I love to read the Apostle Paul because he changes personalities so quickly and innocently. One paragraph sounds like the incredibly well educated and trained Jewish theologian he was. The next you find a caring friend trying to walk you through a difficult time. Then it is the nurturing pastor giving instructions on dealing with life and faith.

But my favorite personality is the mesmerized child watching a caterpillar crawl across the ground or the aspiring astronaut staring up at the Milky Way in the middle of clover field at midnight. It’s just that as you read his writings you find that here is a man who is still trying to discover “what’s all this Jesus stuff?” Sounds like me.

My last post was the musings of an amateur philosopher trying to nail down why the concept of “truth” is so elusive and yet always ultimately points directly back to Jesus. Previous posts are about my frustrations with why Christians are so uninvolved in their communities or churches, about my excitement over just how GOOD the Good News is, or about how far we are to take Jesus’ message of peace in our lives.

But for my first post in several months I would like to spend the majority of the time attempting to describe my amazement with God by looking at things we don’t yet understand. We tend to have a problem with that in our Christian world. We like orderliness. “God is not the author of confusion,” says the oft used Scripture. Paul nonetheless.

We like our church growth to be linear. We like obvious immediate responses to questions of faith. We like to start church at 10:00 and we damned well (am I allowed to use that expression in a Christian blog?) better be done by 11:00 because then the pastor is biting into my time. Life in the Christians world is to be black and white, even if we at least superficially concede to some modicum of gray.

That is how we get hung up on keeping the 10 Commandments and raising important issues in the courts and media like how the retired pastor greets me during Christmas/Chanukkah/Kwanza season at Wal Mart. In doing this we miss expressing the greatest part of our message: That this God who loves us gave us all of creation to explore and enjoy wonder about, and his Son to make sure we get to explore, discover, wonder and enjoy for all eternity.

That is what I see Paul expressing in Ephesians 3:2-12. In describing how his mostly Greek audience how they as Gentiles would be forever melded to the Jews, who were so opposed to them, forever in Christ. And here is the point: How this would happen is a, in Paul’s words, MYSTERY. Do you get it? Paul doesn’t know how it works. He just knows it does. So much for black and white orderliness.

We in modern American Christianity have lost so much of our Jewish roots that we have also lost one of the things Jews to this day still covet in their religion: They love to wonder about what God has done. David wondered about why, while man is such a seemingly insignificant part of creation, does God care so much about us. He describes how the angels sang in awe as God initiated the Big Bang (can I say that in a Christian blog?) and set the creation in motion. Isaiah marveled at 6-winged angels. We wonder how putting a red-hot charcoal briquette to one’s mouth by an angel can make someone’s speech pure? Why are we so afraid of wonder?

Closer to life, how exactly does a man and wife become one? How, as Paul writes, is that the mystery of Christ and the Church. What will our new bodies be like? Mystery is God’s gift to us so we can constantly be amazed at what He’s done, is doing and will continue to do “world without end, Amen.”

If you are one of those who is in constant stress over keeping the 10 Commandments, forget for a moment about the fact that you just cussed out the knucklehead driving in front of you who almost caused a chain reaction wreck on the parkway. Before you pray in repentance, go lie in the middle of a midnight black field looking at the Milky Way and wonder about the One to whom you are about to pray. How can he hear you? How do you know he did? It’s a mystery.
Peace.