The Lure of Small Gods

“When your god is small, you can still be the biggest thing in your world.”

I heard that on Sunday. It’s been in the back of my mind ever since. Small god. Small God. It’s a fascinating thought.

I can’t get it out of my head.

See, I know people who worship the small God, the God that is more concerned about rules and uniformity than about redemption and transformation. The small God doesn’t change you; he gives you rules and demands that you change. The small God doesn’t disciple you; he disciplines you for committing errors you didn’t know you’d committed. The small God doesn’t love you; he demands you love him.

The small God is not the true God.

Even now, there are people who are reading this and going ballistic. They hear words like love, redemption, transformation, rules, discipline, and they hear something very different from me. I am teetering on the edge of heresy by suggesting that God is not concerned primarily with rules and discipline and order and obedience. I’m leading people down a wrong path, a path of easy-believism.

The reality is the opposite. Easy-believism is when you tell people that if they’ll live their lives a certain way, according to to certain code, then God will make everything work out, and if it doesn’t, then it’s their fault for not living right. Easy-believism says that everyone else is wrong and you’re right, so there’s no need to have a conversation. Easy-believism says that only people who live by certain rules truly get God.

True belief is hard. It’s challenging. There are black and white areas to be sure, but there’s also a lot of gray. And it’s in that gray that a person is forced to lean into God, to dig into the word, to search Him out for answers. It’s in that gray that a person finds themselves being transformed. It’s in that gray that a person discovers that the small God is pathetic and mean and not to much different than a petty human being; that if God exists, He must by definition be something more than we can create on our own.

And that’s why the quote above resonated with me so much: people who worship the small God want to be bigger themselves. They want to be able to say that they are special, they are unique, they are gifted or holy or any other adjective that places emphasis on them and their ability to be blessed by the small God.

Maybe that’s the tell: if your God exalts you for following him, you’re worshiping the small God.

Because the big God, the real God, the God revealed in the Bible and in the person of Jesus Christ, isn’t concerned about you being exalted through Him. He wants to be exalted through you. And He does that not by piling the rules on you to the point of suffocation, but by freeing you up to be who He created you to be. He is exalted most when you live a life fully free in Him.

I get scared writing stuff like this. I get scared pushing against the small Gods out there, the gods of abusers and bullies who use religion as a weapon to secure their own power. I get scared because I know those types of people don’t like being called out, don’t abide people who stand up to their scare tactics. I get scared because I know people who live that way, and I don’t wish them any harm or want to hurt them. I get scared because I don’t want to become like that myself.

More and more, though, I find that this is something I want to write. That I feel driven to write on. More and more I feel like I need to say something that presses back against the small Gods so the people who wonder if there’s something more can know the truth: there is.

And He’s so much more than you’ve been lead to believe. Or dared to dream.

Don’t settle for a small God. Don’t settle for a world where, by simply following rules you become the biggest thing. Don’t settle for anything other than the one true God.

Discernment

Yesterday the pastor of the church we’ve been visiting was speaking on the topic of Good Advice. The main point of his sermon was that too often people seek out “yes men” for their decisions – they fail to seek out enough perspective before making a decision and so their choices often lead to hardship. The pastor suggested that for many people, life is about acceptance: we crave it, and so we seek it, and we’ll give it in order to obtain it.

In other words, we’ll give people a pass on things they do if they’ll give us a pass on the things we do. The Romans called it quid pro quo. Scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

The pastor went on; rather than acceptance, he said, what we really want is discernment. To know which things are good, and to be able to choose them. When we can discern for ourselves, we don’t have to trade our approval for someone else’s; we can simply do what we know to be right. We still seek counsel in order to do things wisely, but the fundamental idea of knowing what we should do gives us clarity and focus. It doesn’t leave us chasing our tails.

I was amazed by the pastor’s ability to bring that together. I find myself trying to be an accepting person when what I really want to be is a discerning person. Too often I trade my approval for the approval of others, and I’m learning I don’t have to do that. I can disagree with someone about the how or why of something and not have to feel beholden to them, as if I’m responsible for making them feel good about their life choices.

