Believing is Seeing (Part 2)

It is possible to walk with Jesus day-in and day-out for twelve months, to see him perform signs, to hear him preach on the biggest stage in all of Palestine during the biggest time of the year, and not hear a word he is saying, not see a thing he is doing. 

            The story of John 5:1-9 is offensive to some.  Jesus walks past hundreds of sick and maimed and heals a single person.  The Scripture shows Jesus having compassion on this single paralyzed old man.  But what about everybody else?  That must mean that he didn’t have compassion for hundreds of people, right? 

No, actually.  The response of the crowds and the disciples to the time when Jesus shows compassion on the thousands sheds some light on why Jesus does not heal everybody, how it is that our belief would not be stronger “if only we could see him”.  We are given a dramatic example of what people had been seeing when they saw Jesus. 

            One of the most beautiful things about Scripture is that it tells the story not only of God’s interaction with mankind, but the story of man’s response to God’s action.  John 6:1-15 is as much about Jesus’ compassion as it is about everyone else missing it.  In their search for Leonidas they came across Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter, who everyone loves and follows (except the leaders), who has powers of healing and apparently can multiply food.  Sounds like an unbeatable general in the making.  He can heal his troops and feed entire armies (five thousand men, remember) in the blink of an eye.  And this is what turns the table on our reading not only of John 5:1-9 but our reading of anything Jesus does.  The question is no longer “why didn’t Jesus heal everyone”, but “why did Jesus heal anyone?”  He knew full well that his actions would be misinterpreted.  He knew full well that everything he did and said would be misinterpreted, misconstrued, and distorted. 

            But the Father always has a plan.  Everything God does has purpose.  And everything Jesus did makes sense in light of the Cross.  Everything he said and did was pointing to it; the turning of water into wine pointed to the new life that his death and resurrection would bring to the world; his words with the woman at the well in chapter four spoke of the nature of eternal life that was coming; his healing of the paralyzed man and the feeding of the five thousand were concrete expressions of the new life signified by every word and action up to that point- and everything points to the Cross, the epitome of God’s Word to the world, when Jesus, the Word (John 1:1), who spoke and did so much, finally falls silent with a wordless cry (Mark 15:7), when the heart of God is literally, literally poured out (John 19:34). 

            We see in the feeding of the five thousand, in every action and word of the Word, Jesus the Christ, the perfect image of God.  And the image is of a God who literally pours out his heart, in blood and water, for the world.  The challenge for the world, in response to the action of this God, is to have faith.  We see in all the Gospels that simply seeing, with our eyes, is not the way to faith, that our faith would not be any stronger were Jesus to stand in front of us and begin to speak.  We are left with the task of knowing that Jesus is always in the room (Acts 17:27-28), that anything is possible because Jesus Christ was raised from the dead.  We are left with the task of living in Truth that already is.  And so it is faith that we need, not sight.

Believing is Seeing (Part 1)

Jesus is a crazy guy.  It turns out that you can walk with him, literally, for years and still not know who he really is.  You can, literally, spend every day and every night with him for years straight and, in the middle of such a “life season” or “trial period”, still believe him to be King Leonidas.  In fact that is almost exactly who the crowds and even his closest disciples believed him to be by the time we get to chapter six in the gospel of John. 

            OK, so “King Leonidas might be a slight exaggeration.  But the exaggeration really is slight.  The Jews of first century Palestine, those who populated the crowds that follow Jesus in John 6 and the time period in which the story takes place, all expected their Messiah to be a powerful military figure.  Their Messiah would be the one to lead Israel against the Romans, the one to free God’s people from the yoke of the pagans.  And this expectation or, better yet, the eagerness for the coming of this prophetic figure was at an all-time hi during the first century.  An example of the fire in the hearts of these ancient Jews would be any video clip from the Libyan rebellion against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.  The Libyan rebellion is not an exact parallel of the situation of first century Palestine but does suggest what the climate of Jerusalem was like under Roman rule.

