Before Rising There's Dying
And He told them, "This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day…”
“Same Drugs” by Chance the Rapper always ends up on my Spotify. On a new playlist, on recently played, whenever I am around my friends, whenever I am on my own and hit shuffle. There’s power in its message that transcends what I even think Chance intended. In the song, Chance repeats the refrain “we don’t do the same drugs no more.” Over and over and over. It always hits me, sometimes makes me cry, and usually makes me feel better.
I am Caleb, and I am an alcoholic. Ish. I am a leader of a recovery group for an entirely different “moral” issue. I have codependent leanings. I resonate and dwell and persist in many issues all the time. Although I believe all people deal with many problems, I tend to meander on mine longer than most. It’s a weird kind of masochism, a strange kind of comfort in the midst of misery.
It is the remnant and ongoing fallout of my false self. The Enneagram calls it being “addicted to suffering (type 4).” Myers-Briggs calls it being “overly idealistic (INFP). ” The Highly Sensitive theory calls it “struggling to let go of negative thoughts and feelings.”
The Apostle Paul calls it the old self. And, if I have learned anything through a lot of counseling, obsessing over personality theories, and all the unlearning of so much bad (and psychologically uninformed) theology, it has far more to do with what I believe as opposed to who I am. It is more doing bad because I feel bad, and less being bad which causes me to do bad.
Chance has so many songs near and dear to my heart, but “Same Drugs” is close to the top. It’s message is so powerful. Because it’s so true. I don’t do the “same drugs no more.” I used to watch porn all the time. Not anymore. I used to drink myself into slumber for days on end. I don’t do that as much as I used to. And while the “drug” of codependency is far from kicked, I am leaning into a fuller dependence on God to lean all the more into integrated interdependence.
That old self, that menace whispering lies from the source of all lies, that jerk named Chad (that’s the name I gave to the mean voice in my head, sorry to any wholehearted, kind Chads out there reading this, forgive me) who assaults me several times a day, has less and less power every day.
Because I am rising, but only because I’m dying. And the latter has to precede the former.
I don’t like the typical “Jesus died for your sins” sermon. Let me explain.
America is a neurotic nation. Look at the political landscape. Look at the varying responses to the COVID crisis (people are still wanting us to break protocol and go back to normal “for the economy?!?”). Look at our workaholism. Our obsessions with quick fixes. The deep surge in celebrity-dom (which we now dub being an “influencer”). The way all the data-mining has now personalized your ads, your “suggestions,” your digital life in such a manner to perfectly curate your interests (or, perhaps, to pull you away from your actual likes and dislikes if they don’t generate revenue for someone in silicon valley).
There’s so much pulling at all of us to be one of a kind. To be special and significant and distinct. This was not a phenomenon until pretty recently in human history. Even scrolling back a few hundred years, people’s dreams were not the lofty variety they are now. In feudal Europe, you hoped and prayed to the gods for a good harvest, for few run-ins from bandits, and that your king wouldn’t be too corrupt and/or would protect you from other kings of other nations. In America, it was a hope that these land greedy white people would leave the place of your ancestors and stop railing on and on about “personal property.” Gone was this absurd chase to be “ahead” of the pack, clock in all those extra hours, acquire more and more letters after your name.
We chase money or experiences or passport stamps or followers or some other external thing in an attempt to fill the emptiness inside. Even good things, even a loving partner, wonderful kids, an ethical business, a best-selling book, a postgraduate degree to do even more good in the world.
None of these things fix the aching inside. No one accomplishment or accolade or prize fills the void inside. No rush of excitement or feeling or euphoria or “high” or “low” will ever encompass all it means to be human.
We are all making it up as we go, contrary to the lifestyle guru or influencer or celebrity or celebrity influencer who tries to convince others they know what’s up (even and especially if they claim they are “making it up too”) about living the good life.
But wait, what in the world does this have to do with Jesus dying for sins? Or, more specifically, dying for “your” sins?
We are obsessed with ourselves. But not us as a whole. Rather, “I” as an individual. “You” as an individual. Any random Joe Schmoe as a specific, unique, distinct Joe Schmoe. And so, we have inherited a theology corrupted by this selfish obsession. We have entire rows and shelves in bookstores (oh my beloved Powells, please make it through the craziness) dedicated to your relationship with Jesus. Your relationship to God. Your relationship to your spouse. Your career. Your PhD. Your struggles.
Your specific “youness.”
So when we see a cross, when we read the Passion story, when we hear the angry guy rail against the sins of the world perpetuated by your bad behavior (who really needs a long hug and a lot of counseling), we take the brunt of badness. We feel guilt, but not the good kind of guilt.