As the pastor pointed out, I’m responsible before God for me. Not anyone else.

That doesn’t mean that I live a life of isolation and nonchalance. There’s still a mandate from God to be light in the world. But how people respond to the light isn’t up to me; I simply have to live according to His word and His spirit. He’ll do everything else.

Discernment. Wisdom. Strength. I want them all, and have been praying for God to develop them within me. How about you?

In the Passenger’s Seat

Yesterday was a great day for my family. My brother invited us to an Atlanta Braves baseball game as part of my nephew’s birthday celebration (happy 6th birthday, Joey!), and the game started at 1:30. But before that, we were to meet at the world famous Varsity Drive-In for lunch at eleven. As it’s summer and we love my brother and his family, we agreed to both; plus, we were excited to take Ella and Jon to their first baseball game. However, it presented us with a dilemma.

What about church?

Even though I’m no longer working at a church, it doesn’t mean that the church isn’t important to me. It is, and vitally so. Not to sound all judgy on you, but I think that physical community with fellow Christ-followers is one of the key components of spiritual formation. Which means my family must seek it out intentionally now that I’m no longer employed by a church. It has become much more of a priority for us, instead of an assumed thing.

(I realize that sounds bad, but when you’re on staff at a church, you take for granted that you are part of a community. You get too focused on the responsibilities of leading it.)

Anyway, all this to say that Rachel and I sat down and discussed what to do.

“Well, we could go to an early service somewhere,” she said. “I mean, I suppose we don’t have to…”

“No,” I said. “I’m with you. Let’s go somewhere with a nine o’clock service. We can just head straight downtown after that.”

So we sat down and considered the different churches in our area that offered an early service. Actually, we both knew exactly which church we wanted to attend; it took all of nine seconds for us to simultaneously declare it. I won’t tell you the name, but it’s a local church with a reputation for excellence, and one we’ve both wanted to visit for a while.

Now that we can, we were excited for the possibility.

It didn’t disappoint. I won’t go into a church review, in part because it’d be boring to read, but also because I actively worked to NOT see things that way yesterday. When you spend time working behind the scenes in a church, the tendency when you go to another church is to peek behind the curtain; to get an idea of how the other guy does things, and see if there is any inspiration for your congregation. This tendency gets in the way of you actually worshipping, and so it is that some pastors forget what it means to sit back, relax, and focus on God from the pew (or in this case, theater chair). So I went into yesterday morning with my analyzing mode set to Off.

It was amazing. I didn’t stress about a single thing. We got the kids checked into the church’s registration system, sent Ella off the elementary age kids area and took Jon to the preschool area. I was worried about this part because Jon has attachment issues to me, and those issues flared up every Sunday just before he went to his Sunday school class and I went to mine. So I expected tears. I expected screaming. Instead, I watched my son stroll into a completely foreign environment, pick up a truck, and immediately start playing.

He never even looked back.

I figured if he could do it, then so could I. I walked back out to the lobby area, grabbed a free cup of coffee, found Rachel, and together we strolled into an entirely different world. And for an hour, I forgot I was a pastor. I forgot what it felt like to worry over the service.

I remembered what it was like to simply let go of myself, and enter into the presence of the holy, righteous, and awesome God of All.

Now I’m not saying you don’t worship as a pastor. You do. It’s just different. You’re so involved with the mechanics of the service that you’re a bit more aware of what’s going on than most people. You know what needs to go on in the Audio/Visual booth; you know when the men need to take up the offering; you’re subconsciously listening to the ticking of the clock in your head; reading the body language of the people; judging the ambient temperature in the room, watching the faces during singing, worrying about the lighting, revisiting your sermons notes in your head, thinking about how you might want to change an illustration or the close. In many modern churches, you’re the one responsible for making sure that the people have done their part to make the service worshipful.

