For the first time in a long, long while I feel uncertain, shaken, as though the ground beneath my feet is trembling with the awakening of some furious subterranean monster preparing to crush me between massive jaws and swallow the bloody pieces. However, I know that the uncertainty comes not from some savage beast in the ground the ground, but from myself. My own selfishness, my own desire, my own lack of control. I am shaking my fists blatantly at Heaven, or a part of me is. The other part of me knows what I really want, and finds complete peace and contentment there. But the other part of me is a caged beast that is strangling the bars of its cell in a wild, irrepressible rage, jumping from corner to corner in a furious demand for release. We can face the evil in others with heads shaken in indignant disbelief and outrage. We can face the evil in the world by ignoring the part of it that does not affect us and by distracting ourselves from the part that does. We can face the evil we are told of in the scriptures by knowing that it has been overcome by the cross. But how on earth do we face the evil in ourselves? How do we stare it in the face without being destroyed by it? This is my cry, but the air rings silent with its echoes.

In the book Burn coauthored by Ted Dekker and Erin Healy is this line: “There are two chambers in every heart, one for Judas and one for John.” Judas and John, one embodying the embrace of evil, the other employing a love for truth. John has been alive in me these past several months, but now Judas is calling for a showdown. I have seen him these past few weeks, acknowledging him only as a distraction to be locked away, but he always comes back for more, insatiable, demanding compliance. Now I see that he is not simply seeking to divert, but to control. Judas wants me for himself, and he knows me intimately, knows how to get past my defenses, to deceive me into returning his kiss, to leave the Lover of my soul in exchange for a taste of his forbidden fruit. Judas knows my passions, my lusts, what I crave, how to give evil a position of power in my life through these things, that I may choose darkness over the light. Judas knows this, because I am Judas. We are all Judas. We are all John. Our souls are a contradiction, a paradox. One half a Saint, the other a Sinner. Each side is vying for absolution, but does absolution exist? Or are we forever to be engaged in this war of principalities and powers?

Thank God, no. For Christ’s sake, no! There is an absolution, and moreover, there is an absolution that we have been promised will turn out on the right side. Paradise. Perfection. Bliss. Abstract terms, but not abstract in this context at all. They will be more real, more concrete than we can begin to comprehend. This is the Promised Land we will reach after forty years of wandering through a grueling, unforgiving desert. This is comforting, and I believe it to be true but still I ask, what about me? How long in the desert can I go without falling to my knees in senseless worship of the golden calf? How long will I grapple with Judas before he gets his hands around my throat? Will I, as Moses, get to the brink of what has been promised us, only to never step into it?

But I have forgotten John in all this. John, who is the voice calling out in the desert, “Make straight the way for the Lord!” John who came as a witness to the Light, though he himself was not the Light. It is true that I am Judas the Betrayer, but I am also John the Baptist. Whose role shall I fall into? Will I be a witness to the Light? Will I make straight the way for the Lord? Will I accept grace, sweet grace, and truth from Jesus Christ? Or will I remain of the darkness, indulging the lusts of Judas, his demands for thirty pieces of silver along with my soul? Will I, like Judas, be a device of the Enemy? Or as John, will I allow myself to be an instrument of the Creator? One side calls out to me in love and embraces me in forgiveness, while the other deceives me in lies and ravages me with pain. Which do I choose? The answer is obvious, and I had chosen long ago – but the Enemy still tempts me, seduces me, destroys me. Despite the popular belief, accepting Christ does not make you immune to or shelter you from sin and evil. On the contrary, it makes you a more brightly painted target, placed higher up on the priority list of Hell’s prospective victims, to be hunted down with increased voraciousness and subtlety and efficiency. To drag one of the Redeemed down to Hell is the Enemy’s greatest delight, his greatest achievement, and is endeavored by Hell more viciously than any attempt to further drag down one who has already rejected God. This cannot be denied, cannot be ignored, cannot be endured.

