The Radiance

A drive-home experience with a podcast changed my outlook on God's presence. He met me where I was, and I realized it...

To set this story up I need to tell you that in early February Deb and I visited Houston Methodist hospital to discuss my pending liver transplant.

The doctor was kind, but as we have discovered about doctors in this line of work, he only told us the bad news.
-       The procedure for my type of liver transplant is new and its success is not quantified.
-       They don’t have a long history of statistics to rely upon.
-       They don’t know why some people live and some don’t.
-       They don’t know if my body will accept a perfect fit, or throw a perfect fit.

They can’t tell, apparently … much at all. Or if they can, they’re not telling.

Frankly, and I apologize in advance to my doctor buddies, that approach gets tiresome. I know it’s the result of our litigious society. But man it would be nice for someone to tell us something like, “It might work! Of course there are no guarantees. But based on my experience with this, Wade, I think you have a great chance.”

That would be a nice little nugget to carry around in my mind’s lock box. But under the current CYA system, we got dark news about my lack of a chance.

And driving home from receiving that news is where my real story begins. 

Who can paint this for me? I will buy it.

In November, a friend of mine recommended that I listen to a guy named Rob Bell.

Rob is a former pastor who has turned his passion for understanding God into a pursuit that goes outside the traditional religions most of us grew up with. Somewhere along the way he became disenchanted with the god we accepted from tradition as the “one we got,” and began pursuing a God that is more relevant to us today—at least that’s my interpretation :).

As Deb and I were driving home to Austin I queued up a pod cast from Rob. It was an interview with his colleague Alexander J. Shaia, a child-refugee from Lebanon who grew up in Alabama, gained a Phd in psychology, trained and practiced for decades in religion, and now pursues various other spiritual disciplines.

I had heard Alexander late last year talking with Rob about the four gospels and their application to life’s journeys. It was a new lens for me and I enjoyed hearing it.

This particular “Robcast” interview with Alexander was about the Christmas story. It was February, and I knew we were late to hear it. It was recorded for December; but better late than lost.

It was regarding the gospel of Luke; the “good news” for his audience.

As a quick aside, objective historians will attest that there is no reasonable doubt that Jesus lived in the first part of the first century. Likewise, there is no reasonable doubt that his life started Christianity and that his followers wrote several books about his life, four of which are the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

But that is where the objective certainty ends. People wonder…
-       Why are there inconsistencies between the gospels?
-       Why do some of the authors mention some events while others do not?
-       Why are some of Jesus’s statements different?
-       Why are there contradictions?
-       Why?

Ultimately, the questioning should lead to one thing: how do they work for “you,” the reader?

For me, I have come and gone from these books. In college I was fascinated by the apologetics, searching for historicity and accuracy to the original manuscripts. At another point I was caught up by their comparative study. At still another I searched for their relevance to “the big me.” In each case, my curiosity was satisfied on some level and I left them with more than I brought.

But lately, as a result of listening to Rob and his friend Dr. Shaia, I have gotten new insights that make the gospels more real to me; more commonsensical; more textured with the authors’ sweat and blood as they scratched at their parchments, pouring their creative minds and spirits out onto the pages.

It has become obvious that each one wrote for their specific audience—specific groups of early Jesus followers in specific times and specific states of maturation and distress. They wrote to minister to them, teach them, and encourage them. They likely wrote with some fear for their own lives. They wrote with inspiration and passion about their subject, and about their audience.

And let’s be clear: each gospel was hugely successful. Each one filled its readers with hope, encouragement, light, spiritual security, and any number of other requirements. And as a result, each was selected to be canonized and subsequently reprinted something close to five billion times.

But I digress.

On that day after Deb and I heard the dark news the good doctor shared, we listened to Rob and Dr. Shaia talk about the gospel of Luke.

Luke wrote his letter to early Jesus followers who were in deep, dark distress. Their families were not safe. Romans were rounding them up to be killed. They were ostracized from their mother religion, Judaism, for following Jesus. They were isolated and alone from friends and family. And Judaism itself was in shambles and trying to rediscover its way.

As the story goes, the times were dark. No one could be trusted. Secret signs scratched hastily in temporal dirt identified other believers. Tears were common. Corners were never just corners. Work and money were hard to come by.

When I think about Luke’s audience—meeting in secret in rooms with the shades drawn low, looking from face to face to see who was missing—I realize that while I don’t have it very easy right now, things could be worse. These people were who Luke was thinking about when he sat down to write his gospel—his good news. He wrote to them with their dark times in mind.

