All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken:
The crownless again shall be king. - JRR Tolkein, Lord of the Rings
As I packed my bags and boxed up my office, after 12 years in vocational ministry within the Christian church and 8 years on the pastoral staff within the Vineyard collective church body, I announced my life was changing. To my church community, with whom I had been building a new Vineyard Church, joining along side them as their senior pastor, I told them that my journey this far had been one of a tour guide. Strange comparison perhaps, but when we examine the activities and expressions of a tour guide, my two year assignment as their pastor and church planter seemed to be a comparable occupation. A tour guide takes a group of people along where he or she has already previously been, pointing out the sites along the way, educating them on the history and stories of the places and objects they pass. Informing their minds and inspiring their hearts to consider all these things and what, if any, impact these things may have on their own lives. A tour guide is, in a word, the expert. He is paid to be the expert. He is looked to for answers and information. This was the world in which I lived and served for many years and they were all wonderful years in their own ways. In my years as an occupational minister and pastor, I can say that I never once felt taken for granted. Not once did I wish my experience to be any different than it had been. I served along side of very skilled and very powerful professionals and among some of the most compassionate and dedicated believers in the faith. My professional life as a pastor was, in my opinion, very unique and a true blessing.
As that part of my life came to a close and I was shutting down my laptop of professionalism and tour guidery, if I can create that word, I was opening a new reality and beginning a new journey. That Sunday morning of my last, at the little bundle of joy we affectionately called “The Refinery”, I told my church family that I was embarking on a very exciting journey. No longer would I be the Expert. No longer would I be stepping into the boots of the tour guide. No. I was going on an expedition. I was going to be an explorer.
Certainly, an explorer doesn’t take a group of people with him - they can get hurt. They can break a leg. Even death may overtake some poor soul who may fall off a cliff or get eaten by tigers. Ligers even. It’s pretty much my favorite animal. Explorers go off on their own, find out what is out there and then, hopefully, return to their Majesty with grand stories of new lands and landscapes. Perhaps once an Explorer finishes his expeditions sufficiently enough he may return as a tour guide with a few so he may show them the terrain and help them learn the newfound sites. This was my calling. It was something I set out to do. It is from this expedition I return today. Not as an expert. In these lands, I’m beginning to believe, no one ever truly becomes what we would like to think of as an expert. I don’t return with all the answers, nor do I return with everything in its right place. What I am doing is returning with stories of what I’ve seen, where I’ve been and why this journey is important...not just to me, but to the way we think, feel, love and live. Sometimes wondering doesn’t imply you are lost. Sometimes it just means you are looking.
However, to know what I am and was looking for, you must start with me a year or more before my journey began. You mustn’t come into this at the halftime with when I made the switch. You must start at the beginning for my outward journey was simply a late-breaking manifestation of my inward journey. This inward journey began in the summer of 2007, in an historical museum in Yorktown, Virginia.
THE INNER JOURNEY BEGINS
My family and I had gone to Virginia for vacation in the summer of that year and on the road there, I had the ability to read, in one sitting, Spencer Burke’s epic challenge, “A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity.” Immediately upon first reading, I emailed all my closest friends and told them to leave the book alone. Dangerous. In fact, I think I actually told them that it was the most “dangerous theological book I have ever read and it has the potential to completely fuck you up.” Why did it carry so much power? What about it caused such fear? The answer is simple: Truth. The truth is a powerful, no, the truth is the most powerful weapon and tool imaginable.
The thrust of the book was simple: “what if we’re wrong?” Now, it wasn’t asking that in a macrocosmic way that would question the very foundation of everything we believe and know...at least not on the surface. It began with simple questions about what most Evangelical Christians would consider non-negotiable issues of dogmatic truth - issues like what a person must do to be “saved”, whether or not the grace of God is simply poured out on those who claim it, or is it a gift given to all, is there a Jesus beyond the grasp of Christianity? These questions and others filled page after page as it forced me to examine my thoughts and beliefs and to grapple with rightly dividing Truth from Dogma, Faith from Fundamentalism, Infinity from Doctrine.
To go on much further about the book itself, would detract from the main goal of this writing which is to describe the state in which I found myself when I reached the next precipice, weilding an ax to my preconceptions and strong-handed grip on just how much I had finally reduced God to a being I could name, wrangle, corral, tame and control in my very understanding and description of the Force which we can barely comprehend let alone manage or manipulate.