The historical and scriptural persons of Judas and John were both only instruments, one used by the Enemy to bring the death of Christ, the other used by the Creator to speak of the life offered by Christ. Metaphorically speaking, as two halves of my own heart, Judas and John are roles I can choose to fill, characters I must step into, one or the other, to decide if my story is one of betrayal or one of truth. Judas offers a very tempting position. He promises pleasure, wealth, success. But John does not come to the table empty handed. Where Judas promises attainment, John promises fulfillment. I have spoken mostly of Judas here, for his influence has made me fall and stumble into this pit of confusion and desperation. But in the moment I tipped over the ledge, minutes before I began writing this, a string of visions passed before my eyes like pearls on a string, of what my life could be if I wasn’t a Believer, if I chose not to love my God and seek his truth. I could revel in the sort of pleasure I now deny myself. I could go to college, choose a major, begin a career with only my own goals and desires in mind. I could live for me, use my potential to further myself and become rich. Live in a small, nice uptown apartment. Drink Starbucks every morning. Have the perfect home and car and family everybody dreams about. Never worry about paying the bills. Attain everything my heart desires. At the moment this pearl strand of images passed through my consciousness, John awakened and screamed from within me: “NOOOOO!” A plea, desperate, beseeching. “This life is not what is meant for you,” this cry seemed to say, “Don’t give in. Don’t give in. He has plans for you more awe-inspiring than anything that deceiver could give you!”

This life Judas presented to me seems harmless, promising, and something worth working toward by most standards. But this is not what I was made for. It is not God’s plan for me, and for that reason, it is a form of evil, a manifestation of my own selfishness. I was made for something else, something less comfortable and less affluent and less self-glorifying. Maybe even something less long-lived. Like John, I was made to live in a wilderness rather than the cozy walls of a city high-rise. Like John, I may well have to live on something more similar to locusts and honey than to lattes and neat little breakfast wraps from Starbucks. Maybe like John my head will be served up on a platter to my enemies – but I will have lived and died according to the story God made me for.

Oh, yes: This is what I was made for! John is alive in my heart. He has not fallen asleep despite Judas’s lulling; he has not been dispelled by Judas’s threats. John is pointing me toward the Light that shines in the darkness, and I must step into this character and accept the grace and truth of Christ. I must choose to become like John, an instrument of the living God, so that Judas will wither away, and the Enemy will not have such a hold on my heart. Perhaps my soul will always be in contrast with itself no matter how often I seek to be good, a paradox, the most solemn contradiction of what we think is true. Black and white, darkness and light, evil and good, hate and love, duking it out like boxers for a claim to my soul. It won’t always be that way – just a few more decades to get through before I die, and from there I shall pass on into life. I will become like Joshua and boldly lead the way into the Promised Land, this glorious paradise where the rest of eternity shall be spent fully alive in the love of the One that made us. Judas will no longer live in our hearts. We will be, for the first time since choosing our God, fully and unreservedly His; and without the barrier of sin, He will be ours. For now we are courted by another, one who seeks to entrap us within his chambers forever. But then we shall be free of his advances, free to live sublimely in the mind-numbing, all-satisfying love of our God, the true Lover of our souls.

Reading back, this really goes to show how it all goes back to love. I began writing a painful, bloodstained, shameful entry of my own faithlessness to God, of how easily the evil in my own heart provokes me to sin, and I arrive at the conclusion of love. The more beautiful side of this circular paradox. Everything always comes back to love, a beautiful circle that overcomes all things. Sin was created so that there might be love between God and his creation. So was sin defeated through this love made manifest. I understand why I am what I am, why evil is necessary, and most crucially of all, that my Jesus died to save me from that evil. To choose Judas would be to betray my Jesus a thousand times and watch him hang a thousand more. To choose Judas would be to spit upon Jesus’ face even as he pleads our forgiveness from the cross. This I cannot bear. But it has already been done. It had to be done. The evil nature I so mourn tonight was already nailed to two crossbeams of wood, along with my Savior, two thousand years ago. As it was written in the book of the prophet Isaiah:  

He was despised and rejected by men,
 a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
 Like one from whom men hide their faces
 he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Surely he took up our infirmities
 and carried our sorrows,
 yet we considered him stricken by God,
 smitten by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,
 he was crushed for our iniquities;
 the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
 and by his wounds we are healed.

