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aroma, experience, fragrance
aroma, experience, fragrance Entries in experience (3)
Monday's Meditation: The Aroma of Christ
Monday, October 24, 2011 at 12:05AM 
But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are an aroma that brings death; to the other, an aroma that brings life. And who is equal to such a task? (2 Corinthians 2: 14-16)
Perhaps it’s the smell of donuts and tea, all yeasty and sweet. Or roses: nuanced and subtle, filling the room. Or the smell of baking bread where there should be the stench of burning flesh.
This week’s meditation is an invitation to breathe deep and discover the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Christ. Of course, the Apostle Paul was only using a metaphor, right? The intellectual colossus of Christianity would have never intended we could actually smell the presence of Jesus, would he?
I was away on a business trip last week. My 8 year-old daughter used my Cheerios Tee as a nightshirt, but not before smelling all the T-shirts in the closet because they reminded her of Daddy. We could never remember Jesus like that. Never? Widows tell of opening a dresser drawer and catching the fragrance of their husband long departed. Our brain recalls the decades past by the faintest whiff of a meal we ate as children. We smell the beach before we see the ocean.
Check the commentaries and you’ll find the musty smell of books and study. The commentators will remind you of Roman processions and temples filled with incense. The learned professors will explain these words were the stuff of Paul’s creative metaphor.
But there is another way: you can check the history of the people of God, common folk who have experienced uncommon things:
John the Apostle had a disciple named Polycarp. In 155 A.D. he was arrested and threatened with fire because he loved John’s Master, Jesus. “You threaten fire which burns for an hour and is soon quenched.” he said. “Why do you wait? Come, do what you will!” When the authorities tied him to a stake and set him ablaze, his skin turned golden brown and witnesses smelled the smell of baking bread. Since the witnesses were not theologians they reported their experience and not a metaphor: the aroma of the bread of life.
But who can trust witnesses dead for 18 centuries? Something like that could never happen today.
That’s what I thought until a gnarly old musician, a 60’s throwback who sang worship songs to Jesus came to our little town. Barely 40 people gathered to hear him sing and minister. Yet when he prayed one-on-one for those who stayed until the end, the room swelled with rose-scent, a bouquet of God’s presence right before my very nose. It happened again the next day as I drove him to the airport. Our car filled with perfume as if an alabaster jar had been broken before me.
Still, it’s hard to believe, I grant you. And who could possibly expect it to happen again:
Until one Sunday morning when two rows of worshipers in our church encountered the smell of donuts and tea while they sang and raised their hands, each one sure they were the only ones until one looked at another and said, “This is weird, but do you smell tea?”
Of course, the commentators are right: Paul's words are allusions to the practices of the day. He was merely drawing on the common understanding of his times. But what if Paul also wrote his experiences down? What if there is also a spiritual reality long lost, and the Spirit is trying to whet our appetite for his presence again today?
How about you? Do you have a story to tell? Has his fragrance ever settled on you?
Tasting the Family Heritage
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 12:18AM 
God’s presence is the family heritage. I turn page after page in the family album of scripture and discover my God is highly relational. He wants us to know him. Let’s pull out the album and remind ourselves of the past. Can you hear the pages crackle with the testimony of lives impacted by his touch?
There’s our father, Abraham. He was visited personally by the creator of the universe no fewer than four times. God spoke to Abraham, and Abraham spoke to God. They discussed where Abraham should live, what he should do and how he should raise his family. Abraham served God a meal, heard God laugh, and bargained with him for the lives of the righteous.
Abraham’s son, Isaac, shared his life with God as well. God helped him through difficult economic times with specific advice. Isaac waited a long time for the God of his father to become his God, but it was worth the wait. Isaac’s wife asked of God and discovered why her pregnancy was so difficult; in the process she learned the secret destiny of her twin sons.
Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, did his best to avoid the presence of God. Yet even while running away he stumbled into God’s house. He didn’t know where he was, but he awoke at the base of Heaven’s gate. Later in his life he found himself in hand-to-hand combat with the Almighty, and the experience changed his identity forever: “I’m the one who wrestled with God” (and I have the limp to prove it).
