How many times.....

“Then Peter came to him and said, "Lord, how many times must I forgive my brother who sins against me? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, I tell you, but seventy-seven times!” Matthew 18:21-22 NET

“How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?”......the great Bob Dylan croons in his song, “Blowing in the Wind,” “How many times must a man look up, before he sees the sky?”

It is the answer that we may never know the answer to, yet it came up in the conversation earlier this week with a dear brother in Christ over coffee.

“How many times,” he asked, “is enough before you consider ‘due diligence’ to be done?”

My mind immediately conjured up Matthew’s verse….”How many times??”

Common teaching in the day was that you have to forgive someone three times before you can ‘ethically’ call it quits and be considered exonerated in the community. Peter added a healthy number, a little over double, to his quip figuring he’d ace the exam before he even got the question. And he failed, miserably. Jesus basically told him that he wasn’t in the ballpark; far from it……there is never an ‘end’ point to forgiveness.

You forgive as many times as you have to forgive, without fail.

Otherwise, the limitation you impose on another is the same you’d have imposed on you, which we all know is not even close to the necessary ‘coinage’ to buy our way out of the debt of repetitive sin.

Even the definition of ‘forgiveness’ implies that it ‘resets to zero’ so that we would in effect be forgiving for the first time whether it was for the third or fiftieth time. Forgiveness is a decision to relate to another as if the wrong done to you had never happened.

And too often, we fail at even coming close to true forgiveness.

But isn’t that how God has forgiven us? Isn’t that how we are called to forgive others? And, if the possibility of being redeemed by the blood is IMPOSSIBLE without forgiveness, isn’t it safe to say that forgiveness can be switched out for the ‘other’ fruits of the spirit or characteristics that Christ tells us to expect in our faith, in our homes, in our communities and our congregations? Things like love, joy, peace…..”

How many times are we to exhibit that to our friends, neighbors, congregational members and community?

Seven times?

We should only love our neighbor seven times before we ‘give up’ on them and mark them off the evangelism list?

We should only love our spouses through seven rough times before we feel justified to withhold that love?

We should only bring joy to a widow or a single parent once or twice before we consider the resources of the church to be properly expended for them?

We should bring peace to the restless a handful of times before our mission is fulfilled?

We should only be in relationship with someone until it is no longer convenient to our lives?

After all, the Great Commission says, “Go and preach the Good News for a few days, making a few disciples of all you’ve been taught……”

Doing that which is good is not good in excess, right? And, after all, we only get a few opportunities to live sin-free before we are discarded into the ‘mistake’ pile.

Unfortunately, the current and the past church models (read post-Acts church here) are inherently human and therefore run with human assumptions and expectations. Many of these fall far beyond the scope and the breath of the Gospel intent and description.

Seven times anything in the modern church is a very hard thing to see replicated in anything that requires forgiveness and restoration, or entry into the messy lives of people repeated times.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, the models used are working…..churches are building grand buildings in which to house the worship, educational, outreach, children’s, youth and various vehicles and conveyances that once hauled everything to and from a temporary rental location.

They have acres of land cultivated and amazingly tranquil for those long walks pondering the visage of God.

The church down the road from me, a mega-sized church across from another denomination’s mega-church, is like a beacon in the sea of nighttime darkness…….spot lights and other lighting blaze against the night as the church lies locked up, waiting for the staff to arrive in the morning and be about the Lord’s business.

The Crystal Palace……Saddleback…..Willow Creek…..Mars Hill…….

Hundreds of thousands flock to these leaders and hear the Word preached, sometimes it’s even the Word of God rather than a remix of their own version of what the Bible says in the postmodern, emergent sense.

And yet, when the multitudes walk out of the doors, they are blind to the very mission field that starts inches from its thresholds.

But, my opinion on the state of the ‘Christian’ church and the leadership isn’t something new, it is the same as it was a year ago and a year before that.

What’s changed is my opinion of the human factor in the model of God’s church. When humanity comes to do ‘God’s work,’ it is instantly corrupted and hopelessly flawed.