Jesus bore the complete burden of all the pain and punishment inflicted by every sin. I am saved in the most complete sense of the world. Not saved from temptation and the beckoning of evil, but saved in spite of falling into this evil. The grace of God is truly amazing, for as the Psalmist points out:

If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities,
   O Lord, who could stand?

This is a question that has no need of an answer, for the answer is both self-evident and terrifying. Luckily this is purely hypothetical, for God created a path for us that would separate us from our condemning iniquity, for it would be mixed in with every drop of sweat and blood from Christ’s brow and every cry of pain from his parched lips. Now before us we have a choice: we can stand as John did and seek wholeheartedly the Light that stepped down into darkness, or we can hang with Judas in a full mockery of Christ’s sacrifice. Who we become, how history remembers us, and how God judges us all rely upon what we choose in this perpetual showdown between principalities and powers unseen. Who are we? Who will we be? Universal questions, yet the universe only coughs up contradictions in place of answers.

We are John and we are Judas. We are a Saint and we are a Sinner. We are White and we are Black. We are Light and we are Dark. We are Love and we are Hate. We are our souls, an unstable blend of good and evil, volatile infidels of a race, all careening blindly as we seek to escape the crossfire, yet all unable to do so by our own means.

Thank God it is not all about us.  

And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins – and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.

­-Jesus of Nazareth, Portrayed by the Gospel of Mark, Chapter I, Verse XXII

The New Wine may not be as smooth to the tongue, and finely aged as old wine. It may be a bit sharp and unrefined. But it is alive. You can't contain it in old structures. You must find new wineskins for it or none at all.

Amy Lafferty

May 22 at 7:51pm

Hey, Doron...I was wondering if I could ask your help with something? It has to do with my mission trip, because my deadline's coming up this Tuesday, and I'm still short on funds. Is there anyway you could set it up so that I could come to RCC this Sunday and hand out some of my letters there? I dunno if I'd do it before service or after or what...If you could help me out with this, that'd be great, because I don't want to miss out on this opportunity. :3

Doron Jones

May 23 at 10:07pm

how much are you short? Im fine with you handing out flyers at church. I can talk to pat and make sure he is okay with it.

Amy Lafferty

May 23 at 10:15pm

I'm short by quite a bit, lol. About $700. I have just under $500. But if I give out the last twenty-five or so of my letters before Tuesday, which is entirely possible, I'll have what I need. It's just been really hard to do some active work to get it all in the past few weeks, because of everything leading up to finals.

If you could mention it to a few people who might be interested, that'd be great, too. Should I do it before service or after service? And what time does service start, anyway?

Doron Jones

May 23 at 10:21pm

the services start at 9 and 11.

Amy Lafferty

May 23 at 10:41pm

Mmkay. Well I'm also babysitting tonight, so I'll probably be at the later one...

Prayer will be more helpful to me than funds, though, if you could pass the need for that along as well. :]

Doron Jones

Today at 8:36am

I just asked some higher-ups around the church and since they dont know the group your going with and their theology they arent going to allow you to pass out your flyers. I hope you get this before you come.

Amy Lafferty

Today at 8:54am

I got it. And that's fine.

Prayer would still be nice, if you don't mind. I don't think God cares so much for theology, but I've heard prayer can move mountains.

Thanks for trying, though, I really appreciate it. ^^

This exchange makes me want to cry. Not because I didn’t get an opportunity to gather more funds, or because I feel like Doron or the “higher ups” were being completely rude or mean. I don’t think they were, and I’m grateful to Doron for trying to pull some strings and to the “higher ups” for considering it. It makes me want to cry because its evidence of what the church really follows as a whole these days. It’s proof that to them their theology – and I curse the word – is more important than love. Love is the single commandment Christ, the man whose title we so undeservedly bear, gave us to follow. Isn’t it obvious that this is what my mission trip is rooted in? My group and I will be trekking to a lost corner of the world, over turbulent oceans and through uncultivated jungles with which we are not familiar, seeking a people who exist apart from civilization and technology to show them the Light of the World. Do we do this to receive honor and glory? Do we do it because it would make for a fun vacation? No! I can’t speak for the rest of my group, because I do not know them, but I am doing this for love. I am doing it because I have seen the true Way, and I want to make it open to them as well. I have discovered that there is a God, the One who made us and who loves us more than we can imagine. I want to tell them that this Creator crafted them Himself, with every eye for detail. And I want to tell them that this almighty God died for us so that we might live. I am going there to accept not only the burden of the Great Commission, but the gift of love. I love these people, because God made them. I love them because Jesus had them in mind when he died. I love them, and God loves them, but they do not yet know God. Isn’t the greatest manifestation of love to sacrifice my comfort and risk my health in order to bring them them to the kingdom of God?