            Imagine the kind of individual it would take to lead a rebellion like the one in Libya.  Chances are your mind conjured up, if not Leonidas himself, some sort of ethnic variation of the famous Spartan (always with a beard, of course).  Actually all you need to do is change John 2:16 to “THIS IS SPARTA!” and Jesus starts to seem pretty dang ripped.  But let’s get back to John 6.

            Actually, to John 6:1-15.  The feeding of the five thousand was perhaps the greatest sign performed by Jesus during his ministry, hence it’s being the only miracle recorded by all four gospels.  All of the gospels have subtly different chronologies but in John the feeding of the five thousand take place at least twelve months into Jesus’ ministry.  We know this because the Passover festival was and is celebrated once every twelve months and verse four tells us the time of the Passover was near when this sign took place, the second time in the gospel that the Passover has appeared so far.  John does not specify the amount of time that lapsed between John 2:13 (the first mention of the Passover) and the stories preceding it.  We will take the conservative route and say that by the time the feeding of the five thousands occurs not only have rumors and stories about this Jesus guy been circulating towns and hills of Palestine, not only have thousands seen him heal and preach in the temple in Jerusalem, but at least twelve men, whom Jesus called his disciples, have been at Jesus’ side virtually every hour of every day since Jesus asked them to follow him.  Such was the relationship between a Rabbi and his disciples.  Class was not in session during select hours of select days of the week.  Rather, class was never not in session.  One learned from one’s Rabbi by watching and listening to everything he did and said.

            The feeding of the five thousand was truly incredible.  A careful reading of verse ten reveals that only the men were counted.  The customary way to estimate or count a large crowd was to count the men.  If you figure (conservatively) that every other man had a wife and a child then it is highly likely that there were at least ten thousand people on this great grassy plain. 

For all its grandeur the feeding of the five thousand ends as a tragedy.  The crowds are amazed at the powers of Jesus and try to forcibly capture him and make him their king.  For all his efforts people have yet to see and hear who Jesus is.  Verse fifteen ends with an important detail, “Jesus, as he realized they were about to come and take him by force and make him king, fled back to the hills alone” (New Jerusalem Bible).  That he was forced to flee alone, without his posse following at his heels or protecting him, means that his posse was on the same page as the crowds who saw not Jesus, the Lamb of God (1:29), but King Leonidas.  

Like A Child

Alone in the wild.  A reality show in 2010 bore this name.  It featured the story of Ed Wardle, a born-and-raised wilderness man.  Ed has spent his entire life in love with nature.  But Ed’s love for nature is much more “hands on” than most.  In Orange County (let alone Southern California) it is not uncommon to hear “love for nature” equated with “appreciation of sunsets”.  Nothing is wrong with the equation, sure.  But it fails to really describe people like Ed.  See, Ed has climbed Mt. Everest twice.  And been on an expedition to the North Pole.  His astonishing resume can be viewed here, but let it be known that Ed is, quite frankly, unnatural. 

            Naturally, Ed had always dreamed of living alone in the wild and wanted to prove to himself that he could, if necessary.  The National Geographic Channel decided they’d like to give Ed the opportunity.  And wanted him to film it of course.  Alone In The Wild was born.  Ed was given the task of surviving alone in the Yukon Territory in Northern Canada for 3 months, living off the wildlife he could legally catch.  The story was compelling while it lasted.  Ed called it quits 5 weeks short of the goal.  But the 7 weeks of footage really were remarkable.  He lost 28 pounds and became literally sick with loneliness.  That majestic, beautiful wilderness which had always drawn Ed to such fantastic heights (literally) became cold, cruel, and dispassionate.  In a singularly powerful moment Ed confesses that nature, in all its beauty, could care less whether or not he starved to death.  The greatest teacher is life, after all.

            What would Ed have thought if he had read Psalm 19:1-4 while sitting in such a dismal classroom?

1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 
2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. 
3 They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. 
4 Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. 
In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun.

