"Return the Call to Home"

"If I ever reach heaven I expect to find three wonders there; first, to meet some I had not thought to see there; second, to miss some I had expected to see there and; third, the greatest wonder of all, to find myself there." -John Newton

Last night I felt pretty bad for something I did during the worship service. I finished a song and, feeling the need to say something, I went into a little sermonette about how life’s beauty is good evidence for God’s existence. I cited the snowfall we had here last weekend and the simple things in life like a sunset or a good conversation with a dear friend. These are all things that point me to believe in God, and I said it so confidently standing in front of the youth group during a Wednesday night church service. Later, while I was driving home, the subject came up again in my thoughts and this time it was much different. I thought about life’s beauty and the things I had said in church, and I began to wonder if I really even believed them at all.

I’m going to go ahead and make a confession: I am a doubter. If you asked me I would tell you straight up. I don’t have the faith in God that I would like to have. I believe the things that the Bible says and I accept them as true, but when it comes to actually placing faith in God’s word and standing on it, I am much more uncomfortable. I get frustrated sometimes because I want God to stop being so elusive and vague. I want him to speak clearly; to stop being off in the heavens somewhere and instead be right in front of my face, drinking coffee at Starbucks with me and having a heart to heart conversation. I want that, but I don’t ever get it.

Last night didn’t go very well for me. For the rest of the night I felt pretty bad about the whole situation. I felt bad because once again doubt reared its ugly head and I felt like I was standing on shaky ground. I also felt bad because I stood in front of everybody and said this stuff like I was so absolutely sure of it. Whenever I get up in front of people in church, especially to do worship music, I feel like I have a responsibility to lead them towards God. But also I feel like I have a responsibility to be honest and truthful, not fake. Reconciling the two can seem difficult sometimes, if not altogether impossible.

I just have so many questions that go unanswered. It would be arrogant of me to act like I have all of this figured out. But I think about these questions all the time. I wonder about God all the time, about if he really exists and if he really loves me and if there really is a life after death. I turn to the church for answers, or at least reassurance, but many times church people cause me to question God more than anything. Just today I was driving to class and right down the road from my house a small church was changing their sign. A man had his pickup truck backed up to the sign and he was standing on the tailgate adding new letters. His message was halfway complete. It said, “Try Jesus. If you don’t like…” and that was it. I finished off the message in my mind, knowing what the rest of it would say: “Try Jesus. If you don’t like him, the devil will take you back!” Surely enough, when I came home tonight the message was confirmed. I’ve been around this kind of stuff way too long, I thought.

Arrogant signs like that from the church just send the wrong message. It’s not the message of love and acceptance that I believe the church should put out there. It’s more of a “my way or the highway” kind of attitude. Follow Jesus or go to hell. That stuff is a spiritual turn-off if you ask me. It only pushes people away.

The positive side to these situations is that the tension I experience in my faith causes me to be more diligent in finding ways to resolve it. Whenever I have a day when I don’t feel right and things just don’t seem to go the way they should, most of the time I simply dismiss it as a bad day. Normally this works great because people really do tend to make more out of their problems than they should. But last night it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t shake that feeling, and I didn’t really know what to do about it.

People of faith, who believe in a higher power who exists out there… somewhere, often feel like God is trying to communicate to them something, somehow, for some reason. Many times we are searching, tuning in for some kind of divine message that comes through in a song, a prayer, something a friend says, or some kind of wordless signal in the form of nature. Today I was going through my normal routine, just driving to class listening to the new U2 album. At the end of it they have this amazingly haunting song called Cedars of Lebanon (you can hear it here). I’m not exactly sure what is Bono’s intended meaning in this song, but to me it paints a picture of this sad and broken world we live in and asks the question where is God in the midst of it all. And in between the half sung, half spoken verses of the song is this eerie harmony that comes across like the words of an Old Testament prophet calling out to the people:

“Return the call to home.”

Hearing it, thoughts came to mind of all the times that I let my doubts interfere with my relationship with God, the times when I consciously pushed God away. It reminded me of the moments when I got so confused at the thought of it all that I got fed up and decided not to deal with it--the days when I wrestled with the questions that had no answers and I became apathetic because of it.

I believe that God is out there, and I believe God cares about me. If this is true then it is very likely that God could be calling out, even pursuing me in some way. Interestingly enough, I got on the internet and I don’t know why but I looked up a guy named N. T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham who I had heard quoted in sermons from Rob Bell’s church, Mars Hill. He was also quoted in a book I just finished reading about the historical accuracy of the story of Jesus in the gospels, and also I saw him once on The Colbert Report (the Colbert bump works once again!). He is supposedly the world’s leading New Testament scholar.

Well, he has just written a book about heaven called Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. I watched a brief interview of him talking about it and he said some interesting things. First of all, he said that the general idea that the church has about heaven is wrong. Of course, it’s always interesting when generally accepted religious concepts and ideas might be wrong. I personally don’t buy into the whole Left Behind, rapture, and tribulation stuff anyways; but my idea about the afterlife is basically this: Who knows? Stumped by the weirdness of Revelations and the vague, metaphorical language, I have a hard time figuring out what God is getting at with all of that stuff.

According to N. T. Wright, the Biblical concept of the afterlife is that once we die, we go to heaven. But then, there is even sort of an afterlife to that in which God restores the world and there is a new heaven and a new earth and God returns people to his creation with new bodies to live out eternity the way God originally intended. This means that no longer can we regard the world as a sinking ship in which we must only save souls and then get the heck out. Instead, we must work to improve this world and in doing so play an active role in bringing forth the new heaven and new earth.

I decided this has got to be worth checking into, so I went out and bought the book tonight.

I’ve only read the introduction so far. It’s going to be a project over the next few weeks, but just buying the book and being introduced to a new idea about what heaven is like has got me thinking about heaven and the afterlife in a way that I haven’t conceived of it since childhood. And I go back to the prophetic words of that song:

“Return the call to home.”

I have realized that in the past couple of years, when my faith has been on edge and doubt has creeped in, I put all thought of heaven, of home, out of my mind. It always seemed so far away, and too good to be true. Rather than let myself hope and dream a little, I said to myself, “Why spend time thinking about a place that may or may not exist?” And for about two years or longer I never really thought about it.

But what a person believes about the afterlife has a major impact on how that person lives his or her own life in the here and now. It determines values and actions. It illustrates what is important to that person. Being the doubting Thomas that I am, I think this might be a good place to start trying to fix things. It might be good to try to learn what I can about home. Because if I have learned anything I know that if God doesn’t have a home for me then I have no home. It certainly doesn’t exist here.

I think it may be time to return that call.