“God is in the rain.”
Evey. V for Vendetta.
Once upon a time I decided Paul the Apostle was not my friend. It wasn’t a sudden decision, or a failed courtship. It came after years of listening to this preach and that. He was always linked with argument, forensic analysis, super-long sentences, and prohibitions. He was presented more as lawyer than lover. For me, trying to connect with his words was like trying to grab and hold strands of a spider’s web. In those days I read the Bible through mediators: authors, speakers, leaders. I just couldn’t connect with Paul. My brain struggles with linear and left-to-right, and I thought he would be another one judging me as flaky, if we ever talked.
That was then. Lots of things have changed. Mostly in me. I’ve come to accept my flaky brain, and in accepting it, I ditched the mediators and my judgements of the saints who still surround us. God is bigger and scarier. I am less afraid. Like Evey in the film V for Vendetta I long for the day I am unrecognisable because I am fully liberated from fear.
Repentance is such a gift. The process of exchanging my distorted picture of the 3God for a deeper, kinder knowing. Every time I’ve found God to be lovelier than I’d known before. I’ve repented of my opinions of Paul. I’ve repented of my opinions of the teachers who shared what they saw. I begin again. This time the knowing can come from my belly not my brain. And there’s suddenly so much I want to know. I’ve been engaging with the description of an early adventure Paul had recorded by Luke in Acts 9:25. I wonder what it might teach me about facing down the terror by night (Ps 91:5) and living free from fear. Paul was still mostly known as Saul at this point. Newly baptised as a Jesus follower he spent a few years in Arabia before embarking on a preaching spree in Damascus. He quickly angered the same Jews cheering him on before. As the days passed the believers in the area became his disciples and his influence grew. Noting this, the authorities plotted to kill him. They watched the city gates for an opportunity, but:
His followers took him by night and lowered him in a basket through an opening in the wall (Acts 9 NIV)
Writing about the experience many years later, Paul says:
If I most boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness…. In Damascus the governor under King Aretas had the city of the Damascenes guarded in order to arrest me. But I was lowered in a basket from a window in the wall and slipped through his hands.
2 Corinthians 11:30
I wonder why he refers to this escape as evidence of weakness in him. I lean in and reread the letter. Paul wrote out of a deep love for these followers gathered in cities. He wanted to guard the good news as it formed them into communities. In the letter to the church in Corinth he wrote a striking list of his “achievements” containing both examples and warnings for those who‘d pledged their allegiance to a crucified liberator. As the churches grew, he knew there would be a strong urge to default back to systems they had left behind. He urges them not to be impressed by the credentials of those who would set themselves up as leaders and teachers because of their social status or education. There is no hierarchy in the Kingdom of God. The shape of their gatherings was supposed to reflect their status as freed men and women. No mediators needed. No lording it over one another. (1 Peter 5:3). This is the Kingdom of Priests God spoke of in Exodus 19. It is seen in those baptised into the way of Jesus and filled with the same Spirit of God. Paul’s list of scars as credentials reminds them his authority came from abandonment to the One who chased him down on the road to Damascus. Somehow Paul caught the heart of the One who birthed the bride. He knew this bride was bigger than those who lived in Jerusalem. Bigger than those who lived in Judea. She covered the earth. Knowing the vastness of God’s love consumed any fear he had for his own life.
I’ve been thinking about fear and liberation and the things I hide in and hide from. It’s on my mind because we’ve just passed Shavuot and it’s been such a strange one this year. Plagues are dismantling systems and families. Monuments are falling. Voices are raging with holy and unholy rage. We are called and qualified to stand in love for liberation. It’s not a time to hide.
The word confinement came to my mind as I was imagining Paul curled up in a basket and lowered through a gap in the wall by his friends. I see him in two different confinements that like bookends for his Jesus journey: basket and house.
The basket confinement was at the start of his journey. Only days after his encounter with Jesus he was preaching with boldness, attracting followers and haters and being hidden when trouble brewed and his life was in danger. In a basket he is carried out of sight of the authorities. Then towards the end of his life, Paul is under house arrest and confined within four walls for many years. Confined, but still active in sharing Christ crucified, and visibly living as an example of the pattern Jesus set for us to follow. Both times he is confined, not because he is in danger, but because he is a danger. Neither confinement limited him. Love cannot be constrained.
I see again that the more my life is abandoned to the One who chases me down, the less I have to fear. The more my gaze is set in his direction, the less I’m swayed by the way others look at me. The bigger I see He is, the bigger I am. The Terror by night steps out from behind the curtain like the wizard in Oz: A teeny tiny figure.
So many of my fears hide in the spaces around the boxes I have placed God in. The boxes I have placed around His purposes on the earth. I read some words this year that referenced Pentecost as the birth of the church. For the first time I saw the box around this statement. How small it made the heart of God seem. Then I saw the Lover on the cross. I saw the cut down the side of the second Adam. Then, like Eve drawn from Adam, I saw the bride born from that same place in blood and water. Bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh (Genesis 2:23) We are the bride. We are born from pain for glory. Something about this swallows my fear every time. I see and I’m in awe and wonder as love gets bigger and more expansive and fear dissipates. I stay on this knowing and I feel like I can breathe again. God is in the rain. He is inside and outside and everywhere, and fear is swallowed up as I die to the desire to protect myself.
For your sake we are being killed all day long (Romans 8:36)
Evey is forced to face pain, to face her death, and in doing so she finds herself unrecognisable to those who wanted her killed. She is liberated from fear. Paul knew what it was to be crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20) and in that knowing he is liberated from fear. Unrecognisable from the man he was before.
John wrote there is no fear in love (1 John 4:18). If I become love, I will not hide in these strange and holy days. The questions that burn in me will find their answers in Him, and I can say in truth to everyone I meet:
“Even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you. I love you. With all my heart, I love you.”
V for Vendetta
Come the revolution. In me.
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