I related to colleagues who were assessing ‘church plants’ I told them: “We would have done a survey of the trailer park. After the first ten occupants told us where the road lay in language not used by church liturgy, we would have written these people off. Vern loved them first. Won their friendship and through that won them as disciples of Jesus.” What are we missing? There was a painful lesson for me in this.
I could tell that God was working in that place and especially with Susan. Susan invited us to her apartment for a meal our final evening in paradise. She lived with Richard. Arriving, we discovered an assortment of people already present. I had assumed that it would be a quiet evening and that we would continue our discussions, perhaps leading Susan to a new direction on her journey with God. It would not happen – at least not by my efforts.
One of the guests, a woman I’ll call Jan, arrived on her Harley Davidson motorcycle with an outdoor smoker she had welded that day in the shop where she worked. A woman of medium build, she wore mostly leather and looked the part of a motorcycle ‘momma.’ Frank told me that she had been married to the leader of a motorcycle gang. He beat her one too many times. She shot him with a 45 caliber handgun in his soft flesh, without killing him to let him know that if he ever touched her again, she would kill him. Needless to say, he never did.
In all my life, no man or woman ever spoke with such a profane tongue. The more Jan talked, the more frustrated I became. There was no one around to tell her ‘time out.’
Every few minutes, I found myself walking outside on the veranda. Frank would follow. “I can’t take Jan,” I spoke with anger and frustration.
“She gets way out of line,” Frank told me. I could tell – at least that was my viewpoint. Jan had just finished telling us that she didn’t know why the parents of her daughter’s friends got so upset about her sixteen year old birthday party. “They knew where their (profanity) kids were. What the ______? All I did was keep them from going the _____ out. So we had a keg of _______ beer and they all got a nickel bag of _______ weed. What the _____ do they think they ______ do anyway? I don’t know why the _____ they got so _______ pissed off.”
This was a foreign world and I had just met the demoniac who charged forth from the tombs on a Harley Davison Motorcycle.
I was angry with Susan. She ruined my plans for the evening. Returning home, I couldn’t get the thought of that evening out of my mind. Looking back, I saw the hand of God.
Susan invited us to dinner for a community of the lost, the blind, the lame and the demon possessed; but I wanted nothing to do with them. My wife Judy talked with Jan for two hours, enduring her profanity and listening. “I never knew a woman with more hurt in her life,” she would tell me.
That experience led to a time of repentance and transformation for me. I did not realize that I had traded the work of God and Christ for the work of the institutional church. I was the one that needed deliverance from evil – a subtle evil that came like a ‘thief in the night.’
There was redemption in this story. Several months later, Susan called us to tell us that she and Richard had married and wanted to come and visit. “I found Jesus,” she said. “I went to Church and asked to be baptized. Something happened. I didn’t know Jesus or really believe until them. When I was baptized something happened. I knew I was forgiven. I just knew it.” That story sounded strangely familiar – a little like that of an English reformer of the 18th Century named John Wesley who experienced an unexpected transformation. “I felt my heart strangely warmed. That Christ had died for me, even me,” he said.
I confessed to Susan what I felt. She interrupted saying: “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know Jan would act like that. I just thought they all needed to hear what we would talk about.” A great number of people would also gather from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those tormented by unclean spirits, and they were all cured. Acts 5:16
1 (Accessibility to information often manifests itself anonymously on the internet leaving the processing of such information to individuals or to communities that maybe too isolated from the source to come to an accountable discernment of what is being said. In other words, can you know the information is accurate, factual or in the language of theology, is it true?)
