I had a thought the other day.  If God’s judgment leaves someone out of the Kingdom of Heaven, which can be rationally described as hell, then I’m going to hell.

Did I get your attention?

Here’s why I’m going to hell.  The broad assumption in evangelical Christianity is that in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must speak a specific belief of Jesus.  This was called the sinner’s prayer when I was growing up.

So let’s say that is true.  It is then arguable that most of the Eastern world, Australia, Asia, and much of the Arab and Jewish world would be excluded. The primary assumption in that model is that grace is only true once it is accepted.  It becomes true in the cosmos, when we accept it.  As Rob Bell asked, “Will billions and billions of people burn forever in hell?”

I’ve said that prayer. I learned to recite it daily in college because I constantly wondered if I had said it right.  When someone speaks this prayer, they are considered in…mostly. ;-P  So I’m assuming that I’m in.  In fact, as Paul would often suggest, I must be in.  I’ve committed my entire life, my entire way of being to following this Jesus guy.  I gave up my career in business to pursue ministry.  I spent most of my life savings so I could spend time developing community based discipleship programs. I wrote a book on the Gospel.  None of that get me in heaven. It simply is.

But if I’ve learned anything from following Jesus, if I’ve learned anything from the Gospel, it is that it is relentless in its pursuit of the lost.  Jesus spoke parable after parable of the lost sheep, coin, and son. If there are people on the outside of the gates of heaven, then I’m rallying the troops inside to go find them.  I’m going to hell to remind them of who they are: children of the living God who are called very good.

Love doesn’t end.  The mission isn’t over if someone is on the outside of the gates.  There is still someone who doesn’t know the message.  Call me a dreamer, but I just can’t see Jesus going all the way to the cross and then saying, “Yep, they just didn’t get it while they were alive.  Let’s leave ‘em to rot and burn.”

Care to come with me?

So this weekend I came very close to the threat of human violence, and it really hit me.

A friend of mine emailed me two weeks ago and said, “I have a free ticket to Game 5 of the Sharks/Red Wings series.  Want to go?” Lets see.  “Free.  The Sharks. My best friend. Road trip.” I’m in.  We drove down on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, enjoying the tunes, the conversation, the sounds, the thrill of hockey playoffs. It was all good.

The game started and everything settled in. The Sharks scored first and it looked like the outcome we had hoped for.  Everyone around us was happy, cheering, enjoying a beer, and the sounds of the game.

At the start of the third period a kid showed up with tickets to a couple of seats behind us.  A man and his wife were sitting in the wrong seats.  It was awkward because it was late in the game and the couple had gotten used to the seats.  After a minute or two of figuring it out, they had to move down five seats. No big deal.

But this is playoff hockey.

The man quickly moved down five seats, but his wife sat on the arm rest, waiting for the action to stop.  The kid felt sat awkwardly in his chair with this older woman sitting halfway on him, biding her time. She felt awkward as well.  So she got up in the middle of the play and moved down.  And this is where things got ugly.

A big burly dude that was sitting right behind me didn’t want to miss a play.  As the woman attempted to pass in front of him, he said, “Just wait until the play is over.  This is the playoffs.” She attempted to pass in front of him again, and he leaned forward to block her way, and catch the action.  Everyone around her was shouting, “Sit down!” With no real seat, she attempted to pass one more time, where the burly man put up his arm and blocked her from passing.  Yes, he was drunk.

At this point the husband proceeded to shout, “Don’t touch my f*cking wife,” which is kind of an strange way of talking about the one you love. He reached out and pushed the burly dude, who proceeded to punch the husband.

This is all happening right behind me in section 228, row 15.

The husband instantly erupted and proceeded to grab the burly dude, punching him repeatedly in the face five or six times. Beer went flying (mostly on me), and everyone in the crowd turned to see what was happening.  The wife attempted to break it up, but the two men were now in full battle.  The burly dudes face was covered in blood.  He pushed the wife off and she fell into my arms.  Then the burly dude fell into the row I was sitting in, so I back up a row.  It was all surreal.  The burly dude finally came to his senses and realized that the husband was beating the crap out of him, so he stopped.

As I stood there, watching this happen right next to me, something hit me in the pit of the stomach.  When violence erupts, it is brutal.  We humans are capable of so much beauty and pain in the same breath. My heart broke for both the husband and the burly dude, neither of which probably came expecting to fight.  It just happened.  But when it does, there is a something that gets lost in the moment.

When it was all over, the burly dude just stood there, literally covered in his own blood, looking lost.  I could see the loneliness in his eyes, half drunk, and half sober from the adrenaline.  Everyone had backed away from him, and he was a social outcast.  He had broken the rules, and now everyone wanted him gone.  I was acutely aware in that moment of his pain.  There was no restoration.  Everyone just wanted him gone.

And I get that.  At that moment, the best thing was probably for him to be escorted into the security office, where they medics could take care of him.  The husband and his wife were fine.  We ended up seeing them out on the street and they had no scratches or wounds.  I just remember walking away with this deep desire for a world that could find a way to love.

What if the love of God never left us? We just couldn’t see it until we had exhausted all of our own efforts.

It’s enjoyable to be loved.

Last night my brother-in-law took me to see the Giants play the Dodgers, and it was good.  My brother was treating me to front row seats as a birthday present.  From the moment I got to the game, to the moment I left, he went out of his way to shower me with love.  He treated me to dinner, bought me a Guinness, garlic fries, a Brian Wilson beard, and even a World Series Champion hat. We laughed about “fear the beard” because the moment he put on his beard (literally ten seconds later) Big Pappy hit a home run to tie it.  And the next batter hit a dinger to go ahead.  It was one of those moments you remember because of how fun it was.