Mr. Wardle may have reacted any number of ways.  Dying of hunger, going mad with loneliness, because of a river’s refusal to provide fish, of an unseen predator always lurking in the dark, from any and every noise completely lacking any trace of human causation, it doesn’t take the imagination of a Nick Fetner or a Jordan Benedict to know how Ed would have felt were he to read that the thing killing him was also glorifying God.  He may have questioned the psalmist; his character or life experience.  But the psalmist didn’t write this poem out of ignorance.  Exposure to weather was a little more widespread 3,000 years ago in the Middle East than it is today in the West.  Ed may have questioned the nature of this god; a god who is glorified by a thing capable of such fatal apathy as nature must be just that- fatally apathetic. 

            Despite the incredible distance between the experience of people who lived so wildly 3,000 years ago (or Ed today) and the rest of modern western society, a certain peculiar proximity between the two peoples does exist.  In fact the parallels are quite obvious.  Ed exposed himself to a world that could literally take his life at any moment.  It would not ask his permission.  Were a bear to smell the dead porcupine hanging next to Ed in that tree it would not have asked for a leg of porcupine.  The bear (and this thought tormented Ed all night) would probably have eaten Ed himself.  And that’s pretty much how it works.  By now some of you may already know where this is going.  It almost goes without saying that life in America over the last several years can be described in very similar terms.  Bears may not have haunted us in the night, but millions learned the implications of living in a world where the majority of capital is controlled by the minority.  A few bank owners behave like humans and the global economy is thrown into a nosedive that no one can see an end to.  Millions learned that saving up for retirement, like hanging a porcupine in a tree, does not guarantee that the bear won’t eat you AND your porcupine. 

            But there is good news.  We are not alone.  The machine or bear or whatever shape it happens to take does not have the final say.  Actually, it has already been defeated.  In actuality, the victory is ours (1^st Cor. 15:54-57).  We, as His children, no longer fear bears or machines (Lk. 12:4-5) because, in all truth, they cannot touch us (Rom. 8:37-39).  Our Father can literally, morning after morning, cover the earth around us with provisions (Ex. 16:4-5).  But we choose death when we turn our cares from Him to His provisions (16:20, 27).  It was with Mt. 6:25-34 in mind that a wise man once said, “God cares for tomorrow, and if man cares about God, then his tomorrow is also taken care of.”

            The good news is appalling when circumstances are the dominating filter through which it’s received.  But good news is good news, even when it’s salty.  Ed Wardle learned a hard lesson out in the Yukon Territory about the love of his life.  But his love did not turn to hatred.  His love actually grew.  Ed was humbled.  He realized that, ultimately, he is not in control.  The will of the Father is that His children would know this and more: to be His children we must act as His children, having faith like a child (Mk. 10:13-16), completely vulnerable and dependent on our Father for everything.  This is good news, that the One in whom all things exist (Rom. 11:36) is also the giver of life itself (Jn. 5:21), that if our hands reach out to receive instead of to grab our Father will give us His kingdom (Mk. 10:13-16).  May we stand in this truth for heaven’s sake.

The Universal Presence

“God is not far from any one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17: 27-28)

This verse is spoken by St. Paul in his speech to the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers at the meeting of the Areopagus and was meant to illustrate the tangibility of the Christian God, whom Paul associated with the “unknown god” that these Greeks reserved a place for in their worship.  Tangibility.  Not a word that is typically associated with “unknown”.  But Paul does, because his God is.

The god Paul is witnessing to is close.  Very close, in fact.  How close, you might ask?  Paul, in his effort to witness to the closeness of his god, points to life itself.  And what does life, in part, depend on?  Air.  Oxygen.  You know, the stuff that travels through your mouth, down your trachea, into your lungs, through your bloodstream, bringing strength and life to the billions of cells in your body.  And then it is exhaled.  Your body gently pushes it out of your lungs, through your vocal cords, which vibrate at varying frequencies producing sound.  The movement of your mouth and tongue control the release of this oxygen, these sounds, and hence the source of your voice.  But it is this stuff, air, oxygen, which only imperfectly illustrates the nearness of Paul’s god.  Because Paul’s god is closer than the air in your lungs, your vascular system, and your trachea. 

