the heavens declare

The evening light wanes early now, summer pink fading to September grays and blues in pillows of dispersing raincloud. The silver half-moon is visible for an instant before being swallowed back up by the mist. The heavens declare.

On a clearer night, I would stay out longer in search of a sky striped with shooting stars or dancing with pillars of aurora—though it’s getting too late in the season for such an already-unlikely event. Still, God’s artistry is unbound by what is “likely.”

The heavens declare.

When I was a little girl roaming wide-open spaces under a cloudless wind-whipped sky, I looked often to the face of the mountain in the northwest corner of the horizon, thinking I might see the face of God there. That was the biggest object I had categories for, so in my mind, that was God’s domain, the closest visual I had to God Himself.

But have you noticed? In the Bible, God is not the mountain. God is on the mountain—in the cloud.

God is not an ancient face of rock, half-buried in glaciers, concrete and definable, conquerable by anyone with the will and stamina to try. And He’s not a momentary formation of cloud, shifting and changeable, enterable by anyone who can climb or fly high enough.

He is neither… and both.

Ancient, real, challenging, multifaceted, mysterious, pervasive, impossible to capture.

The heavens declare.

Heaven is declaring God’s glory;
    the sky is proclaiming his handiwork.
One day gushes the news to the next,
    and one night informs another what needs to be known.
Of course, there’s no speech, no words—
        their voices can’t be heard—
but their sound extends throughout the world;
        their words reach the ends of the earth.

Psalm 19:1-4 CEB

“Glory” is a strange word in Hebrew. Its source word, transliterated kabad, is a verb best defined as “to be heavy, weighty, burdensome.” Kabod is the noun version we translate “glory.”

The heavens declare God’s weightiness. His abundance. That He is not to be trifled with. Like the mountain, He is massive and immovable. Like the clouds in the expanse, He is mysterious and unpredictable. His own Creation reflects tiny pieces of who He is and what it means to enter into His presence. It is a heavy thing.

A heavy, wonderful thing.

And the Creation can’t help itself but invite us into the Creator’s throne room.

The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.”

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

1 Kings 19:11-13 NIV

on golden calves

I doubt anyone is counting, but I can’t remember when I last attended an entire Sunday church service. I’ve made it to two Bible study classes and a couple of prayer meetings, and that’s all. Some of it is the summer busyness that is inevitable when one half of the extended family lives hours away; some of it is the standard scheduling mess that’s inevitable when one half of the parenting team is a shift worker; some of it is the reality that after 30 years of fairly automatic weekly attendance, simply going to church has become an activity I feel a lot of internal conflict about.

I had another uncomfortable realization last night (while lying awake with insomnia for the second night in a row) that I’ve often used church as a way to quiet the constant fear in my subconscious that I’m not really, truly following Jesus. After all, even when there is little genuine substance to my everyday relationship with God, I can fall back on the tangible reality that I go to the place and do the thing to make me feel better.

This is Pharisaism at its finest, and it comes very naturally to me.

And Pharisaism is a form of idolatry.

One of my favorite stories in the Old Testament is when, while Moses is receiving the Law on the mountain, Aaron quiets the Israelites’ fear and unrest by helping them create a golden calf. He doesn’t say to them, “Here is a new god for you to worship, since the old one abandoned you!”—he says “This is your God, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4, emphasis added).

At the very moment when the God of Israel was meeting with Moses on a mountaintop cloaked in cloud, Aaron and the assembly reduced Him to the tangible, accessible, visible form of a calf made out of gold. Their small minds needed to be able to go to the place and do the thing—to see “proof” that they were still blessed and protected and led by God, even if it was proof they literally created out of their own ornaments of slavery.

They made for themselves an idol.

Now when Aaron saw [the golden calf], he built an altar before it; and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” So the next day they rose early and offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.

Exodus 32:5-6

If the act of “going to church” is my tangible metric for whether I’m walking in step with God, have I not done the same?

God may be high above on the mountaintop, inviting me into the wonders of His presence and longing to teach me His wisdom, but I’m too busy bringing offerings to a false version of Him—created from the golden chains of legalism—to notice.

Or He may just feel distant and inaccessible right now, and this is a time to wait for Him to speak when He sees fit, and stop filling the silence with counterfeit worship to a counterfeit god.

I don’t mean church itself is bad or idolatrous, but I wonder if I’m the only one who’s guilty of shrinking the glory of relationship with the true God down to a measurable set of religious actions, or trying to contain His presence within the four walls of a three-dimensional building?

If we took those religious actions away and quit going to the building altogether, would there be anything left? If the answer is no, was there any relationship with God there to begin with, or was it all a carefully managed mirage?

Part of me has always felt a little guilty that my richest times of communion with God usually happen far away from church: on horseback rides, in my flower garden, wandering through open fields, at Twenty One Pilots concerts, in conversation with beloved friends or family over cocktails, in times of immense pain and grief, or watching while He shapes the minds and hearts of my two little girls in our most mundane daily activities.