He starts by talking about the story of Mary and Joseph. She was from a priest’s family, an honorable thing. And Joseph, her identified husband, was from the kingly line of David.

They were like a former UT quarterback’s teenage son who is engaged to the beautiful teenage daughter of the First Baptist Church’s Lead Pastor. The two were like the Home-Coming King and Queen of Nazareth.

And then she got pregnant.

Now today of course, when we see this sort of thing happen and the girl says that she is, “pregnant by the Holy Spirit with the Messiah,” we all rejoice that the second coming is here.

Right. Maybe we think instead that the two teenagers got carried away and made a stupid choice and now their promising lives, poor things, are ruined.

The second thing above is what happened to Mary and Joseph. They were excommunicated.

When they traveled alone to Bethlehem, their ancestral home town, they found locked doors and frowning faces from relatives they would have known for decades.

They had to stay in an animal shed, owned by a stranger; an outright animal barn. They fell from privilege to poverty in nine short months.

And then the baby came.

I can’t imagine how hard this was for them. Their baby, the joy of any new parents’ lives, and one they believed was the Christ, was born in a stranger’s animal barn, with no blanket or midwife or even a clean place to put him.

They wrapped him in whatever cloth scraps they could scrounge up and put him in an animal’s feeding trough so Joseph could tend to his wife, who was likely pretty worn out from the ordeal.

It was a dark place for the two of them. But Luke points out they each had faith.

But he wasn’t done with the allegory. He wanted to tell the story of faith in a dark place one more way, and so he reminded his audience of the shepherds.

Shepherds, according to Dr. Shaia, were dirty, diseased, outcast people in that society. They tended sheep because that was the only work they could find. If you saw (or smelled) a shepherd coming down the street, you ducked into a store front until they were gone. And you hid your kids. Shepherds were not acceptable society. 

These guys were out tending their sheep on the hills surrounding Bethlehem at night. There was no ambient light from the city. The Sun was long set. It was dark, dark, dark, with wild animals, and criminals, and stupid sheep.

And then a blinding light covered the entire scene and these shepherds fell on their faces, absolutely terrified. According to Luke’s story an angel told these outcasts about the Messiah first. Why?

Because it made a point for his audience.

The light was bright, but it was blindingly bright because of where it was—in the darkest possible place. The indescribable Light of the Gospel—The Good News—shown even more brilliantly in the dark fields outside a first-century town precisely because it was intensely dark. The Light of Hope for the world, entrusted to Luke’s persecuted readers, was announced in a dark, dark place—by design.

Kapow!!!!

In the same way I now believe it was no accident that Luke chose to make this point for his audience, I believe it was no accident that I picked that particular Rob Bell interview. The God Rob searches for found me and my wife on that road in that dark time, and by all that’s holy, he showed me a bright light; a bright and radiant light that still shines for me in the darkness of my days and nights.

Wow. That is a God I can love. That is a God I can appreciate because He loves me back. Not every time I need it, but sometimes. And when he does, it leaves a mark.

It makes me pause for a moment to let that sink in before I continue..........

Okay. Eyes dried. 

But for my doubter’s sake I just want to think through the set-up to determine something: Did “Today’s God” really put this content in this moment for me and my wife?

Here’s the set-up: This was about four weeks ago. I have not listened to a single Robcast since. (Sorry Rob, if you ever read this :) .) I have had time in the car to do so, and in very similar situations, but I have not done it. Nor had I ever played Rob Bell for Debra—or anyone—prior to this. In fact, I don’t recall that I have ever queued up a “sermon” style audio file for Debra to listen to, ever, in twenty-one years.

And yet, here we were in February, driving along in silence having heard some really devastating news, and out of nowhere I opened my pod cast app, found a Rob Bell interview about a just-passed Christmas season, and pushed play.

And it’s that one? So perfect for our moment? Come on! Deb and I won the spiritual power ball!

The message that found us continues to provide light in our dark place. I have leaned on my awareness of it many times since hearing about it. For me, it shines the brightest because it was no accident.

The radiance of that light on the dark hills of Israel is Hope in a hope-poor time. It tells us we are not lost. It shows us the way. It reminds us that God knows what it’s like to be alone and suffering. He knows, and so He gives us these beautiful messages and images. He is here, now, like He was there, then.

His radiance shines today. It is hope. It is light. It is relief. It is with us when we’re alone. It is for us in our struggles.

My family’s dark times are made lighter.

Thank you, Today’s God, for inspiring the gospel authors to write down the words of their ministry so long ago. And thank you, Today’s God, that the words are still relevant today.