Pieces - missing, lost, hidden, or otherwise (PART 3)

(will only make sense if you read previous chapters)

So you’ve got an orange tree. Or better yet, you’ve got a whole orchard full of them. And they’re all dying. They are rotting. They smell bad. They look bad. They taste bad.

And so the first gut level, knee jerk reaction is to scurry about trying to solve the problem. To save the crop. And because most of like a quick fix, we look on the surface.

The tree isn’t getting enough light. Let’s change the lighting.

The tree isn’t getting enough water. Let’s add some water.

The tree isn’t getting enough nutrients. Let’s add some more soil on top of what’s there.

Quick fixes work sometimes. But usually not when you’re dealing with a whole orchard of trees. But if everyone was able to slow down. To stop worrying about the immediate concerns and pressures of losing money, losing the crop, losing respect among other orchard owners . . . if just for a moment we were able to stop and focus our attention from external changes . . . to what is below the surface. To what the foundation is. To what the trees are rooted into . . . then we might find the problem.

Again . . . we have to ask ourselves the question . . . what is our worldview/theology/reading producing? The clearest and easiest way to look at the validity and value of something, is to look at the quality of what comes from it.

If we’re getting bad quality, perhaps we need to look at the foundation. And not at the sunlight, water, or nutrients. Perhaps we need to take a look at the roots.

It really starts with Jesus for me. Put down everything else except the gospels. And don’t read the gospels . . . don’t read the words of Jesus with a future tense. But read them with a present tense. As if he was talking about the here and now. On this earth. In this life. Then start to watch how everything begins to shift and change. How it begins to take on a new identity and a new life.

How the traditional reading of the story of God doesn’t provide all of the answers to reality. It provides in part . . . yes. It helps in many ways. But something is missing. We’ve missed something or forgotten something along the way.

At this point, this probably sounds like I have some conspiracy theory. Like there is some secret organization that found out what Jesus really meant and then hid it from us. Maybe the Devil hid it. He has a reputation for doing something like that. Or maybe the Maravingian’s took it and hid it with the Holy Grail. And then they passed it on to the Knights Templar, who passed it on to the FreeMasons, who passed it on to the Illuminatti.

Maybe.

Or maybe we suppressed it. Maybe we just lost sight of it. Maybe we let other things became more important to us. Maybe we let Paul’s teaching inform Jesus’ teachings, instead of letting Jesus’ teachings inform Paul’s teaching. I don’t know which it is. Probably a combination of them all. But something happened.

For me, my worldview/thelogy/reading . . . quit making sense. It made sense in parts. But not as a whole. It made good sense systematically.

I could describe the atonement in detailed.

I could describe the afterlife in detail. Which route you were taking (heaven or hell), at what point were you going. When the seven plagues were going to come. What the seven lampstands and the seven bowls were. When Armageddon was going to happen. When the stars were going to fall and the sky to blood. All of these “literal” things.

I could describe the Fall.

I could describe the cross.

I could describe Israel, the church, and me.

I could do it all. I was a theological wizard. I read books. I wrote papers. I footnoted. And what I had was a theology that made sense systematically. Meaning that if you broke everything down into parts, I could explain each part. Like an engine or a machine, I could tell you what each part was for, what it did, why it was there.

But something happened. I heard about an alternative reasoning for why it was there. And instead of seeing the parts as piece of a system. I saw the engine run. I saw the machine move.

And I realized I could explain more by watching and showing why something moved . . . I could explain something better by pointing to its overall purpose, than I could by breaking it down into parts.

My reading made good sense as a system, but not good as a story. Not good as a narrative.

And so I began to discover a different WHY of it all. Whereas before, I had this vague idea of why the world was the way it was and how God was going to fix it. It had something to do with original sin. And how God has been about appeasing his anger ever since that original sin. And how one day God will finally be appeased and will take some people to clouds in the sky forever and some people (who aren’t as lucky) will burn forever.

This whole system that tried to make the puzzle pieces fit into this framework or border . . . of an angry God who is looking to appease himself.

This is about the time that everything started crumbling for me. I felt like all the pieces that I had been putting into the puzzle and working on and slaving over and spending hours upon hours on. What I was building, what I was creating . . . it felt like it all ended up in a pile.

A big pile of pieces. Jumbled and scrambled together. This can be a very disheartening thing. Disillusioning. Scary.

But like I said, I found out about a different WHY. I heard another reading of the story of God.

It’s a story that takes everything into account, and to the best of its ability, makes the larger story make sense. Makes life makes sense. It’s a faith that informs social, political, theological, and relational realities. Whereas my previous reading didn’t take eveything into account.

It just dealt with original sin. And everything was built around this. Like Doug Pagitt has said, the reading began in Genesis 3 and ended in Romans 3 (thanks for the reference Nick). And thus we’ve missed out on the rest of the story.

Tomorrow, I’ll begin to tell you about another possibility in the story. One that takes everything into account.