Missed the Boat

This is whole Modernism vs. Post Modernism is frustrating. To me it seems like anytime there's a name for the era, we've probably missed the boat. Anytime we try to correct what a previous generation overlooked or overdid, we over do it or overlook it in the opposite direction. To me (and excuse my ignorance because I am not very educated in this area) it seems like the farther and farther we get away from the basics of faith and the more humans try to figure it out (I'm not condemning searching or study at all) , the more we miss it completely. It almost seems like all the profound theologians of our time are just reeling us back into that boat that swam away from.

Again I could be wrong completely, but this is what I've observed recently in myself.

So here I am at an essential part of the Christian faith again- God's Holiness. It appears that I've been swimming next to the boat while holding on to the side with one hand (I don't know if it's been port or starboard. I looked up the correct term for the side of the boat so I'd look intelligent and it appears that there's not a generic term. Oh Well.). I knew that God was holy because I was told that God was holy, but I really had no concept of what that meant.

I feel that as a product of (dare I say it) the modernist movement I was taught theology in an outline format. Here's Roman Numeral One which leads to Point A, B, and C and all their subpoints. I don't think that I ever growing up heard a sermon on God's holiness or was encouraged to relish in the mystery and expanse of it. I mean I knew that God was perfect and we were not but the vocabulary stopped there.

And again, just like love, you miss the whole point without it and I'm again a pawn in the Karma game. Everything about God is boxed in nice and neat in my little "This is What God is" box, but life is so unpredictable and terrifying when you attempt to put God there.

Sometimes I wonder (and the emphasis is on wonder) if growing up in a Christian environment did me more harm than good in the truth department. Do children's stories about God, Sunday School, and little songs do us any damage? Again, I'm wondering, not stating. I definitely see the benefits, but I also wonder about the harm. When stories about our creator become stories told with a felt board and cartoon felt characters and cute songs, when youth group becomes a quick lesson in order to maintain a teenager's attention and in that time, syrupy lessons of why they should stay morally upright, and when sermons are bullet pointed and non thought provoking, are we doing more harm than good? I know that everything I listed has it's good merits, but I'm wondering (let me stress again WONDERING) why don't we encourage our children, teenagers, and young adults to have an awe of God, an awe of his power and his love, an awe of the weight of his glory? I know that the stories are intended to do that, but I feel like we stop short of the point and make them just stories. I know that there are churches and people that are encouraging awe, I just personally feel like I didn't attend one of those churches growing up. There were probably even people at those churches that I attended that were right on the mark, but I just didn't know about them.

I feel like I'm a product of an agenda Christian upbringing and I know that I have been an agenda pushing Christian. I wish that I would have taken the time earlier on to marvel at the Holiness of God, but I didn't. I don't think I knew to and to place the blame on my upbringing completely is foolishness because at some point in my life, it became my problem. I do believe that I now have the benefit of connecting the dots of what I was taught. I have to back pedal a bit but perhaps it's better than starting with nothing. I honestly can't say, I am where I am and there's no use dwelling on it.

Okay, I didn't intend for this blog to come out this way. So I'll leave you with a bit from Ruthless Trust that I read this morning and that prompted me to think and write.

The more we let go of our concepts and images which always limit God, the bigger God grows and the more we approach the mystery of his indefinablity.....

Yet I have never in my entire life heard a homily or a sermon on the glory of God shining on the face of Jesus (2 Cor. 3:18). Perhaps the reticence that contemporary preachers feel about preaching on this topic is due to the fact that we have never been brushed by the divine kabod (my note- Early this was described as the weight, greatness, eminence, power and authority of God.). Or perhaps we simply feel incapable of articulating the concept, we sense that to address it would plunge us and our congregations into absolute mystery. And mystery is an embarrassment to the modern mind. All that is elusive, enigmatic, hard to grasp will eventually yield to our intellectual investigation, then to our conclusive categorization- or so we would like to think. But to avoid mystery is to avoid the only God worthy of worship, honor and praise.