Category: A Word or Two

Once upon a time …

(…with gratitude to Frederick Buechner who put these thoughts in my head)

Once upon a time, or so the fable goes, there was an orphaned, motherless lion cub who was adopted by goats and brought up by them to speak their language, eat their food, and in general, to believe that he was goat himself. 

Then one day, the king of the lions happened by and all the goats scattered in fear leaving the young lion … that thought it was a goat … all alone, to confront the king of beasts. He was afraid, of course and yet somehow, strangely  not afraid.

The great lion king asked the young one what he meant by the foolish masquerade of being a goat, but all the young one could do was bleat nervously as any goat would and tried to ignore the question by nibbling at the grass. 

So the lion king picked up the young beast by the scruff of the neck and took him to a pond nearby where he was forced to look at their two reflections side by side in the pool and draw his own conclusions. The poor goat could only bleat in confusion.

Finally, the lion king took him to the carcass of a recent kill and offered him his first taste of raw meat. At first, the young lion was repulsed by the idea and recoiled at the unfamiliar taste of it. 

But then, as he ate more and more of it, and began to feel it warming something deep within him, it began to dawn on him. Lashing his tail and digging his claws into the earth, the young lion finally raised his head high and the landscape trembled at the sound of his first, mighty roar.

This old fable illustrates a very basic point about life: that as human beings, we usually live life in this world at less than what we were created to be. We are supposed to be lions, but we usually live as goats. 

The goat in this fable is really not a goat at all, of course, he is really a young lion. But he doesn’t know that. And as long as he believes he is a goat, in one sense, he really is a goat. Or at the very least, he is really not a lion. 

To cast it then in terms of the humanity that is ours and the spirituality that is available to us in Jesus Christ, we were created in the image of God, a spiritual image, but something has gone desperately wrong. Like a young lion cub, orphaned, left to live among goats, we have been orphaned by our sin to live far below what we were meant to be. 

What all this means is that we have wrenched ourselves out of the kind of spiritual relationship we were intended to have with God and with each other. Like Adam, we have all lost paradise … lost our birthright as lions … lost our full spiritual capacity for life. We have been orphaned by sin.

And yet … and yet… we all carry something of the original intentions of paradise around inside of us like a haunting memory … like a deep longing for what we have lost or a strong yearning for what we dream could one day be.

In the language of our fable, if the lion who thought he was a goat, could really be a goat, he wouldn’t have this problem. He’d just go on being a goat. But there is still enough lion left in him, as there is left in all of us, to make us discontented with being a goat. 

So we may run with the other goats, ignore the larger question of identity and meaning, nibble at the grass and hope that the Lion of Judah will just leave us to bleat along with the rest. But real meaning in life seems to forever elude us, and life as a goat never seems to satisfy us … there is always some something we cannot name, dangling out there, twisting the in the wind of our soul, just beyond our reach. We may bleat well enough, but deep down  …there is a gnawing suspicion that we were really made to roar.

SVE

Behind Closed Doors

Once upon a long ago, I was staying in a well-known big hotel that the organizers of the event paid for … maybe just trying to provide for me in memorable way, I guess. I was speaking at a gathering of clergy on adapting to the waves of cultural change hitting the church and how to avoid getting caught in the undertow of it all and thereby lose focus on our message. There was also a huge business conference of sorts in the hotel at the same time. Their meeting room held 1,200 people or so. Ours held 60. You get the picture: significance and importance and sophistication in Room A-1 and humble and meek and lowly in Room A-23.

One could be intimidated by the impression such inequity created if you didn’t know the story about a destitute and desperate widow found in II Kings 4. There, the prophet Elisha instructs the widow to collect as many pots as she can from her neighbors and then go into her house and shut the door behind her. And there, behind closed doors, through Elisha, God does the miracle of multiplying the little oil she has … over and over and over again. It’s a miracle … not a spectacle. It is done in hiddenness, behind closed doors. 

Jesus said in Matthew 13 something similar about the Kingdom of God. It is like yeast, He said, subtly growing and penetrating this world almost imperceptibly. It’s mustard seed size to begin with but quietly grows and becomes this mighty tree that the birds of heaven nest in. It’s miracle … not a spectacle. It is done in hiddenness, behind closed doors. 

So, as with the miracle of the widow’s oil, the Kingdom is multiplying and at work: behind closed doors. Do you know that the overall World Population is growing by .87% each year, less that one percent? But do you also know that the overall growth in the Christian Population is 1.08% with 4 major Protestant movements leading the way with growth figures of 6.73% each year… almost seven times more than the growth of this world’s population?

Do you know that it took 1400 years to get to where 1 out of every 100 persons in the world was a believing Christian?  Then took over 500 more years, until 1940, to cut that number in half, 1 out of 50. But it took only 70 years to get from that to where 1 out of every 8 people on earth was a believing Christian.  And it is a movement that is still gaining steam. The world holds about 2.52 billion Christians today and that population is projected to grow to 3 billion by 2050. Three billion. That’s a whole lot of Kingdom believers.

Today, there are more churches, more missionaries, more radio broadcasts and more pod casts and more computer on-line teaching courses than ever before. There are more Bibles in more languages than ever before, more Christian books, more Christian music, more Bible colleges and seminaries and training schools…

More relief work, more literacy work, more medical work, more compassion work, more justice work, and more and more and more work of all kinds all being done in Jesus’ name. So let’s stop wringing our hands. Forget the cultural optics. The Kingdom of God is doing quite well, thank you very much.  It’s just doesn’t have a ticker on Wall Street so the whole world can be impressed. It’s never going to be a headline on CNN or FOX News but it’s making the 6 o’clock news each night in Heaven. Why? Because it’s a miracle … not a spectacle. It is being done in hiddenness, behind closed doors.

So don’t let the cover of Forbes Magazine or Time Magazine or Newsweek intimidate your Kingdom faith and hopes. Don’t let Amazon or Google or Intel fool you into thinking they are the really big news of this world. The truly big news of this world is in the little mustard seed and the little yeast and the little bit of widow’s oil. The big news is what is happening behind closed doors. How can we say that? Because God is at work behind those closed doors. And He’s just keeping an old promise He made back in Mt. 16:18 “I will build my church and (even) the gates of hell will not prevail against it!” But don’t look for a spectacle. Look for a miracle.

SVE