The kicker was seeing the Giants win.  And as nice as that was, it was icing on the cake.  We shared stories of our families, work, kids, fatherhood, and how we were doing. And as I walked away, as we parted to go home, I stood at the entrance of AT&T Park and just said, “Thank you.”  It was all I had to give at that moment.  Anything else would have taken away from his amazing gift.

As I walked to my car I was deeply aware of the experience of being loved.  When someone goes out of their way to make you feel loved, it’s deeply enjoyable.  Something arose in my chest that made me feel alive.  And it came at a time when I am acutely aware of that love.  This is a season of tremendous difficulty and change in my life.  And my brother was there to say I am worth it.

Thank you Drew.

I’ve known Chad for close to 3-4 years now and have had many extensive discussions. We got to hang out this summer at Big Tent and I can say that I have no question of his desire to follow Jesus or his love for God. It’s what gets me about these conversations.  Chad’s desire is that of a pastor seeking the restoration of people, and to create a restorative understanding of God.  Yet that understanding was against a traditional set of beliefs, and got him fired.  Rachel Held Evans posted an interview with Chad that shares some of the details.

Seems kind of strange when a pastor gets fired for believing in love. What do you think?

(AP Photo/Sara D. Davis)

When we’re honest, we just don’t want to love because we’re afraid we won’t be loved back. Doooh!

John Michael Talbot explores the idea of Big Love, or how much bigger God is compared to our perceptions.

This video captures a lot of what I have been thinking about lately. Why do you think we try to control God?  I know the easy answer is sin, but I want to go deeper than that.  What is it that drives us to develop neat little theologies that propose to sum up God?

Video from Alter Magazine

I was in conversation recently with a group of people creating a network.  The focus was on radical inclusivity and the practice of love in hard places.  And someone said, “We don’t have a creed.”  My first thought was that I liked that idea.  Creeds have a ways of becoming much more than they were originally intended for, largely because they are based on someone’s constructed ideas or thoughts.  But my second thought was that I didn’t want to participate in something where anything goes. I believe the kingdom of God has some structure.

My second thought ran to the command to love.

He answered: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Could we create a network not around beliefs, which are fluid and subject to interpretation, but on the practice of love?  Because from what I gather, to love is the fulfillment of all that Jesus was trying to get me to believe. In other words, the simplicity automatically took care of the complexity.  Love is simple.  Beliefs are complex.  And so our beliefs are born out of the practice of love, not the other way around.

What do you think?  Do you think it’s possible, advisable, or just plain wrong to build a network on a creed to love?

Where is God calling you to let go? A friend of mine recently retweeted the following, the first part of which I’ve heard many times.

“The only constant is change. When I submit to that reality, creativity and passion float to the surface.”

And the comment made me think about the nature of change embedded into the universe.  God didn’t begin with perfect.  God began with good.  But it’s easy to assume that what is good can’t change.  If it’s good, why on earth would it want to change. But that’s the rub.  Good is a qualitative state that does just that.  It allows for change.  In other words, God embedded into the world a natural creativity that allowed for things to grow and change, which then allows for a constant stream of creativity, as opposed to something static.  Because I can imagine if we did begin perfect, we’d spend the rest of our lives not wanting to change. And that is honestly the epitome of hell to me.

Which leads me to the nature of grace.  What if grace is embedded into change? What if the very nature of change reveals the reality of grace.  In other words, God has already gotten over all of our junk.  Because in the end change has consequences, some good and some bad.  It does affect us but none of it defines us.    And the sooner we let go of our judgments about it, the sooner we can get over it, embracing the reality of grace.

Buddhists have a very similar understanding of the creativity and change embedded into their practice of meditation.  In meditation, the deepest form of it is the free flowing mind, to empty the mind of thought.  But the emptiness is not a void.  It’s the process of allowing the mind to experience and let go of the thought process.  And I was thinking it’s essentially the practice of grace.

I looked at my son tonight and realized that as much as I love him at this age, I don’t really want him to stay this age.  I want him to grow and change.  I want him to experience the fullness of life that comes from growing, pain, suffering, joy, challenge and overcoming. I want him to know the feeling of not getting the job, kissing the girl for the first time, failing a test, and getting down on his knee to ask a girl to marry him.  But he can only experience that if I let go of who he is now.  I want him to feel the full range of emotions that come from being human.

But then I was immediately hit with the same reality for myself, and then my family, and then my neighbor, and then…my enemy.  How much of life is dealing with the frustrations with wanting things not to change.  How much of our striving, wars, conflict and the worst that we have to offer is because we’re afraid of what’s next, or we’re trying to get to something that we once had.  And it captivates us with fear because no matter how much we try, we can’t get it back.

So it seems to that the risk God took with the world is to allow us to grow, and that growth is the fullest experience of grace.  What say you?

I was watching Doug Pagitt’s interview, which took place before his debate on hell with Chris Roseburgh.  And the interviewer asks Doug, “Do you think the Bible is an actual guide for you today for how you should act and function for people you are around.”

Doug responds, “Yeah there is.”  And I would second that notion by going right back to the Great Commandment and say that “love” is the defining act of our humanity.  We’re called to it as a defining way of living.  It’s not about the law.  It’s not about morality, even though we often want it to be.  It’s about love. Why?  Because love was the defining original structure of creation established by God in Genesis 1.  It was enough.  So when Jesus reduces the law to the command to love, he’s not creating something new.  He’s re-establishing what was already true.  Love transcends culture because it is embedded into the fabric of the universe we experience.

The problem is, love his hard.  We like morality because it’s subjective.  We can fashion it in our image.  And it doesn’t really require love.