The grace of… Episode 3

Genesis 1:1 KJVR
(1) In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

You’ve read or heard it preached a million (it seems) times. It’s gotten to the point where you ignore the syntax, the linguistic plurality, the hermeneutical nuances (who comes up with these terms), and the root word extractions. Today, in your mind, God created. Big whoop! This big ethereal being with no time on His hands decides to play Betty Crocker, says a few words, waves a wand and poof, life on a big blue orb is thrust into an even bigger black void of nothingness, all of it trying to make some some sense of why…Oh crap! The chicken is burning! Great, just great. Thanks a lot God. There, how did that feel? The bible says to give thanks in all things. Did you feel the love in that one?

Each one of those is centered on one thing: relationship. If you’re like most people when you first read Genesis 1:1 you didn’t see anything resembling relationship. You, like me and most people, see God, a singular entity doing God-type stuff. Generally, as a matter of course, you learned that there was God, the Father, Jesus, the son, and Holy Spirit, three in one. While you recognized that they all existed, their relationship always was kinda murky. Sure you have a relationship with one of them which is maybe stronger than what you have with one of the others but…well, someday this will make sense. And you live your life.

Life is fast and furious and you go to church to get some rest with God because that what you’re told to enter into. But then you’re in the race again and somehow you’ve got to relate the sermon to your life which is traveling at break-neck speed. Some how, some day it will make sense. But it never seems to, week after furious week. Life seems to be a paradox of contradiction, a state of being that no being longs to be long in. So you force yourself to make sense of it all, to rationalize the contradiction. You follow the path that mankind has taken since the beginning, you make a myth.

It seems harmless enough as it eases the stress of having to explain why in your life, in your mess, in your distress, in your pain, in your shame, in your humiliation and embarrassment, in all the matters that seem to matter, God, His peace and security, His love and acceptance, His hope in you…well it just didn’t seem to show up. So in our myth we place God on this throne high and lifted up above us, seeing into every nook and cranny of our lives and we know, we just know that we did something wrong. This is Him judging our actions, our thoughts. He is removing Himself from our unworthiness.

So we plead the blood of Jesus, cleanse us, please, so that we may be back in right standing with GAWWD! Some of our myths wonder if there is even a drop of blood left in his body because we have expended so much of it trying to come back just one more time to GAWWD. There is the great myth of Jesus being the good cop, who will hear our plea and shield us from the wrath of the bad cop, GAWWD. This same myth also features Jesus once again being beaten senselessly on our behalf so that GAWWD can look down from his mighty throne and reach out to embrace us. Curiously, in most every one of our myths Holy Spirit is just a mute, paralyzed bystander.

Myths are weird. Intellectual myths are even weirder yet. However, they have become our means to explain the unexplainable, the contradiction to our perceptions. We create myths to align our perceptions to our beliefs. If you follow this out properly, logically, we create God out of how we believe he relates to us in our mess of a fast and furious life. They help us cope with the lack of life, the lack of love, the lack of God, and more importantly, the lack of a meaningful relationship with the one who allegedly holds the title of Father.

If this seems dark and foreboding, realize this is just the breaking of the dawn compared to some myths believers have created. You, even myself for that matter, would not want to peak into their inner darkness as they lift their hands in praise and shout “hallelujah!” at the pastor. And these are just the myths of the believers. Imagine those who have experienced and act of GAWWD!

This is what the grace of Jesus came into two thousand years ago and still resides in today. He came to reveal the Father, not as a continuation of our Adamic myths but as a truth found in a face-to-face relationship described “in the beginning.” At every point of our mythological journey with GAWWD, Jesus demonstrates the truth of the Father to us to properly align our perceptions to God. Paul calls the process “renewing the mind.” Yet Jesus has a purpose that extends much…DANG! That will have to wait until the next time. Limits of attention span dictate this as the end…