What more theology do they need than this? Somebody tell me where Christ said any of his children could only tend the rest of his scattered lambs if said children followed the way of Arminianism and held to a specific subcategory of exegesis? Or if they subscribed themselves to a certain denomination? Or if they only believed in certain manifestations of the Spirit? No! He only said we must love; he said we must take up our crosses and follow him, which is to follow him even through death – or at least through unknown jungles – to do everything we can to shine the Light of God. I wish for a full five minutes the church would forget everything it learned in bible college, all those theology classes it took, all the literature it read on the interpretation of God’s nature, all the different denominations it has studied, forget even the epistles written by Paul and by Peter and by John – I wish they would forget it all, and remember the one they claim to follow! Remember Jesus! Remember what he taught us, and remember what he did! Isn’t this what it should mean to be a Christian? I don’t want theology, damn it! Theology is created by man, which means it is tainted with evil. I just want my Jesus, and I just want to revere his sacrifice, and I want to give my life to his love. Isn’t this enough for the “higher ups” of the church? Why add to what is already whole and beautiful and perfect?

I am beginning to understand what Jesus meant when he said the world would hate us for our love. I don’t think the church has realized this yet, because it has become largely a secular institution. Christ knew that those who would truly follow him would be ostracized, not only by skeptics and agnostics, but by those who claim to follow his way. I am only holding to the teachings of Jesus, untainted by man’s theology. Why should I judge any action by whether or not it follows my specific flavor of doctrine? I judge it by love, which is the way Christ judged everyone. Prostitutes, tax collectors, his disciples, his mother, the religious leaders that beat him, the Roman soldiers that nailed him to his cross: all of these were judged in his mind by love, not for what beliefs they adhered to. But I feel like a rebel for following the love Jesus had for us. I’m comforted by the fact, because this is how Jesus told us we would feel. But I’m also tormented by it, because it shows that the church has forgotten. In their general tizzy over being saved, they have forgotten why Jesus did what he did. In their hurry to belong, they have forsaken Christ’s love in exchange for denomination and doctrine. They condemn others for not being saved, they undermine the power and mercy of God, and they live by their own works rather than by Christ’s. To them "faith" means calling themselves a specific religion, and following a certain brand of politics.

 But is this what it means to be a Christian? Is it? If so, then this is not what I am. I will not forget what Jesus did for me, and I will not forget his love just so I can feel like I belong in the church. I refuse to condemn those who do not believe, be it for homosexuality or premarital sex or drugs or self-mutilation. I am neither a Baptist nor a Presbyterian nor a Roman Catholic, and I most certainly am not a rightwing conservative Republican. If any of these things are what it means to be a Christian, than I am not one. If, however, a Christian means believing adamantly in the teachings and example of Jesus Christ, then I am a Christian. If it means noting the love he showed toward prostitutes and beggars and following this example, then I am a Christian. If it means believing that Jesus was the prophesied Son of God who came to die for our sins, the Word made flesh, then I am a Christian. If it means following the Great Commandment to love my God, and the second greatest commandment to love my neighbor, then I am a Christian. If it means being ostracized and scorned because I seek to do these things without adding to them manmade theology, then I am a Christian.  Otherwise, I feel I must clarify: though I am a Christian, I only follow Christ.

