Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

by Sarah Bessey

Tickle is of the opinion that the Church is on the edge of a great shift: she calls it the Great Emergence. She writes “about every five hundred years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at that time, become an intolerable carapace that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur.”

It occurred to me on that day that if I got to know Him—really, truly know Him—I could perhaps begin to spot counterfeit Jesuses.

Jesus came to show us the true God: God in the world and in our lives and in our relationships with one another. If we want to know what God is like, we can look to Jesus. And if we want to read the Bible well, we need to start with Jesus and remain in Jesus, and we need to let Jesus explain it. The Bible doesn’t trump Jesus; Jesus interprets the Bible.

I had been silenced or shut down by people putting words in his mouth or intent in his words that he never intended. I had missed so much of the beauty of Paul.

He wasn’t perfect. He was complex, yes, but oh, such diamond-like, multifaceted brilliance. Poet theologian, evangelist and pastor, leader and thorn in the side. A radical, contradictory truth-teller, a teacher with a tender father heart, a broken and humble servant—all Paul.

If we want to know what God is really, truly like, we look to Christ first: the Scriptures testify to Jesus, not the other way around.

am sick to death of prosperity teaching masking the poverty of the soul and of ignoring the cries for justice from the oppressed. I am sick of vending machine prayers, performance, easy answers, and formulas that don’t add up. I am sick of feeling like a misbehaving cog in someone else’s broken-down machine.

Sometimes we have to cut away the old for the new to grow. We are a resurrection people, darling. God can take our death and ugliness and bitterness, our hurt and our wounds, and make something beautiful and redemptive. For you. In you. With you.

I was part of the Church. We all were part of the Church if we claimed Jesus as Master. I didn’t need to pretend allegiance to everything, but I did need to be part of a community.

When I stopped going to church, I was lonely. I can’t lie about that. But it can be just as lonely inside the building as out. I know this too well.

But a big reason many of us show up on a Sunday morning is that we also want to be part of a village. We go to church because that is how we know to build our community: we need someone to love us and show up in our lives.

Some folks think we need to be vulnerable and transparent and deeply connected with everyone and their dog and Facebook and our church. But that’s just not so. Brené Brown says we should only share with people who have earned the right to hear our story.3 We’re not made for friendship promiscuity. That’s not community anyway, that’s just casting our pearls before swine, and it’s probably a profanity to our souls.

So this is my learned spiritual discipline: I talk to my Somewheres. I say discipline because that is what it takes for me to reach out during conflict. It takes intentional discipline to be honest while I’m still in the midst of the unfinished struggle. I have to say the words out loud: here are my contradictions. I don’t always do it well. Funnily enough, I can be even more reluctant to share my victories than I am to share my imperfections. The universal Canadian love-language is self-deprecation. And yet sometimes cool things happen, amazing things even, and I have found I need somewhere to unapologetically brag too.

Real life is the undignified life, and it is the classroom for holiness. If you can’t find God while you’re changing diapers or serving food or hanging out with your friends, you won’t find God at the worship service or the spiritual retreat or the regimented daily quiet time or the mission field. If you can’t embrace healthy conflict, you’ll never have a truly honest friendship.

Kurt Vonnegut once counseled, “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”7

Real, hard conversations usually only come after a lot of surface conversations.

But Jesus taught something quite different: the Gospel of the Kingdom. This is discipleship, apprenticeship. Sin management makes converts, the Gospel of the Kingdom makes disciples of Jesus Christ.

the Kingdom of God, we join with God in co-creation, in the work of the new earth. We love and we follow Jesus. We shape our lives into His life, to live here on earth as He would live among us. We weren’t called to follow political parties or ideology, nationalism, consumerism, or power. Instead, we were called to apprentice ourselves to Jesus’ way of life.

So now when I think of that whole wrath-of-God thing, I think of it as a holy thing because it’s born of love, it’s directed at injustice and oppression, at anything that diminishes the imago dei in us.

Perhaps it makes sense then that those practices have only grounded me further into my own tradition. Liturgy and tradition enriched my life, but they haven’t changed my place of belonging.

“The weight of these sad times we must obey, and must obey just because they are sad times, sad and bewildering times for people who try to hold on to the Gospel and witness to it somehow when in so many ways the weight of our sadness all but crushes the life out of it,” writes Frederick Buechner.

I’ve been thinking of our Jesus. How He took the bread and tore it with His own hands: This is my body broken for you. How He poured out the wine: This is my blood poured out for you. First the death, then the resurrection. We like to skip that first part. We like to think we can have the resurrection without the death.

When I really began to depart from the Word of Faith teachings of my childhood, I left behind the promise of guaranteed outcomes. I can’t buy that anymore. I have seen too many people go down fighting—people who loved the Lord, who, in anyone’s estimation, “deserved” a miracle, people who played by our arbitrary proof-texted rules for answered prayer. We blamed the sufferer because we believed the only other alternative was to blame God.

I didn’t learn how to lament and grieve, how to pray and be in community until I learned that God could be trusted. God is against the evil and suffering in the world. He is not the origin of evil nor does He “use” evil as a means to justify some cosmic end. Rather, God fights evil.

I couldn’t trust God if I suspected God was behind our deepest griefs and injustices. This is where the sovereignty arguments break down for me. I don’t blame God for much anymore. I see God as the rescue from the injustices, not the cause of them. I see God as the redeemer of the pain, not the origin of it. I see the promise of sovereignty not as hypercontrol over the minute and painful details of the world, but as a faithful promise that all things will be restored, all things will be redeemed, all things will be rescued. And again, I go back to our Jesus.

In Christ, we learned the truth: “Jesus didn’t come to declare that everything already manifests the Father’s will. He came, rather, to establish the Father’s will, because the world as it now is doesn’t consistently manifest God’s will,” writes Greg Boyd.4

And the truth remains: the crucified God, as personified in Jesus, revealed that God is always on the side of suffering wherever it is found6 and God’s endgame is resurrection.

I know that some people find comfort in believing that God’s sovereignty, His plan for all things, is behind their suffering and grief. It gives meaning to our grief, I get that. But I don’t think it’s true. In fact, I think that’s a crappy thing to say and a crappy thing to believe about God.

No one will ever convince me that God made my babies die or that God killed our friend with cancer or that a hurricane is an act of God as punishment for sin. Instead, I think sovereignty is the promise that it will all be healed in the end. Sovereignty means that all will be held. That God is at work to bring redemption and reconciliation, that somehow at the end of all things, we don’t escape from the goodness that pursues us, the life we are promised, the love that redeems.

Sometimes the most holy work we can do is listen to each other’s stories and take their suffering into our hearts, carrying each other’s burdens and wounds to Christ together, in faith and in lament, together.