The best intentions last for a while, the purpose and mission statements are actually believed and lived for a time. Then humanity takes over and we get the success stories of Willow Creek, Northridge, and others. Even then, some of these megas seem to stumble along in the truth somehow for a time….but the corruption of establishing and implementing a business model for a God-endeavor always gears the heart towards human ability and God leaves the building.

But, you forgive seven times seventy and fight alongside the remnant to bring the congregational body back on task for what God has purposed the church and its members for.

You forgive the slights, the disappointments and the hurts because you realize that humanity even in the corporate sense of the word is corrupted even in the best of circumstances and we all are limping towards the prize, the final destination of those who believe and have confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Maybe that is where I’m hung up at and why in this desperate and frightening time, I want to tuck into myself and curl up in my room, far away from the world and its darkness, far from the sinfulness of those whom claim to be perfect and isolated from the one thing I know is truth even as my faith struggles with this fragile humanity…..that God is God and I am not, that Christ is King and died for me and that the knowledge imparted of the Absolute Truth of the Way cannot be denied.

Seven times Seventy.

Forgiveness, loving, hoping; any fruit of the Spirit I believe can be inserted in the place of forgiveness….and still the verse and intent is the same.

And yet, we question how many times we have to ‘endure’ something before we can escape it; love, relationships, heartache, pain, suffering and a montage of other ‘things’ that plague us in this life.

We never question however, how many times we can ask forgiveness for our sins.

Maybe I’m just not cut out for this whole ‘Christian community’ thing because I’m one of the broken, the stupidly confused that just don’t ‘get it,’ or that 'needy' one that just won't ever be happy with what comes his way.

Why?

I’ve hit the brick wall one too many times and finally brain damage has set in. Slamming my head against the wall, confused by the old nature that quails before the new and frightened by the decisive alienation that has happened too many times in "God's Church" where it is a judgment before mercy, condemnation before grace. Where the counter is going over into double or triple digits in the bean counters clickers.

Community is the greatest thing I fear in this ‘family’ of God-fearing people because it is that very ‘community’ that has caused me the most damage. Or maybe I’m just too damaged for such a community and invariably trip over their well-intending feet.

You leave yourself transparent, you are beggin' for a hurting.

George Mueller said that when God is ready to invite you into the things that He is doing in you, around you and ultimately through you, you experience a ‘crisis of faith’ where the beliefs that you have existed with for however long suddenly aren’t enough to reach that next step and so, in the absence of supporting evidence, you have to stretch yourself out on faith and faith alone.

A few of my friends say that God is doing something in my life, prepping me for the next major step in the purpose……

The majority say I’m neglecting my responsibilities; to my family, my community and my God.

And I want to throw in the towel…….

How many more times am I going to be at this place; between the reality of my beliefs and the impossibility of my faith, a finely sharpened point that I can balance upon ever so briefly before I fall; one way or the other…….

It is possible that Dylan was part prophet when he lamented that “the answer my friend is blowing in the wind….”

Fading......

As I look back upon the last forty-three years of this life that I have lived and step into the forty-fourth, I am amazed. Amazed at the meandering path that hasn’t ended well before now despite the pitfalls and crevasses that have spanned its girth……amazed that the life lived wasn’t truly lived, or least felt like it was truly embraced in the warmth of living, until six and almost a half years ago.

Amazed at how much further I have come in that shorter span of time lugging the baggage garnered from the lifetime of living. Amazed that, as I have come close enough to the fire to be forever burned in its flame and still have that desire to love, in the language of the poet, “without knowing how, or when, or from where…straightforwardly…..”

There has been far more darkness, sin and shame in this life…..yet I am mostly aware of its joys and graces, interlaced with the mercies and hope that makes the twine of its length stronger than the sorrows and broken dreams that lie coloring its outer surface. There has been more disappointments, not only in others but in myself (far less in others than myself, I should probably say). There have been too many opportunities ruined by my own selfishness than properly utilized. There have been more relationships squandered than ever were properly grown.

Yet that pesky hope remains, driving me into the sure folly of human interaction and into the realm of assured rejection. Yet it remains.

