Social Overwhelming

The hallmark of autism, no matter what other manifestations it comes with, is its component of social overwhelming. And this, too, is the hallmark of our spiritual autism, which has never been more prominent than at the present time.

We are living in an overwhelmingly social world. Social media has convinced us of the glamorous lives of all of our friends, all the time they spend playing with their dogs, cooking fantastic meals, exercising, giving back to their communities, having random magical encounters in grocery stores, and the like. Social media puts us on hyperalert because the one thing it doesn't show us is down time. The one thing it doesn't show us is rest. The one thing it doesn't show us is who people are when they're not trying to be anything. So we've come to the conclusion that everyone is something, everyone is someone, except, perhaps, for us, because we alone see all the things that never make it to Facebook in our lives and, well, they make us boring. Or broken. Or worse.

Not only this, but social media has given us the idea that essentially everyone we know has spent a lot of time thinking about how they think about the world. Everybody has an opinion on everything. Not just any opinion, a powerful, unchangeable, aggressive opinion. Throw out a few key buzzwords on the latest hot topics, and you'll quickly find that almost everyone you know has something to contribute to the discussion. Thirty years ago, this would have been unfathomable. Thirty years ago, ask a friend what they think about sanctuary cities over coffee or stop by their house and ask them their opinion on health care, and they would have been likely to say, "Hmmm...I never really thought about it." 

Not so today. Ask any number of questions today, and all of a sudden, everyone feels like they are supposed to have an answer. Not just any answer, but the "right" answer. And the "right" answers are socially constructed. Just ask wikipedia. 

So we're living in this world where we can no longer say, "I don't know." We can't say, "I haven't thought about it." Because the answers are all right there; our social connections are more than willing to tell us what to think.

And what this does is to take faith from the realm of the intimate, from the heart of the believer, and to plaster it on display in the social realm. There is no longer a place for developing a personal faith, an intimate love of Jesus that springs from your own heart and experience of Him. No, all the Christians you know are already boldly living out loud. They are adding their voice to the social framework (often with such incredible backlash that you rightfully wonder why anybody would still choose to be a Christian at all), and not only this, but in doing so, even these Christians are telling you what to think. 

There is faith and there is no faith, and it all seems so clear-cut. But here, most of us are somewhere in the middle, unable to agree with the social proclamation of what are often prosperity-gospel Christians, but unwilling to throw faith aside entirely, and yet, the tension is real. The world of social media demands us to be social about every little thing, including our big things, including our faith, which is either this caricature or it is nothing at all. There is no room for nuance, no room for question. You either are or you aren't. 

And most of us, overwhelmed by the social demand placed upon us, declare, "Forget it." It's not a new agnosticism; it's autism. It's our looking at what the world demands of us as a social context and saying, "I can't do this. Even if I wanted to, I can't do this." 

So most of us do nothing at all. And to the watching world, we look empty. We look defeated. We look disabled. We look deformed. Maybe even, at times, we feel these things ourselves. But again, what I say is that this is so much not the case. In the depths of every autistic soul lies untold beauty, and herein lies the key to recapturing our faith. 

Spiritual Autism

There's an argument being made that we're living in a world that is spiritually illiterate, that our world at large no longer comprehends the language of God or knows much about it. The conclusion is that what is required of us as the church is a spirituality that does not depend upon literacy; we are driven back into the days when our stories must be told through art and sacred spaces, through stained glass windows and altars and incense. 

In many respects, when diving into the evidence offered for such an argument, it's rather convincing. I think the world is tired of our words; they're looking for something more tangible of our faith. No longer does it make any sense when we talk about grace, for we are not good at showing it. The word, itself, is meaningless. 

But as I let some of these ideas roll around in my own mind, I quickly came to the conclusion that I'm not so sure that we're living in a spiritually illiterate world; I think it runs much deeper than that.

I think we're living in a spiritually autistic world.

We are living in a time that is socially overwhelming, where we have forgotten how to connect as true community because we are some measure of connected "all the time." We are living in a world that cannot look faith in the eye, for a variety of reasons, and this inability to look faith in the eye has left us looking away from the Cross. We're living in a world where we are overloaded and overwhelmed, not just by theological ideas such as love and hate and hope and grace, but by all the empty noise of the faithful, all the dirty hands that don't feel the blood dripping from them, all the taste of bitter grapes and stale bread. We are living in a world that is beyond our capacity to integrate or to interact. And we are suffering for it. 

There is so much about autism in general, and even a spiritual autism, that we don't understand yet. There's so much that we can't quite put our finger on - what it means, how it develops, what's going on in the world that is locked away from this one where those for whom autism is a reality truly live. Any one of us, whether we are on the spectrum ourselves or love someone who is, can only speak personally into this, knowing that our experience is not universal; every experience of autism is unique. 

But what we do know is this: buried in the depths of the autistic soul is something magical. Anyone who has ever loved someone can tell you that. Autistic persons overwhelmingly have these amazing spirits and these incredible gifts, tucked away in the recesses of these places that don't make sense to most of us. They have a way of seeing the world that is different. They have a way of interacting with it that is unique. They have a way of knowing things that most of us just sit back and say, Man, I never would have seen it.... Those that seem, to most of us, to live in abject darkness often have their eyes most wide open to the light. 

