grace & responsibility

Things have been really, really good for me lately. It seems that every time I've screwed something up, God has clucked His tongue and said to me, "Gee, Matthew, I didn't realize you could suck so hard and screw up something that simple again. Here, let me bless you with something better than you've had before because you clearly don't deserve it!" There are the simple things like family, friends, food, beer, my house, the opportunity the study-- and God has been more than generous with those. But also in the things where I deserved to be rejected because I failed, God has chosen to respond with blessing. And that is at once terrifying and emboldening.

For all the religious games that we play, there seems to be a pretty strong disconnect between how we think about God and how He acts towards us. (Seriously, click on the article-- Tim Challies is really good at exploring this.) So there are two sides to this prodigal grace: the best works that we do cannot earn His favor (though I think that He smiles when He watches us live out His love), and the worst things that we do cannot shake Him from His love for us (though it certainly saddens Him and invites His wrath that was poured out on His Son.)

So the two terrifying aspects of this are that we can never put God in our debt like we want to so often-- that is, the things we do cannot "earn points" with God and make Him owe us anything-- and that God can feel free to bring us to places of terrible suffering even if we have been on our best behavior. And yet at the same time, we can always trust that such suffering is meant to be a blessing and we know that for all that we do wrong, God still longs to bless us and longs to be gracious to us. And I guess that's where I am right now.

So the final aspect that I want to touch on with this (and this is sort of what I was getting to all along) is that I have been bought with a price, namely, the blood of Jesus. And this means, then, that while the things that I do now cannot change God's love for me, I still owe all that I have to Him. I didn't make this trade-- offering all of myself for the best that He can give, rather, I submitted myself to His mercy and found myself with a new master and a new heart. But it is terrifying some days to think about all the blessings that God has given me and how now my role is to use all of them to glorify Him. So I am thankful, yes, but now praying more and more that everything that I steward well everything that God has given me.

And I guess that's how we always ought to live, whether in seasons of sorrow or gladness: as grateful, joyful stewards.

a question about God and suffering

What is it about the nature of love, suffering, and God that bring them together?

One time I went to a really trippy wedding. It was held in a Mason Hall and I remember being a little unnerved by the weird pictures on the ceiling in a room that was way too huge for us. There were maybe 80 or so people at this wedding and the hall was probably build to hold at least 400. The bride had told me about 2 weeks beforehand that she was getting married because "it felt like true love" and she wore a dress that was so revealing that it was kinda gross. She was a pretty cool person otherwise, but the wedding was pretty weird, probably the weirdest (although the wedding that involved the puppet and the cap guns was a close second.)

Perhaps the part that unnerved me most about the wedding was the homily. Now, I have mostly been to weddings of good Christian friends at this point, so I'm quite used to hearing mostly pretty good thoughts about marriage and love and God and whatnot by whoever was officiating the ceremony. This did not happen at this wedding, as the dude (I have no idea if he was a real pastor or not, if he was then somebody in charge somewhere needs to be shot.) This guy opened his homily by talking for what felt like five minutes about how scientists have isolated a force beyond gravity and the weak nuclear attraction. I was homeschooled, so I knew what he was talking about and was intrigued. He went on and on about science and math et cetera et cetera until he declared that scientists that love is the force that binds the universe together. I may have only been a stupid 12-year-old, but I knew that was ridiculous when I heard it.

Now, 10 years old, I've come to agree with him. Sort of. I think he was speaking the truth about the nature of love, but he didn't need to bring in gravity (the only reasonable comparison, in my mind, is that both cause me and my roommate Alex to be extra clumsy.) But love is so important, so unifying, so powerful, and so ubiquitous that the only reason why it's inappropriate to say that it binds the universe together is because Obi-Wan Kenobi took the line. What else do we write as many songs and books and movies about? What else do we celebrate, joke about, worship, or chase after so desperately?

But if we dissect a lot of those songs and books and movies and jokes, we find something deeply disturbing: love is, as Derek Webb once so wonderfully put it, "you're so great, I'm so great, so we're so great together." Anyone who has sustained a loving relationship with someone else for more than 3 weeks will immediately see the problem with this, and if you don't please call me right away so I can help save you from a lifetime of disaster.

So we have a deeply false concept of love, and yet we hunger for it so badly. Indeed, one of the reasons why we spend so much time trying to get love and affirmation from others (be it a romantic partner, friends, family, and even people at work) is that we have such a twisted concept of love, one that relies entirely on how we feel and how other people feel about us. Yet if we dig deeper into the vast library of human creativity, we find more art that has been created about love. But not the sappy, sentimental, vacuous kind of first-crush love (though sometimes it starts like that), nor the warm, tender, caring kind of mother-and-child love (though sometimes it works like that), nor even the passionate, exclusive, brazen man-and-wife kind of love (though sometimes that comes in its time.) No-- if we look at movies like Gran Torino and The Dark Knight, or books like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter we see that there is a more meaningful sort of love. Self-sacrificial love. Even though our culture isn't particularly fascinated with the cross of Jesus anymore, we can't stop telling stories about Him.

We can't stop.

It's unavoidable.

Some readers might give me a hard time for being so bold as to assert that Harry Potter and The Dark Knight are about Jesus. Awfully self-centered of me and my religion to do that, right? Yeah, well, too bad. There is no more perfect story of self-sacrifice, because Jesus had more than any other lover in any other story ever had and gave it all up for people who did more to not deserve it than any other beloved in any other story. And He did so in a way so painful, so trying, and so... well, excruciating that it still makes you shudder when you read about it. And what He accomplished for His beloved-- transformation! Even if you think that the stories about Him were made up, I would posit that His story still licks all the rest (and thus you should give whether or not they were made up a second thought.)