I feel drained, tired, frustrated. I can only pray that they remember, and I mean really remember, who they follow. Not simply by shouting out “Hallelujah Jesus!” at intermittent points throughout a church service, or knowing that this is the guy who died on a tree 2,000 years ago and was raised again as some faceless, impersonal deity. I can only pray that they realize how intimate a relationship with Christ is, so intimate that each of us was in his thoughts as he died for us. How deep is a bond created when one dies out of love for another? Deeper than any of us can know, but most only think of it as skin deep. I can only pray that they think to dig beneath the surface, to dive deep into the wonderful spirit of love God has for each and every one of us, a spirit far greater and far more powerful than our stupid attempts at understanding God through theology. I don’t even know how to go on, because it all seems so plain to me. Their blindness torments me. They’re reveling in their dirty bathwater, forgetting about the baby altogether. As for me: I only want the baby.

Since we have such a hope, we are very bold, not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not gaze at the outcome of what was being brought to an end. But their minds were hardened. For to this day, when they read the old covenant, the same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts. But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.

Paul’s Second Letter to the People at Corinth, Chapter III, Verses XII-XVI

And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split…When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said, “Truly this was the Son of God!”

How many are there today that still choose to live with the veil over their face? How many are there that see the world distorted and hazy because they still have the wool pulled down over their eyes? It is proof that, though 280 million people in the United States operate under the title of Christian, they do not remember the man whose name they bear. They do not remember his teachings, they do not remember the brutality of his death, and they do not remember either the purpose or ramifications of his sacrifice. They can quote to a fault the teachings of Christ, and they know The Great Commandment (Matthew 22:36-40) as well as they know the Pledge of Allegiance. They can reference a hundred points in the New Testament where we are told to have compassion on the world so that through us it may see the Light. But I do not think that even a quarter of these 280 million understand what Christ meant when he said these things. In fact, I do not think they know him at all.

With the Law of Moses was condemnation. It was under this law that a different animal had to be sacrificed in order to account for each respective sin of mankind; that homosexuals were ordered to be stoned immediately and mercilessly beyond the boundaries of the settlement; that any thief or murderer was to be punished according to their crime, either by death or by exile; and even that a woman who was menstruating was considered defiled and had to leave town until she was again purified. The purpose of the law was this and this alone: to show that we could never live up to it in the first place. It was never meant to become a permanent institution, but this is exactly what it has become. This heady condemnation has burdened not just the Jews and Israel, but the entire Western civilization with our desperate, futile pursuit to live up to God’s standard. But it can’t be done: God told us so himself. But a very large, dominant, and active chunk of those 280 million Christians don’t remember that Jesus gave us a new law that, only when adhered to, could allow us to interpret the rest of the law. Instead these rightwing conservative Christians line the halls of Washington, scrambling frantically to ensure that the law is instituted in our society, only because they are full of fear that if they do not, they will have an eternity in Hell to suffer for it.

But didn’t Jesus sacrifice himself for this very reason? Was it not that every fist that struck him and every flick of the whip that shredded his flesh and the nails that embedded him into the cross were the punishment intended for us, for our own sins that we would commit 2.000 years later? Did Jesus not cross into the battlefield of death itself and return victorious for our sake? Is this not perfect love? Has it not been written that perfect love casts out all fear? Aren’t we undermining Christ’s death by not being assured of his love and salvation? Aren’t we being selfish by trying to take our redemption into our own hands by passing laws through Congress, as though such offerings offered any pleasure to God? In Genesis 4 it says, “In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” The fruit of the ground was the work of Cain’s own labor, and he thought that the work of his hands would please God. Abel’s sacrifice, however, was the firstborn of his flock, whose life had been provided by God, and which Abel had no part in but to tend them. God does not care for our own attempts to please Him, because they are misguided and selfish. God gave life to the firstborn of Abel’s flock, and therefore Abel could take no credit for it when he offered it back in humility to God. This is the kind of sacrifice God expects from us: not one drawn up by our own hands, but the one sent by God Himself to be accepted by us and then returned unto Him. In short, God wants us to accept the blood of the sacrificial Lamb he sent to us 2,000 years ago, to recognize that it is only through him that we can be saved. We can take credit for adhering ourselves to the Laws of Moses; we can pride ourselves in writing laws to be passed in Congress and by lobbying for intolerance to homosexuality and abortion. But in light of Christ’s sacrifice, we can only stand in shame and wonder and gratitude, knowing that if not for this perfect love and selfless sacrifice, no amount of discipline and legalism in the world could save our souls.

