Becoming a Better Sinner

The Relentless God

2010-08-20T18:15:00.000-07:00

We've been working through a five-part sermon series on the Five Points of Calvinism. (Now there's a hot topic for a California audience!!) Actually, it's been a really intriguing experience, and the theater's been pin-drop quiet through much of the series, except for the time when the theater accidentally started to play their canned music just as I was picking up steam on Limited Atonement. But, I digress.

Here's what I love about this whole area: it gives us the chance to see the Relentless God who pursues his people even before they start seeking him. Our "personal relationships" with Jesus Christ are not deals we've brokered after careful comparison shopping in the spiritual version of QVC, they are love stories in which a jilted God turns around and seeks out the very loved ones who'd just hurt him.

It all goes back to Eden, really. That haunting call echoing across God's freshly-ruined creation: "Adam--where are you!?" Now Adam and Eve ultimately had to choose whether to accept the grace that God was offering, but I find it stunning to realize that our whole history of salvation was based on God turning around first.

He's relentless, and that's one of the things I love most about the Reformed faith.

How about you? Have you ever been pursued by that relentless God?

Stupid! (Old Fart on Fixie)

2010-08-14T21:36:00.000-07:00

I'm preaching a sermon series on the five points of Calvinism. It's called "A Big God". The point being that even though we have free will and ultimately we decide to choose or reject God's grace for us, we still need God far more than we realize we do. In fact we even need him to help us to be able to choose him. Furthermore we simply need Him to be involved in every area of our lives, because without him...well who knows what we might do?

Some folks don't like a God who's that big or that involved. He seems controlling. They'd rather make their own decisions and deal with their own problems.

Well, I intended to write this blog post about that series. But I'm going to tell you a little story instead.

Our oldest son John is into fixed gear bicycles. Fixies, they call them. Basically they're regular road bikes without special gears or the ability to coast. Or brakes. (The no-brakes thing is a key element in this story.) Because John wouldn't be riding his bike this summer he let me store it in our garage. Or ride it.

Riding a fixed gear bicycle is a lot different than riding a regular bike. You never realize how handy it is to coast until you can't. You swing a leg over the bike and push off and those pedals start going. If you get your feet situated right you pedal right along with them. But if you don't, you've got nothing to stand on: those pedals just kind of push you around until you get settled on the seat or the top bar or whatever part of the bike you land on while you're trying to match your feet to the pedals.

Riding a fixie isn't hard once you get going. At least on straight roads where there are no cars or other obstacles to avoid. You just ride straight and steady and when you want to slow down you start resisting the pedals a little bit, and then a little bit more and then finally you slow down enough that you can step off the thing. However it's a lot harder if you have to stop suddenly. The really good fixie riders know how to lock up the back wheel into a really cool skid and they stop that way. Then they go buy a new tire, I guess. But I'm not a really good fixie rider, so I can't skid. I just kind of slow down gradually. Riders like me need to be really careful. I also made one little change to John's bike: I took his toe clips off. As scary as it was to be riding a bike that kept trying to take charge, the last thing I wanted was to have my feet strapped to those pedals. I'd probably hurt myself, I figured.

I commute by bike a lot, so I took John's fixie to my office. On the way I worked really hard to resist the pedals at every intersection. By the time I got to work my legs felt like jelly, but I think I looked really cool. I mean, how many 40-something pastors ride fixies to work?

There's a big overpass right by our office. My commute takes me over it, and then back again on my way home. My mind was pretty absorbed as I left my office that day, probably thinking about deep spiritual things or the emails I hadn't returned. As my thoughts whirled, my legs churned up and over that overpass, heading down the other side. I'd ridden that climb so often I could do it without thinking.

Which was exactly what I did. Shortly after cresting the incline the high-pressure racing tires started rolling faster and faster. That was usually the place where I squeezed the brakes on my commuter bike. Right about then that must have I started thinking again, as my brain suddenly realized that I had no brakes. I immediately started doing the resist-the-pedals thing, but after a couple strokes the pedals started going too fast for my feet to keep up with them.

(Right about now in the story my son starts doing the dad thing: "Oh no...I can't believe you...What were you thinking?" Just ignore him and listen to the story.)

Apparently those toe clips really serve a purpose on a fixie. I guess they make it a lot easier to slow a bike down because you can resist all the way around the pedal stroke, both pulling and pushing. If you don't have toe clips pretty quickly the pedals get a away from your feet and it's darn near impossible to get them back.

I had an idea: I would lift my feet and let the pedals slap the bottom of them as they spun by. Picture several people rapidly hitting the bottoms of your feet with golf clubs while you're riding a zip line. Didn't really work for me either. And the unnerving thing was that I was still gaining speed.

One little detail I didn't tell you is that there is a traffic light right at the bottom of this downhill. In fact, it never really occurred to me how stupid of a place that was for an intersection, but there it was. The street was packed with cars from all directions. And there comes this pastor flying down the hill with his feet lifted up off the pedals. I swerved out into the lane and easily kept up with all the cars. This should be interesting, I figured.

I'm not much of a gambler, but I quickly figured the chances of catching that light on a green were about 50-50. I feared what might happen if I crashed into a truck or a tree or something. But what I feared even more was crumpling the gorgeous new frame my son had bought when he built the bike last winter. As I continued to accelerate I began to brainstorm just what I might do if the light turned red and I was faced with a delivery truck crossing my path. Try though I might, I really couldn't come up with any good ideas.

And then I saw it. I've seen a lot of beautiful sights in my life: sunsets, mountain ranges, rocky coasts--but I don't think I've ever seen something as beautiful as that green traffic light shining over my intersection from hell. It's viridescent sphere of hope boldly marking the path that I could take as I careened past the other more-conventional commuters.

In a moment it was done. I'd reached level ground, the pedals slowed and eventually accepted my feet again and my pulse slowed to something a little closer to normal. It was like waking from a bad dream.

Like I told you, originally I was going to write a blog post about why I find such comfort in the Reformed understand of a sovereign God who manages even mundane events in our universe. There are those who bristle at the idea of a controlling God who would try to micro-manage the world we live in. They'd prefer to think that they could do just fine on their own. We're not stupid, they would insist.

I would beg to differ.

Shooting Straight: What Christians Don't Seem to Get About Prop. 8

2010-08-06T16:54:00.000-07:00

Once again, we’ve got Prop 8 back in the news. For those of you who aren’t from our fair state of California Prop 8 refers to a ballot initiative and constitutional amendment limiting marriage to the traditional 1 man/1 woman format. This week we had one more step in the continuing trench warfare as activists on each side continue to slug it out.

I’m not quick to jump on a soap-box to make pronouncements on political issues. As a Jesus-following pastor, frankly, I’ve got bigger fish to fry. But at the same time, I cringe as much as anyone else when I see the collateral damage that we continue to inflict on each other in the name of personal rights. Here are four things I wish we in the church would take more seriously.

1. Just because the Bible speaks to an issue doesn’t mean that we should make a law to enforce it. I’ve heard my red-state brethren frequently echo the claim that we’re “A Christian Nation”. News flash--we aren’t. As I recall from Civics class, we’re not supposed to have a government endorsed religious perspective. What we ARE supposed to be is a place where Christians can be Christians without legal recriminations while their Muslim neighbors can be Muslims with the same freedom. If the Muslims in my community tried to pass an initiative outlawing pork, I’d rightly complain.

2. Just because a personal belief comes from my religious perspective doesn’t make it politically irrelevant.

For a variety of strange reasons we have become very religio-phobic in our country, perhaps especially here in the Golden State. OK, I made that word up, but I’m referring to our paranoia about expressing and defending the validity of our spiritual points of view. Somehow we’ve developed this underlying assumption that our spiritual perspectives are like digestive problems: ideally people shouldn’t have them, but if they do they ought to at least avoid talking about them in polite company.

The fact is, everyone has a spiritual worldview. Even the people who claim that we shouldn’t have spiritual worldviews are themselves expressing their particular view on the Bigger Picture of our existence. The thing that matters is what we do with those perspectives. My devout Muslim friends have strong convictions about right and wrong that are not shared by my devout Mormon friends, who in turn have moral convictions that contrast markedly from the convictions that I hold dear. While it’d be offensive if one of us tried to pressure the others into adopting our worldview, it’d also seem pretty weird if we tried to pretend that we didn’t really care about these things. We do.

And following from that, there’s nothing wrong with any of us voting on issues based on what we believe to be true. Last I checked democracy was supposed to be about people voting based on their personal convictions. If a lot of Muslims want to speak strongly on a pork-rights issue, they should be able to do that. And if they get out-voted, they shouldn’t complain about that. After all, they’ve had their say. It’s a democracy. And so if a lot of folks have religious viewpoints that lead to convictions about whether marriage should include same-gender couples, there’s nothing wrong with them voting their conscience.

3. The Christian church needs to recognize that it has VERY little credibility in the gay rights issue, and that’s a problem.

Here’s an ugly truth. One of the reasons why the Christian church has such a hard time putting its foot down when it comes to gay rights issues is that that foot seems to be perforated with bullet holes. When it comes to gay rights we’ve shot ourselves in the foot so often that we’ve got very little appendage left with which to stomp.

Our challenge, of course, is that the Bible simply does have a few passages that make it pretty clear that homosexual unions are not what God originally had in mind. Based on this handful of verses we have all too often voiced outrage towards anyone from the gay community who shows signs of…well, being from the gay community. At the same time we quickly breeze over the page after page after page of scriptures that speak about caring for the poor or forgiving those who have hurt us. Actually the Bible seems to treat gossips with the kind of scandal we assign to gays. We, on the other hand, typically accept gossiping as normal, even entertaining—after all, some people just seem to be born that way, right? And as for gays, well…

So here’s an off-the-wall idea: what would happen if the church quietly agreed to treat gay people the same way as, say, we treat people who have been divorced? After all, both “lifestyles” represent major patterns that are presented in scripture as something less than God’s ideal. Both seem increasingly common and both generally seem to be life-long irreversible situations that usually prove to bring a lot of trauma into the lives of those involved.

I have a lot of people in my life whose lives are marked by divorce. And while I’m not ready to say that those divorces represent God’s best for my loved ones (even if they might not agree), I still cringe with them in their pain and rejoice with them as they move on…still divorced. I do that not because I’ve decided that divorce is good, but because there’s a sort of biblical rock/paper/scissors by which I need to determine what is and isn’t worth losing relationships over. It’d be a shame for me to lose really dear friends because of a shadow in their past, just as it’d be a shame for them to reject me on the basis of some other kind of shadow they might find in my past.

What if the church learned to approach GLBT folks in much the same way? Obviously many who don’t share our perspective on the authority of scripture wouldn’t necessarily agree with our position, but it could allow us to stop having all these rallies at which we chant ugly things about each other.

Well, we haven’t. OK…let me be a little more candid than that. I haven’t. I, and a lot of others in the church, have been all too willing put GLBT folks into some separate category of people who somehow need to be “fixed” before we who happen to be broken differently can accept them. The thing I love about the gospel of Jesus Christ is that it allows someone like me to discover the many layers of my brokenness while at the same time being shocked at a God who loves me in ways I didn’t even realize I needed. Seems to me that there ought to be a lot of room for GLBT friends in that community of broken healing. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be happening very much. And that, I believe, is a problem that extends far beyond this issue.

4. There are some important underlying questions that few people seem to be asking.

Underlying this whole Prop 8 discussion I see a bigger question that has been getting very little air time. How DO we figure out how to define marriage? If “because the Bible says so” isn’t a credible grounds for a nation’s views on marriage, what exactly is?

Is it simply a matter of passing fashion? Gay marriages seem much more popular than they were a century ago, so we’re trying to change things so we can do those kinds of marriages. What if polygamists managed to grow in numbers over the next century—would we someday decide that may having multiple husbands wasn’t so bad after all? Or what about adults and children? Cats and dogs? If marriage based strictly on a popular vote then there is no principle that might prevent us from someday embracing any of those aberrations.

On Wednesday Judge Walker pointed to the lack of a “rational basis” for showing why gay unions shouldn’t be considered genuine marriages. I believe the problem runs deeper than that. Beyond simple popularity, I don’t think we have a rational basis for considering any union to be a real marriage. And so we fight.

I still have this crazy idea that the followers of Jesus Christ might help our communities develop a “rational basis” for this kind of long-term issue.

Unfortunately that seems to be the one thing in this issue that the church doesn’t get...uh, straight.

The Unfairness of God

2010-05-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

I don’t think the Prodigal Son’s older brother gets a fair shake.

In Luke 15 Jesus tells a story about a father with two sons. The younger son proves to be a scoundrel, eventually imploding into a scandal that gutted the family’s net worth. The older brother held his ground, remaining at home, pouring himself into the family business. It’s safe to say that without him the place would have fallen apart.

If you’ve read the parable you know, of course, that this loser brother comes home, repents and is welcomed back with the family’s best bottle of Dom Perignon. The old father seems to forget all about the disgrace and wasted inheritance and simply throws his arms around the filthy shoulders of his homeless son. The older brother sees his father cave completely on his boundaries and he stomps outside. “This jerk has undone everything we’ve worked for and you slaughter the fatted calf! I’ve slaved for you all these years and you’ve never even offered me a goat to barbecue with my friends!”

He has a point. What good is it to work your gluteus maximus off when your slacker brother gets a better reward that you do? Doesn’t all your work even matter?

I’ve felt that way at times. I’m dedicated my entire adult life to serving faithfully as a pastor, to being the best husband and dad that I possibly can…surely that’s got to count for something, right? Certainly God could cut me a break on some of the struggles of life. Yet there are all too many times when God seems to miss some great opportunities to make my life easier.

At times like that, I find the older brother’s complaint feels pretty natural: “Look, I’ve slaved for you all these years, and you’ve never even given me a goat (or break on car repairs, or a sudden surge in church attendance or some other fantasy come to life)!

When it comes right down to it, God has a strange sense of fairness. The grace that led the father to welcome his runaway son is the same grace that leads him to offer a place in his family to spiritually-confused people like you and me who often have little clue just what He’s done for us. And it’s the same grace that leads him to stoop to use quirky, sin-tainted folks like me to announce his good news to others who need it as badly as I do.

The point: I thank God that He’s not fair. His unfairness is our only chance.

The issue for me is not really unfairness: it keeps getting easier for me to see how much I benefit from God’s unfairness. The issue for me is usually control. I wish God would exercise his unfairness in a way that would conform more closely to my expectations. I often wish He would work out his lavish grace in a way that would match what I happen to have on my Christmas list right now.

How about you—what does it take for you to settle into God’s grace?

Good for Nothing

2010-05-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

Grace can really mess with your head if you if you take it too seriously. A little grace is good: it gives a reason why Jesus had to die on the cross and a place to turn for comfort when we fail.

But if you pursue grace much further than that it can really start to mess with your head. After all, what good is there from going to church every Sunday if God is going to grant the same salvation to someone who loves Him but loves the Sunday paper even more? What's the benefit of resisting the urge to cheat on your exams or even on your spouse when God's only going shower the same forgiveness on every repentant liar who comes groveling back to him when the regrets start to hit?

If you allow too much grace into your life it starts to erode things. Pretty soon even fine upstanding church-folks (like you and me) find we don’t have a leg to stand on. Things start to crumble.

And. from the Bible's point of view, that's probably good. In the book of Romans the Apostle Paul is pretty clear on the fact that everyone is going to crumble towards something. He calls it being “slaves” either to sin or slaves to God. Keeping our distance from grace means keeping our distance from God. Some of God’s greatest blessings come when He leads us to crumble before Him, whether we want to or not, as the seedlings of His new life begin to shoot through the dirt in our hearts.

If being good is really good for nothing, then most of us probably don't have a leg to stand on. But then again, maybe we don't need a leg to stand on.

The gospel of Jesus Christ has always been based on the outrageous idea that God loves us more than we can, uh...stand. We want to put our best foot forward to make a good impression in heaven's eyes, but God seems to have arranged things so we never really get the chance to get that best foot in the door. Instead He reaches out to draw us...with a nail-scarred hand. The church of Jesus Christ has always been a haven of people who limp in without a leg to stand on. That's why I seem to fit in, for instance.

When was the last time you felt crazy-loved by God?

Ever hate your job?

2010-05-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

( Living Large: Looking for More in an Age of Less, Part 3)

Success is a critical part of the good life for us. Everybody knows that, right?

Granted in a 3^rd world, more primitive setting people might not worry about this quite a much. When you’re living in a hut in some jungle or desert wasteland all you want to do is survive, but most of us educated people living in what we might call developed countries aim for more than that. We don’t want to merely have lived. We want to have really lived.

Our language reflects that: we want to “live it up”. We look at wealthy, successful people and marvel: “wow, they really know how to live”. “Man, that’s the life,” we may conclude as we watch them enjoy the fruits of their success. We sum all this up by expressing our desire to “get a life”.

The writer of Ecclesiastes looks at all this “getting a life” and once again pushes back against it. In Eccl. 2 he describes all he achieved: “I undertook great projects…I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me…yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.”

Once again the writer of Ecclesiastes questions the real value of something whose benefit we would generally take to be self-evident. Of course it’s good to be successful, right? We might say. Ecclesiastes challenges that—really?

