God in the gumballs

A dream I just had.

Dear S,

My pastor in this dream is a portly man. A teddy bear type with a beard. Not an intellectual or a suit-and-tie arch-deacon like John Macarthur, but what I heard a black man refer to as a “sports white.” That means his shirt’s always untucked, and he constantly butchers names like “Methusalah.”

This Sunday, he decided to spoil us with ice cream.

A deacon was sitting outside the church at a folding table. It was covered in bowls of caramels, and M&Ms, and broken-up bits of chocolate chip cookies. And I was next in line, and I thanked him profusely as he mixed all the toppings together. He threw two scoops of ice cream in a bowl and topped it off with the randoms and handed it to me.

But it was clear the pastor was getting hungry himself.

"What I really want to do,” he said as he went to the giant gumball machine behind him, with a series of chutes for each flavor and size, “is to lay down right here and dump these things into my mouth.”

And right there, for dramatic effect, he positioned his mouth at the chute.

“Can’t blame you,” I said. “Food is just fun.”

“But that's the problem, isn’t it?” he said. "I could never figure out why food is so much fun.” He paused and said, reflectively, “I always wanted to love God as much as I love food, but food comes back to haunt me hourly. It’s always at the door, knocking. It never leaves my mind for too long, and when I get it I'm in heaven — ice cream totally consumes my whole soul.”

“And?”

“It's just… with God I have to try.”

I pondered what he said for a second and then hit back. “Oh, don't feel so bad. It’s not like He’s losing out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, get your mind off food for a moment. Don’t you feel that way about women?”

He glanced around, afraid to answer as we walked back into the church.

“Oh come on,” I continued. “You don’t see some nice legs in a short skirt and BAM — your whole being lights up?”

We were now sitting on the pews eating ice cream and surrounded by the other parishioners, so I gave him a break.

“Look,” I continued, “this could be true for any number of so-called distracting things. You get mad at yourself for not being ‘dedicated’ to God, for not sitting around in prayer meetings all day, but you're obsessed with His creation. Isn’t that kinda the same thing, in a roundabout way?”

He gave me that uncomfortable side-to-side headshake that says kinda.

“All I’m saying is don’t worry — God wins either way. And yeah, maybe the toys He left us are too good. Maybe we chase them the wrong way sometimes, or we’re worried we’ll chase them in the wrong way, or we’re dreaming about chasing them the wrong way. And that makes it all uncomfortable and dangerous. But isn’t it still beautiful? Aren’t we mesmerized all the time by it?”

He shot back, “you're missing my point. I just want to enjoy serving God the way I enjoy food. I want church to be as fun as sports. I don't want it to be forced — another chore. I just want it to be natural. Almost biological.”

“By enjoying the food you are serving God in a sense. Just do it in a way that doesn’t ruin the point of the food in the first place. Look, doesn’t Paul say in Colossians 1 that everything came from God and He exists through everything?”

“Yeah.”

"Well then isn’t the food His own personal gift to you right now?”

“Uhh... yeah, I guess.”

“Then don't worry about whether you love it ‘more than Him.’ Worry about not saying thank you. When you see a beautiful woman, don’t worry so much that you're attracted to her ‘more than you love God.’ Thank God for being a great artist — for making her the way she is, and for making you to like it. It takes the sting out of it.”

I continued.

“You ever realize that what you see in front of you is more beautiful than any book, or movie, or painting? People take pictures of things and frame them on the wall. Well, you're living in that artwork — all the time. You just don't take the time to focus and notice it. You see drops of dew sitting on blades of grass, throwing long shadows over concrete in the morning light, and you hear the chirping of birds, and see rays of light peeking through the fence, and you never think to yourself, ‘wow, what a work of art.’ That's where your lack of religion lies. Not in your lack of dedication, but in your lack of wonder, your lack of gratitude.”

I went on.

“Every 'work of art’ we make is just a caricature of either what exists right in front of us, or what exists inside of us. And here’s where I think you and I split ways. I think what you call ‘God’ is another one of these caricatures. I think it’s a hand-painted picture of a sunset when the real sky is right in front of you. And you never marvel at the real one.”