And once again in the ignorance of that hope, I grasp for the straws of those things that I desire for eternity; love, faith, joy and peace. Knowing even as I grasp them the assurance of their departure once more at the end of the day when the light passes into the horizon of the day and once again the night of human depravity once again grips at the strings of my soul. Even though, it is the infusion of that hope, unblemished yet by the touch of humanity but still fresh with its ordained Godliness, that propels me into the daylight that once again breaks the inkiness of dark night that has bound me in its arms for another time.

I should cry all the time, speaking sorrows untold and unknown in the polite circles of this world, and prove beyond the shadows that hide momentarily in the corners from this sun the reality of humanity’s hopelessness. I spent too many of these forty-three years doing so, proving it to be something more than mere humanity can hope to overcome, and yet, I stand here, forty-three and two days into this foolish journey and ease my weary bones down to the fire….as twilight falls and the shadows begin their play, telling stories that need to be told in the darkness that bore them life and the harsh glow of the light that brings them into sharp focus.

“In this part of the story I am the one who dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you, because I love you,”

We have made love to be a foolish, mortal thing even in the arms of the church, of the faithful who gather around its tepid firelight against the coming darkness of the world.

We have arranged the love of its Chief Priest to be an exercise to be discussed and strategized in the quietness of the hallowed halls of our sanctuaries and devices of faith so that the enemy cannot hear them. Yet ignoring the fact that the enemy knows our plans outright, well before we can even reach for the shuttered doors of our hidden places and throw them wide to greet what we think are the tired masses waiting there.

We discover to our dismay a landscape devoid of life, no masses waiting there for our reach and only the crickets to sing praises for our arrival.

Love is not a static thing, nor does it hide beneath the trappings of our fragile attempt to emulate it. It cannot, for if it did, it would not be love but a wraith of the shadow it casts upon the landscape without light’s touch to throw it. Love has to be lived to be able to love, love without the living beat of its loving is a sad carcass of humanity’s failures and broken dreams.

Love wasn’t meant for such things, limited and sorrowed. Love is impossible, improbable and totally foolish in its dreaming. Love is everything, even in the absence of it. Love is there.

When we reach that point in our existence where love has become a wraith of what it once was, even in the poorly drivel of human’s excuse of it…..when we arrive there, we find ourselves at a cliff, staring down into the dark abyss of eternity. It no longer motivates us, but haunts us…….It not longer challenges us but beats us in endless repetition…..It not longer warms us but burns us with its touch.

When we arrive, it is there where love punishes us the most, with a haunting lullaby of enticement to believe it will come again. And we do, even as the haunting laughter of its rejection echoes in the background of our despair………

In the absence of love, what is there?

Love drove a man, a very special and important man, to leave behind the trappings and authority of His being….to deny Himself….to come to earth to live among us petty and foolish humans as one of us, with all the handicaps and hang-ups that we have…and yet, love drove Him to be the shining example of its expression in such fragility. Even as the world assaulted Him and trod upon His purer version of love, it was that expression and intimate knowledge of love that drove Him forward. It is that love that turned a Father’s eyes away from His Only Begotten Son, whose love drove Him to take on the sins of the world to become His and lose the favor of His Father as it covered Him.

And it is love that made that man, that god-man, rise from the Dead three days later………….

If you stare at the abyss, looking down into its depths and watching the swirling inky blackness caress the sides of the cliff……………look well and look long, for it is that which is what love is when love is absent and dead…..dark, and cold.

Love borne of a woman, treasured and caressed into sustained life by her breath and warmth may never be mine to visit with for a time upon this world and such sorrow is not sweet or manageable…..it is the lot I’ve drawn.

What makes me fear the most is that realization that what I thought was true love was nothing even close because it is that love that I attributed to my Savior and if that image of true love was true, then He cannot exist, He cannot be who He says and there is no love there.

So I struggle for the first time in this journey, among the broken mountains and foothills of this landscape, to pick up my feet and head…..to journey on. Because for the first time, I am afraid of coming to that crevasse where I’ll stand upon the edge and stare into the darkness beyond

And despair…………….

For love will have passed me by………..