This leads us, once again, to ask “why?”. Exactly why do we assume it would be so good to be successful in life? Is it because the things we accomplish really matter so much in the universe? Do we really think the world will be a much better place because we sold more widgets than anyone else in our region?

Imagine this: imagine you’re talking with someone from Haiti who’s about your age. Let’s say that that person slept in the street last night because their shack was of course destroyed in the earthquake a while back. Or maybe they’ve been putting out a heroic effort to carve out a life for themselves in one of the relocation camps. Now picture yourself trying to explain to that person just why it was so critical that you accomplish whatever ambitions you were pursuing this past week. Why it was so important that you landed that overtime pay, or nailed this meeting or get this promotion. Try and explain to someone who’s had to give up a child because he couldn’t scrounge up enough food to feed her just why your career is worth the sleep you lose over it.

Chances are the stress we have from our careers, or lack of them, isn’t really the point. The point is usually something bigger, deeper than making or selling more widgets than anyone else in the company.

The underlying point usually has little to do with widgets and more to do with significance. We want to be remarkable, and we’re afraid we’ll only turn out to be ordinary.

That longing for significance is actually a good thing. It comes from something very important that God hard-wired into each of us—the innate sense that we were created for a purpose. God designed us with an ache to accomplish things that haven’t been accomplished yet. That’s not the problem.

The difficulty, though, comes when we begin to think that our personal career plans will really touch this. The disappointing reality is that many of our career successes tend to have a pretty short shelf life. It feels great to finally land a job after you’ve been unemployed, but before you know it that job becomes…a job. It feels great to get the widget sales award for the month, but then the very next month they turn around and give it to someone else and you have to go back to climbing the ladder. It feels great to be recognized with a promotion or with some new perk, but before long that promotion becomes the new normal and you find you have to aim still higher in order to really feel like you’re somebody. You stake out your kingdom in the widget world, only to discover that someone else’s kingdom is being staked out right over top of your boundaries.

Ecclesiastes puts it this way: “So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. For a man may do his work with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then he must leave all he owns to someone who has not worked for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune (Eccl. 2:20-21).”

In contrast, the Sermon on the Mount talks about pursuing someone else’s dreams. “Seek first (God’s) kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Mt. 6:33). A passage like this is based on the underlying story line of the Bible: a good creation was ruined by human rebellion (Gen 1-3) just as we were warned. God loved us, however, enough that he was willing to do whatever it took to reclaim not only us but also the entire creation he had designed for us. To do that he carved out his original people, Israel, and through them he crept into our world to position himself to suffer for us so that we could live with him. In doing this he would not only be able to provide forgiveness for our sins, but also bring a renewal to our entire creation.

The Bible refers to this cosmic clean-up as the Kingdom of Christ. And, more amazing still, he invites you and me to participate in this amazing venture with him. To have our sins forgiven and our lives healed. To spread the word of this unfolding wonder, to starts homes that mirror his grace, to create great art and make scientific discoveries and…yes, even to make widgets in a way that can make this world a better place. Each of us has the opportunity to step into a custom-created role into this marvelous plan.

When we begin to realize that God may have specifically called us to make our widgets or to teach our students or to serve our customers (or even write our blogs or preach our sermons) we find that this changes everything. Suddenly the shelf life factor becomes a non-issue. The work that you and I do, or the dreams that you and I may pursue take on an eternal significance. These things that we do each day prove to be far more than simply ways to pay bills or to keep busy. Somehow, in some way, the career dreams that he has planted in our hearts are part of his eternal career dream for his entire creation.

We’re not just selling this month’s widgets or working today’s shift at the plant or teaching this week’s lesson plans. Somehow, whether we can see it yet or not, the work that God has given us to do will be a part of that eternal Someday when heaven will come down to earth and Christ will wipe every tear from our eyes (Rev. 21).

Our work, then, becomes meaningful.

But why, then, does it still seem so hard to get out of bed in the morning? Why doesn’t this eternal-significance-thing give us a spring in our step causing us to head off to work with a spring in our step?

More often that not the problem lies with management—who’s in charge? Not necessarily, who has the corner office, but who’s interests are really at stake in your career or mine? Typically we’re actually serving ourselves while we pretend to work for someone else. We agree to show up for work because we anticipate something that will further our purposes: a paycheck, a chance for recognition or advancement. In short, we work for our bosses because we think they can help us serve ourselves. We naively think that our human bosses can provide us with perks that will last only a short time.

Silly, huh? Like they say, if you work for yourself this way it only means that you have an idiot for a boss.

On the other hand, God has a way of using our job dissatisfaction to lead us to work for someone else. To put our career aspirations under new management. Someone who’s strategic plan can assure us that we’ll be part of something eternal.

The book of Ecclesiastes is a strange book. It questions everything we consider to be self-evident and it proposes ideas that couldn’t seem more foreign to upwardly-mobile people like us.

The book of Ecclesiastes can be irritating. It has a way of poking in the places where we already hurt. The steady refrain of “Meaningless!” has a way of echoing around the hallways of our empty dreams and frustrating fantasies. It can drive you crazy.

Or it can drive you to Him. To reach out for the one who reaches back with nail-scarred hands, and who offers not only a way to escape death but also to find a life. To find wholeness and joy and significance. The chance to pour ourselves into something that will really mean something for a long, long time.

Works for me.

Given the chance, would you choose to become rich?

2010-05-06T15:57:00.000-07:00

(Living Large: Looking for More in an Age of Less Part 2)

Our society requires greed.

If it weren’t for greed most ordinary citizens would never dream of participating in our so-called reality shows. Without greed no one would pay attention to the ads on TV which pay for those shows, because no one would really care about buying new and improved versions of products they’d already bought the year before. Without greed most pro athletes would get real jobs when their knees started to give out, because without greed most sane individuals would never allow themselves to get clobbered by an defensive lineman just for money. You have to really want money to do that kind of stuff. And without the desire to get rich quick there’d be almost nothing on TV between midnight and 4 a.m.

When it comes right down to it, capitalism is really nothing more than structured greed. Capitalism is based on the fact that if you can make a little bit better widget than your company made last year people will shell out their hard-earned money to get a new one and show it off to their neighbors. That, of course, will be good for the widget companies, who will post a nice profit from all those widgets. That will prompt them to create even more, new-and-improved widgets and to advertise them aggressively to entice people to buy their new ones. These new widgets 2.0 will only feed the cycle more.

Consumers will realize, of course, that they will need a lot of money to keep buying each year’s widget upgrades, so they will work hard at their jobs in order to bring home as much money as they can in order to buy more widgets, which will keep the widget companies busy creating even more widgets with even more exciting features.

If we all decided that we were tired of buying new widgets, it could all grind to a stop. That, in fact, is what starts to happen in a recession. That scares the tar out of corporate executives.

Our society runs on greed. The pursuit of wealth is what keeps it all going. That fact is, if you or I click on the word “wealth” or maybe “treasure” pictures start to pop up on our screen showing what our idea of treasure might look like. Maybe it’s a big house, a cool car or a TV screen the size of Connecticut.

The most important thing to realize, though, is that the benefits of wealth are considered self-evident. It’s not like most people have paused to reflect and eventually concluded that a feverish attempt to accumulate possessions might be the right lifestyle for them. Instead we just assume that that’s what we need to do. Once the benefits of wealth seem self-evident our critical thinking grinds to a halt.

That’s why the book of Ecclesiastes stops us in our tracks. The Old Testament pushes back on some of our assumptions. What if money didn’t necessarily make us happier?

“I have seen another evil under the sun, and it weighs heavily on men: God gives a man wealth, possessions and honor, so that he lacks nothing his heart desires, but God does not enable him to enjoy them…This is meaningless.” (Eccl. 6:1,2)

This brings us back to the same question we asked in Part 1. Why exactly would we want to have a lot of money? (I know, that’s a silly question because everyone knows that being rich is better than being poor, etc. etc. but I’m the one writing the blog so humor me.) Is life a game where the one who dies with the most toys wins? What really is the benefit of having more money than other people we know? What is the itch that we hope can be scratched with our wealth? These questions take on an increasing relevance during a time of financial struggles. Do we want the possessions? Is the object of the game to have a big of a net worth number as possible? If not, what does really matter?

Let me ask you a question: suppose if you could have everything you were aiming for but without actually owning those things? Let’s say you had a wealthy relative or friend who might loan you his vacation home or private jet, or might take you shopping for that new outfit you’d seen or might make sure that your home entertainment system was state-of-the-art. Would that do it? Through his generosity you ended up with everything you might want, but none of it was really yours, and you had no long-term promises that your standard of living would continue.

I suspect most of us would find this scenario less than satisfying. While taking the Lear to the South of France would be lovely (don’t get me wrong!) in the long run there’d still be something missing if everything came as a favor. Part of the appeal of wealth comes from things that can’t necessarily be bought with money, but might seem to come along with the influx of cash. Self-reliance. Freedom. The security from having a substantial margin with which we can face whatever surprises might come our way.

In short, part of the appeal of money is that we can buy stuff. But the larger, deeper appeal of money comes from our impressions that with enough money in the bank we could know that we could be OK, no matter what life might bring our way. Money brings security and freedom. That seems obvious, doesn’t it? That’s what we’re really looking for from our net worth.

Well, Ecclesiastes would push back on that. As John Ortberg says, life is a board game and when the game is done all our playing pieces go back in the box. It all goes back in the box. In fact, I’m not so sure that having a lot of money guarantees much happiness during this life right now. A quick glance at the tabloid covers at my local grocery story would suggest that there are a lot of people who have far more money than I do but seem to be having a lot less fun. I’m not sure I’d trade places with Brad and Angelina, even when their marital struggles seem to be having a calm period.

The fact is we clutch to our money like drowning people clinging to bricks. Any fool can see that those bricks are really going to help us much, but when we’re feeling frightened and needy we’ll reach for whatever anyone tells us to grab.

Here the Sermon on the Mount breaks in a completely counter-intuitive direction. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in a steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy and where thieves do not break in a steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

The point: Christ is the only treasure that will really satisfy the needs that lurk behind our credit card bills and bank statements.

(Ding! Cliché alert goes off. Of course Christ is our treasure...duh!)

But wait a minute. What might we need to rearrange to get to the point where if we clicked on the word “treasure” up would pop a picture of Jesus? That might take a little doing. It’s not hard to picture Jesus as the forgiver of our sins, or maybe the personal body-guard in times of risk. But to think of Jesus as our treasure seems like a bit of a reach, doesn’t it? Take your pick: Jesus or a big screen TV? Which would you relentlessly pursue, your savior or your Lexus?

This raises the question of what Jesus is really good for, anyway, doesn’t it? Of course he’s the one who gets us RSVP’d for heaven but beyond that does he really make that big of a difference.

Here’s where the Sermon on the Mount starts to really get serious. Not only does it question the myth that our “treasures on earth” will really do it for us in the long run, it also points towards the ultimate satisfaction that comes from looking to Christ for the things we might want from our wealth.

Think about it: all the things that we might hope for from our wealth—like security, freedom, a sense of being special, knowing that we’ll be taken care of in the future—those are the things that Jesus promises to provide us beyond whatever we might be able to ask or imagine. Jesus may or may not provide us with huge houses and fabulous luxury cars, but any fool can see those status symbols aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Money can buy you a car, put gas in the tank, and bring you back to the garage of your beautiful house, but it can’t get you real friends to visit, or joy as you travel and it certainly can’t give you peace in your heart as you finish the day in your beautiful home. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence to show that wealth can actually pull you backwards in those categories.

While Jesus never promises an upper-class lifestyle, he does promise to provide us all the things that we might think and upper-class lifestyle might bring us. The stuff we really ache for is the stuff he died for: peace, joy, love and a settled sense of security that can let us sleep like a baby at night.

“Store up for yourselves treasure…”

So what does it take to start investing in that kind of treasure?

First of all, we need to learn to grieve. We need to grieve the illusions we so easily cling to, the silly ideas we have about how deeply satisfied we’d be if we could pay all our bills on time. (see Part 1)

Secondly, we need to recognize the reality check that our recession can provide. The money pressures we feel from a struggling economy can help us discover some basic truths. The fact is if I think money could solve my problems then I have problems that money could never solve.

Thirdly, we need to practice imagining real wealth. I’m working on this one the most in my own life. I’m developing my ability to imagine myself being fabulously wealthy with the people in my life and the experiences God’s led me to discover. He’s given me an astonishing windfall with the eternal purpose that He’s woven right into the story of my life. And He’s grounded all these luxuries on a promise that’s a solid as Romans 8:28, guaranteeing that He’ll be working for good in everything because of His love for me.

Well, there you have it; my get-rich-quick scheme.

Living Large: Looking for More in an Age of Less (Part 1)

2010-04-24T20:30:00.000-07:00

I've been reading from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes lately, in fact I'm been doing a sermon series on it. Fascinating book. Strange book. Dark, even. (Perfect for us Calvinist types.)

The book of Ecclesiastes is brought to you by the word Meaningless and by the concept of Futility, (“Undermining life dreams since Genesis 3”). The opening words of the book: “Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher. And then, in case we hadn’t gotten the point: “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” You get the point.

In its opening chapters the book of Ecclesiastes seems to offer very little hope, but by the time you reach the close of the book you find…well, very little hope. We’re pretty much reminded that life is short and death is inevitable. Not the kind of passage that a guy like Joel Osteen usually dwells on. Actually most of us who spend time in the pulpit usually clear a wide berth around this part of scripture.

But the book of Ecclesiastes has something genuinely life-giving to offer. It provides a healthy dose of skepticism in an age of naïveté. It’s amazing how easily intelligent folks like ourselves can find ourselves falling for some flimsy myths about what really matters in life. If all we follow are the ads on TV we’ll spend the better part of our lives straining after things that, while they might give us whiter teeth or better hair color, don’t really do anything to make our lives richer or more satisfying. Ecclesiastes pushes back against all this silliness, offering a reality check.

I find it helpful to pair the book of Ecclesiastes with something like the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew. They make a great combination: Ecclesiastes shows us what doesn’t really matter and the Sermon on the Mount points us towards what does.

Ecclesiastes 2 walks us through the author’s mid-life explorations. Solomon (or whoever wrote the book from Solomon’s perspective) traces for us all the various places he’d looked in his search for something meaningful. The chapter reads like the California experience: food, sex, money, accomplishments, fame: he tries it all and finds that each of these comforts leaves him with a nagging sense of emptiness. Nothing really seems to scratch the itch.

Now most of the people who would ever bother to read Ecclesiastes would quickly agree with this assessment. Of COURSE those kinds of things aren’t really going to satisfy, and OF COURSE only God can really meet the needs of our deepest hearts, etc. etc. etc. We know that those are the right answers, of course.

And yet, most of us Bible-readers spend just as much energy pursuing these things as anyone else: we want bigger TVs as much as anyone else, and we churn with many of the same sexual fantasies everyone else does, and we knock ourselves out trying to get ahead with the same fervor as the materialist down the street. We just take a break from it all to go to church on Sunday. OK…on most Sundays, at least. The fact is most of us church-going folks take our upgrades just as seriously as anyone else.

What do you think God thinks of our “pursuit of happiness”? Some might suggest that God just scowls down on our little pleasures, like the dour couple in Grant Woods’ American Gothic. The rest of us snicker, because surely God isn’t that Puritan, but it’s a bit of a nervous snicker as we’re not entirely convinced in the matter.

So what DOES God actually think of our pursuit of pleasure?

It’s at right about this point that our discussion usually takes a sharp right turn into questions of morality. Is it OK to do this or drink that or watch this? We try to figure out the rules so we can know which pleasures are all right and which we should feel guilty about. Once we figure out the rules we go for it.

But there’s a bigger, deeper issue that lurks underneath these questions of morality. We need to learn to ask why these pleasures are so important to us. On the one hand, the answer is obvious. By definition pleasures are…well, pleasurable. If we didn’t enjoy them they wouldn’t be pleasures.

Sometimes our pleasures are merely a matter of entertainment. “Oh..that sounds fun…” But sometimes we pursue pleasures not simply to enjoy, but also to compensate. We can begin to feel like we need our pleasures. We end up rummaging for pleasures like teenage boys rummaging through the fridge before dinner: “I need something…I’m starving!”

There are telltale signs that can sometimes show when this is happening. One sign is irritation. When part of our world begins to collapse because we have been denied a pleasure that’s a pretty good sign that there’s more going on than mere enjoyment. Another sign is a growing pressure to compromise scriptural standards. When we start to feel like we have to bend the Bible’s teachings on our enjoyment of pleasures because we need food or TV or alcohol or sex—that’s also a pretty good sign that something is out of balance.

So what does God think of our pursuit of pleasure? Here’s where the Sermon on the Mount can serve as a sequel to the book of Ecclesiastes. The one leads to the other.

The Sermon on the Mount addresses the issue of pleasure from a completely different point of view. Matthew 5 begins with what we know as the Beatitudes. In Mt 5:4 we read: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

Now frankly…this sounds pretty stupid. Blessed are those who grieve, who are unhappy, because they will be happy. (This is one of those passages that are probably important for other people to take seriously, but certainly not us.) After all, why would you ever want to encourage someone to mourn?

