The Dead Fly

A new post is in the works on the incarnation and grace, but I could not help but relay what just happened. As I was writing I paused to reflect on a point when I noticed a dead fly in the window seal. If a picture paints a thousand words, a dead fly in the window seal speaks volumes. Vintage Holy Spirit.

Here are a few of the thoughts that filled my mind as I stared at the dead fly.

• He left it all on his field of dreams.
• Effort exhausts without truth.
• A false savior will kill you every time.
• We can’t invent freedom.
• It’s not up to us to make it.
• Things are not always what they seem.
• It’s okay to stop and rest.
• Listen
• Universalism?

I made a little banner with a post-it note and a tooth pick. On the banner I wrote “I did it my way.” Then I took some small rocks and hoisted the banner above the fly in honor of his Herculean effort.


Post your own comments and I will place them in the main text after a few days.

Thank you Lord Jesus that you found a way to meet us in our darkness.

Expectation

The incarnation is about the Lord’s acceptance of us as we are as fallen creatures, and about the stunning move to so identify with us as to see things the way we do. A third lesson on the incarnation has to with divine expectation. Read the Prologue of John with the following questions in mind. What does God expect from us in the incarnation? What is He counting on us to do to make the incarnation a success? Most of us, I suspect, would say that the Lord is expecting us, or counting on us to believe. But think of this statement: “He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him (John 1:10).

If the Lord was counting on us to believe in order for the incarnation to happen, then bitter divine disappointment lay on the horizon. For our response was to crucify the Father’s Son.

Let me share a lesson from the deer stand, a book I have been reading, and a story from a friend, all of which may help us understand that the only expectation that the blessed Trinity had of the human race is that we would murder the Father’s Son.

Sitting on my deer stand, reading James Hollis’ The Middle Passage, I heard the fabled snap of a stick. It sounded like it came from straight in front of me, maybe at 11:30, if you imagine 12:00 being directly in front of me. I began to stare at every tree, branch and twig. The more I stared, the more I was convinced that I could see a deer, a buck, large and in charge. It took me a full minute to grab my gun and get it pointed in the right direction. As I looked through the scope I could not see the buck at all. So I moved my eyes away from the scope and scanned the area. Nothing. But as I stared I began to see the buck again. Shouldering my rifle, I looked through my scope but there was no buck. This back and forth went on for over ten minutes before I finally accepted, as all deer hunters know, that in the woods our minds can play tricks on us.

On the way home I phoned my friend Ken Courtney and he relayed a lesson that he had learned many years ago in his training in the National Guard. His team was being taught how to spot things in the woods in the dead of night. Never, he said, stare at the object. When you hear or see something, look at it, then turn away and focus on something else, then come back and look again, then look away. When you stare or focus on something for very long your mind’s eye will create something that is not there.

I was amazed at the apparent coincidence of Ken’s lesson and my experience with ‘seeing’ the buck, with what I was reading in The Middle Passage. One of Hollis’ main points is what he calls “the Magical Other.” It seems that in our dating days we so stare or focus upon our new found beloved that we create an image of them that is not actually there. Our minds (or hearts, or brokenness) play a trick on us. We create the Magical Other who will be our life, our security, our completion, our salvation, our wholeness, and they do the same with us. Unearthly expectations run high, hope abounds, and all is well in never never land.

It is disappointing enough when the buck turns out to be a figment of our own imaginations, but it is an altogether different matter when cracks appear in our Magical Other. It is inevitable. Think about it, two broken people make gods and goddesses out of each other. How long can that last? At some point the incongruence between the real person and the image we have plastered over their faces—an image conceived in the dungeons of our own brokenness—becomes very apparent. Given the intensity of our investment in our Magical Other, and given how deep and dear the dream is to us, its shattering is catastrophic. A new world of bitter disappointment and venomous blame, of frustration and anger, of withdrawal and manipulation, among other things, burst into being. The relationship dies. Couples split up, and each one goes out and does the same thing all over again, plastering his or her dreams of life onto the face of a new, true love. ‘This one is different, special. I just know it.’

Was it ever a real relationship to begin with? And has it really died? After I realized that there was no buck, I had the opportunity to go back to real hunting. When the dream of the Magical Other is shattered, the simple truth is that we then have an opportunity to get to know the real person, and to accept them as they are, to identify with them, and have real relationship, and who knows, maybe even find the companionship and communion we have longed for all along.

