Delivered

What a train wreck of a year. So long, 2023. And good riddance.

Today I’m thinking about the word “deliver.” What does it mean? Google says it means "to be set free" from the Latin verb "liberare," but now I am wondering what exactly I am being set free from, and why my spiritual deliverance sometimes feels like bondage. Google can't answer that question for me. It has been a brutal year for me, and I am left pondering if I am missing something. Singing Christmas carols and watching nativities has brought me more questions than answers this year. Will my faith in Christ's deliverance hold strong if I am born into yet another new year of heartbreak and challenges? "Oh come, oh come Immanuel," I sing with renewed fervour, but what if He never comes?

At Christmas, we celebrate two parallel deliveries in the birth of our Savior. The first is literal. Birth is called a “delivery.” Mary delivered her Son with her own flesh, and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger. The second delivery we celebrate is more spiritual than physical. Christ delivers us spiritually with His flesh, swaddles us in the garment of His priesthood, and gathers us to His bosom the way a Mother receives her child, or like a hen gathers her chicks. It is an experience meant to parallel the birth of a child. Rebirth is as real an experience as our own miraculous birth from our mothers.

Delivery can also be a cruel experience, for both the mother and the child being delivered. I have witnessed it with my children, standing there like a helpless idiot at the suffering of my wife as my child remains too long wedged between worlds. All of my children ended up in the NICU because of the trauma of their birth, gasping on their own meconium. Some days I feel like I am also stuck in the birth canal, fighting for my life, choking on my own crap, heaved and contracted by the slow rhythm of days that shoves me out of the amnion and into what feels like a world of cold oblivion. 

Most weeks I am lost in the midst of my labor pains, unaware of the exceptional pains of my great Deliverer, the tearing of His flesh or the gushing of His blood that are required weekly for me to receive new breath, a new spirit, and a new life. But on New Year's Eve, I take a moment and recognize that Jesus and I have labored together through a lot this year, through another 365 circle around the sun in a timed contraction that brings me closer to the ever dilating cervix of my mortal exit. This has been terrifying for me, to face my own mortality and waning, but despite what it feels like, I have not been alone in my suffering. A mother in labor cannot be separated from her child. Neither Christ be separated from me.

Like the Lord’s people waiting for deliverance from the Romans at Jerusalem, all the world has been taxed. The tax is at times grievous to be borne. We all live and work and scroll our phones in a world run by usurpers. The irony is that we worship a God that’s completely absent from the pantheon of our oppressors. This tests my faith to its limits, because my God seems so powerless here in a system run by whoever has the most soldiers. How can I put stock in a sacrificial lamb in such a place as this? How can this brother nailed to a cross save me in a world already boasting in their victory won with warriors and weapons? I am mocked for believing in a God who appears to have lost the war. My victors make merry that when I most needed strength, I am reaching for a God they are crucifying before my very eyes. They inscribe on his cross, “Behold, the king of the Jews.” Or perhaps in my case, "Behold, the king of this poor repressed bisexual Mormon." There is no victory for me here. Or so it seems.

Christ does not immediately deliver me from them, this nation of selfish despots and grandiose tyrants. His kingdom is not of this world. This is always frustrating to me, and so my suffering continues. Though I hold onto my belief in Christ's eventual victory, I am often unable to feel anything else except the daily ache that I must carry with me, the relentless loneliness—my deepest, loneliest of hurts. It is hard to praise God when all I feel are the pangs of a wound that does not heal. But this cross I carry connects me to Him. Sometimes the tenor of my worship is more of a lament than a praise, but my God understands this even better than I do. "Is there any other way?" "If it be possible..." and “How long, O Lord?” are as holy prayers as anything else in the scriptures. They are prayers the God of all has uttered Himself as He groaned beneath my load.

In years like this, carrying the burdens I have now, I am annoyed and desperate at the news that Christ’s deliverance will not take me out of the fire. It was a rude jolt for me in recent years to gradually fall out of the comforting faith of my youth in which obedience alone brought blessings and safety. But the truth cuts deeper. A baptism is not just a cleansing baptism of water, but a purging baptism of fire. In some ways, Christ's deliverance is an extraction out of the womb of my comfortable innocence that puts me directly into the birth canal of my great purging—the sanctification that comes when I pass through this burning, dilating ring of fire. That is one meaning of deliverance that packs a punch. Though covenants with Christ can bring comfort, they can also bring pain. Both those things are true. But in the crucible of my faith, I'll admit that sometimes all I can feel is the pain.

Deliverance. Delivered. De-livered. In the myth of Prometheus, his punishment from the gods for stealing fire from mount Olympus was to be bound to a rock while an eagle swooped down at him daily to eat out his liver until it grew back again the next day. The savage cycle of eagles tearing open his flesh daily feels disturbingly relatable. Like Prometheus, I am also bound to this rock, de-livered by the daily grind of discipleship that tears at my bowels. But that is not the definition of de-livery Christ is talking about. To be delivered is not just to be insanely mutilated. No one would continue on such a path. Chapels and temples dedicated to this God wouldn't have anyone in them at all. 

And here is my declaration of faith: Jesus Christ is the rock we are tied to, but He is not the torture. He is the Deliverer. Binding myself to Him is not a pointless ravaging, but the purposeful purging of my natural man. Sometimes it grows back just as quickly as it is removed by the eagles, but daily repentance and taking up the cross of discipleship brings me peace and reconciliation. It is a work I will continue to engage in willingly, (though at times "turning a rather steely eye toward heaven" as Elder Holland puts it.) It is the joy of the saints, the comfort of the comfortless, that which always looks like madness to those watching on the outside of it.