That’s a good question, actually. Why would you?

Lurking behind passages like this is the dark reality that many of the desires that we have in life often prove to be frustrating and unsatisfying. All too often when we get what we want we discover that that wasn’t what we had really wanted. It might have been good, but it wasn’t it. You’re convinced that you’re dream vacation would make all the difference in your life, but when you actually got the chance to take it you discovered that when you returned home you were still just the same old you, but with a suntan. You couldn’t wait to get the new job or the new spouse or to start your family or send your kids out, but once those things happened you soon realized that your life still felt exactly the same as before except you were surrounded by different people.

Here’s something else: often the more fiercely we pursue these pleasures the more disappointed we end up in the end. Ask the college student whose week of spring break debauchery left him feeling both cheap and broke a week later. Ask the young mom who was convinced that getting rid of the guy she married would do it, and she now wakes up each day realizing the havoc she has caused for so many people. Ask the parent who watches his children grow and leave the house as near strangers to him, and he suddenly discovers the true cost of all those evening meetings and business trips that it took to build his career. Often the more fiercely we pursue our pleasures the more fierce our disappointment when those delights don’t prove to be it.

There’s a word for that kind of disappointment. Do you know what it is? Mourning. Blessed are those who discover what doesn’t really satisfy, because they can then begin to find what really is it.

That’s why the Sermon on the Mount provides such a great sequel to Ecclesiastes. If Ecclesiastes helps us discover what doesn’t satisfy, the Sermon on the Mount points us towards what really does. Read Matthew 6: “Don’t store up for yourselves treasures on earth where thieves can steal and moth and rust destroy. Instead store up for yourselves treasures in heaven…for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Jesus’ point is clear: we’re going to inevitably pursue someone’s kingdom, whether our own carnal interests or His eternal cause. But only one Kingdom will prove to be it.

So what might this grieving look like for you? Here are three things that I’m finding helpful:

Become a skeptic. I’m slowly learning to be a bit cynical towards things that probably won’t satisfy in the long run. The ads on TV that broadly hint that if I buy a certain product I’ll become popular or sexy or envied by all my friends. The stray desires that suggest that if my car were classy enough or my home were impressive enough that then I could really enjoy things. Ecclesiastes helps me learn to roll my eyes at some of the ads I see on TV.

Identify our underlying needs. I may know what I want, but do I know what I really want? I may be reaching for more of those chocolate chip cookies, but what I’m really hungering for is some comfort because I’m frightened or tired. It may seem like I really want to upgrade my car stereo or my TV or my backyard, but what I really want is simply to feel impressive.

Finally, I need to learn to claim good gifts from God. God may or may not want me to upgrade my landscaping or get a bigger TV, but he does want me to feel loved, to feel important and to know that it’s good to be me. I’m finding that I often sell him short when it comes to many of these underlying needs.

Every once in a while, though, I have these flashes of clarity where I’ll realize that the stuff I fantasize about wouldn’t really do it anyway, and it will hit me again how much I long to be filled with God’s best for me. When that happens God grins, shows me His best, and I discover that I’ve been comforted.

Hmm...just like He said.

Easter: Finding the Remote

2010-04-04T18:00:00.000-07:00

(Part 2 of a series).
I sometimes wonder if one of the most significant inventions of the 20^th century was the TV remote.

I remember “back in the day” when my little brothers and I would have to get up off the couch and manually walk across the room and clunk our way around the dial when it was time to watch Hogan’s Heroes, or maybe C.H.I.P’s. Once the show started it was, like, “Sssshhh….” if my mom tried to say anything, because we didn’t want to miss anything important.

Today everything is different, thanks to this little device. Not only do husbands and wives have an entirely new collection of arguments to engage in, (give me that remote!) but the very way we watch TV or movies has changed. Did you know that this little guy can even pause live TV? That’s right. Jack Bauer can be right in the middle of tracking down some bad guys with their stolen uranium rods, and he has to stop when we tell him to! Uh…hold it right there, Jack, I gotta go to the bathroom. ("Chloe--I'll call you back.") And if something else comes up, Jack will just stay there holding his cell phone while we take care of whatever we might have considered more important than an impending nuclear disaster. Then, when we give the word he’s off again saving the Big Apple for all America. (Bhmh-bhmh!).

You see, for the first time in history, this little device has snapped the unyielding one-step-at-a-time link between the events in a story. Our stories don’t have to unfold one scene after another in steady succession. Now we have the liberty to st….. (click remote)

(click remote again) …op for as long as we want before resuming the story. We can even jump back to the beginning to pick up a clue we might have missed or even jump to the end of a pre-recorded show.

You know, this can really mess things up if we’re not careful. You can get an entirely wrong idea of what’s going on in a story. Back to our buddy Jack Bauer—if one of my sons pauses the show just as Jack is having some terrible things being done to him with jumper cables it’s going to look really bad. Every time I walk through the family room there he is getting beat up. Again. WOW…sucks to be him… Eventually my impression of Jack Bauer may begin to change. Every time I see him he’s getting hammered on something awful. I’ll eventually start to figure that he must be some kind of wimp, unable to take care of himself in the big bad world of international terrorism. I may even start losing my faith in our buddy Jack. Man, he’s washed up. He’s done for.

Now, if you ever watch the show 24 you know that that’s not really true. Jack Bauer is actually awesome. Terrorists quake at the sound of his name. In fact, Jack pretty much died not too long ago, but even that couldn’t stop him. Before you could say “conspiracy” he'd be back, ready to rock on completely with some brand new components.

But here’s the thing—if I got stuck halfway through the story, I wouldn’t know any of that. I’d miss it completely. I’d never see that through some blend of courage and cleverness Jack would not only get out of his latest difficulty, but he’d actually get the best of the guy who at one time seemed to have him licked. And I’d never discover the fact that the bad guy wasn’t really such a big deal after all. He may have looked like a big scary bad guy, but he was really nothing more than a bully with a funny accent. No big deal.

But wow…if I hit “pause” at the wrong place I could miss all that.

The same thing can happen if we hit "pause" before we get to Easter. If we stop the action after Satan's infiltration of Eden, or the struggles of the nation of Israel, or the exile years, or--worse yet--Gethsemane or the crucifixion outside Jerusalem. The Bad Guy looks pretty powerful as God stands there apparently dumb-founded by the treachery wrought by His people.

But if I can remember to his "play" again I can see where the story goes from there. A tomb broken open on Easter morning, followers drawn back together, the church bursting to life on Pentecost Sunday, and the Roman Empire turned upside down. Eventually Revelations gives us a fast-forward look at Christ's second coming: "I will wipe away every tear from their eyes." The bad guy is gone.

I need Easter. It gives me a chance to hit "play" again.

Now where was that remote?

Easter: The Last Laugh

2010-04-03T21:00:00.000-07:00

(Part 1 of a series.)

The hardest part of Good Friday is probably the most obvious--the story ends in death. Christ’s death. His final screams of agony, the nervous scrambling of those huddled in the darkness around those torture poles, they all lead up to that one awful moment when Jesus “gave up his spirit”. Finally, after all this, it was finished. And then…nothing. Nothing but a grotesque corpse to be taken away for grieving.

What goes through your mind when you’re one of Jesus’ loved ones, seeing that battered corpse released from that cross? What do you cling to as you receive it, wrap it and start to figure out what to do for a tomb? Do you try to think about the better days? About the times you had together? Or does the cruel fact of the silent corpse in front of you simply mock any memory you might try to pull up?

There’s a really weird kind of emptiness that comes after death, isn’t there? We’ve all felt the chill of that emptiness—losing parents, loved ones, friends. It leaves a silence that can seem deafening, its silent thunder triggering an avalanche of things we wish would do or re-do or un-do one more time. Death is just so…permanent. That’s why we fear it so much. That’s why we try not to even think about it. Death looms like a cloud bank on each of our horizons.

Death has this way of mocking us, like the way coming term papers can taunt even the best day of spring break. Death mocks life.

But here’s the thing. Jesus’ death was the death of death.

He broke death, taking its worst only to come back out the other side a few days later. The permanence of death was shattered. In its place hope could appear. That awful silence of the cemetery broken by the rumble of an earthquake and a rush of angels’ wings. And on Sunday we’ll celebrate how the story comes out.

So here’s the thing: death mocks life. But Easter mocks death.

Ha!!

Evangelism--Offending People for Jesus

2010-03-16T17:27:00.000-07:00

Most of us cringe at the prospect of evangelism. While it’s necessary, of course, it still feels like we’re getting pressured to offend people for Jesus. Here in Northern CA the idea of encouraging someone else to convert to your religious views feels like the verbal equivalent of the Crusades.

Yet…we’re supposed to just do it, aren’t we? Isn’t that what God tells us?

I’m increasingly convinced that much of our evangelistic anxiety comes from a pretty basic misunderstanding that we make when it comes to sharing our faith. We tend to think of evangelism as something prescriptive. A person is being prescriptive when he or she is urging someone else to do something. That’s why a doctor will prescribe a particular treatment for an ailment a patient may have, perhaps even writing a prescription. We typically think of evangelism in this way: evangelism is the process through which we exhort our friends and neighbors to adopt our spiritual views. Most people, at least where I live, don’t seem to appreciate this prescriptive approach to spiritual matters. They don’t request Amway sales calls, either.

But another alternative can be found in what we could call descriptive evangelism. A person is being descriptive when he or she is simply describing an experience they’d had. When friends tell you how much they enjoyed a new movie that’s come out or how they loved the new Thai restaurant they tried last night, they are being descriptive about what they’d experienced. You can’t argue with that.

So what if we thought about evangelism in those terms? Prescriptive evangelism would then describe an effort to convince someone else to change their spiritual beliefs at your urging. (“Turn or burn!”) All too often, you’d be simply asking for a fight. On the other hand a descriptive approach to evangelism could avoid that tension by simply presenting what you or I have already experienced. Telling someone about the peace or joy you’ve discovered, or how prayer has brought noticeable changes in your life would both be examples of descriptive evangelism.

The beauty of descriptive evangelism is that it’s virtually argument-proof, when done correctly. It’s impossible to argue with someone’s personal experience—they’re simply telling you what happened to them. It’d be silly to try to convince your friends that they actually hated that movie or that they really thought the new restaurant’s food was terrible. You wouldn’t know; you weren’t even there!

Evangelism, viewed this way, would focus primarily on simply not hiding the good things that God had been doing in our lives? And at this point a lot of scriptures would begin making more sense. Just imagine if we asked God to create opportunities to “let our gentleness be evident to all” as Paul wrote the Philippians? Or what if we prepared ourselves to “give an answer” to explain the hope we have as Peter wrote in his first epistle? What if we simply stopped hiding the lamp of Christ’s love, taking it out from under whatever bowl we’d hidden it as Jesus himself challenged us?

That’d be a lot easier. People wouldn’t need to brace themselves against us. In fact, they’d probably start to get curious: “what do you mean, you’re at peace in the middle of all this stress? “ “You just prayed about this, and now you’re getting these lucky breaks?”

Question for you: if you were transparent about what you’ve experienced with God, what would other people see?

Getting What You Want

2010-02-28T08:13:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it’s not good to get what you ask for.

As a boy, a friend of mine loved to visit his big sister at the deli where she worked. Sometimes she’d fix him a treat; one day it was a bagel with cream cheese. He loved it. On his next visit, hoping for the same treat, he asked his sister for “a bagel with sour cream”. She looked at him quizzically and began to suggest that perhaps he meant cream cheese, but he was quite insistent on his order. Eventually she toasted a bagel, topped it with sour cream and handed it to him. His face scrunched into a grimace as he suddenly realized his mistake. Humbled, he asked for a bagel with cream cheese.

Sometimes getting what we ask for isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We insist that we want sour cream on our life’s bagels, only to finally get our request and discover that that wasn’t really what we wanted. Sometimes getting what we’re asking for can leave a sour taste in our mouths.

The Bible is full of examples of people with gagging on their sour cream. Just ask Jacob, scurrying into the night having snagged the birthright he’d never use. Or Samson, blind (literally) in his pursuit of Philistine pleasures. Or just ask David, finally having enjoyed the friend’s wife he’d been longing for. Perhaps you can tell similar stories from your life: times when you tried to force a pleasure or an achievement or make a purchase even though others questioned whether your choice was wise.

God created us to be hungry--but for things that only He can satisfy. What have you been hungry for lately?

The Faith of Atheists

2010-02-21T18:00:00.000-08:00

I could never be an atheist. It would take way too much faith.

To be fair, I’ve really got to respect people who are so deeply committed to their faith position, even if I don’t happen to buy their viewpoint myself. We can all learn from each other, I figure. And besides, it’s inspiring to see someone stake their entire worldview, and even their whole lifestyle, around something that can’t be proven. You’ve got to admit there’s something pretty bold about shaking your fist in the face of millennia of human common sense. That just inspires me. It’s pretty gutsy, actually.

Most atheists I know would never brag about it, of course—which I also respect—but it’s not hard to see how their worldview is based solidly on the kind of faith that can never be proven. After all, how can you prove nothing? How on earth could anybody ever check to make sure that God really wasn’t there? Ultimately it comes down to their faith that they won’t find themselves in line at some Pearly Gates or shocked to discover that they’ve been reincarnated as some lower life form. Like anyone else, they’ve made their faith commitments.

Throughout recorded history civilization after civilization has succumbed to the obvious common-sense assumption that someone or something Greater Than Us was responsible for life in our universe. Granted, folks had a hard time agreeing on just who or what that “Greater Than Us” actually was. While some subscribed to Jehovah, others signed on for Baal or Allah, or the Buddha or the Great Pumpkin or whatever other local deity they chose. But no matter what brand name people happened to choose, virtually everyone agreed that there was someone or something out there--from tribes in Africa to the great civilizations in the Middle East or Asia, to the rise of Judaism and Christianity, countered by the celtic religions in Europe and all the various brands of eastern religion now featured. (And don’t even get me started on the whole pantheon of gods that the Greeks and Romans developed. Personally, I can never keep them all straight.) But the fact is that until the Enlightenment suddenly sprang up a few generations back, everyone just took it as obvious that someone or something was behind the wonders of our world.

And that makes sense to me. All I have to do is spend an evening up in the Sierras gaping at the infinite fog of starlight that has exploded in our little corner of the galaxy and I quickly slide into the assumption that this could not have happened by accident. Call it peer pressure if you want—I’ll admit there probably is something reassuring about knowing that for untold centuries of human civilization everyone has come to the same conclusion that I have. But regardless, I just think it would be hard to be an atheist outdoors.

But that’s why I can appreciate the courage of the staunch minority who in the past few generations have decided to march to a different non-drummer. Recently, as seen from the span of human history, a few bold thinkers have theorized that all those galaxies and constellations have somehow appeared by accident. They point proudly to the theory of evolution as a kingpin in their worldview. I’m no scientist, but my understanding of that theory is that we’re all somehow mutants, having morphed from the first glops of seaweed that washed up on a beach somewhere. Maybe other folks can understand some of these fine points, but I have a hard time grasping this. I’ve known a few mutants in my day (hey, I’ve watched cartoons just like anybody else) and I have a hard time seeing how the continually mutating offspring of the first mutants could result in something like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. You ask me, bass guitar licks like Flea’s don’t just happen.

Maybe my problem is with science. Maybe I should put more willing to put my faith in science as a way to figure these things out. But I figure: the best science of the day got us the Flat Earth theory. Then a little bit later the new-and-improved best science of the day got us the Round Earth theory. (Note: at the time of this writing the earth was still round). I just keep looking for someone to take responsibility for that Big Bang. That much noise, somebody had to hear something!

And maybe I’m just a little too common-sense about it all. I suppose any academic discipline can have a bad century now and then. Who knows? Maybe all the pieces did line up just right to enable sea scum to somehow produce Michael Jordan’s dunk shot or whatever magic there is that makes my laptop here come to life when I turn it on.

But it just seems like a long shot to me. Buying into that would take a lot more faith that I seem to have. Rumor has it some guy in Ohio dumped 10,000 dominoes off the roof of a school gymnasium and they randomly formed a perfect version of the Mona Lisa, including getting the smile just right. Call me a skeptic, but I have a hard time with that one, too.

I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m judging my atheist friends. Most of them are really good people who are genuinely sincere about what they believe. And maybe their faith in science can do for modern medicine what Mother Teresa’s faith did for the poor of Calcutta. What’s not to like about that?

But having said that I also don’t like it when atheists get all fundamentalist on me. Maybe I’m not as smart as they are with their fancy theories about everything, but I can’t help but feel judged when they smile kindly at the fact that I still don’t “get it”. Call me crazy, but I still say the emperor has no clothes.

What I would like to see would be an open-minded kind of dialogue about all of our different kinds of faith. I'm not talking about some kind of evangelistic shoot-out where anybody’s trying to convince me that I should have faith in whatever scientific theories they’re betting the farm on. I’d just thing it’d be interesting to learn from the faith stories of some atheists who’ve been at it a while. How does it feel put your faith in a minority viewpoint? How do you shore up your faith when you have those inevitable moments when you can’t help but wonder whether you may have been put here for a reason? How do you begin to explain your trust in something you could never prove?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing something simple here. But whenever I look for something that would offer a reason to have faith in atheism, all I find is…

…nothing.

