CROSSING THE BAR - XV
When Wisdom Bends Her Knee
By Jim Johnson

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Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum. And what is true of physical nature is true also of human nature.

So it is that, when religious matters are discussed in a saloon like mine, you can almost hear that giant sucking sound that precedes someone’s discourse on how they understand things divine. I can’t tell you how it is back east, but in the Rocky Mountain west, that discourse usually has something to do with God, the mountains, and what’s fair.

“My god is up in the mountains,” they often say. “That’s where I feel closest to God, the most at peace.” (It is interesting that “peace” is often a part of the conversation.)

Others will say, “I figure that if a guy does more good than bad, God’ll have to take ya and it’ll all work out okay in the end.” Such celestial scales of balance are also often a part of barroom theology – a theology which is not all that different from songs sung by the three “friends” who plagued poor Job.

Out here, God is found (though just out of sight) in creation. God is found also among justice. Almost never in these discussions, though, is God found in revelation, for this would be claiming too much; more than we can know. And so it is that everyone is careful to hold their own – though often conflicting – view of who God is and what God does without challenging their neighbor’s opinion. (It’s almost like they’re trying to be politically correct, though to accuse them of that would constitute “fightin’ words.”)

In more hushed tones, however, and in conversations that cut to the chase much more quickly than the above barroom banter regarding God, are those desperate questions and grasping-at-straws answers that are blurted out on occasions such as when someone suddenly loses the love of his or her life to sudden death. My bartender Cindy suffered this when her husband Bubba died. For her, the “wisdom of the world” regarding God, whether it is traditional western piety or that of the likes of Sylvia Brown and others who claim to speak to and/or for the dead (and she’s heard and tried to hold on to both!) just doesn’t answer the real questions Cindy has both about, and for God.

All of those mentioned above, of course, need to know more than they do about God; for some, that need is simply much more deeply felt. And though it is perhaps not fair to Cindy to lump her searching in with the others, I think it will be helpful in the end if we do just that for now.

Common to each is a pretty firm belief that God exists. It is almost as if God designed into everyone a deep-down desire to know who God is, and to have some sense as to what God is up to in this world, and in their own life.

Such has been true from the beginning of time.

Sacrifices were burned to either appease or influence idols.

The sailors who were unlucky enough to have had the prophet Jonah in the belly of their boat cried “each to their own gods” for help. Finding none, they turned to Jonah, aghast to learn that this man of God was running away from the One who had created the earth and seas.

Paul speaks of it in the first chapters of his letters both to the Romans and, more pointedly yet, to those in Corinth, proclaiming that no matter how hard they tried or how cleverly their arguments were devised, God was not going to be known through anything they could figure out on their own. God won’t allow it. It is simply not to be.

Yet still it remains that without some clear revelation of God, the lack of understanding that comes from not having a relationship with God will be filled with whatever seems to make the most sense.

Often times, the most sensible answer at the time is that we can’t know the answer.

Such was the conclusion of Trevor who deals cards at the Bull’n Bear on Tuesdays, Fridays and, if we can get a game going, Saturdays. One Saturday night a few weeks ago, Trevor and I were sitting at the bar waiting to see if anyone would show up for the game. While I’m not too clear how it came up, somehow the conversation turned toward our understanding of God.

Trevor’s observation about this subject had to do with two fleas on the back of a dog who were trying to figure out the nature of the dog that made up their world, keeping them warm and fed.

(Please forgive the aside here, but it reminded me of one of my favorite jokes: “Did you hear about the agnostic dyslexic insomniac? He’d stay awake all night long wondering if there really was a dog.”)

Back to Trevor…According to Trevor’s story, both fleas (though on the same dog) had very different ideas of just what the nature of their dog really was. And so it was that, when they were warm and full, they’d sit back and argue about the existence and nature of “dog,” all the while riding on its back.

“That’s what I think religion is,” was the sense I got from Trevor. “Even though most of us, anyway, agree that God exists, there’s no way we can know who or what God really is, much less really know God.”

And there’s the rub.

As another wise man once said, “there is a vast difference between knowing that there is a god, and knowing God.”

For most people, that vast and churning sea that exists between knowing there is a God, and knowing who God is, is never crossed or even attempted. The journey seems too long and tedious, if not just plain dangerous. (The most dangerous part of it all, of course, is actually finding – or being found by – that One True God.) In my observations (and not only in the saloon), it is this fear that keeps most people from “setting out to sea,” as it were, to seek the truth of God at all. It is far safer and more comfortable having God “over there,” allowing us to fill the vacuum of our need for God with whatever seems, as my friend Eddie would say, “copasetic.”