It is a glorious truth that the blessed Trinity is not into projection. There is no dungeon of brokenness in the basement of the Trinitarian life of God out of which dreams for us are born. The dream of the Father, Son, and Spirit for our adoption, for our inclusion in their shared life, love and fellowship carries no expectations for our contribution. We are not the Magical Other of the Trinity, upon whom the Father, Son and Spirit project their hope of one day becoming whole.

In shocking grace and humility, the one expectation of the Triune God, the one thing that the Father, Son and Spirit counted on from us in order to make the incarnation a reality is that we would pour our scorn, our anger, our wrath, our judgment onto Jesus, humiliating him publicly by cruel crucifixion. And Jesus deliberately and wonderfully endured it all. In bearing our scorn, and submitting himself to our bitter anger, Jesus met us where we are in the dungeon of our brokenness. He accepted us. He identified with us, and through having no expectations from us other than that we would reject him, he has established a personal relationship with us at our very worst. Now, Jesus lives in our dungeons, and he brought his Papa and the Holy Spirit with him. In the very place where our disastrous dream of the Magical Other (and its poisonous demands) is born now dwells the life and fellowship and love of the blessed Trinity.

Discovering Jesus in the dungeons of our brokenness means that we do not have to dream of a Magical Other or plaster our dream upon their face and demand that they live up to our unearthly expectations. And it means that we do not have to impose our agendas upon the lives of our friends, or of creation. Discovering Jesus in the dungeon means we are free to live in and out of the real dream of the Father, Son and Spirit, for now our adoption is no dream at all, but the simple truth. We are included in their shared life. The Father, Son and Spirit have pitched their tent inside our dungeon. Such a discovery is the beginning of faith and repentance (a radical change in the way we see), and it is the beginning of the freedom to accept others and to be accepted, to know and to be known, to love and to be loved, to delight and being delighted in.


Lord Jesus forgive us for what we have done to you and to one another in our pain. Holy Spirit help us meet Jesus in our dungeons.


References
James Hollis, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Middle Life
James Hollis, The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other.

From Dirk Vanderleest

Dear Friends of Perichoresis,


Now that we finally figured out how to send emails through our web site, let me introduce myself. My name is Dirk Vanderleest. I am the CEO of the Jackson Municipal Airport Authority. I have been a part of the ministry of Perichoresis since its beginning back in the early 90’s, and now serve as the Chairman of its Board. It is one of the highlights of my life to be involved in such a ministry.

Yesterday I Googled “Baxter Kruger” and discovered over 6 million results. I was shocked and thrilled. Then I checked the numbers on Baxter’s blog. To date his blog has been accessed over 44,000 times from over 70 countries. Again, I was shocked and thrilled, and then perplexed. As a businessmen I could not help but wonder, how can a ministry with this kind of impact be financially strapped every month? As you know, Baxter is a theologian for the masses and a great communicator of the real gospel, but he is not good about communicating how our ministry survives, or about asking for money to support it.

Here are the business facts. Book and lecture sales make up about one tenth of our annual budget of one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. The rest comes from private donation, people like you and me, who have been blessed by this ministry and want to see it touch the whole world. There is some contribution from churches, but not much. As one of our Board members put it, ‘there are a lot of folks feeding from our trough and not even leaving a tip.’ I think the problem is that many people who of have been blessed by our ministry simply don’t know that their help is sorely needed. So I am asking you to help support this ministry. A contribution of $20.00 or more a month would go along way. If you can do more we would be thrilled. I realize that we are all struggling these days, but I also realize that Perichoresis has helped millions of people around the world. A small contribution from a large number of people will help stabilize the financial part of our ministry, and it would help us expand our outreach so that many more folks can find real healing and hope.

• You can contribute by making a tax-deductible check payable to Perichoresis and by sending it to:
Perichoresis
P. O. Box 98157
Jackson, MS 39298

• You can contribute anywhere in the world through our web site (perichoresis.org). If, like me, that word is to hard too remember, visit and it will guide you to our main web site. Once there look for the word “Donate” between “Free Resources” and “Subscription,” just under the black Perichoresis banner at the top of the page. Click on “Donate.”

• In Canada send tax-deductible check payable Incarnation Ministries to:
Incarnation Ministries
P. O. Box 11168
2620-1055 West Georgia Street
Vancouver, BC V6E 3R5
Canada
(Be sure to write Perichoresis on the check memo line)

Thank you for your help and contribution.


