CROSSING THE BAR - XI
The Wonderful Problem of the Freedom of God
By Jim Johnson

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While it seems odd to say, there is a certain danger involved in giving someone their first bible. At least if the weather-worn hands that receive it belong to a crusty, set-in-his-ways, 64 year old rancher like Ed. If you knew Ed, you’d know what I mean. You’d understand the danger – as well as the excited hope.

It all started when Ed and I were sitting at the bar in the Bull’n Bear, talking about the previous night’s Country Music Awards, and how strange it had seemed to me to have listened to Elton John and Dolly Parton sing John Lennon’s “Imagine” (“…imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try…) within 10 minutes of when Brooks and Dunn sang about an old fellow who, looking back on what had been and ahead at what was yet to come realized that he needed more and more to pay attention to the “letters in red.”

“You know,” Ed said to me, “I think it’s time that I start paying more attention to those red letters myself.”

What to do was clear. Ed is my friend. We’ve bantered back and forth across the bar about numerous topics including religion, usually over enough beers; taken a couple of “road trips” either fishing or hunting, telling stories and laughing; We’ve walked down a lot of roads together, the hardest one being that of the death of his daughter Mary (which is why, I think, he has finally found some use for those “letters in red”). How could I not buy for him a red-letter edition Bible? The hard part has been thinking of what to write inside the front cover. “Good luck” just didn’t seem to cut it.

You see, as I considered what to say - as I looked first at the “church people” who already have their bibles, and then at the “bar people” who know only a few stereotypical things about it, I found myself running into the same problem for both.

That problem is freedom, and not so much our freedom, as the freedom of God. A problem that seems to be just as much trouble to the Church as it is to those outside, for we have each in our own way found it necessary to limit God’s freedom, to make God more comfortable and easier to handle; to define and domesticate God, box “him” up and say to the Lord God Almighty (much like God says to the chaotic sea in the book of Job) “thus far shall you go and no further.”

For bar people, this problem is a lot less complicated than it is for church people. Contrary to what they themselves would say that life itself teaches, bar people have “boxed” God up in ideas of “what is fair.” If the balance of a person’s life tips the scales more to the “been good” side than it does the “been bad” side, it seems only fair that they go to heaven when they die (if there is such a place). Since what’s fair seems to define what’s right, if God is right, God must be fair. And if God isn’t fair? Who needs him! We’ll punish him by not believing (which sounds pretty silly, but is fairly accurate). “I just can’t believe in a god like that.”

For church people the waters are a lot muddier, with the boxes in which we try to confine God taking on an almost origami-like complexity.

Some are fairly simple, of course. God’s nature pretty much mirrors how that person or group feels about things. You know what I mean: “God hates Gays” and the myriad of similar statements by which we define God by our own biases.

Other ways of limiting God’s freedom are a little more convoluted.

My son-in-law’s sister was attending a Christian college when she began having terrible headaches. Those at her school told her that, as a sign of her faith in God, she should refrain from seeing a doctor. Months later, when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, a pastor from a like-minded church said she hadn’t been healed because her faith had not been strong enough. And not only her faith, but also her mother’s faith. God “couldn’t” work, you see, because their lack of faith had apparently made God impotent. Two and a half years later, after unsuccessful surgeries and experimental chemotherapy, God was still testing their faith. Six months after that, after she had been in the mortuary for 3 days, someone came to raise her from the dead, but were told (by God) that they should let her go; she was in God’s hands now. Apparently the end of the box in which God lived and moved (but only according to our strength of faith) had finally broken open to actually make room for… God.

It’s a problem, isn’t it!?

Without the bible, we run the risk of allowing God the freedom only to be what either our cultural values, our sense of “what’s right,” allows God to be, or the things we learn about God from nature, leaving no room for a God who relates to her own creation. No room for God having the last self-defining word through Jesus, the Word made flesh. For while there are some things to be learned about God from the created order, you just can’t learn about Jesus from the mountains or prairies or seas, no matter how much they say about God being a pretty good creator.

With the bible, we run the risk of allowing God to go “thus far and no farther” by picking and choosing the parts that say that God is indeed what we want God to be - with “proof texts” to back us up! We become selectively literal to prove that we are right, taking God’s name in vain by using God to buck-up our opinions (often against the witness of the rest of scripture!). And perhaps most of all, we limit God’s activity in the world by not allowing God the freedom to be – God. To be the One whose life and activity among us is very real, but also only a part of what it is to be God. To be the One who has graciously and lovingly shown us as much as we need to know to understand that we are God’s children, but certainly not all that there is to know about God. God abides. God also hides.

The surface of faith, it seems to me, is that we believe and trust that, because we are loved, God both can and will do whatever we ask in Jesus’ name. Jesus certainly encouraged that kind of faith.

The essence of faith, however, is trusting God regardless of what God does or does not do. No boxes. No fences. God alone is God, and that is enough.

And so it is that, with the problem of the freedom of God had roiling and moiling around in my mind, I think I know what I will write in Ed’s first bible. After you read it, say a little prayer for Ed, that he will come to understand that the One spoken of in his new book is not only absolutely free, but that this One has freely chosen to be for him - for us all.

For my dear friend, Ed Weast

While this book contains those “red letters” you mentioned, it holds also stories about, and words from, those whose lives were forever changed by the one who spoke those letters in red. And though neither one of us believe that this Bible was literally written by the “hand of God,” I do believe that it was written by ones who were both touched, and led, by that very hand. They believed that what they wrote was not only the truth, but was also true for them in the deepest sense imaginable. I believe that too.

I envy your eyes, Ed. Because you haven’t read this book before, you will see things that my eyes do not; I hope you will share them with me. I hope also that you will get such a sense of what God can do - you will see that God is not to be domesticated and limited by the fences that either the church, or those outside of it, often want to build around him - that you will find wonder in what God did do. And in the end, I hope that this book will help you know not only what “any damn fool knows” (that there is a God), but that it will help you to actually know this God who already knows you.

Read well, dear friend. Wonder a lot. And give thanks for every time that what is true in this book seems like it might just be true for you.