How can this be?  How can any-thing, let alone any person, let alone any god, be closer to your Self than air?  But even the “air” metaphor (not that Paul is speaking metaphorically), stretched and pushed to its limit, fails to do justice to the intimacy of Paul’s god. 

How about being?  Paul says that we have our being in his god.  The Greek word for being is ousia, which can also mean “existence”.  Paul tells us that he exists IN his god, explaining his previous statement, showing how it is that his god “is not far from any one of us”.  Really, this truth Paul is witnessing to has its source back before time, before the Beginning itself.  This is what Tozer calls “the universal presence”.

Unfortunately we (21^st century American Christians) tend to err in the same direction as the ancient Greek philosophers that Paul spoke to thousands of years ago.  Sure, we don’t refer to our God as unknown, and we don’t (explicitly) worship the gods of the Greek pantheon.  But practically?  Minute-to-minute?  From Monday to Saturday?  Once our Sunday singing ends?  God all too often is relegated to the corner, the little labeled box with his name on it, to the back of our minds waiting to be acknowledged again next Sunday.  Far too often our God, the God of St. Paul, is practically unknown.  Unfortunately I know this more from honest self-examination than observation of other people, though finding a self-proclaimed Christian who fails to consistently live out their beliefs isn’t the most daunting task imaginable. 

We know His name, Jesus Christ, “through [whom] all things were made” (John 1:3).  He is not unknown.  He has made himself known.  And not just himself, but in him we see the Father, “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3).  And he lives in us.  Sit with that.  Sit with that when you wake up in the morning.  Sit with that as you drive to work.  Sit with that in the midst of conversations.  Sit with it, so that your Sunday singing spills into Monday, and then Tuesday, into your living, moving, and breathing.
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At His Word (John 4:50/Part 2)

I got it.  I got there and laid the weight of my heart at his feet. 

“Jesus, come to my house and cure my dying son”. 

His response was sort of expected.  Though he didn’t spit on me he also seemed to have denied my request.  But his denial was not as I anticipated.  I thought the denial would be of the kind you get when you ask a wall to dinner.  Your words bounce straight back and hit you in the face and then you eat alone.  But Jesus hadn’t ignored my existence or even my words.  He responded.  And even his response was unexpected.  Instead of calling me a fool or spitting the words “rich man” in my direction, he seemed to have spoken to me like I was the same as everyone in the crowd. 

“Unless you people see signs and wonders,” Jesus said, “you will never believe.”

Yes, he denied me, but he saw me, first of all, as equal to those around me.  Needless to say I was stunned.  As I said I’ve been spit on and insulted, but never called poor or faithless.  Jesus said this to me, to us, though I had never been led to believe there was an us.

            I could hardly gather my self.  All that was left standing from this peculiar push of Jesus was the cry of my heart for the life of my son.  And it was with a voice betraying more of this cry than I had hoped that I spoke. 

“Sir,” I replied, “come down before my child dies.” 

In a flash the atmosphere shifted from confusion and dismay to ferocity.  The tremor in my voice affected the crowd like a downed deer might affect a hungry lion.  But it was just a flash after all.  Every eye was fixed on Jesus even as he reprimanded them and these eyes had only begun to turn onto me when his countenance completely changed.  It was terribly ironic, that my own life seemed so seriously imperiled as I pleaded for the saving of my son, but it really felt as if it could leave me any second due to my affliction. 

The crowd, yet to fully shift their attention from Jesus, perceived the relaxing of the muscles, the softening of those ever-hardening lines and perhaps, even, the slightest shadow of a smile pass across that well of mystery that was the face of Jesus. 

“Go home,” said Jesus, “your son will live.”

