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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609816704 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Oasis Audio |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2013 |
| Edition description: | Library Edition |
| Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 6.70(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
DIRTY GOD
By JOHNNIE MOORE
Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2013 Johnnie MooreAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8499-6420-6
Chapter One
CHISHTI'S ROSES
Ajmer isn't a place of great significance to most people. It's an almost invisible town—a small outpost of life crunched into the lifeless deserts of western India along the Pakistan border. Ajmer is a place where a gaggle of everyday Indians live their common lives unnoticed by the greater world. They drink their chai, raise their families, work hard, and then die. The pages of history flip with nary an incident in Ajmer, where people:
Wake up.
Have tea.
Work.
Eat.
Work.
Go home.
Sleep.
Wake up ...
That's Ajmer—a sleepy little Indian village.
Unless you're a devotee of the major mystical sect of Islam in India, Sufism, then insignificant Ajmer is to you the most important place on planet Earth. It is your particular Mecca, and you live and will die revering it. On all the planet, there isn't a place for which your faith has more affection.
This is what brought me to Ajmer.
A JOURNEY TO BELIEVE
I arrived in Ajmer in the middle of my own personal pilgrimage of India's major religions. I was "kicking their tires" to see what might seem legitimate, and I was trying desperately to understand why their devotees believed what they believed about Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, and Sikhism.
Ajmer was the next stop on a journey that had already taken me to other obscure places, such as Pushkar, one of the oldest cities in India, which hugs a tiny pond in which adherents ceremonially bathe each morning. Pushkar is most famous for its annual camel caravan and, most important, for one of India's only temples to the Hindu creator, Brahma. Before Pushkar, I had visited the important Islamic cities of Jaipur and Agra; the holiest Hindu city, Varanasi; the city of the Sikhs, Amritsar; and the mountaintop village of the Dalai Lama, McLeod Ganj.
I must have smelled of the divine by the time my train arrived in the city of the Sufis. I also smelled of some other, less appetizing flavors of travel.
The potent religious significance of Ajmer resides in a single shrine that draws millions of devotees from around the world. It sits unobtrusively at the foot of the Taragarh hill, surrounded by a group of ramshackle marble buildings. Only in India do the terms ramshackle and marble work in the same sentence. And only in India would such an important place be crammed into a corner at the foot of a hill. India is, above all, dripping in the sacred.
Each building in the complex was donated by one of India's great Muslim emperors, over hundreds of years of veneration.
You arrive through a massive and ornate gate given by a maharaja from southern India. There is also a mosque named after the Muslim Mughal emperor Akbar the Great, donated by his grandson Shah Jahan (who also constructed the Taj Mahal).
And then there's the shrine where the entombed body of Moinuddin Chishti has lain since the early thirteenth century. This shrine gleams in the harsh Indian sun. Its magnetism has attracted myriad worshippers from every stratum of society, from nations around the world, for hundreds of years.
Akbar the Great, who had anything he wanted in the entire world at his beck and call, would nevertheless embark each year on a four-hundred-kilometer journey by foot to visit the shrine, erecting large pillars memorializing his journey every few kilometers along the way.
Chishti's shrine was hypnotizing to the powerful Akbar, and its enchantment seemed just as palpable on the day of my own journey there, as I watched thousands of people come to pay homage.
SMELLING ROSES
The circular shrine isn't very large. Devotees slip through a tiny entrance and worship by circling clockwise around the gold-plated casket of Chishti. Hours of travel, thousands of dollars, and tons of frustration culminate in a passing glance at the casket of a centuries-gone Sufi saint.
Actually, it's a little more like pushing than walking. The circle could comfortably hold a couple of dozen people, but typically hundreds cram into the shrine, all elbowing each other and complaining as they move at a snail's pace around the casket, creeping centimeter by centimeter.
What I most remember about the inside of the shrine was the nearly intoxicating smell.
Devotees of Chishti customarily bring with them red rose petals as an offering to the entombed saint. They carry the large baskets over their heads as they navigate around the coffin, say a brief prayer, and then dump the rose petals over the shrine. The lack of ventilation causes the smell of the roses to hover like trapped smoke in the tiny room. It's inebriating.
By the time I made it out the sliver of a door, I was already light-headed. The mystical aroma of Chishti's roses clung to my clothing, leaving its sweet smell lingering in my wake for hours.
People must have been able to tell I had visited Chishti's tomb. I was one of thousands walking through dusty alleyways accompanied by the curious scent of a rose.
* * *
Then there were the "demon-possessed" man and the elderly lady worshipping frantically outside the shrine.
The man was lying on the marble floor, shaking violently and foaming at the mouth. The young Sufi leader showing us around told me that he was "possessed by spirits" and that his family had traveled a long way to lay him outside of the shrine in the hope that Chishti would be gracious enough to cleanse him of the evil that was controlling him. The saint was their last-ditch effort to free their loved one of the terror plaguing him.
They had traveled for days, desperate for help. They had thrown hundreds of rose petals on his casket and sat outside his shrine for hours, begging and pleading.
