To listen to the whole unabridged class: Limping into the Second Call
The afternoon of life, the banquet invitation, and the welcome home sign
Beyond Sunday School: The Ragamuffin Gospel, chapters 9 and 10
I am the baby in our Beyond Sunday School room. I am 50.
Which is exactly why chapter 9 of The Ragamuffin Gospel, “The Second Call,” landed the way it did around our table. We are all pretty squarely in the second calling season of life. And Manning’s great gift in this chapter is the way he talks about it.
Most of us begin with what theologians call an early naivety. A simple belief. God said it, I believe it, that settles it. And that works, for a while.
Then this thing called life happens.
Life is messy. Life is hard. There is suffering and pain, and all of a sudden we are asking, where is God in the midst of all of this? I thought if I obeyed and followed and did what I was told, everything would be great and rosy and hunky dory. It is not.
So we become disillusioned. We wrestle. We doubt. The tradition has called that season the dark night of the soul. In the last decade or so, it has been rebranded as deconstruction.
Here is the thing we need to say out loud: this is good and normal. Scripture is full of it. People wrestle. Their picture of God gets challenged, transformed, changed. This is what growing up into our faith actually looks like. Richard Rohr calls it the movement from the first half of life to the second half of life, and he says it is the normal progression.
At that decision point, people tend to respond in one of three ways.
Some revert. They run back to “God said it, I believe it, that is all there is to it,” and they refuse to deal with the dissonance. It becomes a rigid fundamentalism they will hold onto come hell or high water. In their world, the grass is blue, and no amount of evidence will ever make it green.
Some walk away. The dissonance is too much, so they hit the eject button. Yep, I am out.
And then there is the third way. You enter the struggle. You begin to sort out which parts of what you inherited were constructs that people built around the faith, and which parts are actually essential. What is the Jesus way, and what is simply churchy? “We don’t dance, smoke, drink, or chew, or go with girls who do” is a construct. That is not necessarily the Jesus way.
You come out the other side with a deeper, richer, more resilient faith. One that can bear up under the struggles and sufferings of real life.
A call, not a collapse
What I love about Manning’s framing is that it shifts our perspective. The dark night sounds like something to run from. Deconstruction sounds scary, like something to hide from.
But a second call? A second call into a deeper faith with Jesus?
That is something we would all sign up for. We would all love our Peter moment. Yes, I denied Jesus in these parts of my life, and now Jesus is sitting with me around the fire saying, Do you love me? Come back. I am here. I have not left. I am right here.
Manning puts it this way:
Second journeys usually end with a new wisdom and a coming to a true sense of self that releases great power. The wisdom is that of an adult who has regained equilibrium, stabilized, and found fresh purpose in new dreams. It is a wisdom that gives some things up, lets some things die, and accepts human limitations. It is a wisdom that realizes I cannot expect anyone to understand me fully. It is wisdom that admits the inevitability of old age and death. It is a wisdom that has faced the pain caused by parents, spouse, family, friends, colleagues, business associates, and has truly forgiven them, and acknowledged with unexpected compassion that these people are neither angels nor devils, but only human.
That paragraph could have ended the chapter, and I would have been processing it all week.
Henry Cloud, the Christian psychiatrist who wrote Changes That Heal, would call part of this the healing of the good and bad split: the ability to know that no person and no situation is all good or all bad. It is both. People are neither angels nor devils. They are only human. And once we can grasp that, we can move toward them in compassion. We begin to remember that people have stories, just like we do.
One line stopped someone in our room cold: I cannot expect anyone to understand me fully. “How can I expect someone to know me fully,” she said, “when I don’t even know myself some days?”
Exactly. And yet our culture runs on the opposite expectation. We expect everyone else to understand us fully, while quietly assuming nobody should expect us to understand them. It is a fascinating conundrum. The second journey releases us from it.
You cannot live the afternoon by the morning program
Right next to that passage sits the chapter’s other great sentence: The second journey begins when we know we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the morning program.
Now, the morning program matters. In Falling Upward, Rohr talks about the box. Children need a box of belief. They need to know what is real and true. Little kids deal in black and white: good, bad, right, wrong. If an adult never moves beyond black and white, you worry a little about whether they are stuck.
But the opposite problem is everywhere now too. A lot of children never receive a morning program at all. They are treated as though they are already in the afternoon of life. And if you never had the box, you do not know where to push. You cannot tell the essential from the nonessential. You have no foundation to jump from.
We need the morning program. We also cannot live there forever. We need both.
The three obstacles: faith, hope, and love
Manning gives the second journey three obstacles, and they are the last three words you would expect: faith, hope, and love.
Faith is an obstacle because, as he puts it, faith means you want God, and you want to want nothing else. That is tough.
