You Reap What You Sow

possession and perceptions-proper 28, year A

Friends, welcome to The Book of Common Words, where we explore the Christian spirituality of being human through poetry and essays about my life, art, and the Christian faith. I’m your writer, Aaron.

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I’ve come to understand theology (the way we think about God) as an ever-evolving thing. When I was younger—and now, still, if I am honest with myself—I had an idea drilled into my head and heart that I had to get my theology right. All of it. I had to understand it all, have the right answers, and answer all the questions. I needed to get my theology right because my salvation depended on it.

If I was wrong, I was a heretic, and heretics don’t get into heaven.

So, I studied, and studied, and read, and studied. I was determined to get it right, to understand the doctrine, to master theology. I had a drive, a compulsion, a mission to get my theology, my thinking about God right. I was terrified of getting it wrong, so every day I scoured the scriptures for clues to the mysteries of theology. I read theologians, old and new. I did word studies, consulted lexicons, and studied commentaries. I pursued the study of theology in order to make sure I was saved.

This pursuit exposed me to different ways of interpreting scripture and new theological ideas. My beliefs morphed, changed, grew. I came to see the story of scripture not as the story of sinful men and God’s effort to save us—this is what I was raised to believe the biblical story was: God created everything perfectly, man sinned and messed everything up, God had a plan to save us, now we’re waiting to get to heaven—but as the story of God being near to humanity, near to us, in our distress, in our suffering, in our oppression. Yes, sin runs rampant in the world, but a form of moralism—don’t drink, smoke, or dance—isn’t what will save us, nor is it what we are saved for.

We have created systems of oppression, systems of power where a few people have much, others have little, and many have nothing. We function in these systems, and (usually unconsciously) uphold their power structures. It’s into these systems and structures that God comes to us, revealing Godself to be among the lowly and marginalized, those who are crushed by the systems and structures. God comes in the person of Jesus to be the lowly, to be the oppressed, to suffer, die, and rise again that we might know the power systems and oppression structures don’t get the final say. We aren’t replaceable cogs in a machine; no, we all are destined for glorious liberation.

This kind of faith I have now, the kind of faith that has grown and developed from my pursuit of theology, is so different from the damaging, damning faith I used to live with. This pilgrimage of theology has allowed me to keep my faith, my spirituality, intact through some hard things, both personal things and societal upheaval and tragedy. The evil and hurt I see in the world would have destroyed my faith if I hadn’t been able to change how I think about God.

It’s in this alteration of the way I think about God, the way I do theology, has done far more than challenge some intellectual concepts about God, sin, and humanity. The way I do theology—indeed the way anyone does theology for we all, from atheist to devotee, do theology when we set out to think about God or the lack thereof—bleeds over and shapes how I live, how I choose to act, how I love.

The truth is, our core understanding about God shapes (at least in part) how we act. If God is a source of fear in us, fear will be expressed through insecurity, anger, perfectionism… all sorts of toxicity that in the end only hurts us and those around us. But if our understanding of God is that we are first and foremost beloved by God, that safety, security, and stability will guide us towards wholeness and health both for ourselves and the world around us.

The view we hold of God will also shape what we do with what we have, what has been invested in us, what has been given to us.

If we see God as a “a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed” then we are apt to do little to nothing with what we have been given because we fear the retribution of getting it wrong. We fear becoming heretics and going to hell. We spend all our time functioning in fear of God, and that harshness will spill out to how we see others, how we treat others, how we love others.

Fear often times comes bleeding out of our wounds to those around us. We become angry, quick to judgement, holding people to an impossible standard that we ourselves struggle (and fail) to achieve. Or, we become self-sure, convinced of our own righteousness and therefore in a place to judge others who will never live up to the kind of life we lead. Anger and arrogance are both deadly to relationships and to love. These both stem from fear that we have to be right, that we have to master the doctrine and dogma, that we must have everything perfect so that we aren’t at risk of punishment.

This is what comes from holding a view that God is a harsh master. This is what happens when we view God as an “Old Testament” God, full of wrath towards all humanity, waiting to unleash his anger and judgment on us unworthy souls. This is a view of God that is devoid of the truth that God is Jesus.

Jesus isn’t an aberration in the nature of God. Jesus is the full revelation of all that God is, and that revelation is wrapped in self-emptying and self-donation. This changes how we approach God, and how we see ourselves. Jesus shows us that God is love, and that we are beloved, worth incarnation, life, death, and resurrection. We are worth the promise to return. We are valuable to God, just as we are, just as we were, just as we will be. There is nothing we need to change, nothing we need to do, nothing we need to become in order for God to not be angry with us. God is loving towards us, willing to come and be one with us to show us that love.

If we are loved without reservation, we can love without reservation. There is no reason to judge others as unworthy because we are all worthy. Yes, there is accountability for actions that are unloving, actions that harm, hurt, and wound others. But that accountability comes because we are loved, not because God is wrathful waiting to club us on the head with guilt and shame.

Being beloved allows us to take risks with what we have, to trade with our talents, so to speak. What we love to do, what we are good at doing, what we are drawn towards as a passion, these things are what the world around us needs. These are what has been invested in us to use to show others they are loved by us and by God.

We are the broken body and the spilled blood of Jesus to the world around us. If we see God as giving us because we are beloved and trustworthy with the kingdom, everything changes.

Sow an image of God that is based in fear, and you will reap nothing at harvest time. Plant a vision of a loving God in your heart, and you will receive more than you ever imagined.

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