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Subscribe to CommentsSo I need to explain something. I’ve been to the same place for vacation for the past 28 years. I know, boring as the post office. Which is exactly the way I like vacation. Maybe as a result, vacation clears space in my head. Maybe for God to speak. Several years ago, I’m guessing now but 1998 or 1999, I’m praying on vacation and a voice gets through saying, “Pay attention to what I’m doing among liberals.”
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There’s a biblical category they don’t tell you about in many seminaries: the category of the moral dilemma. There are moral dilemmas as surely as there are moral certainties. There are situations through which the way forward is not clear, just as surely as there are situations through which the way forward is is indicated with flashing lights, blaring horns, and a helicopter hovering above to draw your attention. Thankfully, the latter, in the realm of moral choices, exceeds the former, but the former exists. King David, for example–read the account of his life and some of the choices he faced, his heart being after God’s heart and all. How after serving for a time, he knew it wasn’t for him to build the temple because he had blood on his hands, and not just Uriah’s. Take Abraham, walking with his son Isaac to Mount Moriah–did what he learn about moral dilemmas in seminary prepare him for the one he was walking into? Can you even read that story without understanding that its dramatic impact makes no sense without the category of moral dilemma?
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This is one of those posts where I’m working something out, in this case trying to come to grips with a niggling annoyance that keeps coming up. Pops up like a prairie dog and then down in the hole again, then up again, then down again. Now you see it, now you don’t. What was that? Fear, but of a particular sort. Fear with a religious or pious bent. It’s not that bracing fear that wakes you up either, a fear that clarifies and sharpens focus. Like Isaiah in the temple fear or whatever the fear is that is the beginning of wisdom. This is more like an anxious fear, a whining kind of dread that won’t look you straight in the eye. It’s a worrying nervous sort of fear.
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I traveled down with a van load of Ann Arbor Vineyard friends to speak at the Columbus Vineyard Joshua House–the twenty something Sunday evening service. Found myself speaking to them as an old(er) Jesus freak, seeking to convey something that I’m struggling to put into words. I’ll keep trying till I get it.
All theology is biography ultimately–something we can’t shy away from if our study of God involves the knowing of a truth in person whose first-last-and deepest truth telling begins-ends-continues with the words, “I am.” All of biblical truth is carried on the back of a donkey called story–history, his story, the story that includes and redeems and transforms our story, because a plot likes nothing better than to thicken. And so I find myself struggling to tell my Jesus freak story to this generation that’s filling up the likes of Joshua House.
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Frederick Buechner has a little devotional reading do-jobby titled, Listening to Your Life. As though your life is telling a story, and you’re both a participant in the story and audience to it. So while you’re in the middle of living your life, listen to it as well. Because maybe God is in there playing hide and seek.
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