Another Open Letter to Addie: Heaven, Faith, & Hope...

Again, more in the ongoing saga of the email conversation between my sister, Addie, and I.

Here is my latest offering, in response to this.

*******************************************

Here's what I would say about Heaven. To start off, let's be clear: we don't know. Anyone who acts like they know doesn't know what "faith" means. That being said, I think that there is a big difference between faith and hope. Hope is something that we all have. I hope that I get to Heaven. I hope that everyone gets to Heaven. I also hope that it doesn't snow tomorrow, and that the Patriots lose the Super Bowl. At a basic level, hope is a desire, a wish. Faith is what we do with that hope. In Greek, "faith" is a verb - "pistis," as in "I faith that." It is living your life based on that hope, based on something greater than mere wishes. To have faith in God isn't just hoping that He exists; it's actually living it out.

My point in making this distinction is that most of us live with lots of hope, but not a lot of faith. If we do have faith, we often put it in the wrong things, thinking that's what will make life a "success," whether it's money, status, stuff, friends, experience, whatever. The difference comes in not living for this life, but living for what's beyond it. Now, obviously, we enjoy this life while we are here, but we don't worry about whether we lead a "full life," whatever that means, but that we lead a life that exhibits our faith in God.

As you said, this is not for our own sake, as there is nothing that we can do to become deserving of salvation. (This becomes hard, too, because we sometimes forget this, and operate as though what we do matters FOR SALVATION. What we do DOES matter, but not for our salvation. For if we could do even a bit towards our salvation, it would be safe to assume that it would be possible for someone who was really good to actually achieve it on their own. If that were the case, then there would be no need for Jesus to have sacrificed himself. But I digress - that's another issue - point is that our actions have nothing to do with our salvation). So instead, our actions, our life of faith is for the benefit of others, and for the glory of God. Our works are a RESPONSE to salvation rather than the cause of it. By loving and serving others, we are loving and serving God.

The main misunderstanding of this, however, is what it means to "love" someone. We have used the words "love" and "tolerance" interchangeably, and they are not even really all that close. To tolerate simply means to not actively try to exclude. To love means to actively try to include. Tolerance is the same as indifference. Love is the opposite of indifference.

Moreover, though, love doesn't just mean being nice. One of the key reasons that we have the image of God as a loving parent is because this is such a good example of what love really is. A parent who spanks their kid doesn't do it out of hate (well, a good parent, at least), but out of love, to correct them when they are doing something that will harm them. The fancy word for this is "admonition," which basically means to hold someone accountable out of love. This is how we are with people that we truly love. We wouldn't let people that we love do drugs or other things that are bad for them - we would confront them because we love them. This is missed in far too many churches, and in far too many people's minds.

Most think of love as simply embracing all people all the time - where no one is ever wrong. This doesn't work, and is not showing love of others. In the wealthier neighborhoods that I was in, parents would have drinking parties for their kids at their house because "they were going to do it anyway, and this way they will be safe." That isn't love at all. That is simply love of self, where the parent wants to be the "cool" friend of their kids rather than being a parent. Showing love to that person would be letting them know that this behavior is bad for you, not muddying their understanding of right and wrong.

This is what a lot of the churches are doing, though. We are trying to form a community where we affirm everything about each other, but we don't hold anyone accountable. At the heart of this, it actually has nothing to do with the hot button issue of homosexuality. There is more straight up adultery in the church than anyone would care to mention. No one talks about it because we want to be loving. In the process, we miss the point of what we are called to do.

The flip side of this is that you can't hold someone accountable if you aren't in community with them. This is perhaps an even bigger problem - the church telling people who have nothing to do with the church what they should do with their lives. THIS is the Bullhorn guy. The mission of the church isn't to fix everyone. It is to draw everyone into a loving community. That means bringing them in, as they are - broken. We are ALL broken, and that's okay. Remember, that has no bearing on our salvation.

However, it's the community that we bring people into that fixes us. If we are a community that is truly the Body of Christ, a community where the Holy Spirit is visibly present, a community that is living by faith and not simply on hope, then we are going to be a community that can have mutual accountability based on LOVE. "I want you to get better not for my own benefit or ego, but because this behavior is hurting you, and getting in the way for you to be what God created you to be."

There is a song by Switchfoot called "Meant to Live" that is awesome. Actually, I didn't like Switchfoot much at first until I really listened to this song. It's talking about how God has created us to be so much more than we are currently. We are broken. Christ died so that we could be fixed - not just in Heaven, but here on Earth as well.

