already & not yet

The final echo Wright describes in Simply Christian is delight in beauty. A stunning sunset, a lilting piece of music, an evocative painting…each of these has the power to invoke awe and wonder within the human heart. Why do we find beauty in certain things? Surely these are grace moments, glimpses into the very heart of God. We image God when we enter into the creative process. And we also reflect His image when we recognize the beauty of that creation. God Himself acknowledged the goodness of His creation (Gen. 1:31). To find something beautiful is to ascribe value to it. This is the very heart of worship: confession of God’s beauty and goodness.

Praise God today for the beauty of His creation!

One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple.
Psalm 27:4

Our desire for true relationship is yet another indicator of God’s claim upon our lives. The image of God we have from Scripture is that of a relational God. Theologians spill much ink delineating the triune nature of God. This same God who exists corporately and individually (Father, Son and Spirit) creates humanity in His image. And this is essential for we, too, are relational beings. The portrait of a world set to rights in Genesis depicts a harmonious relational order: God, man, and woman — Creator and created — sharing life together in the garden.

And yet, the Fall produces a world where relationship is severed. The intimacy between God and man was destroyed causing all creation to groan for redemption. Furthermore, the relationships we share with one another are marred. We’re made for each other, yet each human relationship comes to an end through death. “If this is paradoxical — we’re meant for relationship, but all relationships come to an end — we find in both parts an echoing voice that reminds us of the echoes we have heard in the first two chapters (p36).“

God’s story illustrates His heart for relationship with us. As God enters the garden in Genesis 3, searching for the man and woman hiding from His presence, we hear His broken-hearted cry: “Where are you? (Gen. 3:9)” I’m convinced it is this desire for relationship that leads God to the cross, the place where He restores that relationship with us. This is redemption: God reconciling His image-bearing creation back to Himself.

Indeed, it’s as if we and God were made for each other.

N.T. Wright describes man’s search for spirituality as a spring hidden deep within the human heart, bubbling forth from the deep places of our soul. This desire, according to Wright, is given us by our Creator God and indicates that for which we were truly created.

Wright argues that we’ve abandoned a holistic understanding of religion and spirituality. Whereas our forebears “would have gone to church, said their prayers, worshipped in this way or that, and understood what they were doing as part of the warp and woof of the rest of life, the Western world from roughly the 1780s through to the 1980s was very different. (p18)” For the past 200 years, we’ve constructed a society with clear demarcation between the sacred and the secular. In this paradigm, church life becomes separated from the constraints of “real life.” What does Saturday night have to do with Sunday morning?

As a result, members of the postmodern generation are leaving church in droves. They see no point in investing themselves in something that is inauthentic and unrelated to their real lives. Some would bemoan this attitude as a lack of spirituality. This indictment, however, is false. If you don’t think people are hungry for spirituality, check out the religion / spirituality section in your local bookstore. To the contrary, today’s seeker passionately yearns for spiritual experience. Most postmoderns, when asked, would confess a belief in some kind of Higher Power. They’re not concerned with our teleological arguments for God’s existence. They simply want to know how to experience Him.

Wright contends that this passion for spirituality is another echo of a distant voice. This is an exciting time to be a follower of Christ. People are genuinely interested in spiritual truth, in religious experience. There is a great opportunity for us to tap into this hidden spring of spirituality. Through the sharing of our stories, may we invite others to participate in the Great Story of God.

He has also set eternity in the hearts of men. — Ecclesiastes 3:11

I’m currently reading N. T. Wright’s Simply Christian for one of my grad classes. Wright has a tremendous gift for taking weighty theological concepts and making them palatable on the popular level. That’s his M.O. with Simply Christian, his explanation of the Christian faith. Wright identifies four elements of our existence that can be interpreted as “echoes of a voice”: the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationship and the delight in beauty. Each of these, Wright contends, points beyond our existence to the image of God within us. I plan on writing about each of these issues over the next few days. Here’s a quote from Wright on our longing for justice:

We dream the dream of justice. We glimpse, for a moment, a world at one, a world put to rights, a world where things work out, where societies function fairly and effeciently, where we not only know what we ought to do but actually do it. And then we wake up and come back to reality. But what are we hearing when we’re dreaming that dream?
It’s as though we can hear, not perhaps a voice itself, but the echo of a voice: a voice speaking with calm, healing authority, speaking about justice, about things being put to rights, about peace and hope and prosperity for all. The voice continues to echo in our imagination, our subconscious….But the voice goes on, calling us, beckoning us, luring us to think that there might be such a thing as justice, as the world being put to rights, even though we find it so elusive. — pp.3-4

We live in an unjust world. An entire generation is being orphaned in Africa because of the AIDS pandemic. Natural catastrophes like hurricanes and earthquakes claim thousands of lives each year. The rich continue to line their pockets at the expense of the poor. Apartheid, slavery, hunger, genocide, war, rape, terrorism…our vocabulary is replete with words to describe the injustices around us.

We ask why it must be this way. Our innate desire for justice — or putting the world to rights, as Wright calls it — points to God Himself. Isn’t it odd that children playing on a playground have a fully developed sense of justice? (How long do you have to be on the playground before you hear someone crying, “That’s not fair!”) We have a difficult time squaring the way the world is with the way we beleive it ought to be. It’s as if we’re wired with a longing for justice.

And, although injustice seemingly runs rampant in these days, there are those grace moments, those moments when the curtain is lifted for but a moment and we hear the beautiful echo of that distant voice once more. And these moments of hope irrigate our souls and reawaken our passion to be agents of God’s justice here on earth. And may this passion for justice manifest itself through activism and engagement in our unique contexts.

May we follow the example of Christian men like William Wilberforce and John Woolman, who worked to abolish slave trade in Britain and the United States respectively. Their efforts flew in the face of popular Christian thought of the day with many people justifying the slave trade because the Bible mentions slavery. May we follow the example of Martin Luther King, Jr. who opposed the racial prejudice of his time by mobilizing the nonviolent civil rights movement in the United States. As Wright points out, God used these individuals and countless others like them to put the world to rights.

We continue to live in a fallen, unjust world. To believe injustice will be fully vanquished this side of eternity is both naive and absurd. But let’s not allow this to dissuade us from living out our calling. May God’s passion for justice become ours, too. May we be agents for Kingdom living that, through us, His will might be done “on earth as it is in heaven.”