We just have to figure out how to communicate with them.

And this is, I guess, an illiteracy, but not on their part; the illiteracy is ours. We are so trapped in our language that we cannot understand what does not use words. But we must. Oh, we must. We must figure out how to communicate with those whose experience of the world is not locked into language, but into something much deeper. We have to figure out how to look into (not look at, but look into) those who cannot seem to make eye contact with us. We have to begin to understand what language can never teach us. For herein lies some wondrous beauty. Herein lies some incredible faith. 

Spiritual illiteracy seems like a daunting challenge; spiritual autism seems like an impossible one. But neither is the case. Like the stained glass windows of old, we build our faith anew in fragments and fractals of color and light that come together to tell a story to eyes wide open, unable to look us in the eye though we are unable to look away. 

Male and Female

There's been a great deal of talk this week about women, coming off the women's march last Saturday. Those who marched are aggressively pushing the narrative that they marched for "all women," even those who boldly declare that those women do not represent them. A friend of mine even re-posted a rather lengthy item on Facebook, declaring, "You are unequal. Even if you feel like you're equal, you're not, and that's why this march was for you." 

Although it is firmly wrapped in a bunch of political ideology, this is also a theological issue. So let me say, plainly, those women do not represent me.

I've never been under any illusions that I was made to be equal.

On Tuesday, I wrote about how not all men are created equal, and this is true of men and women, as well. Men and women were not created equal; they were never meant to be. They have always been complementary to one another. (Complementary with an "e" means that they are meant to provide balance to one another, to fill in the empty spaces left by the other, to come together into a whole.)

One of the greatest myths of modern culture is that in order to be a complete human being, men and women must embrace the totality of human experience. Women need to learn to be dominant in some ways, to compete in the world, to be tough, and to do the things that we typically expect of men. Men, in turn, need to learn to be sensitive, to take a nurturing role, to do the things that we typically expect of women. Only then, they tell us (whoever "they" are) will we have the "whole" human experience. Only when we embrace what is both masculine and feminine in all of us will we be whole.

Here's the subtle, but important, truth, however: we were not made to be whole. We were made to be full. 

We were made to be full of our own sexuality, of our maleness or femaleness. We were created to have the richest, deepest experience of who we are. And when we try to be more than what we were made to be, when we try to capture more than we were created to capture, when we try to live as though the whole of masculinity and femininity lives within each one of us, as though this is the totality of the human experience, we do not become more complete human beings; we become less than human. 

There are aspects of the glory of God that I bear uniquely as a woman. Men, no matter how hard they try, will never be able to accurately represent these glories in the world; they aren't wired for it. Similarly, there are aspects of the glory of God that men bear uniquely in the world, and women, no matter how hard they try, will never be able to accurately represent these glories in the world; they aren't wired for it. 

This does not mean that I'm arguing for some archaic divide of male and female in the world. I'm not saying we should go back to the times when women were silent, when they stayed at home and kept house. I'm not saying that women can't work construction (I've done so) or that men can't bake cookies. I'm not saying that women shouldn't have a vote or that men shouldn't cry. That is not at all what I'm saying. What I am saying is that we need to stop pretending that we're equal. 

We're not, and we were never meant to be. We're complementary. And the greatest aspiration of any of our lives is not to be whole (only Jesus can ever make us whole), but to be full. Full of the glories that we uniquely bear. 

There are, of course, political issues woven through all of this and a thousand other reasons why these women do not represent me. There are, although they refuse to admit it, a thousand ways in which the current dialogue is far, far different from other marches for women's concerns. But I profoundly do not want to use this space for the political; it's such a waste. 

We cannot, however, ignore the theological just because some will not be able to cut the political strings. There is a reason that God created both male and female. There is a way in which this is vitally important. And we do ourselves no good, and our God no glory, by pretending otherwise. 

Despising the Altar

Why does any of this matter? Why do we have to care about getting it "right"? We are living in a world that is driven by "whatever works," so don't we have the same right to transform our faith into something that just "works" for us, whether it is exactly what God intended or not? 

This is an actual argument that Christians are making right now, and their justification for it is that "the world is different now than it was in the Bible. This is the reality that we're living in, and we have to have a faith that can meet the world where it's at." 

No. Profoundly no. 

And before we get too far into this, with persons stomping their feet and pumping their fists and demanding that today is unlike any other time in history and that the challenges we face in our culture are wholly unique, let's just call bunk on that, too. Shall we? This has been the challenge of God's people from the very beginning, and if you read the Old Testament even half-heartedly, you will see the very same arguments being made, not only by the people, but by the priests.

Hey, God, this covenant thing isn't really working for us. See, You don't understand how all the other nations think. It's not so simple as just being a covenant people.

Hey, God, all these behavioral laws you gave us? Yeah, they are nice, but they don't really work in the real world.

Hey, God...

And on and on and on it goes. And here's the problem: most of us don't understand this for what it is. 