God intended from the beginning to die for our sins. He knew that an incarnation of Himself would have to descend to Earth and die if we were to be saved. In complete foreknowledge and understanding that we would turn our backs on Him and require that He die the most brutal of deaths, God still said, “Let us make man in our image, after our own likeness.” (Genesis 1:26) The Laws of Moses, along with all of history, was intended only to point to His coming. “You are helpless and unworthy,” the law tells us – but it doesn’t stop there. In Isaiah 53:3-6 it speaks of a Savior: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”  

It is an insult to the anguish of Jesus, foretold in this passage, to think that we can keep following the Old Covenant as a complete authority. We are undermining his pain, his sorrow, and his death to set the Law of Moses as our standard in politics, in church, and even in our personal lives. Christ, his teachings, and his sacrifice must be our authority. As Paul said in his first letter to the church at Corinth: “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” We cannot live like Christ if we are set on following the Old Law, because it drives us to condemn rather than to forgive. We cannot take up our crosses and follow Him if we remain fearful of sin and death, because as Ted Dekker so eloquently stated in his book Thunder of Heaven, “How can a people scared of death willingly climb up on the cross?” Yet this is what we have been commanded to do, and to do it we must accept the perfect love and sacrifice of Christ. This means loving a world that rejects us and the Truth, loving a world full of corruption. We do not love as we should, because we are too obsessed with politics and religion rather than with Jesus. Instead we scorn the homosexual, we refused to look a prostitute or drug runner in the eye, and we raise ourselves on a pedestal while trampling the lowly beneath our feet. The Church today does not know its God. It does not remember its Savior.

When Jesus yielded up his spirit and stepped over the threshold into death, the veil separating the inner and outer temple – the former being the place where the Spirit of Yahweh was said to reside – thus rendering God available to all for a personal relationship and eternal life with Him. The veil was representative of sin, which kept us from being able to stand in God’s presence, for we are tainted and blackened by evil. But Jesus’ sacrifice tore the veil, overcame sin and death, and released us from the constraints of the law that condemned us. So why then do people still look at God as an impersonal and ruthless deity to be obeyed, or else? Why do they choose to blind themselves by continuing to look at both God and the world through the veil? We were warned by Paul in this letter that the Law of Moses places a veil over our hearts, for even though we are saved, evil still seeks to condemn us. For with that condemnation burdening us and weighing us down, how can we fully stand for Christ? It’s a good strategy by the enemy, I think. It is apparent by the world’s collective opinion of a Christian as an “intolerant, rightwing, bigoted Republican” that this veil is still over their eyes, that their hearts are hardened as a defense to the fear of condemnation evoked within them. It makes it apparent to me that they do not really know Jesus, because as Paul says in Second Corinthians, “But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.”

 I can only pray that they will come to lay down all their thoughts on how things should be, on politics and legislation and religion and theology. I can only pray that one day they will unburden themselves to stand at the foot of the cross, to look up at our bruised and torn and bloodied Savior and have their hardened hearts broken completely by the love they see in his sacrifice. And I hope they will see that this love is our new law, to be lived without fear or restraint. This may mean taking a known thief to stay in our own house, or embracing a prostitute, and it most definitely means becoming ostracized by a world who doesn’t understand why we would do these things. We do it because our Christ did it, because he sought to join hands with thieves and dine with prostitutes. We do these things because they are free of haughtiness, and full of the love that Paul said would mark us to the world as being Christians.

“For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”

1 Corinthians 6:19-20

You are not your own; you were bought at a price.