In Trouble

2010-02-19T10:56:00.000-08:00

Been reading the New Testament book of I Peter lately…part of a sermon series Stan and I are working through here at The Gathering. Great book, especially for those times when don’t seem to be going like you’d hoped. The epistle is all about trouble, which is why it can make for good reading during a recession.

A word about trouble: there’s a big difference between having troubles and being in trouble. Having troubles is pretty normal: you get a bad grade in school, you come down with the flu, you get a flat tire driving home from work. Most troubles, while annoying, can be fixed pretty easily. You pull out your spare tire, figure out how the crazy jack works, and make the switch. Before too long you’re on your way, remembering to wash your hands when you get to your destination.

Most troubles aren’t really so hard to deal with.

But when you begin to get too many of those troubles it starts to affect your worldview. You begin to get the sense that everything in your life is starting to fall apart. You suspect that even if you were to fix one or two of the problems in front of you there would be two or three other problems that would creep up on you from another side. You find a sense of futility begins to hang over your efforts—even if you fixed one of your problems you’d still face so many others that it’d hardly make a difference.

An eerie realization begins to well up inside you: it’s not that you simply have troubles, you realize that you are now in trouble. Your struggles have claimed your worldview.

That’s when you start losing hope. Hope is the force field that fends off a sense of futility. When you lose hope, despair slowly seeps into your heart.

Let’s face it; many of us today are losing hope, no matter what our current President’s campaign slogan might have suggested.

The economy is a big part of that, of course. Not too long ago it seemed like everyone had a lot of money. In my neighborhood everyone was spending re-fi money freely as our homes quickly doubled in value. Anyone who wanted a job could find one. Now today all that has changed, and doesn’t appear to be changing back any time soon. But our troubles extend beyond the economy: what are we going to do about health care? About the incessant conflicts in the Middle East or in Africa? And what good is it to avoid losing your home if you don’t really like the people you have to share it with?

Many of us know that sinking feeling that comes when you realize that you are in trouble and probably not likely to escape it in the near future. Our hope shrivels under those conditions.

The epistle of I Peter was written to people who felt much like that. The letter was probably written around the early 60’s A.D. by Peter, who probably wrote it from the city of Rome. In any case, the letter was certainly written in the shadow of Rome, as the threat of Roman persecution looms over the epistle from the not-to-distant future. The letter was written around the time of the Emperor Nero, under whose persecution Peter eventually lost his life.

To put it simply: if you were a Christ-follower in the time of Nero you were in trouble.

As Christians today we face resistance. Look at the nerve touched by the recent Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad where his mom simply acknowledged that she loves her son. But that kind of resistance is really pretty minor in the broader scheme of things.

First-century Christians faced a whole series of very real troubles. Troubles from Rome, whose leaders figured that they were atheists, with the way they bristled against worshipping the emperor or his pantheon of gods in favor of this curious invisible non-god they claimed to follow. From the Jews, who resented being grouped by the Romans in the same atheist group, and did what they could to purge their communities of these aberrant Christ-followers. And often from their families, since in their day the head of a family determined the religious perspective for everyone. For a person to begin following Christ in defiance of their family was often taken as a rejection of that family. Family leaders were known to go to extreme measures to keep their pagan family members in the fold, and following Christ often meant losing one’s family.

Peter was writing to people who not only had troubles, they were in trouble. No matter where they turned there were forces arrayed that could destroy everything their lives had been based on. You can easily become paranoid in a situation like that…except that in your case the threats you face are definitely real.

So Peter opens his letter to these down-and-outs with a boisterous cheer for the “living hope” that they could share together. (Look at I Peter 1:3-12 sometime). Notice, though, that Peter is not even pretending that this hope will protect them from suffering. No, he candidly acknowledges that suffering is coming their way. Instead he points to something that transcends their suffering. As big as their troubles might seem, Peter points them to something bigger. A “living hope”, an un-depreciated “inheritance”, and the snug security that comes from being “shielded” by God’s power during turbulent times. Peter then offers a very different perspective on their suffering: instead of being a setback, he interprets suffering as a force that can “purify” the faith through which we ultimately connect to Christ and all these blessings.

What Peter is doing is offering a contrasting worldview. Here’s what a worldview is: everyone has a center to their world, something around which everything else inevitably orbits. In the first century it may have been Nero or the power of Rome or the all-star team of Greek and Roman gods that needed to be appeased. Today our worldviews may be a little more difficult to identify, but we still always have something at the center. It may be a conventional religion of some sort or it may be something less clearly defined. It may be finances, or recreation or physical beauty or romance or maybe even the right to view oneself as “a pretty good person”. In any case there is something at the center of each person’s world. And in the face of insurmountable forces that could easily destroy every other form of security, Peter points his friends toward something unchanging. He invites his friends to stomp down with abandon on a foundation that even Nero can’t shake. He’s not trying to promise that painful things won’t happen; he’s helping them discover something that will still stand firm, even if those bad things might happen.

So how do you tell what’s really at the center of your worldview? Ask yourself this: what would effectively end your life if you were to lose it? Each of us undoubtedly has blessings in our lives about which we care passionately and for which we would grieve deeply were we to ever lose them. But there is usually one set of blessings which would ultimately prove to be a deal-breaker for each person. Deep in our hearts we know that if we were ever to lose our (family, middle-class-wealth, good looks, professional success, etc.) we just couldn’t go on. Life would prove to be pointless if that central blessing were taken away.

What would that “deal-breaker” be for you? Peter invites us to dare to imagine something big enough to tower over any other dream we might pursue or any other potential loss we might face. He invites us to look to Christ and ask Him to fill us with the kind of living hope that comes only when you’re solidly based on something that even a recession can’t take away.

“Got hope?”

Lessons I've Been Learning from 2009

2010-01-03T17:55:00.000-08:00

I have a tradition at The Gathering of dedicating my first sermon of the year to sharing some of the lessons God had been teaching me during the previous year.

I’m always a little uncomfortable presenting that sermon because:
a.) Our people get the opportunity to see proof of what they may frequently suspect (that their preacher can be pretty messed-up in side).
b.) Announcing lessons “learned” implies that I've gotten the point. In reality the shelf life for these kinds of lessons seems to be measured in hours, not years, which means that I typically have an awful lot of re-learning going on.

Well, so be it.

Having said that, here’s a summary of what I’m sharing this year.

1. We need to be who God created us to be.
God makes it really clear in the Bible that he has custom-designed each of us for specific purposes which He’s prepared for us to do (I Cor. 12). I’ve known that for a long time, yet it seems like I frequently discover how little I grasp what this really means.

As a pastor, I love seeing how this works. Not long ago I was in a meeting with two of our key leaders. Person A was expressing appreciation for a role Person B had stepped into. “I think it’s so awesome to see how you are able to…” (you get the point). Person B seemed a little flattered, adding how she was amazed every time she saw Person A doing what she did well. They each considered the other to be remarkably gifted and were each surprised to hear the other celebrate their unique contributions.

That conversation just felt very right to me. I love seeing people discovering how they uniquely fit together as we uncover clues as to what God has had in mind for us since the beginning.

In my own situation God has been nudging (OK…shoving) me in a direction that helps me discover just how big of a deal this really is. A lot of my particular learning has had to do with the significance of being an introvert. I’ve been a Meyers-Briggs INTJ since way back, and I’ve always suspected that if you click on the word “introvert” you’d see my picture pop up. People are often surprised about that since I talk for a living, but I’ve known that for a long time. Introversion isn’t the same thing as shy: introvert refers to someone whose battery recharges when they’re alone while an extrovert’s battery recharges while being with other people.

However, God’s lead me to read a number of voices during this past year who are helping me discover just how significant this really is in my life. One of these voices is Adam McHugh, who recently published the book Introverts in the Church which has been attracting a lot of attention on the internet.

Here’s the significance for me: I love people, I love what our church stands for, and I love to explore possibilities with people so together we can figure out how to make them happen. Most of my work time is connected to meetings. But as much as I enjoy that, I also find it incredibly tiring. More often than people suspect I’ll finish an all-day run of meetings and find myself weary to the point of tears. As the adrenaline subsides I’ll discover that I’ve given away more than I had to give. I usually push through that, because you do what you have to do, but that kind of fatigue doesn’t help anybody, and it could really screw up my own life if I’m not careful.

At the same time, I’m learning that the best stuff I have to offer in life comes from the things that happen in my solitude. What I bring in preaching, teaching or writing comes from the very things that I need to be healthy. You lock a red-blooded extrovert up in solitary confinement and you’ll have a mess on your hands. You lock me up and chances are I’ll write something that you’ll find really helpful. It’s all part of the same temperament.

So the lesson for me is that I need to be smart about how I spend my time and my energy. It wouldn’t help anyone for me to crash and burn. I need to trust that Christ can take my five loaves and two fish use them to produce whatever kind of meal is needed.

That’s what I’m learning about how I’m wired. What has God been showing you about how He’s wired you? He’s made you to be very unique, different from anyone else who might read this blog. What has He been showing you about the kind situations in which you can really make His dreams come true?

2. I Need to Watch for God’s Presence.
Theoretically, God is everywhere. He’s omni-present, we say. That’s what David was saying in Psalm 139: “where can I flee from your presence?” In a broader sense it’s impossible to escape the presence of God. Just ask Jonah.

On the other hand there is a unique sense of flourishing that comes from being deeply connected in relationship with him. Jesus described it as being like a vine with branches (John 15). We were created to live life with an ongoing connection to God: seeing life through His eyes, going through our days with His passions beating in our hearts. That’s what I’ve been exploring at a deeper level lately.

Here’s one thing I’ve been discovering: joy is one of the by-products of this Presence. I think of it as the God’s cologne which lets you know he’s somewhere in the immediate vicinity. Joy is different than happiness: happiness is a temporary delight from temporary circumstances. Joy is a lasting sense of well-being that will outlast temporary circumstances.

I’m learning to take that sense of His joy more seriously. Joy is important because it’s good. Grin for grin it’s a better value than happiness and a lot less fragile.

But tracking joy more closely also tends to unearth some weird stuff that can distort my worldview. For instance, I tend to get spooked by my own unhappiness. If my internal weather report is cloudy I’ll begin to assume that things are going badly in life. That’s actually a pretty atheist/humanist kind of approach. It assumes a bunch of things that don’t sync with the gospel very well: that events in life need to meet my approval, that I’m the one who’s best-qualified to judge what’s good or bad in life, and that my happiness index should consistently rise over time. It puts me at the center.

On the other hand, if I re-accept God’s hand in my world then it becomes easier for me to rest in a general sense that God’s on the job and that Rom. 8:28 somehow still applies. For instance, suppose God should grant me joy tomorrow without providing me with a corresponding degree of happiness? Would I be OK with that?

When I slide in my humanist bad habits I tend to over-value happiness and I begin to freak over each potential unhappy thing that might come my way. In short, I worry. Sometimes a lot. But when I shift my focus to tracking His joy more than I track my happiness I find that things change. Then I can be OK without having to be happy. That tends to make life a lot easier in a world that sometimes refuses to bend to my will.

Here’s what lies behind the whole discovery of joy: God really loves me, loves us. It’s not simply that God approves us or accepts us or even if committed to us whether He happens to like it or not. The mystery of the Gospel inevitably leads us to the startling discovery that God is awfully fond of you, and of me. When we come to terms with that everything else in the Christian faith becomes a lot easier. But until we dare accept his heavenly hug everything else in the Bible seems like a burden.

I’m not fully there yet…God’s still working on me with that. But he’s still working on me. He used the book The Shack to move me along in this area. I'm slowly getting used to the idea of being really special in God’s eyes.

3. Pride is a heavy weight to carry.
A long time ago I seem to have concluded that I needed to take myself very seriously, since it appeared that no one else was likely to do that for me. And so I developed a habit of being very concerned about how I would do in life, and what people would think of me, how I would come across.

This can be a clumsy trait for a preacher. It’s hard to help people see that God is great when I’m also hoping they’ll notice that the preacher is pretty good. That’s an understandable, maybe even inevitable, concern but it requires a lot of extra energy to worry about.

I’m learning that Jesus has called us to a life that’s a lot easier. As Matthew tells us He calls us to seek first His kingdom, promising that He’ll take care of all our other concerns as well.

I find it’s pretty easy for me to get confused on this point. (As you may have noticed, it’s actually pretty easy for me to get confused on a wide variety of important issues.) Fortunately God has a really effective way of helping me re-center on this point: He leads me into situations where I might not end up looking very good. Perhaps it’s because His particular leading for me may be misunderstood by others, at other times it may simply be due to ways in which I might screw something up. In any case, any dip in the ratings can quickly bring into question whose reputation I’m most concerned. It’s hard to serve both God and reputation. (Although I’m still hoping you’ll really like this blog post!)

If I were to look for a summary theme through these three lessons I think it would have to do with how big of a God I expect to find in the coming year. God has this way of shrinking or expanding to match our expectations for Him. To the extent that I try to hold my future in my own hands I’ll probably have a rough time of things: I’ll try to be someone I’m not, I’ll fret over my level of happiness and I’ll worry about my reputation. On the other hand, if I’m following a God who has created me to fit exactly into His good plans, who is committed to sustaining me in His joy and will grant me whatever level of success is needed for me to be accomplish my mission…well, then I’ll be set for the coming year.

How about you--I'd love to hear comments about what God's been teaching YOU.

The Gospel According to Metallica

2009-12-23T15:42:00.000-08:00

(The conclusion of a 4-part series)

Many communities have some kind of small, classifieds-only newspaper designed to offer want ads or job postings to people in their city. For a long time one such paper in the Los Angeles area has been the Recycler. In early 1981 a teen named Lars Ulrich posted an ad in the Recycler looking for other musicians who were interested in jamming with him. Guitarist James Hetfield and another musician responded to the ad, and that first jam session eventually resulted in the group we know as Metallica.

By the mid-eighties Lars and James, along with Kirk Hammett and Cliff Burton had helped create a new genre of rock music known as “thrash metal”. In the eyes (and ears) of many, thrash metal offered a refreshing alternative to the spandex-makeup-and-big-hair that had begun to define mainstream rock. Thrash metal artists like Metallica played louder, faster and with a sharper sense of defiance than most artists dared portray. Their combination of tremendous technical skill and raw fury touched something inside listeners that groups like Kiss or Aerosmith could never reach. Metallica brought rage into the world of popular music industry.

Why would a Christian listen to Metallica?

Many Christians tend to shy away from artists like Metallica. We assume that anyone venting that much rage couldn’t possibly have much to offer towards a biblical worldview. A few years ago a pastor friend of mine, John Van Sloten, presented a sermon on the gospel according to Metallica, which began to tip my worldview in this area.

I’m finding that taking artists like Metallica seriously can help us dig more deeply into some easily overlooked themes in the scriptures. You might be surprised what we can discover in the Gospel when it’s refracted through Metallica.

Typically we tend to shy away from some of the more gruesome parts of the Bible, hoping to sanitize it into a form more appropriate for religious greeting cards. A God who would release deadly plagues on the nation of Egypt, arbitrarily killing a nation’s generation of first-born children, seems shockingly out of place in most bible story books. But somehow that vindictive rage shown by God seems a little less fundamentalist when described by Metallica: “Die by my hand, I creep across the land, killing first-born man. Die by my hand…” (from Creeping Death).

But why would someone want to revel in that kind of ugliness? Sure these scenes are in the Bible, but what’s the benefit in dwelling on them?

Artists like Metallica can help us come to terms with the fact that some things in life just aren’t right. We live in a world that’s not like it’s supposed to be.

We were told this, to be fair. Way back in the Garden of Eden God warned us that if we rejected him life in our world would begin to unravel, and we’ve been dealing with this twistedness ever since. In our world if you’re born poor or with the “wrong” skin color you’ll find that you’ve drawn “The Shortest Straw”. You don’t have to get very far into “And Justice For All” to pick up Metallica’s protest to the blatant unfairness that has soaked into our way of life. “Justice is raped…”

And God looks down from heaven and says…YES!

While we stare at him in disbelief He immediately points us to the Minor Prophets where He’s been unsuccessfully to get his people to protest like that for years.

“For I know how many are your offenses and how great your sins. You oppress the righteous and take bribes and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts.” (Amos 5:12)

No one calls for justice; no one pleads his case with integrity. They rely on empty arguments and speak lies. They conceive trouble and give birth to evil. (Isaiah 59:3-4)

There is a conspiracy of her princes within her like a roaring lion Her officials within her are like wolves tearing their prey; they shed blood and kill people to make unjust gain. The people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the alien, denying them justice. (Ezekiel 22:25, 27, 29)

“But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like an never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:24)

But the suffering in scripture isn’t limited to the impersonal pain of far-off victims. The Bible is filled with the stories of real people experiencing real pain—the same kinds of pain we experience. The members of Metallica are no different than us in that regard. In interviews the various band members tells stories of a father who never came back from a business trip, of a mother who died young of a preventable cause, of parents whose marriage was scarred by a father’s abuse. The entire band reeled from the death of Cliff Burton, their first bassist, whose death threw the rest of the band off-balance for more than a decade.

