Last week, a white guy harrassed a black family for parking in a handicap spot at a Florida convenience store.

Per security video footage, the black dad got out of his car, confronted the white guy, pushed him to the ground, then stood at a distance as they exchanged words. According to local “stand your ground laws,” white guy can legally discharge his firearm if threatened, which he did, claiming that the black guy made an agressive move towards him, making the shooting legal.

The video shows a different scenario.

Yesterday, white guy was convicted of murder.

Over a parking space.

2 years ago, you’d be hard pressed to find video footage of someone being shot. Now it’s at our fingertips, and you can bet that there’ll be more. Social media has few rules, and doesn’t seem to care about ruining our innocence.

We’re now exposed to the horrors of this world like no previous generation. Earthquakes, fire, disease, racism, stupidity, war, rumors of war, etc., all in our face.

The world seems like it’s falling apart.

Things are actually no worse than they’ve ever been. Our world will always be a broken, unfair, dangerous place, but the wealthiest parts are insulated from it all. It’s easy for people who live in relative ease, comfort, and safety to believe that the wole planet is a suburban paradise.

It’s not. Never has been.

And while the internet’s happy to show us the occasional good Samaritan, it loves the dark stuff – that’s where the money’s made, and we’re willing customers.

It’s interesting that there’s also what seems to be a mass exodus in the Christian community. Leaders, pastors, influencers, etc., in increasing numbers, are bailing.

Faith no longer makes sense and is, at best, a benign presence, if not a harmful one.

Arguably, it’s hard to be a Christian these days as our culture moves at breakneck speed away from things that our Bible’s seem to value. And if you’ve attended church with any regularity for a number of years, it gets boring.

And the people of our faith don’t seem to be too concerned about stepping into the broken and unfair places of our world. Turns out that the Christian world can be broken and unjust as well.

Social media really loves that one.

But at the top of the list of reasons why people are packing their spiritual baggage is the fact that the world seems to be spinning out of control, and God, and His people, aren’t doing anything about it.

For a Christian, an out of control world is difficult to reconcile with the Bible’s account of a good, loving God who doesn’t stomach evil and, ultimately, wants the world to be a good place.

If God exists, this world wouldn’t be as it is. How can we place faith in a God who allows people to hurt like this, or a church that doesn’t want to do anything abou it?

You won’t find this exodus in non-Western, underdeveloped countries, where everyone knows that the world’s always been a screwed up mess. The majority of these departing folk hail from cultures that pursue, with mercenary abandon, ease, wealth, and safety.

We say, “God shouldn’t let this happen.” They say, “God does whatever He wants.”

I fall more in the “God shouldn’t let this happen” camp. I feel the anger and sense of injustice when horrible things happen, like kids, who’ve already gotten a solid helping of racism, watching their dad get shot at a 7-11. God can do anything He wants, why not step in and stop this?

I also feel the burn that comes with Christians who don’t seem concerned with the myriad social injustices swirling around, also marketed heavily by social media. Wanna make an American Christian angry? Talk about systemic racism, or poverty, or immigration.

The church is just as broken as the world it’s hoping to serve.

So, I understand when people get fed up. Things should be different. There should be far less suffering, especially the horrible kind, and Christians should spend less time pointing fingers and more time helping.

As our phones constantly educate us on how things really are, we become increasingly convinced that none of this religious stuff is working, that it’s all a sham.

I share many of the frustrations that the departed/departing are feeling, especially with regards to racism, justice, and our posture towards the Gay community.

We’re hurting people. Some of those are my friends. I’d prefer that we stop, and I’m compelled to cash in whatever chips I’ve acquired to attempt some level of change.

But I’m not ready to bail yet. Here’s why:

First, I’ve spent years in church. Years. I’ve served in almost every position imaginable, from pastor to janitor, and I’m a different human as a result. Serving these communities – trying my best to learn the ways of Jesus, being encouraged by different leaders to become a better version of myself, etc. – has brought a level of salvation into my personal brokenness like nothing else.

