A Bitter Woman

There's a lesser-known story in the Biblical testimony about a woman you've probably heard of, but not by such a name. The woman's name is Mara; she says so herself.

You probably know her better as Naomi.

Naomi is the mother-in-law of Ruth, who has an entire book named after her story and who is listed in the genealogy of Jesus in the New Testament. Naomi is a woman who married a man, had two sons, moved to a foreign country where her two sons got married, then lost it all except her two daughters-in-law. With no husband and no sons, Naomi decides to go home (because in Old Testament times, this would have been where a close relative - we find out it is Boaz - would be required to care for her as a widow). Ruth goes with her, which is how the book got its name, but let's talk about Naomi for a minute.

When Naomi gets back to the place from which she came, she is greeted by those who remember her. A hearty greeting, actually. They have heard what has happened. But when the women of the city flock to care for her wounded heart, she says something strange.

Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara.

Names back then meant something, something special. And Naomi means "sweet," which likely meant that Naomi was a sweet baby and was encouraged to grow into a sweet woman. In fact, we have no reason to think otherwise. Mara, on the other hand, means "bitter." 

It'd be easy for us to say that of course Naomi....er, Mara....was bitter; she'd lost everything that had ever meant anything to her! She's the female version of Job, for crying out loud. We'd be bitter, too. But we're not talking about an attitude of bitterness. The way that Mara contrasts her new name with her old name, we can plainly see that she's talking about a state of being. 

She's not feeling bitter; she actually is bitter, not sweet, as if you would be able to tell the difference just by licking her. (Please don't lick persons. It's not cool.) But you get the point - to Mara, the very substance of her entire being has changed. 

Don't call me Naomi.

But here's the thing - this happens very early in the story as told in Ruth, but not one single time does the biblical narrative actually refer to Naomi by her chosen name; she's never actually called Mara. Not by God. God continues to call her Naomi. So does everyone else.

Because it doesn't matter what she feels like. It doesn't matter how deeply she believes this bitterness has penetrated her being, right down to her very core. God created her Naomi, and Naomi she is. Sweet, she is, even on the days when she's feeling downright salty. 

I love that God has given voice to this even in His Word, that He thought it important enough to include. It's just one sentence, just one tiny little sentence that honestly doesn't seem to change the story at all. God could easily have left it out and still said everything through Ruth that He intended to say, everything about community and family and redemption and the line of brokenness through which His Son comes into the world. But He doesn't. He puts that one little line in there. Why?

Because He wants us to know it's okay to feel that way sometimes. It's okay to feel like the entire substance of your being has changed. Life is hard. He gets it. But just because life is hard, just because you feel something today that's new for you or different for you or difficult for you, just because it feels like everything about you has changed, there's something very fundamental about you that hasn't changed - and that is the very core of who God made you to be. 

Sorry, Mara, but God has made you sweet.

God says that He has a name for each and every one of us. And names...they mean something. At least, to God, they do. The name that God has for you is a reflection of something very fundamental about the being that He's created in you. It's something that doesn't change, even when life gets hard. 

And He'll give you this moment, this time, to say different, to vent, to express yourself. But the truth is? Nothing's really changed. You are who you are, in the very image of Him. 

Mara, my dear...you have never been more Naomi. And if you've forgotten that, just look at how much He loves you. 

Knowing

Recently, I was speaking with a physician in a difficult specialty, and he said that it was typically his religious patients who would rather not put things off. "It is usually the people of faith," he said, "that would rather just know." 

It struck me as an interesting statement. Most patients in his office would probably rather have no news than bad news, his work being what it is. Most patients would probably even be content to not know at all, but just to guess and to play around and to see if things can get better for them without having to say any so dreaded words. 

But the people of faith want to know. Sooner, rather than later. 

There's a certain tension for us people of faith around this idea of knowing. On one hand, we know what we know - we know that God is good, that God loves us, that God both created and redeemed the world. We know that the Word of God has been given to us so that we might know Him better. But there's this nagging little voice that always whispers, You don't really know. And it reminds us of all the things we can simply never know. 

That is the mystery of God. I'm not at all saying that God is unknowable; His Word promises otherwise. But we plainly confess that we see as through a glass, but darkly.  

And the unbelieving world calls us on it. They mock us for claiming to know something we could never prove (and thus, in the world's eyes, never really know). They chastise us for our arrogance about our knowing anything at all. They tell us it's all wishes and hopes and dreams, and these things are but the vapors of knowing. They aren't real knowledge at all. 

Yet we build our lives around this knowing and unknowing, this knowing what we cannot possibly know and knowing that we cannot know it. That's what faith is. It's believing beyond what we can see. 

Then we hear something like this from someone like this doctor - and this is something I've observed in my own ministry and heard from others, as well - and it just brings this tension to the surface all over again. People of faith are a people confident in their unknowing, but they are the ones most determined to know. 