Never has my life hung so literally on the words of another.  Never have I seen so clearly the eternity that exists in between moments of time.  Having (against all odds!) made it through eternity and hearing what he said I was brought to the crossroads upon which my son hung.  No Rabbi has ever thought so much in so little time as I did in those few seconds of silence.  “Go home,” he said to me.  Go home?  Was he yanking my yamaka?  Were those stories racing across Judaea and Galilee stories of Jesus telling people to leave?  No they weren’t!  He touched people with his hands, he spoke to them, he prayed over them, and they were changed, delivered, healed.  Was I asking something new or different or that he hadn’t heard?  Was I a type of person he had yet to come across?  That’s quite unlikely for someone like him whose been hanging around Jerusalem during the Passover and traveling the countryside.  So what was it?  Really, I have yet to know.  Perhaps it was my desperation, my vulnerability, or my request that provoked such an unusual response from Jesus.  But he had responded.  And I will never forget the look on his face when he did. 

Suddenly it became clear that there was no better thing to do in that moment than to take Jesus at his word.  Indeed, to this day I have yet to come across a word so worthy of my life, even the life of my son.

The ride home was agonizing.  Not fearfully agonizing.  No, my son would live.  That much was true.  But I could hardly wait to see him!  I had all but given up hope of ever seeing his life restored, and now it was.  And then I saw dust approaching from the distance.  As it grew closer I realized it was my servants.  As they grew closer I could see the urgency of their riding.  And then they met me, telling me of the recovery of my son.  Of course he was recovered.  That much was expected, but I hadn’t thought of the effect it would have on my entire household.  I asked them when the fever left him, they said yesterday at the seventh hour, the exact time Jesus had said it would.  I told them and my household the story of my encounter, much to the dismay of my servants, and my conviction became theirs.  This Jesus, the center of swirling mystery, who was coming to be known as the leader of the weak, the Rabbi to the poor, transcended all the stories and sayings.  He was the leader of the weak and poor but my experience told of a man doing more than gathering an army or winning the masses.  Jesus was starting his own movement directed not exclusively toward the poor, but toward anyone who would trust his word, his very person.  Jesus is the Chosen One of God, and as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.

At His Word (John 4:50/Part 1)

50“’Go home,’ said Jesus, ‘your son will live.’ The man believed what Jesus had said and went on his way home”.

            It was clear to me very early, even as a young boy; the eyes that burned into me as I rode past, and those that refused to even drift in my direction, were part of the same chastising strike.  Not that this insight, gained so early, had anything to do with a profundity of wisdom on my part, or any sort of instruction or warning from my father.  However consistently dark and mysterious, even bright and mysterious, this world is, she has truth to share that is unavoidable, even for the weak-minded.  Like gravity, or the need for food or the heat of the sun, knowledge of the hatred of entire villages of you and your horse and garments and the clinking of the gold in your purse, is inevitable.  For all people ignorance is bliss.  For a few people ignorance is impossible.

            The leper is cursed by God and so he is a leper.  The rich man is blessed by God and so he is rich.  Yet both are hated, one for being cursed and the other for being blessed.  It really is- almost –funny.  And so I laughed as I rode to the last place I could have chosen to spend the day, in Cana of Galilee, to beg a man who would either glare and spit like the others, or listen and acknowledge with the compassion of a 5’8’’ rock.  Dismal prospects indeed, my family was thoroughly convinced I’d lost my mind; my son was on his deathbed and the best solution I had come up with was to throw myself into the lion’s den.  Taking Daniel as my example I rode straight into Cana and immediately found the man I’d been hearing about.

