Post.

Five years ago Kellie and I moved up to the North Carolina mountains just outside of Blowing Rock. It was a homecoming of sorts for me because I spent many a Christmas vacation up here as a kid at my grandfather’s house. For about 40 years I visited and savored the beauty of this place until I could actually live here.

There is a gorgeous Victorian home perched high on a hill in town, and I remember thinking as a young man, Now that would be the ultimate place to live! Funny thing is, though, while the house is as beautiful as ever, my style has shifted and I’m no longer drawn to it. These days my architectural tastes lean more toward “Mountain Tuscan.” What feeds my soul visually has changed.

Resonation. Alignment. Aliveness.

Something within us longs to awaken. To see and be seen. To know and be known. To recognize within the other something essential to ourselves. When was the last time you felt that?

Perhaps a song, a book, a speaker, an artist: Someone gave birth to an expression that felt deeply true to you. They found words or brushstrokes or musical arrangement that said something you’ve always wanted to say. And in that fellowship, a sacred kinship arose.

For me, it’s almost always words on a page. The last time I felt it was a few weeks ago, reading a 20-year-old book called A Generous Orthodoxy, by Brian McLaren. Brian somehow was able to articulate the theology of my heart—my own deepest knowing of what’s true about God and us. To the best of my understanding. So far. (Hint: That understanding will eventually also grow and change.)

If you’re into that kind of thing, I hope you’ll read McLaren’s book. But if not, you’ll get a strong drift of his message from the subtitle:

Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/calvinist, anabaptist/anglican, methodist, catholic, green, incarnational, depressed-yet-hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian.

I suppose any wordsmith can knit a clever string of words together, but it’s the extrapolated meaning behind the words that echoes in a sonic half-life that never quite fades in my inner ear. Today, I’d like to talk about just one of those words… “Post.”

To be post-anything is to convey the reality of a journey: I began somewhere, only to wind up somewhere else, thus I am post-where-I-used-to-be. It evokes the ethos of transformation, of evolution. Of growth and change and becoming. Of caterpillar-to-butterfly…or at least something on that spectrum. Today I am post-Victorian.

Change is hard, no doubt. Just ask the caterpillar! Change is a micro-death. Yet providentially, the Author of our faith modeled just such a transformational death in order to seed in us the courage to die our own small deaths and find resurrection on the other side. For me, the greatest tragedy in our Christian community lies in fearing such uncomfortable transformations in order to “conserve” the life of the past as a security blanket. And so the next step on the journey of faith is never taken.

Listen to the radical voice of one whom many would expect to conserve, Francis Shaeffer in 1970…

One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary. To be conservative today is to miss the whole point, for conservatism means standing in the flow of the status quo, and the status quo no longer belongs to us….

Jesus was not conservative, Jesus was revolutionary. Jesus was “post-scribes-and-pharisees.” Jesus was progressive. (Not in the political sense, but in the innate sense of an evolving faith.) Jesus deconstructed the established “church” of his time in order to let it breath and grow and move toward the next necessary stage of life. Can we do this too? Can we trust the journey enough to be that bold?

I relate to “post.” While becoming post-Victorian in architecture, I have also become post-evangelical, post-charismatic, and post-conservative. I draw upon that heritage, but they no longer define me or circumscribe me. This isn’t to throw these worthy origins under the bus. These forces formed me and now inform me. I am not anti-Victorian by being post-Victorian. But my faith journey is in motion…as I hope yours is. I think this is the way Jesus designed it.

“You have heard it said,” Jesus repeated five times in a single message. (What a dangerous lead-in for the spiritual status-quo.) You understood your faith in one dimension, Jesus is saying, but now it’s time for you to understand it at an entirely different level. Theologically, we call this progressive revelation. Abraham understood the gospel at one level (knowing almost nothing); Moses took it to a radically different level with revelation of a theocratic civil system; David took it to a qualitatively greater level of worship, personally and corporately. Jesus turned it on its head by “fulfilling” what had only been hinted at previously. So while the arc of salvation history didn’t stop there, for some it has.

I meet believers constantly who feel that the static faith-story handed to them has run out of gas and can no longer contain or sustain their lives now. It’s a wrenching, disorienting experience. Some are tempted to leave the faith entirely. But others are willing to let Jesus say, once again, “You have heard it said…but I tell you….” And when that happens, just as in Jesus’ day, faith finds a second wind! New pieces fall into place. The Holy Spirit continues her role of progressive revelation by “teaching us all things” (Jn 14:26).

So what about you? Are you feeling “post-ish” about anything these days? Does your faith need a fresh wind of the Spirit’s awakening and revitalization? If so, don’t be afraid. Let the Wind of the Spirit blow upon the foundations of scripture, tradition, experience, and reason to move your faith into new life!

ThriveTip

Try this exercise: Take a piece of paper and chart the major awakenings, revelations, and God encounters that have marked your faith journey so far. You might also include crises of faith or other desolations from your story. Reflect with gratitude upon who you were when you started this journey and who you have become so far. Now look forward just a bit: What fresh understanding or practice might God want to invite you into next?

Takeaway

If it’s alive, it’s changing.