Maybe it goes back to what I was saying last week about seeking being finding. Maybe our mere willingness to ask the questions is, in itself, our answer. I don't know. 

Maybe it's a lot of things. Maybe it's that we have nothing to fear. Maybe it's that we have everything to gain. Maybe it's because we know that our God answers our prayers, and we just want to know for sure what to pray for. Maybe it's because we believe in the sanctity of life and our responsibility to care for it, even our own, at all costs. Maybe it's because we believe in healing, but we cannot be healed unless we know we are sick. 

Maybe it's because we embrace the opportunity to know something we never knew before. Maybe it's because we know that in knowing something new, we will likely discover something new about the unknowable. Maybe we understand that when our lens shifts, we see something in the heartbeat of God that we never could have understood before. 

Maybe we're actually quite restless in our knowing unknowing and we're just desperate to know something for sure, for real. 

Maybe we're just a people who believe we can only find the answers if we're willing to ask the questions.

Who knows?

This world talks a lot about how little we people of faith know. It laughs at us. It mocks us. It belittles us for our faith. But if this doctor is right, we are the people least afraid of knowing. We are the ones least intimidated by the answers. We are the ones least willing to stake our lives on what we do not know.

So perhaps we know something after all.

Please Play on the Lawn

If it's true that those who seek understand, and if we're all just trying to figure all this out, then why are we not doing a better job of figuring it out together?

There has always been an "in-crowd" among God's people, for whatever reason. First, it was the Levites and the priests, who thought they were somehow special because of their place in God's community. Then, there were the Pharisees, and we all know how that turned out. But even after the institution of the Church, as the disciples and apostles traveled throughout the region spreading the Good News of the Christ who came to, among other things, tear down the walls of the in-crowd and let all peoples flood into His courtyard, we still see that there's something taking shape, even as early as Acts 5.

"The believers had a common faith in Jesus as they met on Solomon's Porch. None of the other people dared to join them, although everyone spoke highly of them." (v. 12)

Excuse me? The message of redemption for all, the testimony of those who had walked with a Man who showed no favoritism, the very beginnings of a radical new faith are taking shape, and they've already set themselves up at a distance from others? The new Christians have staked out Solomon's Porch, and no one dares to join them there?

That ought to make us weep. It ought to make us weep, but it probably doesn't because honestly, most of us are still doing the same thing.

We're acting like this God thing is something special, and it is, but we're acting more like it makes us something special. We're acting like it's something just for us, like you'd have to be one of us to understand it. We act like the gatekeepers of the Kingdom, making sure that anyone who might dare approach the throne of God know that we are the ones who have it all figured out. 

We want the world to look at us and think highly of us, like we're doing something favored that the rest of the world can't do. And the early church had it. They met on Solomon's Porch and everyone thought highly of them, but no one dared try to come to the porch to chat. No one dared try to sit in on their meetings. No one dared pretend that Christianity was an open door. Note that this verse says absolutely nothing about what's happening in Solomon's Foyer.

Heavens, no! For we are the keepers of the door, so we dwell and we dialogue on the porch.

Forget that our Savior Himself tore open the curtain of the Temple. Forget that He broke open the graves. Forget that He shook the very foundations of the earth so that all of the holy things that had so long been done in secret would be done now in the open, not just for all to see, but for all to be a part of. Forget all that. For we are the keepers of the door.

And we shall die on this porch.

I don't know what it is. I don't know why God's people have done this throughout their history; I don't know why we continue to do it. Jesus came and went to the outsiders, and as soon as He's gone, those who "had a common faith"in Him - those who wholeheartedly believed - started curmudgeoning. Get off my lawn.

It's almost like Jesus didn't just tell them a story of amazing Grace through the witness of the woman, the leper, the blind, the arrogant, the afflicted, the lame, the Samaritan....

I gotta tell you - I just don't get grace without these witnesses. I don't understand without their testimony. Everything I know about God, I know through the broken, through the beaten, through the belittled. Everything I know, I learned from someone who would probably never dare to join me on Solomon's Porch. 

Unless, of course, I invite them. 

Please, please, please - for the sake of us who love God, who have a common faith in Jesus, who ache for the kind of love and grace and forgiveness and hope that He lived for - please play on the lawn. Trample the grass. Catch frisbees. Chase fireflies. I'll come play with you. And if we get a little tired, that's okay. Come on up to the porch, and we'll pour ourselves a couple of glasses of Living Water. 

Seeking to Understand

Most of us seek in order to understand. We believe that if we set out on a path toward the answers, we will one day arrive and know all that it is that we've wanted to know. We believe this about God, especially, and that's why we spend our lives attempting to grow in the faith, to know more, to understand better this God who created us, called us, and calls us home to Him. 

We even hold onto verses that promise that "he who seeks, finds" as proof positive that if we just keep at it, we'll get there. It may not be until this life is over (which is the popular Christian idea), but we'll get there. We will find what it is that we seek?