In the old days thirty pieces of silver was the asking price for the life of a man who not only claimed to be the Son of God, but who supported this claim through miracles and wisdom and by shaking the world to its core without a single political struggle or even so much as an attempted coup d’état. This was the amount that Judas consented to receive after betraying Jesus with a kiss in the garden that night; this was also the amount that Judas threw back at the feet of the religious leaders right before he killed himself. What the religious leaders did not know was that they needn’t have paid anything for the life of the man whose prolonged existence drove them into such a frenzy of bloodlust. He gave it up freely, though of course they, in their pride, did not realize this. Thirty pieces of silver was the price paid to take his life. Thirty pieces of silver to ensure the betrayal and crucifixion of this blasphemer; thirty pieces of silver to hang this self-proclaimed Son of God from his rightful place on the cross. The real price was not paid by the High Priest or the Pharisees or the Sadducees, however, but by the man whose life they sought to end. Upon those splintered beams he stretched out his arms and embraced the world he loved enough to let it kill him. Take away all of his miracles, all of his wisdom, all of the prophecies he just happened to fulfill. Crush them into the dirt, and give no more evidence to his testament of being God’s son this: that Jesus loved more than any man has ever loved before.

I think that it’s important today – though I’m not completely sure why – that I remember that God has saved me. What cost did Jesus bear for me on the cross that day on Golgotha? How much of his anguish was my anguish; and how much more of it should have been mine? The price of my Savior was thirty pieces of silver, the lumber for a cross, and the iron for the nails. The real price he paid that day was his life in exchange for mine: less a trade than a bartering between life and death for the souls of every man. I will remember what he saved me from that day, and I will remember it as he commanded us to. “Do this in remembrance of me”, he urged his disciples. Remember what I did for you. Remember the price I paid. Remember me. Just as the Hebrews, preceding their exodus from Egypt, were commanded to remember not only who saved them, but from what they were saved, I will remember that Jesus has used his own life to scrape me off the underbelly of this world. I am not my own; I am bought at a price, the greatest price that has ever been laid down for another. God, I’ll take your invitation; you take all of me.  

I'm falling even more in love with you
Letting go of all I've held onto
I'm standing here until you make me move
I'm hanging by a moment here with you
I'm living for the only thing I know
I'm running and not quite sure where to go
And I don't know what I'm diving into
Just hanging by a moment here with you

It’s almost embarrassing that, as one who claims the title of writer, I don’t have nearly enough words to begin shaping and forging the awareness that sinks its way like barbed hooks into the nether reaches of my soul. The wonder of it has possessed me steadily all day, and if I think hard enough on it without distraction, it consumes me entirely. It is bewildering and incomprehensible, and stunning and beautiful, and so whole and ardent that it bursts to my lips in a smile devoid of any context to the real world and a sudden welling of tears to my eyes, like water seeping forth from the dry earth to form a natural oasis that sparkles in a desert sun. It makes me long for its object more than I have ever thought to long for anything before, and it carries with it the assurance that I never need long for anything else ever again. Money carries no more concern for me, nor does any form of material success and earthly happiness. In this awareness I know that my needs will always be provided for; that happiness is fleeting and fragile from any other source; and that even death itself is not something to be shirked from as though it could actually have any hold on me. What I can feel intertwining itself within every fiber of my being, enlivening and awakening dormant senses and understanding, is more than anything that can be printed from the government’s treasury or bought with status and power. What I sense working its way through my soul with emerald, ever-searching tendrils is life as I have never experienced it in this dead world. It is truth and light in stark contrast with the reigning darkness, and it is a love that overcomes a status quo of selfishness and bitterness. It is a love that even overcomes death, and this revelation has changed something within me that has caused my entire outlook to look out in the world differently, tentatively, but steadfast against the darkness I see there. The Light of the World lives within me, and it has bound itself to my soul like the pages of a book sewn deliberately between the leather bindings that complete it. I know now what my purpose is, and that is to take up my cross and follow the One that died for me. Despite the difficulties I see ahead, the debris-strewn, treacherous path I see laid out before me, I would choose no other path. This awareness that is nesting so effectively within my soul is so complete, so stunning, and that provides such comfort is the only thing in all of creation that is worth the dedication of all I have to give. This one thing would enrich me if the world’s economy should crash entirely and deplete the world’s stores of capital; this one thing would fulfill me if a plague wiped out all agriculture and turned the waters to blood. This one thing would comfort me if all those people now rooted in my life would turn their backs on me, and this one thing would assure me in the face of death itself that my sin has already been borne and all death is defeated. What words have I to attempt to entrap what I am experiencing? And why should I attempt to stuff it into words that will only stifle it? I only know that with each rising and setting of the sun, with each cycle of the moon, and with each passing of the seasons, I am falling even more in love with the One who made me; and that if it were required of me, no amount of force from the ocean’s tempestuous waves, nor shrieking gales sent from every corner of the earth, nor fires raised from the bowels of this world could keep me from fighting my way back into his arms.

