Background information: The following was written as response to a question posed in The Good and Beautiful LIFE by James Bryan Smith. On the recommendation of a good friend, I am reading through it and reflecting on some of the questions posed within. The answers given to the questions should be not be assumed to be direct responses to the content of the book. I have enjoyed reading the text even if my answers may at times suggest otherwise. Note - My response below has also been influenced by the works of Peter Rollins (The Idolatry of God and Insurrection) and Thich Nhat Hanh (Living Buddha Living Christ).
Have you heard this gospel? Explain how it came across to you and how you lived as a result of it.
I have heard the gospel my entire life. My first bible was a muted gold colored book titled The Good News Bible. The pages were so thin that I had to be careful to not tear them when casually flipping to a favorite verse or passage. Simple stick-figured illustrations were found seemingly at random throughout the books as a visual guidepost that important words lay ahead. That bible was marked throughout with my own highlights and notations. I used it off and on until my early twenties.
My second bible was a book called The Message. It was a translation by Eugene Peterson which updated the bible into modern language. The pages were also thin and easily torn and the cover was made of a some sort of texture that was like nails on a chalkboard to me. In order to be useable to me, it was covered in some sort of light green construction paper. The pages of that bible were also marked and highlighted throughout.
I received another bible sometime in my early thirties. It was a nice leather bound book. It was light-weight, easy to hold in my hand and looked nice on bookshelf. It was a modern translation that fell somewhere between The Good News Bible and The Message. It has mostly sat on my bookshelf ever since I received it.
How I have used the bibles I have received reflects well my relationship with the gospel. As a child and adolescent, I believed the bible was central to my faith and the way in which I should live my life. I went to it often for advice, for comfort and because I was told that reading your bible was what "good" Christians were supposed to do. No matter how difficult life was, the gospel was where I could find hope.
My faith in the good news of the gospel began to wane around the time I received that second bible. While I still read it on a fairly regular basis, I took less comfort in the words I found within it. The last time I picked up a bible to read it was a little over a year ago, a sort of last gasp effort to maintain a grip on a dying faith that was quickly catching up to the conclusions I had reached long ago. I found little hope in the gospel and in the ways that I had been taught to live because of said good news.
The life I lived while following the gospel was good. There were plenty of moments of joy and I have few regrets. But, it was a life lived mostly with a mask over my face. A life lived in fear and distrust of the consequences that would occur if I were to slip off my mask even only a little bit.
Only in moving past the gospel have I been able to find true good news. That is, that I do not have to live life with a mask over my face. I can live for the moment instead of a future moment promised or a future punishment threatened.
As I have moved past the good news of my early life, I have thought often of a calling I thought I once had. In my adolescence, I felt a pull to work within the church, to be a pastor. But, something always kept me from pursuing that career path. For years I attributed it to my difficulties with coming to terms with my identity or to frustrations I had with church culture and its unwillingness to love the very people I felt it was called to love.
Even as I avoided the call I felt I had, I sometimes thought about what it would be like to deliver a sermon. What would I say? How would I present the good news? In light of my recent willingness to be more open the darkness of doubt that has always lived within me, I have been thinking again about what I would say if I were given the platform to speak to a congregation of church goers.
"Thank you for allowing me the gift of your time. In a finite lifetime, we all only have so many moments and for you to give me a few moments of yours is a gift of immeasurable value. I make no promises I will use that gift well but regardless, know that it is one I cherish.
I have good news to tell you today. But, I admit it is not good news in the way you have traditionally heard it. It is good news that will likely anger some, good news that will likely create in some and good news that most of you will immediately dismiss until the dead of the night when those creeping questions of existentialism are hardest to hide from.
I have doubts. Deep, painful doubts about the existence of the faith that I have returned to time and time again. For years I played the game of pretending my doubts were only academic in nature while hiding the shame of having said doubts as I knew intuitively that to express my doubts would mean a rejection that until recently I was not yet ready to face.
I do not know if God exists. I cannot prove his existence nor can I disprove his existence. To be honest, it is not a condition I give much thought to as ultimately any such god that is knowable is only a god of my own mind.
Jesus was a person who existed for a time. I do not know if he was the son of God or only believed himself to be. To be honest, it does not really impact my life all that much one way or the other. If Jesus is who he said he was and died for the redemption of the world, then I am in whether I take a universalist view or fall back on my two baptisms (apparently the one at birth didn't take) and the various prayers of forgiveness I have spoken over the years. If even that is not enough for entry, then I am not one of the elect and there is nothing I can do about it anyway.
There is a spirit of togetherness that runs through us all. Perhaps this is the Holy Spirit described in the Christian text, perhaps it is nothing at all.
Life is meaningless. We live, we die and the cycle repeats itself for a new generation. Any promise of a future reward is a salve to sooth current fears of eternal nothingness. Any threat of a future punishment is merely a means to control and shape current behavior. There is no future heaven. Heaven is our life now. There is no future hell. Hell is our life now.
We are all just water, water in the form of waves, waves on a journey to the shore where we will someday break and return to the ocean from which we came.
I do not believe the church has your best interests in mind. The church is a crutch which forces you to wear a mask over the doubts you have, the same doubts I have but am no longer willing to repress and dismiss. It is not the churches fault completely that it is a crutch. We all readily accept its shallow promises of a better life to come because who would want the alternative?
The alternative hurts. The alternative is that someday I will die and that will be it. I will never see my loved ones again and they will never see me. One shot at life and that is all. Never again will I see my wife, my daughters. I will return to the nothingness that I was before.
Just saying it brings a stab of pain to my heart that I want nothing to do with. But, still I hold it there alongside my doubts and live with it and let it direct the pathway of my life. On those dark nights when I want nothing more to jump feet first into the rat race and spend all my time accumulating wealth, power and material goods, my doubts, no matter how painful, my doubts force me to come back to what is important.
To love and live well, to have good relationships with others, to spend my time helping others to love and live well. To understand that what I do is enough because I have very little actual control over the impact I can actually make.
Maybe there is a God, maybe Jesus is who he said was, maybe the Holy Spirit rests within us all, maybe there is a heaven. I really doubt there is a hell other than living life hiding from ourselves.
I invite you to unmask your doubts as well. If your pastor is unable to accept you for them, then he is unworthy to stand in the pulpit in front of you. He is merely a charlatan who is more afraid than you are.
Regardless of who Jesus may be, he was a man who died on a cross in belief of you. Why did he die? Not to save you from some sort of divine and eternal punishment but rather to allow you to be who you are without need of the mask of religion that keeps your life so shallow and mundane.
That is the good news of the cross. You are okay as you are. No one is better than you, no one is worse than you. We are all just muddling through this life trying out best to figure out the next step. If there is a heaven on the other side, all the well but do not waste the life you have now waiting for it.
Evil and suffering live in all of us but so too does goodness and joy. To avoid doubt, to ignore the reality of the finality of this life is how great evil reigns. We hyper focus on accumulating beyond what we reasonably need in one life and justify it by holding strong to the delusion that there is another life in which all needs will be met. So why not exploit the current one?
Focus on cultivating joy and minimizing evil in yourself and those around you. Seek out help when you need it and help those who seek out help from you. Live your life and enjoy your life to the benefit of those who came before you and those who will come after you. Share. Love.
Ride the wave to its destination and smile joyfully when it returns you to the water from whence you came.
Now go, and spread the good news!"
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