            His name was Jesus.  He was the center of the endless commotion surrounding last Passover, the subject of stories spreading like wildfire throughout the countryside.  They say that when he looks at you he sees straight into your heart, sees who you were, who you are, who you will be.  They say that his prayers strike both the proud and the humble, offending one and embracing the latter.  That he provokes the wrath of the elite and the adoration of the weak.  That his touch, even his shadow, is enough to heal a man.  And yet, while I knew where I fit into the stories I’d heard (the meaning of the sideways glance of my own servants upon discovering my eavesdropping) I remained drawn to this man.  A peculiar mystery pervaded these stories, pervaded him, provoking my reminiscence on my most precious memories, like the first time I read the story of the burning bush, or smelled the holiness drifting out of the inner sanctuary of the Temple.  And I could see this same effect move like a breeze across the town squares and temples, producing the oddest mix of fury and compassion on the countenance of its subjects.  Sooner or later I knew I would need to see, hopefully hear, this man for myself.

            Of course everyone within a days journey of Cana heard quickly of Jesus’ return, hence the tension, the strain in the air of the entire town.  It’s difficult to say whether I would have felt compelled enough to make the journey, to press through the crowds, to sit with the lions, for the opportunity to see for myself, were my son not slowly and steadily approaching Abraham’s bosom.  But I had to.  I had to see, to ask, to beg if necessary.  I guess I did.  But not at first.  It was easy enough to find him and less easy to draw near enough to have a hearing.  I persevered despite the exceptional firmness of the social chastisement.  I thought I was ready for the hate but had not thought through the implications of someone like me trying to have a word with “their guy”.  Glares turned to shoves and spit struck my feet.  I’m not positive, but it seemed that my purse grew progressively lighter as I pressed through the crowd.  Divine encouragement? Unlikely.  I didn’t care.  The life of my child depended upon this conversation.

Paranormal Activity

What a phrase.  Thanks to the recent trilogy of movies bearing this title, its utterance alone seems to fill people with a mixture of fear and excitement.  Our minds are filled with images of shadows appearing on walls, people getting tossed here and there by invisible forces, and 145 lb. girls with the strength and temper of a steroid injected Goku-Frieza fusion.  But are these true-to-life depictions of paranormal activity?  In some cases, yes.. sort of. I will get to the “sort of” part later, but it is true that violent paranormal activity does in fact exist. 

The spiritual realm is real, demons are real, and they impact, affect, and at times possess people who are not temples of the Living God.  And this is the answer most Christians will give when asked why they won’t watch these movies, because that stuff actual happens, needs to be taken seriously and is not an appropriate source of entertainment.  But not everyone who thinks of themselves as Christian refuses to see them.  In fact, those Christians who are willing to see them must be in the majority if one is to account for the incredible success of the three movies.  Why do they still go?  Probably a combination of minimal worry about content in any of their sources of entertainment and they’ve developed a liking for the kind of thrill that these movies offer.  And so one would think that the question at hand, when it comes whether or not it is OK to watch movies like Paranormal Activity, centers around the importance of the content in our sources of entertainment.  But it seems like Christians, on both sides of the argument, have already bought into the falsities perpetuated by the paranormal trilogy (which is also bound up with all of these ghost-hunter shows). 

To cut to the chase, these movies are teaching America to fear the paranormal, meaning demons.  And here is problem #1.  Already they are outside the biblical witness (the standard which the Church is required to hold the world to) by equating  “paranormal activity” with “demonic”.  Dictionary.com defines paranormal as “of or pertaining to the claimed occurrence of an event or perception without scientific explanation, as psychokinesis, extrasensory perception, or other purportedly supernatural phenomena”.  Notice the immediate discrepancy between the definition provided by the Paranormal movies and Dictionary.com.  The former has nothing more to say than “demonic” while the latter says, basically, “things beyond the explanation of modern science”.  But is the demonic the only thing existing beyond the reaches of modern science?  And it’s at this point that Christian’s on both sounds of the argument should be bothered. 