They had probably participated in the common practice of tying strings to the gate that clung to the external wall of the shrine. Each string represented a particular prayer request, and it would remain there until Chishti answered their request. Then they would remove the string from the saint's divine to-do list.
There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of strings tied to the gate. Some had been there so long that the elements had rotted them.
Chishti must have been preoccupied.
In the shadow of the string gate lay the elderly woman whose face remains branded onto my own story. Her wrinkles testified to a long and difficult life, and this day was clearly one of her most difficult.
She lay on her side, her aged fingers clinging to the gate where the strings were tied. In fact, she seemed to be holding on to a string I assumed was her own, her knuckles white with desperation as she prayed intensely for the saint's attention.
Her words were thumping like hammers on the exterior of Chishti's shrine. She was pleading her case.
I wish I knew exactly what she was praying for. Maybe a grandchild or a friend was sick, or maybe a loved one was enduring some impossible financial situation. Maybe she was asking God for the strength to live on after the death of her husband, or maybe the desert sun had lapped up the rain on her family farm and drought was draining them of food and a future.
I have no idea what was consuming that dear woman's heart that day, but one thing was blatantly clear—she was desperate.
She wasn't praying one of those halfhearted, before-you-gobble-down-a-Thanksgiving-turkey types of prayers. She was praying the kind of prayer someone prays when it's a matter of life or death, when things look hopeless—when a miracle seems to be the only possible solution. The kind you pray when you feel as if you're in a tomb yourself, hopelessly crushed by life's troubles, and the only solution is a resurrection. Resurrections are miracles, and miracles seem sadly hard to come by when you need them the most.
She was begging Chishti for a dose of grace.
Meanwhile, Chishti lay there in his own tomb, surrounded by the incandescent scent of roses. Dead.
Maybe, by now, her string has rotted off that gate.
DESPERATE FOR GOD
This desperation to get to God gnaws at us, doesn't it? It's like a hunger pang that quietly signals to us that we need some nutrients.
This hunger has fueled man's ancient pursuit of God in its great variety of incarnations around the world, through all the world's religious systems. For sure, it was this hunger that pushed me to India, and this hunger that is causing me to type these words, and it's probably this hunger that causes you to read them too.
We are more than curious about God. We are compelled to find out what kind of God he is, and whether he cares at all about us. And even when we're most tempted to run away from him, we always find that, like Jonah, we fail to do so.
I've spent much of my young life wandering around the world trying to satiate this hunger myself, and the more I try to feed it, or to run away from it, somehow it's still there. It knocks on my heart. God seems so elusive—and yet he's somehow always there.
All the religions of the world are after God's attention. They throw their roses, tie their strings, and plead for their deity to give them—at least—a passing glance.
Muslims have their "Five Pillars." Sikhs have their "Five K's." Hindus ring bells when they enter their temples to awaken their gods to their presence. Muslims pray fives times a day and steady their lives on the Koran, and every day Hindu priests on the banks of the Ganges River scream, plead, bang metal, twirl fire, and ring bells to try to attract the attention of any one of their many gods.
All of that racket and ruckus, all of that noise and devotion, is informed by one simple belief: men and women believe they have to work very hard to get their gods to turn their faces toward them.
It's the same all through history: man begging his God for grace, and doing everything he can to earn it.
A cacophony of worship has risen wildly into the sky for centuries as people grasp frantically for the attention of a god. Some god. Their god.
But Jesus changed things. He told a different story. He taught, and millions of Christians through the ages have discovered, a different kind of God. Jesus' teaching gave birth to the only religious system in the world that breaks through the racket of worship with a simple message: the real God is a God who delights in giving grace.
We can stop trying so hard to get his attention.
We already have it.
Chapter Two
TALKING SMACK TO FAKE GODS
Grace accepts us as we are.
Because of this, God's story, through history, is filled with people whom we would probably have passed over.
Take Elijah, for instance. He was one of God's prophets in the Old Testament. God chose him to speak on his behalf to his people at a particularly unflattering moment of their own story. They had become fascinated with a kind of pagan worship that involved unimaginable rituals. They had long forgotten the God who had freed them from Egyptian bondage.
At that unpleasant time, God sent Elijah as his spokesperson to his wandering people.
You would expect Elijah to have it all together—to be the kind of guy who had never had a bad day, who had never yelled at his mom. To be the goody-two-shoes type who never smoked a cigarette or said a bad word. To be the type of person who doesn't lose his temper and has never considered suicide.
In short, you would expect him to be prime prophet material, right?
When you actually read the story of Elijah, you find a story that's altogether different. Elijah was a basket case! His emotions were up one minute, down the next, and his greatest achievement was followed by a colossal failure. He was sometimes doubtful and even angry with God.
Not to mention, Elijah became so depressed at one point that he nearly killed himself! His relationship with God "depended on the day."
And you know what?
Elijah wasn't the exception.
