Timelines

Sitting in church listening to the sermon this morning, it occurred to me to actually write down some of the things I didn't agree with, this time. As I've probably made clear enough by now, I can be obnoxiously opinionated at times. I rarely agree with anyone I hear speaking: I wouldn’t suppose that this is absolutely particular to me, but what I dislike about what is said in church, most of the time, is not what is said, in its essence, but how it is said. It is much easier to remember the gist of a sermon than its exact wording, and since my problem normally lies with the latter, I end up tirading at my mother or father or brother or some other poor victim of my immediate presence shortly afterwards without being able to pinpoint exactly what it was I disliked. This normally results in my coming off as a stubborn, disrespectful brat with no reason for her pessimism. This is not a reputation I particularly enjoy. So, like my post on Evangelism, this blog is written mostly for the purpose of attempted self-redemption. (Oh boy, it seems I'm going to have a number of these...)

It being Valentines Day, the sermon was on Love. Not surprisingly, 1 Corinthians 13 got targeted:

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."

This is one of the few passages I actually like best in NIV, because I feel it manages not to lose the poetry while at the same time retaining the fun anaphora and parallel structure (although it does kind of lose the juxtaposition in verse 6. I had a lot of fun nerding out over the Greek version of this passage. I wish I could actually read Greek. Pretty much, I transliterate and figure out more or less what it's saying with the help of cognates, the small list of vocabulary words I remember from middleschool Sunday School, my Interlinear Greek-English Bible, Biblegateway, and- yes, this is the best part- ONLINE TRANSLATORS). It gets Jump5 stuck in my head and is quoted much too often, but I love this passage anyways. (Ha. Ha. Love. ...um, nevermind.) It's a bunch of excellent reminders, especially because the word is thrown around so lightly and so often.

…but I digress. With the knowledge that most of the above is irrelevant... Let us return to the topic at hand.

The two quotes I managed to scrawl out on the back of one of those bulletin things before they escaped my memory were addressing the phrases "Love is patient" and "always perseveres":

1. "God is waiting for us to catch up with him, and he's gunna keep waiting, he doesn't ever quit on me."

2. "God does get mad, but he takes awhile to get there. A long while."

This is the dilemma I deal with: I state that I disagree with the top two quotes, and people automatically conclude that I must agree with the negated statement. For the record, I don't believe that God would forsake us, or that God is quick to anger. My point is that God doesn't wait and he isn't made up of "while"s. God is completely outside of time: he cannot be forced onto a timeline.

I reiterate that I'm not condemning anyone, as I myself put God in all kinds of boxes quite frequently. It’s just that I think all of our boxes should get pointed out because normally one can't see them when they're in one's own hands. Don’t take this to mean that I intend to correct my pastor, either… He knows a lot more about this kind of stuff than I do. I am simply commenting on the worldview his words represent. This is all completely detached from him and from the church and anyone else... this is simply another worldview study.

Now that I’m finished putting guardrails up: I believe one of the biggest, most important, key ideas of a Christian life is the ability to free everyday realities from the bonds of a timeline. That's what I believe makes life beautiful, and indeed, what makes it worth living at all. It’s what allows us to maintain joy through the hardest of times; it’s what helps us understand that God is not the enemy. God is omnipresent. God is omniscient. God is simultaneous. God is not “patient” in human terms because in human terms, "patience" means sitting out a number of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, whatever, until the anticipated something happens. Since God is not bound by time, he doesn't do things like that. In Godly terms, "patience" means... well, it's much harder to define, because there simply is no such thing to us. He sees everything at once, how everything works, fits and harmonizes (Col. 1:20, MSG), smushed together in one big, perfect… thing. (Wording brings tears to the eyes, I know.) Simultaneously. He sees pain objectively even when it’s as personal as it can get because he sees that it works. When he willingly trapped himself in our timeline for thirty years, he was calm at his lowest moment, despite the extreme emotional distress he underwent (great paradox). Right before his crucifixion, he said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you.” Not “Father, the hour of my demise has come,” or “Father, this hour is intolerable, unbearable,” but “let your will be done.” And then he proceeded to talk about things other than himself for the rest of the conversation. He understood that his father has a great plan for his life, his story, the horrible pain he had to endure. He knew that where there is light there can't not be darkness... God never sees things trapped in a timeline. This is how God thinks. Isn’t it the purpose of a Christian to be like him?

