A lot is going on in the world, and it’s doing quite a bit of carnage to our hearts, so for this Sunday… Can we just jump right in?
Deconstruction is just a nice word for demolition. It feels like you are being torn limb from limb, all while the foundations you have known are shifting underneath your feet. Many of you who read 36W regularly are in the midst of a long-game theological and spiritual deconstruction, with deep and reasonable questions about what is true and where is God now that God’s box no longer contains Him. (Spoiler alert: it never did.)
Add to this. the nation we live and vote within is in its own deconstruction. The presumptive moorings about the rules of engagement and what it means to be an American are shifting. Some of this shift will be productive, expanding the field for a broader definition of American that includes those previously left at the margins. Some of it will have consequences. Wrecking balls sometimes swing to far.
And let us not leave out the third piece of our remaking world: the American church. Because the country and its presumptive religion have functioned as conjoined twins these last 400 years, they tend to go through pubescent phases in parallel, and so here we are. The definitions of “Christian” are stretching, the rhythms of church, unwinding for the last 30 years, accelerated by a pandemic and its accompanying social distances.
Today, I want to acknowledge what life feels like as a person whose joints are de-socketing, all while driving a rusted-out Chevy Nova at 88 MPH.
The Scream of the Stretch
As we all age, stretching gets more critical and, if you’re like me, more painful. You’ve got to push hard and consistent to get that back to release (don’t @ me, chiropractors) and don’t even get me started on the head, shoulders, knees, and toes. If you stretch too far though, of course, new injuries ensue. The more you’ve let those bendy places calcify, the greater the risk of pain.
Systems like America and evangelicalism calcify all on their own. So do man-made ideas like “Gospel,” “salvation,” and “freedom.” The more ideas like these get treated as simple concepts with easy meanings, the more they get left on the shelf without exercise. And the more their joints lock up when they get out of bed.
The problem is, the most valuable ideas we share are not easily reduced to T-shirt slogans. “Love,” “worship,” “trust,” are all irreducibly complex ideas that perhaps exist in some pure form in the mind of God, but are multi-faceted jewels in the human experience, different in every light, reimagined at every angle. Turn them this way or that and they are all-but wholly transformed.
When these ideas are put on display under a glaring spotlight, unmoved and unconsidered, we accidentally transform them into flat objects, confusing our limited view with reality.
“Freedom” got locked in the museum in 1776, apparently perfected by the Declaration of Independence, and has since suffered from a lack of the exact stretching, questioning, and reconsidering that brought this country into existence.
In the middle of the last century, a group of well-meaning leaders like Billy Graham and Bill Bright set out to lock “The Gospel” into its glass case, unquestionable and simple. Building off the idea that the Bible was a straightforward document, unquestionable in all things, sure the “The Gospel” was irreducible as well?
These lock-ups created mass institutions. Super sale centers built to market these simple ideas, and to rally the unquestioning. Many of us have been among those unquestioning. The painful stretch of deconstruction is the price we pay to get back into running shape.
The Power of a Question
The power of a question is that it forces an idea to go to work. It undermines over-simplifications and stretches out old joints. Love, Gospel, Freedom, Joy are only useful to us in this life if they can bend and stretch to the wildest and most diverse circumstances. The work we do to tie them down only sets them into useless stone.
Questions, which are often triggered by doubts, are the physical therapists of our human being. The bring mobility, agility, and presence to that which matters most.
The Truth always requires a question. That’s why Jesus flourished within them. He often met questions with more questions. Not to obfuscate the message, but to stretch it, allowing it to flourish beyond legalistic boundaries.
The white American middle-class way of life, and the religion that supported it, functioned as an unquestioned moral good for 70 years. The picket fences, the acquisitive way of life, the hyper-individualism, the Gospel in a single prayer. For those of us that have reaped its benefits, the stretching of that definition, the questioning of its superiority, the unraveling of its religion feels like being torn tendon from joint. It is a stretch after years on the couch that no one would choose. Unless.
Glory in the Unmaking
Unless there is glory in the unmaking.
Unless the goodness of God is unwilling to be contained.
Unless the generosity of Spirit is unmanaged and free.
Unless love requires a liberality of community.
Unless outcasts are the heroes, sinners are the saints, and those surest of themselves are hollow caves of death.
Deconstruction of what we’ve known—the painful separation of truth from slogan—is horrifying, unless there is more.
As my body aches from mobility I’ve avoided, as my soul aches from expansiveness I’ve feared, as my heart aches from beauty I’ve burned to ashes, so goes the deconstruction.
Unmake me, O God. Tear down the castles of belief that have hidden me from the wide fields of faith.
Unravel us, O God. Shred the garments of self-righteousness and fear. Reveal our naked vulnerabilities to unashamed love.
Deconstruct us, O God. Tear our sandcastles joint from timber, until all that remains is the spacious question of solid ground.
I write here at 36W to share my own journey of rediscovering faith within and after the deconstruction. If you feel yourself stretched—wanted or unwanted—you are welcome here. It would be a gift to me (and maybe to you or others!) if you would subscribe or share.