Life is painful: not just for the anonymous people behind the headlines, but for people like us. That’s what led the prophet Jeremiah to burst out:

“Curse the day I was born! The day my mother bore me, a curse on it, I say! And curse the man who delivered the news to my father: "You've got a new baby--a boy baby!" (How happy it made him.) Let that birth notice be blacked out, deleted from the records, And the man who brought it haunted to his death with the bad news he brought. He should have killed me before I was born, with that womb as my tomb, My mother pregnant for the rest of her life with a baby dead in her womb. Why, oh why, did I ever leave that womb? Life's been nothing but trouble and tears, and what's coming is more of the same.” (Jeremiah 20:14-18, The Message).

In their song Fixxer, the band throws out the same complaint:

But tell me

Can you heal what father’s done?

Or fix this hole in mother’s son?

Can you heal the broken worlds within?

Can you strip away so we may start again?

That’s anger. Anger for a reason.

But you can’t hold anger forever. Eventually something’s got to give: your health, your relationships, your sanity. Sooner or later it seems that the irresistible force of anger ultimately crumbles every immovable object we might place in its path. You can hear that in Metallica’s music. It’s hard to imagine anyone putting more raw passion into any one song. Eventually something’s got to give.

And finally it did. Suddenly the scene switches to a hill outside Jerusalem where Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is ripped from his Father by the force of a wrath that we’d never even imagined before. If you’ve seen the movie “The Passion of the Christ” you can probably form a picture of the scene. What you’re seeing is the wrath of God coming down like a city bus on an unsuspecting pedestrian.

You can sense that tragedy on Golgotha in The God That Failed :

I see faith in your eyes

Never you hear the discouraging lies

I hear faith in your cries

Broken is the promise, betrayal

The healing hand held back by the deepened nail

Follow the god that failed…

Trust you gave, a child to save

Left you cold and him in grave…

But wait a minute—was that scene really a failure? We sometimes twist this story into a narrow, judgmental caricature of a God who doesn’t like to be crossed. But if you look at how God presents this event you find something surprising: an anger even greater than that of Metallica. Not simply the anger of irritation or wounded pride. Not even the anger of injustice or abuse. This is the anger of a Creator who knows better than any of us just how right this world was created to be, and just how wrong it has now become since Genesis 3 spoiled everything.

Yes, eventually something has to give.

But suddenly the scene switches again. Now we see the risen Jesus Christ appearing in John’s vision in Revelation 21. Surveying the final arrival of his Kingdom He states it simply: I am making everything new (Rev. 21:5). God says HERE is where you can point your anger. Let your anger surface, grieve mourn and wail as it ripens into a longing for the world that we were made for, the one we ache for in our bones.

Sounds like gospel to me.

Yes, strangely enough, Metallica leads me to Jesus. Not that the band members themselves have discovered that yet. It appears that they haven’t, at least so far. But here’s what I’m learning: readers of the Bible need to understand voices like Metallica’s to read the Bible more vividly, just as listeners of Metallica need to turn to the Bible to find somewhere they can go with their rage. Each side needs the other.

If you’ve stuck with me all the way to the end of this blog post, chances are that you can feel some of what Metallica voices so powerfully. You get it. Maybe you have lived with some of the same kinds of pain that members of the band have experienced.

But then let me ask you: where do you go with your anger, with whatever particular cocktail of hurt and brokenness life has mixed in your heart? Do you shake your fist at Heaven, giving voice to your frustration? Or do you try your best to give God the silent treatment? (not a small feat, given His omniscience). And how do you picture God responding? Maybe, like many, you sense God wrinkling His nose in irritation at your bitterness. Maybe you wonder if He even notices at all.

If God were oblivious to our suffering, then it would seem that He has wasted a lot of valuable space in the Bible to include all those laments and protests that he packed into there. Why in the world would He include all that ugly stuff if He only wanted us to make nice? On the contrary, God goads us on in our protests, even giving us some good lines to throw back at Him.

God is serious about our protests, because the more we feel just how wrong life still is, the more we begin to realize just how right his redemption will be. If your world only needs a little tweaking to make it right, you’ll only look for a little help from God. But when we discover a little more of just how twisted God’s creations has become we’re able to make room for a much bigger, deeper, more powerful kind of redemption. The kind that doesn’t simply make things a little better, but makes things new.

Chances are God has raised the stakes for you, forcing you to look for a redemption that’s real enough to change a world like yours. He’s goading you on, looking to finally do some business with you as you creep towards redemption.

What are you waiting for?

The Gospel According to U2 ("Still Looking?")

2009-12-21T12:18:00.000-08:00

(#3 in a series of 4)

On Sept. 25, 1976, 14-year-old Larry Mullen, Jr. had some new friends over to his house. He’d posted an ad at school for starting a band and had gotten several takers. He invited them to a meeting in his kitchen to begin what was to be The Larry Mullen Band. Mullen explains that that dream lasted for about 10 minutes until a particularly high-wattage student named Paul Hewson (nicknamed Bono Vox after a local hearing aid shop) walked in and blew away the chances of anyone else even trying to lead the band. Four years later a record deal…the rest, as they say, is album sales.

In the years since that first meeting, U2 has become not only a primary band in the secular music world, but certainly the largest Christian secular band.

The work of U2 offers a textbook example of how deeply our backgrounds shape our Christian beliefs. While certainly the written truths in scripture are to be taken at face value, our experiences in life have a dramatic effect on just how we take those beliefs at face value. For instance, just imagine how different the sermons you hear are from the whatever sermons are furtively shared in a house church in a persecuted 3^rd World setting.

U2 came together against a very turbulent setting. Their childhood was spent against the backdrop of “The Troubles” in Ireland, where Protestant-Catholic tensions had created strife that was only inches away from a civil war. Bono himself was the child of a mixed home, with a Protestant mother and Catholic father. His mother died when he was 10, and his relationship with his father was very conflicted. Furthermore, as the band developed three of the four members were part of a Christian community that pressured them to choose between their church and their band. Leaving that community was a difficult experience for them.

As a result, U2 writes their songs against a backdrop of pain. Listen, for instance, to Sunday, Bloody Sunday, one of their early anthems protesting the British attack against unarmed demonstrators in the town of Derry in Northern Ireland. This was for Ireland what the Kent State attacks were for US during the Viet Nam era.

In contrast with other bands, such as The Clash, U2 were not promoting anarchy. They offered hope, but hope that seeped in through the wreckage of war.

Experiences like these will inevitably result in a different approach to Christianity. Here in the United States today we tend to avoid ambiguity. We prefer them clearly laid out, cut-and-dried. (“Would you like fries with those commandments, sit?”)

Take, for example, our understanding of Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son, as we know it from Luke 15. A typical reading of the story renders it pretty simply: there’s a good guy and a bad guy, and by the end the bad guy becomes another good guy.

It can be easy to miss a lot in a story like that. For instance, why didn’t the father give his “bad son” a decent hearing with his apology? He cut him off before he could roll into the confession that he’d been struggling with for weeks. Or, why did Jesus leave the “good son” out in the cold at the end of the story? That’s no happily-ever-after. And perhaps more troubling, why do most of us hope our kids grow up to be older brothers? Frankly, we could do worse than have our kids grow up to hard-working responsible types who don’t ask for much, not even a goat.

My point is this: questions like these are troubling, because they can lead to tension and ambiguity. And so we avoid them, to our detriment.

What we miss in our compulsive clarity is that the Christian faith is not merely a religion, it’s a relationship. And relationships tend to be messy, conflicted things.

Religion is generally pretty simple: either you sign on or you don’t. If our Christianity is primarily a religion with rules and doctrines and facts to memorize, then it will ultimately be pretty easy to draw the lines to determine who’s in, who’s out.

A relationship, on the other hand, tend to be a lot more complicated than that. Compare getting vaccinated to getting married. Both can be accomplished in less than an hour, yet the one can still remain a mystery decades later.

The music of U2 is marbled with tensions and ambiguity. For the First Time portrays the ambivalence of the sons in the Luke 15 parable, and all of us in our exile from Eden. Until the End of the World offers a poignant portrayal of Judas reaching out for Jesus from the afterlife. And the tension in Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For is self-explanatory.

The cumulative effect of a library of U2 music is to deepen our ache for shalom. Shalom is the Hebrew word describing a situation where everything is right, as it should be. Take every TV ad you’ve ever seen for luxury cars, for investment firms and for brands of beer and morph them all together. The end result will be a brittle concept of shalom.

U2 helps us ache for shalom. A society like ours can tend to numb us, keeping us too busy to ache much for anything. A band like U2, and a man like Bono, help keep our wounds just raw enough that they can really heal.

Have you ever been famished and had just a tiny nibble to hold you until dinner? (In a family with three growing sons that seems to happen to someone on a daily basis). A bite-sized sample of a coming dinner can only leave you more hungry than before. U2 hungers for shalom, not because they haven’t found anything, but because what they’ve found has only whet their appetites for more. They tasted the feast of the Kingdom, but discovered that dinner might not be served for a while. Jesus put it this way: Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Question: if God gave you the choice between being numb and being healed, which would you choose? The fact is most of the things I bring to God in prayer probably fall into the category of pain-relievers. I want my nuisances to go away, my impatience to be satisfied, and my guilt and shame to subside.

Fortunately God loves me too much to merely give me spiritual ibuprofen to mask my lack of shalom. I have a growing sense that many of the things I most resist in my life are actually there to play some part in my healing.

God loves us too much to merely numb us into complacency. Instead he prompts us to ache for the Shalom that rings through the pages of scripture. On a good day, that makes sense to me.

So when’s dinner? I'm starving.

The Gospel According to Michael Jackson ("Is This It?")

2009-12-18T07:00:00.000-08:00

(#2 in a series of 4)

It’s a long ways from Gary, IN to Neverland Ranch. When I was a boy I lived close enough to Gary to smell it. The community where my family and I were safely tucked away was only about 15 miles from Gary; I would look at the interstate frontage as we drove to visit family in Michigan for holidays. Like most of my neighbors, though, I never actually set foot in Gary. It was a certain kind of town for only certain kinds of people. Through no merit of my own, I wasn’t one of those people.

I could, however, smell the town when the wind blew from the right direction. Whenever the breeze shifted to the northeast the industrial stench from the steel mills in Gary would drift over Lansing IL, and for a few hours that distant world clouded my own. When that happened I was forced to go inside and enjoy the air conditioning.

During those same years a crane operator at one of those steel mills was doing what he could to earn a living for his wife and 9 children. Feeding all those growing children was tough, and so Joseph Jackson did what he could to moonlight in an R-and-B band. As his sons grew he discovered that they shared his love of music. He helped his sons form a group, eventually called the Jackson 5. They even had little Jermaine and Michael singing back-ups and working their tambourines.

Eventually the little guys worked their way to the front. And after that the littlest guy, Michael, became the solo front singer for their group. And they were amazing. Polished, singing with an ease and maturity beyond their years. (Check out their videos on Youtube sometime. I’ve been to a lot of elementary school music programs; trust me, they didn’t look anything like that!) They didn’t look at all like Gary, they looked like Hollywood.

What no one knew at the time was that behind those practiced smiles was a domineering father who supervised the endless rehearsals with his belt ready to enforce his authority. As various family members have explained in interviews, if you made mistakes you “got your butt tore up pretty good”.

Over time Michael Jackson moved from the front singer to THE singer, launching his solo career as the groups star began to decline. He emerged on the scene just about the time a new music-video network was getting established: MTV. Michael and MTV fit like a marriage made in Neverland. Before Michael Jackson MTV videos were mostly promotional footage for bands, showing concert footage and studio shenanigans of long-haired musicians. But Michael reinvented the music video, shaping it into a form of cinema in its own right. Billie Jean translated the classic detective movie into a musical form, Beat It re-invented West Side Story, and Thriller blew everyone away as the ghouls quietly emerged from their graves, clearly showing “the soul for getting down”.

In all of these, Michael was amazing. He could chase away the bad guys, he could reconcile rival street gangs, he could tame the dreaded ghouls from the graveyard…just by dancing! He could fly loops around the globe faster than you could say “Black or White”.

And it wasn’t just that he was good. Michael Jackson’s ability transcended whatever limitations mere mortals like you and me had to live with. Gravity didn’t seem to hold him, the basic laws of physics were no more than mere guidelines as he moonwalked across the stage, sliding and bending in ways that only cartoon characters can hope for.

He made it look easy. That was the thing, really—watching Michael Jackson made you think you could be cool. For a few minutes even a heavy-footed, Midwest white boy could imagine gliding and sliding gracefully, every move just perfect. A few weeks ago I watched “This Is It”, the tribute movie hastily thrown together for Michael Jackson. It was fascinating to watch him: a relentless perfectionist, working very hard making it look that easy.

Unfortunately Michael Jackson’s videos all ended after 5 or 10 minutes, only to leave me disappointingly aware that this middle-aged preacher wasn’t going to dance that smoothly any more than he was going to juggle chainsaws.

Of course, I knew that would happen…it happens every time. But still…something inside me can’t shake the idea that I was meant to be awesome.

And it’s at this point that God looks down on me from heaven and says…“You think?”

It’s right about then that I’m driven to Gen. 3 where I’m told that things were created to be awesome, that life was intended to be elegant and powerful and nothing was supposed to feel bleak or heavy or clumsy. And once again I’m driven to realize that even though you can take people out of Eden, you can’t quite take the Eden out of people.

C.S. Lewis once wrote: "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. … Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing."

Michael Jackson’s smoothness made us ache to get past the clumsiness of this life that we consider “real”. We ache to moonwalk our way from our individual Gary, Indianas, to whatever Neverland might be waiting for us in the pleasant hills of Santa Barbara. We ache for that…only to find that we can’t get there from here.

And, of course, the media have always made it very clear that not even Michael Jackson was actually as cool as Michael Jackson seemed to be. The signs of an unsatisfied longing were obvious: the compulsive plastic surgery (reportedly spurred by his father’s verbal abuse accusing him of being ugly, having a big nose, etc.). The various rumors and sexual charges that, at the very least, proved some serious eccentricity. In fact, the man just seemed…bizarre, even before he dangled his child off that balcony.

Michael Jackson presented something that he probably didn’t have a whole lot of himself: hope. The hope of escaping the heavy drudgery which turns our loving into conflict, our creativity into mere day jobs and the creation itself into a series of environmental crises.

1 Peter 1 talks about the “inexpressible and glorious joy” that can be ours through Christ. Not because we can finally Beat It, but because Christ himself will someday wipe every tear from our eyes, restoring the glory that we ache to see here in Gary Indiana.

I can almost—but not quite—get used to living in the bleakness of life after Eden. But when I see magic set to music something inside me is roused to eager expectation, if only for a few minutes.

The man may have had flaws, but he helped us ache past our own.

The Gospel According to The Beatles ("All You Need is...What?")

2009-12-16T07:00:00.000-08:00

(First in a four-part series.)

If you’ve ever gotten truly filthy, you know how good it can feel to get cleaned up. Maybe it’s a long day landscaping, or a really good mud football game, or a long-distance run in the rain. Once you get inside there’s nothing like the feeling of a long, hot shower and the chance to slip into some clean, dry clothes. You start to feel human again.

I can imagine how that feeling must have swept across Britain after the horrors of World War 2. After the endless years of air raid sirens, gutted buildings and children sent away to hide in the country it must have felt wonderful to simply settle down again. To get cleaned up once again. It’s not surprising, then, that the years following the war on both sides of the Atlantic were marked by an exaggerated sense of tidiness: the “Leave It To Beaver” era.

But it was during these years of tidiness that a new wave of children were entering their parents’ world—the Baby Boom. They arrived untouched by the grime of their parents’ nightmares; they just wanted to have fun. What had felt snug and secure to their parents began to feel sterile and confining to them. Soon voices of protest began to emerge.

One of the first of these voices came from a group of young boys from the working-class town of Liverpool, in England. They were crude, but clever, and they gained a following by gently poking fun of their parents’ generation. Eventually they were discovered by a record shop owner who offered to serve as their manager, and they were whisked off to Hamburg Germany where they served as a non-stop opening act for various all-night strip clubs there. After several months of (amphetamine-boosted) marathon performances they returned to England, exhausted. Eventually this trial by fire forged The Beatles.

Despite their humble start, The Beatles’ creativity rattled English society, like a shot of tequila at tea-time. They only stayed together 9 years, yet in less than a decade they changed everything musically.

How? They expressed an ache that many Baby Boomers had been feeling but couldn’t quite express. Whether in the cute romance of I Saw Her Standing There, the melancholy grieving of She’s Leaving Home or the wistful longing for community in Yellow Submarine, The Beatles’ music somehow made it easier to believe that there was more to life than dear old dad and mum might ever imagine. All you need is love, right?

Really?

