Late one night this week I found myself high upon a rock in the middle of Joshua Tree National Park. I was camping with my family. They were tucked in their sleeping bags trying to keep warm. The last one up, I’d left the glowing embers of our campfire and wandered up to this promontory to observe the night sky.

As I gazed up, I was greeted by the constellation Cassiopeia, along with her husband Cepheus and their daughter Andromeda draped in the Milky Way. As my eyes adjusted to the light, my mind adjusted to the reality above me. A Psalm came to me:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? (Ps. 8:4 NRSV)

I recalled something I’d read earlier this year in theologian Miroslav Volf’s book about forgiveness, Free of Charge. The first chapter is titled “God the Giver”, exploring how God is first a pure giver (Free of Charge, 43). Some believe our response is to gravel before God—as if somehow our worship will “pay” him back. Volf says, no, our response is two fold—faith and gratitude. He writes:

Faith is an expression of the fact that we exist so that the infinite God can dwell in us and work through us for well-being of the whole creation. If faith denies anything, it denies that we are tiny, self-obsessed specks of matter who are reaching for the stars but remain hopelessly nailed to the earth stuck in our own self-absorption. Faith is the first part of the bridge from self-centeredness to generosity (Free of Charge, 44).

Gratitude toward God is the corollary of faith in God. When I have faith, I affirm explicitly that I am a recipient of God’s favors, and implicitly recognize and affirm God as the giver. When I am grateful, I recognize and affirm myself as a recipient of God’s gifts. In a way, faith and gratitude are two sides of the same coin. At the same time, there is a certain progression from faith to gratitude. Faith receives gifts as gifts; gratitude receives them well. (Free of Charge, 45).

On this day of Thanksgiving I’m reminded of all these things—I’m grateful for all of God’s wondrous gifts. But I pray it may not stop there, and that by God’s grace I’d increasingly live in faith and gratitude toward the One who never ceases giving. The closing thoughts’ of Volf’s chapter remind me what this may look like in my life:

Every word and every deed, every thought and every gesture, even the simple act of paying attention can be a gift and therefore and echo of God’s life in us … You sit on your couch, beer or soda in your hand and junk food by your side watching TV for hours—that’s ordinary. You work around the clock not because you have to feed your family, but for no other reason than to park a better car in your garage than your neighbors have—that’s ordinary. You get up from the couch to play with your kids or you give your time and energy to help educate a prisoner or lend an ear to an elderly person—that’s extraordinary. Why? Because you are giving. Every gift breaks the barrier between the sacred and the mundane and floods the mundane with the sacred. When a gift is given, life becomes extraordinary because God’s own gift giving flows through the giver (Free of Charge, 53).

Thanks be to God!
Thanksgiving Day, 2011

Note: I am re-reading Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy. Over the next several weeks I’ll be posting my reflections as I make my way through a book  that changed my life nearly a decade ago.

In the third chapter, What Jesus Knew: Our God-Bathed World, we come to one of Willard’s most important chapters in the Divine Conspiracy. The table is set for what’s to come. The main idea: If we’re really going to trust Jesus, we need to see things the way he does, about God, ourselves, and the world. As Willard says,

Jesus’ good news about the kingdom can be an effective guide for our lives only if we share his view of the world in which we live. To his eyes this is a God-bathed and God-permeated world…. It is a world that is inconceivably beautiful and good because of God and because God is always in it. It is a world in which God is continually at play and over which he constantly rejoices.  Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us. (p. 62)

This may seem obvious to some who know the Scriptures well, but until I encountered this chapter a decade ago, I’d never thought of God this way before. Even though growing up my parents tried to show me a good image of God, I never imagined God as a joyous being. Instead God was a stern, cold, exacting being.

Yet, God’s is actually interesting (he’s the most interesting being in the universe). Anyone who creates billions of galaxy’s has to be interesting, but we end up making him in our own image, petty and boring. Rather God is a great eternal experience of goodness, beauty, and justice. He is madly in love with his creation, from the farthest reaches of the universe to the tiniest microbe on planet earth.  We see this in the Psalms, as Willard writes,

What makes the language [of the Psalms] great and provides the emotional lift is chiefly its picture of God and of life. We learn from the pslams how to think and act in reference to God. We drink in God and God’s world from them. They provide a vocabulary for living Godward, one inspired by God himself. They show us who God is, and that expands and lifts and directs our minds and hearts. (p. 65)

One of the most brilliant ideas Willard develops in chapter three, is the concept of the “heavens” and God’s proximity to his creation. By heavens Willard means the space around us, not a distant location. Many people visualize God as removed from his creation. Willard claims idea about God is one of the key reasons we have a difficult time trusting Jesus, like when he says we have nothing to worry about in life e.g. the Sermon on the Mount.  Willard uses several biblical examples of the Hebrew way of imagining God as near as the air around us (Gen. 21:17-19; 22:11,15; 28:12-19; 1 Sam. 7:10).

So when it comes to the New Testament, Matthew (with a Jewish audience) has Jesus referring to the Kingdom of the Heavens (unlike Luke’s Kingdom of God), but this isn’t a distant heaven as in a place where God lives, rather it’s a reference to God’s nearness, i.e. God has come close in Jesus. At the same time Willard isn’t pulling a John Lennon, imagine there’s no heaven. Rather he’s helping his readers grasp a significant biblical concept of God’s presence in the universe.  I’ll get into this more next week in the second part of my thoughts on “What Jesus Knew: Our God-Bathed World.

From Dietrich Bonhoeffer on suffering in the Pslams:

“There are no theoretical answers in the Psalms to all these questions, as there are none in the New Testament. The only real answer is Jesus Christ. But this answer is already sought in the Psalms. It is common to all of them that they cast every difficulty and agony on God: “We can no longer bear it, take it from us and bear it yourself, you alone can handle suffering.” That is the goal of all of the lamentation Psalms. They pray concerning the one who took upon himself our diseases and bore our infirmities, Jesus Christ. They proclaim Jesus Christ to be the only help in suffering, for in him God is with us.”

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1970), pp. 46-9.

I just finished checking out the “Lens” blog from the New York Times. Today’s post is “On Assignment: Prayers in the Dark”, revealing some of the most horrific images I’ve ever seen (If you jump to the blog, you’ve been warned). Damon Winters of the New York Times says, “I’ve never seen anything like this, and I doubt I’ll see anything like this again. The scene at the morgue today was just utterly unbelievable.”

Like many people, I’ve asked myself why God allows something like this to happen? I was ashamed of Pat Robertson’s comments this week about God cursing the Haitian people. I’m sure it only confirms for many people that a Christian God is a vengeful God, bent on causing humanity to suffer for their sins. Do you know what came to my mind as I viewed those images? Something I once read in Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, based on his time in a Nazi concentration camp.  One day he watches a young boy hanged by the Nazis.  In his head Weisel hears, “Where is He [God]? Here He is–He is hanging here on this gallows.”

“Why does God allow this to happen?”, I don’t have any easy answers, only more questions. Elie Wiesel reminds me that we’re not alone, this world is not alone. As Jürgen Moltmann has expressed, God is not impassable, he is present with us even in the darkest moments of this planet—he’s a suffering God, a crucified God. Does it give any meaning to what has happened in Haiti? Probably not, but he is with us in our suffering, weeping with us, mourning with us. His tears are real, they are for all of us.  God is with us.