We Are But Creatures

Ash Wednesday is her favorite point of the church calendar.

Why?—Because with the gentle smudge of dark ash on her forehead, through the murmured “from dust you came and to dust you will return,” she is reminded that she is but a creature.

Does this bring you comfort, friend? Do you find comfort in your creatureliness?

We try hard to hide from it, in a culture (and all too often a church) that shrinks from death and weakness. We prop ourselves up with the latest treatments, the latest offers of medicinal immortality. We resolve to try harder, to be better—or to at least conceal the blemishes of our broken hearts, flawed decisions, or mortal bodies. Without saying it outright, we flee from our creatureliness, wanting to look anywhere else than at our limitations, our failings, our inadequacies. Though we may not lay a claim to being God, we would at the very least like to forget that we are creatures—that we are but dust.

Weakness is a place few march into willingly, with fanfare announcing the arrival. No—I find myself at the door, carefully steal glances to one side and then the other, and while all heads are turned, slip in, gently closing the door behind me, hoping my entrance went unmarked. In my preoccupation, I fail to notice that so many others near me stand at doors of their own, furtively entering into this same arena of the human race, marked by weakness, pain, and questions.

Many would find this discussion depressing, an unnecessary meditation on what often seems a bleak reality of existence. They would hardly claim these thoughts a comfort. Others claim that we must claim victory and power, losing sight of the truth that we follow not only the Risen Christ, but the Crucified Christ as well.

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Counting Out the Bills

Sometimes life offers us parables better than those we could invent ourselves, offering us pictures, stories, glimmers of grace, offering us a language to speak of the Gospel in fresh ways unsullied by dry repetition. Friends, we never move past this hope of the Gospel; we never graduate from it onto “bigger and better things.” It calls us deeper and deeper into its mystery; its riches are unending.

Scott and I recently watched a documentary about the work of his boss, Marian, in fighting slavery in Nepal. He sat with low caste Hindu slaves and their owners, listening to stories of how they and their families found themselves enslaved. For many, they sold themselves into slavery in order to pay for medical bills or because their circumstances were so dire that slavery was the only alternative to watching their children starve. Some were there as a result of debts that deceased fathers or grandfathers had accrued, which they had to work off in their stead. The price of these human lives, the sum of their debt, typically $100-300 U.S. dollars, was a price insurmountable to them. Tears came to my eyes as I watched Marian counting bills one by one, the exact amount they owed, into the slaves’ hands, and their extreme joy and disbelief as they handed the bills to their owner and shook hands with him, finally freed. Marian helped these families find homes and work, either in the form of land to farm or supplies to start a small business. His request in return: that they live in such a way as to never allow themselves and their families to become slaves again.

This picture evokes what is one of my favorite words—redeem—which quite literally means “to buy back.” Someone, like Marian, takes an interest in and has compassion on his fellow man, who is in great need, enslaved or indebted, powerless to do anything to free himself, and he takes out his own money and gives it to the slave master. It is not his debt to pay; it is of no consequence to his own life and freedom, but he makes it his business to pay the price required for the freedom of a man, a woman, a child who is enslaved.

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Crutches On the Church Wall

On a hill in Montreal beckons the grand edifice, its cross-peaked dome the crowning point of the city. Looming, hovering, intimidating, inspiring, St. Joseph’s Oratory stands watch as pilgrims prayerfully climb its stream of wooden steps on their knees, inching higher and higher to place they hope to find healing. Within its walls one finds the remnants left by those who have come before—racks built into the walls covered with the long wooden crutches of men and the short ones of children, and well worn canes once gripped by desperate hands. They are the marks of the sick, the disabled, the weak, the injured, those whose bodies bore the blight of our human frailty. They are the marks of ones who came to a holy place broken and left whole, healed, restored.

Imagine with me for a moment if our church walls were covered with the symbols and markers of what were once our greatest weaknesses, our most painful limitations, those low places in which God met us and changed beauty into ashes, mourning into joy.

This is something I can’t help but love about the Catholic tradition—there is something very physical and embodied in the way they mark the places in which God has worked, as physical signs of remembrance memorialize spiritual histories. They are modern Ebenezer stones, declaring “Thus far the Lord has helped us” (1 Sam. 7:12). But for those of us in more Protestant traditions, we rarely are left with tangible objects to remind us of God’s workings in the past.

What would your “crutch” be hanging on the walls of such a place, my friend? What infirmities have you left behind to walk in freedom?

