In Defense of Motorcycles

 “There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything.”

- G.K. Chesterton

I once heard of a boy (about 16 or 17) who wanted a motorcycle. But above all, he wanted his father's approval and made the prudent choice of asking his father not only for permission but also for his opinion. The father, being as prudent as his son (prudence being a product of synergy if not hereditary), told him to write out all the ways owning a motorcycle might bring glory to God. The son, seeing the wisdom in such a task, went out and attempted it. Later, he came back and informed his father he decided he didn't want a motorcycle. The exact reason he changed his mind is a bit unclear to me, though I make the reasonable inference the son was unable to see how God might be glorified in his motorcycle and therefore concluded it was not worth having. Both persons in this parable are commendable. Both are prudent and in the end, both did the right thing. However, where my commendation of this story ends is at the moment when the son was unable to find a way God might be glorified in his owning a motorcycle. Though I have no deference to motorcycles in themselves, I do have deference to theology and even the theology of motorcycles. Therefore, I will defend what the son could not. I will defend motorcycles even when they cannot defend themselves and when they seemingly have no one to defend them. 

While the phrase, "theology of motorcycles" seems to serve no other purpose than to amuse (and in some cases offend) pious minds, it in fact has another purpose. If we ask how a motorcycle might glorify God, the grins and sarcasm can begin. But if we ask a synonymous and more serious question, "how can a small thing glorify God?" We cannot grin and chuckle over it. It is a dreadfully serious question. If we ask "how can one small thing glorify such a large thing?" then not only are we apt to drop all forms of insincerity, but we also see how, with regards to the question, we have a lot in common with motorcycles. In fact, in a real sense, a motorcycle is a far holier thing than us. A motorcycle cannot sin. We can, have, and do. It does not take a complicated analysis to see how a sinful thing has more difficulty glorifying God than a thing that cannot sin. A motorcycle can fall over but the human would (and did) fall further than the motorcycle ever could. Nevertheless, it is not my aim to sink humanity lower than motorcycles. It is not even my aim to defend motorcycles in particular. As a mode of transportation, I find them to have a paltry utility. However, if I am to do anything at all, it is to explain how small things glorify big things and show how, if motorcycles do not glorify God, nothing does. 

In the morning of the world, we are told "God saw everything that He made, and behold, it was very good." Why was it good? It was good because God had made it. The birds, the rocks, and the trees were all good. Is there not a discernable sense in which this original goodness was the first way in which God was glorified? It is said that the first created frog exclaimed, "Lord, how you made me jump!" Is not this almost child-like picture of Creation a form of glorification? God made the frog jump and the frog likes jumping. God made the fish swim and the fish likes swimming. God made the birds fly and the birds like flying. God made the first man live, but does this man like living? Before there were temples, churches, idols, and liturgy, God was glorified by the frogs jumping, the fish swimming, and birds flying. He was glorified because these things were good and the simple Creation obeyed the divine imagination. It would be a very odd thing if God gave the birds wings but the birds were too afraid to use them because they couldn't figure out how that honored God. To the birds, he gave the sky, to the fish, he gave the sea, and to man, he gave all these things. In the beginning, God gave man the earth, and is not God glorified when man uses his God-given faculties to esteem as good the things God had already deemed good? We may say that God gave man an imagination so that man could appreciate the divine imagination. In the first picture of the world we see the riddle that laughs from the pages of the Levitical Law first laughed in the Garden of Eden. It's the laugh of the newly formed frog and the laugh of Adam rejoicing in the frog jumping. This is the bliss of Eden that Milton describes and why pure obedient innocence is fundamentally God-glorifying. 

There is some undetected irony in the first five books of the Bible. It is unclear whether the actors and authors were aware of this irony. I have a suspicion that several of them did. If it is not an irony it is at the very least a technical curiosity when God makes rocks and men use rocks to make an altar to worship God. I wonder if the more sensitive actors in the story were aware of this puzzle of cattle God made being sacrificed for God. It is these more sensitive and thoughtful actors we see saying things like, "Sacrifice and burnt offerings thou didst not require." Nevertheless, God still required it, in a sense. God still commanded men to take stones and build an altar. God still commanded His creation to take other parts of His creation and use them to worship His name. This summary will lead to a misunderstanding of my point if the oversimplification is taken too far. The distinction between holy things and unholy things does exist, but the point is, whether holy or unholy, the substance is still God's. "In Him we live and move and have our being," says the Apostle. God commands worship and God provides means of worship. 

This fundamental question of substance is what drives our current inquiry. Is the substance of a motorcycle of a type capable of glorifying God? Does a motorcycle have the substantial properties capable of increasing the glory of God and the furtherance of the gospel? And here we come to a question that lies at the end of a string of more terrible questions. We must be more honest than this. Before asking whether motorcycles glorify God, we must ask if I am glorifying God. Is the substance of my life of a type capable of glorifying God? Is the substance of my schedule of a type capable of glorifying God? Is the substance of my work, relationships, time, energy, possessions, and anything else I come into contact with of a type that can substantially increase the glorification of God? Any man serious about the glory of God must ask himself these things. Any one who has ever sought to do something big for God must stand up under the wind of these blistering questions. And within this howling wilderness we are faced within only two options, either nothing glorifies God, or everything does. 

There are two wrong ways of thinking about the world. The first is to think it is divine. The second is to think it isn't divine. The sin of paganism was worshipping the earth. The sin of Gnosticism was thinking the earth wasn't something worth worshiping. You can either take the world so seriously you worship it, or you can despise it so much you hate it. You can either see under every leaf the face of a god to be venerated or a demon to be expurgated. It is exactly this horrible dichotomy that the Incarnation of Our Lord cured. The Incarnation of Christ positively asserts that flesh is flesh and flesh is good. Food is food and food is good. Ordinary things, bread, wine, mustard seeds, pennies, and yes, even mundane means of transportation like donkeys are things in which the Kingdom of God is advanced. It is within these horribly common images of a supper with friends or a mother, a father, and an infant that the image of God comes to us. And I sometimes fancy that if Christ had come to an age such as ours, with all our foibles and misguided pieties, palm leaves and shouts of hosanna might be offered up to a man, a single man, humble and mounted on a Yamaha TTR 230. 

If the reader will bear with me in a little more foolishness, I'd like to underscore the practical points of my thesis. The glory of God is in humble things. There is nothing more humble than an infant and nothing more small than a mustard seed. Yet in these things is salvation. Perhaps next time when we come to ask ourselves "will this increase the glory of God?" we must humbly assent that only through God can we glorify God. And then, like little children, laugh at being alive, free from carrying the crippling weight of glory.