In Christian circles, speaking like the above two quotes is very common. The thing is, we try to put Godly concepts into human understanding, and it doesn’t work. When we start talking as if he works the same way we do, our words begin to grow implicit meanings with fallacious cancers all over them.

I was going to go find some spiffy quote from Barth because I remember this coming up in a discussion I was having with someone about him, but seeing as I am a sophomore in highschool and he spent his entire adult life writing something like ten million words, I figure I’d be spending more time seeking and less time finding. The basic idea- my first concrete point- is this: that God is not waiting for us, because there is nothing to wait for. God isn’t waiting for us to catch up to him, like he’s running faster than we are. We will never catch up. It’s all grey. The amount we screwed up on a daily basis could be 1(∞) or 100(∞)- they’re equally infinite. We will never be “back on track” because it is not possible for us to live without the presence of our sin, which is not simply an action, but a state of being.

My second concrete point, still concerning the first quote, is that God is not waiting for us because he would have already have stopped waiting if he were. He has seen us fallen and needy; he has seen the death of his son; he has seen the redeemed. He is everywhere. He is not on the timeline.

Thirdly (boy, I’m on a roll), now concerning the second quote, “long” is completely subjective. Ultimately, we are not the subject. God is the subject. To him there is no long and short, as I have been explaining. Everything simply is. Therefore he does not take a long time to get mad, he simply does or he doesn’t.

And lastly, God’s anger and our anger are notably different. Saying that God takes “a long while” to get angry leads to slippery conclusions about our own anger. We cannot justify our anger simply because we’ve decided we’ve been patient enough thus far, we’ve been patient for what seems like a “long while” to us. That’s not the way God does it, anyways. He doesn’t get angry because he’s annoyed or irritated. He isn’t just some impatient father retaliating because he’s exasperated by the squabblings of his children. He doesn’t lose patience. In fact, when the word’s used in the human context, I would argue that he has no patience, and he has no lack thereof, either. The term doesn’t apply to him, he simply is. God doesn’t sit up on the clouds holding back his temper until he’s had enough. I imagine that God works somewhat like Cesare Beccaria. His punishment, or anger, is corrective. It’s the way he reacts to the things we do to hurt ourselves, in our best interest, our improvement, our relationship with him, not because God feels offended or annoyed or “impatient.” The difference between God’s patience and our (supposed) patience is that ours is restraint from sin and God’s is a response to ours. What Paul was talking about in 1 Corinthians when he said “Love is patient” was that we would be willing to withstand the temptation to become irritated. The word translated as “patience” is μακροθυμεῖ, or makrothumei, which means “suffers long.” (Interestingly, it comes in part from μακρός, ά-, -όν, or makros, which is the part that means “long” (hence the word “macron,” those long accents used in Latin). I have not the faintest clue where the other piece comes from. “Thumei.” Oh well.) In any case, it seems to indicate a focus on perseverance through the “suffering” instead of restraint of punishment from those under one’s jurisdiction, especially given that it talks about perseverance just 3 sentences later.

God’s enormity is one of those funny things people explain to us over and over and over throughout our lives, from the day we are born or the moment we enter a church until we leave. And none of us ever get it. We’re such small people, such linear people, blind people. It’s a topic that seems to encompass so many other topics, a theme that can be applied to nearly every theological situation. I’m guessing there will be a lot of other topics I will write on with this same founding premise: we are little. God is big. An idea so basic, so fundamental, yet incomprehensibly complex!