Diluted

A friend and I were discussing last night the movie Wild Hogs. He told me he hasn’t seen it yet because he doesn’t like Martin Lawrence. I told him that he appears alone in scenes fairly infrequently, since the thrust of the story is about four men discovering something together on the cross-country journey they have set out on. I used the word “diluted,” as in “Martin Lawrence’s antics are diluted in the movie, since he’s usually in scenes with other main characters.” That is to say, his presence is not as strong. His personality doesn’t come through as much. It’s watered-down, reduced, weakened, skimpy, washed out. It’s not a story about Martin Lawrence; it’s a story about Martin Lawrence and. It’s about the band of friends who call themselves the Wild Hogs.

I’ve been thinking about that word a lot since then, diluted. The other day my wife and I bought some “organic” lemonade, which means, I guess, that it’s a mix of fresh-squeezed lemons and a bit of water. At least, that’s what I thought until I took a swig, then I realized they labeled it organic because they want to warn you of its potency. They are trying to tell you that if you drink it you may grow a lemon orchard in your stomach, if your stomach survives the toxic acidity of the stuff and doesn’t melt into your toes. That is, if you can get it past your mouth, which puckers so hard at the first drop that not even air can get through and your jawbone nearly crushes under the intensity of your flexed masseter muscles. I quickly mixed mine with about 200% water and a pound of sugar and was able to enjoy the taste with what was left of my tongue. They should write fatally concentrated on the bottle, not organic. Pure. Potent. Strong. Undiluted.

It’s such a good word to describe what we do with our lives, this word dilute. Things around us are too strong to take in, so we dilute them. We do, all of us. Especially the most important things, the pure, fresh-from-the-vine, life-giving things, the organic ones.

Take the concept of grace, for example. There, you see, I called it a concept. It’s not a concept, it’s reality, it’s breath, it’s our heartbeat, our lifeblood. I have just diluted it into a “concept” or a “notion” or an “idea,” putting distance between me and it because if I were to receive it fully, 200-proof, undistilled, it could very well destroy me by its pure and unmerited extravagance. It would melt my ego and tear my sense of independence into shreds. It might even draw me close to God, and would that this would never happen, because then I might have to face the Really Real, and my identity that I hold so dear would certainly be crucified. It was this grace that Martin Luther encountered that launched the great Reformation, enthralled as he was when he encountered in the depths of his heart the reality from Romans 3:21-26, which completely ravished him for the rest of his life… destroyed him, really, for any other thing.

Or what about the gospel? I didn’t capitalize the word, did you notice? Officially, when you speak of the “good news,” you don’t capitalize the word, but you do when you talk of one of the four books about the life of Jesus canonized in the New Testament. Grammatically, you only capitalize “proper” names, those designating a particular thing, a specific or immediate one. The “gospel,” then, is not specific or immediate. It is, then, general, conventional, customary, commonplace, delayed, distant, removed. Distance. Do you see it, the way we dilute our experience with the gospel, with our experience of the Kingdom here, right here, right now, right among us, and the King here present in the here and now? Talk of the gospel as watered-down is prevalent in various circles of Christendom, and I won’t get into now how that is or where it comes from, because ultimately it’s me that waters it down, fearful of what it might require of me would I but believe it, enter into it, and encounter The One who brings it.

And so, we dilute things. It’s no coincidence, I don’t think, that another friend in that conversation last night mistakenly heard me say the word, “deluded,” as in to mislead, to elude or evade, to frustrate the hope of. That is an accurate description, I think, for what we do to ourselves and our friends that would otherwise fall hard and fast into the life and love of God would that we live and present it as it is with nothing added or taken from it.

The book of Hebrews says that Jesus offered up prayers and petitions “with loud cries and tears” to his Father, to the one, it says, “who could save him from death” (5:7). God heard him “because of his reverent submission.” The Amplified Bible has it “because of His reverence toward God,” and then goes on to describe His reverence: “…in that He shrank from the horrors of separation from the bright presence of the Father.”

In other words, He was horrified of being separated from the bright presence of the Father. He was terror-stricken at the prospect of separation. Why? Because He knew his Father, and He loved him with all he was. He was intimate with him, and reveled in being His son, the Son.

I think all our pale excuses and fearful shrinking and hiding in the shadows will be blown away by the bright presence of God. I have a suspicion that not only is a real encounter with the Risen One what we most fear and what we most need; it is what we most want. To open ourselves up to Him unreservedly, to plead and cry out for His life and presence with us, until we, too, shrink not from Him but from the horror of separation from Him. Wide-eyed with wonder. Sweaty with anticipation. Giddy with the hope and prospect of the encounter. Dry-mouthed, jaw-dropping, knee-knocking with expectation and trembling with awe.

In C.S. Lewis's A Horse and His Boy, Wihn is a talking Narnia horse who longed and rode hard for her home country, exiled as she had been. When she finally encounters the Christ-figure of Aslan, all she can do is, trembling, kneel before His beauty and declare, “I would rather be eaten by You than fed by any other.” It was the presence of his presence that was captivating and for her it would be a horror to think of separation from him. She would sooner have death. Or, in the words of a poet, she would rather be “broken in his hands than whole in barren lands.”

Keep me, Lord, with thee. I call from out the dark
Hear in thy light, of which I am a spark.
I know not what is mine and what is thine
Of branch and stem I miss the differing mark
But if a mere hair's-breadth me separateth,
That hair's-breadth is eternal, infinite death.
For sap thy dead branch calls, O living Vine!
-George MacDonald