This is our family album as well. Our ancestors conversed with God, questioned God, wrestled with God, and heard his secrets. They bargained and pleaded with him, and--most amazingly--they experienced his presence even while they were in conflict with him.
Those of us with a high view of scripture should allow it to whet our appetite, to provoke our thirst for his tangible presence. We have a choice: if our experience does not match the revealed word of God, we should change our way of life and pursue the experience we see. Instead we have settled for knowing the record of the past, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Monday’s post collected stories from everyday people who have felt his touch in our time. Their stories should encourage us that Abraham’s blessing can be ours as well. God’s relationship with others is a promise to us. We were made to be with him. Do we experience his presence? Are we aware when God is in the room? Jesus intended that, like our family, we should know his presence. We should settle for nothing less. One taste is enough to bring hunger for life. We should feel him for real or wrestle with the lack until he comes and touches us himself.
Many Christians have no story to tell because they have been taught avoid subjective experience. They’ve been taught the facts of God’s presence, but what good is it to have a theology that asserts God’s presence is everywhere if there is no evidence of it? It may be the central failing of the North American church: His presence is rarely manifest. We do not even feel the lack. He is indeed with everyone, but everyone is not always with him. God is present with everyone; more important, He longs for everyone to be present with him.
We have settled. The presence of God has been canned, preserved and placed in the pantry. Our taste for the freshness of his presence has been dulled. We have subsisted on the remains of his presence when just one taste of the real thing is enough to cause us to hunger for the rest of our lives. It’s the kind of hunger that will keep us filled for life.
The Honorable Order of Experience
Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 12:05AM 
Just a mile up the road is Green River State Park. Like most locals, I never go to the lake, except to take visitors cliff-jumping.
We park the car in a gravel lot and take the trail out to a secluded spot overlooking the man-made lake. The shale stone cliff is only about twenty feet above the lake, but I’m fond of telling first-timers it’s forty feet, minimum. In the woods near the point are the remains of campfires and beer bottles. We tell the newbies to keep their voice down, otherwise the park rangers will run us off, because cliff jumping is not authorized. Too dangerous.
I’m a safety-first kinda guy, so I ask one of the young bucks in our party to first climb down the cliff and swim the waters to check for submerged logs or anything that could cause injury. I watch the first-timers peer over the edge and watch the swimmer below. You can see them do the math about jumping: is it really 40 feet? How often are there submerged logs? Is this really safe?
I know what you’re thinking: This is a post about taking a leap of faith. Nope. This isn’t a metaphor about faith: it’s about experience. Nothing replaces it.
The word “faith” has been virtually ruined in our discourse. It can mean intellectual agreement with various propositions. It can mean superstition regarding any number of moments in life. Even among Christians, faith is frequently reduced to the mere teaching of bullet points and making sure everyone is on the same page doctrinally.
That’s why cliff jumping is so refreshing: cliff jumping requires the jump: you can walk the path, swim the waters, climb the rocks, but eventually you must jump. Nothing else will do. You can go along and watch. You can correct my estimate of how many feet you will fall. You can watch others all afternoon. But if you’re going to be a cliff jumper, eventually you have to jump.
It doesn’t matter how you jump. Hold your nose and close your eyes. Put your arms in the air like a roller coaster ride. Scream like a little girl. Now you’re a jumper, and sailing through the air trumps study or song. You’ll return home with a new experience and a souvenir memory. You are a member of the Honorable Order of Park Ranger-Defying Cliff Jumpers. You know whereof you speak.
Knowledge and theory are overrated. Experience is underrated. We need experience: it’s the kind of knowing the scripture describes when it urges us:
Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord;
his going out is sure as the dawn;
he will come to us as the showers,
as the spring rains that water the earth. (Hosea 6:3)
I want to feel him like the rush of my first jump. Like the wind in my ears. Like the crazy sound of the water when it covers my head in an instant. I want to know him in the twitching of my leg muscles in the night when I go to bed and remember the first time I jumped.
I want faith that grabs him in the middle of the jump and never lets go. I want Paul’s prayer to be answered in me:
I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3: 16-21)
I want words to fail me. I want the fourth dimension. I want faith that grasps his love. Then I’ll go study, because only then will he be with me.