I’ve always known the church to be a busted place. People are hurting, angry, frightened. Add to that a bit of theology and some misread Bible passages and things can get ugly, fast. God’s people have a history of getting things wrong.

But that’s not the only story. Sometimes we get things right. For example, the Christian world spends billions a year advocating for the poor and marginalized of our world.

Billions.

I’m not claiming that the good we do cancels out the bad. Maybe it does, but to me, I’m not ready to evaluate religion’s overall efficacy based on the internet’s moral tally sheet.

The good that religion does never makes the headlines. It’s popular and sexy to only focus on the misguided parts of Christianity. Advocacy for faith is bad news for any media outlet.

As a pastor, I’ve seen people take some pretty courageous steps towards their own healing, or the healing of others. A friend of mine once said, “people don’t change.” Not true. I’ve seen people change too many times.

Second, I have some philosophical problems with the idea that God’s supposed to intervene when things get horrible. Let me explain.

Let’s say that there’s a God – a being who can somehow procure a universe, make it spin, and grow some people on one of its planets. It wouldn’t just be a powerful being, it would have infinitely more knowlege than I do. It’s understanding of truth would be higher than mine.

Then, this God writes a book, explaining how the world works, who He is, who we are, and how we’re supposed to live as a result. Many Christians claim this to be the message of the Bible. Let’s assume for a moment that’s true.

Because of the vast expanse between His ken and ours, there would be multiple places in this book that don’t make sense, or seem stupid. By definition, there would be entire chapters that seem unjust.

That’s the number one reason people reject the scriptures. It’s not the history of canonization, or internal/external evidence for or against, it’s merely the fact that this book doesn’t jive with the way we think things should be.

Maybe the Bible’s complete crap. But if it is the actual words of God, we still wouldn’t agree.

Also, by definition, there would things about the way His world operates that we wouldn’t agree with. Multiple things. When we say, “things shouldn’t be as they are,” we’re saying, “From where I sit, things are wrong.”

I agree that things are horrible. But when we decide that the world shouldn’t be as it is, we’re embracing the idea that we’ve understood everything. From our very limited perspective, with our relatively limited ability to grasp higher truths, we declare how things should be.

That’s like two kids in a sandbox trying to figure out why mom and dad were making weird noises in the bedroom last night. Were they wrestling? Maybe they’re sick?

In our high tech, high discovery, post-industrial-revolution culture, we’ve become too impressed with our ability to understand. Couple that with our knowlege of good and evil getting turned up to level 13, compliments of social media, and things get funky. Fast.

Either way, I can expect that more Western Christians will be leaving my faith. While that threatens me for no good reason (working on that), I don’t think there’s cause for alarm.

This is all a sign that things are changing, though I’m unsure of the direction.

My job is not to judge these folk. It is and will always be to grind whatever grist the mill requires to become more like Jesus – more compassion, mercy, sacrifice, hope, joy – so much so that others are infected with it.

If it’s all a sham, it’s still the best way to live.

Jesus told the story of a young man who, in first-century Jewish parlance, sinned his brains out. It’s difficult for us modern Westerners to understand how bad this kid’s behavior was.

Suffice it to say that we’d be utterly appalled.

To top it off, the young man leaves the holy land of Israel to go and live “in a far off place” with pagans – people who the ancient Jewish mind considered to be godless, morally bankrupt, spiritually filthy people.

He then spends his entire inheritance sinning what’s left of his brains out.

You can’t get worse than this guy.

Ultimately, he parties more than his purse will allow, realizes that he might die, and makes plans to come home.

His first order of business is to craft a speech that he hopes will convince his father to at least make him a slave. That way he can eat, have a place to stay, not die, etc.

It’s at this point that the story tends to get misinterpreted.

The kid’s speech goes like this:

“Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me as one of your hired servants.”

