He had directions from Google maps. He had long experience driving in the area. He had a GPS unit. Karl still got very lost driving from Chicago to the north suburbs. In a recent article in the Covenant Quarterly, Karl Clifton-Soderstrom explains how his ill-fated journey resulted from too many directional resources. Google conflicted with GPS, which conflicted with Karl’s directional sense, and all of it failed to take into account construction and the directions offered by detour signs.
Karl likens his driving experience to the plethora of moral voices which offer to guide us in today’s world, but it seems also an apt illustration of spiritual life in general. Browse the religion section at Borders; tune into a PBS special on the Bible; talk to friends; listen to religious broadcasting; attend church–put all those guides together and the result is likely to be more confusion than enlightenment.
Yet the spirit of the age seems to demand all those different navigational options, not just for driving but for spiritual life. We would chafe if told not to learn all we can from every possible source of information and not to consider all the possible interpretations and takes on the deepest questions of life.
In particular, we of our age might resist the implication of our text for Transfiguration Sunday this week, Matthew 17:1-8. After an incredible spiritual experience of multiple dimensions of sight and hearing–Jesus transfigured and talking with Moses and Elijah–the three disciples end up at this point: “When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.” Are we able in this day of pluralism and choice to insist on a spiritual life based on “no one except Jesus?”
Love Wins, a book by Rob Bell, which no one has even read yet because it’s not out until the end of the month, generated an on-line brouhaha because pre-pub publicity seems to suggest Bell embraces universalism, the view that everyone is saved. Just the possibility of such a view offered by a prominent young evangelical figure caused a firestorm because the pluralist spirit of the age is so much feared in some Christian corners. The vicious attacks on Bell make it apparent that it is more and more difficult to appear (and to be) loving and reasonable while insisting that there is only one Savior, “no one except Jesus.”
The great Christian challenge of our day may be this: to hold a faith exclusively based in Jesus Christ and His death and resurrection while doing what the disciples ultimately did, proclaiming that faith in a way that welcomes and includes anyone and everyone who will believe in, love and follow Jesus as God’s Son and our Savior.
So my hope for this Sunday is that we can remember to look only to Jesus as our spiritual guide, but that we can learn to do it with grace and love.