We don't understand it because our English translations of the Scriptures have been lying to us. They have dramatized things, thinking that they have to be the most dire, most extreme, most scary of all circumstances in order for us to "get" what's going on. But things are not always as they seem.

Most of the Scriptures around this softening of God's commands are translated to say that we hate them. Men hate them. They hate God. They despise His altar. They despise His ways. And then we, so convinced that the purity of God's Word is not quite so important as the heart of it, tell ourselves that we don't hate God. No, we love God! And because we don't hate Him, it's okay to do what we're doing, to twist things just a bit to make them work in our own context.

But the Hebrew words that are actually used where our English translations give us "hate" and "despise" are not so extreme. Rather, these words actually mean "to think lightly of." In Malachi 1, for example, God lashes out at the priests for bringing impure offerings to His altar. The English tells us He accuses them of "despising" it, but the Hebrew literally says they "thought lightly of" it. 

This is a world of difference. It's not that they actively hated God; they just didn't take Him seriously. They knew what He said about offerings and sacrifices, but they didn't feel any need to follow those instructions quite exactly. They tweaked them a little bit into something that "worked" for them and for the people. This was the sin. This was the offense. 

This is what we're doing today. We refuse to take God seriously. We refuse to believe that He said what He said for a reason, that it matters how we do things to His glory. We think lightly of His Word, and His altar, and as a result, we are bringing impure offerings. And we're trying to convince Him that it's no such thing.

But He knows better. And keep reading into Malachi 2, and we see plainly how He responds to this: He threatens to smear dung on the faces of the priests who think so lightly of His Word and then to hold them up as impure offerings themselves. 

How's that workin' for ya'?

That's why it matters that we take God's Word seriously. That's why it's so important that we stop twisting it to suit our own needs. That's why we have to diligently invest our time in figuring out what it is that God really teaches. Because our grave sin is not that we hate Him (and most of us know that. We love Him, for crying out loud!)...our greatest offense is that we think too lightly of Him and thus defile, not despise, His altar. 

Unchristian Nation

One of the places where we are most tempted to say that God's thoughts are our thoughts is in respect to our nation. We saw a lot of this around the last election cycle (and I think this is true around all election cycles): tons of Christians coming out and saying that America needs to take her God back so that she will be blessed.

Not quite.

I know that's going to offend a lot of people, but I make no apologies for that. This is biblical proof-texting at its most dangerous. Yes, it is true that there are many verses (in the Old Testament specifically) that reference "the nation" that is faithful, that worships the Lord, that obeys His commands, that loves Him. 

But that nation is never America; it is always Israel.

Israel existed in a time of polytheism. That's a fancy word for saying there were many gods all around. Every country, every nation, every people had their own gods. That is why God was so pointed in telling His people not to intermingle with those nations; they would be led astray to worship other gods. 

Now, Israel does a good service to the nations around them in that this nation does not typically identify the other nations by the gods that they worship. They make references to some of the sacred stones and pillars that the other nations have, but they call the nations themselves by name - Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, etc. This was not, we easily get the sense, the same in reverse. Other nations identified Israel by her God, not by her ancestors.

Israel was known as "the nation whose God is the Lord." That's how she was distinguished from other nations. When other nations come to attempt to make treaties or when they respond to Israel's approaching army, they never say, "We have heard a lot about you." No. They say, "We have heard about your God." Everywhere Israel goes, she was identified as "the nation of the people of the Lord." 

Israel, not America.

And that's as it should be. In a world of polytheism, Israel was distinct in her worship of only one God, in her adherence to the only legitimate Lord. She was a nation called by God, chosen by Him, beloved by Him as His special possession. Over and over, this is confirmed through the covenant, renewed throughout the pages of Scripture as God chooses Israel again and again and again.

God has never chosen America.

When Jesus came, God continued to love Israel as a special possession, but He extended His love beyond her ancestry and out into the whole world. That's what the New Testament was about. No longer was there just one nation that was the Lord's; the whole world was His. He laid claim to every soul, regardless of lineage. Regardless of ethnicity. Regardless of nation. The New Covenant does not single out one nation over another. (And we must also keep in mind that when the Bible discusses "nations," they are not using the word in the same way that we do. It does not mean "countries," but "extended families.") So if we want to make the argument that America is God's chosen nation, then we must also go back and reinstate the Old Covenant, complete with its Temple worship, ritual sacrifices, and mere anticipation of a Messiah. If we do not, we have smacked the New Testament in the face by twisting the New Covenant into something it was never meant to be.

There's no such thing as a Christian nation; there never has been. There was a Jewish nation, but in Christ, there is no nation; there is only grace. The onus now falls on us as individuals to be faithful. The responsibility is on our shoulders to be persons of God, not peoples of God. We come together, yes, as communities of God, but even the church is not a holy nation; it is a body of believers. No longer can we be known as a "nation whose God is the Lord" because that's just not the way it works in the New Covenant. We can only be known as "a man or woman whose God is the Lord."

From here, our faithfulness speaks into our nation. Never....never the other way around.