The problem, of course, was to figure out just what they were actually longing for. Albums like the landmark Sgt. Pepper sharpened and deepened that desire, without pointing towards a clear remedy. The group wandered in and out of a variety of world-view alternatives, including Eastern religions, without finding something credible to hang their spiritual hats on. And ironically, it was during the years of this search that the Beatles themselves began to unravel in some very unloving ways. By the time their two final albums were released the band members were facing each other in court, squabbling over everything from money to creative differences. All you need is love…and a bigger share of the groups’ royalties.

The Beatles had a point—there is more to life than material possessions. At the same time, The Beatles were ultimately pointless—they had no idea what might present a better alternative. And they apparently didn’t know that they didn’t know that.

In the Beatitudes Jesus encouraged us to grieve our inability to straighten out our worlds. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” he said in the Sermon on the Mount, urging us to recognize the futility of creating our own “Octupus’ Gardens, in the shade.”

Furthermore, the Bible makes it clear that there is only one place to turn to get things straightened out in life. In Col. 1:15-23 we’re told that Christ is the only one who can reconcile that which is ruined. To discover the gospel involves grieving our complete inability to fix things in order to cling tightly to the One who can.

We can’t do this on our own. Left to our own devices we will pendulum-swing from one disaster to another. The 60’s “free love” led to the STD’s of the 80’s and the broken families of the 90’s and the hopelessness marked by the children of those generations.

The Beatles helped us ache for that “long and winding road” that might lead us to healing. What they didn’t realize was that that path was actually straight and narrow.

Discovering the Gospel in Rock Music

2009-12-14T21:26:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about popular music a lot lately, as our church has just finished a series of services looking at the topic. I’m going to use my next series of blog posts to reflect on that. For more on the series, visit www.gatheringchurch.org.

A generation or two ago most Christians were keeping their distance from the disturbing new music known as “Rock ‘n’ Roll”. There were enough concerns about Elvis (“the Pelvis”) Presley and others of his ilk to convince most decent church folk to keep their distance. It just didn’t seem normal and it certainly wasn’t godly.

Today things have changed greatly; for better or for worse. In most Christian families children listen to a variety of popular music stations without hesitation, and their parents may have their own blend of classic, heavy metal, or light rock artists. Most believers rarely question the fact that all these hours of listening time are devoted to secular music, any more than they might question all the hours they spend watching secular TV. After all, who would seriously consider watching only Christian TV?

Clearly our idea of normal has shifted, along with our listening habits. Is that a good thing?

Right about this point this conversation usually veers directly into questioning the lifestyles of various rock artists, their dubious credibility as role models, etc. While these are valid questions, Christians have generally found a way to separate the music of their artists from their lifestyles. Spend a little time reading up on the personal lives of Mozart, for example, (much less Tchaikovsky) to be reminded of God’s ability to inspire amazing art from flawed individuals.

This blog is not intended to pursue that conversation, as it has already gotten enough column inches during the past several decades. Instead, I believe there is a far more important conversation that’s been generally neglected: finding hints of the Gospel in rock music. Throughout the astonishing breath of the popular music industry one can find hints and urges that, if followed, can lead us directly to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

(Now that sounds like a gimmicky seeker-friendly way to try to lure people into your church! Why not just preach the gospel rather than going all Hollywood about it? If we’re not careful we could lose our bearings!)

If you read Acts 17 sometime you may be surprised to see the Apostle Paul losing his bearings in the city of Athens. As any decent Jewish Christ-follower could tell you, Athens was dangerous. In a first-century world where people collected false gods and goddesses as a hobby, Athens was one of the destinations of choice for someone who really wanted to get serious about it. Athens was for idolaters what Las Vegas is for problem gamblers.

Paul found himself with time to kill in Athens. He’d run into trouble in another city and had to leave town quickly. His supporters brought him to Athens where he would then wait for Silas and Timothy to join him later. Before long, Paul had found the Jewish synagogue and had begun challenging folks with the news of Jesus Christ. One thing led to another and before long he’d gotten sucked into the whole “pantheon of gods” scene. Before you could say “abomination” he found himself talking face to face with some of the big names in idol worship.

The Greek idolaters seemed to get a kick out of Paul. They kept goading him with questions and challenges. Eventually Paul hit pay dirt. Pointing to the Altar of the Unknown God (their catch-all for whatever deity they may have failed to invent along the way) Paul looked them in the eyes and made his pitch: I know about this mystery god. Let me tell you about the god you’re already worshipping.

There was a method in Paul’s madness. Although in most Jewish eyes he probably seemed to be compromising in his efforts to recruit followers of Jesus Christ, he was actually making surgical strike in a spiritual hot-spot in their world. Instead of lobbing the gospel at the Athenians from the outside, bellowing condemnation like Jonah in Nineveh, he found something they were already looking for and joined them in their search. He came alongside of them, respectfully but with full integrity, and helped them with the search they were already on.

There’s a lot that we can learn from Paul’s approach. Often we approach evangelism as if everyone “out there” were spiritually tone-deaf and needed to be rebuked into the gospel faith. While rebellion has indeed spread throughout humanity like a spiritual H1N1 virus, the fact is that many people around us are longing for Christ’s redemption, but may not know it yet.

In Romans 8 Paul explained that there’s an ache inside each one of us: a deep-seated sense that life could be, should be more that what it is—but isn’t. Rom. 8:22 assures this that this is real. All creation, we’re told, groans in expectation waiting for God’s redemption to be fully ushered in. But sometimes we can get so used to this nagging ache that we lose our sense of it. When we lose our ability to ache we lose our sense of redemption and our awareness of the gospel.

One of the reasons why it can be important for Christians to follow popular music is that popular artists often have an instinctive way of tapping into this chronic ache. Let’s face it, when an artist is able to sell millions of albums he or she is clearly offering a lot more than a catchy melody or rhythm line. Somehow, on a deep level, that artist has been able to connect with something that a lot of potential fans are feeling. A best-selling artist is able to, in some way, provide listeners with a shock of recognition: “yes, I feel like that, too!”

Thoughtful listening to popular music can go a long way in helping us rediscover the human ache for God and the redemption He offers us. The particular artists may or may not have anything helpful to offer to help with this ache, but they can undo a lot of the numbness that the followers of Jesus can sometimes develop.

In the next four posts on this blog I’d like to share some reflections on how this ache for God can be seen in the music of The Beatles, Michael Jackson (yes, that Michael Jackson), U2 and Metallica.

These four artists each speak to the inner ache many of us would just as soon avoid. By exploring the significance of their voices we can re-discover important aspects of the gospel.

Downstream

2009-12-03T12:32:00.000-08:00

It's surprising how easily you can get swept away in a river. I remember swimming with our family once in a mountain river near us ("Ruck-a-Chucky" -- isn't that a fun name to say 10 times in a row?)...I remember wading in the icy, waist-deep water and barely being able to stand still. The water wasn't moving all that fast, but it was still powerful enough to give the power of gravity a good run for its money.

Now ordinarily it's not that hard to stand still. Mostly it requires, well, just standing there. But standing still presents a whole new challenge when the lower half of your body is surrounded by slowly moving water. There's a power called buoyancy which makes your body a lot less heavy. And once you start to lose your traction even the slowest current can start to take you away. The waters there were pretty calm and so we weren't in any danger, but I still remember how hard it was to simply stand still. I'd lift my arms out of the water, stretching as tall as I could out of the buoyant water to get as much weight on my feet as I could. Reaching up seemed to shift my center of gravity and help me settle back down. But even then my feet would still slip easily through the sand.

I find the same thing can happen when surrounded by the currents of busyness. When I go through seasons where the events on my calendar want to sweep me downstream I find myself feeling like a one-armed paperhanger. Soon I'm struggling simply to get settled into who I'm supposed to be and what I'm supposed to be doing...

(Oops--just got a text about something I was supposed to have done by now. Bummer. But back to my train of thought)

...and soon it can feel surprisingly difficult to simply stand still. To "be still and know that (He) is God" as Psalm 46 says.

What helps, I've found, is to raise my hands. Reaching up seems to change my spiritual center of gravity and help me feet to settle back down on terra firma. I don't know exactly how He does it, but God seems to put my feet back on solid ground (Psalm 40:2).

Ever have that?

"Zoom" Adjustments

2009-12-01T10:30:00.000-08:00

It’s not easy to live with suspense. I find I talk to a lot of people who are living with a profound sense of suspense: will I lose my house? Will I lose my job? Will I ever find another one? As a church planter it seems like my own life has been up in the air for a long time.

As Christians, of course, we know we’re supposed to pray about these kinds of struggles, and the Bible seems to indicate that prayer should help us discover a certain kind of peace about things. But saying our prayers doesn’t necessarily seem to change how things look, at least right away. And that can be unnerving.

I’m writing these words on my laptop computer, sitting on my patio. One of the things I like about writing on a computer is the “zoom” feature. Sitting here with my laptop on the top of my…uh, lap I find that the text can seem a little bit too small to read easily. I might just crane my neck and try to squint to track whatever it is I’ve just written. But that looks funny and can get really uncomfortable after a while. What works much better is to go to the “View” menu, click “Zoom” and then simply make all the text appear bigger. With a few gestures on the touchpad (or better yet, keyboard shortcuts!) I suddenly find that everything is so much easier to keep in perspective.

Back to the suspense thing. I wonder if there is a “Zoom” feature in our lives that we need to learn to use. Maybe even develop a few keyboard shortcuts for.

Here’s how it seems to work for me. I find that most of my suspense comes from things that await me in my future. Problems that may come up next week, next month or even next year. Sometimes I can even fret on the basis of a career trajectory or retirement plan. Actually I’m a pretty nimble worrier: I can switch almost instantly from worrying about catching a traffic light green to worrying about what I’ll do when I retire several decades from now. Maybe it’s a mid-life thing.

So here’s what I’ve noticed: the Bible speaks very bluntly about our worry, but much of what it says seems to focus on my daily needs. In His pattern prayer Jesus tells us we should pray “give us this day our ~~annual~~ daily bread”. He also cautions us (in Matthew) to let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day, since each day has enough trouble of its own. And after all that’s how the whole manna meal plan worked in the desert; one day at a time.

Then it occurs to me, maybe my problem is that I need to set my mental “zoom” to the daily setting, not a weekly or monthly or annual view. And that really seems to help. If I adjust the zoom so all I can see is today, God’s faithfulness seems obvious. “By His great love I am not consumed; His mercies are new every morning. Great is His faithfulness” (to borrow words from Lamentations 3). One day’s needs matched up with one day’s grace. Not bad.

But if I zoom back to include more of the future, then suddenly a lot more questions pop up in front of me. Now I'm now faced with 365 days worth of needs pitted against only one days’ grace. I’ve got 365 times more problems than I have grace to deal with them. That looks a lot more dismal. And if I start to think a few decades ahead things can get pretty overwhelming pretty quickly.

So…one of my spiritual disciplines is to learn to re-set my zoom setting to daily more often. And sure enough, I keep finding that His mercies are new every morning, and that each day I’m given my daily bread.

I can live with that.

The Last-Minute God

2009-11-14T20:42:00.000-08:00

Do you ever get the impression that God doesn't mind letting you struggle? Perhaps by design ("builds character!"), or maybe just by accident?

Sometimes it can seem like Gods having to scramble a bit to take care of our basic needs? Like he maybe didn't really plan ahead and so like a procrastinating student he's having to cram his Providence in at the last minute, just before your life slides into the brink. That doesn't make much sense to me, but I see it nonetheless. He's the Almighty, with the limitless resources of Heaven at his disposal, and yet he so often seems to delay his care for us until the very last minute. And even then he usually ends up wanting us to do a lot of the heavy lifting. The suspense of following a last-minute God like that can really rattle your nerves.

It drives me crazy, actually. While I'm glad God has cared for me along the way, sometimes I just want to feel SAFE, to feel SETTLED. Instead of worrying about whether he'll come through I'd just like to be able to see that he's already thought through everything I will need.

Seems like he's always been that way. Take, for instance, the day that Jesus ran out of food with all those people. The crowd had gathered, the air was thick with the Holy Spirit and the time must have flown by. Suddenly the day had ended and people were fading fast. Nobody had eaten anything. Jesus turns to his disciples, apparently dumbfounded. Instead of doing something properly Son-of-God like and zapping some rocks into bread, he tries to hand the situation off to his 12 followers. "You feed them", he said (Mark 6). They tried to get him to wrap his mind around the situation. "Eight months' wages wouldn't feed this crowd!"

But Jesus didn't get it. He just wanted to know how much food they did have. He was apparently hoping that the crowd had somehow thought to bring along several thousand picnic baskets. Maybe he was stalling for time. Can you imagine how stupid you feel as a disciple going around asking people if they happen to have a lunch big enough to feed five or ten thousand people?

They came back with one lunch, from a little boy who hadn't eaten it yet. Jesus took the five rolls and two fish and turned his face toward heaven to give God thanks. Have you ever heard someone say thank-you in a way that made it clear that there was more to the story than you'd realized? Jesus gave God that kind of thank-you. And then he started distributing the rolls and the fish, breaking them off. And darned if that lunch didn't keep spreading until baskets of it had been spread throughout the thousands of people who were now watching in stunned silence.

By this point the disciples were the ones who were dumbfounded. They'd just experienced first-hand something that couldn't be explained. They'd handed the boy's lunch to Jesus, they'd heard the thank-you he gave the Father, and then they'd seen those little rolls and the dried fish somehow prove to be sufficient.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have felt like to be that little boy: "That was my lunch that Jesus took. I saw him do it--he broke up those rolls my mom made and started give them to the disciples. And he did the same thing with my dried fish!" The boy who'd probably resigned himself to walking home hungry now discovered what it felt like to be part of God providing more than they could ask or imagine.

What would that have felt like--to have been a first-hand player in a wonderful scene like that? I'm guessing that that little guy was never hungry in quite the same way again. Even if his belly emptied, I'd like to think that his hunger only served to remind him of the fact that food can be stretched to provide what's really needed. In fact he'd probably discovered something that can only be learned when you're hungry. And I'll bet he felt SAFE, even SETTLED; filled with the sense that God really has thought through everything.

All the things I'd like to feel like.

God apparently let him hunger in a way that would let him discover what it felt like to be truly filled.

I'd like to be like that boy when I grow up. In the meantime, here's my lunch, Lord.

Getting "Fed" by Your Preacher

2009-11-12T11:24:00.000-08:00

People often talk about the need to feel "fed" by their preachers. Secretly a lot us preacher-types cringe at those conversations, probably for a lot of different reasons.

Sometimes listeners can be "picky eaters" and so no matter what you put on their plates they're going to have low blood sugar by the time they turn on the Sunday afternoon sports on TV. Sometimes we cringe because we wish we had more to offer them--pastors with overflowing to-do lists have to deal with the reality that there simply isn't as much time as there should be to create a truly substantial meal. But sometimes we cringe because those kind of conversations can end up being vague, unhelpful volleys of cliches. What do people really NEED from a sermon?

Obviously, people need the Bible. Without that a preacher is merely slinging anecdotes and illustrations. But just because a preacher refers to a lot of Bible verses or really takes apart all the words in one passage doesn't mean people will walk out feeling fed. The reality is that there are different "food groups" listeners need from scripture, and heaping a congregation's plate full of an unneeded food group can still leave them strangely unsatisfied, even if bloated.

Here are three major food groups people need from sermons:

* Biblical information. What does the Bible say? People need to become familiar with what's in their Bibles. They need to learn important people and events recorded there, they need foundational doctrines presented in it, and most of all they need the simple, over-arching story of a perfect world, ruined by sin that's being reclaimed by Christ in anticipation of the day when all things are made new. If people don't know their Bibles nothing else will make sense.

* Biblical application. What does this mean I should do? Knowing scripture without knowing how to apply it can sometimes result in disappointingly little life-change. All the bible knowledge in the world will make very little difference if listeners never discover what it will look like for those teachings to be applied to their lives. What do they need to do differently because of what the Bible says to them?

* Biblical self-knowledge. Why do I often resist this? Biblical information and practical application alone won't necessarily bring change to someone's life if their heart isn't open to that transformation. The fact is that as fallen people our hearts instinctively resist receiving God's grace and sharing it with others. Our hearts can unexpectedly spasm, leaving them hardened against God's transformation. Preachers need to help listeners discover some of the more common ways in which the Enemy tricks us into turning our backs on the new life God offers.

These are three of the more common food groups needed in a sermon diet. One of the challenges facing preachers is that no two congregations have the same dietary needs, and and in fact no two listeners in any one church family need exactly the same thing. A preacher offering solid Biblical information may leave people starving for application, or sermons that are rich with application may ring flat if people aren't helped to open their hearts to receive what scripture offers.

Pray for your preacher as he or she plans your congregation's menu.

And then clean your plate when the meal is served.

A Call for You?

2009-11-07T19:02:00.000-08:00

Why do you do whatever it is you "do" in life? If you're a student, an executive, a lawnmower repairman or whatever it is...why did you decide to head in that direction? Chances are there may be some pretty good common sense reasons for your choice: a good opportunity, the need to pay bills, maybe the expectations of other around you.

When you become a pastor they don't talk like that. Suddenly the whole "what-to-do-when-you-grow-up" takes on a much more pious tone. You don't merely decide to become a pastor, you discern a call. Sounds a lot more mysterious--kind of like Jake and Elwood Blues deciding to get their band back together in Blues Brothers. That kind of talk is taken as normal for preacher-types, and I've had a lot of conversations where I've told people of the process through which God called me to serve him in full-time ministry.