God's Old Testament prophets had their fair share of drama. Jonah was swallowed by a fish because of blatant disobedience, David had an affair, Jeremiah was a crybaby, Isaiah once walked naked and barefoot for three years to make a point, Ezekiel lay on his side for over a year as an illustration of God's relationship with his people, and Hosea married a prostitute.
And don't forget our buddy Elisha's crowning moment: "As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. 'Get out of here, baldy!' they said. 'Get out of here, baldy!'" (2 Kings 2:23).
How did Elisha respond?
He didn't exactly turn the other cheek. Instead: "He turned around, looked at them, and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord" (v. 24).
One thing is sure: the great heroes of biblical history had plenty of issues. If they were living today, they would headline tabloids and star in reality shows.
God has a track record of giving grace to rookie leaders—an approach that seems absurd when you consider that most of the great figures I've encountered in the other religions of the world have become famous by their perfection. The very reason that they are priests or prophets, saints or monks, is because they lived nearly flawless lives of pure devotion.
Yet Jesus taught us that his Father was the kind of God who picked regular people and then used them in powerful ways despite their imperfections.
In fact, nearly all of the great stories of the Bible are stories of God using an imperfect person. In the end, it is God who is the star of the show—and Elijah's most famous triumph was no exception.
Actually, the whole thing was worth watching on pay-per-view.
WHEN GOD SHOWED UP
As a child, I had an unfortunate obsession with professional wrestling. My dad and I watched each week as grown men, in carefully choreographed routines, pummeled each other to death. They created and fueled rivalries, jumped off poles, punched and kicked, twisted and tortured, and eventually pinned their opponents. Even more unfortunately, all of this was done by men wearing what was basically a Speedo!
Eventually these rivalries became so intense that there had to be one final, conclusive contest. For weeks ahead of time, the promoters would air commercials and put up posters and billboards, and fans would shell out millions on pay-per-view television to see the final showdown between archenemies in a deadly "cage match."
This would be the decisive battle; the winner would be declared champion.
The combatants would be locked into an arena, and the door chained shut! The audience would watch in fevered anticipation, and one thing was guaranteed—there would be a winner and a loser. One guy would come out bloodied but victorious, and the other would be incapacitated, lying there in shame and defeat. The cage match would spell the end of the rivalry.
Elijah's ancient showdown with the prophets of Baal was a cage match.
There would be no ambiguity. They would fight until the end. Except that in Elijah's case, there was no choreography, the stakes were higher, and this moment would be the moment when the ancient war between the pagan god Baal and Jehovah would be settled once and for all.
In 1 Kings, we learn that it was the confident Elijah who challenged the prophets of Baal to this showdown. The rules were simple: whichever God sent fire from heaven to consume a readied sacrifice would be declared the one true God.
The prophets of Baal were the first to try. They spent all day yelling their mantras to Baal. They even started cutting themselves to demonstrate to their god how serious they were about all of this. They danced and pleaded and bled—from morning till evening.
Remember—Elijah was a bit rough around the edges. There's a sarcastic edge to him in the biblical account. As the prophets of Baal became louder and louder, and as their praying went longer and longer, Elijah began to taunt them.
In 1 Kings 18:27, he barked at them, "Shout louder! ... Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened." Elijah's Hebrew word for busy is sometimes translated to imply that Baal might be indisposed. (For the less sophisticated among us, indisposed is a word that polite people use to refer to someone who is sitting on the toilet.)
I like Elijah.
He's feisty.
He's gritty.
He's human.
I think God liked him too.
Elijah wasn't just going to sit on the sidelines, watching these pagan priests fail at jarring their god from his lethargy. Elijah threw insults at them. He was like a football player from Georgia or Texas. He wasn't content just to know that he was going to win, and that his team was the strongest, fastest, and best. No, he wanted glory in his victory. He wanted to make sure the other team knew that they were weaker, slower, second-rate. Elijah was the kind of guy who puffed out his chest, chewed a little tobacco sometimes, and rubbed in a victory.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from DIRTY GOD by JOHNNIE MOORE Copyright © 2013 by Johnnie Moore. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword xv
Introduction xvii
Getting Grace
1 Chishti's Roses 3
2 Talking Smack to Fake Gods 11
3 The God with Dirty Hands 19
4 Jesus Made a Mess of Things 31
5 Jesus and the Rejects 39
6 Grace Sleeps with Truth 51
7 Mayberry, Tsunamis, and Clean Again 61
8 Christians Should Be Happy, for God's Sake 69
9 How to Miss the Grace of God 81
Giving Grace
10 What's Good about Death 97
11 What to Do When Terrorists Kill Your Spouse 111
12 Gladly Strange 121
13 God Might Want You to Fail Your Test 131
14 Cracking Pandora's Box 143
15 A Grace-Starved Planet 155
16 Grace in the Trenches 165
17 How to Perform Miracles 173
18 What Could Happen If Grace Covered the Earth 183
Afterword 195
About the Author 199
Acknowledgments 201
Notes 203