“What I’m saying is that the whole story about who God is and what He wants for us — what He wants from us — is only a small part of the picture. You'll never be happy ‘dedicating yourself to God’ because your idea of dedication is all wrong — because your idea of God is too small. And it’s also too boring. You've created a version of God in your head, based on a few things you’ve heard — a bare silhouette — and you're trying to fit yourself to the caricature. You can't celebrate God the way you want to because you don’t see God in a bowl of ice cream. You don’t see Him in a nice pair of legs, or a blade of grass. You never stop and think, just for once, that God is in the gumballs, and that He is the thing making you enjoy them.”

Others were starting to listen by this point, and he became embarrassed that I was preaching to him in his own church. So I started to wrap things up.

“Pastor, better things are coming. Even better things than these. Someday we're going to be clean, and God isn’t going to hide himself in the same creation He expresses Himself in. We’re going to see Him face-to-face, and talk to Him, and dance. And we’re going to be able to enjoy reality fully instead of being overwhelmed by its goodness.”

“But we mistake many things that are God Himself, His winks, His gifts, as something other than Him — as something competing with Him. And this separating of ‘the profane' from ‘the divine’ is part of what's killing us. The problem was never with the beauty of the world, the pure fun of it. It was always divine. The problem was always with us — how we went nuts over it, what we did with it.”

At that he turned away and began to walk. And I said to him, “thanks for the ice cream,” but he kept walking; and I said it again and he kept walking, and I said it again and again and again, because I was worried he wouldn't know I was grateful for it. And I realized at that moment that He didn’t know I was from God, so he wasn’t grateful for me. And I also realized that I wasn’t thanking Him for the ice cream. I was thanking God for sending him to me so I could learn something about myself, and I was desperate to let God know it.

And then I woke up.

Yours,

-J

P.S. Once you’ve had an epiphany like this, it’s tempting to pretend that “everything is okay” — a mindless pantheism that strips God of His moral nature, and is just as backward a caricature, in the end, as the belief that He only cares about your character.

But the fact is God is just as much Mother Nature as He is your fear of it — your revulsion to it. He’s just as much the present moment as He is your desperate attempt to change it. And just as The Bible states, in no uncertain terms, that God cares very much about how you act (and its corollary: just as much about what you think), He also cares very much about how much you enjoy.

Aside from this, the people who say “every word of the Bible is inspired” are the most likely to paint God as a stern, uncompromising, sexless authoritarian jerk. But the parts of the Bible they gloss over are the parts that prove He isn't. Ecclesiastes implies that God is in the riddle — not necessarily just the answer. The Song of Solomon implies that God is in sex — and, if you know who the Shulamite is (hint: not Solomon's first wife), that He’s even in lust. Job implies that God is in the “evil” — in the rock-bottom disaster that strips man of even his dignity. And the Psalms prove that God is in the song, the fury, the ecstasy, the loneliness, the desperation, the feeling of dirtiness that comprises some of the most reflective moments in the true believer's life.

The boondocks of the Bible are the monkey-wrench God threw into our conventions — a carefully planted nail-bomb that blows holes in the box we made for Him. And when Jesus says the stones will cry out, it doesn’t mean God’s going to make them come alive with actual mouths. It means the things you never paid attention to, the most dreary, the most forgettable, the things you put under your feet without noticing them, are alive with the majesty and the genius of our Creator. We have yet to see the union between the shadow and the rainbow, the mountain and the valley, the parasite and the flower. But when we notice them for what they are, even the grains of sand on the beach will be worthy of their own songs.

Martin Luther, speaking of God’s moral nature, and how everything in Creation, even the worst of it, is a masterstroke, put it another way,

God works by contraries... a man feels himself to be lost in the very moment when he is on the point of being saved. When God is about to justify a man, he damns him. Whom he would make alive he must first kill. God's favour is so communicated in the form of wrath that it seems furthest when it is at hand. Man must first cry out that there is no health in him. He must be consumed with horror. This is the pain of purgatory.... In this disturbance salvation begins. When a man believes himself to be utterly lost, it is only then when the light breaks.