But to a lot of people that kind of talk would sound funny applied to other jobs or professions. "When did you discern your call to drive that delivery truck?" "When did you discover God was calling you to be a personal-injury attorney? Somehow it seems strange to think of people in other jobs actually being called to those professions.

OK, let me get more specific with you: when did you first realize that God was calling you to (insert your job or school status here)? Chances are most non-minister types would look at me kind of funny in the face of a question like that. People may choose their jobs for an of a number of reasons, but a clear call from God usually isn't very high on the list.

That seems strange to me. The Bible speaks so clearly about God's plans for our lives: Eph. 2:10 reminds us that we are "God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which He prepared in advance for us to do". Psalm 139 assures us that "all the days ordained for (us) were written in His book before one of them came to be." If God has plans for every single day of our lives, and if there are some very specific reasons why you and I are exactly where we are--then wouldn't it make sense for us to ask God what He wants us to do? And if we start to get tired of whatever that was, wouldn't it make sense to ask Him again before jumping into whatever comes next.

In our denomination we take a minister's call very seriously. In fact there are pretty tight restrictions placed on people like me who have been called to ministry. I think that's good; if God called me to something I should think twice before jumping into something else just for a change. What if we did that with substitute teachers or computer techs or with oil change specialists?

When Jesus Got Distracted

2009-11-04T16:33:00.000-08:00

I grew up with the idea that Jesus was all about the cross. Somehow I got the impression that the events of Holy Week the only real priorities for him. It never really occurred to me to wonder what He'd been up to for the three years of his public ministry before that week, or even the thirty years of his life, for that matter. Seems like a long ramp-up process, especially for the Son of God.

Actually, if you read the Gospel accounts you begin to get the sense that Jesus got off-task quite a bit. He almost comes off as having a little bit of redemptive A.D.D: just when he's working up a good head of steam about our sins...HEY LOOK GUYS, A LEPER! And off He'd go, getting all caught up healing some disabled person or talking about giving a cup of cold water to some poor kid. Fortunately the Apostle Paul was able to cut through these distractions and lay things out decently and in good order in books like Romans and Galatians.

Unless...maybe Jesus wasn't distracted. Maybe He took three years to start rocking things with a quake whose epicenter was located by that empty tomb outside Jerusalem. Maybe He was actually demonstrating exactly what He was doing during His time on earth with us. Making all things new, wiping away every tear from our eyes, letting the dumb start scat-singing with pleasure and the lame start breaking out in some celebrative dance steps. Maybe we needed to see how "distracted" He could get so we didn't freeze-dry His gospel down to four spiritual laws through which we could calculate our salvation. In fact, the Apostle Paul himself did all his theologizing against a backdrop of all creation "groaning as in the pangs of childbirth" waiting for Christ's redemption to be completed.

You know, maybe we don't get distracted enough.

Why I Hate Manna

2009-10-28T22:43:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to live one day at a time.

Lately I’ve been feeling that and seeing it in the lives of people I care about. The steady drain of financial suspense. The cold prospect of disease creeping into the life of a friend. The heart-wrenching pain of sudden bad news in lives of friends. And while today seems to have worked out—barely—who knows what will happen tomorrow? That’s what living on manna must have been like (Exodus 16).

It’s not that manna’s so bad, actually. It’s actually amazing if you really think about it. Fed directly by God--how cool is that? Every day there’s a brand new helping of what you need, carefully dished out in the perfect portions designed for you.

It’s not the manna really. Manna is fine, even if it lacks the variety. And it’s not even the “coming from heaven” part of it. Even after all these years of Bedouin backpacking the daily reminder of His presence is still reassuring.

The problem with manna is that it’s all you get. It’s not like you can scare up some nice roasted quail, and you can hardly remember the exotic fruits and vegetables from Egypt. And so when you’re forced to have the same thing day after day after day…well, you begin to discover that you really hunger for more than bread alone.

Just think how nice it would be to have a choice, after all. Choosing another round of manna would be so much more empowering than simply being given it. “What do you feel like for dinner tonight, dear?—Oh…how about some manna this evening?” It’s nice to have some variety on the menu.

But the real problem with manna is that there’s no back-up supplier. It only comes from Him. And while He’s never failed to deliver, He’s also made a point of never giving one extra flake to store away. No matter how careful you might be, it’s absolutely utterly impossible to get any kind of margin for tomorrow. That's got to raise at least a few questions for you. There’s simply no way to get any kind of real security. And so you live from one morning’s manna-gathering to the next, with the nagging realization that if this crazy bread from heaven even thinned out you’d face certain disaster. It’s humbling to feel so dependent. Sometimes manna tastes like eating crow.

And so you hunger, even when your stomach’s stuffed. You hunger in advance for tomorrow because you never know how tomorrow will turn out. You hunger for some of the fruit from the Tree in Eden, back when God first started all these crazy limits on our diet. Sometimes it almost seems like too much.

And yet, by His great mercy, we are not consumed. His mercies are new every morning. Great is His faithfulness. (Lam. 3:23)

Sometimes, sitting back after a big meal of--you guessed it—manna, you begin to get a strange sense that maybe it’s supposed to be like this. Your days uncluttered by the hubris that comes from margin, your plans completely aligned with the giver of manna, the Giver of All Good Things. You realize you have exactly what He wants you to have, no more and no less. Relying not simply on the daily spread of that crazy desert bread, but relying even more on the character of the One who gives that manna. He is good, you’ve discovered.

No one would ever choose to live on manna. Maybe that’s why God doesn’t give us the choice. He gives what we hunger for even while depriving us of what we want.

How to be miserable.

2009-10-22T20:38:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about happiness this week, preparing for this Sunday's "How to be Miserable". (Now there's a sermon title that'll really pack 'em in!)

Our country has always been based on "the pursuit of happiness". That little phrase would have been remarkable in the 18th century. Not many monarchs at the time were staying awake wondering whether their people were happy. As long as they had bread--or cake, in the case of the French--why bother?

There are some interesting assumptions in the phrase "the pursuit of happiness". First of all, what makes us think that happiness should actually be a right that we should expect to pursue? Should happiness be considered essential, or is it merely a kind of icing on our cake? But even more striking is the assumption that happiness is something that we can identify, set our aim toward, and pursue. It assumes that you and I have a pretty good idea what will make us happy, and if only given the chance to pursue them we can be happy.

But what if happiness wasn't something we could engineer ourselves? What if being happy was actually more like sneezing? If you've ever been stuck mid-sentence, your face contorted by a sneeze that wasn't quite ready to launch, you know how hard it can be to force something like that. Sometimes we're the most miserable when we're busy trying to be happy.

People often turn to the Bible to find happiness. The problem is that the Bible seems to take its time getting around to issues of happiness. Along the way there's an awful lot of taking up one's cross, dying to self and even having to rise again with the crucified savior. The Bible's picture of fulfillment often seems to be anti-happiness: turning the other cheek, giving up one's cloak, forgiving the very people who made us unhappy in the first place.

Here's the secret. While the Bible seems pretty nonchalant about happiness, it is much more serious about something else: joy. Joy is what can come when you've been so thoroughly filled by Something so completely satisfying that one's level of happiness becomes less and less important. Joy is what Paul bubbled with when he wrote to the Philippians about how it didn't really matter whether he lived or died, he just wanted to serve Christ. (He almost sounded a little Buddhist at that point, except you can tell that he cared more deeply than any respectable Buddhist would allow.)

Our nation has unprecedented freedom to pursue our own personal happiness. I don't think it's helped very much. From what I can tell, people who "have it all" don't seem to be enjoying life any more than people who have much less. They just experience their frustration while living in bigger houses.

Most of my personal fantasies still tend to aim towards "having it all", but God's helping me get over that. He's steadily weaning me from happiness and whetting my appetite for joy. On the days when I cooperate with him, I find the strangest thing happen: pleasure.

I enjoy that.

I'm Good!

2009-10-19T19:48:00.000-07:00

“I’m good.”

We say that sometimes, usually when someone asks if we need help. Sounds a little presumptuous, but it seems to work with current slang expressions. I may stumble noticeably, my friends turn and ask if I need any help, to which I respond: “No, I’m good.”

It’s ironic, of course, because usually if someone has reason to ask us this it means we’re actually not doing very well. We rarely announce our “goodness” when we successfully step over a curb in a parking lot and enter a store without incident. It’s not until we trip over that curb that it even occurs to us to announce our self-sufficiency to our fellow shoppers. It’s only when we’re obviously having trouble that we feel the need to proclaim our goodness.

Actually, the expression “I’m good” probably means something quite the opposite. It probably means something like “Even though I’m having trouble, I’d still rather handle things on my own.” Or more succinctly: “(I’d like to think that) I’m good!”

I think there are a lot of people in the bible who would understand this. I think of Nicodemus in John 3, discreetly searching out Christ under the cover of night. Something’s not quite right, so he seeks Jesus’ word on becoming acceptable in God’s eyes. Jesus flatly informs him that he must be born again. Nicodemus briefly ponders the cost of surrendering a lifetime of religious celebrity; the price is too much to ask. “I’m good,” he tells the Messiah, as he scurries back into his night.

Or the more candid approach of the Rich Young Ruler in Luke 18. “What must I do to be good”, he asks Jesus. Give away all your riches, Christ tells him. He, too, slinks away: “That’s OK--I’m good.”

It’d be nice to think that God will simply accept us as we are: not perfect, but certainly not bad. But we have to do a few theological acrobatics to get this to happen. Claiming goodness involves somehow lowering the bar of God’s standards until we can easily clear it. We re-phrase “be perfect as your Father in Heaven in perfect” until it sounds like “be a little better than other people you know.”

Contrast this with the Philippian jailor, as found in Acts 16. He’s in trouble. An earthquake has broken open his stronghold and now the prisoners entrusted to him are now free to escape. This is not good. In his mind he already hears his death sentence pronounced: his life for theirs. In his panic he turns to Paul and Silas: “what must I do to be saved?”

Now, I must tell you: I find this question a bit curious. Where I grew up the word “saved” was usually reserved for conversations involving a specific understanding of Jesus’ role in covering the guilt of our sins. In the middle of what’s probably the worst crisis of his life this jailor is calling a quick time-out to discuss Paul and Silas’ theory of the atonement? I don’t think so?

It’s probably fair to say that whatever the jailer meant by the word “saved” must have extended much further than clarifying his doctrine of justification by faith. This was a big question he was voicing.

However, I think I know what he’s wasn’t saying at that moment: “I’m good”.

There’s something that happens when someone suddenly discovers their complete inability to make their life “good”. That may come in a jailer’s crisis, an adolescent discovery or maybe in mid-life changes, but however it happens it involves a surrender of everything to the One who can actually make things happen well.

Announcing “I’m good” is probably forgivable when I stumble a little. After all, it’s just a figure of speech. But a day is coming when those words will take on a lot more meaning. On that Day every single stumble I’ve ever made—including the big ones—will be inventoried for public display if needed. I wonder if I’ll cringe as I realize how long that list really is. But as everyone’s attention turns to that list, someone will hold up nail-scarred hands reassuringly.

“It’s OK”, he’ll declare. “He’s good.”

Who would notice?

2009-09-25T12:54:00.000-07:00

Question: If our church were to suddenly disappear overnight, who besides our members would notice? Would we be missed enough to suggest that Christ was really doing something in our community through us?

Answer: We'll talk more at The Gathering this Sunday morning.

Voluntary Stress

2009-09-23T15:35:00.000-07:00

Been thinking about monkeys this week. They seem to keep coming up in conversations.

A long time ago someone once explained to me how a monkey trap works. The trap consists of a hollow gourd, attached by a stout rope to a tree or some other immoveable object. The gourd contains something that will draw the interest of the monkey (some food, a trinket or some other kind of monkey bling), which can be seen through a small hole just large enough for a monkey to insert its hand through. The aforementioned monkey comes along, notices the bait and reaches for it, squeezing its hand to get it through the hole. Once it's reached inside it quickly clutches whatever it was that had drawn its interest. However it they try to remove its hand it discovers that its clenched hand can no longer fit out the hole. As long as the monkey clings to the bait, it's stuck, although it could easily escape were it to let go of the bait. The monkey is now facing the difficult dilemma of choosing between freedom or the chance that it can somehow get that bait out of the gourd.

I find that fascinating. I guess I'm intrigued by the simple idea of a monkey voluntarily holding its hand in the trap that will lead to its capture. Perhaps the fact that I'm not a monkey leaves me with a little bit of a cavalier attitude the plight of the monkeys.

But it does make me wonder how often I allow myself to get stuck by clinging to something that's simply not worth it. Not to get all Buddhist about this, but there's something here that's worth more thought. That's probably how most of my temptations work. That's the dynamic behind most church fights, in my experience. I suspect that a large percentage of my stress comes from various gourds into which we've inserted our clenched fists. My life is blissfully free from major crises right now, and I find it disconcerting to think about how much of my stress might be considered voluntary.

How about you? How much of your stress is self-inflicted?

Why I Don't Wear Tights

2009-09-17T18:24:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about superheroes lately. This Sunday our church is doing a special family service using that theme and it's gotten me thinking: it’d be pretty cool to be a superhero.

When I was a kid I used to imagine being able to fly, or having a special bat-cave for all my space-age electronic crime-fighting stuff. Actually, I probably would have settled for figuring out how to get my mom’s picnic blanket to flutter when I draped it over my shoulders. Superman’s cape always fluttered straight out behind him but even when I ran my fastest mine always seemed to just hang there. I guess I must not have run very fast, at least not while trying to watch my cape over my shoulder at the same time.

While I have very little interest in parading around in tights (no…strike that, pretty much NO interest in that sort of thing) I still probably harbor some latent desires to have superpowers. To be able to zoom overhead when everyone else has to wait in traffic, or to be able to hear or see through walls to know everything that’s going on. To be a super-pastor, or a super-dad, or even a super lawn guy on the weekends. That’d be pretty cool.

But, alas, I’m not. I don’t have any ability that couldn’t also be found in some other guy. Instead of Mr. Incredible I’m probably more like Mr. Forgettable. On a good day I qualify as normal.

I wonder if that’s how Simon Peter looked at himself. A blue-collar Budweiser kind of guy, working The Deadliest Catch with his brother and their buddies. Voted by his classmates Most Likely to Get in a Fight. And yet Jesus picked him out, invited him to sign on for a whole new life. Peter apparently didn’t buy the whole idea at first: “Get away from me—I’m a sinful man.” But eventually Peter began to realize that Jesus’ call was not based on what Peter could do, but on what Jesus could do through Peter.

The result was amazing. In less time than it takes Brett Favre to retire a few times, Peter became a disciple, cast out demons, walked on the waves he used to fish, faced the wrath of the Jewish authorities, sold out his savior to save his neck and then discovered what grace really felt like. On Pentecost morning a stone-sober Peter blazed with such passion they thought he was drunk. At least until 3000 of them came forward for his altar call.

Peter is one of my heroes. I think he’s super, actually.

If that’s what Jesus saw in that fisherman, I wonder what he sees in me?

And what do you think He sees in YOU?

Fogged In

2009-09-03T21:23:00.000-07:00

Faith is the dirty little secret behind Christianity. It suppose it’s necessary, but given the choice I often think I’d prefer an alternative.

Faith can be like the little “donut” spare tire found in the trunk of many smaller cars. When all else fails it’s nice to be able to dig it out so you can keep on moving down the road. But as soon as possible you want to replace it with something that feels a little more substantial.

I’m discovering that much of my ambivalence towards faith comes from a basic misunderstanding we often have about what faith really is. We often tend to look at faith as something we need to do, as if we were the ones doing whatever needed to be done for the object of our faith to be true. When faced with a crisis, we cringe and brace ourselves as we muster up as much God-optimism as we can in order to make sure that His promises still hold true.

Taken this way, faith becomes a verb, an action; like peddling an exercise bike on a generator to keep the lights on. Actually, it’s a form of fear: we worry that if we were to grow tired of faith-peddling the lights of Heaven would dim. If we can only keep “faith-ing” hard enough God will provide what we need from him—working all things for our good or forgiving our sins or guiding us when we face decisions.

It’s strange that we picture faith in that way, because that’s not at all how the Bible describes it. Hebrews 11 doesn’t describe faith as an effort, but rather as a kind of visibility: “Now faith is being…certain of what we do not see.” Faith is an ability to see something that was already there whether we’d spotted it or not.

I live in Northern California, and I enjoy the San Francisco Bay. One of the things I love most about the Bay is the fog that often creeps in. When the fog arrives things change quickly. The city of San Francisco suddenly vanishes, or Angel Island or Alcatraz may turn up missing. Drivers across the Golden Gate Bridge may begin their crossing with no visible proof that the other half of the bridge even exists. Once while sailing I discovered that the city and two prominent islands disappeared around me in ten minutes’ time. That was weird.

