An Endless Parade of Crazy

I'm going to tell you all a terrible secret.

I've sworn in church. It's true. I really have. I didn't do it intentionally. When someone pointed it out I said "It's okay. God knows I swear."

I wasn't trying to offend anyone. In fact, the reason I don't typically swear in church is that it does offend people. Like I said, God knows I swear. He has met me. For some reason I've never put my finger on, he loves me.

I take issue with the idea that someone knows everything about me and loves me anyway. If you're my friend, I love you. I don't love someone in spite of their faults like I have some kind of list of things and there's a point at which it becomes too much. I either love someone or I don't. I may not like everything about someone but I don't love them anyway. I just love them.

God takes this to another level. Maybe I learned it from him, I don't know. God knows I swear. He knows I lie (albeit badly). He knows I have a hard time controlling my temper. He knows I'm self absorbed. He knows all this and loves me. I know this because I have gotten completely out of hand in our relationship and he didn't turn his face away from me. I'm an Episcopalian so when I'm at church our relationship is very formal. Sometimes when I'm at home and I'm at my best I do okay at keeping up a level of formality. If I'm tired, drunk, upset, or just plain old happy though I get sloppy. God becomes Papa. In my younger days, when I got upset, I would talk to one friend, then another, then another and finally it would come down to prayer. It would just get progressively worse on the upset scale until it exploded. Until I exploded. Looking back, I feel really sorry for my friend Will. He was the last one on the list before I got to God. If he got a tornado of teenage angst, Jesus got the hurricane. By morning I was usually back to some semblance of sanity, if you can call it that, because they calmed the storm in me. I don't know how I would have gotten through the valley of the shadow of raging hormones without Him.

I'm not saying God just puts up with it. He pushes back. I just never get the sense that if I cross that line one more time, the relationship could be over. I know people who live with that fear. I know people who think they can hide the shadow side of themselves from God. I know they think they can't let him into that space. I also know that they'll never truly be free until they do.

I remember when I was a little kid being told that God hates sin and can't be around it. I was taught that it was something everybody did. So it should have followed, I guess, that God hates everybody. Then because God also loves everybody, he sent his son to earth to be murdered by a gang of... no that's not working. Wait, they don't make it sound like that. They make it sound like a set up. They make it sound staged. Which made it even more confusing...

I managed to ignore all that. Call it blissful ignorance. I remember being in the first grade and reading chapter books. When I got to the words I didn't know I'd just make a buzzing noise in my little brain and fill in the blanks from the context. I have lots of practice at skipping over the parts I don't get and filling in the blanks.

So here's what I get. God made the universe. God called it good. Something goes wrong. We do something that makes us feel like we can't talk to God without killing something or burning something. God spends lots and lots of time trying to get us back into a relationship with him. Abraham didn't find favor with God because he was perfect. It wasn't because he was super special. Abraham found favor with God because he believed God and God reckoned it to him as righteousness. He didn't get it right. He wasn't perfect. He haggled with the creator of the universe for heaven's sake!! He haggled! With God! Moses was a murderer. Noah was a drunk. King David's great grand mama was supposedly a whore. I'm not going to talk about Saul/Paul. God the Son comes to earth as the child of unwed pregnant teenager and leaves the life of a gnarly contractor guy to become a wandering preacher who runs with a bunch of first century rednecks. God does not seem to be looking for perfect people! If he is, he's having a horrible time finding good help! But he does find good help! This endless parade of crazy leads to redemption. It ends (and begins a new story) with resurrection and redemption.

The story ends with life. It ends with God not taking no for an answer. No, he will NOT leave us alone. No, he will not give up. No, he will not let us decide who he will or will not love. No, God does not accept the limitations we put on grace. No, there is nothing we can do make him listen to reason and see that we've really got this religion stuff figured out. We can't stop him from loving us. We can't hide. The more we try the more tied up we get in ourselves.

That's deadly. It's deadly because he loves us. He doesn't love us anyway. He loves us. He can do that. He's God.

And he knows I swear. I don't think he minds nearly as much as my mother does.