And I worried about that more than I should have. I did theater in high school and happent to be a bit of a nerd, so the ins and outs of production not only fascinate me, they present an area for excellence to be achieved. Which means that I spent more time worrying about that stuff than necessary, which meant that I allowed my worship to sometimes be more of a battle than it needed to be.

Which made sitting in the passenger seat yesterday all the more restful.

It was also instructive for my spiritual life. I cannot always be in control. I cannot always be worried about making sure that every I is dotted and every T is crossed. To be that consumed with attaining perfection is to deny what Christ’s death and resurrection proclaims as true: that I am broken, and cannot fix myself, even after He’s put me back together again. I must rest in Him and let Him transform me.

To be sure, we can’t, as Dallas Willard famously wrote, be Vampire Christians – “I’ll just take your blood, Jesus, and go on with my life, thank you very much.” But neither can we go to the opposite extreme, where we don’t even need the blood of Jesus because we’ve figured out the magic formula. There’s a reason Jesus spent so much time chiding the Pharisees; when we feel like we have God mastered, then we’ve missed the point because we’ve missed the Person.

Writing all of this is taboo in some people’s minds because I’m admitting to something that some Christians want to deny: that I’m still being conformed to Christ. As a pastor, I often felt the sadness in people when they would ask me for an answer and the only one I could give them was “I don’t know.” Others were liberated by my honesty, but there were some who seemed defeated by the truth. Looking back on it, I think it was because they felt if I didn’t have all my stuff together, how could they possibly hope to?

Here’s how: by surrendering to Christ. Reading His word, not as a rule book, but as a conversation. Considering His Spirit in us not as a power to be mastered, but as a gift to be enjoyed. Putting ourselves into His hands and trusting that He will shape and grow us in the ways that matter, the ways we need, and that He’ll do the same for others.

Yesterday, I was reminded of that. It was powerful. It was awesome. And it awakened a hunger for more.

It was a good day.

In a Boat With a Tiger

Last night Rachel and I watched the Oscar winning film, “Life of Pi.” It was a homework assignment given to me by my friend, Kevin, who forbade us from any more coffee get-togethers until I’d seen the flick. I picked it up from Redbox on Blu-Ray, we put the kiddos to bed, and we settled down to watch…

…well, we didn’t know, exactly.

I mean, we both knew it was about a guy in a boat with a tiger, but we weren’t sure of much beyond that. I knew that the visuals were supposed to be remarkable and unlike anything anyone had ever seen, but I had no sense of the plot. Kevin had given me a bit of a hint – as had his girlfriend, Kristin – but knowing that a movie has something to do with God doesn’t quite constitute a spoiler alert.

So when the first five minutes of the movie were slow pans of various animals inside some sort of sub-tropical jungle/zoo-type-enclosure-thingy, Rachel turned to me and said, “I thought this was about a guy and a tiger.”

“It is,” I said. “But I have no idea how it gets there from here.”

I really didn’t have any idea how the crux of the story – Pi on the boat with a tiger named, strangely enough, Richard Parker – came about. And I certainly wasn’t prepared for the journey. If you’ve not seen the movie I won’t spoil it for you, but it was moving and heart-wrenching and had me rooting for the boy with the unusual name the entire time.

In fact, the plot of the movie wasn’t what really captivated me. It rang true, even with its fantastical elements, and that was what mattered; you can watch a good movie with a great plot and not have it say something to your heart. While the story was fantastic, Life of Pi is powerful precisely because it says something about the nature of faith and the struggle we all endure to make sense of our lives on a daily basis. In Pi, plenty of people find a doppleganger: a person who, as a result of growing up in a multi-cultural world, has a powerful faith in God – be it Vishnu, Christ, or Allah.

Pi isn’t someone whose faith tradition was simply handed to him; he comes to believe the various things he believes because of his own search for meaning and purpose. He seeks out God in so many places because he believes God may be found. He sees the hand of God in places others can’t be bothered to look. And while I may not subscribe to the polytheistic ecumenism that Pi embraces, I can certainly say that the desire to believe in something, to see the majestic at work in my life, is a longing I can identify with.