This reads like he’s super sorry. What we miss is the fact that he’s not going home because he feels bad about his error(s), and he’s certainly not going home because he misses his family.

He is, in fact, not sorry, and he’s still not a good person.

He’s hungry. He doesn’t want to die. His plan is to tell his father what he thinks he wants to hear. His “speech” is nothing short of an attempt at manipulation.

Add that to his already long list of stupid.

At this point, Jesus’ audience would be expecting a not-so-happy ending. No self-respecting, first-century, wealthy Jewish father would put up with this crap. Sure, the kid will go home, but his dad might just put him out of his misery.

When father and son are reunited, the kid recites his speech. Word. For. Word, just like he’d rehearsed it:

“Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight. I am no longer worthy to be called your son…”

But dad doesn’t care. his lost son has been returned. He’s beside himself with joy and can’t wait to restore him to his former glory. He doesn’t even let the kid finish his speech.

His love eclipses everything.

Then, dad throws a huge party, which completely pisses off the oldest, much more obedient son, not to mention Jesus’ audience. If we understood how horrible this kid’s behavior was, we’d be angry too. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever that this person has done to earn forgiveness, much less full restoration.

And a party to boot?

This story would be a full-on frontal assault to the way a first century Jewish person thought about God, His forgiveness, and upon whom He gives favor.

This would shiver their understanding of repentance to the timbers.

It assaults ours too. That’s why we interpret this into something that better fits our understanding of God. In our version, yeah, the kid’s a sinner, but he’s not that bad. And he’s sorry. He repents, asks for forgiveness, etc.

To us, the father forgives his son because he repented of his sin.

He didn’t. There was no apology. The only thing the kid did was to come home.

Repentance

We tend to believe that God only grants forgiveness if we ask for it. In modern Western Chrisitan parlance, repentance – an attitude that accepts responsibility and is truly sorry for whatever sin has been committed – is fundamental to the forgiveness of God.

In other words, God will forgive us, but we have to earn it.

Not true in the above parable.

What is Jesus trying to tell us? We can sin our brains out and everything will be OK? Sin doesn’t matter? We don’t have to ask for forgiveness?

Unfortunately for our neatly wrapped and packaged understandings of God, this is a difficult thing to integrate. We’re tempted to craft a system or two in which this parable fits into what we already believe, but I think that’s the wrong way to go.

Personally, I’m not sure what to do with this, but I’ll offer some reflections on how this jacks about with my understanding of the relationship between repentance and the forgiveness of God.

The Bible is full of stories about people getting punished for their faithlessness. So it’s understandable when us Bible folk come to believe that obedience to God is the most important thing for our lives. It’s also understandable that we get a bit lost as the issue of morality actually becomes God, weird as that is.

In this, we begin to think about who’s worthy of forgiveness and who’s not; who’s in and who’s out – an activity commonly referred to as “judging others,” something Jesus told us not to do.

But it’s fun, and comes part and parcel with the belief that we’ve got God and His forgiveness all figured out. Multiple iterations of bad theology come from this.

For example, what about the sins that we don’t know we’re committing; the sins that are impossible to repent of? Does God forgive us for those?

In Jesus’s day, that was covered. Daily, in the sacred temple, a lamb was slaughtered and sacrificed for the “unknown” sins of Israel. You couldn’t get away from the smoke, the smell, and the constant reminder that we’re all clueless.

This is where the phrase “lamb of God” comes from. John the Baptist didn’t forever attach this moniker to Jesus because he believed him to be gentle and fuzzy. He was making a direct reference to this daily sacrifice that applied to the un-owned infractions of the people of Israel.

But John believed Jesus’ sacrifice extended far beyond any national boundaries:

Behold, the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

In John’s mind, Jesus would somehow wash all of us clean, remove all of our infractions – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc., even the ones we’re not aware of, especially the ones we’re not sorry for.