Now why this is true of many Christian people is a matter for a different discussion.

Why it is true for my friends in the bar who do not know about Jesus, and what we who are Christian ought to do in the face of it, however, has been the subject of years of thought and prayer for me. It always seems to come to head every Christmas.

To be sure, there are those I encounter who just don’t care about God, the “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul” type.

But for others, for those who do care, the very real fear is that, should they find God, God might be found not to care; that God might want that distance that seems so integral to the “wisdom of the world.”

Even more than that! What if, they fear, they were finally willing to look to God only to find that God is not willing to be there for them? To help them in their most desperate need, where only God can help. Like when your husband dies and you find yourself alone and wondering if he’s okay and if you’ll ever see him again and what you can do to make that happen.

After all, the consistent willingness of God to be for them is something that they haven’t seen in the mountains. While being in the mountains may be peaceful for a time, the mountains cannot give peace.

So also do the seemingly random natural disasters speak of anything but God’s overarching fairness.

To be sure, there are things to be known about God in these things. But to know the God that can fill the restlessness of our hearts, for a God who is actually for us, requires more.

It used to be the case that when people tried to make their arguments for or about God using these or any other worldly wisdom, that I would argue with them, mustering up my best theological sense to convince them that they were wrong. “Surely God is more!” I would assert, as if God needed my defense.

I don’t do that anymore.

Rather than denying what their “wisdom” has taught them about God, I now view these things in much the same way as I understand the wisdom of the Wise Men of old. For these were ones who took the wisdom they had gathered over the ages – much of which we would have strongly argued against, had they dared suggest it to us (stargazers and seers they were) – and somehow, in the end, were carried by it to Jesus.

Jesus, through whom God crossed that vast distance so we may know God, not as we might want God to be (for who would have picked such weakness to witness to the unspeakable strength and wonder of God), but as God in God’s self wants to be known. God, who in desiring to show how deep is God’s willingness to be for us, became one of us!

“Do you want to know God? Look here. Here I am, for you.”

Being in the mountains – or in the desert or on the sea or in the valleys or anywhere in the marvelous creation of God – does teach us something true about God, as does that innate sense of justice that most people feel within themselves.

The same is true of the myriad of religious beliefs which teach true things about God, things relating to peace and humility, wisdom and order, God’s “otherness,” and our need for lives of service… Just as Job’s three friends expressed some truth, especially about how life works in this world, when they said (as they say out here – cowboy wisdom) that “what goes around, comes around.”

Yet the wisdom of God is that all of these things must finally follow the lead of the Wise Men, take all that they have both accumulated and nourished throughout the ages, and kneel before the baby Jesus. For this is where that vast distance between knowing that God exists, or even knowing something about God, and knowing God is crossed once for all. This is the revelation of God that we all desire, yet so often pass by. This is God’s response to the “vacuum” in us all.

For over 10 years now my wife Nancy and I have invited our friends from the bar – and anyone else who hears about it and want to join us – to come to our home on Christmas night. We share with each other some wonderful clam chowder and other appetizers, a glass of wine or other libation, and wind our way along the luminary-lit path that goes down to the river behind our house. There we stand around a campfire, sing Christmas carols, read one of the Christmas stories from the Bible, and I tell them why this night matters so; for them, and for all the world.

In the past I’ve talked with them about the wonder of Mary’s story; not so much the appearance of the angels, the miracle of the virgin birth, or God’s regarding her purity or deserving or even low estate, but that God the Lord of heaven and earth thought of – regarded her – at all. (“What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”)

I have talked with them, too, about the shepherds, who those at our campfire saw to be an awful lot like themselves (bar people, not church people), and how God had sent angels to tell them – before anyone else – that a savior had been “born this day to you!”

This year, I think it will be the wise men: What led them to the manger, and what they did with it. How, like so many of us (whether in barroom banter or in desperate searching), they had spent time and effort trying to understand both God’s world, and the God who made it. How, in and through it all, God had finally led them to that place where they could know more about God, and could come to know God. Whose willingness to be with them finally answered the burning question about whether or not God was willing to be for them. And how this encounter finally led them to bend their knees and lay down before Jesus all the gifts of their own wisdom and riches and strength, as well as all of the tears and fears and grasping at hope, that they had carried for so long.

Perhaps this year God will see fit that we too, in the light of the campfire on Christmas night, will once again or for the first time finally bend our knees as well, with all that we bring, before the true light that has come to lighten the darkness of all the world.

Jim Johnson is a Church Innovations consultant, a former pastor and owner of the Bull ‘n Bear Saloon in Red Lodge, Montana.