Sincerely,


Dirk Vanderleest

Identification

The last blog was focused on the incarnation as an act of divine acceptance of the human race as we are in our profound confusion. Without approving of what happened in Adam, and without being in denial about it, the Lord, in His everlasting commitment to share His abounding life with us, became what we are. Before creation the Father, Son and Spirit dreamed of our adoption. Unto this end the universe and humanity were called into being, and the Lord entered into real relationship with Adam and Eve. Believing the lie of the evil one opened the door for darkness and alienation to enter Adam’s world, ruining all possibility of relationship between Adam and the Lord.

The first response of the Lord was simple acceptance (without approval) of what had happened. Then came His clothing of his terrified creatures. And recall that I said the clothing of Adam and Eve was never about God and some divine need to be appeased. The clothing was about the afflicted and terrorized conscience of Adam and Eve. For there can be no real relationship, and thus no real sharing of life, when fear and hiding dominate Adam’s fallen mind. For John, the incarnation involves the Lord’s acceptance of the fallen world, and it involves a stunning move toward real identification. “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” That is to say, the Father’s son not only became human, but so entered into our fallen world as to establish relationship with us as fallen creatures. He entered into Adam’s fallen mind, identifying with the way Adam, and the human race at large, see things.

The sharing of life is the point, which necessitates real relationship, which in turn necessitates that we must find a way into God’s life, or the Lord must find a way to into ours. Acceptance is the first step. Identification is the next. We are capable of neither. So the Lord is his abounding grace, as Irenaeus said nearly 19 centuries ago, became what we are (Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp who was a disciple of John, the disciple of Jesus).

Identification, like acceptance, does not mean approval. It means that one person so desires to share life with another (which is the trinitarian way of being) that she or he is willing to enter into the other person’s way of thinking, seeing and believing (without necessarily approving of them at all), even into the other’s way of seeing themselves. For John, that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” means that the Father’s Son has identified with us in our profound darkness, especially with our grotesque confusion about his Father. There are few words more terrible than “He came unto His own and His own received Him not.” Yet that is exactly what the Father’s Son did. He entered not only into our world, but into our darkness and dastardly broken way of seeing, believing and thinking, and there he was terribly rejected, exactly as He knew He would be. Think about it. This is not naïve divine denial. Jesus and His Father and the Holy Spirit knew what we would do—reject Jesus—and Jesus embraced our rejection, deliberately and astonishingly allowing Himself to be cursed and damned by His own creation. And—and the existence of the universe hangs on this and—in allowing Himself to be cursed by His own creation, He met us in our sickness, and He brought His Father and the Holy Spirit with Him.

So then, the Father, Son and Spirit (and their shared life, love and fellowship) have not only accepted us in our terrible sin, but have so made their way into our craziness that their shared life now dwells in our brazen, wrongheaded rejection. Jesus’ way of seeing and believing and thinking has set up shop inside our darkness. His own relationship with His Father, and His own relationship with the Holy Spirit have—through His enduring of our bitter scorn—pitched their tent inside our hell. Acceptance. Identification. Determined love. Real relationship. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Acceptance

The incarnation means that the Father’s one and only Son became a human being, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. He who is face to face with the Father became what we are. Such staggering humility is a theme in itself, and we will come back to the Lord’s humility, but for the moment, the focus is upon the hidden acceptance involved in the coming of the Father’s Son.

In the Genesis narrative (and excuse me if I refer to something other than John and Ephesians) Adam and Eve’s fall left them hiding from the presence of the Lord. Terrorized and overwhelmed with guilt, they were not about to come out and face the Lord. And the Lord, in beautiful and astonishing grace, met them where they were in their new found darkness. He clothed them. Most of us in the West, subject as we are to the trauma of legalism, would assume that the Lord clothed them so that He could look at them, given that He is so holy as to not be able to look upon sinners. Such a notion is the product, in my opinion, of the fallen mind. The act of clothing Adam and Eve is not about the Lord and His supposed need to be appeased, but about Adam and Eve and their afflicted conscience. They have believed the lie, and doubted the very heart of the Lord. In believing that the Lord is not really for them they have adopted a profoundly alien paradigm. How could they possibly react to the presence of the Lord, given what they now believe about Him. The Lord, however, has set His heart upon Adam and Eve, and in them upon the race at large, to do us good beyond our wildest dreams. But now that Adam has bought the lie such relationship is beyond possibility.

