Am I There, Yet?

Yes…I’ve blogged too much today.  I told you…I’m going to be lazy all day.  That’s twice this week.  I think I’m due for a vacation.  Oh yea, I’ve already mentioned that.

I’m reading Velvet Elvis:  Repainting the Christian Faith by Rob Bell.  It’s a great book.  It’s as good as Erwin Raphael McManus’ books.  Go out and get it today…especially if you are as fascinated by the emerging church conversation as I am.  I love this book and in actuality, you may hate this book, but you’ll never know until you read it.  J

O.K.  So, have you ever read a book and then all of a sudden something you’ve read jumps out at you and you feel as if you’ve been bit?  And you feel as if the author has a weird sense that you’d be reading his or her book and knew that you needed to hear an exact something at the exact moment you’ve read it?  Well…this entire book has been like this for me. 

Here’s one of the many quotes that resonated with me:

Central to the Christian experience is the art of questioning God.  Not belligerent, arrogant questions that have no respect for our maker, but naked, honest, vulnerable, raw questions, arising out of the awe that comes from engaging the living God.

This type of questioning frees us.  Frees us from having to have it all figured out.  Frees us from having answers to everything.  Frees us from always having to be right.  It allows us to have moments when we come to the end of our ability to comprehend.  Moments when the silence is enough.

The great Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder.”

The Christian faith is mysterious to the core.  It is about things and beings that ultimately can’t be put into words.  Language fails.  And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not.

Most of us are conditioned to think of mystery in terms of a television show or a novel or a film in which the mystery is solved at the end.  Often right before the credits we find out who did it, or who is actually the long-lost son of whom, or that she is actually a he.  Or that Bruce Willis was dead for most of the movie and we just now figured it out.

Mystery is created when key facts are hidden from the viewer.  What the writer/director/creator does at the end is pull back the curtain and show us the things that had previously been hidden.

So the mystery gets solved and our questions get answered.

But the Bible has an entirely different understanding of mystery.  True mystery, the kind of mystery rooted in the infinite nature of God, gives us answers that actually plunge us into even more…questions.

Isn’t that true?

On a side note, I’m in an online reading group that is studying this particular book.  It’s funny because it seems as if some people take certain passages in the book and slightly twist them to say what they want it to say.  I can just imaging the author reading their comments and scratching his head thinking, “Did I really say that?”  It got me thinking about how some of us read the Bible.  We focus so much on 1 or 2 passages and milk them for all they are worth and I sometimes wonder if God listens to our discussions of these passages and thinks, “Did I really say that?” 

Anyways…go get this book.  Now.  I’m serious!  What are you still reading this for?  Go!  Here…I’ll make it easy for you:  Barnes and Noble.com