the gods aren’t angry

Saw Rob Bell at The Uptown Theater last night and it was really great, as expected. I hesitate to blog about it for so many reasons.. 1. I know I can’t do it justice. 2. I am still absorbing and integrating a lot of it and don’t want to screw up the beautiful things Rob was saying. 3. I don’t want to be the loser who spoils it for someone else who bought tickets and wants to be surprised. [in case you are one of those people, stop reading now and just enjoy your experience without reading about mine.]

For those of you who didn’t go, and are curious…here’s my attempt at laying it all out.

Rob wore his performance uniform of all black with the white belt. [love it.] and his only prop this time was a large faux stone altar that he nimbly circled and sat on at different times throughout the 1:45 min performance.

He began with a story of cave woman and cave man and how their observance of and dependence on natural phenomena [the sun, moon, weather, etc.] resulted in a tendency to apply human attributes to them…the question emerges, how do I please the forces at work here in order that I might experience sun, rain, etc. at the right times in order to grow food or how do I make sure I am successful at the hunt so I can feed my family, or even greater still, how do we ensure success in procreation.

Humans from the beginning of time have searched for peace with God, but there have been many god stops on the way, and some pretty strange ones at that. We have been created with a conscience and anxieties and the knowledge that we somehow fall short. We invent ways to make the pain stop..to appease the gods.

Rob did an amazing job of providing a historical context to some books of the bible that are head scratchers if you don’t understand the religious climate of the day. Take the book of Leviticus, for example. Rob laid out the reasons why Leviticus might sound like a B-grade slasher movie to us, but to the Levitical audience, these ways made sense. They were familiar ways of relating to god.

Then the Levitical priests discovered they could make money on people’s guilt and shame. [completely unlike today ;] And God hatched a plan to end the violence once and for all. The money changers were driven out of the temple by a Prophet who claimed he could raise the temple, if it were destroyed, in three days. His claims were radical and a threat to their power, and so they killed him. He was the final blood sacrifice, and his name was Jesus.

Rob pointed to Hebrews…and the passage there on blood sacrifices: [from the NLT]

Under the old system, the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a young cow could cleanse people’s bodies from ceremonial impurity so that we can worship the living God. For by the power of the eternal Spirit, Christ offered himself to God as a perfect sacrifice for our sins. That is why he is the one who mediates a new covenant between God and people, so that all who are called can receive the eternal inheritance God has promised them. For Christ died to set them free from the penalty of the sins they had committed under that first covenant. Just think how much more the blood of Christ will purify our consciences from sinful deeds.

All of the ways we tried to earn God’s love, to find peace, all of them were made null and void in Jesus. There is nothing else we can do. No religious act we perform can add to or detract from the love God has for us, just because we are His. He pointed out some other cool references to the old ways of making peace with God found in the scripture…Psalm 50, Micah, etc.

There are many reasons why I respect Rob Bell; chief among them his ability to present the story of God in an innovative and memorable way. His performance last night was no exception. The stories he told are what made the first part of his presentation come together…all of them working together to demonstrate that we are all broken, shame-filled people apart from an understanding of what God has done to become intimate with us. Our singular hope lies in an encounter with the risen Christ.

The good news for those of us who have trusted this Jesus with our lives, is we are invited to become partners in His mission [the restoration of all things] as we demonstrate His love in tangible ways to those around us. Those who haven’t encountered this Jesus we have come to love and trust may not understand the stories of the bible and they may not care. What they do get is the sacrificial acts of love we do for no good reason at all. This is a language they can understand…and it is just how God came to us.