So this finally gets me to my question. Since love seems to be the fragile string that holds the fabric of humankind together and suffering is probably the thickest thread in that string, what does this say about God? After all, the Bible says that God is love. What does that mean?

In Hebrews 2 it says that "...we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor( because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering." (emphasis obviously added.) What does this mean? Is it in God's nature to suffer? Would a universe without suffering be a universe without true love? Would God be love without suffering?

What is it about the nature of love, suffering, and God that bring them together?


go ahead and comment, I want to hear your thoughts.

[cross-posted on facebook]

it takes two when it used to take only one

sorry the posting has been light as of late. anyone who has run into me and my shit-eating grin lately (i'm afraid i can't apologize for it) is probably not surprised.

but yeah. i wrote about a month to a month and a half ago about how everything in my life was really awesome except for two small things, and even those have changed a lot in the past few weeks. it is exciting to see what God is doing, and although i am still very much convinced that God works predominantly through suffering and sacrifice, it is good to have a season where i'm being taught through overabundant blessing.

more music is coming down the pike, i promise. being a little more disciplined about my computer is giving me more time to write and play with my instruments (which seem to be multiplying way too fast.)

sometime soon i was thinking of doing a series of lists-- the books that have influenced me the most, stuff like that. i know that that is the exact same thing that i complained about with the whole "25 things" meme, but oh well.

if you don't read Baltimore's City Paper regularly, this probably won't be funny

As a regular reader who reads Ms. Butler's rantings routinely, I found great joy in reading this letter, although I am not sure why.

Ms. Butler, as a Eurocentric Darwinian Leftist, I am compelled to let you in on a little secret that has served the forces of white supremacy and white privilege well during our reign in America. It is our policy that any prominent white man or woman who embarrasses us with acts of brazen criminality, stupidity, or immorality is taken and thrown under the bus ("Dixon a Victim," The Mail, Jan. 28). Now and again, some escape punishment. Occasionally, we allow some offenders back into our ranks. More often than not, when an elite white man does something stupid, he goes under the wheels of the bus. In this way, our precious time, money, and effort are not dissipated on defending them, but are instead invested in maintaining our iron grip on power.

Ms. Butler, there are only so many African-Americans, with only so much money and so much available time. If you truly believe that Sheila Dixon is innocent and more importantly have concrete evidence that the charges against her are motivated by "the ultimate meanness of racism, and gender institutional racism" and being propagated by a wide ranging conspiracy plotting "to take a 'bitch' down from the high tower of administrative government" then by all means go out and rally community support behind her. If my belief is correct and you do not have any evidence (real, documentary evidence) then I advise the African-American community of Baltimore to simply ignore you because every dollar your actions direct toward Dixon's legal defense fund (when and if she establishes one) is a dollar that could have been spent on funding Baltimore City schools or other projects and institutions that serve the African-American and Baltimore City communities, and every minute spent defending Dixon is a minute wasted that could have been used to mentor a wayward child, lobby for additional funding for the Algebra Project, or report criminal activities.

Matthew Hood
Baltimore

grace & discipline

I've been thinking a lot about grace and discipline the last few months. I need both in my life a lot; I think the lack of both has contributed to a lot of the bad things that have happened in my life the last several years, and just about all of my readers have been on the receiving end of me not being disciplined in my words or actions.

At the start, grace and discipline seem diametrically opposed, and in many ways they are. Discipline gives you a structure and a set of rules to live by, and grace gives you freedom to do as you wish. But you have to walk the line between the two just as much as you have to let both work very hard.

God hates religion. He desires ourselves and our love, as Peter has been working out so eloquently the last few days. Our faith in God is not a series of payments we make to earn our way back to God, but it is a gift that God blesses us with. Yet the temptation to talk to ourselves in terms of moralistic works-based theology is overwhelming, as Tim Keller brilliantly expounds on. The temptation to treat ourselves moralistically-- to say, "Matthew, you screwed it up again and you just need to try harder to make it right,"-- is always lurking below the surface. Keller often says that you can disobey God in two ways: the traditional hedonistic way, or the way in which you do good works but you trust in those works rather than in the grace of the Gospel.

But grace needs discipline to work well, and this is the mystery I've been exploring lately. Discipline represents the deadest of dead works, the self-flagellating moralism that cannot save you. Yet, as Eugene Peterson says:

Frederick von Hugel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There's no life in the bark. It's dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows and grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it's prone to disease, dehydration, death.

So, yes, the church is dead but it protects something alive. And when you try to have a church without bark, it doesn't last long. It disappears, gets sick, and it's prone to all kinds of disease, heresy, and narcissism.

Peterson is specifically referring to the complaint that the church is "dead" and thus worthless for us to bother with, but I still really like the idea of bark to understand discipline and grace. The disciplines that I take part in-- prayer, fasting, reading the Bible, going to church, singing to Jesus-- are structures and bark that protects the grace of the Gospel growing within me. And with that understanding, I think, grace can have the power to penetrate the deepest parts of my life.

At the heart of things, I sin because I don't believe the Gospel. When I let my desire to be liked by others or my desire to control my own life take precedence in my life, I worship an idol and don't trust the grace of Christ to save me. I can even commit idolatry when I rely on my good works, my good image, or my desire to earn my salvation. But when I repent and trust in Jesus, I can admit without fear where I am broken because my hope, my identity, and my salvation are all found in Him. And from that grace, then, I can build up disciplines.