Over the course of the next couple of weeks of vacation, I continued to read this book and explore the author’s intent and ideas. After my second reading, our family reached Yorktown, Virginia where my life was to come into contact with what I can only describe as the beginning of my own Abrahamic experience. Arriving at the Yorktown Victory Center Museum, we wandered around for a few hours until I found myself entranced in a timeline that traced recorded human history. The most recent event was the World Trade Center bombings on September 11, 2001. The oldest event recorded was 15,000 B.C. chronicled as the earliest recorded artfully decorated pottery in South America. Somewhere around 12,000 B.C. was listed on this timeline as the earliest evidence of boats in and around Japan. Around 8,000 B.C. had listed tools, cooking items and other evidences of civilization. Scattered up and down the timeline were events like the Battle of Waterloo, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the birth of Jesus, and Abraham leaving Sumeria, traveling into Egypt for about 15 years or so and finally settling into the Palestinian area, which happened somewhere between 2,800 and 2,500 B.C.
So, on the far left we have early civilization around 15,000 B.C. and then roughly 17,000 years later we have the 9/11/01 bombings in New York.
As this timeline began to sink in, I stood for what seemed like hours, just letting this thing chip away at my paradigms and dismantling my reality as it seemed to demand. I found myself in a struggle. There were too many factors all converging in on this one reality to keep me from being able to untangle it all enough to make sense of this universe anymore. In Christian scripture, we’re are told that the fundamental character of God dos not change. His immutable qualities are the constant of the cosmos and they are the glue that hold everything together. If this were true, then one of those qualities is God’s desire to reveal Himself to mankind and constantly seek out ways to reveal himself. If this were true, then why did we have to wait through at LEAST three quarters of recorded human history for Him to do something proactive like calling Abraham out of his people to search out a place and get to know Him on a more intimate basis? When you join that question with the study of how much Abraham’s Sumerian culture influenced the language of the Old Testament history books, and the Hebrews burgeoning monotheism from the Sumerian henotheistic tradition, it begins to unravel more than a couple of preconceptions about one’s faith. Things suddenly weren’t as cut and dried as they once were. What I began to see in the Abrahamic journey wasn’t a new religion, but a redefinition and restructuring of a cultural understanding of Reality. A clarification of sorts. This seemed consistent with the nature of the God that I thought I knew, but it was taking that immutable characteristic to a new level.
It became clearer to me that what we really have in Christian scripture is a God who has truly been on a pursuit of mankind, to put it in Christian terms, but that to think that pursuit started after God stayed silent for 14,000 years or so of recorded human history, or simply that His pursuit was exclusive to this one little tract of land we call the Middle East, and all other humanity can just go to hell...well, not only do we commit huge grievances in the name of God through this over-anthropomorphizing of His selectivity or cliquish behavior, but we also grossly misunderstand human, anthropologic development and world history.
All of this and more flooded through my head in those fifteen or twenty minutes that I stood looking at this timeline. That moment became a catalyst for a journey that outwardly began almost a year and a half later. As I found myself preparing to tell my congregation that I was no longer going to be their spiritual tour guide, I had to face the fact that my best preparations would still fall short. However, I knew that the only true equipment needed is a pure heart that passionately searches for truth. Even Jesus guaranteed that if we seek, we will find. If we are willfully and earnestly seeking after Truth, it would stand to reason that our journey will not be in vain. Jesus didn’t even qualify that statement with admonitions to seek, but only in the Torah and the Temple. The harsh reality of the Gospel stories found in the New Testament is that Jesus never once tried to start a new religion, and those who fight and die for it and by it, fight and die for something altogether different than the simple teachings He gave in his words and his deeds.
All who seek Truth are on a journey of soul and matter. These journeys are not epic, but they are heroic. If a person casts aside all fear and preconception to journey out into the hidden and unknown, in search of nothing less than Truth, their aspirations will be met with pain, disillusion, growth, loneliness and joy, but ultimately triumph and freedom. This is only the beginning of my journey. I will continue to write and post more as my time allows, but for now, this may potentially bring more questions to you than answers. Just be patient. You just might have to dig for your answers. In fact, I hope you do. They will mean more to you in the end than if I simply hand them to you with garnishes of stories and jokes.