They would all simply go away, because of Jesus, and God would look at us as if nothing ever happened.

I know, some of you are reading this thinking, “blah blah blah, here he goes again, Jesus, Jesus, blah blah.”

I get it. It’s crazy.

But I also know who you are, and I know you to be someone who wrestles with guilt and fear about the myriad ways that you’ve fallen short of your ideal of how a human is supposed to live.

Christianity is an invitation to lay waste to the guilt and shame that’s been holding you back from becoming who you truly are. These tax the human soul like nothing else.

It’s also an invitation to stop spending so much time considering the sins of others, to stop loving the “obedient” ones, and marginalizing the “sinners.”

Our job is to consider our own sin, to accept the unconditional, boundless forgiveness of God, then extend it to others, then shamelessly wallow in the peace that comes when shame and guilt finally get their comeuppance.

So, yeah, for the small percentage of personal sin that we’re aware of, let’s repent, and be sorry, and commit to change. But let’s stop believing that our repentance changes God, or His posture towards all of humanity.

Repentance doesn’t change God, it changes us.

The prodigal son wasn’t sorry. Neither are we, in many cases, yet still, somehow, there’s forgiveness.

But because we’ve made obedience and morality our God, and because we’ve become addicted to the belittling of people who don’t behave or think or believe as we think they should, we keep ourselves at arm’s length from this crazy, nonsensical brand of forgiveness that God offers.

Jesus gave us the story of a kid who had no idea of the gravity or magnitude of his sin so that we would put ourselves in his worn out shoes, understand the true nature of God, and how far His forgiveness travels.

But the story ends with a warning.

The other son, the “obedient” one, who’s a little too impressed with himself, becomes lost. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with his sinful brother. His father begs him to join the huge party that’s going on, but the lost brother can’t give up his allegience to right and wrong, and refuses the invitation.

That’s where the story ends.

And that’s where I’ll end my thoughts. How many relationships have I broken because I can’t forgive as God does? My failure here implies that I’ve not yet managed to recieve His forgiveness, to let it so overthrow me that I wouldn’t think twice about extending it to others.

On the night of April 1st, 1999, 10 year old Dren Caka was taken captive along with others from his hometown of Gjakova in Kosovo. Everyone was forced to sit on the living room floor of a neighbor’s home and wait the few short moments before members of the Serb police force opened fire. Dren was shot but pretended to be dead as the gunmen set fire to the home.

His baby sister was still alive but Dren couldn’t get her out. He’s the only one who managed to escape. Her screaming still rings in his ears as he wanders zombie-like through the rest of his life.

How can God sit still for this?

If He doesn’t want to do anything about such a horror, He could at least give us an explanation. The best the Bible offers is the idea that God does whatever He wants, in addition to the scads of episodes in the Old Testament where He actually causes suffering – sometimes akin to the story above.

One of the most difficult things about this kind of suffering is that it seems to be pointless, and suffering that doesn’t have a point is patently unjust. Stories of despots, dictators, terrorists and other “bad guys” getting theirs don’t bother us. But children? The poor? Widows and orphans?

Innocent suffering is wrong. Evil. Many in our culture won’t tolerate the idea of a God who not only gives license to pointless suffering, but seems many times to be the cause of it.

It’s the pointlessness of suffering, not the mere existence of it, that garners so many indictments against God, and the most prolific apologetic against His existence. If we were to terminate a pregnancy because the child would be born with a life threatening deformity, or if we amputated someone’s leg to rid the whole body of gangrene, we’d have some supporters. Likewise, if there was some kind of meaning that we could attach to global suffering – some redemption or restoration on a not-so-distant horizon – we might be a bit more comfortable with it all.

But we can’t see past the pain, and we’re given no explanation from God. In the silence we’re left with four difficult options: either there isn’t a point Continue reading God is Nonsense: Why it’s Impossible to Reconcile Faith and Science