The day has finally come that I have found a connection, however allegorical it is, between my raison d’être and my boisson de choix. I’m not quite sure what drove me to make this link; perhaps it is only proof of the random firing off of neurons in the brain that I even thought of it in the first place, though I choose to believe in divine inspiration. It’s about time coffee served some purpose higher than just keeping me awake and tasting great. :3

The basic summary of my thoughts is that God is like black coffee, in a sense. (Yes, I realize how strange it is to compare the omnipotent God of all creation to a drink made by crushing up little brown beans harvested from the heart of a small red fruit. But bear with me. :]) I do not mean this in the sense that he energizes and strengthens those in whom he subsists, though this is true. I also do not mean it in that having him makes waking up in the mornings much more worthwhile. This also is true, but neither of these things is the point I want to make.

God is like black coffee in the sense that God is God just as black coffee is coffee. Make sense? No? Well fear not, because I intend to elaborate. When it was still relatively new, and I was even then a relatively seasoned coffee aficionado, I absolutely deplored Starbucks, though I have long since given in to its wonderful cinnamon dolce lattes and calming, sophisticated atmosphere. But I abhorred it because of the mutilation it performed [in my mind] on each cup of coffee it charged its customers an arm and a leg for. From what I could see, Starbucks was committing by the minute the atrocious crime of taking a perfectly good cup of Joe and turning it into a double whipped, triple shot, caramelized, hyperglycemic disaster waiting to happen. It was still coffee, technically, just disguised and suffocating under all the additions that were made to it. In the same way, people have a habit of adding certain rituals and attributes and frilly nonsense to God. And in doing so they forget what God is really about; they don’t love Him, just the rituals and services and social opportunities they associate with Him. Just as I held it to be sad that people forgot what coffee was in exchange for a caramel hazelnut mocha drizzled with chocolate and topped with extra whipped cream, I hold it to be a million times sadder that people have forgotten what God is in exchange for the meaningless songs they sing and the empty words they speak and the insignificant denomination they hold to. Coffee isn’t the steamed milk or the flavored syrup or the chocolate chips sprinkled in the whipped cream. Nor is God the superfluous frills and sugarcoating and theology our world has added to Him; God is God alone, and our time has forgotten how to accept Him for who He is.

God is not a Catholic or a Baptist or an Evangelist or a Presbyterian. Neither is God a Calvinist or an Arminian. God also carries no interest in apologetics or hermeneutics or constructive theology. God is not a Republican or a Democrat, Pro-Choice or Pro-Life, homophobic or in favor of gay rights. God only is. I think I am beginning to understand this small sliver of God’s overall incomprehensible nature. You cannot subscribe God’s thinking or character to a certain world viewpoint, because He can only be truth; no classification shaped by human hands can hold Him. Isn’t it a bit pointless, then, for us to focus so much on divisive opinions and beliefs that really hold no bearing? For this reason I don’t believe in considering myself to belong to a certain denomination, even if I do agree with many of its beliefs and values. I also don’t believe it matters whether or not we believe abortion or the death penalty or stem cell research is acceptable, so long as we remember that these beliefs are only the additions we humans adapt to feel secure. There is only one belief we have been commanded to hold to, and that is love. And most people lose their focus of this far too easily. We forget that we have been told to love our neighbor because we are too busy shaking our heads in disdain at him for being an alcoholic or a Calvinist or a Muslim. We stand on the front lawn of Washington and proclaim that God does not want this country to stand for abortion, but what our world’s heart is breaking for is the message of God’s love, not of His law. Theology and religion and politics are divisive; love overcomes all things.

My only religion is to love my God, and to love my neighbor; and to take up my cross and follow my Savior.