||| SUN DAYS ON ORCAS by EDEE KULPER |||
I love to hear people’s points of view. Especially the thoughts of my oldest sibling, Jack. I am the fifth of five, born 11 years after my closest sibling. Jack was 15 when I came along, which means he was 18 when I was three. We were in very different phases of life – I’d recently learned to walk and talk, and he was almost out of the house. My mom used to say that when Jack walked through the room, I’d stop everything and watch him, like he was a celebrity passing through.
Jack has always been a deep thinker, and what I love about hearing his thoughts is that I can never predict what they will be. I don’t get to see him much. He’s a circuit board designer for Caterpillar who works out of his house in a small town called Princeton, Illinois, who listens to lectures, podcasts, and sermons by day and works on biblical blog posts and fascinating paintings of scriptures at night – a husband, father, and happy introvert who is intelligent, imaginative, and introspective. He also happens to resemble Hagrid from the Harry Potter movies.
My siblings and I grew up as “forced” Catholics, attending church every Sunday until the age of eighteen (freedom!!). My mom chose Catholicism as a young teenager, but I’m not sure it’s what any of us kids would have chosen had we been given the choice. While I don’t want to speak for my brothers and sisters, for me, Catholic church was torture (no offense to Catholics out there). Every minute felt like an hour. I went through the process of confirmation at 15 only because there was no choice, but it meant absolutely nothing to me – quite the opposite of its intent.
After 18, I excitedly dropped church from my life. It wasn’t until I was 29 that I chose Christianity for myself. I didn’t do it for any reason other than the fact that it truly resonated with me – there was no people-pleasing involved this time around. The 18-year-old me would have been shocked to know that the future me would ever choose to step foot in a church again. Yet here I am, attending church every Sunday with my Christian husband, raising our kids in it despite how bored they feel about it. (Show me kids that are excited about sitting in any church and there you will have an anomaly. It’s not meant to be flashy. While God may be stunningly unfathomable, church isn’t God.) These days when I look back, I am thankful my mom was Catholic. I’m thankful for the journey we were on and all the unspoken values that went along with it, no matter how much I despised it when I was young.
I’m not sure how upfront and honest the average Christian will be with others about their thoughts and questions. I think it’s refreshing for me to tell you that I question it. I would wonder about anyone who followed something without questioning it. At heart, I’m a questioner. I also enjoy knowing people’s opinions – I love to know the whys.
While no human has the answers to life’s mysteries, I decided to write down some of my genuine questions about God to which I’d love to hear my brother’s answers. My questions are the kinds of things I often ponder regarding Christianity, some involving my own doubts and bits of unbelief, at least in the way I have been “taught” to imagine God by church, church-goers, church-ese, hymns, etc. (By the way, none of this is a slant on any church in particular.) What I like is that Jack has no interest in being a biblical automaton, and I trust that he isn’t going to tell me anyone else’s thoughts but his own. Here is my first question and his first answer.
Edee:
If we are made in God’s image (as it says in Genesis 1:27), what, to you, is God’s image? Do we resemble how he looks? Does he look like anything? Does it have something to do with male and female? How we see God in our minds actually affects how we view him in various ways. In this unimaginably vast universe, with planets, stars, black holes, nebulae, and even the microscopic universe of molecules, atoms, and quarks, how do you see God in your mind?
Jack:
I’m choosing a place to start that doesn’t seem related, but bear with me, okay?
If God exists, it seems like he wants to be with us.
He was there from the beginning of the biblical story.
I’m not sure I fully understand what Eden was like, but after a time of innocence, the knowledge of good and evil entered the world and our relationship with God changed.
Since that time, it seems like God has made ways to be with us. For example, He taught His followers how to make the tabernacle in the early days, and later the holy temple. These were constructed specifically to enable God to inhabit a place within. Even more fascinating to me, people who followed specific cleansing and purification rituals could cross over and visit!
Meanwhile, a parallel type of relationship can be observed in societies that had traditions using idols. They would make a container out of physical materials, then perform some type of ritual to prepare the vessel, followed by an invitation for the spirit to come inhabit the space within.
The concept of the Holy Spirit finding a suitable dwelling place in our world reached its ultimate expression in the good news of the Gospel. What was the good news? Jesus claimed that the kingdom of God was coming into our world. Yep, He’s coming to be with us again! Not just to a chosen few, but to anyone who desires it. What no one could have predicted, yet makes perfect sense in hindsight, was that after the work of Jesus was completed, we ourselves were made acceptable enough for Him to reside in. The veil was torn at Pentecost, and the Holy Spirit left the temple and settled into the people. History records the final destruction of the physical temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, and the bible declares that we ourselves are the new holy temple:
2 Corinthians 6:16: What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”
We are made in the image of God, making us suitable containers for His Spirit.
1 Corinthians 3:16: Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?
That’s why the bible forbids us to make idols for God, because God already has a suitable dwelling place, made in His image. Us!
To be honest, I have a hard time picturing Jesus as a non-descript Middle Eastern Jewish man, and he was human. My mental image of God is vague and undefined; I really can’t imagine anything that seems appropriate. I hope He’s okay with the long gray hair that is usually associated with Him.
Readers, feel free to respond in the comments with your own answers to this question.
Great food for thought…. Thank you!