Here is what happens when God’s love is taken for granted. We paint him into a corner and rob him of the opportunity to love us in a new and surprising way, and faith begins to shrivel and shrink. When I become so spiritually advanced that Abba is old hat, then the Father has been had, Jesus has been tamed, the Spirit has been corralled, and the Pentecostal fire has been extinguished.
Manning insists that real faith is the opposite of lukewarmness. It carries a profound dissatisfaction with our present state. In faith there is movement and development. Each day something is new. Faith has to be alive and growing. It cannot be static, finished, settled.
Someone in our room connected this back to chapter 5, to the rabbi who prayed for wonder. If we lose our sense of wonder, we lose everything. Why do you think Jesus tells us to become like little children? Not childish faith. Childlike faith. Faith still caught up in wonder.
The Psalms say God’s mercies are new every morning. Why do we need new mercy every day? Because every day is hard. A faith that can receive mercy fresh each day will never be static, finished, or settled.
And how many people do we know with static, finished, settled faiths? They do things out of habit. It is cold. It is complacency. One of us remembered a late pastor who said the death knell of every church is summed up in a few words: that’s the way we’ve always done it.
We think we want a finished, settled faith. But a finished faith is a dead faith, and a dead faith is not attractive to anybody. The desire is to keep growing. To learn something new every day, even something tiny. It is like reading a passage of Scripture you have read ten thousand times and having something pop out at you today like you have never seen it before. That still happens. That is the living faith.
Hope is an obstacle because we so easily lose it. Manning says our hope, our acceptance of the invitation to the banquet, is not based on the idea that we will be free of pain and suffering. It is based on the conviction that God will triumph over suffering.
Do you really believe you have been invited to the banquet of the Lamb? Picture the people arriving at a wedding reception. They are excited. They came to celebrate. Do we have that kind of excitement about the ultimate feast? It is one thing to show up thinking, I get a free meal. It is another thing entirely to believe that our Father is standing there with his arms open saying, You are here. Let’s go. I can’t wait.
The hope is that we have actually been invited, and that we will get to party with the prodigal. So many of us, especially the frozen chosen in the Reformed tradition, stand with the older brother outside. They don’t deserve it. I have done all the things right. That is often where our hope leaks out.
Love is an obstacle because, as someone at our table happily pointed out, the Father is crazy. God is kooky with love. Francis Chan wrote a whole book called Crazy Love, and Manning got there first.
On the far side of the prodigal son, Manning writes: No, the love of our God isn’t dignified at all. And apparently that is the way he expects our love to be. He requires us not only to accept his inexplicable, embarrassing kind of love, but once we have accepted it, to behave the same way with others.
I could probably live with a God whose love for me is embarrassing. The thought that I have to act that way toward other people is a bit harder to swallow.
But that is the deal. This is what we have been preaching on Sundays in Jonah. We are expected to be the people who love the most, and who love well, in an embarrassing way. And we come up with so many reasons why we do not have to. That is where we short circuit our faith, our hope, and our whole way of following Jesus.
An invitation, not a chase
Someone asked a good question about Jesus. When you think about him going around doing good, most people had to receive him. He did not chase people down and say, Believe in me or else. He said, You are invited. Come on. Some took him up on it. A lot did not.
That is exactly the shape of the prodigal story. The younger son tells his father, in effect, Treat me like you are dead. Give me my inheritance. He runs off and wastes everything. He comes home and is welcomed, given the cloak and the ring, and the father throws a party. The older brother, who in his own eyes has never done anything wrong, is also invited to the party. He chooses to be miserable. He chooses to stand outside.
The invitation goes out either way. Woe to us if we choose not to receive it. And here is the part that should grab our hearts: when we watch people we were quietly fine with leaving outside start to fall in love with the way of Jesus, that ought to thrill us. That is such a good and beautiful thing.
Then someone read the passage on page 174 aloud, and the room went quiet:
And the Lord is now calling me a second time, affirming me, enabling me, encouraging me, challenging me all the way into faithful fullness of faith, hope, and love in the power of His Holy Spirit. Ignorant, weak, sinful person that I am, with easy rationalizations for my sinful behavior, I am being told a new and unmistakable language of love: I am with you. I am for you. I am in you. And I expect more failure from you than you expect from yourself.
Especially that last line.
I expect more failure from you than you expect from yourself.
So many of us grew up believing that once we got saved, we were not supposed to make mistakes. And when we did, we pulled away, because we thought, I cannot do this. Nobody told us it was okay to fail and still be called.
You know what we could package that as? Something called the good news. If we wanted to shorten it, we could call it the Gospel.
Here is why we need to keep reading it. The next time you really blow it, you are going to look in the mirror and struggle to believe it. So am I. The second call is God saying it again, in a language we cannot mistake.
Carl Jung asked the question our room could not shake: What if you discover that the least of the brethren is you?