Prometheus, by Patrick Rasenberg

So passes another day being de-livered by the eagles. Another year closer to my delivery as a Son of God. This is a difficult process, but it is not without joy or devoid of meaning. What gives my suffering meaning? What makes "all the difference" on this "road less traveled by?" 

It is the love of Christ. I can feel Him here with me. This is the path toward love. He is de-livered and delivered alongside me, like a mother giving birth to Her child, or like a Prometheus at the sacrament table regenerating for another go with the eagles. He is here with me in the sacred spaces of my innermost heart. I would rather spend a lifetime of purging with Him here than face a lifetime of comfortable luxury without Him. His love is perfect. It dazzles me. I am drawn to it again and again. Learning to love the way He loves breaks my heart wide open again and again with my incompetence, but I tie myself to this rock willingly, because this is the rock that bleeds for me. This is the rock that delivers me, the only sure foundation in a world of fiery darts and tempestuous whirlwinds and reliable unreliability. (Helaman 5:12) This is the rock that delivers me from the absurdity of my inevitable death and sin.

So here at the end of another year, I am reminded once more that "the days are accomplished that [I] should be delivered." (Luke 2:6) And we all will be. So I say Merry Christmas to that, and a very Happy New Year.

Gathering Israel or Spreading it?

President Nelson said, “The Gathering of Israel is the most important thing taking place on earth today.”

I like the phrase "gathering of Israel" because it suggests that we are the ones out there searching, not everyone else. If we are out there gathering, then we are the ones with the deficit. We are called to gather the people and truths we are missing. We are seeking wholeness. This should invite greater humility in how we interact with others because they have something to offer us, not just the other way around. Relationships come into sharper focus, instead of PR and marketing campaigns and trying to maintain a certain image.

I sometimes think of it as "spreading Israel" instead of gathering it. Framing it this way, however, missionary work tends to give me intense feelings of anxiety and guilt as I try to spread myself around, but always bump up against my own pride. And while there are aspects of sharing in the gathering process (Christ still asks us to be the light, the salt, the city on the hill, etc.) that doesn't mean we are asked to be door to door salesmen. Though we may have an excellent product, if we are only there to sell and never to buy, we won't come away with any sort of lasting relationship.

Instead, we are seeking our own salvation outside of ourselves, which is precisely what love makes us do. "He that thrusteth in his sickle with his might, the same layeth up in store that he perisheth not, but bringeth salvation to his soul." (D&C 4:4)

Thinking of ourselves as spreaders of Israel rather than its gatherers, we might miss the most exciting part of the gathering—the miracle of our own redemption that comes from participating in the gathering process! The part where we get to repent and change, not just everyone else. The primary indicators of success for the spreader are numbers of baptisms or likes on social media, but the indicator of success for the gatherer is simply an increase of love and a change of heart.

Our efforts at gathering Israel may bring healing and conversion to others from time to time (which is always a joyful bonus we can expect) but most importantly the work of gathering heals and converts us, the laborers in the vineyard. As we learn in Jacob 5, grafting branches not only gives new life to others by connecting them to Christ through the ordinances of the priesthood, but it also brings new life to our own very old and VERY high maintenance olive tree, saving us from the inevitable decay and death of our own stagnation and pride.

Gathering Israel should bring a spirit of life, flexibility, and newness to our congregations. It should invite humility and sharing, rather than smugness and salesmanship. It is the pathway to love. I will admit that I say all this to console myself because I am actually a terrible spreader. If God's missionary work really follows a business model that focuses on marketing and statistics (like it sometimes did for me as a full time missionary in the mid 2000s) I know I would flunk the program (and probably not be that unhappy I did.)

But as it turns out, I am actually a pretty good gatherer. Not that I am not still awkward and clunky and full of flaws, but that when I try to gather I am forced to face up to my own deficits, and so I end up picking up more truths than I was initially trying to spread. Gathering gives me the opportunity to learn how to carefully (and with the Spirit) find new ideas from all kinds of people and weave them together with the truths I already cherish. This alone makes it worth it for me. From my Latter-day Saint bubble, I once left on a mission as a 19 year old kid thinking I was going out to save the world, but I ended up finding the missing pieces I needed to save myself. While I did help some people come unto Christ through faith, repentance, and baptism, the main story was that the people I met as a missionary saved me. That was the miracle.

So what are we gathering? Everything and anything good! New ideas, new truths, new kinds of people that fit into the body of Christ. This requires a change in US as much as in THEM (whoever THEM is supposed to be, anyway.)

As we learn to gather Israel and unlearn the work of spreading it (or worse, scattering it!) the process becomes a collaboration instead of a transaction. We form friendships instead of treat people or groups as "projects." Marketing and PR are no longer our biggest concern, and honest dialogue and relationships become foremost in our minds. Our hearts are more open to recognizing our flaws, both as individuals and as a collective, and we repent of them because we know it's a process of change in ourselves to gather those people we need, along with their fresh perspectives, in order to be made whole. (And that includes everyone.)

So for me this year, that's my goal. To gather the truths and relationships that I need in order to be made whole. This time, I am doing it for me and my own salvation. I may still be awkward at it, and my own pride and fear will certainly keep getting in the way, but for me it's worth the effort.

It probably still won't convince me to buy a "gather" sign for my kitchen, though.