Problem #2: these movies, for all their emphasis on paranormal activity, have nothing to say about the paranormal activity that people across the world encounter hundreds of times more frequently than anything witnessed to in these movies; the movement of the Holy Spirit, the living presence of Jesus, the joy of the Father, in our worshipping together as the Church, in time spent in silence seeking personal communion with our Creator, in our loving of our children, in our taking the posture of servant towards our friends, families, and enemies, in our helping the helpless, and even in the appreciation of a purple-red-orange-melting together sunset.  And while it’s the life of the former three that gives significance to the latter activities, it remains true that we worship, know, and are known by a God who is all-powerful, all knowing and everywhere.  (If the reader is like every other Christian in the world who struggles to grasp the nature of those attributes of God, here is an explanation that approaches those attributes from a different angle.)  The only Christian influence, by the movie’s standards, is a Catholic nanny that knows how to do spells.  Some would point out that her being Catholic means she’s not Christian.  I would point out that her spell-casting means she’s not even Catholic.  And that’s it.  The movies are silent outside of this single pseudo-Catholic influence. 

At this point some might say we shouldn’t take things so seriously, to stop dissecting for theological error movies that were created solely for entertainment purposes.  This brings us to problem #3: the country is being taught to fear things that really aren’t worth fearing, while the things worth fearing are truly left in the dark.  Millions and millions have flocked to theatres to see these films over the years (including myself).  The only explanation for this (besides the movies being skillfully put together) is that the subject matter actually scares people.  And at first glance it would seem that the fear driving people to these theatres is healthy; it’s based on stuff that is sort of real.  And so we come back to the “sort of” from the first paragraph.  Not only do these movies define “paranormal activity” as “demonic”, but also equate “demonic” with “people getting flung across rooms”.  This is what’s truly unhealthy about these films: they take something the majority of people are afraid of and then build movies around a fantastic caricature of it while the truer evils of demonic forces are completely neglected. 

Yes, demons can probably throw you across a room.  Yes, they could probably lift your entire kitchen up to the ceiling and then drop it with timing so precise as to maximize your reaction.  But if every time a demon pumped thoughts through your mind to distort the image of your friend with the goal of destroying your relationship with them you instead got your feet pulled out from under you and landed on your back, you would be profoundly better off.  If every time you were led in your thinking to see women as objects to be consumed an invisible Chuck Liddell instead punched you in the chest, you might still know how to treat women as persons created in the image of the Triune God.  If every time you were home alone your lamps started blinking and swaying, or you got picked up by your hair, or kept getting locked in closets, instead of being led to believe that the only way to relieve your boredom was to go on Facebook or watch TV or look at pornography, then you might have annoying lights, a sore scalp, or need to become a locksmith, but at least you would know the importance of being alone and silent at the feet of your Redeemer, or to pray for the many sorrows you see in the lives of those around you, not to mention the catastrophic evil that fills our news stations, or to appreciate the irreducible beauty of the turning leaves on the tree outside your window.  If instead of institutions that systematically exploit the weak and powerless we had a bunch of men in suits that got picked up in their sleep, we might have some freaked out men in suits but thousands of Americans might still have their homes, little girls would not be enslaved by sex trafficking gangs, and children in Africa would not be abducted and forced to armies. 

The subject, or the exploitation of the subject, of these movies, offends many Christians.  It’s the position of the Pious and Profane that even said Christians have already been tricked by the father of lies.  He would have our fears directed toward little girls who act like tigers, inexplicable shadows on walls, and rearrangement of furniture, all the while we are being trained to see women as pleasures to be had, to interpret that comment we heard the other day as intended to hurt, to think that the world will be better off, that we can end sex trafficking, the corruption of wall street, and perverse international economic imbalance if only we can get “our guy” in the oval office.  The irony is that (to borrow from Pastor Sean Kappauf) the thing the world needs most, which she aches and groans for (Rom. 8:19-22), IS paranormal activity in its truest, most biblical sense.  She needs the movement of the Holy Spirit, the living (and therefore judging) presence of Jesus the Christ, according to the eternal plan of the Father.  And until the true King returns on a cloud of fire, hurling lightning bolts at evil forces, dropping grenades of power on our demonic systems, it is the job of the holy and catholic Church to usher in the Kingdom by the power of the Spirit.  God’s plan for the world is wildly paranormal, and it’s about time His Body reclaimed that word in His name.