Magnets and Paddles--September 27, 2024

Magnets and Paddles--September 27, 2024

"Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you." [James 4:7-8a]

Look, here's the thing: there's a lot in this life we don't have control over... but we do have some choice, some agency, in this life. And where we do, it matters what we choose. It matters, where we move--more in tune with the way of Jesus or less... how we move in rhythm the cadences of Christ, or out of step with his peculiar goodness in a world full of mean. And so, yes, while we are all held in the sway of bigger influences than our own power, it's worth using whatever pull we have, even as meager as it may seem, to step more fully into alignment with the heart of God.

Acknowledging both sides of that is important. Yes, there are things we don't have control over in our lives, and they exert a certain influence on us, no matter what. Some of those are just the accidents of history and the quirks of our own particular life stories. We live in the twenty-first century, in the days of late-stage capitalism, citizens of the current superpower/empire of the day, and that affects our lives in ways we cannot avoid. We are influenced by the internet and international relations. We are affected by cultural behemoths like Amazon, McDonald's, Walmart, and Apple. We are touched by cancer diagnoses in our families and patterns of addiction in our social circles. We know the well-worn pessimism of living in the Rust Belt, and we have learned from experience that everyone's selling something and every seemingly great deal has got a catch. We know and move through the world through the lens of our racial, cultural, gender, and socio-economic categories--these are things that exert a pull on our lives like the moon's gravity pulling on the oceans to make the tides. All of those things, and surely a great many more, are constantly tugging on us, moving us in one direction or another, or several at once, and we didn't ask for them or sign up for them. They're just there.

Beyond that, too, we can say that evil has its own gravitational pull--whether we think of it in terms of the devil, or the nudging of sin inside us, or the power of wicked systems and structures, the "powers and principalities" that the New Testament talks about, or all of the above. We're susceptible to the power of each and all of them, seeking to move us away from the ways of God.

And on the flipside, Christians are convinced that God also draws us, with grace like gravity, pulling us into movements that echo God's own motion in the world. In fact, we dare to believe that God's pull on us is not only the first but the most important power at work on us--it is God's powerful, prevenient goodness before we've done a thing that claims us in grace, that loved us into being, that laid down God's own life for us at the cross. So it's not all bad news that there are powers bigger than our own that move and influence us. Our only hope, honestly, in the end, is that the pull of God's grace is more powerful than even our own ornery, stubborn hardness of heart, and that at the last God's love will get through to us even in our most hell-bent opposition to God.

But, to come back around full circle, just because those forces--both social and spiritual--are at work beyond our power or control, it doesn't mean we can just give up and ride aimlessly wherever the current takes us. We have the ability to influence our orbit, so to speak, so that we move away from the things that are bent on our destruction, and closer to the Love who is calling us home.

Or maybe it's helpful to think of ourselves like a magnet with two poles--we have the ability, depending on how we are turned, to repel some things and to draw other things. We can use the force of the magnetic field to cling to something, or we can use it to push something away. And of course, also like a magnetic field, the strength of the pull or push increases the closer you get to another magnet. In terms of our relationship with God, the closer we get, the stronger the pull to be drawn even closer into God's embrace. To be sure, God's pull is already drawing us in, simply by God's own grace, but in addition, the closer we let ourselves move, the more fully we'll be swept up into connection with God, too.

We can't wish away the powers out there that are bigger than ourselves that exert influence over us and shape the direction of our lives like the course of a river. But we can make choices about how we navigate the rapids. And where we feel the pull of the world's meanness, or our own internal self-centeredness, or the voices we can only call "demonic," attempting to lead us into the rocks or over a cliff, we can use the paddles in our hands to steer away from those currents. The people in our lives who reflect the way of Jesus are worth watching, listening to, and learning from. The voices in the wider culture that do the opposite are ones to stop giving our attention to. We might not be able to change everything about the circumstances we are in, but we can use whatever power we have to steer in a good direction, toward the channel that is leading us home.

The question that is worth asking on a day like today is simply this: what is worth using our strength on, however much or little it really is? Where will we paddle the canoe we are in? What will we move closer toward, and what will we seek to repel, while knowing we are always still held in the grip of grace, and that God's goodness holds us all the while?  Whose way will we follow in this day?

Lord God, hold us close. Hold us close. Hold us close.