I submit that the clothing of Adam and Eve had no Godward direction at all. It had nothing to do with the fallen notion that we must pacify and angry God, or that God needs to be pacified. The clothing of Adam and Eve was an act of concession on the Lord’s part, accommodating Adam’s fallen imagination, in order to establish a real relationship with Adam and Eve in their fallenness. In His astonishing love, and in determination to fulfill His dreams for our adoption, the Lord stoops to meet Adam and Eve where there are, to relate to them as fallen creatures. He accepts the situation. He accepts the fall as reality for Adam and Eve. He does not approve of their debacle, but neither is He in denial about what has happened. Adam and Eve have bought the lie. Their basic cast of mind is now terribly skewed. They believe terrible things about the Lord. They are hiding. The Lord meets them in their darkness and clothes them so that their conscience can be somewhat quieted, and perhaps a new relationship can begin.

The incarnation is the same love and determination writ large. The Lord comes in person. He comes to us. He enters into our world of darkness. He comes to His own. He not only becomes a human being; He becomes flesh. That is to say, He enters into the bushes with Adam and Eve, stepping into their terribly wrongheaded frame of reference and way of thinking. Why? To meet us where we are. To establish a real relationship with us as we are in our brokenness.

The incarnation is an act of divine acceptance of the human race as we are in our profound confusion. Without approving of what has happened, and without being in denial about it, the Lord, in His relentless love and determination to live in relationship with us and to share His abounding life with us, becomes what we are.

There is a lesson here about the power of acceptance. To accept someone is not necessarily to approve of what they are about, or even of what has happened. To accept them is to say that we recognize that what has happened is real, and that we intend to meet them where they actually are. The incarnation is the determination of the love of the Father, Son and Spirit to establish a real relationship with us as we are in our darkness. It is a costly move, as John announces in his prologue. ‘He came unto his own and His own received Him not.’ This rejection on our part will lead to the terrible shout, ‘Crucify, Crucify Him!’ And this shout, which is more than mere words, is where the incarnation finds its ultimate fulfillment. As we, as the Jews, as the Gentiles, the Romans, and the race at large nail the Lord to the cross of Calvary in utter rejection, He submits Himself to our brazen wrongheaded judgment, thereby meeting us at our utter worst, thereby establishing a real relationship with us as we are in our fallen, broken, judgmental craziness. And He brought His Father and the Holy Spirit with Him.

Acceptance leads to real relationship, and real relationship leads to real relationship.

May the Holy Spirit give us more light.

Notes on John's Prologue 1

Over the next few months I will be sharing some of my thoughts on John’s famous prologue (1:1-18). Much like Paul’s opening statement in Ephesians, which runs from vs. 3 to vs. 14, John’s prologue is packed. Each and every word and phrase are chosen deliberately. I suspect John wrote his prologue last, as a shorter version of his gospel at large. For the gospel is the prologue expanded.

John begins and ends with a revolution in human thought about the very being of God.

In the beginning the Word was, and the Word was (face to face) with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning (face to face) with God (1:1-2).

No human has ever seen God. The one and only Son of God, who dwells in the bosom of the Father, he has made Him known (1:18).

As a good Jewish man, John believes that God created the heavens and the earth, and all things. And while John affirms the opening verse in the Hebrew bible, (In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth) he wants to fill out our concept of God by adding relationship. So John starts before creation itself, and places the Word, or the Son, there before the beginning with God.

John has met Jesus, and in meeting him, in knowing him, he has concluded that Jesus belongs to the divine side of things. Jesus is everything that God is, the one and only Son, who dwells in the Father’s bosom from all eternity. And he became human.

John’s thought is a revolution in human thought about the being of God, a revolution which took over three hundreds to reach formulation in the doctrine of the Trinity. But for John, the implications are staggering, and form the heart of his message. The one who is face to face with the Father from before the beginning, the one who dwells in his bosom, and knows the Father inside out, this one has become a human being (1:14) to be with us. The Father’s Son himself has come. He has become human, what we are, and the Father’s Son has become one of us so that he could share with us all that he is and has with his Father in the anointing of the Holy Spirit. That is the staggering sequence. Divine relationship. Incarnation. Sharing of divine life. And nothing less.

Before the beginning, the Son was face to face with his Father, dwelling in his bosom. He became one of us, to dwell among us, so that we could receive of his own fulness and life. Herein lies the heart of John’s message, and he writes so that we can come to see who Jesus is and who we are in him, and what stunning life has been given to the human race in him.

