As I drove home today from off campus, the twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit literally sickened me. I typically use the words “literally” and “virtually” interchangeably (and I’m sorry for that), but this is one of the rare cases in which I used “literally” correctly. It literally made me sick to the stomach, the notion that I had to crawl down Hackberry Lane before I could write this post. I can say with confidence that I know how Jeremiah felt when he wrote “His word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.” (Jeremiah 20:9). I pray that God gets the recognition for the words I can’t keep in and that I get nothing.
During winter break, through reading the Gospel of Luke and two different Christian books, I became well aware both of my duty to take up my cross and follow Jesus (Luke 9:23) and my striking inability to do so to date. Though it was a simple and beautiful realization, it only left me mired in guilt and paralyzed in my inaction because I lacked joy, God’s true catalyst.
Towards the end of break, I prayed for God to show me His love, and the result was overwhelming. I’ve heard it said, “When you pray for rain, bring an umbrella,” but after experiencing His relentless answer to my plea, I am convinced that the phrase would be more appropriately translated, “When you pray for rain, purchase flood insurance.” Over the past three weeks, God has shown me a love so great it trivializes all else I’ve ever known. He hasn’t given me the infamous “side hug” that reeks of “I’m going to pretend we just had a glorious reunion when in reality you’ve never been anything more than a peripheral acquaintance”, nor has he given me the ever-manly handshake that stinks of “I like you, child, but not enough to hug you and let anybody else see.” No, that’s not it at all. God wrapped me in a full-frontal embrace so tight my own spine begged for mercy, threw me against the wall and planted kisses down my neck.
As I sat down to brainstorm my new years resolutions, I originally took this newfound love into account and carefully planned what I thought was an appropriate response. I conjured up some pretty specific running goals (after all, the body is a temple), decided whether I wanted to shoot for A’s, A-‘s, or B+’s, and made a rough mental sketch of when I could pray each day to try and grow closer to God. Finally, after a few days of sorting out the specifics, I decided to completely abandon the plan. I even deleted the Word document. It was that day, about a week ago, that I decided I wanted, as my sole New Year’s Resolution, to become a Christian Pirate.
To be clear, it is not my wish to in any way glorify or condone the atrocities associated with real-life pirates (because such figures did and do exist), but rather to use the idea of a Pirate as a model of raw, relentless, rule-breaking thrill (in pursuit of God’s heart and the mission of The Gospel.)
I think there is something written into our DNA that makes us yearn to be like pirates. I am oddly jealous of Jack Sparrow and his crew of misfits every time I watch Pirates of The Caribbean. I’m jealous of pirates’ disregard of naysayers, I’m jealous of their obsessive zeal, and I’m jealous of their ceremonious worship of all things pirate-related (Sparrow proudly ends the first Pirates movie with a hearty yo-ho and a closing of his compass). I want to apply that zeal to my walk with God. My faith will not be a mere Sunday social event; rather, it will be a sweaty, passionate, intimate, and relentless journey to execute God’s mission and comprehend God’s heart.
The more scripture I read, the more connections I see to this appealing and rebellious piracy. C.S. Lewis says, “Enemy-occupied territory- that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.” Something about the words “a great campaign of sabotage” appeals to my male genetic coding and sounds awfully pirate-ish.
Pirates don’t seek to avoid their enemies, they seek to obliterate them. Similarly, I don’t want to simply avoid my most common sins, I want to dominate them. I want to adopt what John Piper calls a “wartime mindset.” There’s a good reason why Ephesians 6:11 commands us to “put on the full armor of God.” Through God’s great love, there is something staunchly warlike and buccaneer-like about God. In Psalm 68:2, He “blows enemies away like smoke.” Though my sin is inevitable and covered infinitely into the future by God’s grace, it is not something I want to merely avoid bumping into, as if bumbling around with my hands in my pockets. No, instead it’s something I want to make war on. Piper says “there is a violent, mean streak to Christianity…a mean streak against sin.” God has shown me a love too great and too intimate for me to commit adultery against him any longer.
And out of this intimate love and building upon my original recent experience of such love in it’s fullest, God has freed me to be a reckless and un-caged pirate of love. In Psalm 68:6, God “leads the prisoners (us) out with singing”, not so we can be cooped up in our little Christian time-out corners, but so we can unapologetically love Him and unapologetically love our brothers. In the days, we, like pirates, can board the enemy’s ship and take down his black flag of death, replacing it with the white flag of surrender to God. “May we shout for joy over your victory, and lift up our banners in the name of our God,” reads Psalm 20:5. In the nights after battle, we, again like pirates, can dance around a campfire like a band of misfits intoxicated with love. 2 Samuel 6:22 says, “I will become even more undignified than this, and I will become humiliated in my own eyes.”
As Pirates of the Gospel, we can pillage every facet of unrighteousness, starting with the ones within our own selves. In Matthew 21, Jesus is so enraged when he visits the temple complex, yet so overtaken with love for his father that he literally flips over the tables inside the place. We should take pride in our refusal to withhold the Gospel from any people group, and I hope it will be said of our generation, what was said of the apostles in Acts 17:6, “those men who have turned the world upside down, they have come here too.”
Perhaps my favorite thing about Jack Sparrow is the fact that he recognizes he’s a pirate and loves it. Nowhere in Pirates of the Caribbean does Sparrow try to cut his shaggy hair, polish the salt or grime off the brim of hat, shower, or “freshen up” for some sort of worldly dinner party. He’s authentically pirate and he couldn’t care less when Elizabeth Swann decries his lifestyle because he knows he was born to be a pirate. It is my hope that I will have the same attitude toward my faith as Sparrow has towards his piracy. I want Romans 1:16, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel” to become more than a Facebook status. Just as Elizabeth’s grumblings meant nothing to Sparrow, so too do I hope to ignore the grumblings of worldly wisdom and personalize the experience of Romans 12:2 (“do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”)
Though tact is important, and savvy is useful, Christ is a square peg and the world is a round hole. For the past year and a half, I’ve been fruitlessly trying to whittle and sand down the sharp edges of the cube that is Christ to try and make it fit into the round hole that is worldly acceptance. There is something offensive to much of the world about the concreteness of Christ, but instead of trying to sand down the edges of the sharp cube, I want to, for once, step back and admire the beauty of its right angles. Christ is love. He is the way, the truth, and the light. Nobody comes to the Father except through Him. Salvation is available to all who believe. Ego Eimi. It’s no surprise that when we see heaven in Revelation 21:15-18, it is literally in the form of a golden cube.
I realize that many of you are probably thinking I’ve gone off the deep end, but there comes a point when we all have to ask ourselves how we must appropriately respond to God. It seems almost anti-climatically practical that the most appropriate response to a radical God and radical grace is a radical lifestyle.
I also realize that a lot of this sounds vague but as this semester progresses, the practical implications will become more and more apparent. My hope, in writing this, was not to lay out my News Year’s Resolution as a glossy, refined, three-step process I could find in a self-help book, but rather to release my New year’s Resolution from myself as some sort of undefined tribal yell coupled with hope to keep yelling. Join with me this semester in letting out a rebel yell, that sounds, to some ears, like a cacophonous screech, but a screech that, when it reverberates, sounds oddly like the chorus “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God almighty, who was and is and is to come.”