Being adrift in a boat with a tiger isn’t a perfect metaphor for everything, but it’s apt for where my family finds itself right now. We are at the mercy of God’s hand; we are moved by His leading; we are aware that the danger before is also something of terrible beauty. And like Pi, we’re simply looking to come ashore somewhere safe. I can’t remember when a movie collided with my life so perfectly.

Is it for everyone? Nope. There are plenty of people who won’t be able to get past the fact that Pi, born in India, doesn’t stick with one religion over another. Others won’t be able to swallow the admittedly dream-like story. But for those who are looking for something undefinable, something outside the normal channels, this might be a movie for you.

I can’t promise it will say anything to you, but I can tell you that it stuck with me in quiet ways; long after I’ve returned the movie to Redbox, I’ll still be thinking about the visuals, and the story, and the power of a heart that is open to life’s great moments, no matter how they arrive. For that, I am grateful.

Beyond The Walls

Yesterday afternoon I found myself balancing on two rocks, trying desperately not to fall into the Chattahoochee River. I was also trying hard not to drop the young man in my arms.

Before you freak out, let me explain: I was baptizing him.

See, once upon a time, the young man came to my youth group. He was a small kid, loved baseball, very energetic (from what I can remember). Now, he’s a buffed out Naval weapons instructor who’s on leave for a few days. He came to Christ while serving in Kuwait, and when he decided he wanted to be baptized like Jesus, he had only two conditions: 1- it should be in a river, and 2- he wanted me to do the dunking.

He talked it over with his mother, and she decided that was acceptable – as long as she could be baptized with him. They called a mutual friend, who contacted me because, as we determined yesterday, I was “the only preacher crazy enough to do this.”

Naturally, I agreed.

So after some searching, we found Abbotts Bridge Park, which isn’t as much of a park as it is a boat ramp with a gravel parking lot and a bathroom. Turns out they load in tubers by the busload at the park, so we had to wait until about 35 bathing suited rednecks lashed their beer coolers and their tubes together and launched a massive flotilla of whooping shenanigans down the river. Once they were safely out of range, we tiptoed down the ramp, through the mud and into the frigid water.

Which is where we began: me, balancing on two rocks, holding the young man while I said, “Because of your faith in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, it is my privilege to baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

And with that, I dunked him. I also lost my balance for a split second and had to fight to keep him from falling. Once he came out of the water, he was all smiles, and he hugged me.

“Thank you,” he said.

His mother was next, and when she stepped into the water she let out a small yelp. I’m telling you – it was cold. But she went under with the same pronouncement, and when she came up, she shouted. Then she hugged me. And then her joy in the moment just bubbled over and infected our audience on the shore: her husband, her son, his wife, our mutual friend and her husband, and my wife Rachel and our two kids, Ella and Jon. Someone started singing “He Is Lord.”

It was cool.

Afterward, as we stood on the boat ramp chatting, I overheard Rachel tell the mother, “Well, he left the church because he knew God had something more. He still loves the church – but he wants to take it beyond the walls.” I thought about that for a second; it made me think of something that a friend told me a few weeks ago, a friend who doesn’t like church because of negative associations but likes getting together with me to talk about God: “Don’t give up what you’re doing – there aren’t enough people like you willing to talk to people like me.”

I don’t know how much things like that shape direction and purpose, but I’ll say this much: I love taking the church into unexpected places. I love the fact that when some men wanted to pull their boat from the river they got to see the mother’s baptism. One even asked, “Aren’t you supposed to do that in a church?”

“Anywhere is the church,” someone else said.

I like that. “Anywhere is the church” as long as the people who are Christ’s body will make it so. A coffee shop, a riverside, a baseball field – we can find moments of the holy wherever and whenever we’re willing to seek them.

We just have to be willing.