Word of Life Church Podcast

The idea that God could and would truly suffer is foreign and scandalous to us. From the dawn of religious consciousness, humanity has shared similar images of God: The Glorious God, The Almighty God, The Holy God, The Merciful God. But the idea that God could suffer is something altogether unexpected. But God did suffer; torture, crucifixion, and finally death. On the cross Jesus suffers with us as God. God not only became human, he became the kind of human we don't want to be; A despised and rejected outcast, a failure. Jesus Christ God with us in life, in struggle, in sorrow, in pain, and in death. Jesus died the worst kind of death, that he might go down to the ugliest depths of death. But this suffering is not just an act of solidarity; it's also an act of salvation. God in Christ suffered death that he might enter into death and lead the way out. God saves us by suffering death with us! Only the suffering God can help.

In the Bible, the new day doesn't begin at sunrise or at midnight, but rather, at sunset. God wants us to see that each new day begins with darkness. The new day does not begin by being able to see— The new day begins with being unable to see. Likewise, spiritual growth does not begin with knowing. Holding onto certitude and insisting you have all the answers prevents spiritual progress. The process of spiritual growth is knowing, unknowing, and then new knowing. There are some things you have to unlearn before you can make spiritual progress. We want to think that to make spiritual progress all we need is positive addition. But a lot of making spiritual progress is about negative subtraction. Unknowing is harder than not knowing. It's not the learning that is hard, it's the unlearning.

Religion can be misused as a way of avoiding the reality of pain. Religion becomes delusional and destructive when misconstrued as a guaranteed way of avoiding pain. This phenomenon is dramatized in the cycles of debate found in the Hebrew scriptures of Job. The first lesson we should learn from the book of Job is to be wary of explaining to sufferers why they are suffering. If we accept that Job was a blameless man who suffered outrageous and undeserved misfortune, as the scriptures says, then our false certitudes, our easy answers, and our trite clichés need to be called into question. Perhaps the main lesson we are to learn is that blame is the satan and serves no good purpose—whether it's the friends blaming Job, or Job nearly blaming God.

The bread and wine in communion are more than a symbol, but not less than that. In the broken bread we see not only a symbol of the brokenness of Christ given for the sins of the world, we also see a picture of the church. Jesus blesses us; he breaks us; he gives us to the world. This three-step Eucharistic action provides for us our core identity. We are blessed. We are broken. We are given. In our brokenness we admit we are broken by sin and we also choose to break open ourselves to allow people to see us as we are. This kind of vulnerability is the pathway of love. We cannot love or be loved if we do not trust. We do not trust and do not become trustworthy if we do not know. We do not know and are not known if we are not vulnerable.

Beginning at Bethlehem, Jesus enters the world of the wounded and is himself wounded. Yet there is a beautiful, sacred mystery: It is by those wounds that we are healed. In bringing our hurts to the wounds of Christ we begin to find our healing. But for this to happen we must first acknowledge our wounds, our own pain. In our culture we find this hard to do, because we are schooled in denial. We have been taught to deceive ourselves and deny our pains and our wounds. Of course that kind of denial only bottles up the pain until it poisons the soul. Depression, anger, addiction, sickness are what result from un-lamented pain. When we’re schooled in denial we earn a degree in how to stay miserable. But when we face our pain with honesty, when we grieve and lament openly, we open up space for the comfort of God, given by others, to come to us and heal us.

The Church is the society of Jesus. That is, it is God's alternative society built around Jesus. Within the various societies of the world there are pockets of the society of Jesus, consisting of baptized communities learning to live the Jesus way and embracing the politics of Jesus. As these Jesus societies are faithful to the Jesus way they are the light of the world, the salt of the earth. But if they are unfaithful, they become nothing more than religious versions of the wider culture. This is why our first task must always be to remain faithful to Jesus, not to be "effective" or "successful." At Word of Life Church, we want to learn to be a faithful society of Jesus in 21st century American society.

We inhabit a world of hurt. Pain is an ever-present possibility. Grief stalks us. This is not just true of people in third-world countries suffering deep, grinding poverty. This reality is not restricted to the victims of violent regimes in the Middle East. It is the human condition. Pain is no respecter of persons. It comes to us all. To take part in the journey of life, pain is inevitable and unavoidable. Part of our Christian hope is that God will someday lead his creation beyond pain. We have the hope of a world beyond hurt. But our present world is quite different. For now pain remains the price of admission into God's good creation. What we see in the Bible portraits is people who learned how to transform their pain. They learned that by grace we can transform our pain into a kind of grace: A grace that heals.

In the final track of the summer 2013 series, Finding God On Your iPod, Pastor Brian Zahnd examines the song “Show Me The Place” by Leonard Cohen. It is a serious and prayerful reflection on the Incarnation. If we drift too far into the realm of ideas and out of the realm of matter, we easily drift away from Christianity and toward Gnosticism. Christianity is an intensely earthy, material religion. God came to earth, not merely as an idea, but in the form of a man, with all of the dirtiness and pain that human life requires. God shares human suffering with us. He suffered sorrow, bereavement, betrayal, rejection, torture, and even death. This is the great scandal of Christianity: We worship a suffering, crucified God.

In the final Sunday morning installment of the 2013 edition of Finding God On Your iPod, the rock & roll foursome Alabama Shakes tell us that "you gotta hold on". Take hold of the life of the age to come... and hold on! We can't settle for the script of the old age; we must lay hold of a new way of being human. Jesus in his death and resurrection really did re-found the world. The powers and principalities with their ways and means of death have been overthrown. Believe that in the resurrection of Jesus a new world order has been inaugurated. Sometimes it's hard to see that God's new age has dawned, but hold on! The bitterness of death and the sting of salty tears is still with us, but hold on! The ugly specters of war, poverty, and injustice still haunt us, but hold on!

Our 21st-century Western culture prescribes consumerism to quench the thirst of our soul. The up-and-coming hip-hop artist Macklemore uncovers the fraud of such prescription in his track called Wing$. As consumerism is exposed, it leaves us wondering is there anything that can truly quench the thirst of the human soul.