Put your big boy britches on and deal with it. This is what has happened. The Father’s Son himself has come. And he has established a real relationship with us in our darkness, so that we could share in, taste and feel, and experience, all that he is and has in his life with his Father.

Everything in John’s gospel is calculated to help us, who live in the great darkness, to come to ‘know’ Jesus for ourselves, so that believing in him, we may begin to experience his own life, rather than our own. So John’s gospel is both the announcement of the coming of the Father’s Son in person, and the news that summons us to believe in him, rather than in ourselves, so that we can know what he knows—the Father, and experience life in his embrace.

On Evil

Dualism says that good and evil are equal powers, with Jesus and Satan squared off for the prize of humanity. But in the Christian tradition, Satan is a creature whose opposite is not Jesus at all, but the archangel Michael. Jesus is the Creator, Satan a creature, apparently an angel, now fallen. In his incarnate life, death, resurrection and ascension, Jesus has overcome evil, disarming the rulers and principalities and authorities in the heavenly places. Jesus’ lordship, however, is not yet completely manifested. He instructs us to pray for his Father’s will to be done on earth, as it is in heaven, and for us to pray to be delivered from the evil one. Moreover, we are constantly called to participate in Jesus’ life and lordship.

The sticky bit lies here, between the completeness of Jesus’ victory in himself, and yet the continued presence and work of Satan and his cronies on earth. The presence and influence of evil, of course, seem to argue that Jesus’ victory is not real. It may be, however, a little more complicated than that. For me, Jesus’ victory is absolute, a non-negotiable. But his victory, and this I think is critical, includes us, and us not as robots, but as real persons. Jesus has included us in his own life with his Father, and in his own anointing in the Holy Spirit, and in his own relationship with all creation. For the most part, I have always focussed on the sheer, stunning beauty of such an act. We are included in the Trinitarian life of God. But the other side is equally beautiful and stunnning. The Father, Son and Spirit have included us in their life. They take us seriously. As Barth so wonderfully put it, “God does not want to be God without us.” And the fact that we are included in the Trinitarian life means that the Father, Son and Spirit are not doing end runs around us. As shocking as it may seem, the Triune God does not operate as if we are not included in the Trinitarian life.

It is here, I suspect, and who knows, that the evil one finds a temporary toe-hold in Jesus’ world. These days, especially in physics, we have come to understand that the human mind is not simply a detached observer of the world around it. What we ‘observe’ actually impacts the thing or things we are observing. The human mind is powerful. But not in itself. That is the mistake the self-help, and the faith folks make. Jesus is the One in and through and by and for whom all things were created, and are sustained. He is the One connected to all things. The cosmos is wired, so to speak, to respond to his thoughts and observations. Having been given a real place in Jesus’ life means, among other things, that we have been given a real place in His connection with everything in the cosmos. While we do not have any power in ourselves (because we do not have any real connections with things in ourselves), our inclusion in Jesus means that we have the plivelege of participating in his powerful connections. What we think, or believe, or observe matters, because of who we are in Jesus.

I suspect, and again, who can really say, that this is what the evil one knows about us that we don’t. He has found a way, for the moment, to hijack, to borrow a great word from Ken Blue, the goodwill and life and power of Jesus through us. Satan exploits and misuses us, and our place in Jesus. It is not that Satan has found a way to reprogram our hard drives, for that would be to violate our wills. He has found a way to deceive us so that we unwittingly, yet willingly, bring his poison into our ‘observations’ of ourselves, others, and life.

If we were not connected to Jesus, then our ‘observations’ would not impact a single particle, even in our own minds, no matter how we strained get our faith right. But we are, and they do. Diabolos exploits Jesus’ relationship with us and our relationship with Jesus through his lie. That is all that he has. Even his own existence comes from Jesus himself. His time is limited because he has been defeated by the Lord Jesus, and because the Holy Spirit himself has been sent to us to teach us the truth. As we come to know the truth, the truth of who we are in Jesus, and as we learn by experience that Satan’s lie is a yoke, grievous to be born, (Thank you, J. B. Torrance) and we cry out to be delivered from his deception, he will have no place in the life of humanity. Toto will have pulled back the curtain of Satan’s confusion, and we will be shocked at the mere creature who has deceived the nations. Then the Lord of all creation will speak to him.

Meantime, we cry out to the Holy Spirit for light, for understanding, for the freedom and life that is ours in Christ to be manifested in our ‘observations.’

“These things I have spoken to you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but be of good cheer; I have overcome the cosmos (John 16:33).