We think of our selfishness. Our porn use. Our drunken nights. Our lying to our friends about being fine. Our distinct and unique brand of sinfulness. Trapped in this, we take a few different routes to suppress this heavy load. We either do much of what I described before; we pursue career, marriage, school, “influencing,” creativity, fitness, drugs, alcohol, porn, etc. With things we do outside, we hope to to help the thing happening (or not happening) inside of us. Personally, I get hung up on selfish neuroses but with a different brush; I listen to Chad’s laundry list of chastisements against my character and appease him with drinking or porn or some other thing to make Chad quiet. If he gets his way, I mistakenly believe he will be quiet.
We all search everywhere in the world to mend the bentness within. My pastor described it like this; that although we are born good, wholehearted, and loving, our bentness is tied to our wounding, our hurting, our selfishness. Yet the order really matters here.
I was raised believing I was utterly depraved. I could quote Romans, some obscure OT passages, and the ultimate “come to Jesus to be washed” sermonette all as proof of how I, ultimately, deserved to go to Hell. And you did too.
But this crap just doesn’t work for me anymore. I don’t think it works for others either.
It just has nothing to say for trauma, for struggle, for the voices inside our heads. It has extremely weak ground in regards to justice and caring for the least of these. And it has consumed us into thinking about how we can prove to others, prove to God, and even prove to ourselves that we are worthy of… what? Getting on God’s good side? Ensuring God as Father sees us on a good day for Him because He sees Jesus inside and He’s not pissed today? Hoping others will see us as “arrived” in the victorious Christian living kind of way?
Simply put, as Rick Warren famously says in The Purpose Driven Life, life isn’t about you. It isn’t about me.
It’s about a good God loving a broken world and a broken people because He is Love. It’s what that famous verse even says, the one we all know in our heads but consistently disbelieve in our hearts; that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever should believe in Him shall have eternal life. Yet, let’s not leave out the next verse (which I like more): for God did not send His son to condemn the world but to save the world through Him.
Jesus is a counselor before He is a preacher. Can’t figure out whether that’s a controversial claim, but I’m sure it would upset quite a few Bible teachers out there.
It is from Jesus’ person that His teaching flows. He preaches love because He is love. He commanded us to leave the ninety-nine to find the one because He leaves the ninety-nine to find the one.
Divorcing spirituality from psychology was probably the dumbest “enlightened” thing to happen in the Enlightenment. Inheriting a Greek heritage of hating the body and believing the mind was paramount to every other organ in the body led us to the neuroses I described before. It is a complete rejection of Paul’s mandate to capture every thought. And, finally, belief is informed by thought, but not thought alone. It is also through our heart, our spirit, and our actions.
Proverbs says that “above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Yet in Jeremiah, we are told “the heart is deceptively wicked and beyond any cure. Who can understand it?”
In thought, these concepts are at odds. And yet, in our heart, in our spirit, even in our bodies, we can see that both of these seemingly counter things can coexist. Paul puts it like this:
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Notice his mentioning to offer your bodies before renewing your mind. And, too, that we sacrifice those same bodies because of God’s mercy.
The order of things in our lives really matters. This is something that is “rising” in me as I “die” to old beliefs, old mantras, old patterns, and old behaviors.
We believe, deeply and firmly, that we are in the Beloved embrace of God as Father, God as Son, God as Spirit, and then everything else flows from that. This is how I am guarding my heart. Through belief that I am loved, completely, wholly, fully, and without any exception, by God. This is what enables me to be godly and causes me to naturally bear the fruit of the Spirit.
So in the death of Jesus, I too can model a death of the old self that He died for so that I might rise to my new self as His body rose too.
Our obsession with sin, with sin management, with the sin of others and the sins of the world and especially the sins of ourselves pollute the very death of Christ and its meaning for our lives.
He didn’t die for you. He didn’t die for me.
He died for us. He died for a people. He died for the world.
This old self of selfishness must die, and not just selfish, “moral” sins. But also the sins of negative thought patterns, self-loathing, self-sabotage, self-torture. The sins of careerism, pedagogy, gluttony of experiences, ego inflation. The sins of hiding shame, confessing sin without the hurt behind it, the sin of being so obsessed with our sin that we rob Jesus’ death and later resurrection of its radical power to change, transform, and cleanse us from ourselves.
Before rising there’s dying. Before the new self comes the old self has gotta go. Before we see the truths of the True Self we have to call out the lies of the False Self.
Thankfully, we have a very good, very cheap, and very reliable counselor to rely on in this process. One who had to wait in Sheol for a few days before coming back from the grave and confirm, without a shadow of a doubt, that He was the One we were all waiting for…