But what if the seeking itself is the finding?

There's a little verse tucked away in Proverbs that changes the way that we should think about what it means to seek. "Evil people do not understand justice, but those who seek the Lord understand everything." (28:5)

That verse says so much, but what we have to notice right away is what it doesn't say: it doesn't contain that little word that we love so much to add to our Christian faith. It doesn't say will. It doesn't say those who seek will understand everything. You know, maybe one day. When God wants us to. Those who seek do understand everything. 

So there must be something about the seeking.

It's got to be a humility thing. That's all I can figure. Because the Christians who are so confident that they actually understand everything, the ones who are so sure they're right on all accounts, are those that it's so often clear to the rest of us that they have no clue. But those who confess that they're just doing their best, that they're just trying to figure this all out, who plainly admit that they might be wrong - that the revelation of God is indeed developing - they're the ones who most seem to have their finger on the pulse of this whole thing. And what is it that they're doing that the first group of Christians is not?

They're still seeking. They're just trying to find God and the holy in this world. And in an honest, humble, faithful effort in such seeking, perhaps they have found it and do not even know. 

I'm struck by all of the things that I seem to understand when I'm just trying to find God's heartbeat in this world, things that I could never have figured out on my own or by sheer hard work. It's when I'm looking for God's creational intent that I discover brokenness and understand what it truly means. It's when I'm searching for God's tears of grief that I figure out heartbreak. It's when I'm seeking some kind of real authority that I understand the false voices of the world. It's not because I've necessarily found God, that I would know fully and well what creational intent, grief, or authority are in any way that I could put them into words or anything like that; it's just that in looking for them, I am better able to see all that they are not. 

Maybe it's the same way with God Himself. In seeking Him, our eyes are open to better understand all the things that are not Him...and precisely how and why they're not. Only in seeking the God who will never fail us can we truly understand all those things that let us down time after time after time. Only in seeking the God who loves us can we honestly look at something and say, "That's not love." Only in looking for God can we find Him, but with our eyes wide open for holy things, it becomes piercingly clear what is nowhere close. So we look around and know more than maybe we thought we knew because at the very least, we can say, "That's not it." 

That's not it. That's not what I'm looking for. That's not what I'm after. And all of a sudden, all of the shadows start to come into the light and I don't know, maybe it does make sense. Maybe the best that we really can do is not so much to find.

Maybe it's just to seek. 

Those who seek the Lord understand everything.

God's Will

The persons in the Gospels who came to Jesus, the psalmist who prayed from the depths of his heart, essentially everyone in all the Scriptures knew that the God to whom they prayed was already working on it. They trusted that God already was who He said He was, that what they were asking for in accordance with His character was already in progress.

The persons of the Scriptures believed in a God named, "I Am."

The persons of today, not so much.

Christians of today have become far too acquainted with a little idea called "God's Will," and God's Will is something that almost always is put somewhere in the future. God's Will is whatever God will do whenever He feels like it, but not usually today. Almost never today.

And this is how we pray. You hear it all the time. We hold the hand of someone who is battling against some vicious cancer, and we pray for "God's Will" in "God's time" - God's future time when He "will" decide what to do. We don't pray for God's healing right now. We don't pray for God's presence in this moment. We don't pray for or to "I Am."

Or we present our child before the altar or the congregation, intending to dedicate him or her and bless this child in the name of the Lord. In doing so, we pray this beautiful prayer over our children, entrusting them to God's care and praying for God to guide them and to use their life "as they grow." Not today. Not in our arms right now. But the expanse of their life as it stretches out before them, particularly, we think, in those days when they are able to do something. We seem to forget that God is in our children's lives right now, even as those children are dependent upon being in our arms. Because we've given them to God's Will, not God's now.

This is how we're living our lives, and we're calling them holy. But it's not what we ever see in the Scriptures. It's not the God we see revealed in His own Word. It would have been a completely foreign concept to the people of Israel, to the Jews and the Gentiles in the New Testament, to spend their lives of faith living tomorrow instead of today. That's not what God called them to. That's not what God said. And that's not what God promised.

We're so hung up on heaven, on this idea that everything God wants to give us exists only in paradise. Only in the life that is after this one. Only tomorrow. And our hang-up on heaven is killing us. It's killing us! It's convincing us of precisely what we already know - "God will God's Will" - instead of the very thing that His entire testimony is meant to remind us - "God IS."

At the burning bush, God Is. Long after their years, God IS the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When the baby Jesus is born, He is named Immanuel - God IS with us. Not God will be with us. God even tells us that He is the same yesterday and today and forever, but most of us are reading our Bibles to discover the God of yesterday, holding out the hope of Heaven in the God of forever, and completely forgetting that this very same God declared that HE IS today.

No wonder we're stuck praying all these polite little powerless prayers. We're looking right past "I Am" in devotion to "God's 'Will'."