People who live in this area have learned to adapt to the fog. There’s no widespread panic because of a missing bridge or misplaced mountain. Folks have discovered that all those landmarks are still there; they’re just temporarily out of sight. They have learned that if they can just be patient for a few hours they will get their bridge back and their mountains and islands will once again return. That’s just how fog works. (Earthquakes, on the other hand, have been known to make lasting changes.)

The principle is this: fog doesn’t change our landmarks; it changes our visibility of those landmarks.

I find that the same principle applies to faith. There are days when God’s hand can be clearly seen in my life. I can bask in His love and my heart is felled with a sense of confidence in His care for me. But there are other days that aren’t like that at all. A fog of doubt or a haze of shame creep in and suddenly all of those spiritual realities seem to have vanished. No matter how hard I may try to muster up the sunny emotions I might have enjoyed before nothing seems to help. All my peace and joy seems to have vanished, like the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.

And that’s where a Hebrews 11 kind of faith comes in. Faith is my awareness of the fact that all those things are still there, even when i can’t see them at the moment. It takes a kind of faith to drive across a bridge when you can’t see the other side. It takes the same kind of faith to continue loving a difficult family member, or to continue serving in a ministry role or following a call to a particular ministry, or to continue to fight a chronic temptation.

Taken in a broader sense, our faith doesn’t necessarily change some of our fundamental realities, it only exposes them. My faith doesn’t cause God to be faithful; it simply discovers that He was faithful all along.

Seen this way, faith becomes a kind of imagination; seeing things in the fog. Not fantasy, mentally rearranging the landmarks as I might wish, but a realistic imagining of what I know to be true. When the visibility drops on the Bay I can still visualize where the bridges are and where the islands are located. With the help of my GPS I can still tell how things are laid out, even if I can’t really see.

So also when my awareness of God is obscured. I can picture God loving me or providing for me or forgiving me even when that’s not how it looks because I’ve discovered that those things are really true. With the help of my Bible I can still tell how things really are, even if I can’t currently see.

I’m learning that I don’t have to make God faithful, I simply need to enjoy the fact that He already is. That takes the pressure off, letting Him do most of the work.

And I can handle that.

"Numb"--the new Guilty?

2009-08-29T21:35:00.000-07:00

Guilt is out. That’s so Bible Belt Fundamentalist. People just aren’t into it like they used to be.

Guilt used to be stock in trade for clergy types in my trade. Churches thrived on guilt: even a marginally-effective speaker could whip up a deep sense of insufficiency and soon trigger an urge to tithe or serve or pray or even just not think about sexual things or any other Very Bad Pleasures. For preacher, but also for parents and other authority figures, guilt was the fire alarm lever you could pull to get everybody’s attention. That's when Chuch Lady was born.

Guilt doesn’t seem to carry the weight that it used to. People just aren’t interested. Trying to trigger guilt today can feel like trying to offer someone a really good deal on an AM car radio.

And you know…I think that’s probably a good thing. Guilt-induced goodness isn’t really goodness. Ultimately it’s more like a fear response. And it’s kind creepy to think that people in my profession could actually end up bullying people into adopting a certain lifestyle. Shame on you/us…

So, it’s probably a good thing that we’re so much less into the whole guilt thing. How much better for people like us to live without the constant burden of a guilty conscience. To just let us be free to be loved by God, to enjoy the healing and the wholeness that He offers. A big improvement, right?

It would seem so, at least. And yet…my sense is that the majority of us still somehow consider ourselves 2^nd rate followers of Christ.

I think most of us recognize that we’re sinners, at least technically. Most weeks we miss at least one or two of those Ten Commandments—even if we can actually remember what they actually are. That means that we’re sinners on some level. But that doesn’t mean we have to get all fire-and-brimstone about it, right?

And yet, no matter how we may shrug off the idea of feeling guilty for having made some bad choices or for having had too much of the wrong kinds of fun at an earlier stage in life, something inside of us still feels like we need to ratchet our expectations for God down a notch.

I hear it in the awkward wisecracks when someone attends a worship service for the first time, as if they half suspect that the place will be struck by lightning because they showed up. I hear it when someone first begins some position of leadership or authority—almost as if it was some kind of inside joke for someone like them to be considered for any kind of “advanced” Christian role. And I think I hear it when someone cringes at the prospect of praying out loud in a group. If someone like me prays out loud, everyone will hear God not answering!

Seem that no matter how we may shrug off the idea of feeling guilty for having made some bad choices or for having had too much of the wrong kinds of fun at an earlier stage in life, something inside of us still feels like we need to ratchet our expectations for God down a notch.

So, here's the weird situation I think we find ourselves in: we no longer buy the idea of guilt, but we still somehow feel like we need to give ourselves some sort of spiritual “time out”. Like people like us need to make sure that we don’t expect too much from God too fast. Better to keep ourselves on the sidelines for the first little bit. The first few months…or years…or decades. Maybe I’m crazy, but those all sound like symptoms of what we used to call guilt.

We don’t feel guilty as much any more. Maybe that’s good. But I’m not sure we feel all that innocent, either. That doesn’t seem right. If anything we're spiritually numb. What are we missing?

Why Pray? (a better response)

2009-08-20T15:32:00.000-07:00

(OK, so not all Calvinist jokes are funny...)

If God has everything in our lives already laid out, then why pray?

Seems to me the question can be re-worded as "why get emotionally involved in something whose outcome is largely predetermined?" (Although that's admittedly a bit clumsier.) God invites us to pray, but he also assures us that He's already previewed and edited the events that will unfold. Clearly the point of such prayers would not be for information (God smacking his forehead as he discovers needs of our He would otherwise have missed). Instead it must have more to do with His desire for us to approach life somehow connected to Him, like branches to a vine.

But still...why whip up a sense of urgency praying over needs which will come as no surprise? It seems that predictability doesn't really have to stifle our emotional involvement or our desire to share something with someone we care about. It happens whenever we gather with friends to watch an old movie. We still turn towards each other at the scary scenes and we still laugh together at the funny parts. Not because anything was NEW, but because it was IMPORTANT to us. Redundancy doesn't really get in the way when something is important. That's why I still laugh at old "Airplane" scenes. Just as we turn to each other when a re-run moves us to laughter or fear, so God also wants us to turn to Him when something powerful moves us in life.

Can we change God's plan? It seems that we can, judging from some of the examples in the Bible. Look at Abram negotiating with God over the future of Sodom. Or look at almost anything in the minor prophets. To what extent is God's logic fuzzy enough that He can handle multiple scenarios, or to what extent is God simply pre-aware of just how we'll change our mind, having seen this movie before? I don't really know. And I'm not sure I need to.

Why Pray?

2009-08-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

A friend emailed me with a valid question: if God has our days all planned out...why pray?

I responded promptly, sensing the importance of the question. I told him that the moment I read his email I knew that this was my moment: that I was MEANT to offer him a helpful, insightful response.

And then I didn't. (psych!)

In Step?

2009-08-15T15:59:00.000-07:00

I wonder if Jesus became easy to overlook after a while. Maybe that's why He spent so much time in the gospels trying to help his disciples get at least a little clue.

To cut to the chase, I suspect I overlook him. Not in a larger cosmic sense, so much. My belief in Christ is pretty settled and I've arranged a lot of my life's furniture around Him being in the house. But sometimes I wonder how much I still miss.

For this week's sermon I've been thinking about Galatians 5:25: "since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit." That comes at the end of the passage listing the whole cornucopia known as the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, and a number of other traits I'd like to see more of. Ever since Jesus returned to the Father, he deputized the Spirit to be His presence. And it sounds like that Presence is planning on being present every step of the way, like He's planning on walking me through the various experiences each day brings.

As much as I'd like folks to think that I live in constant communion with my Savior, I have to admit that His interventions still tend to catch me by surprise. You know, since I'm periodically straightened out by the Spirit, maybe I should try to periodically stay straight with Him.

So...makes me wonder how much more easily all this love-joy-peace etc. might come if I were to check in every step or so. I'd probably stumble a lot less.

Worrying Like an Atheist

2009-08-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

If I was an atheist I'd be worried.

By definition, an atheist lives with the conviction that there is no one "out there" watching over him/her, much less our world as a whole. It's like a cosmic remake of the Home Alone movies--we get to stay up as late as we want and eat junk food, but when the bad guys show up we're on our own. While atheism has its appeal, in the face of problems like a recession, crime, personal struggles and the garden-variety aches and pains of life I think overall I'd prefer to have a deity on the job somewhere.

This is not to say that we should get to choose our divinities, I'm just noting the advantages and disadvantages of the various worldviews. In the long run there definitely is something to say for the Providence of God, even if His overall purposes can be a little hard to figure out. If I was the only one in charge of my world, I think I'd have reason to be worried. Fortunately, that's not the case.

Which brings me to my main point here: why, then, do I still worry? Why do I allow myself to get wrapped in knots as if my own efforts were needed to get all things to work together for good? And why do I periodically wake up during the night thinking that if I could somehow strain toward success I could make things in my world go more smoothly? Seems like there ought to be a lot more days when I feel like a spiritual lottery winner.

Fact is, I still end up worrying like an atheist. I believe...but God help my unbelief.

Fortunately, God's wired an automatic warning signal into me that can prompt me to re-align my worldview. To remember Him. It's called stress, and when it works properly it leads me to pray.

And I think it's working.

Should God Be Reasonable?

2009-08-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

Should God make sense?

This week I've been thinking about some of the less-conventional aspects of the Holy Spirit's work: at least as seen from my Midwest-America, western-European sort of perspective. You know--the whole idea that He might lead people to speak in tongues, break out in prophecies or produce some flat-out miracles.

The God I grew up with was fairly predictable. That was nice, you could count on Him to be reasonable. Later on some friends introduced me to a God who couldn't always be figured out. That sort of stuff always bothers me.

A big wild card in this, of course, is the fact that we human beings ourselves have a tendency to distort things...and that's not God's fault. Just because some wacky things can end up happening in Jesus' name doesn't mean that Jesus is necessarily signing off on every spectacle.

And yet...well, "Aslan is not a tame lion", as the story goes (if you've read the Chronicles of Narnia). I wonder how often I accidentally limit some amazing things God would love to do, just because of the narrowness of my expectations. Actually, push-come-to-shove, I'd rather expect too much from God rather than too little. I'm adjusting.

To be honest, though, Mr Beaver's little grin makes me nervous ("No, he's not safe...but he's good, I tell you.")

Nervous, but I'm intrigued.

The Spooky Side of God

2009-07-24T10:27:00.000-07:00

In the Christian sub-culture I come from we never really talked much about the Holy Spirit. As someone once said, our Trinity involved the Father, Son and the Holy Scriptures. Sure, we read about the Spirit in the Bible, but the sense I picked up was that the Holy Spirit was like a volcano that had largely gone dormant, except for an intermittent trail of smoke to serve as a reminder of another time. Fire and brimstone may have flowed freely during the early years of the church, but most of that lava had long since cooled, I was assured. Things were stable now.

Over time I met other believers who seemed to talk about the Spirit all the time. These Christians prayed for anointing, they spoke in tongues, they told of prophecies and healings and other wonders unheard of in my childhood world. Basically, they freaked me out. While their sense of expectancy jarred my assumptions about the Spirit’s dormancy, I sometimes got the sense that they had somehow found a magic lamp that could produce a miraculous genie when rubbed in a certain manner.

I’ve now pendulum-swung in my relationship with God enough that I’m familiar with—and also uneasy with—both sides of this contrast. And in both of them I see a common, often unacknowledged struggle: we don’t know what to make of a God who promises to be incarnate among us. Each Christmas we sing about Immanuel God-with-us but we’re not quite sure what to make of it when God actually shows up.

The disciples had the opposite problem. They were scared to death that their Immanuel would leave them. Whenever He would hint of his return to the Father a deep panic would rise up within them. How could He could leave them. That’s when Jesus began to get very specific about the arrival of the Holy Spirit. Without bothering to get into the Trinitarian complexities of it all He simply assured them that He would be with them always, to the very end of the age. He would come in the person of the Paraclete: the come-alongside-to-help-and-guide-you person in the Trinity. (You’ll notice that most New Testaments translations struggle to translate that word, and with good reason.)

So…here we are, with Jesus Christ alive and well and still bringing his changes in our world. Still bothering all the right people and soothing all the wrong ones, just as he did back then. He’s still here, through His Spirit.

I wonder how He reacts to some of the troubles we have with His Spirit? Does he grieve when we pronounce Him dormant, no longer needed for spiritual warfare today like He was in the New Testament? Does He bristle when we start creating instruction manuals spelling out techniques for getting Him to do certain tricks and wonders? (“Rub the lamp with this kind of motion and then genie will come out—just watch!”)

All this makes me more and more grateful for the scriptures. I can turn to the scriptures to find out who the Spirit is, what He has done, and from there I can get some important guidance for what He may be up to. With the scriptures I can test the spirits, finding out which voices speak with the dialect of Christ. Unpredictable? Yes. Unfamiliar? No.

I’m so glad the Holy Spirit isn’t a new development—a recent upgrade available only for those who register. He’s guiding, if we’re willing to keep in step.

No really...I mean it!

2009-07-19T08:51:00.000-07:00

It always feels really weird to me to have to say something that I’m not sure I really mean. Or maybe that I’m really sure that I don’t mean. It can feel like marveling at the Emperor’s new clothes.

I remember how difficult that was as a kid. Having to say “thank-you” when I didn’t happen to feel very thankful. Having to say “excuse me” when someone clumsy got in my way. Having to apologize to my brother for something that deep-down I figured he had coming.

Sometime I’d try to hold out against these injunctions: “But I’m not sorry!” However, parents have a way of winning these childhood standoffs, and eventually I’d mumble my contrition even as my demeanor glared my dissent.

That always seemed silly. Why say something if you don’t really mean it? What good does it do to insist to Aunt Sally that you really do love her zucchini-and-peanut butter lasagna? Why say it if you don’t mean it? That only makes sense.

But on the other hand, I think there are times when we might not mean something until we say it. While my views on a toxic casserole might not waver, there have been things that I know I didn’t mean until I started to announce them. Take almost anything having to do with real love, for instance. I have shockingly few moments of spontaneous servanthood; usually I have to prompt myself to be helpful or to apologize or even to let someone else go first through a doorway. Those kinds of things just don’t come naturally to me. There’s a sense in which I can still hear my parents’ instructions: “say thank you…say you’re sorry…”.

My point is that sometimes I won’t really feel something until I say it. The very process of going through the motions helps me situate myself in the attitude that I really want to have. Saying I'm sorry helps me be sorry when it doesn’t come naturally. It helps me mean it better, you could say.

I find that the same kind of thing often happens in prayer. Later this morning our congregation, The Gathering, will be holding a special prayer service. Our people will be led in prayer by our worship leaders, in spoken prayers and in some of the songs we sing. Some of our people will choose to pray with special prayer teams positioned around the room. And I’d bet good money that we won’t fully mean many of the things we say to God in those prayers, at least not at the time that we say them. Like telling God we trust in Him, or that we really want to see His will happen in our crisis situations. We’ll likely profess faith that doesn’t ring very true, or ask for guidance when what we really want is for God to take a few pointers from us.

We’ll say things that we don’t really, fully mean. We’ll join with the father before Jesus in Mark 9: “I believe, help my unbelief!”

And frankly, I’m OK with that. While it’d be great to think that our hearts always feel the right things, some of those things won’t fully change until after we hear a loud trumpet blast. And in the meantime, we’re still sinners, and we’ll still have to say some of these things to help us mean them.

Really.

Better Sinners? (Or, the whole point of this blog)

2009-07-16T17:47:00.000-07:00

“This time I’m going to do better”.

The words come muttered with determination: filled with equal parts guilt and gratitude. I’ve just sinned. One of my favorite temptations came along, I saw it for what it was, but I let it get me anyway. No major felonies; just a reminder of my messiness. And now afterwards, my conscience feels bruised, my spirit feels sheepish, and I struggle to convince myself that next time I’ll do better.

I remember once as a child asking my parents once if grown-ups ever sinned. I recall them smiling and trying to explain to me that sometimes grown-ups lost their tempers or did things to hurt people. As a pastor and his wife, my parents knew full well the darkness that still lurks in the sunniest Christian adults. But it was difficult for me to imagine the grown-ups in my church still struggling with sin. From my elementary-school perspective, sin was something eventually to be outgrown, along with the need to go to bed at 8:00. I just had to wait.

You know...I’m still waiting.

It helps me to think about the recovery movement. Alcoholics Anonymous and other groups have helped millions come to terms with addictions that won’t go away. The idea is simple: while an addict won’t be done with the addiction in this life, he or she can still become free from it. The addicts learn to allow God to lead them into a new life that is no longer at the mercy of the addiction. A recovering alcoholic will say that while she is still an alcoholic, she has not had a drink in a decade. Still an alcoholic, but a much healthier one. A better alcoholic, one might say.

What if we looked at sinners in the Bible like this? What if Jacob’s history of deception or David’s relapse with Bathsheba or Peter’s denial were somehow part of that same process of God allowing us to hit bottom, acknowledge our helplessness and finally turn to His higher power to be set free? And what if we viewed the Christian community as a network of “sinners anonymous” groups? That'd actually be pretty cool.

Hi...my name’s Ron, and I’m a sinner.