Okay... I've strayed from my initial point. Heaven.

Again, none of us know. That to me is the greatest relief. God has promised me that if I have faith in Him, then I'm good - boom, eternal life. More than just hope. John 3:16, the most overused (and misunderstood?) verse in the Bible says "who so ever would believe in him..." In that verse, "believe" is the Greek word "pistis" - faith. Whosoever would faith in him..."

If we live our faith out, that is a sign of our salvation. Remember, salvation happened already - can't earn it, past tense - so anything that we do now is a sign of that salvation. Does that mean that those who live their lives in ways that imitate Christ but don't believe in God outright aren't living out signs of their own salvation? I don't know.

Again, it's not my place to know. I can have confidence in my own salvation because I know that I have faith in God and I am doing my best to live that out and do what God is calling me to do. I put my faith in God to help me to lead other people to that same conviction, to put their faith in God, but that's all that I can do.

Except hope. The Bible doesn't besmirch hope like I kinda did above. While hope may not be the active response that faith is, it's still important. Paul puts it as one of the three most important things we have (1 Corinthians 13:13 - faith, hope, & love). There is a certain limit to what we can do through our faith. God can make us do incredible things, but still there is mystery behind it all. That is where hope comes in. Hope for things that we cannot see or understand.

I wasn't too keen on Calvin before I had to read his big book The Institutes of the Christian Faith for class. Now I love him. The turning point came when he pointed out that if we are to have faith in God, the best place to look is the Bible. If we are to have faith in the Bible, we have to have faith in the whole thing. This means that we have to look at the whole thing. The great thing was that Calvin admits that a lot of the Bible doesn't make sense... and that's okay. We aren't supposed to know everything, not because God likes to keep secrets, but because we aren't able to understand everything. We aren't God, so we can never know what it is like to BE God, or to see the plan.

When you are in the middle of a forest, you have a hard time discerning where you are. You could be only 15 feet from the edge, but you might be lost in there for good. If we were able to stand on a 50 foot ladder, above all of the trees, all of a sudden, we can get a different perspective, and everything would make sense - you can see the whole forest. But when you are stuck in the midst of the trees, you can't understand that.

The Bible leads us to discern God's call in our lives (through the Holy Spirit), and how we should live that call out, but a lot of the time that won't make sense. We can't see the whole of God's plan. We are stuck in the trees. That's when we need HOPE.

I hope that Heath Ledger is in Heaven. Ultimately, though, there is nothing that I can do about that, other than to hope that he is there. Moreover, I hope that everyone gets to Heaven. I would be surprised if everyone did get to Heaven, but that doesn't mean that it can't happen. I know that God wants everyone to go to Heaven.

A friend of mine at school suggested that the only unforgivable sin is turning away from God. It was only unforgivable because you aren't there to be forgiven. That doesn't mean that we can't come back, as the prodigal son clearly shows, but it still seems to be a clear theme throughout Scriptures. A key part of free will is the will to choose to follow God or to deny God.

Essentially turning away from God is actively denying that gift of salvation. Now again, this gets into some things that are hard to understand (i.e. if denying salvation prevents us from getting it, wouldn't accepting salvation mean that we take a part in achieving it, through our acceptance of it? The answer is not really.)

In this sense, I think of it more like a ticket that has been bought and paid for. Your picking up that ticket has nothing to do with the fact that the ticket was already bought and paid for, but your refusal of the ticket is the only thing that can keep you from taking the trip.

So what do you do with this? Try to live out that faith, a faith that will uplift others, bringing them into community, and helping them to get fixed. It's not about US saving people. It's about letting God use us to restore people to Him.

Look at Jonah, probably my favorite book in the Bible. Jonah is this crybaby who doesn't want to do what God is sending him to do, and along the way, God uses him to save all of the sailors on the ship, and then 120,000 people in Nineveh, none of which Jonah intended or even wanted to help. Ultimately, this stuff is up to God.

Augustine, an African monk who lived in the 4th century, put it succinctly: If someone claims to have God completely figured out, that person does not know God at all.

Still that doesn't mean that we can't try to make some sense out of it. Augustine spent his whole life trying to make sense of it (and did a pretty good job). We just need to recognize that some of it will always be beyond our grasp. We are stuck here in the midst of the trees, trying to figure out which direction we should go in. All that we can do is listen for God's direction, and have the faith to follow where He leads us.

Okay, I think I win the prize for longest email.

Let me know your thoughts.

rock,
Tyler

***********************************************

Addie responds thusly.