Some are physical—like the crutches and canes hanging on the walls of St. Joseph’s—the defeated cancer, the miraculous second chance at life, the work of the right treatment by the right doctor in the precise moment of your need. For some, though, dare I say most of us, our weaknesses, our “crutches” in which God has done his work, are hidden, subtle, difficult to embody in a form for all to see—depression lifted, shattered relationships restored, secret addictions defeated; overcoming pornography or eating disorders, perfectionism or workaholism, anger or shame. These victories too are the healings of God, the moments in which His hand of mercy reached into our helplessness and set us on our feet again. These too are His work in strengthening us to run in places before we could only limp and crawl.  

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Christian with No Adjectives

How many times have you had to qualify the term Christian? We use adjectives—“real Christian,” “genuine Christian,” “nominal Christian,” and so on—to describe what we mean. We define Christians by their views on particular issues—women in ministry, infant or adult baptism, their political leanings, their style of worship and music, or [add your pet issue here]. In college I was shocked to find that after my name, major, and hometown, the most commonly asked introductory chit-chat question was my church denomination. We do this too, dismissing or lauding a person by his or her adherence to a particular religious flavor—Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Catholic, Methodist.

[On this denominational front, I’ve always been thankful to be hard to nail down—I grew up in a tiny denomination few have heard of, attended an Anglican church plant throughout college, and now attend a church subtly connected to a Baptist denomination.]

We like labels. We like their ability to describe more clearly our meaning, lest anyone misunderstand what type of Christian of which we speak. We like to make judgment-calls on who is serious about the faith, who the “real” Christians are—and who are the imposters. We like our clean, clear-cut categorical boxes into which we can lock other people.

I must admit that I do this. I catch words coming to my lips; I catch my index and middle finger bending, gesturing to form quotation marks in the air around my words as they escape. I catch my thoughts crafting judgments on the quality and genuineness of another’s faith based on their actions, their commentary, or their attitude.

How quickly we forget that “we are all beggars.” How quickly we forget how easy it is to misrepresent our Lord. How quickly we forget that these categories are of our own creation—how quickly we allow them to divide us, to justify the judgments we cast.

How tragic it is that we feel the need to further qualify the word “Christian” at all.

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God with a Human Face

The world was an enemy occupied kingdom—and the enemy had turned the hearts of the people against the king they had once loved. Those who had been alive when the king was physically present and ruling were long dead; all that was left for the younger generations were stories, stories that had been distorted over the centuries. The king knew that the only way to win back his kingdom and the love and trust of his people would be to sneak into their midst. Propaganda wouldn’t work because they had been fed so many lies and misconceptions of what his kingdom was actually like. The people wouldn’t be won back by an extensive military campaign—they would either feel conquered and obligated to return their allegiance to him or they would turn to him because they saw he was more powerful and wanted to be on the winning side. But what the king wanted was the trust and allegiance of their hearts. He wanted them to follow because of who he was, not just what he could offer them. The only way to do this would be to sneak into the kingdom in disguise and let them get to know him, slowly revealing his true identity. Then his true kingdom, formed by the band of those who knew him, could rise up in the midst of oppositional rule, to reclaim and reorient the kingdom as it was meant to be around its rightful king.

As soon as the weather cools and the New England foliage drifts leaf by leaf to the ground, I start to think of the holidays. The season evokes a sense of warmth in my heart—time with family, beautifully wrapped gifts all carefully chosen, tiny lights glimmering between colorful antique ornaments, the smell of pine and freshly baked cookies, the familiar sound of songs crackling from the record player. It’s a precious time.

This year, I’ve been mulling over the Incarnation. If Jesus was just a normal baby born to a poor family in 1st century Palestine, his birth would not be important at all. If he was just a revered teacher, it might be notable but certainly not something worthy of being celebrated by millions of people worldwide.

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But Jesus, he was fully God—the ruler of the universe, the creator of everything—God putting on human skin. We could not approach God ourselves. He was too big, too high, too far out of our reach. So he came to us. But he came in disguise - as the rightful king slipping in to win back the hearts of his people. He didn’t come in extreme power so that we had no other choice but to submit to following him. He came as a small baby, born in a barn, a supposedly illegitimate child of a poor couple, in a land ruled by foreigners. He was Emmanuel—God with us, not in a flash of power, grandeur, and might, but in the soft skin, the whimpering cries, the fragile, sleeping form of a newborn. And this—this birth of the long-forgotten, long-awaited king, this was the first moment we could see God with a human face.