AN EMPTY BALLPOINT PEN
I’m tired of a God who won’t step in and deal with
wickedness—won’t put a stop to it! I’m tired of a God who does all his
crying through the tears of humanity! I’m weary of a God who’s always
willing to forgive us our sins. Isn’t that sweet of him! If you believe
some of those who profess to be his interpreters and followers he
foreordained us to sin, for pity's sake.
Poor little humans! We only have one tiny life and for so many it’s
one long crucifixion until they die of exhaustion, unmissed and
unmourned . Dear God they haven’t time to become great sinners because
they’re too busy covering their heads while they’re being beaten, too
busy trying to figure out how they’re going to feed their children and
so exhausted that their hearts can’t carry the crushing emotional
burden; there’s so much pain, disappointment and unanswered prayers; so
much undeserved suffering.
All right, so they’re all sinners but what chance was there that they
could be otherwise? Here’s an actual case. His name’s John, he’s
eighteen, he’s no vicious hoodlum and his mother is no “Beast of
Buchenwald”. Yes, yes, they’ve done wrong things in their lives—did God
expect them to be sinless?
Here’s their story told by John’s mother. Multiply it by a billion!
On January 25th, 1973 in Memorial Hospital, John Risso,
red-haired, laughing, tall, eighteen, tractor-driving, cow-scratching,
flirtatious, shy, died after two and a half years of leukemia. After six
weeks of a raging temperature, experimental drugs, bleeding, and an
abscess in his rectum that became gangrenous, he died soft and gentle,
finally, after six hours of violent death throes. His face was so thin,
his hair only a memory, a soft red fuzz, arms blue and green from shots
and intravenous feeding, the looked like an old picture of a saint after
his tortures were over...
Why would a kind God do what was done to John, or do such a thing
to me? I’m poor, have only second-hand furniture and clothing. The things
of value were my husband and sons...How can I live with the agony he
suffered?
Part of the time he was in a comma, and he kept saying, ‘Mama,
help me, Mama, help me.’ I couldn’t and it’s killing me. I whispered in
his ear, ‘John, I love you so much.’ All of a sudden his arm came up
stiffly and fell across my back, and very quietly he said, from some
vast depth, ‘Me too.’ “
There are no currently satisfying answers to the agony of the world
because it isn’t “answers” or “explanations” these people want though,
despite the silly advice from silly OT professors for us to keep our
mouths shut on the subject, the sufferers keep on asking “why?”
Paul’s message of the suffering of God in and as Jesus was scandalous
and it hasn’t changed. To those who wanted vindicated, those who wanted
a work of the Spirit to prove that God was on their side he offered a
King without dignity, without acceptance, a “loser” streaked with spit
and sweat and blood, hanging on a public gallows. To those who wanted
the dignity of being seen to be wise, scholarly, academically
well-heeled and esteemed he offered the wisdom of God embodied in a kid
nailed to a stake.
I don’t know much; I’ve never been a scholar and it’s too late for me
even if I had the ability to become one but I know I’m tired of
scholarship with all its wisdom—a wisdom that can show a mass of
opposing ways to understand the same texts. “Oh look, see what I can do
with this section if I rearrange the textual pieces like Lego
fragments—I can make all kinds of different shapes out of it.”
I’m tired of famous OT scholars teaching ethics and social action
from the biblical witness they have no faith in; using it when it suits
their agenda and sneering at it when it doesn’t; one moment telling us
that the God of the Bible is concerned about justice and the next moment
telling us that the God of the Bible is “obsessed” or “drunk” with
punishing people. I’m tired of those who know this about them [or
should!] oohing and aahing over such people. Okay, maybe they’re right,
maybe they can out-talk us, they’ve out-read us; maybe we can’t, as they
say, get beyond the biblical narrative that portrays God as a Jekkyl
& Hyde but at least one would think there should be openness. I
don’t say such people should be persecuted but there’s something
profoundly out of straight when we listen to people thinking they
believe in the Bible when in truth they believe what they believe
independent of the Bible but use the Bible as a textbook because that's
the book they’ve studied most of their lives!
I’m tired of the banal moralizing that I listen to week after week
after week. Preachers who Google and armed with a database of a hundred
and fifty favorite verses and their favorite topics they present them in
something of different suit and yet, more often than not, with the same
tired stories, platitudes and clips from the Andy Griffith show. I’d rather have the scandal.
Colin Morris, a prominent British churchman some years back told us
that during the night a couple of hundred yards from his door people
found a little man lying on the pavement– quite dead. An Asian. His sole
possessions were the pair of shorts he wore, a pair of worn sandals and
his shirt with an empty ballpoint pen in it. The autopsy found a ball
of grass in his otherwise empty stomach.
Arrrrrgh!
My dear Mrs. Risso, my poor little Asian man I’ve nothing to tell
you other than that there is a God and that he is like Jesus Christ and
he will make all things right.
Meanwhile we have the brave speeches that demand churches to give
females dignity and their right to be bishops and preachers, brave
speeches that in the right circles are applauded long and often. “I have
a dream! I have a dream that one day all the churches throughout the
Western world will have female preachers and bishops exercising
authority over the flocks as the males do today.”
Only God can save the Church from itself! Only God can work savingly
through such a pathetic self-serving Community led by talkers like us
who are drunk on our own wisdom and passion, who think we're courageous
and free when the truth is we are dragged around as slaves by the newest
fad that comes along or who take a truth [debated] and act like it is
the central truth. Only a God like the God and Father of the Lord Jesus
can bless a human family through such a Church shaped by talkers like
us—sinfully shaped and with our unknown motivations—unknown even to
us..
[I’m tired of hearing the sickening substitutes for the glorious
Gospel and I'm tired of hearing my own voice and as soon as I get a few
things cleared up I purpose to shut down this site.]