But perhaps that’s exactly as it should be. Is He not in all of these things at least as much as He is in church? These are the real things that make up 98.9% of our lives, the things that go on between Sunday noon and the next Sunday at 10am. Going to the place and doing the thing once or twice a week is fine—and ideally it’s supportive of the goal—but going and doing are hardly the same as being and dwelling. Following the rules is not the same as living out a reborn heart. Feasting before a golden calf doesn’t mean you are worshiping the One True God.

belonging to Jesus

The reformer in me is ever-tempted by the idea of a Ninety-Five Theses moment—a complete break from the ball of religion attached to my limbs by a chain of bureaucracy (in other words, your average Western church). What would it feel like to run—to set off at a sprint toward the finish line, cheered on by that Cloud of Witnesses, unencumbered by sin, guilt, law, fear, or any other unnecessary hindrance?

I have spent my life immersed in evangelicalism, in a variety of different local church bodies. The weight of religion seems to grow heavier over time, and I wonder if it’s because it didn’t feel like much of a burden when it gave me belonging. But what if conformity, not Christ, has been at the root of that belonging? Ever since I started seeking first the kingdom of heaven—sometimes at the expense of the “kingdom” of the church—the shackles of religion have become much more obvious.

When you belong, it’s so easy to believe that you’ve got it right. You are where you’re supposed to be, doing what you’re supposed to do. Your church must be approved by God, because you feel so at home there. But wait a second. Doesn’t that just mean your church is approved by . . . you?

I heard this quote recently for the first time, and it made me think:

Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence—religious meaning—apart from God as revealed through the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but, at least in America, almost never against the crowds.

Eugene H. Peterson

When my sense of belonging began to erode, I noticed: I may have been substituting the ecstasy of being part of the crowd for the actual transcendence of being part of Christ’s body.

I may have been conflating going to church and doing “churchy” things with obedience. I may have been measuring my faithfulness by how many Sundays my butt was in the pew. I may have started making my faith about going somewhere once a week for two hours to play-act the perfect mix of smiling and submissive and vulnerable and guarded—not about being something, being an apprentice of Christ alone, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

When Jesus called His disciples, He didn’t say “Meet me at the synagogue on the Sabbath for an hour.” He said, “Follow Me.”

Starting here, now, wherever we are and wherever we go—and continuing indefinitely. And, importantly, doing it together, even when our backgrounds are beyond disparate, our personalities mix like oil and water, and our political differences would normally have us killing each other. That’s what being a disciple means.

That’s what being the Church means.

The ball and chain of religion would have us believe that “church” is a place we go with a bunch of people who look and sound and think exactly like us. That it’s an event we help make happen, not a body that we are an animating part of. It often pushes a certificate of church membership or confirmation like it’s a certificate of marriage, forgetting that biblically, we don’t marry a church; we are the Bride of Christ. Religion tries to pass off valuing conformity as treasuring the truth, gatekeeping ministry as protecting the body, and upholding legalism as fearing God.

The truth is something to treasure—so maybe we shouldn’t try to shut down truth-seekers for fear that they’ll find where our statement of faith doesn’t fully reflect God’s heart.

The body is something to protect—so maybe we shouldn’t try to silence and dismiss whole demographics within it that could provide a valuable voice and perspective on behalf of its vulnerable.

God is Someone to fear—so maybe we should consider how He will judge those who, like Pharisees, obstruct the entrance to the kingdom of heaven by paving the way instead toward kingdoms of this world. Jesus said of them: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut the kingdom of heaven in front of people; for you do not enter it yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (Matthew 23:13, emphasis added).

I’m not calling out any particular church I’ve been part of in the last 30 years. I’m pleading with all of them. All of us.

Unity does not, cannot, mean conformity to a particular denomination or set of secondary and tertiary doctrines. The goal isn’t to belong to a large and growing crowd, it’s to become one healthy body. Genuine unity can only come through recognizing Christ as the body’s Head—meaning, according to Ephesians, its Unifier. Only a central focus on the Messiah Jesus, His death and resurrection, and His kingdom can bind us together into one living and working and fruit-bearing organism.

Any “unity” achieved through legalistic conformity instead of the pursuit of Jesus will lead only to the (continued) mass fracturing of Christianity into a million tiny echo chambers. We can’t accomplish our mission in that state.

The call of the disciple is simple and difficult: She must deny herself, take up her cross, and follow Jesus.

Jesus, not a crowd.

Jesus, not a husband.

Jesus, not a pastor.

Jesus, not a denomination.

Jesus, not a political party, candidate, or policy platform.

Jesus, not a particular side of a culture war.

Belonging, while a vitally important aspect of human flourishing, is not a biblical metric for how well we’re doing this. Belonging—at least the kind that feels comfortable, confirms all our priors, and lets us come together to congratulate ourselves on our rightness week after week—may not be part of the deal.

We belong to Jesus, and no other.

“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand.”

John 10:27-28