Edgework

Simplicity is a virtue, but oversimplification can actually be a vice, a sign of laziness (N. T. Wright in Simply Jesus, p. x).

Jesus – the Jesus we might discover if we really looked! – is larger, more disturbing, more urgent than we – than the church – had ever imagined (N. T. Wright, in Simply Jesus, p. 5).

In my early youth I was introduced to a simple Jesus. The world had rejected the creator God which meant that everyone was on the way to hell. Jesus came to this world to appease God’s wrath by dying on the cross. This allowed me to escape damnation and go to heaven if I believed that story. Simple as that!

Jesus and what he was about was summarized in the “The Crayon Box Song.”

O…Red is the color of the blood that he shed.
Brown is the crown that they laid upon his head.
Blue is for royalty which in him did dwell.
And yellow is for the Christian who is afraid to tell.

I remember thinking as a youngster that perhaps this story line about Jesus was a little too simple.  But to ask difficult questions about Jesus was frowned upon. When someone asked Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in the early fourth century, what God was doing before creation, supposedly he replied that God was making hell for people who ask silly questions like that. Right. So stick to the simple script and keep marching forward.

And that is the temptation Christians face even today. Just yesterday I spent a few hours with someone looking for a simple answer to his second messed up marriage. He came looking for Bible verses I might know which would make him look good compared to his wife who had walked out on him. He appeared surprised when I suggested that a 43-year-old man should perhaps do some digging for himself. “But I am not a reader,” he said. End of story.

On one occasion when I was still preaching, after I had finished a sermon by leaving some questions for my listeners to ponder, I got a thorough dressing-down from a zealous Christian. “I didn’t come to church to hear more questions but to be reminded that we have all the right answers!” he said. In other words, he was saying that he wanted to keep things simple. He didn’t want to be stretched “out of shape.”

I wonder how it is that we can accept the fact that to enter a profession one must participate in rigorous study and practice, but when it comes to our faith we can be content to sing The Crayon Box Song. A diesel mechanic must study hard and ask a lot of questions if he is to become proficient in his vocation. A senior-level accountant must know more than how to add and subtract. Medical students must probe the depths of anatomy, physiology, chemistry and a whole lot more before being certified as a medical doctor. Life simply is more complex than we like to think. No wonder some people are put off by simple, religious clichés which only scratch the surface of faith and life issues.

Jesus calls us to “…seek first his kingdom and his righteousness…” (Matthew 6:33). In my books, to seek in this context is “to quest, to ponder, to think deeply about” and so eventually keep discovering more and more about what it means to follow Jesus in the way of the Kingdom he inaugurated. Yet many of us don’t like questing; we prefer to hear simple answers to our simple questions repeated over and over again. Is this the case because we fear that going deeper might require more from us; that we might be called to make major changes in our lives? Perhaps.

Let me use my computer to illustrate our desire for simplicity. I have owned a computer for about 25 years now. Over the years my computers have become increasingly more powerful and by now are capable of doing literally hundreds – or even thousands – of things I know very little about. Yet I mostly use my computer for writing, receiving and sending emails, storing pictures and surfing the web; not much more. That meets my needs just fine, thank you. I kind of understand these functions and want to stay with them. Don’t confuse me with the untold number of functions that lie dormant inside that black box under my desk. When something goes wrong or I need to do something new on the computer I frantically call one of my sons because all of them have moved deeper into the world of computers than I have. But always I ask them to keep it as simple as possible. I understand. We all want to keep things simple.

But what if God is more – a thousand times more – than what I now understand him to be? What if I ask some hard questions and then, in the process of seeking answers, discover God to be much more than I could have thought or imagined? What if I discover that by simply staying with what I know I am missing out on deeper understandings of God and what it means to be a follower of Jesus in the way of the Kingdom?

While I understand our common propensity to keep things simple, I have also begun to discover the exhilaration of digging a little deeper. Some of my friends find it odd that I am coming to new conclusions about matters of faith and life at this stage in my life. But how could it be any other way? After nearly a life-time of questing in the context of my faith community, surely it should not be a surprise that I have moved past The Crayon Box Song.

But some would like me to stay in the box. I’m sorry. I have looked beyond the box and found a lot more to seek after.