Atonement Part One: Emmanuel?

A while ago my friend The Digital Pastor did a preaching series at his church called “Sex God.” It was, as you might expect, based upon Rob Bell’s book by the same title. The series focused on what God’s intent for marriage, sex, and all of that stuff was for those who professed faith in Christ. It was a really well-done sermon series. (Podcast can be found here.) My friend The Digital Pastor blew me away with this:

“Jesus going to the cross to wipe away our sins is essentially God renewing his marriage vows to his people…. God is saying, ‘I want to know you and I want you to know me and this is how serious I am about it.’… But there’s another word for that and it’s called atonement… What do we see when we look at the word atonement? At-one-ment.”

He goes on to talk about the ways that we have given ourselves away (sexually in this case) hoping to find the “oneness” that we all seek. I’m currently struggling with my atonement theology, so I’ll leave that be for another blog at another time. Here is the point I want to make about this, though: whatever atonement is, God did it because he so strongly desires to know us and for us to know him. God desires to be with us.

A lot of the things my friend The Digital Pastor said were true. If we are being honest, we seek “oneness” in most of the things we do, except we usually call it community. There is a fantastic little book that I have gotten a lot of milage out of called Soul Cravings by Erwin McManus. The entire first third of the book is dedicated to one topic: intimacy. Erwin’s point is simple: we crave intimacy. We desire it with all that we are. It doesn’t mean that everyone is extroverted, because everyone certainly is not. What is does mean is this: people were never meant to be alone. God knows this. God went to extreme measures, namely Jesus, to ensure that we would never be alone, as The Digital Pastor said so that we would know, “… how serious God is about it.” In Blue Like Jazz Donald Miller reflects on a story about him orbiting the planet, all alone:

“I would lay there in bed thinking about Stacy’s story, putting myself out there in the black. And there came a time, in space, when I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. All my thoughts mingled together because I had no people to remind me what was rel and what was not. I would punch myself in the side to feel pain, and this way I could be relatively sure I was not dreaming. Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot that was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing.” (p.71)

What are we apart from community? Not just community with others, but community God, as experienced through our interactions with other people? Nothing. Not even human.

This is all well and good. If we can wrap our minds around the concept of God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, for some reason desiring intimate community with us, so much the better. But the reality is that even though we hear this all the time and perhaps even make conscious effor to live differently in light of it, we still seek intimacy in other, often unhealthy, ways. The question is: why? God demonstrated on the cross, in the ultimate self-sacrifice, just how much he desires us to know him. We are constantly reminded of this, in our “church” language and in the crosses and other trinkets we see people wear. So why do we seek intimacy in places and people that, in the end, will just leave us more run down than before?

Why does God still feel so distant?

It is is easy to look around and claim that God is not present. Where is God in Darfur? Where is God in the sex-trade industry in the East? Where is God in children starving to death?

Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani

Never have I so felt God’s absence than a few weeks ago on what I’m sure will be one of the defining moments of my life. The ambulance service (a 911 emergency response unit) that I work for was paged out to a house for a possible DOA. Before we could get there we were told that the patient was a 9 week old child. My partner told me that when we got there he would go in, pick up the child, and come back out. As I watched him run out of that house I could hardly believe what I saw. He carried in his arms a 9 week old baby girl… but she didn’t look how a baby should look. She looked fake, like a training doll that we might practice CPR on. This was no practice or training session, however. As he set her down on the cot and I started doing chest compressions, she became real to me. She was still warm to the touch, but there was blood around her mouth and nose. And she wasn’t crying. Babies are supposed to cry. As we worked I found myself crying out to God, more desperate for his presence than ever before. It was a simple prayer: God we need you here. She needs you here.

I will spare you the medical details of what transpired. Suffice it to say we did not arrive in time. Our shifts are 24 hours long and we had a few more calls during that time, so it was easy to push her to the back of my mind. It wasn’t until I’d really had time to process it that I began to feel… much of anything at all really. How could I look at that beautiful baby girl, now lifeless before me at only 9 weeks old, and come to any conclusion other than, “God is absent.” How can I watch a 21 year-old male stop breathing, watch his heart stop as he finally gave in to the cancer that had ravaged him for 5 long years; watch his father (who was with us in the ambulance) climb over the seats into the back to hold his hand as he died; watch is mother come apart as we wheeled him into the ER, covered by a sheet, and believe God is present?

God we need you here.

(This is part one in a series.)

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