Greetings, everyone. File this one under “Conspiracy Theory.”

I usually wait to be moved to write a newsletter, and this one is no exception: the difference is that it’s not a Cause that prompts me to write, but an Anti-Cause. (Anti-Causes are fun because they are Causes which say “I’m not.”)

Before I get to my Cause de jour, I’ll responsibly cover business first: my new book is out. Madman. It’s about the Gerasene demoniac and a guy from an academy who tries to figure out what happened to him.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled newsletter.

I’ve inherited a quality I enjoy from my mother, and that quality is ire. Social ire. My mother is good at spotting conspiracy. She’ll call attention to it by her howling sense of justice, happily judge the matter in her never-erring armchair ways, and move on with life. Not me. I can get irate, bothered, miffed, and in particular distracted by a particular subject for a very long time—and that’s precisely the danger of the Cause de Jour, or Conspiracy Theories.

My current Cause de Jour has been Universalism. I’ve been troubled by what I see going on in my neck of the woods, that a few local churches seem to be abandoning my own intolerant gospel which states that Jesus is the way, the truth, the life, and that no one comes to the Father but by him. I’ve been appalled, distressed, and generally bummed by the prevalent nation-wide, world-wide, wide wide wide and Oprah–cool declaration that Jesus as the only means to God is narrow, intolerant, and mean; that God Himself is not so small as to expect such a teensy, crabbed world view.

In light of my intolerance, what if you’re stuck on a deserted island or you’re a tribesman who never heard the Gospel? (It’s supposed to be Good News, by the way—too many of us Christians make it sound like its Bad News.) Will God send you to hell? Nope. He says nature itself will get you on the right course to Him, if you let it. I happen to believe Romans 1:19 and 20, which says “that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what is made, so that they are without excuse.” It’s like the Calorman from Narnia, who kinda had a feeling Aslan was the right place for putting his bets though no one really told him.

Then why Jesus? In the case above, Jesus doesn’t really enter into the picture, does he. He’s not been taken to that tribesman, the tribesman hasn’t heard about him. The tribesman is left to that which is within him, and without him, to make his way to God. So in this sense, yeah, sure, I understand Universalism. Where I don’t agree is parking Jesus on the sidelines and setting others in his driver’s seat, others like Joseph Smith and Muhammad, and Buddha. Like Don Miller said, when chided for only giving a cursory (and thereby irresponsible) glance at Islam and Buddhism and Confucianism over embracing Christianity: (this is secondhand, so I may be paraphrasing): “Whoa, whoa, whoa—my relationship with the Creator, my Father, is no philosophy.”

People who have been born into the civilized world and educated in the normal course of human means…(and that’s most of us)…those are the folks who need the Gospel of Jesus, that Jesus came to cleanse us from our inner Riff-Raff, that the Good News means God isn’t mad at us; He has goodwill toward us, and wants to beckon us from our instability and entanglements and general unhappy malaise to a far, far better place…He wants to show us what heaven on earth is like, what a kingdom not of this world is all about…

My point: I was ready to take on Universalism as my new Cause. I was practically designing the protest placards when God stopped me dead with His own protest. It came from His Word. (To hear from God straight from the Bible can seem like a novelty these days.) (And yeah, I’ll capitalize “Word.” I believe the Bible really, really, really is the Word of God for us mortals—somebody call the ACLU.)

Here’s what stopped me dead, from Isaiah:

“For thus the Lord spoke to me with mighty power and instructed me not to walk in the way of this people, saying, ‘You are not to say, ‘It is a conspiracy!’ in regard to all that this people call a conspiracy, and you are not to fear what they fear or be in dread of it.

It is the Lord of hosts whom you should regard as holy.
And He shall be your fear.
And He shall be your dread.
Then He shall be your sanctuary.”
Isaiah 8:11-14

If I make Universalism my cause, I alienate. I alienate the very people who may need Jesus in the driver’s seat. I alienate myself from God, because I am up-in-arms with yet another doctrine instead of being up-in-arms about Him. Same goes with homosexuality. If I get in a dither over it, like certain folks out of Topeka, Kansas, I’ll alienate the very people Jesus wants to love and to set free. Magnify the sin, and you equate the sin with the sinner: you condemn them both: baby out with the bathwater. And do I have a problem calling someone a sinner? Hell, no. (Sorry—heck no.) Because I’m a sinner, too. It’s like having the audacity to call someone human.

We like Causes, and there is a time teach good doctrine, and we should be teaching good doctrine, and there is a time to take a stand for stuff. But I reckon that the danger in taking a stand is the stand itself, until one day we wake up and find all we have is our stand, and God, ladies and gentlemen, God has left the building.

God doesn’t want Universalism or homosexuality or tolerance or intolerance to be our fear, or our dread, or our sanctuary. That’s His place. He wants our attention, our focus, our passion to be for Him. Therein is our safety, and He knows it right well. He knows that if we give too much attention and focus to other things, that’s what we will become about—causes. Even good causes: weight loss. Debt reduction. Tolerance. I don’t want to be about Causes. I want to be about God.

Even God Stuff can make us miss the mark. One particular song we’ve been singing at my church is a song I cannot sing, for conscience sake: It goes like this: “Holiness, holiness is what I long for. Holiness is what I need. Holiness is what You want from me. Righteousness, Righteousness is what I long for…” I tell you what: if holiness and righteousness are my aim, I will fall short. If excellence is my aim, I will fall short. If God is my aim, I have a chance of hitting those marks. I once heard a guy say, “I’m more holy on accident than on purpose.” Holiness should be a glorious indifference to us. Excellence shouldn’t be thought of. God…God is everything.

Time for my favorite quote: Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling until, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. –C.S. Lewis.

God is our safety. Our relief. When we are in Him we will know what to do about causes…if anything at all. Find yourself in Him and causes won’t seem so important. You’ll not focus on the placards of the indignant but on the God who created those indignant people. There is great, mysterious relief in the refocus. It’s the only thing that can make me pray for people like the bunch out of Topeka, Kansas, who carry placards at military funerals saying, “God Hates Your Tears”, “God Hates Homosexuals”, “God Hates America.” If God makes me refocus my attention, I can’t see their faces when I’m plunging my fist at them—they don’t get a black eye, and I don’t go to jail.

He has a way of disarming us. I think the more attention we put on Him, the more the Causes will seem insignificant by comparison. The more attention we put on Him, the cause becomes nothing; God and His ways become everything. Only then, with this astonishing Jesus-type focus, can we maybe say, “God, forgive them—they don’t even know what they’re doing.”

Universalism is nothing compared to “the priceless gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” Geez, I have enough on my hands, getting to know Jesus.

I guess that’s all I have to say about that.

Groot—out.

>> Read more from the files of Tracy Groot at TracyGroot.com/newsletters.shtml.