God the Great Iconoclast

A friend of mine forwarded a part of a journal that his nephew had written as part of his observations from a mission trip to Mexico. He's about 18. Read this:

"What a long, strange trip it’s been…
Who knew I’d pick Grateful Dead lyrics to describe a Mission Trip?

Well, the ride has been strange. Lots of guys expected lots of things. The outlandish path this mission trip has led me down has got me searching. When you see or feel something profound and moving, it normally leaps out at you as to halt you with awe. I always thought mission trips were supposed to stop you in your tracks a little bit. I thought revelations, big or small, were inherent to the mission trip experience.

In Mexico, I didn’t get knocked down or challenged or enormously moved—the whole week was pretty much smooth sailing. I came, I built a house, and now I’m gone—that’s the story through and through. Lots of expectations were left unrealized.

It’s fascinating though. In reflection, it has been the lack of challenging moments and memories that has emerged as the challenge of the trip. God, if you’re not sticking things out in front of my nose, I’m really gonna have to delve deep to see what lies beneath the glassy surface. One thing that keeps ringing in my head is this quote by C.S. Lewis—“He (God) is the great iconoclast.” Darn straight He is; certainly shattered my once-plenary idea of missions."

First I had to go to the dictionary to be sure I knew what iconoclast meant. Then I had to look up plenary to make sure I got the point. After feeling a bit humbled by an 18 year-old's exceptional use of language, I sat back and enjoyed the point and the profound understanding. Several things hit me.

First, God is the one who shatters the images (iconoclast) we construct of the way things are. Lewis is so very helpful to the postmodern pilgrim at this point. Modernity claims to construct unassailable categories that help us control our environment our world our selves. But the postmodern acknowledgement is that it doesn't work - not most of the time. Certainly, modernity has given us some great insights that must not be dismissed or cast aside. But when it comes to viewing the soul, the meaning of our lives and the world, we need more and different kinds of information. My friend's nephew named the condition we find ourselves in on a daily basis. God rarely smacks us over the head or in the face.

God is subversive. Just when we've got it figured out, "I'll go on a mission trip, get God-smacked and that missing piece of my life will fall into place." This 18 year-old made the good observation, "It’s fascinating though. In reflection, it has been the lack of challenging moments and memories that has emerged as the challenge of the trip." The psalmist says that God's voice can be still and small. But like any good orator or singer, as our choir director said last week, the pianissimo or even silence can create as big a moment or bigger than any forte vocal. We know this is true by experience, but we so often believe the formulas we created instead of our observation. It's easier to fit things into formulas than to actually be aware of our circumstances and honest about our circumstances.

God is very much in charge of how we meet him. It is always on God's terms not ours. We don't beckon God, God beckons us. If we get this wrong, we get the whole message wrong. We become god and God becomes our servant.

"The outlandish path this mission trip has led me down has got me searching." It is the seemingly silence of God that has our young missionary "searching." Two observations here for us to think about. First, we tend to move quickly past the searching phase in our lives and settle the matter. This is very modern of us. We don't like the feelings associated with the search - it makes us anxious and unsettled. We try to resolve these feelings by 'landing.' We end the journey in favor of finding security, even if it means coming up short in our search. (See Lewis's discussion of 'Fixed Land' in the book Perelandra) So we often short-circuit our searching, we don't stay with it long enough. The second point is that the result of short-circuiting the search is that we often settle. We name something God that isn't. We identify what God is doing out of our anxiety without really recognizing what God is doing.

My friend's nephew could easily have stopped the reflection and landed on God's work as the houses that were built or the friendships or whatever. But none of them were it. For some it might be, but for this one there was more to the less. My guess is that God is in the process of revealing himself more fully with a greater impact. That would be my guess and hope.

Would that we be as observant. Maybe that's the problem. My generation of 50 somethings act as though our experience, unreflected experience gives us a leg-up on understanding what God is doing. We've got God in a box as J.B. Phillips often suggested. The irony is that we may be the worst at putting up with the ambiguities of life as though they have something to teach us about God. We've decided what God is like and we put our conception of God to work each day. This is what needs to be shattered. My friend's nephew is not merely expousing youthful ignorance, but perhaps youthful hope and an openness that we shut down with age.

A Prayer: "He [God] is the great iconoclast." Come and deliver us from our stayed and contrived opinions of You.