Beloved Stranger

Why are we here? 

To drink the sea?

To swallow the sun whole? 

God is light, and rain.

Our hearts are stone. 

Waiting in the dark. 

Longing to know. 

Our minds like maps

With whole continents 

Missing.

See, my religion is not God. 

Nor are my thoughts about God, God.

The Bible on my desk is not God. 

My church building is not God. 

My pastor? Not God.

These can only point the way

And there's a reason that 

Pointing things point away 

From themselves.

Because they are not the things 

That they are pointing to. 

Easy to get confused, but: 

Only God is God. Alone. 

Fiercely intimate, 

Devastatingly foreign, 

Heart-breakingly quiet, 

Deafeningly clear.

Stranger, yet knowable,

But not the way you

Master Algebra. 

More like the way

You remember your phone number

From your childhood home

No matter how many times

You move.

303-377-8095.

He’s in our bones like that. 

Like where we used to live. 

Like my very first memory in color: 

Running around naked, laughing,

Holding an orange squirt gun

Upside down. 

Familiar, but not even close. 

Close, but not familiar. 

He is God. 

The one who stands apart. 

He has no Kingdom, Phylum, 

Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. 

He is the place where classification ceases. 

And our minds like shot glasses. 

Hearts like porous rock. 

We are not guaranteed

To figure this out

In time for dinner.   

I could sit in church

For decades upon decades

Singing all the hymns

Taking all the notes, 

Stacking up all the years

Like uneaten pancakes

While my heart starves

In a closet:  Unchanged. 

Because I was only willing

To offer God the right side

Of my brain. 

I could stand at the shore of God:

Bathing suit fastened, goggles down, 

And just stand there. For years. 

Just stand there. 

And miss the glistening chrysalis

Of water surrounding me, 

The sound of mystery shushing my ears, 

Rocked and moved by cool waves

Like an infant in arms.

I could know things about Him

And never know Him. 

Before there were schools of theology

Before there were leather-bound Bibles

And epistles and bishops and hymns

Before there were Baptists

And Lutherans and Anglicans

And Charismatics

And Greek Orthodox

And Roman Catholics,

Before there were ecumenical councils

In Chalcedon and Nicea,

Fiercely debating the nature of Christ,

Before there were Crusades

And Inquisitions, blood soaked

Ground for the sake of conquest,

And power. 

Before we forgot

That His kingdom is not 

Of this world. 

Before you could take your pick 

Of 20 churches within a 10-mile radius,

Before church became something we do

And not something we are;

There was a small band

Of fisherman, zealots, 

Tax collectors, prostitutes, 

Who came into contact

With a Rabbi named Jesus. 

Who’s longing eyes

And burning words

Beckoned them to forsake

Jobs and homes and family

To know Him. 

He set their hearts on fire.

Shattered their normal lives 

And caught them ablaze

Like carcasses on the altar. 

He told them:

Yes, God has given you

His word on parchments

And out of the mouths

Of the Prophets.

Yes, He gave you Moses. 

But before Moses was, 

I am.  

Behold, I come to you. 

Ocean wrapped in skin. 

A mystery incarnate. 

Behold, I have come. 

In the scroll of the book

It is written of me. 

Elohim kissing your eyes

With lips of flesh. 

And setting your hearts

On fire. I am He. 

The reason your heart

Keeps checking its watch. 

Whether you know it or not, 

You been waiting for Me. 

I’ve come a long journey

To meet you.  Face to face. 

To hug your neck and weep

With joy into your hair, 

Once you knew of Me. 

Now, know Me. 

Zenith of human history. 

The day God came down. 

One face among the billions of faces

Who ripped the jaws of death wide open

By dying in our places. 

His body broken, blood spilled into our veins

To make us blood brothers and blood sisters;

Forever changed.   

Advent is like the way

A kiss can end a war. 

One strong embrace with tears

Can somehow snatch away the years of bitterness;

One touch can traverse the grand canyons between us

In ways that words could never. 

So God came down

And dwelt among us.

Full of grace and truth.  

And a rambling band

Of misfits, the unlikeliest of men,

Rough bearded and callus handed, 

Petty and unschooled, 

Found themselves holding hands with God

Like school children crossing the street.  

And not only were they 

Never, ever the same. 

They were reborn. 

DNA rewritten.

Cowards became martyrs.

Haters became lovers. 

Dead men came alive.  

Not by textbooks

Or colleges.

Or sermons. 

Or spells.  

The Light stitched Himself

Into their souls. 

God touched them. 

Kissed their eyes. 

The touch of rain and sun

On open faces.  

The touch that causes 

Green things to grow

In deep and untouched places.

That I may know Him. 

This was the cry. To know Him

Not just that I may know about Him, 

Not that I may find the right box

To put Him in, Not that I may

Get a blood sample to put under 

My microscope, but: 

That I may know Him. 

This is the cry of the Christian: 

That I may know Him. 

That I may feel those nail-pierced hands

Pry open my chest,

Scratchy palms 

Fastening around this heart of stone, 

And yank it out, like a bad engine, finally,

A heavy thud in the dirt behind me. 

And that I may feel those same hands

Reach inside me

And plant something 

Electric.

We are rewritten. 

We are reborn. 

We are eclipsed. 

We are crucified.

We are not what we were, 

Else we are not Christian. 

For Christian is

By definition: 

Erased and rewritten. 

Smitten with God, 

Gloriously forgiven,

Passionately driven

To know Him. 

Not all who check off 

The Christian box 

Are the Church. 

We are the transformed. 

We are the radiant. 

We are the unlikely, 

And the lovers

Of the unlikely.

We are those who know Him,

And seek and reach and tremble

Our whole lives

To know Him

World without end. 

Amen.