The victorious limp
Chapter 10, “The Victorious Limp,” flows right out of the second call, because as we move into our second calling we become more aware of our brokenness, our failings, and our shortcomings. And the easy thing then is to disqualify ourselves. I cannot serve. I cannot join God here. I am too flawed, too weak, too broken. God cannot use someone like me.
Somebody wrote a book once called God Uses Cracked Pots. More than one of us prays some version of that prayer: Thank you, God, that you can use cracked pots.
Manning is blunt about the alternative picture:
Most of the descriptions of the victorious life do not match the reality of my own. Hyperbole, bloated rhetoric, and grandiose testimonies create the impression that once Jesus is acknowledged as Lord, the Christian life becomes a picnic on a green lawn. Marriage blossoms into connubial bliss, physical health flourishes. Acne disappears and sinking careers suddenly soar.
Everybody is a winner. An attractive 20 year old accepts Jesus and becomes Miss America. A floundering lawyer conquers alcoholism and whips F. Lee Bailey in court. A tenth round draft choice for the Green Bay Packers goes to the Pro Bowl. Church attendance skyrockets, ruptured relationships get healed, shy people become gregarious, and the Atlanta Braves win the World Series.
Idyllic descriptions of victory in Jesus are colored more by cultural and personal expectations than by Christ and the ragamuffin gospel. The New Testament gives us another picture of the victorious life: Jesus on Calvary.
The biblical image is not the victorious lap. It is the victorious limp.
As we move down the Jesus way, we become more acutely aware of our frailty. And God’s goodness shines through precisely there, as we seek to love well and to be present and obedient in the second call of our lives.
Someone read the next turn in the chapter: after life has lined their faces a little, many followers of Jesus come into a coherent sense of themselves for the first time when they modestly claim, I am still a ragamuffin, but I am different. They are right. Where sin abounded, grace abounded more.
Peter’s fallacy, and ours
Think about Peter. Peter had such a clear sense of being the rock, the strong one, the one who would never let Jesus down. The commentator Lloyd John Ogilvie says that is why Peter took his denial of the Lord so hard. His strength, loyalty, and faithfulness were his self generated assets of discipleship. The fallacy in Peter’s mind was this: he believed his relationship with the Lord depended on his consistency in producing the qualities he thought had earned him the Lord’s approval.
As we move into the second call, we realize we do not earn the Lord’s approval. It is just given. He loves us. We bring nothing to that table.
And so we limp. We absolutely limp, all the way through.
Someone in our room named the table we have turned: we try to live so that God will love us, rather than living because he already loves us.
Sit with that reversal for a moment. How would your life change if you actually lived as though Jesus already loved you?
You would live with more joy. More peace. More hope, in spite of what is going on. You would be more likely to spread that love around. You would not live under the constant stress of trying to be Mr. or Mrs. Perfect. And when you failed, you would understand: I am a human being, and God saved me in A.D. 33.
There would be so much freedom. Freedom to mess up. Freedom to try and not worry. Freedom to know that when you do mess up, you are still accepted, loved, and embraced.
That freedom removes fear. This is why John says perfect love casts out fear. The uncontrollable, embarrassing love of God frees us to move through the world without worrying about who sees us having lunch with that person and what the church will think. You showed up and you loved. The church will not punish that. The church will celebrate it and join the party.
A light in the window
I love the last paragraph of the chapter. On the last day, when we arrive at the great cabin in the sky, many of us will be bloodied, battered, bruised, and limping. But by God and by Christ, there will be a light in the window and a welcome home sign on the door.
Someone objected that it is supposed to be a mansion. But Manning called it a great cabin. It is a really big one. For him, it is a cabin. And some of us have seen some beautiful cabins.
Is that not the picture? No matter how battered, bruised, broken, and limping we arrive, the light will be on. The welcome home sign will be at the door.
If we could really grasp that, it would be so freeing. It would let us take God seriously and stop taking ourselves so seriously.
A few paragraphs earlier, Manning makes the contrast that explains the limp: the ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better feel for his faithfulness than the timid man who hides behind the law and never finds out who he is at all.
Someone paired that with the line attributed to Winston Churchill: success is never final, failure is never fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.
Which brings me to my favorite G. K. Chesterton quote. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and therefore not tried.
Following Jesus requires courage. When we take the narrow road, the hard road of loving our neighbor as ourselves and loving our enemies, we experience the faithfulness of God, and discover our own faithfulness, in ways we never could from hiding. The Christian ideal is very, very difficult. And it is worth every limping step.
Heavenly Father, thanks for today. Thanks for the gospel. Thank you for grace. Thank you for the reality that we have been invited to the banquet, and that we have this hope that is sure. And thank you that when we get to the great cabin in the sky, the porch light will be on and the welcome sign will be at the door, because we will be welcomed home with open arms by you, the one who loves us lavishly. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.